Tag: scary

Ken Russell’s Gothic

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Ken Russell’s Gothic reminds me of one of those nights where you and a group of your friends all get hammered and take psychedelics together but accidentally forget to designate one amongst the group to stay sober and take care of the rest, so you all just kind of collectively lose it without a sane babysitter to steer you away from a bad trip. In this case the group of friends in question includes Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), his doe-eyed concubine (Myriam Cyr), Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson), her poet husband (Julian Sands) and John Polidori (Timothy Spall), and if you’re even vaguely familiar with their real life literary works it wouldn’t even surprise me that the lot of them were out of their heads on all sorts of drugs. All metaphors aside this is a fantastic, warped, fever dream shock horror film that provides an abundance of perverse enjoyment, provided you have the strong stomach, deranged sensibilities and capacity for abstraction required to get perverse enjoyment out of what can only be described as really fucking weird shit. As the odd group engages in tantalizing swinger’s foreplay and picks each other’s brains, subtle supernatural things start to show up, then all hell breaks loose after they conduct an impromptu seance around a supposedly enchanted skull. This is my first Ken Russell film and I already love his work, the guy just likes to roll up his sleeves and get unapologetically bizarre for the sheer joy of it. Natasha Richardson’s Mary Shelley is the eventual main focal point of the group and both her wonderful, edgy performance and the night in question subtly suggests what past traumas and diabolical new inspirations led to the genesis idea for her iconic Frankenstein novel, while Byrne’s impossibly sleazy Byron hovers in the background, a hedonistic tornado of deviant sexual energy and debutant petulance that the actor, still early in his career, tears into with seething voracity. Russell himself is a wizard of hallucinatory panic, visual madness and disorienting, hair raising sound design, with a lot of help from a terrifically spine chilling score by the one and only Thomas Dolby. The experience is one of dementedly strange horror, with indescribable monsters lurking around every corner and edifice of Byron’s spooky mansion, a constant state of mental disarray, existential confusion and otherworldly anxiety inflicted both upon the characters and audience alike, a truly immersive realm of a film. It’s a shame this isn’t really more widely available, streaming, physical or otherwise because it’s essential for any horror fan. I watched it on YouTube with surprisingly decent picture and sound quality, I suppose that will have to do for now. Excellent film.

-Nate Hill

Patrick Brice’s There’s Someone Inside Your House

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Netflix and filmmaker Patrick Brice (the effective DIY Creep films) try their hand at a classic slasher frolic with 80’s influences for There’s Someone Inside Your House, a surprisingly grisly horror that works, for the most part, when the script isn’t trying to be too contemporary and ‘of the minute’ with tiresome buzzwords. It concerns a group of teens from one of those football, cornfield, jock jacket Midwest towns where the local high school has all the regular archetypes, here written through a prism of updated millennial banter that probably should have been dialed down. Someone is going around ruthlessly murdering people, each victim with a terrible, life changing secret that gets exposed alongside their killing, the murderer wearing a 3D printed mask of their prey each and every time. It’s a cool idea; a killer who uses secrets as lethally as blunt objects or blades, and when they come for you, you see an unsettlingly pristine prosthetic mirror image of yourself staring back at you. The film’s third act and Scream-esque revelations based on the killer’s identity reveal feel a bit anticlimactic, while the setup and ferocious midsection boast some truly inspired and gruesome kills, the opening murder involving severed Achilles’ tendons will be enough to make even the most seasoned gore hound wince. Much use is made of the cornfield setting, the locations have a desolate, wide open feel to them and of course they fucking shot it in Vancouver and Chilliwack and tried to pass it off as the States because they’ve got no imagination. It’s the sort of mid level, not classic but still pretty enjoyable slasher flick you’d see in the 80’s and 90’s, something like a tribute to Urban Legend or I Know What You Did Last Summer that isn’t destined for greatness or franchise notoriety, yet still does the trick. The woke stuff could have been toned down though, it takes you right out of the era they’re trying to place you in as it’s so obviously shoehorned in. Good kills and atmosphere though, and just check out that gorgeous poster.

-Nate Hill

Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within is the second snowbound, dark comedy werewolf movie made this year, which seems like a crazy coincidence until you remember stuff like Armageddon and Deep Impact or Volcano and Dante’s Peak, both pairs from the same year. It’s a popular trend and there’s always one that stands out as the better version of whatever sub genre they’re exploring, and this is certainly a far stronger film than Wolf Of Snow Hollow, which I was underwhelmed by. I don’t want to compare them too much but this one just nails the mile a minute dialogue, quaint characterization and pitch black comedic notes way better, and the inevitable whodunit of which character is the wolf is far more fun too. In a ski resort town in upstate NY, a various motley skeleton crew of local residents are being hunted and attacked by a werewolf, and one amongst them is responsible for it, hiding in plain sight. The twitchy, meek rookie park ranger (Sam Richardson) and bubbly, hyperactive mailwoman (Milena Vayntraub) try to keep the peace but these people love to bicker like I’ve never seen before, they’re worse than a room full of divorced parents. Some cast standouts include Wayne Duvall (Prisoners, O Brother Where Art Thou) as a smarmy, booze guzzling industrialist trying to buy out the town for an oil pipeline and Glenn Fleshler (True Detective, Hannibal) as a pelt adorned, perpetually grumpy mountain man who is sometimes indistinguishable from the werewolf itself and looks like he just walked in from Last Of The Mohicans. So begins an Agatha Christie type countdown as characters are dispatched in bloody fashion and the unveiling of the wolf’s identity draws nearer. The film is tons of fun thanks to a sharp, pithy script and a host of appropriately caffeinated actors who hit the ground running and all give wonderfully lively work. It’s kind of a slight, mild horror with the emphasis on comedy, it careens by like a rogue snowdrift and is a solid good time.

-Nate Hill

David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

When David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween dropped I didn’t quite believe that talk of an entire trilogy was true because we’ve heard that one before. As such, there were things that felt unwieldy, strange and open ended in the narrative that are explored further and deeper in Halloween Kills, a film that is getting some serious bad mojo out there in internet land. Well, it’s certainly not perfect, but I still enjoyed it for what it was: an expansion on the 1978 Halloween night and Myers lore with a whole circus tent of new characters, comic relief asides, callbacks, fresh themes and a surprising amount of actors from Carpenter’s original film returning once again. It’s hectic, it’s cluttered, at times it feels like far too much is going on but there’s also this feverish momentum to it as Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie and her whole band frantically run about trying to track down Michael and kill him. There’s her daughter Karen played by the always lovely Judy Greer and granddaughter Allyson played by Andi Matichak, a wonderful actress who creates a character you care about and is the emotional lynchpin of this new vision, I like the dynamic between the three of them that is given more room to develop here. Will Patton returns as Haddonfield’s toughest Sheriff’s Deputy, it’s always nice to see him and I’m not sure what’s spoiler territory or not in mentioning who shows up but none of it seems to really be a secret, they are kind of hit and miss across the board. Anthony Michael Hall is oddly stilted and stiff as grown up Tommy Doyle (where’s the 78 Doyle actor?) , while Kyle Richards is utterly sensational reprising her role as now adult Lindsay Wallace, she has become a terrific actress, a beautiful woman and the closest the film gets to a true retro Scream Queen, she rocks it in the single most suspenseful Michael sequence I’ve seen in these intense new visions. Equally effective is the wonderful Robert Longstreet as adult Lonnie Elam, exuding the same gritty humanity he brought to Mike Flanagan’s Haunting Of Hill House and Midnight Mass. This might be the most ambitious Halloween sequel we’ve seen yet and, naturally, not all of it works or clicks into place in a way that feels earned and organic, but look back at each instalment in the canon and you’ll find films that aren’t perfect, are rough around the edges but to a true diehard fan of this franchise (raises hand) all have some lovable quality or aspect that can be enjoyed and held dear. Except for for Resurrection, fuck that movie right up it’s Jack o’ lantern ass. But Kills is a sequel with a lot of inspiration and heart for the Myers mythos, the overarching Haddonfield saga and the slasher motif. There’s a sequence in the film where Haddonfield’s residents are whipped up into an angry, frenzied mob trying to hunt down Michael, but they become a maniacal, non thinking rabble with tunnel vision instead of carefully examining their situation and forming a tactical, realistic plan. I see a lot of that on the interwebs, where one bad review snowballs into a fervour of keyboard mashing until a big dumb mob forms to rip the film a new one. But did that first guy even see the thing, or form a focused, logical assessment of why the film is bad? Did you, dear critic, even read that before suiting up and joining the ranks? If you saw Halloween Kills and genuinely thought it was a bad film and can concisely articulate for us why it didn’t work for you, then carry on. But don’t just pitch your voice in tune with the din because that’s the way the fish are swimming, because that doesn’t make you cool, babe, it just makes you boring. I for one got a lot of enjoyment from the film, both in that special nostalgic spooky way the original two films made me feel and in a fascinating expansion of lore sensibility too. It’s not a perfect film and maybe not even a great one, but it sure works as an effective, formidable and entertaining chapter of the Michael Myers legacy for me.

-Nate Hill

Can Evrenol’s Housewife

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I wasn’t quite prepared for Can Evrenol’s Housewife, a disarmingly gruesome slow burn horror flick that I went into blindly on purpose. Had I looked it up first I might have seen that Turkish director Evrenol is also responsible for another notoriously fucked up horror called Baskin, which I’ve heard many a rumour about but have been circling for years as I just don’t have the stomach for the heavy stuff like I used to. Anyways I waded into Housewife uninformed and unassuming and, well… it’s quite the fucking experience. It tells of a girl (Clémentine Poidatz) living in Istanbul with her husband, who is troubled by nightmarish dreams of her traumatized youth where she watched her mentally ill mother murder her older sister, for starters. She always feels on the edge of that same mental instability, which is put to the test when she reconnects with an estranged best friend who has become deeply involved with a dangerous doomsday cult, particularly it’s charismatic leader (David Sakurai). The film starts off as an eerie, cerebral, glacial buildup full of terse atmospheric visuals and a truly genius, beautifully spooky musical score but as soon the cult angle barrels into the narrative it gets wild and bloody pretty quick, which is a shocking left turn. The ever present yet unseen threat of something bad turns into a geyser of gore, torn off faces, ruthless umbrella shankings, slimy demonic babies, hooting and hollering insanity of clamouring cult members and a third act that is so far beyond the stratosphere of subtlety that all I could do was laugh with the characters as they succumb to the frenzied, maniacal final beat of the narrative that would be too much if it wasn’t just too damn hilarious in a “throw your hands up and surrender to the shenanigans” type of way. I think I liked the first half of the film more, it feels like the measured, dread soaked first two acts of Rosemary’s Baby in tone and atmosphere, obviously way more R rated, contemporary and balls-out psychosexual than that creaky old classic. And where that one never showed the grisly viscera in person, only ever suggested it, this film shows *everything*, and trust me it ain’t pretty. There’s an ethereal beauty and calculated, delicate menace to the buildup and while the third act fells a tad cluttered, a bit too grotesque in some frames and nothing like the hushed, reverent opening acts, I admired its sheer willingness to plough head on into kinky, perverse, violent sex games and some hysterically over the top Lovecraftian cosmic pandemonium. It’s good, but bring a titanium lined stomach or a Costco orders worth of barf bags because it’s a truly sickening experience, the kind of gross-out Euro erotica shocker madness that most North American audiences just are not used to.

-Nate Hill

Stephen King’s Children Of The Corn

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Children Of The Corn is such an iconoclast franchise packed to the brim with as many sequels as your Hellraisers or your Pumpkinheads, and it has firm roots in horror pop culture so I was excited to finally check out the original 1984 that started it all and my strongest thoughts are that it’s just not a good movie. Like… this? This is what spawned an entire legacy that, to this day, still won’t quit? I expected something memorable, legendary and possessive of some quality or spark that genuinely lives on in your mind and fears after the credits roll, some quality that justifies two dozen sequels that stretch right into the new millennium, something that most lore-expansive horror franchise’s first efforts usually have, that this one simply doesn’t. All there is to this story is a young couple (Linda Hamilton & Peter Horton) driving through a desolate county filled with miles of cornfields, a region populated only by creepy little brats who have all killed their parents and every other adult in the area at the behest of some unseen deity who when finally made visible via some truly abysmal special effects, is a laughable, mostly absent antagonist. The child actors, spearheaded by irritating John Franklin and hammy Courtney Gains, are forgettable and nothing close to naturalistic or scary, the locations are over lit and drab, I’ve never seen a horror film set in and around cornfields squander the incredibly potent setting, there’s just no atmosphere at all. The story honestly just reminded me of that South Park episode where all the kids get their parents locked up for “molestering” them and live alone, which now that I think about it, they probably based that on this. I wish I had something nice to say about this but sadly I was so so letdown by a film whose reputation curiously says otherwise. I suppose there’s two of the little kids that give decent performances and elicit sympathy, I can’t find their names now on IMDb as they’ve grown up and the photos look different but they’re a brother and sister of maybe 5 and 7 with telekinesis who wish to defect and run away from this cult, they had my sympathy and I liked their work, but other than that this was just dire. There’s about as many sequels to this out there as there were weird little kids running around in the corn here and if you’ve seen them and know of any that, like those two little kids, rise above the B grade, cheap shit vibes of this one let me know, but I was about as unimpressed as possible here.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Fall Down Dead

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

A vicious serial killer toys with cops in a dark, unnamed urban hellhole and no I’m not talking about Fincher’s Seven or even that Keanu Reeves Watcher flick. Fall Down Dead is an apt title for a murky, messy shocker that falls down wayyyy below the horror influences it’s inspired by and is a pretty lame excuse for horror, saved only by the spectral presence of the great Udo Kier. Playing a nasty mass murderer called the Picasso Killer, his MO is to slice people up with a straight razor and use their blood and tissue for artwork on canvas, and he’s set his sights in single mother Dominique Swain, who has the misfortune of running into him on Christmas Eve as she heads home through a curiously deserted city (filmed in North Carolina). From there it’s a series of tired jump scares, chases and impossibly athletic kills (Kier was like 70 here and he jumps off ten foot ledges like an acrobat lol) as he follows her into an empty office building where she joins forces with a sleepy security guard (David Carradine) and two Eastern European police detectives who seem oddly out of place stateside, but then again I suppose Udo does too. Swain doesn’t make a half bad scream Queen in general, I’ve always loved her vibe and her presence is always a plus for me somehow, even in stuff like this. Carradine is so lethargic and unenthusiastic you couldn’t even call his performance a phone-in, it’s about five minutes of him looking like he got dragged to a Christmas dinner with every set of in-laws on the planet, he just flatlines, grabs his paycheque and bounces with nary a moment of memorable screen time. Kier, however, is the life of the party as usual, he has this otherworldly, transfixing charisma and even hopelessly shitty junk like this he somehow makes it worth watching, if you’re a fan. His killer here is a vampiric, nearly invincible razor wielding maniac with who purrs and hisses out hysterically ridiculous lines like “Now you’re mine”, “I’m going to cut off your skin” and “Your blood will paint my canvas.” He’s a hoot, and pretty much the only reason to dive into this dumpster. Stay for a post credit scene, if you get that far!

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Devil’s Pond

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Be careful who you marry because they could end up being like the dude in Devil’s Pond, a so-so two person horror flick that sees a newlywed couple (Tara Reid & Kip Pardue) embark on their honeymoon to a remote cabin on an island in the middle of a lake, only for her to discover that her charming new husband is in fact a possessive, volatile nut job who has no plans on letting her leave this island… ever. Now, you would think there’d be signs of this guy being a loonie early on or at least something to suggest to her that he might not be a trustworthy spouse, but experience, my own and that of others around me, has taught that you can think you know someone pretty damn well only to have them pull the rout out with no warning bells and turn out to be an absolute monster. It’s a tricky situation because the island is smack-dab in the kiddie of this giant Montana lake, it’s boat accessible only and hubbie keeps the keys to his truck, parked over on the lake’s edge, on his person at all times. This leaves her to play a dangerous, breathless, brutally violent game of survival and wage a battle of wills with him so she can escape, always trying to elude his psychological torment and scary outbursts, overcome her intimidating fear of water/swimming and get out of this nightmare. The performances are good, Pardue does a serviceable lunatic routine pretty well, but Reid surprised me with a disarmingly well calibrated turn. I’m used to her in disposable teen comedies and whatnot, where she’s usually the ditzy chick and the only thing I ever consistently rewatch with her is The Big Lebowski where she’s basically the original ditzy chick prototype. She actually comes across as likeable, desperate and earned my sympathy here with emotional beats that felt authentic and a well rounded character, so good on her. The film overall is nothing special, just your run of the mill psycho husband thriller with a nice spin provided by the uniquely situated location. Just good enough to be solidly entertaining, if not much more.

-Nate Hill

Castille Landon’s Fear Of Rain

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Schizophrenia is a delicate subject to tackle in cinema; if you get too sensationalistic and thriller oriented you lose the honesty of the affliction, but if you get too bleak and oppressive with realism you’ll chase your audience away. I’m pleased to report that Castile Landon’s Fear Of Rain is a beautiful, haunting, truthful and compassionate portrait of the illness that incorporates a fragile character study, emotionally affecting family dynamics and an almost unbearably suspenseful thriller narrative for not only one of the most powerful films this year, but one of the most intelligent and thoughtful depictions of this unfortunate condition in cinema thus far. Madison Iseman is Rain, a teenage girl who has been struggling with schizophrenia her entire life. It affects her high school life, day to day routine and relationship with her loving parents (Katherine Heigl & Harry Connick Jr) who do everything they can to help her. She wants to get better but feels frustrated by the fact that the meds she takes dull her creative edge, as she’s an enormously talented painter. Things get impossibly complicated when she meets and makes friends with a boy (Israel Broussard) from out of town who she isn’t even sure is real and starts to suspect her neighbour/high school teacher (Eugenie Bondurant) of kidnapping and holding a little girl captive in her house. Are all these things realities of her life or densely spun facets of her own delusional mind spilling out into her outward mental state? The film could have easily gone for cheap thrills, cloying teen romance and a sanitized, glossed over depiction of schizophrenia but there’s a brutal honesty and careful balancing act between all these elements that feels genuine. Iseman is raw and potent, finding the desperate notes, the inevitable clarity and the instances where Rain skirts the dangerous line of hopelessness and losing her mind forever. Heigl and Connick Jr are excellent as the parents, finding all the right beats individually and as a unit. Director Landon seamlessly weaves the thriller aspects into the psychological themes for a story that has twists that feel earned, performances that feel human, a third act that will toss your nerves into a bundle and some visually striking, almost fairytale-like cinematography that gets downright dreamy to illustrate Rain’s kaleidoscopic mental state and draw you into her journey. Great film, and important because it goes a long way in educating and erasing stigmas around schizophrenia.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Be Afraid

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Be Afraid is a big, bold title for a horror film and despite it being a relatively low budget effort that skirts the boundaries of outright B grade quality, there were a few moments that did come very close to being truly, impressively scary. The story sees the residents of a sleepy rural county in Pennsylvania preyed upon by some sort of either supernatural or extraterrestrial beings that dwell in a cave deep in the woods. The county doctor (Brian Krause, Charmed, Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers) does his best to uncover what’s going on while dealing with family issues, an uncooperative sheriff (Louis Herthum), ghosts from the past and the fact that both his young son and he himself are having terrifying nocturnal visions of these strange humanoid horrors walking right into their bedrooms and standing over them. Now, the film never outright tells you what these things are but the ringleader of them appears to wear a top hat which in my book rules out aliens and feels more akin to something earthly, elemental and folk-horror oriented but it’s really anyones guess. The film almost has a Signs vibe, what with all the rural farms and quaint, small town feel pervaded upon by threatening figures on the edge of the landscape. There are nice forest shots and they seem to have filmed this in Fall, so the seasonal vibes are there as well. I can’t quite call it a great film because it just feels like a DTV outing half the time, but on those terms it’s certainly not a bad one at all, one that genuinely tries to do something cool with capable actors, tangible atmosphere and discernible style to it. Originally titled “Within The Dark”, it can be found streaming on Prime at least here in Canada anyways, and is a nice lazy afternoon watch for spooky season.

-Nate Hill