Tag: film reviews

Dark Places (2015)

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Any fans of deep southern gothic potboilers with shamelessly lurid trappings, hectic, labyrinthine mysteries spanning decades acted wonderfully by a massive cast of character versions both old and young should greatly appreciate Dark Places as much as I did. It’s based on a book by Gillian Flynn who also penned the source material for David Fincher’s Gone Girl but for me this was a much, much stronger and more rewarding film. Fincher approached the material with his custom clinical, cynical tunnel vision detachment and meticulously calibrated style while director Gilles Paquet-Brenn adopts a much more sprawling, scattered, rough around the edges vernacular that is more narratively oblong and hazy yet no less compelling and even throws in the faintest glimmer of humanity. Charlize Theron is excellent as ever as Libby, the lone survivor of a farmhouse massacre that left her entire family dead when she was a kid, the killer never found and her left wandering as a broken adult trying to cope. The film intersperses dense, overlapping flashbacks to her difficult childhood life, a troubled brother (Tye Sheridan and Corey Stoll in present day scenes) who was ultimately blamed for the crimes, a desperate mother (Christina Hendricks) and aggressive deadbeat father (Sean Bridgers) who all may have had some hand in the events, although nothing is made clear until you are well beyond neck deep in this tragic, increasingly bizarre small town family saga. Chloe Grace Moretz gives a terrifically creepy performance as her brother’s unstable, untrustworthy teen girlfriend and there’s lots of solid supporting work from great folks like Glenn Moreshower, Andrea Roth, Jeff Chase, Laura Cayouette and Drea de Matteo as a shady stripper with ties to Libby’s past. You know this is a film for true crime fans (even if the story itself is fictitious) when a subplot literally features a club of true crime aficionados led by a twitchy Nicholas Hoult who reach out to Libby in attempts to help her bring the case to a close. There is a *lot* going on in this film, and while not all of it gels into an ultimately cohesive tapestry, the resulting patchwork quilt is beautifully scrappy, full of jagged loose threads and is just an awesome, inky black, deliberately overcooked, chokingly sleazy pit of depravity, hidden half truths, deplorable human beings and even some very well buried pathos that sneaks up out of the slime to surprise you in the back end of the final act. Theron anchors it with her haunted, pensive aura as a fiercely guarded woman who is likely a lot more vulnerable and damaged than she’d care to admit, and the messy, bloody trajectory she must descend down to solve an infamous murder she was unwittingly at the centre of. Absolutely great film.

-Nate Hill

Captain Ron

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Kurt Russell doesn’t usually go for the comedy scripts so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Captain Ron but it was a legit blast of good times and the character he creates here is a legendary tornado of dreadlocked, suntanned, beer swillin’ manic energy. Martin Short plays a reliably high strung Chicago businessman who inherits a decent sized sailboat from a distant relative, and has to go down to the Caribbean to sail it back up before it can be appraised by an oily marine magnate (Paul Anka, of all people). So he decides to take his wife (Mary Kay Place) and two teenage kids along for the adventure, and since Russell’s renegade rascal Ron seems to be the only skipper on the rock who isn’t too hungover to be their guide and navigator, he hires him on the spot. What could go wrong? Well… not as much as I expected from the marketing on this thing but like… in a good way. The comedy is surprisingly restrained, very situational and well written where it could have been pretty 90’s silly slapstick and Russell’s performance, although loopy as all hell, is actually pretty subtle when it comes to getting those small, spur of the moment laughs that sneak in and become the funniest bits of the film. Like when he’s explaining the hierarchy of a ship crew to this clueless family and he goes “incentives are important. I learned that in rehab.” They encounter storms, pirates, packed harbours ready to party hard and armed ‘guerrillas’ (another joke that landed spectacularly) attempting to overthrow an unstable government and although Short’s attitude sometimes makes this feel like the ‘trip from hell downward spiral of insanity’ kind of flick it wants to be, it inadvertently just ends up having a great time out at sea and becomes a party, laidback hangout film, which is fine by me. This is thanks mainly to Russell and his effortless good ol’ boy charisma; even when he’s playing the most stoic, unfriendly badasses you always just get the sense that he’d be a guy you’d love to have a beer and just kick it with. Well you can do that here, and Captain Ron is one of the most easygoing, flat out hilarious and downright fun films of his career. Good times.

-Nate Hill

Ben Wheatley’s In The Earth

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

In The Earth is only the second film from Ben Wheatley I’ve seen, the first being his spunky noir shootout flick Free Fire which seems to be the odd duck out and a far cry from the dark, morose, esoteric folk horror fans are used to from him. This was a very interesting film and while the pieces don’t necessarily all fit together in a way that struck the ultimate timbre with me, it’s certainly a visually galvanizing, stylistically impressive work. As a research scientist (Joel Fry) and a park ranger (Ellora Torchia) trek deep into a wild forest in rural England on some sort of mission they encounter two very different individuals who are both trying to communicate and study some sort of… I dunno, entity or force that hides within the very structure of the natural world. There’s borderline zealot Zach (Reece Shearsmith) who lives as a homeless person would and approaches this being from a folk point of view, offering it iconography in a religious fashion like the pagans who lived in the region eons ago would have. His ex wife Olivia (Hayley Squires) lives in another region of the woods where nary the two stray into each other’s path (like most exes) and her efforts are a lot more scientific but no less bizarre, using complex machinery to reach out to this thing with light, sound and rhythm. The two leads find themselves stuck squarely between two duelling fanatics who are in way over their heads with a force of life neither can comprehend and are both slowly being driven mad by. And that’s as far as the plot goes in the realm of what is coherent and comprehensible anyways. The closest thing you could describe this entity as is a stone monolith punctuated by an opening through which you can view the stars, and nature on its terms but never is it presented as a physical or visible ethereal being beyond hints, abstract hallucinations and sounds out there in the dark. If that’s your thing than cool, I enjoyed the odd, surreal, impenetrable nature of it and recognized the welcome nods to many influences including Alex Garland’s Annihilation, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and even John Carpenter’s Prince Of Darkness in a few brief strokes. Just don’t expect to walk out of this thing with answers; it’s a moody horror SciFi that quickly transforms itself into a wild arthouse romp from which there is no rhyme or reason to be distilled from but what one’s own intuition says.

-Nate Hill

Mark Pavia’s Fender Bender

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The next time you get into a mild vehicular dustup be careful how much of your personal information you give to the other party involved, lest you end up like the unfortunate girls in Mark Pavia’s Fender Bender, a vicious little Grindhouse exercise that doesn’t quite achieve genre greatness but is still good fun. When a teenage girl (Mackenzie Vega, Sin City) is rear ended by a weird guy (Bill Sage, American Psycho) in a mysterious black muscle car she exchanges information and heads home to face the disappointment and subsequent grounding alone at home from her parents for taking the car out, she discovers that that’s the least of her worries for the night. It turns out this guy, beyond just having creeper vibes, is a stalker/serial killer who deliberately causes fender benders and uses the insurance contact info to hunt girls down and murder them, and he’s on his way to her place. This leaves her to fight him off initially alone, and then with the help of two ditzy friends. Now, this is a competently made, atmospheric and very suspenseful piece and while I *usually* am not the type of person to be like “why didn’t this character do this” etc in terms of plot, these characters, including our lead, are especially stupid in their attempts to evade and overpower this guy, to the point where the ‘slasher trope’ excuse just doesn’t cut it. That aside it’s a good time and Sage is wonderfully sinister as this dude, credited simply as ‘The Driver.’ The score is done by an electronic group called Nightrunner and adds a lot of dark sonic synth ambience too, which is always great. Aside from how braindead the lead is in frantic situations this is a nice little retro slasher with tense set pieces and a genuinely memorable killer.

-Nate Hill

Silent House (2011)

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Elizabeth Olsen has been making a huge impact on film these days and already was a decade ago I was pleased to learn with 2011’s Silent House, a superior, intelligent and unconventional horror film that showcases some of the best ‘scream Queen’ acting from her that I’ve seen in the genre overall. This is a simple story that sees her play a teenage girl who is helping her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) pack up a house that they are about to move out of. Everything seems routine save for a little bickering until suddenly she finds herself trapped in a threatening netherworld version of the house, full of half seen ghosts, whispering voices and apparently no contact with the outside world. Is she dead? Hallucinating? The switch from the opening scenes into frightening territory is so swift and so abrupt that at first I had no idea what was going on and felt disoriented, but then realized that’s exactly how this poor girl must feel and noted how effectively and promptly the film drew me into its world and the point of view of its protagonist. She wanders about with little notion of what to do beyond hide, scream and run until she finds old Polaroids and other long forgotten totems of memory and we see the truth slowly come to light. It’s a sad, tragic revelation that so many girls who went through what she did as a kid must later unearth in their own repressed memories and Olsen’s performance is note perfect on every level. There are some deeply terrifying scenes here including a sequence where she uses the brief flash of the Polaroid camera to gain some visibility in the dark and quickly wishes she didn’t as we catch momentary glimpses of the horrors surrounding her. The camera work, staging and spatial dynamics are all excellently done by husband and wife directing team Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, who are remaking a Uruguayan horror film here of the same name that I have yet to see but based on the sterling quality level I experienced here, it must be something else indeed. This is dark, tragic, genuinely creepy horror on all levels, a story told in almost dreamlike fashion with a lead performance from Olsen so potent with raw fear and deep anxiety I’d almost be hesitant to discover what her actor’s process is. Really great stuff.

-Nate Hill

Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I miss the days in the 90’s or so when big budget, star studded thrillers dominated the summer and they’d often have slightly outrageous yet totally exciting high concepts that melded different elements into one palette. Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead is a terrific example of this and a banger of a film, the exact type of summer popcorn escapism I miss having around a lot. Angelina Jolie plays an ex wildfire fighter/smoke jumper with PTSD after a mission gone horribly wrong, now relegated to fire-watch atop a lonely tower and occasionally getting arrested by the local sheriff (Jon Bernthal) for doing insane daredevil stunts just to keep the pain at bay. One day a kid runs into her region of Montana forest trying to escape two psychotic contract killers (Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) who have chased him and his dad (Jake Weber) in there from the city, for dark reasons that are, wisely, only hinted at. It’s up to a haunted Jolie to protect this kid at all costs with the help of Bernthal’s badass lawman, his equally badass and very pregnant wife (Medina Senghore) and some of her former smoke jumping crew, but will it be enough to stop these incredibly heinous assassins? I’m not even kidding either, these two are literal cold blooded monsters who aren’t above blowing up houses with families in them, killing pregnant women and kids and even deliberately starting a wildfire that torches half a valley just to smoke out their prey. “I hate this place” growls an unreasonably sinister Gillen (if you thought he was slimy in Game Of Thrones, well…), to which another character replies “it hates you back” in trademark pulpy yet elemental Taylor Sheridan writing fashion. Jolie is stunning here and I wish she’d headline more films these days, she captures the flint-spark resilience and crushing vulnerability of her character beautifully in a top shelf performance. The sweeping Montana cinematography is gorgeous and threatening in equal parts, the violence and action vicious and unrelenting, as is the very effective suspense. I see that this has gotten lukewarm reactions almost all across the board and I’m really not sure what film most people were watching; this is the kind of blockbuster stuff I live for and miss greatly these days. It’s bombastic, grandly drawn, hearty genre meal material that’s exciting, tightly written, unforgivingly brutal and solidly directed. One of the best so far this year, I’m my books.

-Nate Hill

Benson & Moorhead’s Synchronic

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead have consistently been putting out wild, innovative and boundlessly creative ideas into cinema including Lovecraftian romance, esoteric doomsday cults, otherworldly time loops and more. What’s so great about their work is that along with these very grand, high concept SciFi ideas they always have the right application of atmosphere and tone as well as extremely believable, well written characters to back it up and with their newest film Synchronic they just may have outdone themselves. Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan play two New Orleans EMT’s who are also steadfast besties, their bromance banter a huge asset to this story. They seem to be getting a lot of disturbing calls lately, of people injured or hurt very badly after taking a mysterious experimental street drug called Synchronic, which is available in Vape form at various stores. It’s basically a synthetic DMT compound that acts on the pineal gland to provide unnervingly vivid hallucinations, but what really happens is that for the duration of the high, you quite literally go backwards in time to a random period of history, could be five years ago, could be five thousand years ago. This powerful but dangerous ability is the lynchpin of a story that involves these two characters as Dornan struggles with family issues, Mackie wrestles with a terminal illness diagnosis and the drug itself comes into play in ways you might not expect. Both actors are terrific especially when onscreen together, with Mackie being the standout and taking full blooded advantage of the deep, ponderous and soulful writing. What really makes the film sing is the synergistic flow of atmosphere, music and special effects for the trips back in time and there are several breathtaking set pieces including a Spanish conquistador in a damp bayou, a hellish picture of the New Orleans harbour on fire sometime around the civil war and an absolutely stunning trip back to the ice age. These sequences feel fully realized, immersive and tactile and where other films would take a high tech gadgetry approach to time travel, this one uses the onset of the drug’s effect in an eerie, elemental biochemistry fashion to transport us into the film’s realm. Moorehead and Benson floored me with their 2015 film Spring (couldn’t recommend it enough) and then their follow up The Endless left me a bit underwhelmed but for me this is them roaring back into cinematic innovation on all levels with a wondrously moody, unbelievably creative SciFi that’s sure to become a classic. Brilliant film.

-Nate Hill

Justin Dix’s Blood Vessel

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What’s something you can find on a nazi warship that’s worse than nazis themselves? Well a group of allied castaways find out exactly what when they drift into the path of a deserted one in Blood Vessel (amazing title) a super fun, super old school, kinda low budget but enthusiastic B horror flick that I really enjoyed. As a stranded life raft from a torpedoed sub approaches a giant derelict boat, the survivors are seemingly saved until they board the craft, find it curiously deserted and discover what is lurking deep below deck, waiting to hunt them. It seems the nazis were transporting several caskets from Romania containing immortal creatures known as Strigoi, which are basically vampires with a lot more snazzy magic powers backed up by a lot more specific backstory lore. The minute these things wake up it’s game on as they discover these new people in their vicinity and begin to viciously take them out. The allied group is a surprisingly varied bunch including a cowardly Brit, an enthusiast Aussie, an American battle surgeon and an Eastern European badass who has survived all kinds of gnarly stuff and has the scars to prove it. They are all very well acted, written and have distinct, unique anthropological personas and angles which isn’t something you find in every horror flick about a bunch of folks who are essentially cannon fodder for vampires. The creatures themselves are very cool, designed with practical prosthetic effects, all exaggerated ears, accentuated fangs and acted with snarling vivacity by those under all that awesome makeup. What’s more is they aren’t just an animalistic horde either, they’re an ancient, evil aristocratic family complete with a young daughter Strigoi who is just as deadly as mom and dad, it’s a cool family dynamic. There’s gory showdowns, subtle sociopolitical banter amongst the human characters, well drawn arcs and loads of spooky, smoky, eerie abandoned boat atmosphere full of beautifully saturated Argento-esque lighting and gorgeous frames filled with gothic eye candy. A solid horror, streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Nia DeCosta’s Candyman

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Urban legends have a way of living on decades after the actual events that inspired them, like ghosts of the past doomed to linger as long as the collective human consciousness remembers what happened, and spreads it by word of mouth. The original 1992 Candyman film is a minted horror classic that has only gotten better with age and still holds up in every respect to this day, a terrifying supernatural parable that covers classism, racism, the power of myth and the passing on of stories in a ritualistic fashion. So how does Nia DeCosta’s Candyman, a ‘spiritual’ sequel and decades later follow up compare to its inspiration? Well naturally it’s not quite as good, but it was never going to be, and it was also never going to be the exact same thing because the world has changed and along with it so has the grim Chicago project housing neighbourhood of Cabrini Green, once a derelict death trap and now a hilariously partially gentrified (we see a rundown laundromat sitting snug right next to an artisanal ‘roastery’) overrun with art world types, the horrors that befell it over twenty years ago now almost forgotten. Not quite though, as we see struggling artist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) catch wind of the Candyman events, now little more than a campfire story, and decide to investigate further in order to gain inspiration during an artistic dry spell where his successful girlfriend (Teyonah Parris) is supporting him financially. Naturally the more he learns the more his life unravels and pretty soon people are saying those magic words five times into mirrors and being viciously murdered by Candyman, albeit a different incarnation than Tony Todd’s iconic and darkly tragic Daniel Robitaille. He’s called Sherman Fields this time (played excellently by Michael Hargrove) and I gotta hand it to the guy, he’s pretty damn scary, in less baroque, theatrical fashion than Todd and instead a more animalistic, unstable way. The idea here is that Robitaille pioneered the dark necromancy that keeps the Candyman legend alive but there are also others, each with an appropriately unfortunate backstory, who fill the position. It’s a neat expansion into the mythos even if Todd himself gets sadly little to do here. The callbacks to the first are integrated well enough into this version of today so that it feels psychically linked to it without having outright sequel syndrome, which I suppose is what they mean by ‘spiritual sequel.’ Nia Decosta is a filmmaker to watch out for, she meticulously blocks actors and stages the killing scenes in ingeniously innovative ways using space, movement and reflection for some truly trippy and original sequences invoking settings like mirrored elevators, high rise apartments, high school washrooms and cavernous holes in dilapidated drywall. There’s also some beautiful shadow puppetry that fills in for flashbacks instead of ripping actual footage right from the 1992 version, which adds an elemental flourish and a terrific musical score by Robert Aiki Aubrey Love that echoes Phillip Glass’s achingly gorgeous original composition without aping it. There’s even some startlingly gruesome body horror thrown in that breaks new prosthetic ground and is… quite something to look at, or look away from depending on your tolerance. It ain’t the 1992 version and let’s face it, nothing will be. But it’s hell of a good horror film and a damn fine shoutout to a classic that’s in its own time capsule now, it illustrates how myth, legend and superstition live on no matter who forgets, dark forces like that have a way of finding their way home to the hallowed grounds where they were birthed, and this incarnation of Candyman is every bit as chilling and atmospheric as the first, albeit in different, fresh ways.

-Nate Hill

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