Tag: creepy

Francis Lawrence’s Constantine

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

So they chose a dark haired, American Keanu Reeves to play John Constantine instead of some sassy blonde British Sting doppelgänger, big whoop. I mean if that really cheeses you off as a fan of the comics to the point where you can’t enjoy this wonderful film then fair enough. This iteration of Constantine makes its decided departure from source material and opts to give us a gorgeous dark LA Noir fantasy full of striking imagery, genuinely frightening set pieces, intense character work from a host of cool actors and a slick, oily visual feel that accentuates the supernatural tone beautifully. Keanu is basically an icon of cool, between The Matrix and recently introducing John Wick to the world this guy is kind of a cultural talisman of epic genre films and for me this stands with the best. Constantine is an exorcist, detective, damned soul, chain smoker, extreme ghostbuster and all around cynical badass, here solving a mystery with biblical implications relating to an LAPD officer (Rachel Weisz), her ill fated clairvoyant twin sister (also Weisz) and a fearsome series of events that could spell the end of the world. John has allies in snarky cab driver Chaz (Shia Leboeuf in his ‘back in the day’ phase), mysterious club magnate and sorcerer Papa Midnite (Djimon Hounsou), eccentric entomologist Beeman (Max Baker), hard drinking clergyman Father Hennessy (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and demonic concubine Ellie (Michelle Monaghan). He’s up against some gnarly foes of this world and others including nasty hellhound Balthazar (Gavin Rossdale channelling Harvey Dent), a possessed Mexican immigrant (Jesse Ramirez), the treacherous Angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton in mercurial androgynous mode) and big baddie Lucifer himself played by a kooky, darkly dapper Peter Stormare in what has to be one of the coolest and most captivating portrayals of the devil cinema has to offer. Director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, The Hunger Games) has big budget, flashy effects sensibilities and while there is a fair amount of visual sizzle and large scale spectacle here the tone is often one of suffocating darkness, unseen dread creeping down narrow hallways stifling both light and space, eerie close quarters settings and a claustrophobic aesthetic that refracts the hellish elements of this story into the forefront brilliantly. John’s trip to hell with assistance from a cat is one stunner of a sequence, as is his explosively violent, gory n’ gooey showdown with Balthazar and an opening exorcism that launches a full length mirror, demon trapped inside, onto an LA street in broad daylight. His flippant confrontation with Stormare’s Satan has to be my favourite scene though, it’s such a classy, stylish, well acted and creepy-funny bit that caps off this story not with a huge bombastic action sequence but rather a clipped, ironic and altogether biting exchange of dialogue between these two great actors, who would go on to have another priceless little Easter egg scene together in John Wick 2. So say what you will about this film and I hear ya with legitimate grievances regarding fealty to the comics but that don’t bother me, I love this dark, unique, creepy, baroque jewel of a film too much. Great stuff.

-Nate Hill

TNT’s Salem’s Lot

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I have not read Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot nor have I seen the 70’s film adaptions but damn I have to say this 2004 TNT miniseries version is one lazy pile of garbage. It’s one of those shows that they released onto DVD as one movie and as such it has a runtime of like three hours not separated by episodes. That length of time seemed empty and devoid of story, they could have just as easily told this in a 90 minute slot, but that’s the least of its issues, really.

Rob Lowe is a weird choice to play an introspective, lone wolf writer who returns back home to a small town under threat from a malevolent force. That’s not to say he’s incapable of more intense work that shirks his pretty boy image, it’s just that someone less flashy and obvious would have made more sense here. He also narrates the thing like he’s casually reading a teleprompter over coffee, I didn’t think anyone would be able to make Stephen King’s rich prose sound like stereo instructions but his inner delivery is flat and soulless. He plays Ben Mears, a disgraced journalist researching domestic trauma in his childhood burg, but discovers something way worse. A spooky old antiques dealer (Donald Sutherland) has some backhanded deal with ancient vampire Kurt Barlow (Rutger Hauer) and is flooding the area with unspeakable evil. This is in amongst a tangled cobweb of stupid subplots, atrocious acting from the no name supporting characters and just an overall murky, lazy, drab feel.

I mainly tracked this down for Hauer, who is reliably fine as the supernatural villain but isn’t given nearly enough screen time and just somehow feels like a cameo, as does Sutherland who hams it up a bit but still can’t raise a pulse for this thing. James Cromwell has enough grit to play vampire slaying preacher Callahan who I fondly remember from the Dark Tower novels. Andre Braugher and Samantha Mathis are not bad as other townsfolk swept up into the incomprehensible threat but the acting pedigree stops right there, they hired some seriously deplorable people for the rest of the roles and at times it’s hard to watch. I will give the music some props though, it’s an atmospheric composition with beautifully eerie lyrics from Lisa Gerrard (Man On Fire, Gladiator) that honestly deserves a way better outlet than this mess. One of the only good things I can say about it is that it has the mid 2000’s cozy late night cable TV feel to it, and I have some mad nostalgia for that but even then it’s kind of my bias and that compliment can’t be accredited to the success of the project itself, which is largely nonexistent. Boring, mumbly, not even remotely scary, overcast and rainy but not even in the cool ambient way, awkward, shitty bargain basement CGI, clunky, about an hour and a half too long, man the list of shit just goes on. Avoid.

-Nate Hill

Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’m not usually too lenient on remakes of my favourite films and 1977’s Suspiria would have been a deal breaker, but holy goddamn if they didn’t do it justice and then some with 2018’s fierce, austere, unrelentingly gruesome update. It shouldn’t even be called a remake anyways as besides title and general premise, it’s an entirely different beast possessing of its own unique aesthetic and themes far removed from Dario Argento’s vision. Italian director Luca Guadagnino is not a voice I’m familiar with, I haven’t seen a single other film he’s done and looking at his credits it seems this is his first venture into the horror genre, a winning first stroke for sure.

The visual atmosphere here is decidedly different and that’s part of what makes this such a piece all its own. Argento’s neon bathed, opulently saturated colour and lighting is traded in for bleak greys, browns, sickly beiges and suffocated hues that breed uncomfortably onscreen for something less attractive yet far more unsettling than the bejewelled beauty of its predecessor. It also fits the late 70’s Berlin setting which as history reminds us was pretty fucking grim. Young Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) journeys from an Ohio Mennonite community to the prestigious Markos dance academy, which as fans of this story know, is front for a nasty coven of ancient witches. Things go awry almost from the second she arrives but the film plays deftly with who and what it means to be a protagonist here and we see a dynamic shift from other girls (played solidly by Mia Goth and Chloë Grace Moretz) who get suspicious and then wish they hadn’t. The school is run by angular, mercurial shryke Madame Blanc, played by Tilda Swinton in one of three roles, because apparently she can do anything.

So is this a better film than Argento’s original? There is of course no right answer to that and I don’t even think they should be compared alongside one another, they may as well be from different galaxies, let alone genres. There’s a sense of diseased malfeasance to these witches, who go out on the town, drink and party just like anyone else but are anything but human. I loved the decision to change Susie’s character from doe eyed heroine to an eerily intuitive avatar with a seemingly dark destiny already written in blood years before. The film wanders about in draft filled hallways, echoey dance studios and chilly, depressing Berlin streets for much of the runtime until the climax arrives, and holy fuck I was not expecting this to go the whole nine yards into outright wanton, surrealistic chaos horror mode. There’s a crazily violent collective piece of mania that happens deep within the bowels of the school building that might be one of my new favourite set pieces in any horror film ever. It tells this story through image, impression, carnage, lighting and fantastic performances from all involved including a terrifying cameo from the grim reaper itself. All set to a hauntingly unconventional score by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, it’s not a sequence I’ll soon forget and propels the overall film into classic territory. What an experience.

-Nate Hill

Ari Aster’s Midsommar

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I didn’t expect to be saying this but Ari Aster’s Midsommar is, for the most part, a colossal waste of time and talent. It sucks to have to bash this given my level of anticipation for a follow up to Hereditary which is one of the most effectively terrifying films I’ve ever seen, but this thing not only pales in comparison but just kind of cavorts about in broad daylight for an excessively bloated runtime, provides *no* effective scares and then just… ends.

The most successful and engaging scenes show up in the first ten minutes of the film: after a harrowing tragedy that wipes out the family of Dani (Florence Pugh), the camera swoops through an open window to observe a snowy winter landscape while the minimalist opening credits appear, accented by an eerie score. It’s a haunting prologue that sets atmosphere and tone like nobody’s business… and then the resulting film falls flat on its inbred face. This thing was marketed more aggressively than the super bowl so by now you know the drill: Dani is accompanying her neglectful boyfriend (Jack Reynor) to a remote Swedish commune where one of their friends has ancestral roots. They aim to study these amiable pagan bumpkins for an anthropological thesis but it soon turns out they’re anything but amiable and in fact they’ve wandered into a freaky occult ritual as unwilling participants.

So, what works here? The beautifully off kilter score, for one. The cinematography, fascinating production design and undeniably striking artistry in costumes are all wonderful on their own terms. Pugh’s performance is deeply felt when the script allows for it to develop properly, but see that brings me to the fucking many things that don’t work. The film is two and a half hours long which it just absolutely doesn’t need to be, and for most of that time we’re forced to watch this ridiculous group of insane loonies and their absurd customs play out for so long that any semblance of story gets lost in maypole dancing, sustained singing and all manner of ritualistic bullshit. Here’s the thing with Hereditary versus this film: in the former, real life trauma was used to gild and intertwine with the esoteric external threat for an oppressive, unbearably down to earth yet somehow also otherworldly experience, both sides of the coin proving effective as all hell. With this film the grounded trauma is shown early on and then cheerfully abandoned for a flower adorned theme park ride of empty, hollow Wicker Man shenanigans that don’t address, conjure up or call back to our protagonist’s trauma in any way whatsoever, and that is key in this film’s resounding failure. Dani has been through the kind of event (I won’t spoil it) that is so horrific and traumatic that it either drives a person mad, to suicide or in some cases births the kind of resilience so that they may rise above it, gain strength and unlock a new facet of their being. This film allows her none of that, betraying a real, tangible story for something lost up in the clouds doing its own dumb dumb thing for goddamn forever until you just want to call in an air strike on the whole commune and firebomb this dreary set of non-events from existence. What. A. Mess.

In closing I’d like to recommend a far better pagan folk horror tale that has more torque under its hood than this turd: Gareth Evans’s Apostle, a frightening tale of another outsider finding madness in a small occult community, you’ll be glad you chose that over Midsommar’s ingratiating lack of focus or vision.

-Nate Hill

Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

There’s no nice way to put this: Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman is a fucking embarrassing mess of a film. It frequently looks very beautiful but stunning snowy visuals can only get you so far in a film whose story is so jagged it’s borderline nonexistent. Based on an airport thriller novel, this tries to be a grisly murder mystery in the vein of Fincher’s Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or something and ends up stumbling over its own lopsided narrative, getting lost in a sea of serial killer cliches and providing a host of excellent actors with basically jack shit to do.

Michael Fassbender is Detective Harry Hole (snicker), hard bitten Oslo lawman who comes across a serial murderer who leaves victim’s bloody scarves wrapped around an eerie looking snowman. So begins an impenetrable investigation dating decades back and relating (somehow) to a bunch of characters whose involvement just seems out of nowhere really. There’s a set of twins played by Chloe Sevigny, who always picks edgy, boundary pushing roles but seems listless and lost here. J.K. Simmons shows up briefly with a horrendous Norwegian accent as the police captain overseeing the case. Others meander in and out including Rebecca Ferguson, James D’arcy, Toby Jones, Adrian Dunbar and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Oh yeah and Val Kilmer too, playing a cop in flashbacks who lost his mind trying to find this killer, with godawful dubbing over his voice. At one point he actually steps out his office window and paces out onto a ledge like he wants nothing more than to escape this train wreck of a film. What a cast, just thrown to the winds.

I remember when the trailer for this came out, I couldn’t have been more excited for it. Snowy setting, eerie serial killer mystery, hard boiled cop with his own demons, I mean it’s so much up my alley it was practically knocking on my door. I answered by seeing the thing finally and wish I just stayed inside. The resulting film seems like it was thrown into a snowblower for editing and just launched across a field for release with little thought for character, incident, motivation, suspense or anything remotely engaging. It’s a shame because up until this, Alfredson’s track record was pretty impeccable. A straight up dud.

-Nate Hill

Ready Or Not

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

You ever have a game night with people who take that shit just a bit too seriously? Well for new bride Samara Weaving, such is most definitely the case. She’s marrying into an impossibly rich, pompous and slightly creepy family, and on the midnight stroke of her wedding night they want to play a game with her, an initiation rite of sorts. Could be Uno, could be checkers or crib, but god help them all if she pulls the hide and seek card. Ready Or Not is a brutal, breathless, hilarious and grisly horror comedy that plays like a big soup mix of Knives Out, The Evil Dead, The Most Dangerous Game, Meet The Parents, The Looney Toons and… well I shouldn’t compare it to all that much because it’s got its own thing going on too, and I fucking loved the dementedly high strung, black comedy saturated aesthetic.

Weaving is a phenomenal talent, who you’ll remember as the sinister but smokin hot Babysitter in the Netflix film of the same name. She bears such a striking resemblance to Margot Robbie that up until now it thought it *was* Margot in this flick, but she’s just as awesome. Basically she’s stuck in a grand old Clue-esque manor while her obnoxious, flippant, asshole in-laws hunt her down with antiquated weapons that look like they’re pilfered off that angry ass colonial hunter from Jumanji. There’s all kinds of hijinks, gory set pieces and an ending that is so off the map of WTF-ness and unexpected pandemonium I had to give it a the ol’ royal slow clap for effort and ingenuity. Scene stealers include the always deadpan Henry Czerny as the clan’s smarmy, perpetually cheesed off patriarch, Adam Brody as his very conflicted son and beloved Andie MacDowell as the two-faced dragon of a matriarch. This is tongue in cheek territory and then some, I mean the concept is right out of a darker version of Saturday Night Live or something. Weaving is just so great, turning white hot panic into exasperated anger and truly getting some exemplary, crowd pleasing moments of extreme violence, especially towards the family’s hapless butler (John Ralston). If you’re a fan of down n’ dirty, super gory and utterly hilarious horror mayhem, this is pretty much guaranteed to be a good time.

-Nate Hill

William Eubank’s Underwater

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’m pumped that I got to see William Eubank’s Underwater in theatres, because it’s the kind of giddy, delightful escapism that you don’t get on the big screen too often anymore. I love creature feature flicks, love SciFi, love films set underwater, there’s a feel akin to outer space that is just so immersive and enchanting. Throw in Kristen Stewart, who I love as an actress no matter how much hate y’all throw her way, and well this thing seems like it was made for me!

Seven miles down the Mariana Trench, a vast drilling expedition has made a bit to much of a racket and awoken something up on the ocean floor, something big, pissed off and scary as fuck. Stewart and her research team feel the repercussive effects about a mile further up on their rig, and in the first couple minutes of the film, all hell literally breaks loose. This is after a brief, moody and atmosphere setting introduction to Stewart’s Nora, a tough but damaged and fatalistic engineer whose survival instinct kicks in the minute things go haywire, evading extreme pressure, aquatic dementia, claustrophobia, panic and undersea monsters to stay alive along with her captain (Vincent Cassel) and crew that includes T.J. Miller as hysterical comic relief, John Gallagher Jr and Jessica Henwick as their research assistant who brings a sense of warmth and humanity in her excellent performance.

This is a tight, no nonsense B movie that hits the ground running, basically takes place in real time, has some very inventive biology for the creatures that I won’t spoil (there’s a WTF reveal in the third act that gave me chills) and feels like one long extended scene that somehow finds a few moments to actually make you feel for these people. Stewart rocks a blonde crew cut and sports bra, vaguely evoking Ripley from the Alien films but finding her own bleak, badass groove. Her final ‘fuck you’ to the aquatic beasts is a stand-up-and-fucking-cheer moment that solidifies her character as a capable, selfless and gritty heroine. This isn’t going to win any awards but it’s a shining example of the type of thing I want to go see at the multiplex: thrilling escapism, heroes to root for, nasty monsters from the deep places of the earth, a beautiful sense of style brought by cinematographer Bojan Bazelli and wonderfully spooky, cathartic score composed by Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts. I couldn’t recommend this enough.

-Nate Hill

Jan De Bont’s The Haunting

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It amazes me that anyone involved in the making of Jan De Bont’s The Haunting thought they were doing anything that could be classified as remotely ‘scary.’ The film barely deserves its PG-13 rating and quite honestly I’ve seen spookier ghosts in that Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion thing. Now, having said that: I do recommend seeing it for the absolutely stunning, breathtakingly elaborate production design and set artistry. The visuals are so beautiful they really deserve a better film to showcase, but oh well.

Basically silly professor Liam Neeson wants to study fear and it’s effects on people, so he places an ad and soon a few people have agreed to spend a night in gargantuan Hill House manor under the guise of a sleep deprivation experiment. Lili Taylor, who is no stranger to haunted houses now that she headlined The Conjuring, is someone I usually love but her performance here as the lead is grating, weird, shrill, dull, stilted and bizarre just to use a few adjectives. Catherine Zeta Jones fares better as a sassy bisexual babe who relishes line delivery and whose ornately beautiful aura slinks in nicely with that of the baroque estate. Owen Wilson is unfortunately also cast and gets saddled with the weirdo comic relief thing, falling flat in every scene and just coming across as vaguely neurologically damaged. Others fly by in smaller roles including Alix Koromzy, Todd Field, Virginia Madsen, Michael Cavanaugh, Tom Irwin, M.C. Gainey and Bruce Dern as the cranky caretaker.

There’s this half baked plot around the guy that built the place, kid’s souls trapped within and something about Taylor’s character being the reincarnation of his wife, which is a horror motif I’m honestly just so sick of. Really it’s just the cast bumbling about these gorgeous sets while things go bump, and occasionally unforgivably bad CGI giant hands reaching out of walls to give them a spank or two. It’s an unrepentant mess. But like I said before, these are some jaw dropping sets they’ve built, full of ornate detail and embellished craftsmanship, from a house of mirrors built into a carousel to a glass solarium complete with spiral staircases to a water featured corridor with book shaped stepping stones to what has to be the world’s largest walk-in fireplace and so much more. Honestly I’d just put it on with no volume, pull up an atmospheric playlist on Spotify and enjoy it sans dialogue or even it’s own score, to saturate yourself in the visual aspect.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Mary

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

There are worse ways to spend your lazy Sunday than watching Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer on a haunted sailboat. Mary is one in a handful of lower budget things that Oldman has insisted on doing lately despite being a desired actor of high acclaim (I didn’t write that last bit with a straight face FYI) and for the most part they’re to be avoided (the two pulpy crime ones with Jessica Alba and Olga Kurylenko are just shit), but I kind of enjoyed this maritime horror yarn for what it was. Oldman plays a fishing tour guide in coastal Florida who dreams of one day having his own boat and patching up his rocky marriage to spitfire Mortimer. Fate tracks him down in the form of the Mary, a mysterious derelict schooner up for auction. It needs a bit of work but there’s nothing a good montage can’t fix, then soon enough it’s out to sea for her maiden voyage with their two daughters and his trusty first mate (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, who is getting great traction these days). Midway through the voyage strange, supernatural stuff starts happening and it appears that this vessel is indeed haunted by the vengeful spirit of a drowned witch. I’m not going to talk up this thing for more than it is, it’s essentially a cheapie horror time killer and I probably wouldn’t have paid it any attention whatsoever without the presence of Oldman, who I’m a super fan of, and Mortimer who I have always really loved. This is the first time they’ve worked together and it’s really nice to see them onscreen, neither of them phone it in at all despite the fact that the material is clearly beneath them. Decent scares, atmospheric cinematography and solid performances from them make this worth a look. Just don’t get out the top hat and monocle or try and get really critical, because the only person you’ll disappoint is yourself.

-Nate

Adam Randall’s I See You

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

A lot of thrillers promise you’ll be “on the edge of your seat,” “white knuckling it” or other sensational claims, but few follow through on such guarantees. Adam Randall’s I See You doesn’t merely make good on the edge of your seat bit, it’s so fucking suspenseful it has you hovering *above* your seat in anticipation and screaming back down into it when the multiple instances of nerve shredding payoff hit. It’s a fantastic home invasion thriller, a skin drawling horror flick and somehow has this odd, surreal aura to it that it never fully explores but maintains on the fringes of our awareness like the unsettling memory of a mostly forgotten nightmare. I literally can’t explain more than the super basic premise here or I’ll ruin the many amazing, tantalizing and eerie surprises it has to offer, you just have to dive in blind for this baby.

So basically there’s this small town homicide detective (Jon Tenney from True Detective Season 3), his wife (Helen Hunt, where has she been this past decade?) and their kid (Judah Lewis) and they’re really not on great terms as a family. Young boys are disappearing around the town and he’s forced to put most of his energy into investigations while his wife and son try and coexist with civility. Then all of a sudden weird shit starts happening around their house like things gone missing, out of place, odd bumps in the night etc. Is it all connected somehow? The fun is in this superbly twisty guessing game of a narrative that will *actually* keep seasoned pros who think they’ve seen every turn of events in the dark. Some of the camera work here is downright brilliant, with swooping crane, fluid dolly and pan shots that give the illusion of gliding through this diabolical story. The score by William Arcane must be mentioned as well, not since the Sinister films have I heard a more disorienting, otherworldly collection of wails, moans and such ghostlike auditorial menace, it really adds to the whole deal in a dreamlike way. Aside from a few slightly murky plot details (to be fair, this is a tough rig to navigate through the canyon flawlessly) this is as close to a perfectly orchestrated thriller as I’ve seen in a while, not to mention about as suspenseful, immersive and scary too. Highly recommended.

-Nate Hill