Tag: film reviews

Andrew Patterson’s The Vast Of Night

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Andrew Patterson’s The Vast Of Night is one of the only films I’ve seen that almost flawlessly captures that incredibly specific feeling of ‘a summer night right around school ending’, that magical, magnetic, ‘stay up all night’ vibe right as the year gets exciting. The film itself is about two high school students in the 50’s who receive a very strange radio frequency signal at a local broadcast station one of them works at, a signal that may or may not be coming from a mysterious unseen UFO hovering above the small town’s airspace. That plot thread is really just the groundwork for what can only be described as a very atmospheric, unbelievably well written and candidly acted mood piece where, for most of the film, we simply follow these characters talking amongst themselves and interacting in a very realistic fashion until slowly, bit by bit, the underlaying SciFi narrative makes itself known. Now, naturally such a style and pace requires a modicum of nearly meditation level patience from the viewer, but when your dialogue, atmospherics, acting and physical blocking of people and objects are this fluid, assured and endearing it’s not a tough task for a viewer to fully surrender themsef to the experience. Our two young leads (Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz) are both superb and have the kind of whip smart, intuitive chemistry you can relate to being a teenager once yourself, and every character they meet over the course of this night (unfolding in cohesive real time) is very well casted and acted, from their friends and family, high school faculty and a couple spooky informants who provide theories and personal experience as intel on this UFO scavenger hunt. This is director Andrew Patterson’s debut film and he goes for the boy wonder routine by basically doing almost everything himself including editing, and I have to give it to the guy, this is one hell of a first time effort. The camera moves elemental from scene to scene with unobtrusive cuts, gorgeous nocturnal summer photography and the sheer ballet of movement as characters move across town, in and out of cars, buildings and the central hub of the high school basketball stadium feels like an understated dance of near flawless blocking and storyboard translation. I won’t spoil whether or not these two kids actually find a real UFO or not because this is decidedly a ‘the journey, not the destination’ experience, but what a transfixing little journey it is. Anyone who has ever laid out in a field on a hushed summer evening, gazed up at the stars and felt that special indescribable feeling when they wonder what’s out there and are we really alone will heavily relate to this film and vibe on its atmospheric frequency, because it achieves something that is often so hard for films to tangibly and effectively alchemize onto the screen: a genuine sense of wonder. Very fine film.

-Nate Hill

Hider In The House

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Hider In The House is pretty much your average ‘unhinged loner stalking a suburban American family’ thriller, and the psycho in question is played by Gary Busey, which seems like your perfect setup for a maniacal ride. However, this film presents its antagonist as a surprisingly sympathetic individual who was abused viciously for year by his own parents until he finally had it and burned the house down around them. Fair enough. Upon being released from psychiatric care and a halfway house as an adult he decides to take up residence in the attic of an empty house, just to see what normal life feels like. Well the house doesn’t stay empty for long as a yuppie couple (Mimi Rogers and Michael McKean) prepare to move in. Busey just keeps on living up there and eventually insinuates him self into their lives under the guise of a ‘neighbour,’ eventually becoming downright disturbed, menacing and dangerous. The film is pretty relaxed as far as thrillers like this go, it takes a while to amp up to anything resembling tension and Busey, given the perfect runway to cut loose and turn in one of his patented loony performances, chooses instead to almost entirely rein it in except when the situation legit calls for a touch of hysteria. It’s decent enough and I’ll pretty much watch the guy in anything, he’s just got such a presence, but this is low budget, melodramatic silliness no matter how you slice it.

-Nate Hill

Arthur Hiller’s Silver Streak

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Is this what was considered funny in the 70’s? Because it felt lukewarm, awkward and stretched over a super long runtime to me. Don’t get me wrong I love Gene Wilder with all my heart and Richard Pryor is cool too but if Silver Streak is any kind of barometer as to what their comedic pairing in cinema back then is all about (this is my first one) then, well… meh. Wilder plays a mild mannered businessman on a long distance rail trip who gets unwittingly yanked into all sorts of espionage shenanigans involving a femme fatale (Jill Clayburgh), a malevolent Bond type villain (Patrick McGoohan), a boisterous undercover federal agent (Ned Beatty) and many others aboard the speeding train, all of them looking for some sort of highly incriminating McGuffin object that we never really see. Pryor himself doesn’t even show up until at least halfway through the film playing a rowdy petty thief who is proud of his vocation (“I’m a thief” lol) and sort of forms an uneasy alliance with Wilder to outwit all these competing forces. That sounds like a ton of fun, right? Not so much. It all just comes across as awkward, weirdly paced and WAY too long, this is a brisk 90 minute comedy posing as a two hour big budget thing that just doesn’t have the juice to fill that runtime with enough to keep us occupied. There’s a jarring sequence where Wilder gets done up in blackface, *with* Pryor’s assistance no less, and get coached in jive turkey talk as some harebrained disguise gimmick, but it’s only really in the film as a shtick to serve itself and makes no logical or comedic sense whatsoever. Now I know this was the 70’s and comedy was a lot different back then, and I’m the last one to ruffle my feathers over stuff like that but time period aside it just feels lame, awkward and unnecessary, with both actors making painfully embarrassing asses of themselves. There is one scene that genuinely made me laugh hard, in which a frazzled Wilder frantically tries to explain his predicament to a dozy small town sheriff (Clifton James) who simply cannot wrap his mind around the complexities of a multi-character spy dilemma unfolding in real time. This part is genuinely hilarious and shows some spark but it was the only instance of that for me. The film is packed with recognizable faces including Fred Willard, Scatman Crothers, Ray Walston, Richard Kiel and more, none of whom make very vivid or memorable impressions. This just felt like a misfire to me overall, with two actors who I know to be surefire winners most of the time that just sort of flatline here in oddly conceived skits, a hopelessly cluttered and not particularly engaging caper that just feels like a lot of sitting on a train, running around and then more sitting on the train without much that kept me entertained. Check out the sheriff’s station scene over on YouTube though, it’s a hoot.

-Nate Hill

Brad Furman’s City Of Lies

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Question for you: did the LAPD use propagandist maneuvers and media manipulation in the 90’s to fictitiously outline an ongoing east coast/west coast gang war that never even existed and then, using covert tactics and unstable deep cover operatives, deliberately and unlawfully orchestrate behind the scenes murders of influential rappers Christopher ‘Notorious BIG’ Wallace and Tupac Shakur? This film certainly seems to think so, and the fact that it was suspiciously buried in distribution hell for three plus years following its production and snuck unceremoniously into release just this year has me thinking so as well. City Of Lies, based on the documentarian book LAbyrinth, is a fascinating, paranoia laced, very well written procedural thriller starring Johnny Depp as real life LAPD detective Russell Poole who never stopped trying to find out who really shot Biggie and Forest Whitaker as a reporter interested in the case who spends some time with him trying to get to the truth. The film is centralized around 2015 when the final chapter of Russell’s almost career-long investigation arrives at a conclusion but it leaps all over the 90’s for stylish, eerie, memory laden flashbacks that evoke everything from Tony Scott to Bourne movies and the filmmaking aesthetics, score, soundtrack and performances are all exemplary. Depp has had the misfortune of being dealt a few shitty hands lately which I won’t go into too much, but a mystifying scandal was whipped around this film itself to scapegoat him when it appears the real reason this film was buried was… well, just look at the subject matter. He gives a pained, haunted, understated, against type and altogether gripping performance here that hopefully is the start of a surge of roles that sees his phoenix ascent upwards from the quagmire of bullshit he’s been put through. Whitaker is fantastic as well and quite soulful in the third act and director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) assembles an unbelievable supporting cast just packed with character actor talent including Michael Paré, Toby Huss, Xander Berkeley, Rockmund Dunbar, Laurence Mason, Louis Herthum, Shea Wigham, Dayton Callie, Biggie’s real life mother Voletta Wallace playing herself, Obba Babatundé, Kevin Chapman, Glenn Plummer and the great Peter Greene as a particularly acid tongued LAPD commander. The film has a way of swerving just south of every question asked and a knack for making you feel like this story is open ended and unsolved. Unsolved is different than unproved though, and if everything that Depp’s Russell Poole cataloged and uncovered is for real then it’s no wonder this film never saw a major release and was held up for so long. Whatever really happened back then, this is one finely crafted thriller with a galaxy of terrific performances, a taut, engaging narrative and an incentive to shed light on those who abuse power, should know better, and need someone to call them out on it. Who better than a good cop like Poole, and who better to bring his story to life than an actor like Depp, who can pretty much do anything but tries something we’re not used to seeing from him everyday: play a regular guy just trying to do the right thing in the face of absolute corruption.

-Nate Hill

The Windmill Massacre

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I mean how amazing could a horror movie about a haunted windmill be? The Windmill Massacre is not bad as far as cheap thrill slashers go and actually gets together an effort to tell a decent story here and there amidst the carnage. Several tourists, runaways and drifters take a guided windmill tour in Holland throughout the countryside one weekend, and when their bus breaks down near a spooky old windmill that doesn’t seem to be on any of their maps, weird shit starts happening. It turns out this particular structure is owned and operated by a miller who once sold his soul to the devil for snazzy witchcraft powers and has been doing naughty things in the several centuries since including using the bones of corpses to grind through his mill and recently, hunting and brutally butchering these poor stranded folks with his scythe thingie. But are they all really just innocent victims? There’s a cool spin on the story where every tourist potentially has a dark past and this miller isn’t just some unhinged clog wearing maniac but serves as a sort of reaper who collects these souls based on their sins. Even our good hearted Australian protagonist (Charlotte Beaumont) has a dark, unfortunate and violent secret in her past that the miller preys upon. The gore is decently vicious, the miller is a threatening enough presence with a neat Leatherface facial aesthetic and all the actors range from good to decent. An entertaining enough time killer now streaming on Shudder, worth it alone just for those two hysterical tag-lines on the two posters. “This isn’t hell, this is Holland!” Ffs lol.

-Nate Hill

John Connolly’s The Dry

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Australia is the perfect place to set a good mystery, there’s just this inherently unexplored magnitude of desolation, otherworldly geological splendour and ghostly vastness to the landscape, an advantage that director John Connolly seizes with The Dry, an absolutely sensational noir singed thriller starring Eric Bana in a galvanizing comeback of sorts, or at least in my eyes I feel like I haven’t seen the dude in a while and he comes roaring back into play here. Based on the novel by Jane Harper, Bana plays Melbourne detective Aaron Falk, who returns home to Kiewarra, the outback bush-town he grew up in after the family of a childhood friend is found brutally murdered, including a young child. He initially only plans to stay for the funeral but the moment he arrives, the entire suppressed collective memory of the townsfolk dredges back up to the surface and before you know it old grudges are stirred and painful memories of the unsolved murder of a teenage girl from their past come back to haunt them, especially Aaron who was unofficially implicated as a teen. As if all this isn’t stressful enough already, the region is also going through an apocalyptic drought that makes the threat of wildfire an ever present source of anxiety and causes threatening, Mordor-esque flares of fiery colour on the horizon. The film expertly meanders through a narrative that feels languid and as slow paced as the sun etching across the desert horizon and as brittle, succinct and unforgiving as the landscape. We weave back and forth between hazily recollected flashbacks to the teenage years of this group, jigsawed together with laser precision and tethered to the present day investigation that bit by bit, conversation by conversation, memory by memory, yields truth to both mysteries. The eventual resolutions to both threads are shocking, cathartic, operatic and intensely emotional experiences impeccably acted by the entire cast, beautifully and eerily scored by Peter Raeburn (check out his amazing musical work in this year’s Amazon Prime show Tell Me Your Secrets as well) and given the evocative atmospheric boost of the ever present Australian wilderness enveloping everything. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Zack Snyder’s Army Of The Dead

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

We don’t deserve a movie as outright cool, fun, entertaining and badass as Zack Snyder’s Army Of The Dead. Know how I know? Because of all the flagrant, inflammatory hate I’m seeing in discussion threads across the universe of social media, hate being doled out largely (not exclusively, before you lunge for my throat) by people who would have surely left this film alone and even enjoyed it if Snyder had nothing to do with it. Know how I know *that*? Just trust me, I know how these fuckwit Snyder hating trolls operate and I know it’s only because of his involvement that they are being this way. Anyways enough about them and onto the film, which is sensational and one of the best I’ve seen this year. Snyder sets the action in and out of a cordoned off Las Vegas where an undead outbreak several years before has decimated sin city and the zombies, unlike anything you’ve seen so far in the genre by the way, have taken up a sort of primordial tribal residence amongst the once glitzy landmark city. A Japanese billionaire (Hiroyuki Sanada) assembles a team spearheaded by Dave Bautista’ ex special forces short order cook to venture in and bust open a casino vault with millions inside, but is that what he’s really after? Bautista is wonderful and proves yet again what a talented presence he is on top of being a solid action dude. His character reconnects with an estranged daughter (Ella Purnell) who works inside the quarantine zone and here the film finds a pathos usually uncommon in this arena. Others in the cast make vivid impressions including Tig Notaro as a cavalier helicopter pilot, Mathias Schweighöfer as an adorably aloof safecracker, Theo Rossi as a despicably abusive government soldier, Ana de la Reguera as a fearsome warrior and perennial slime-ball Garrett Dillahunt as a smarmy private security expert with a shady agenda. My favourite was the lovely Nora Arnezeder as the aptly named Coyote, a highly trained scout who regularly ventures into the hot zone and serves as their guide, she brings a humanity and urgency to both her lines and action choreography that really struck a chord with me. The zombies are ruled by a sort of patient zero Alpha named Zeus, played ferociously by Richard Cetrome, who also played the leader of the pack Big Daddy Mars in John Carpenter’s Ghosts Of Mars, a nice shoutout to a similarly maligned flick that actually totally rocks. Zeus has a Bride (Chelsea Edmundson) who for me was the most striking character in the film, a serpentine zombie queen with fiery contact lenses, a shrieking battle cry and wonderful physicality provided by model Edmundson. And yes there is a zombie tiger too, and yes she is one incredibly badass and beautifully rendered creature creation that is a highlight of the film. Look, this is a torqued up, totally ridiculous, hyper-stylized B movie about an outbreak in Vegas, wherein lies an undead jungle cat, zombies who ride skeletal horses and can both breed and have little zombie babies all wrapped up in a heist flick with a father daughter relationship, anti government undercurrents and more action that you can shake a severed head at, so if you’re trying to poke holes of logic and burrow for plot holes in a film that intrepidly incorporates all of that under one two and a half hour tent, well babe the only person you’re fooling is yourself. So what the story isn’t a succinct high-wire act of pushpin writing beats and realistic arcs? It’s a kickass old school horror flick with a huge cast, buckets of beautiful and strikingly graphic gore (eat your heart out, Bear attack scene from The Revenant), wonderfully unique mythology, dark humour, tons of gorgeous twilight and magic hour cinematography, splashes of genuinely affecting emotional work and a fucking zombie tiger named Valentine! So chill out. My top film of the year so far 🐅 🐯

-Nate Hill

Nick Willing’s Altar

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

◦ There’s a few spooky touches in Altar and a handful of well orchestrated scenes that are fun but for the most part this is a murky, depressing slog through the well travelled “American family moves into a creaky old British manor that is clearly haunted’ sub-genre that I’m sure by now any seasoned horror fan can tick off the narrative beats of in their sleep. Matthew Modine and Olivia Williams are an artist couple who take up residence in a country house with a sordid past that comes back to claim their souls and their sanity, starting with Modine’s husband who gradually begins to act very very strange. Now, there’s two scenes that are genuinely great: their daughter (Antonia Clarke), who seems to be the only one in the family with any sense in her head, is spectacularly haunted by a female ghost that crawls into her bed one night, sits beside her and looks her *right* in the eyes. Most horror films would use gruesome prosthetics, moonlit contact lenses and fake blood for this but the film chooses to view this spirit through a sort of ‘fragmented mirror kaleidoscope prism’ veil that is like shifting broken glass come to life and I thought it was just so cool. There’s another terrific scene where Modine and Williams mesmerically unearth a sort of ritualistic mural depicting sacrifice beneath their home that is just wonderfully edited and set to a piece of the score that stuck with me and is a sequence of true power and dynamism. That’s all the film musters that grabbed me though, and I was frustrated by the fact that Williams’s as the wife and mother consistently and flagrantly made shitty decisions to the point where I was yelling at her through the screen. At least Modine had an excuse because he was already under the influences of dark spirits. Only the daughter acted with rationality, logic and seemed to want to get out of there and, ironically, no one listens to her. This is a good time waster and it does shine in those two instances I described unfortunately it doesn’t do too much of anything else we haven’t seen before.

-Nate Hill

Boys From County Hell

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’m not sure what I expected from Boys From County Hell, probably more than what I got, which was a meagre, serviceable but ultimately forgettable ‘Irish gothic’ monster flick that seems so wrapped in its own Bram Stoker inspired mythology that it forgot to have some good old splatter filled fun. The story sees a dysfunctional road workers crew somewhere in Ireland who accidentally unearth an ancient Irish vampire who has been slumbering for thousands of years, prompting wanton bloodshed. The crew is run by a father and son duo who are constantly at each other’s throats, which adds a well rounded character dynamic and in that sense the film is kinda fun but it fails to present to us a monster that is anything close to memorable or remarkable and worse, the same thing doesn’t even seem to show up much at all throughout the whole runtime. The narrative tries to build this lore around the vampire mythos and do something unexpected with the via some obscure Stoker offshoot story but it ends up just being sort of muddled, forgettable and seriously lacking a vampire that shows up for more than a few minutes at a time.

-Nate Hill

Jordan Graham’s Sator

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I love when a horror film hits all the right notes in the aesthetics department of what resonates with me, so listen up if you are into: elemental, esoteric folk horror, lyrical, almost Malick level dialogue and character interaction, eerily hazy home video footage, misty, rugged wilderness cinematography, atmosphere so think you could cut it with an antler knife, demonic pagan deities that live unseen in the natural world and can be summoned by unwitting, weak minded human beings and more. Jordan Graham’s Sator is a stunning, immersive, spectacularly terrifying and absolutely visually gorgeous folk horror that cuts right to the heart of what genuinely freaks me out in the genre: atmosphere, the unknown, being alone, dark forces outside our narrow scope of belief and knowledge and how these forces corrupt, reshape and pervert the human condition to disturbing new heights. The film sees one man (Michael Daniel) alone far out in the remote California wilderness, living in a ramshackle cabin and setting out each day into the territory looking for… something. He has introspective flashbacks to a mother (Wendy Taylor) who went missing years before, a sister (Aurora Lowe) who was on the verge of mental illness, a brother (Gabriel Nicholson) who tried to keep the family together and an ailing grandmother (June Peterson) who spent the last few dementia ridden years of her life chronicling her unsettling internal relationship with a being she calls ‘Sator’, who reportedly talks in her head, dictates books filled with disquieting scripture and seems to have some stranglehold over this family as a group. When he’s not lost in dreamy memory recollection he wanders the perimeter of his property checking on motion sensor cameras he has set up all over the place and trust me you do *not* want to know what he finds they saw. This is a slow burn, arthouse, borderline surreal film through and through, and anyone without the patience for atmosphere, gradually cultivated tension and lyrical storytelling will be lost. There are payoffs and they are huge but first the film asks you to settle, to surrender and be swept away by the sights, sounds and dreamy world it offers before it reveals any secrets. It’s like if A24 did something akin to Blair Witch but with really earthen, nature based lore and a very atmosphere based approach. And as if the film weren’t scary enough, the concept of Sator and all the handwritten lore we see is authentic, very real stuff that actress June Peterson (who is the director’s real grandmother by the way) experienced in real life after a Ouija experience left her in psychiatric care going on about this ‘Sator’ thing for the rest of her life. If that doesn’t stand your hairs directly on end I don’t know what will, because when a film this scary can legitimately claim to be based on a true story in the *truest* sense of the concept, it’s enough to send anyone running for the hills and back again once they find whatever’s really out there. An absolute stunner of a horror film in every sense and one of those rare finds like It Follows, Hereditary, or The Blair Witch Project that successfully do what so many films in the genre promise to yet seldom deliver: scares the absolute fuck out of you. Streaming on Shudder now.