Tag: horror

B Movie Glory: Breach aka AntiLife

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Alright, the Bruce Willis space movie. Breach (aka AntiLife) isn’t terrible, it’s just not super inspired or original and if you go in with your nose already turned up at it, well that’s on you bud, you silly cinephile you. However, if you’re a periodically undemanding moviegoer who enjoys a nice schlocktastic cheapie once in a while you may just get a kick out of it. This thing riffs on everything from Doom to The Thing to Pandorum and if you don’t have expectations higher than Bruce Willis and Johnny Messner clearly got while filming their scenes then you’ll have just as much fun as the two of them clearly did. So it’s sometime in the future and earth has been all but decimated by a plague, the remnants of humanity are packed into a giant space station and hurtled towards a distant exoplanet called ‘New Earth’ under the stern, hambone stewardship of The Admiral (Thomas Jane). Most of the passengers slumber in tranquil cryogenic sleep save for a barebones maintenance crew managed by Willis’s once great colonel turned disgraced alcoholic janitor. They’re watched like a hawk by a military man (Timothy V. Murphy) that Willis literally refers to as a ‘space Nazi’ (to his face), but somehow a doomsday zealot manages to smuggle some freaky alien parasite onboard which quickly begins infecting the crew and turning them into ink spewing, putrefied space zombies. Willis and his team that includes Cody Kearsely, Corey Large, Callab Mulvey, Continuum’s Rachel Nichols and scene stealing Messner are stuck fighting off legions of what I suppose would count as the undead in a way but they’re more like a hive minded organism, really. Willis is cool here and actually looks like he’s having a modicum of fun compared to other B flicks he’s recently done. He also plays against type as kind of a reverse action hero and I never thought I’d see the day he plays a character that gets referred to as a ‘lover, not a fighter.’ Jane only has a few atypical military A-hole scenes but he fires off his lines with glib, cavalier flair and I find it hysterical how intensely he insists on wearing his pitch dark tinted aviator shades *indoors*, in a dimly lit spaceship no less. Look, it’s junk, I won’t call pretend it’s a great film, but as an avid lover of cinematic junk food it did the trick for me, and I had fun with it.

-Nate Hill

Shawn Linden’s Hunter Hunter

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I doubt you’ll see a more gruesome, harrowing, WTF horror film this year than Shawn Linden’s Hunter Hunter, a sly deconstruction of several sub-genres including the wilderness creature feature, breathless survival thriller and serial killer suspense tale. It’s orchestrated around a simple premise that evolves into something not so simple until the final act takes a battering ram to the audience’s nerves and expectations alike and you sit there as the credits roll frantically looking for your heart pills before you slide off the couch in full coronary. Somewhere out in the bush a man (Devon Sawa), his wife (Camille Sullivan) and their daughter (Summer H. Howell) live a rugged, simple life as off the grid fur trapper survivalists. One year a rogue wolf returns to their line and threatens to eat both them and their livelihood unless they can track, hunt and kill it before it does the same to them. Only thing is, there’s something way worse than wolves out in those woods, something each family member will come face to face with in a series of white knuckle horror sequences that generate true suspense thanks to nervy, close quarters editing, tension soaked acting from all especially Sullivan and a spooky, atmospherically earthy score by Kevin Cronin. Most of the film is a clever blend of chills, dark humour, scenery and mystery… until that ending rolls around and it goes completely berserk, hog-wild, deranged and etches a fucked up, primally violent conclusion into the viewer’s psyche. Not many films have the big ol’ nuts to pull an ending like this off, but this one does it with grinding, cheerless yet stylish confidence set to a soundtrack song I can’t find on google, but it’s a cool one. Director Linden is responsible for one of my favourite hidden gem films, a metaphysical, Dark City-esque noir from circa 2007 called Nobody, and I always wondered what he’d follow it up with, if ever. Hunter is a lean, mean, bleak, pitilessly cruel picture in all the best ways, and quite the effective, aesthetically pleasing horror film. Just bring your barf bag and your anxiety meds and you’re all set.

-Nate Hill

Gregory Hoblit’s Untraceable

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Gregory Hoblit’s Untraceable is one of those rare Hollywood serial killer thrillers that manages to walk a tightrope between being super intense and over the top gruesome yet sill smart and believable in its story. Set in chilly, rainy Portland, Diane Lane plays a gruff FBI agent pursuing a particularly nasty mass murderer who kidnaps people, kills them and broadcasts the filmed footage all over the internet, and the more viewers who sign on, the faster they die. You would think that this would come across purely as torture porn or at the very least too gratuitous but they somehow manage to make the thing feel genuine and stylish without tipping into overboard horror territory. This is mainly thanks to the fact that there is a genuinely fascinating reason as to why the killer is doing what he’s doing, down to the very details of his methodology and victim selection. He *is* a cuckoo bananas fucking nut-job but he’s not just some wild sadist off the chain killing at random and only for enjoyment, which the criminal behavioural profiler in me appreciated. The film is incredibly suspenseful and some of the elaborate murder set pieces orchestrate a terrific amount of race against the clock tension, while an ambient score by Christopher Young, solid and engaging lead performance from the always awesome Lane and rain-streaked Pacific Northwest cinematography go a long way. Director Hoblit is responsible for some of my favourite high concept genre thriller including Frequency and Fallen, and I’d now add this one strongly among them. Very good film.

-Nate Hill

Babak Anvari’s Under The Shadow

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I admire ghost stories that set their story around an already troubled region of period of conflict because it raises the stakes unbearably high. If a haunting occurs in tranquil North American suburbia it’s bad enough but can be dealt with on its own terms, but let’s say a ghost or demon shows up during an especially stressful time, in the case of Babak Anvari’s Under The Shadow the Iraq/Iran conflict of the 1980’s, there is an extra level of horror the protagonists must go through on top of their already considerable suffering and it can be incredibly effective in getting you to invest paramount interest and sympathy in the story. In war-torn Tehran, young mother Shideh (Narges Rashidi) struggles when her husband (Bobby Naderi) is drafted in the military and she’s left alone with her young daughter (Avin Mashadi) in a creaky tenement building as air raid sirens signal incoming bomb threats and the mounting tensions get closer to home. One day an actual literal bomb does drop in through the roof of the apartment complex and although doesn’t detonate, sits there like some ugly reminder of the potential violence just outside their walls. Her daughter is convinced that something else came along with it though, something evil and supernatural that rode the same winds that carried the bomb to them and is now tormenting her with night terrors, waking visions and feverish apparitions. There are some flat out terrifying scares in this film, the acting is all terrific and the mythology surrounding the ghost is utterly fascinating. What really makes it a winner though is the atmosphere that Anvari conjures up, a suffocating cloak of wartime dread and bleak apprehension that is completely immersive and will root you to your couch. I love films that start off with a brief written summary on black background like “The year is 1980. Conflict rages across so and so, as one family struggles etc etc.” It’s an incredibly powerful way to begin your story if you choose the right music and lead-in to follow and this film is darkly captivating from the moment those words show up on screen and the first scene fades in. This is streaming on Netflix (at least here in Canada, anyway) and I highly recommend it for fans of chilling atmospheric horror with a grounded human core.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: The Caller

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Want something *really* weird? The Caller is an old Empire Pictures flick starring Madolyn Smith as a young woman alone in some forest cabin and Malcolm McDowell as a sinister stranger who knocks at her door asking to use the phone. This film is so rare you couldn’t even find it on VHS or DVD for decades until boutique, niche distribution label Vinegar Syndrome recently did a Blu Ray. The transfer looks terrific, McDowell and Smith handle the strange, talky, stage-play esque roles given to them by the script as best they can but the film overall is a monotonous, repetitive drag.. until the final five minutes when it goes so thoroughly and dementedly off the rails you just have to sit up straight on the couch after being lulled into a coma by the first eighty minutes and go “what even in the fuck?” The film is structured around a Hitchcockian premise where these two are strangers, alone together in the wilderness and both them and us aren’t sure who might be the potentially dangerous one, but their dialogue and interactions are so inane, random and bizarre we get a sense of neither backstory, character traits or motives for either. It’s simply a brain melting extended vignette of two people talking in circles about nothing until the certifiably bonkers ending that although is flashy, shocking and out of left field, does little to explain the hefty, dense several acres of tin drum dialogue that preceded it. This is an Indiana Jones artifact of sorts for me as a DVD collector, I’m a huge Malcolm McDowell fan and this has always been somewhat out of my reach so I’m glad I finally nabbed it but I wouldn’t really recommend this to casual viewers, it’s too unwieldy and inconsistent. Empire Pictures was momentarily famous for grainy, low-fi retro science fiction horror like the Trancers franchise, and this one only fits that mold in the final few minutes when it goes ape shit, while the rest is chamber piece drivel that desperately needed story and structure that the script just couldn’t provide it with.

-Nate Hill

Child’s Play (2019)

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

So before I write a review gushing about a horror remake I’ll say I’m well aware of the fact that MGM viciously plagiarized their own sacred content to produce a Child’s Play ‘reimagining’ that no one asked for, wanted or even knew was coming until a few months out. Hell, the original franchise is still technically going. Why did they do this? Well it has to do with rights and who holds them, a dumb and always pointless red tape hurdle that now means there will be two Chucky franchises operating simultaneously, both vaguely owned by the same studio but also kinda not? It’s weird, but needless to say the fans weren’t happy and I it’s important to know this behind the scenes shit going in because this is a very different Chucky movie than you might be used to. Now that that’s out of the way, is the film itself good? Yes! It’s a lot of fun and makes its departure from the original series in several key ways, the most obvious being Chucky himself, who is now voiced by Mark Hamill instead of Brad Dourif. He isn’t some voodoo doll inhabited by the spirit of a serial killer either, he starts off as a normal Buddi doll off the assembly line who has all his violence inhibitors, social boundaries and conscience features disabled by a very disgruntled Vietnamese factory worker before being sent stateside to be bought by a single mom (Aubrey Plaza) for her kid (Ben Daon) who doesn’t have too many friends. The ‘Buddi’ doll is at first kind of a blank slate until his AI capabilities kick in, the dysfunctional household and hectic neighbourhood around him augment settings and, you guessed it, he becomes a homicidal little bastard with Mark Hamill’s voice cackling out of him. The cast are all great including Brian Tyree Henry as a cop who lives next door, Tim Matheson as the oily toy company CEO and David Lewis as Plaza’s shitty asshole garbage boyfriend who meets the film’s stickiest and most hilarious end thanks to Chucky. This is a fun, imaginative, very gory flick filled with dark humour and gruesome kills. One of the ways it breaks new ground is seeing how Chucky’s Bluetooth capabilities allow him to control various other electronic devices in his vicinity for maximum carnage including a fleet of deadly drones. All because of a pissed off asian factory worker, a priceless plot detail that had me laughing right off the bat. This is a ton of fun if you can wrestle past the fact that it’s not the most necessary remake an enjoy it as a standalone of sorts.

-Nate Hill

Bryan Bertino’s The Dark & The Wicked

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Bryan Bertino’s The Dark & The Wicked is very dark and very wicked indeed, and as bleak, hopeless and suffocating as a horror film could be. This is a film whose narrative fairly simple and let’s the complexities come out in performances and atmosphere while the story itself is as stark and ragged as the Texas farmland it takes place on. This is one of those drab, rundown farms where tired, rusted equipment lays strewn carelessly, the barns have long since shed their paint, it’s somehow perpetually dusk and the animals scatter about their paddocks nervously, clearly freaked out by something only they can see. The farm is owned by a family, and the father (Michael Zagst) is dying of some unnamed terminal illness but has unwittingly also been possessed by a particularly nasty demon who is making life hell for the rest of the family. I don’t say that lightly either, this is one seriously mean, horrifically malevolent entity who torments this poor clan (and by proxy the audience) no end when they’re already at their weakest and doesn’t relent until they’re thoroughly broken and ruined. The aging mother (Julie Oliver Touchstone) begins to lose her head and get delusional while her son (Michael Abbott jr) and daughter (Marin Ireland) try to hold the family and the homestead together by a thread against the onslaught of visions, hauntings, attacks and intimidation from this entity. There’s also an archaic preacher played by the great Xander Berkeley who is not much help to anyone and seems to be just as spooky as the demon itself as he unloads additional portent onto these already suffering folks. Bertino is also responsible for the 2008 horror classic The Strangers and he brings the same sense of trapped desperation and fading hope he did there, obviously with a much more illusory antagonist than masked killers. Ireland is a terrific actress who already made vivid impressions in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and this year’s criminally under-seen The Empty Man, she’s once again utterly immersed, convincing and committed to her role here, conveying anguish and impending loss to chilling effect. There’s an impossibly creepy strings score by Tom Schraeder that piles on a lot of atmospheric mood too. This is a slow burn, psychologically taxing, wretchedly bleak piece of American gothic terror that’s impressively made in every arena and will give seasoned horror vets a case of the spoops. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Eli Roth’s Knock Knock

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What exactly was Eli Roth hoping to accomplish with Knock Knock? Awkward softcore porn? Crude exploitation? Trashy home invasion potboiler? Hard Candy-esque moral revenge fantasy? That Ana De Armas looks good in a blond dye job? Well I hate to break it to him but if it was any or all of the above, none of it works and this is just a hollow, misdirected, tasteless bit of pond scum trying to pass itself off as a thriller and I feel sorry for poor Keanu Reeves having to wade through the gauntlet of what has to be the worst film he’s ever graced his angelic presence with. He plays an upper middle class family man whose wife and kids go on a long weekend trip so he can stay home and get some work done. He’s keeping it mellow on a super rainy night until two unstable, whack-job gutter hoes (Ana De Armas and Lorenza Izzo) show up at his door under the pretence of being lost and insinuate their way into first his house, then his shower and eventually his bed, and you can guess where things spiral from there. These are two seriously disturbed, dangerous and fucked up individuals and both actresses are terrifically intense and deranged, while Reeves holds his end up nicely with a difficult role, the editing, photography, music and splashes of dark humour do what they can but to what purpose does the film work towards, and when it gets there, is it worth it? Not so much. If Roth has set out to convince us that the tables can be turned and men can be just as coerced, preyed upon, shamed and ruined by the other sex as women can by them then he’s somewhat succeeded in showing us a turn of events like that at a primal level, but any attempts at theme or subtext are buried or lost in translation and what could have been something of a message movie ends up simply being ‘two crazy bitches torturing Keanu Reeves for just over ninety minutes.’ There’s a haphazard attempt at *something* deeper involving words written on a mirror in lipstick and Armas going postal about something that seems like an event from her past but neither thread is explored or followed up on. I don’t even know whether to call this a missed opportunity or not because I can’t even tell if Roth set out trying to achieve anything of substance or just didn’t bother at all and deliberately aimed for below the audience’s belt. Also I didn’t buy that Keanu ‘John Wick’ Reeves could be physically outmatched to that extent by two college age chicks, but that’s the least of this film’s issues. There’s something to this idea on paper but it’s nowhere to be found in this film, which is simply an ugly, pointless fucking waste of time.

-Nate Hill

William Kaufman’s Daylight’s End

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The zombie genre is so saturated these days that most new entries just try and stir up the pot by default and do something innovative with the scenario, but it’s refreshing when a filmmaker goes for a simple, honest to goodness zombie film with little to no frills and we’re reminded of why we fell in love with the genre in the first place. William Kaufman’s Daylight’s End is an earnest, brutal and rousing undead post apocalyptic piece that benefits from a strong ensemble cast, wicked sharp tactical direction and a script that adds just the right amount of character work in between the gunplay and gore. Johnny Strong plays a lone gunslinger who bands together with a tight knit tribe of survivors protected by gruff leader Lance Henriksen, while undead forces gather against them and they try to fight their way out of a severely destroyed Dallas to somewhere safer. The only real deviation from classic zombie lore here is that these creatures can’t stand daylight and only come out when it’s dark, leaving the daytime scenes to have this eerie, desolate feel while most of the heavy action takes place atmospherically after dusk for a nice Vampirish flourish. Kaufman is a real master at staging tactical, realistic feeling action and as such blocks his actors, chooses his weapons and makes his kills feel exciting, propulsive and immediate. Strong is every inch action hero material, Henriksen makes a stoic and sage pack leader and surprisingly emotional work is provided by the usually cavalier Louis Mandylor as his son and top lieutenant. This is obviously a low budget film and one can see that but the story they’ve told and the world they’ve built using what they had is really impressive, and stands with some of the best zombie shoot-em-up’s out there. Check out Kaufman’s New Orleans set cop flick Sinners & Saints too, which also stars Strong as a relentless badass and also features flawlessly directed action scenes, they make a cool genre double feature together.

-Nate Hill

Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Not since LOST has a sentient tropical island caused a bunch of people this much trouble in this weird ass, misguided stab at a nostalgia reboot of content that it’s target audience is too young to even remember, let alone have been into. They shouldn’t be compared at all because LOST is overall a masterpiece and Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island is a short circuited fusebox of loose wire subplots, mish-mashed attempts at torture porn and overall anemic bunch of nothing stretched painfully over a feature length runtime. In the original 70’s show, each episode saw a bunch of vacuous, shallow individuals brought to fantasy island where polished Latin debonair Roarke (Ricardo Montalban) made their deepest wishes come true, with a little help from the island’s powers. In this version Roarke is played by a markedly disinterested Michael Pena and his agenda gets decidedly morbid as the fantasies of each guest on the island get a gnarly horror twist. That should be fun, right? Well not really, because they literally and figuratively missed the boat to making this island remotely fun, scary or memorable. There’s various visitors including the always lovely Maggie Q, whose fantasy involves a former fiancée she spurned, Lucy Hale who wants revenge on a high school bully and others, all of whose fantasies mingle like paint thrown violently at a wall without any sense of cohesion or logic. Michael Rooker shows up to skulk around the jungle swinging a machete and apparently the costume department misread his role on the call sheet as ‘flamboyant river pirate’ because that’s the only way I can describe what he’s dressed in here. There’s an evil musclebound doctor who runs around trying to slice and dice people, mostly ineffectively. The always awesome Kim Coates briefly brings a bit of much needed energy as a random Russian henchman (whose? The plot barely addresses it). A lot of bad films can be considered a swing and a miss but fuck man, this thing doesn’t even seem to want to swing in the first place. It’s lazy, written so thinly it makes the numerous anorexic bikini models look huge and it’s just not a scary, remotely engaging film.

-Nate Hill