Tag: creepy

Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’m not sure exactly happened with The Black Dahlia but it’s like the recipe was there, it was on time and legible and whoever was in charge of whipping up the ingredients into something coherent, be it editor or producer or Brian DePalma himself, was simply having an off day. In telling the story of two hard-boiled LAPD detectives (Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett, both giving good performances that deserve a much better film) who are assigned to the infamous murder of Elizabeth Short (here played by Mia Kirshner in flashbacks), the filmmakers seem more intent on sidetracking into a useless love triangle between the two cops and a former prostitute (Scarlett Johannsson) as well as numerous political, high society and other cluttered subplot threads that don’t feel like they need to be there. Hartnett gets tangled up with a weird femme fatale (Hilary Swank trying on an accent that fails spectacularly) from a super rich and super shady aristocratic family and it’s here where the film, based on a fiction novel, tries its best to tell the made-up story of what really happened to this girl, kind of like that Johnny Depp Jack The Ripper film only nowhere near as gripping, atmospheric or well told of a story. There’s so much going on I just threw my hands up in frustration at one point and resigned myself to bailing on the story and simply spending most of the two hours playing I-Spy with all the familiar faces in the supporting cast, and it’s here I can say something truly positive about the film. I miss the days when big budget Hollywood flicks had epic, sprawling supporting casts full of awesome people on roll call, even if they’re only around for a swift cameo or couple cool quick scenes. Here we get appearances from many including Kevin Dunn, Mike Starr, Rose McGowan, Troy Evans, Richard Brake, Rachel Miner, Patrick Fischler, Gregg Henry, Ian McNeice, singer K.D. Lang, DePalma himself and more. The great British actress Fiona Shaw (Aunt Petunia in Harry Potter) almost saves the entire film with a deranged extended cameo as Swank’s deeply unstable mother, her performance is so intensely off the wall and bizarrely compelling she seems like she walked in from a David Lynch film, she’s basically the liveliest spark the film has to offer. There is one particular death scene that is also quite memorable and almost more gruesome than the Dahlia murder itself, you’ll know when you see it. I just couldn’t get wrapped up in this thing though, the story is all over the place, feels disingenuous at the core of its script and is just a giant mess, no other way to put it. Great cast though, at least there’s that.

-Nate Hill

Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavour

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s always neat when a major streaming service takes a devilish gamble on something completely deranged and ‘out there’ for their original shows, and Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavour is about as WTF as you can accessibly produce without going into full fledged David Lynch surreal arthouse realms. It’s based on a book by a dude called Todd Grimson who I’m not familiar with but the creator/show-runner is Nick Antosca who is responsible for my favourite horror tv show of all time Channel Zero (which can be seen on Shudder) so it’s safe to say his creative output here is also a unique, otherworldly game changer. This tells the story of Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar, the Battle Angel in Alita), a film student who has brought her horror short to LA in hopes of signing a feature deal, which starts by garnering the interest of fast talking, knowledgeable, well connected producing guru Lou Burke (Eric Lange). Unfortunately, as is often the case with Hollywood bigwigs, Lou is a sociopathic, sleazy piece of shit who not only comes onto her and gets petty when she rejects his advances but then steals her short film for his own purposes and even assaults her. What to do? Well, you could sell your soul to a weird cat worshipping witch deity in exchange for revenge most foul. I wouldn’t recommend it but in this case Lisa is a bit naive and doesn’t heed the obvious warning bells when she’s approached by mysterious Boro (Catherine Keener), who promises her retribution in return for a vaguely Faustian bargain. Well after neglecting to read the fine print Lisa finds her life and that of everyone around her turn into a full on hellish supernatural nightmare complete with flesh eating zombies, inter dimensional hallucinations, angry phantasms, peyote induced mania, pissed off Latino mob hitmen, hiccups, extreme violence at every turn and a strange affliction where every so often she’ll dry heave and vomit up a newborn kitten, and I mean that in the lost literal, explicit way possible, she straight up chundies little tiny demonic white cats covered in barf and it’s nasty af. But that’s what you get when you tangle with a mischievous witch I suppose. Catherine Keener hasn’t had a role this great in years and she’s a diabolical wonder as Boro, the least trustworthy being you’ve ever met, full of quips, quotes and scathing verbal roasts with the bizarre black magic to back her talk up, it’s truly a wondrous villain performance that she has a lot of fun with. This isn’t necessarily the most… succinct or airtight vision and it’s sometimes feels like paint just hurled at a canvas there are so many elements at play, especially in the back half of the season. But oh, what elements they are. This is dark, fucked up, no-chill storytelling with some of the blackest humour imaginable, laughs that catch in your throat on the way up like a barfed kitten and some of the most acidic, punchy, sizzling writing I’ve ever heard, full of impossibly colourful language and brimming with delicious, often very niche Hollywood references. It’s messy but it’s a beautiful goddamn mess and has so much jaw dropping, unbelievable content that I was transported along for the ride that resembles something like Mulholland Dr tossed together with Cronenberg, Raimi’s Evil Dead films with a dash of Entourage and something even intangible thrown in for good bloody measure. Be careful with this one if you’re content sensitive because it’s… punishingly perverse, overbearingly intense and unforgivingly willing got plumb the dark, demented depths of the collective storytelling psyche and puke up whatever it finds onto the screen. Like a kitten, or a self removed eyeball, cannibalistic zombies, metre long tapeworms pulled slowly out of human eye sockets, those are all but a taste. Buckle up.

-Nate Hill

The MacManus Brothers’ The Block Island Sound

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Aliens are up there and they’re messing with us… or are they down below, in the waters of the ocean? The MacManus Brothers’ The Block Island Sound is a fascinating, atmospheric and frequently terrifying glimpse of life in a small fishing town on the Rhode Island coast as inhabitants grapple with a mysterious, threatening, possibly extraterrestrial or cryptozoological force that slowly encroaches on them in increasingly horrifying ways. One fisherman (Chris Sheffield) has already seen his father (Neville Archambault) fall victim to these things and now finds himself coming down with strange symptoms: sleepwalking, blackouts, bizarre hallucinations, dark thoughts and the most severe case of tinnitus I’ve ever seen. He struggles to protect his family from whatever is out there and what it’s doing to him as he can no longer trust his own actions or impulses, especially around his young niece (Matilda Lawler, excellent) whose safety he fears for. This is a slow burn, ambiguous SciFi horror story that takes its time; you never see what’s out there beyond esoteric hints and chilling sounds behind the perpetually overcast coastal skies and the flint grey waters of the sea below. It’s always the threat of what’s out there that is scarier than the thing itself seen in full, and the filmmakers know this, taking full advantage of the ‘less is more’ mantra. Acting is all superior quality, there are a few sequences that drag and could have been tightened up a bit but overall this is a slick, nasty, spine chilling otherworldly horror that hits the spot. It even achieves a moment of pure greatness right at the very end when a character provides thought provoking narration that will make you completely rethink the nature of alien abductions themselves. Good stuff.

-Nate Hill

Willy’s Wonderland

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I never thought I’d live to see Nicolas Cage violently tune up a giant plush gorilla with a toilet plunger and curb stomp it’s head onto a urinal, but here we are. Willy’s Wonderland is an absolute bonkers blast, the kind of delirious, fucked up, funny as hell, gory as shit horror comedy I haven’t seen the likes of since the original Evil Dead. Now, I’m not sure what the rights or relationship situation is to the video game Five Nights At Freddy’s because this is clearly very much inspired by it, but that aside this finds it’s own demented groove, devilish mythology and wicked funny dark humour. Cage plays a mysterious, mute drifter who takes a night job cleaning a creepy, rundown Chuck E. Cheese restaurant to pay off a mechanic debt but it’s clear that the inbred yokels of this backwater enclave have a more sinister agenda, starting with the no nonsense sheriff (Beth Grant, Speed, Donnie Darko). Sure enough, the seemingly dormant animatronic toys are possessed by evil spirits and come to life at night with plans on killing Cage. What to do? He springs into silent but deadly action and beats the ever-loving fucking piss out of these loud mouthed Fisher Price rejects in what can only be described as an experience of pure unfiltered pandemonium. Meanwhile outside the restaurant a group of local kids prepares to pour gasoline and burn the place down in attempts to end the evil forever. This is Cage’s show and he’s a tornado of charisma even with no dialogue, guzzling down soda pop and dancing around pinball machines when he isn’t ruthlessly and violently decimating the animatronics, who all have interesting and creative designs from an ostrich to a medieval Knight to a Mexican mariachi turtle (lol) to Willy himself, a giant leering weasel with an elongated neck. The unnerving theme song and all of the musical numbers belted out by this demonic cabal of zoological burnouts are all written by experimental multi-musical artist Emoi and they all pop for a soundtrack that sets the cheeky tone perfectly. The story, although completely ludicrous, somehow feels engrossing and believable in a manic, bizarro world kind of way and every actor knows what kind of script they’ve been handed and does a terrific job with the humour. It is what it is man, if you came to see anything other than Nic Cage tangle with animatronics you’re gonna disappoint yourself but I’ll tell you this much: this could have been cheap lazy trash built around a gimmick they expected to sell itself. It isn’t. The gimmick is just the diving board, and the film itself is a genuinely well written, acted and executed piece that’s impressive and fun beyond being ‘just that crazy Nic Cage flick.’ It’s even legit scary in a few places, which is did NOT expect. So buckle up.

-Nate Hill

RL Stine’s Fear Street

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Netflix has tried a somewhat innovative and unique experiment with their film adaptations of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books, filming an entire interconnected trilogy and then releasing them week by week like a running serial of feature length films. The effect is genius both in terms of marketing and the stories themselves and the only thing that would have made it better is if we got to see them week by week on the big screen, like a triple dip multiplex experience. The films are wonderful, three different slasher flicks set respectively in 1994, 1978 and 1666 with a neat double-back to the 90’s again as the last film wraps up the multigenerational, complicated tale of an evil curse placed on the hard-luck town of Shadyside, OH. As a group of teens in 94 scramble to figure out what’s causing some townspeople to go on murderous rampages, the second film takes us back to summer camp 78’ as the generation before them experiences the same killers who seem to be controlled by some kind of powerful force, and the third goes even farther back to the pilgrim settlers that first came to the region as we finally get to the root of what’s causing these century long killings spurred on by what seems like an evil witch, until we learn the real reason which is far more scary and sad. 94 presents to us a stunning opening sequence set inside an appropriately retro shopping centre complete with neon decorations and a masked killer inspired by Ghostface, while 78 offers a nice riff on stuff like Friday The 13th and Sleepaway Camp and 66 goes for a devilish spin on Salem-esque cultish witchiness. Despite all these stylistic influences and homages and an appropriately nostalgic soundtrack lineup full of crowd pleasing anthems of their day, this trilogy strives to be its own thing and not sink too deep into the waters of retro fan service without having an original voice of its own. The characters here are all terrifically developed and wonderfully acted by a massive cast full of familiar faces and relative newcomers alike and the whole thing is as fun as a gong show Halloween house party, as insanely gory (some of the kills are downright shocking) as we like our slashers to get, as down to earth as our favourite social commentary horrors and as deeply tragic and heartbreaking as horror should often be. Great stuff all round.

–Nate Hill

David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Dead Zone is the combined efforts of three artists who can only be described overall as a trio of the most extreme storytellers of their day, Stephen King, Christopher Walken and David Cronenberg. It’s a bold, counterintuitive and brilliant move on all parts to then make this a restrained, humane and warm-hearted piece of compassionate thriller filmmaking, despite having the aura of a classic horror film. Christopher Walken gives one of his best, most soulful performances as Johnny Smith, a mild mannered schoolteacher who is blessed/cursed with the powers of spooky clairvoyance after a cataclysmic car wreck leaves him in a coma for five years. He can now sense the future, past and ill fated destiny of others around him based on touch, an ability that can save many lives but also has a draining effect on his own spirit forces. As he helps the local sheriff (Tom Skeritt) track a vicious serial killer, tutors the neurologically challenged young son of a rich businessman (Anthony Zerbe) and has growing suspicions about an overzealous, obviously sinister politician (a smarmy as hell Martin Sheen) running for senate, he tries his best to reconnect with the former girlfriend (Brooke Adams) who remarried during his coma and pick up the pieces of his life. Walken is excellent and reins in his usual eccentricities (apart from one brief, shockingly hilarious outburst) for a subtle, restrained and heartbreaking portrayal akin to his award winning turn in The Deer Hunter. Johnny isn’t a warrior, cop, leader or hero, he’s just a quiet schoolteacher who finds himself thrown into this extraordinary situation and has to deal, and Walken’s shy, awkward and otherworldly presence brings this to life wonderfully. The film is shot in rural Ontario during wintertime and as such there’s an icy, eerie blanket of small town atmosphere over everything, made thicker by a beautiful Michael Kamen score that lays on the orchestral swells and quirky, spine chilling experimental cues in perfect musical symbiosis. This is King at his kindest, with an ending that although is appropriately bleak, still has a sorrowful heart to it and not his often cynical, hollow hearted touch. It’s also Cronenberg at his most character based, ditching the body horror to explore the psychological strain a phenomenon like this would exert and taking a long breath in his otherwise hectic, gooey career to compassionately explore a character alongside Walken who is a dark angel revelation as Smith. Sensational film.

-Nate Hill

The Final Girls

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The slasher sub-genre of horror has consistently and gradually become self aware as it has evolved, reshaping it’s archetypes, going spectacularly meta and immersing the audience in self commentary whether it’s well known blockbusters like Scream or obscure indie treats like The Rise Of Leslie Vernon. The Final Girls is as detailed, referential, loving, meta and rewarding as they come with a disarmingly affecting emotional weight to it I did not expect. Playfully skewering summer camp slasher outings like Friday The 13th and Sleepaway Camp, it stars the lovely Taissa Farmiga as Max, a teen girl whose mother Nancy (Malin Ackerman) is killed in a brutal car wreck. Nancy was once a Hollywood scream queen and starred in the very popular Camp Bloodbath franchise, a claim to fame that she always resented and a legacy that Max now wants nothing to do with. At an anniversary screening of the first Bloodbath film Max and her friends find themselves somehow transported into the film itself through the screen by some sort of magical inter dimensional slasher voodoo, the same kind of cinema themed mysticism that brought that one kid into the Schwarzenegger movie world in another vastly under appreciated meta flick, Last Action Hero. In this pristine 1980’s world they find sunny campgrounds, a glassy lake and knowingly corny writing (the movie counsellors are priceless) and the killer himself, who is set on a preordained murder spree of these characters which include, as a panicked Max learns, her own mother. So begins a breathless, clever and often very funny deconstruction of the classic slasher narrative as these modern kids quite literally interrupt it midway and aggressively rearrange the formulaic turns we’re so used to experiencing beat by beat. There’s an epic, adderall fuelled striptease set to She’s My Cherry Pie, endless tongue in cheek jokes and references that get turned on their head, some wild, colourful and borderline psychedelic set design and cinematography in the ‘movie’ world too. What really makes this such a great film and a strong piece is the deeply heartfelt mother daughter relationship between Max and Nancy, acted stunningly by both. Farmiga is an unbelievable otherworldly talent and, dare I say, more mesmerizing onscreen than her sister Vera, one long stare from her could shatter down walls built by anyone, she makes Max a wounded yet resilient spirit. Ackerman gets shafted a bit as the ‘hot blonde’ archetype but she is far more talented than she gets credit for and does a delicate balancing act here between obligatory campiness with pockets of very candid realism peppered in for a gem of a performance. Now, myself being someone who has used both film and music to cope with the death of a parent, I can tell you that this film is almost too real and near transcendent at accomplishing that theme onscreen. It’s essentially a story about Max working through the unimaginable hurt, and very long lasting pain of losing her mother presented in a mature and heartbreaking way, reflected through the prism of a fun, self aware horror comedy and I think the overall idea and execution are genius, really. Add to the fact that the song that Max and Nancy share as ‘their song’ is Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes which was one of my dad’s favourites so you can say that, for me, this cut really deep (slasher pub heavily intended). A masterpiece, streaming on Netflix now.

-Nate Hill

Jenn Wexler’s The Ranger

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Park rangers are always kind of benign, often goofy and only vaguely threatening figures in cinema, they’re not quite cops, not quite tradesmen and the archetype for writers has always been a blurred line. Jenn Wexler’s The Ranger brazenly shakes that up and draws a firm delineation in the campfire dirt here for an utterly ruthless, absolutely fantastic grindhouse romp that packs a punch to the gut and a kick to the nuts. Teenage punk runaway Chelsea (Chloë Levine) has fuzzy memories of an encounter with a strange park Ranger (Jeremy Holm) when she was young at her deceased uncle’s cabin, briefly before being carted off to the foster care system. Years later and she has fallen in with the wrong crowd, a group of heavy metal brats who inadvertently kill a cop and drag her on the run, eventually ending up in the same national park her uncle’s cabin is in. Naturally, the Ranger is still there too and has made it his personal mission to hunt and kill anyone who wanders into his jurisdiction which now includes Chelsea and all her friends. This is a grisly, fucked up, jaggedly stylish exercise in knowingly lowbrow horror in the tradition of stuff like Cop Car, Wolf Creek and The Hitcher where one archetypal madman roams the enclaves of his realm and stalks anyone who ventures there. Holm is a twisted revelation as The Ranger, possessive of the kind of stalwart, clean cut, Kennedy-esque aura that is all the more unnerving when we see just how cuckoo bananas mentally deranged and wantonly homicidal he is. I appreciated a really fascinating psychological dynamic between he and Chelsea as well, a mysterious mental link that goes back to her childhood near the cabin and is revealed bit by bit in hazy hallucinatory flashbacks. Set to a brain melting nebula of heavy metal and synth music that clashes wonderfully with the wilderness palette, acted to the nines by Levine and Holm (the rest of the teens verge on camp but that’s half the fun) and wound tightly into a blood drenched, visceral mind-game mentality that’s just scrappy enough around the edges, this is a rip-snortin indie worth it for any fan of raw, torqued up exploitation horror, streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea is about as loud, silly, gory and hilarious as you’d expect a ‘killer smart shark’ flick to be and is for the most part a lot of fun, even if it sometimes dissolves into eyeball melting pandemonium. The premise is actually a good one: a brilliant and obligatorily sexy scientist (the lovely Saffron Burrows) has developed a potential formula to treat Alzheimer’s using genetic material from shark brains, and she’s gotten a high level executive (Samuel L. Jackson) to convince his CEO boss (a brief, contemplative cameo from Ronny Cox) to sign off on funding, pending an inspection visit to her test facility out in the ocean. There we meet others including shark hunting guru Thomas Jane, gruff scientist Stellan Skarsgard, oddball cook LL Cool J and grunt Michael Rapaport, all who make great cannon fodder for the marauding sharks once they decide they’re too smart to be lab rats for these people anymore. There are some great gory kills here and the timing of them is sometimes genuinely shocking and inspired, including one death scene that is straight out of the book of nihilism and dark humour 101 and had me laughing hard. It’s basically a decent B movie souped up with Hollywood effects, tons of explosions and while it has the misfortune of being released when CGI wasn’t too great (it shows), it also has the advantage of being made at a time when shark horror films weren’t over saturated and done to death like they are these days and as such feels somewhat fresh, especially given its additional premise of sentient sharks. It’s fun, engaging and a bit cacophonous in some instances where it could have employed more stealth and suspense, but overall a good example of the shark sub genre.

-Nate Hill

Burnt Offerings

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Burnt Offerings (that stellar title deserves a much better film) doesn’t do much as far as innovation goes in the haunted house genre but it’s serviceable enough as an atmospheric diversion and benefits from a very strong and frequently cuckoo bananas performance from the great Oliver Reed as a family man and writer who moves his wife (Karen Black) and son (Lee Montgomery) into a suspiciously creepy manor in the English countryside in a sort of caretakers capacity. Now we all know from collective cinema experience how ill advised it is for writers to move their families into empty large buildings with threatening auras, but hey that’s half the fun. They should have especially known better here though because they’re hired to house sit the place by the weirdest people imaginable, two creepy old goats played by a half mad Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart, and let me tell you if these two tried to hire me to look after their weird empty English house I’d run the other way, but then we wouldn’t have a story I suppose. The film hinges on a dynamic that consists of Reed trying to be steadfast and responsible but slowly succumbing to some Jack Torrence level madness while Black’s ineffectual wife blathers on in ditzy mania and the poor kid is stuck between them. There’s a highly effective sequence in the manor’s pool where playful, benign roughhousing between father and son turns unexpectedly violent and grim very fast and is a nice example of tension building and infused menace on Reed’s part. Bette Davis shows up in a rather forgettable role and there’s a spooky grinning valet driver who may or may not be a ghost that sows seeds of narrative and tonal unrest too. It’s nothing fancy, nothing new or noteworthy but as far as routine, atmospheric haunted house flicks with esteemed actors go, you could do worse. Streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill