Tag: scary

The Collector

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Collector is a booby trap rigged horror flick that not only gives Saw a run for it’s money, but outdoes it in the atmosphere department. This is one seriously spooky film, made so by it’s eerie, claustrophobia ridden single-location setting, elaborate and maximum pain inflicting terror traps and burnished, browned out cinematography that gives it it’s own aesthetic. In a creaky old heritage mansion, a cat burglar leads his team from room to room, robbing the place to pay back a hefty debt owing to his ex-wife. Only problem is, they’re not alone in there. Stalking through the shadows is a silent, mask wearing phantom with a fucked up bag of tricks and a disconcerting leather face mask. Each new hallway or edifice finds them falling into one of his gory, well staged snares, from razor wire to full on bear traps and every gnarly device in between. It’s never really clear who he is or why he’s there save for a minuscule expository scene that you’ll miss if you blink, but it’s scarier that way in most cases, he could be robbing the place too for all they know and he’s just getting territorial. The film is a shadow laced game of spider and fly, as each individual finally realizes they’re no match for this fiend. Terrifically well made horror outing, but avoid the sequel (unimaginably called The Collection), as it takes everything that works so well here and shines a silly, noisy spotlight on it. This one will work you over and spit you out a clammy, nervous mess after it’s 90 minute stranglehold has had it’s way with you.

-Nate Hill

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’ve seen M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit several times now and it gets funnier with every viewing. Funny in a good way, and scary too as it’s a great little fright flick, but there’s just something about demented old people who aren’t right in the head that shunts the deranged part of my funny bone into overdrive (I must’ve subconsciously picked that up from David Lynch). It’s first and foremost a dark comedy for me, and seems like it wants to be that anyways when you consider how it’s shot, edited and lit, but the horror just happens naturally through this very weird set of circumstances, which I found neat. There’s also an unexpected emotional gravitas running through the plot line, which is impressive when you consider how short and fast paced the film is and that it actually had time to throw some real drama in there. In true Hansel and Gretel allegorical form, a brother (Ed Oxenbould, quite irritating and the only weak link in the cast, especially when he ‘raps’) and sister (Olivia DeJonge, radiating talent both beyond her years and what her character is written as, hope to see more of her) head out into the sticks to visit the grandparents they’ve never met, whilst their single mother (Kathryn Hahn) heads off on a cruise with her beau to be. The kids are at first quite taken with their Nana (Deanna Dunegan) and Pop Pop (Daredevil’s Peter McRobbie), but, as any trailer will show, gradually they start to act in a way that would put the word strange in the understatement zone. There’s something terminally off with these two sweet old codgers, as the kids discover hour by hour of their visit, from Pop Pop hoarding up soiled diapers in the shed to Nana scuttling about the house naked at night like a geriatric Emily Rose. Are they possessed? Dementia ridden? High on bath salts? It’s best you figure out the nasty little surprises of Shyamalan’s narrative for yourself, and squirm at every delicious little bit of unpleasantness along the way. McRobbie and Dunegan offer a staggering number of both bone chilling and riotously funny moments in two performances that they should be proud of, for both scaring our socks off and providing endless off colour comedic moments. Now as for the found footage camera aspect, that’s usually something I hate these days, but given how well it works with the subject matter and tone here, plus how non intrusive it is, I can’t bash it too much. This is a neat little departure for Shyamalan, whose usual somber, bleak and airily atmospheric tone definitely needed a little shaking up, and what better new avenue to explore than darkly comic, hyperactive horror?

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Silent Night

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Santa is an axe wielding mass murderer! In Silent Night he is anyway, a slick, excessively gory remake of an obscure 80’s slasher called Silent Night, Deadly Night, which I’ve still yet to see. This new version is a heavy handed, knowingly silly affair, as a small town Sheriff’s department races to find a heinous killer who dresses like the red guy and has been wantonly slaughtering townsfolk all morning. A timid deputy (Sin City’s Jaime King) is the front runner to head him off at the pass, joined by the cantankerous, mouthy Sheriff, played by a hammy Malcolm McDowell with attitude to spare. The murders are so over the top it seems like the filmmakers wanted to outdo each and every slasher film out there, an impossible task, but they throw Paint at the wall furiously anyway. Electrocution by Christmas lights, high powered flamethrower, a souped up stun gun used to skewer an annoying 14 year old chick, but my favourite has to be the naked stripper fed through a giant wood chipper in a scene that would have Fargo covering it’s eyes. That’s the kind of flick it is, sleazed out to the max, tongue firmly in it’s cheek and never too serious. Problem is, a few of the actors (I’m looking at you,

priest dude) take it way too far into camp territory and ruin whole sequences with their wannabe satirical blathering. McDowell gets the tone right though, and is a right treat as the world’s most sarcastic lawman. Donal Logue also fares well as a bad tempered grinch of a mall Santa who eventually tangles with the murderer in a fiery police station set piece. Maybe I was just tired, but when the origin of the killer is finally revealed, which I waited for the whole time, it seemed like kind of a confusing letdown, a bit less of a surprise than it should have been. Worth it for the kills and a couple entertaining performances, but ultimately not much.

-Nate Hill

Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo is a film that has stuck with me since I saw it years ago, a glowing textbook example on how to create chilly, effective and engrossing horror on a minimal budget, to maximum creepy effect. Set in the snowy drifts of Upstate New York in the dead of winter, a stressed out family heads up to a remote cottage for a rest. Following an accident, a dead deer and the subsequent altercations with angry locals, things take a turn for the supernatural as some dark force takes up residence on the cottage grounds, shaking the family to their collective core. There’s an old legend out there about a spirit called Wendigo, a vengeful ghost that latches onto traumatic events, haunting those involved often right to their graves. These poor people awakened it, and it won’t go away. Jake Weber, Patricia Clarkson and Dewey from Malcolm In The Middle are great as these folks, compelling in their sense of confusion and dread. The creature is rarely seen, save for a single stark image that I haven’t forgotten since: after the car accident, the child looks a ways up the road and sees it standing there, a freaky spectre, all shadows, antlers and such. Spooky stuff. 

-Nate Hill

Alan Parker’s Angel Heart 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


No other film has the seething elemental power of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, a detective story propelled by a murder mystery, all the while cradled in the sweaty, unnerving blanket of a satanic horror story. Get the extended unrated cut if you can, as it cheerfully amps up both the queasy gore and kinky sex in spades. The time is postwar 1940’s, the setting New York, or at first anyways. Shabby private detective Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is hired by sinister clandestine gentleman Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find a missing lounge crooner named Johnny Favourite, for nasty reasons shrouded in thinly veiled threats. Harry is stalled at every turn, kept just out of the loop on every plot twist and soon seems to be a magnet for violence, troubling hallucinations and all the eerie hallmarks of a case he should have stayed far away from. The grisly clues lead him from Brooklyn to the smoky ghettos of Harlem, then south to voodoo soaked swamps of Louisiana and beyond, chasing illusory information and feeling more like the hunted than the hunter with each step. The film feels at times like a shrinking steel cage of unease and dread, a trap that closes in on both Harry and the viewer until the soul crushing revelations of the final act have been laid bare. This is hands down the best work Rourke has ever done, and it’s priceless listening to him try and to downplay it on the DVD commentary, classic ice cool Mickey. De Niro is the kind of quietly dangerous that leaves a deadly vacuum in the air of each scene, underplaying evil expertly and laying down more mystic mood by simply peeling a boiled egg than most actors could with a twenty page monologue. Ex Cosby Show darling Lisa Bonet sauces up her image here as a Bayou voodoo princess with ties to the mystery, and the steamy, no holds barred sex romp she has with Rourke has since become the stuff of legend, a feverish cascade of blood and other bodily fluid that almost gave the MPAA a coronary. The one area this film excels at most is atmosphere; there’s something intangibly wild about everything we see, hear and feel on Harry’s journey, from the supernatural tinged, noirish hues of Michael Seresin’s cinematography to the haunted, hollow tones of Trevor Jones’s baroque, restless original score, everything contributes to forging a world in which we feel enveloped in and can’t quite shake after, like a bad dream that creeps out into waking life for a while after the night. Angel Heart is a horror classic, a blood red gem amongst genre fare and one in an elite group of films that are pretty much as close to perfect as can be. 

-Nate Hill

Christian Alvert’s Antibodies

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Christian Alvert is a wicked sharp German director who has quietly been making terrific films for years that have somehow slipped past the nets of notoriety (his SciFi horror Pandorum is one of the most underrated films of the decade). If you haven’t seen his highly disturbing, Silence of the Lambs esque psycho shocker Antibodies, you’re in for a treat. Perverted, intelligent, psychological, skin crawlingly freaky, the story unwinds in uncomfortable revelations following a gruesome discovery in an apartment by a Berlin police officer, who curiously enough, is played by a silent Norman Reedus. This turns into a raid in which prolific serial killer Gabriel Engel (a bone chilling portrayal by André Hennicke) is finally captured. After sometime, top cop Michael Martens (Wotan Wilke Möhring) runs into a series of murders that bear similarity to Engel’s Crimes, and brings the killer into the fold in consultation capacity. From there it’s a devilish madhouse of deception, sickening mind games and one cracker of a suspenseful ending. I’ll warn you: this shit ain’t pretty. There’s a lot of seriously dark stuff, thematic matter that blasts through the western taboos we find in films over here, and buckets of clinical, shudder inducing gore. If you enjoy smart horror that piles on thought provoking notions in with the carnage and asks questions along the way, you’ll dig this. 

-Nate Hill

Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is kinda guilty of shitty false advertising, as well as just being an overall laughable effort in the franchise, which by that time had already run thin on new ideas. It was after Jason had run amok in the Camp Crystal Lake Woods, but before he got to go to hell, space or slap fisticuffs with Freddy Krueger, and kind of suffers in limbo at a juncture of the franchise that’s stuck in a quagmire of dumb ideas. Of all the evocative, atmospheric locales they could have switched his bloody tirades to, the big Apple just doesn’t seem like the ticket. That isn’t even the real problem anyways, as a good two and a half thirds of the film isn’t even set in NYC, but rather on a luxury cruise liner out on the coastline straights, bound for Manhattan and stuffed with more idiotic graduating high schoolers than you can shake a machete at. Lazy writing, nonexistent plotting and goofball acting are hallmarks in this terrain, but even more so with this flick, literally every non Jason character just being an insufferable ignoramus. The kills are passable but don’t even come halfway to topping the franchise charts, Kane Hodder shows up for his shift as the big lug in full gear, hockey mask and slimy mongoloid prosthetics included at no extra charge. When the boat does finally land on New York shores, it’s jarring to see Jason waltzing down fifth avenue looking like a homeless nut whose stairs don’t quite reach the attic, machete in hand in broad daylight as he pursues the few remaining partygoers through the crowded streets. Really, guys? Keep the big guy in his shrouded summer camp forests where he’s at home, and the feng-shui of his murders rings true. Or at least let him go to space where there’s still dark hallways and hidden alcoves. Probably the biggest misfire in the series.  

B Movie Glory- Brian Yuzna’s Faust: Love Of The Damned 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


I think Goethe might do a few barrel roles in his grave if he ever saw Brian Yuzna’s Faust: Love Of The Damned, an unhinged, risible and obnoxious rendition of his literary works, filled with Spawn inspired effects, heavy metal music, extreme nudity and a general sense of debauched commotion running through it. When regular guy John Jaspers (Mark Frost) sells his soul to the mysterious M (Andrew Divoff) in order to exact revenge on those who killed his girlfriend, things don’t… quite go as planned. Before he knows it he’s transformed into some ridiculous walking demon vigilante thing, given snazzy superpowers and set loose on the city. M, being the devil, is naturally not a man of his word and is planning some horrific apocalyptic mayhem using Faust’s unwitting help, and it all goes so monumentally haywire it’s hard to tell what is even going on, for fuck’s sake. Much of the film consists of him just running about with blaring music in the background, killing people in over the top, spectacularly gory ways. Story has little place here amongst the ruckus din of VFX and soft core porn sensibilities. Divoff is in Djinn mode as M, sporting a startling blonde dye job and Mayan inspired costume design, and having as much fun as every Hollywood character actor has playing Old Scratch himself. There’s a scene where he reprimands his hot sidekick by causing her to melt into a moaning pile of her own bodily fluids that will have everyone nervously shifting on the couch and wondering just exactly what the fuck they’re watching. The Reanimator himself Jeffrey Combs has an eccentric police detective role that somehow just gets swallowed up by the orgy of visual and auditory assault that the film consists of. Nothing remotely similar to the original tale of Faust, you’ll either get a sick thrill, laugh the whole way through or get up and walk out. I loved it. 

-Nate Hill

Hellraiser: Inferno 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


Hellraiser: Inferno marks the first juncture in the franchise where ideas deviated beyond the formula set in place by the first borderline surreal, masochist piece.

Gone is the dreamy, sordid aesthetic used back then, the Cenobites who were front and centre are reduced to limited appearances and the story is less otherworldly and something decidedly more noirish and down to earth. Whether that’s accepted by franchise die-hards and horror hounds alike is subjective, but I didn’t mind it’s slow burn approach or sidewinding tone. Craig Sheffer, the closest thing you’ll get to Josh Brolin without breaking the bank, plays a crooked Detective who finds himself dragged down a rabbit hole of creepy, murderous goings-on when he’s assigned to hunt a serial killer known as ‘The Engineer’. Of course the murders always seem one step ahead of his grasp, and naturally dark secrets from his sketchy past are brought to light as he gradually begins to lose his mind. Doug Bradley does eventually return as the iconic Pinhead, with a few members of the Cenobite posse, but their presence is kept mostly on the back burner for quite a while. Taking antagonist duties for a while instead is Sheffer’s eerie psychiatrist, played with sinister charm and knowing charisma by James Remar, a dubious fellow with a few tricks up his own sleeve. This is the one entry that sticks out from the franchise in it’s diversion from the usual path of distinct, abstract psychosexual horror and mutes the whole icy nightmare down to rebuild a story in it’s own image. You’ll either appreciate the initiative, or you’ll miss the good ol’ freakshow of the original film. Up to you. 

-Nate Hill

Freddy’s Dead: The ‘Final’ Nightmare 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


I’m not sure what they were going for with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, but the summation of what they produced is simply… bizarre. Of course it’s not the final round, they never can resist churning out meta reworking, crossovers and remakes, rendering the ‘final’ titles hilariously redundant (the ‘final’ Friday The 13th chapter is only the fourth entry in a franchise that soared into double digits). It’s silly more than anything else, like the New Line Cinema boardroom passed around the laughing gas and spit-balled out this cartoonish, random, cameo stuffed looney bin of a flick. Actually, writing credit goes to director Rachel Talalay, who also helped the equally silly rumpus cult classic Tank Girl, which is lovable in it’s own right. Speaking of silly, Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger has never been more buffoonish than here, the culmination of every one line and quip throughout the franchise. He’s back, hunting down the last remaining Springwood teenager, as well as a woman (Lisa Zane) whose connection to his past could be dicy for him. There’s also a weird backstory angle involving dream demons that look like sentient tadpoles who apparently are responsible for Freddy’s initial resurrection and powers. Hmm. The cameos seem like they just made a celebrity collage on a dartboard, blindfolded each other and flung them all over. Alice Cooper shows up in flashbacks as Freddy’s sadistic stepfather, Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold are around, plus Breckin Meyer and Yaphet Kotto. The rule of randoms is excepting Johnny Depp of course, an Elm Street veteran who has a quick bit as a TV advertisement dude. The dream sequences are wild and wacky, but never really frightening or as atmospheric as they used to be, the one springing to mind being a video game themed thing where pixelated Freddy chases a victim Super Mario style, not exactly the most bone chilling setting, but oh well. This does mark the last of the initial franchise before they moved on to deluxe entries like the super meta New Nightmare and the gong show that was Freddy Vs. Jason. If you’re looking for the weirdest Elm Street flick, you’ve found it, and if you’re looking for a scary, coherent one then you’ll have to backtrack earlier in the franchise, or skip ahead to Wes Craven’s excellent next one. 

-Nate Hill