Tag: movie

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

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