Tag: horror

John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s fascinating how human beings crave resolution, airtight narratives, explanation and a clear roadmap of where they’re going at all times, characteristics that that are evident in our creation and consumption of art. Every time a narrative comes along that eerily ducks the expectations of a clean, neatly wrapped and satisfying ending the resulting reaction can be hostile and downright explosive, and some of the reactions to John Lee Hancock’s unconventional cops vs killer thriller The Little Things have been just that. This is a script that was written in the 90’s I’m told, and shelved until it was dusted off for production this year, so naturally we have a measured, paced, atmospheric and story based film that feels not necessarily dated but just a little bit.. “untethered from time’ in a sense, and the effect is mesmerizing. Denzel plays Joe Deacon, a once hotshot homicide detective who lost it all over an obsessive hunt for a serial killer that resulted in divorce, a heart attack and being relegated to county sheriff somewhere far outside LA. When he returns for a simple day trip to evidence swap with colleagues, he swiftly gets pulled into the mystery of another killer operating near the city and teams up with the eager rookie detective (Rami Malek) assigned to the case, much to the concern and unimpressed huff of his former lieutenant (Terry Kinney). Is this the same killer who once drove him to the absolute edge? Is this case related in any way to the tangled web of mysteries from Joe’s past? Who is the impossibly creepy loner (Jared Leto) who taunts them both with very real details from the murders yet always seems to be one step beyond any suspicion or proof of involvement? This is a tantalizing, deliberately opaque jigsaw puzzle with quite a few pieces missing, hidden or otherwise unaccounted for, and the result can be maddening for some, mildly frustrating for others or an outright dealbreaker for those who simply can’t reconcile a story left unfinished. One has to invest laser focused attentiveness and studious detection skills to arrive at the same conclusions alongside our leads and have any idea what just happened, and this is even before the big reveals, or lack thereof. It evokes a genuine sense of mystery and I honestly wish more big Hollywood films had the nerve to pull narrative stunts like this, because it would effectively ween viewers off of the oversimplification, excessive exposition and ravenous need to make sense of everything that permeates North American filmgoing culture. Denzel is terrific here, letting the intensity and introspective obsessiveness his detective no doubt once had simmer on a dim low burn that comes with years of searching for answers to no avail. Malek does his wife eyed nosferatu shtick again, I’ve never been able to really connect with him as an actor but there’s no denying that he has presence, the exact essence and intention of which still eludes me. Leto is undoubtedly spooky as all hell but perhaps falls victim a tad to mannerism and histrionic flexing, yet still does a fine job in a difficult role to pull off. Director Hancock uses some absolutely sensational camera movements to create tension and atmosphere, as we see a lone girl jogging down an unlit side street, an ominous black car slinking in after her and then a slow time-lapse panning shot up over the LA horizon as the sun rises, just purely inspired creativity there. Thomas Newman does excellent music work as always, his score here is a melodic, fretful jangle of electronic rhythms and nocturnal passages that feels like the highway, the sky just before dawn, unanswered questions and decades of dark rumination wrapped up in one transfixing musical chorus. This film won’t be for everyone but I hope it at least imparts the harsh reality that not all stories are neatly wrapped packages of comforting resolution and beat-by-beat bullet points of what you can always expect to find in a serial killer thriller, because how boring would that be, to always and forever be able to predict narrative patterns and never once be surprised, scared or left in the dark? This story isn’t afraid to go to those dark intangible places, and more importantly, isn’t afraid to not return from them. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Damian McCarthy’s Caveat

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Trust Ireland to give us what for me now stands as the scariest film I’ve seen since Ari Aster’s Hereditary. I realize that is the boldest of claims and before anyone chimes in with the obligatory “welL HEridiTARy didntT scAre me And wasNT evEn thAT GOoD”, just keep in mind there are many of us who were scared piss-less by it and keep your edginess to yourself. Damian McCarthy’s Caveat is a brand new addition from Shudder, an Irish mood piece with some unique ideas, atmosphere so thick you could choke on it and some of the most skin crawling, sleep with the lights on moments of sheer terror I’ve seen in many a moon. I didn’t say it was a perfect film and the plot, such as it is, is kind of a murky one in areas but best I could surmise it is: a shady English dude (Ben Caplan) hires an also somewhat shady Irish dude (Jonathan French) with amnesia to babysit his adult niece on an isolated island cabin. The girl has some form of schizophrenia of schizo-affective disorder and is out of it most of the time, but one of the conditions of this well paid for agreement is that Irish dude must wear a leather harness attached to a chain that prevents him from entering certain areas of the house, to make the disturbed girl feel safer… I guess? It’s a premise with so many loaded questions attached that you just kind of have to surrender to the atmosphere and experience, and it’s here that the film not only shines but unearths something almost profoundly spooky. There are ghosts in the film, and they are so scary you’ll wish I’d never recommended this to you. You know that special feeling after you’ve watched a film that genuinely, tangibly provoked real fear in you and you have immediate, dread soaked regret that you ever watched it? Yeah I got that from this one, which is rare for me these days and it may not hit for everyone like that but for me it was effective in that elemental, hair raising way. There is an actual plot to the film and although I wasn’t entirely clear on all the ins, outs and beats it did feel like it was trying to impart a discernible narrative while still being a decidedly arthouse mood-board experience. There’s also a creepy little toy rabbit, as you can see by the poster, and he serves as both a mascot of sorts and also a proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine’ device, as he seems to beat his little drums with relative sentience whenever it feels like malevolent forces are near. The eerie score, suffocating abandoned house atmosphere and deliberately spatial camera movements all place you right in the front seat of terror and apprehension as you wander the mildewed halls and decrepit rooms of this broken down house and encounter things you really could have done without seeing at 2am when you’re alone in your own house and the cat is making noise somewhere. It’s a staggeringly well made film for a first time director and I can’t wait to see what he does next. Terrifying, immersive, hypnotically unsettling, a fully realized horror experience that will fuel the darkest of nightmares. Streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Psycho Goreman is a hell of a title for a film and anyone one that dares use must ensure their art lives up to it, and this one sure as hell does. It’s one of those deft, near miraculous efforts that dances an impossible yet flawless ballet between genres of horror, SciFi and comedy and almost fuses them all together for something entirely new. The titular Psycho Goreman is a hulking alien warlord with a penchant for violence, torture and all sorts of melodramatic menace, who arrives on earth only to be outwitted by a incredibly feisty ten year old girl (Nita Josee-Hanna) who snags the magic gemstone that controls him and now calls the shots. There is an entire galactic Narmada of silly funny weird creatures who are trying to track and destroy him though and they eventually follow him to earth for all out warfare. The terrific thing about this film is how deftly it balanced extremely graphic, hard-R gore with a genuine childlike sensibility and the kind of dark, deadpan humour that is so funny and so pointed that I just can’t even describe it in a review, you have to see the thing to get it. It’s sweet yet still has a jaggedly nihilistic tonal edge, hilarious yet feels truly gnarly and almost… ‘Troma’ in its levels of schlock and splatter and just the perfect mix of everything fun. Director Steven Kostanski also made the brilliant 2017 cosmic horror The Void, which is in my top ever made in the genre and I always wondered what he’d follow it up with. A true winner that blazes new trails and shows his devotion, invocation and passion for practical effects based horror. The costumes, makeup and gore effects are pure bliss here, with every extraterrestrial creature owning their own distinct, hilarious and lovingly campy anatomical design, the gore is unapologetically ruthless, bathed in buckets of blood n’ body parts and the the script laced with indescribably hysterical wit, comedic inspiration and overall horror nirvana. Wonderful film.

-Nate Hill

Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium is one of those films that takes one simple premise and attempts to wring just about as much mileage out of it as one feature length story possibly could and it’s… *mostly* a successful endeavour. As it opens a young lower middle class couple (Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg) are house hunting for something in their price range. She’s an elementary school teacher and he’s a landscaper, relatable choices I admired from the writer, as you don’t normally see this down to earth demographic in the protagonist arena. They browse into a development office for a project called ‘Yonder’, that seems to have units affordable to them, the estate agent (Jonathan Aris) bizarrely informs them, he’s one of those eerily, painfully cheerful characters that you just want to boot in the jaw and trusting him is definitely their first, and gravest mistake. They go with him to Yonder which is basically the kind of horrifying, cookie cutter, piss green pastel suburbia that even Dr. Seuss would shudder at, and before they know it they’re stuck there, for good. It seems to be a kind of labyrinthine ‘living algorithm’ that traps them, and even when they try to drive away they consistently just end up at the house this guy was showing them, and he’s never seen again. What is this place? Can they ever get out? Who is the absolutely nightmare fuelling Little Rascal reject (Senan Jennings, dubbed over with someone else’s impossibly scary voice who isn’t listed anywhere and I’d like to keep it that way) who one day shows up and demands to be fed, cared for and raised as if he were their own kid? I’ll let you come to those answers on your own because it’s quite a fuckin ride. Imogen and Jesse give fantastic performances, stripped of their usual comedic flourishes and trademark mannerisms for two portrayals that are dark, desperate, down to earth, strikingly emotional and show none of their usual personas. The visual landscape of this artificially tranquil doldrum they are stuck in is both beautiful and threatening, orchestrated by something that knows what a human neighbourhood with cloudy skies above it *should* look like but can’t properly make it look that way because… well, you’ll see. The score by Kristian Eidnes Anderson (Von Trier’s Antichrist) is an unsettling aural piece that seems to hang languidly in the very air of this place and emanate from around every spooky deserted suburban street corner, a very effective lowkey composition. Everything works… so why didn’t I like this film as much as I should have? Well.. I can’t say because it’ll spoil the experience but I will say that this is one disquieting, unpleasant, hopelessly bleak tale in terms of thematics. There’s a scene right at the beginning of the film where Imogen teaches one of her students about a particularly nasty reality in the animal kingdom and the kid bluntly observes “I don’t like nature, it’s horrible.” To which Imogen replies, “It’s not horrible all the time.” This is very true, but this film is pretty much horrible all the time and it is essentially the forces of nature simply playing out on a much grander scale, and we have to watch two inherently decent and kind people preyed upon, broken down and used most heinously. To quote that kid: “I don’t like it, it’s horrible.” That’s not to say I disliked the entire film, I just felt like shit after. There is one moment late in the third act where all seems to be lost and Imogen cradles Jesse in her arms as they share a moment of reminiscence back to the day they met. It’s a beautiful, sweet, tender moment that is handled with maturity, gravity and staggering emotional intelligence from both actors but still served to further accent their despairing situation. It’s a good film and everyone involved should be very proud of their work, and I would never lay blame on artists for how *their* narrative and tone made *me* feel, but I’ll sure as hell be honest about it and this one felt like the world just might end.

-Nate Hill

Ryan Whitaker’s After

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Countless films give their visual interpretation of what purgatory and the afterlife may look like, and Ryan Whitaker’s After paints a misty, darkly entertaining tale of two souls stuck in the great beyond who must work together to discern their situation and escape. As a greyhound bus ploughs through the rural night, it’s two lone passengers (Steven Strait, Karolina Wydra) are strangers who flirt briefly before the bus takes a wrong turn and crashes horribly, sending them both hurtling out the windows. When they awaken they are trapped in some sort of deserted, hazy twilight zone version of their hometown, as a curtain of ominous black vapour surrounds the area on all sides, walling them in. It soon becomes clear that they are both stuck in comas out there in the real world and inside this sort of, spiritual simulation if you will, they have to delicately find a way out by delving deep into their respective pasts, processing painful memories, finding the right key (literally and metaphorically) to escape this hovering inter-zone and either pass on to the other side in ethereal form or reawaken once again in the physical realm to continue this incarnation. It’s heavy, philosophical stuff that is given the somewhat surface level thriller treatment yet still manages to be just metaphysical enough to keep me intrigued. There’s a terrifying Stranger Things type monster that hunts them and is clearly there to represent the trauma in both their pasts manifesting in tangible form to haunt them. There’s a romance angle that I’m not sure if I altogether bought but the film and actors seem assured enough in and some of the finer plot turns could have been more richly developed, I found myself wishing that this concept could be done as a long form 8 episode miniseries or something, but the film serves well enough as a perfectly decent told story with a truly fascinating concept. Good times.

-Nate Hill

Alien Vs Predator: Requiem

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

There’s a lot of trash been talked about the Alien Vs Predator films and.. yeah, I’m not going to argue, they’re not the greatest thing in the universe, let alone the canon. But at least the second film, given the appropriate subheading Requiem, had the decency to actually be R rated and go for broke with gore, violence and ooze as we are accustomed to from each respective franchise and, as dutiful fans, no doubt deserve. While the first film was a lore-heavy, multidimensional Antarctic set SciFi horror with a ton of exposition, this one ditches all of that for a lush Canadian Pacific Northwest setting and a very thinly plotted slasher aesthetic wherein the residents of a quiet Vancouver suburb encounter both species when a predator research spacecraft carrying a bunch of alien face-huggers crash lands nearby. I won’t go too much into detail regarding the characters because they are just beyond cliched. Hot dumb blonde dating the asshole jock, underdog pizza delivery boy hopelessly in love with her, cue violent altercations blah blah who honestly cares, the writers literally put less than no effort into that arena. Tough guy town sheriff (John Ortiz) rallying the troops to fight these beasties and a mysterious army colonel (Robert Joy, adding the film’s only recognizable horror pedigree as far as cast goes) who has some egregious agenda connected to the Yutani corporation. Much of the film is shot in dim or dark settings like the first, so the action isn’t always discernible or legible, but there are a whole parade of Xenomorphs just crawling all over the place which is fun. One way this one succeeds is in its gruesome viciousness; the gore, kills, splatter and deaths here are an absolutely spectacular array of surprisingly nasty (we see kids and a pregnant mother in a hospital butchered by the marauding Aliens) set pieces and carnage, and when it comes time for the two species to have their WWE Smackdown the series of fights between them are brutal and not disappointing. The film has zero mythology and strips down all of that world building for a simple tale of one Canadian town being decimated by these two warring species as they beat each other senseless, and that’s pretty much it. I didn’t hate this film, and I didn’t love it but I sure as hell admired its willingness to go full on hard R like these franchises were always meant to be, unlike its pansy ass predecessor. And one more thing: this is the only film on record in either canon to feature an Alien/Predator crossbreed creature that seems to show up out of nowhere, and while that probably just means it was created in a lab by the Predator species who appear to be busy bees as far as experimentation goes here, I’d fondly like to think that at some point two of them fucked and had gnarly acid-lubed intergalactic alien sexy time, and I’ll leave you with whatever lovely mental image that may conjure up. Good bloody fun.

-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

Stephen King’s The Shining

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

This is going to be a tough one to review no matter how I slice it, so I’ll be upfront with my thoughts and afterwards I’m open to any and all discussions regarding them: I finally got a chance to watch the entire miniseries of Stephen King’s The Shining from 1997 (not in the right order I might add, as the discs in my DVD set were somehow labelled wrong) and in quite a few ways I much prefer it to Stanley Kubrick’s film, which I also love and consider a stronger piece in some aspects as well. Please hear me out: it’s no secret that King prefers this one and that it follows his book far more closely than than Kubrick’s film, but this was irrelevant to me as I’ve never read the book. What I enjoyed a lot about this is that it dives far deeper into the character of Jack Torrence, here played by Steven Weber in a performance I much prefer over Nicholson’s, his alcoholism and inability to control the addiction and anger issues, how that mirrors the evil forces at the Overlook Hotel who are trying to win over his soul and prompt him to murder his wife Wendy (Rebecca DeMornay) and son Danny (Courtland Mead). Here we see Jack go from a loving husband and father and slowly disintegrate into the deranged, possessed lunatic that stalks his family through the hallways in the third act. But what struck me here is how we clearly see a good yet troubled man with demons in his past who encounters new and very literal ones in the present yet fights fiercely against them, we see a clear trajectory from decent man to stressed out cabin fever victim to unwitting host of dark forces to full on, mentally deranged homicidal maniac and it’s an actual *arc* as opposed to Jack Nicholson, who just seemed like a loony oddball right off the bat and never earns or even asks for your sympathy or understanding. Now, what falls flat here? I mean obviously it’s made for TV miniseries so it feels chopped up by the obligatory commercial breaks and just, you know, has that ‘TV feel’ that’ll knock it down a peg in the eyes of cinephiles by default alone. There’s some startlingly terrible CGI including hedge animals that come to life, that could have totally been done with practical effects and just look laughable. The weakest link though is this young actor Courtland Mead who plays Danny, he is just painfully unbearable to even look at and when he talks you just want to flip the coffee table over, *very* bad casting choice. The dynamic between Jack and Wendy is explored far more in depth here with entire sequences devoted to dialogue that feels like a beautifully dark stage play unfolding, scenes that are incredibly well acted and affecting. The supporting cast is terrific with work from Pat Hingle, Melvin Van Peebles, Miguel Ferrer, Shawnee Smith, Elliott Gould in a brittle cameo as the Overlook’s bluntly skeptical owner and Stanley Anderson in a chilling turn as the place’s former caretaker, the ghostly Delbert Grady. One way in which this truly outshone Kubrick’s for me is location: this was shot at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado where King actually wrote much of the book and my god does it ever show; breathtaking Rocky mountain vistas surround the place, the architecture is baroque and creepy and gorgeous all at once and there’s just this atmospheric alpine feel outdoors and this spooky, lived-in aura within the building that drew me right in. Weber is truly terrifying, deeply sympathetic and even frequently very funny and candid as Jack, it’s an overlooked performance that struck many chords with me and felt palpably threatening, despite the fact the he carries around a Denver croquet mallet instead of an axe. I could go on, but the simple truth is this is more up my horror alley overall, it feels like a campfire tale, decidedly genre and very hot blooded, dramatic and full of rich storytelling whereas Kubrick’s, no doubt an incredible film that I also enjoy quite a bit, simply comes across as colder, more detached, scant on King’s mythology and ideas with a far less developed and intriguing Jack Torrence and very much like an art film in many instances. I love both, but this version just vibes with me more, and I don’t know what else to say, really.

-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

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