Tag: scary

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (such beautifully deliberate typos) blends the director’s trademark kinky, drippy body horror with a tactile, analog virtual reality aesthetic that is one of his most fun, freaky and mind warping SciFi horror outings I’ve seen. Jennifer Jason Leigh is an edgy, uncompromising, fearless actress who has made it her personal mission to work with some of the wildest, weirdest filmmakers out there including Tarantino, Paul Verhoeven, The Coens, The Safdies, Charlie Kaufman, Brad Anderson and of course David Lynch. Her collaboration with Cronenberg provides us with fascinating protagonist Allegra Keller, a futuristic video game designer who Leigh imbues with a wistful, detached-from-reality aura, a girl who got lost in the virtual world and is only half present in any given scene. Allegra is the target of corporate assassins out to plunder her tech, so she’s on the run with a low level marketing schmuck (Jude Law) from her firm, hiding out in a backwoods motel. Her only choice is to play her own game with this underling in order to find out if it’s damaged or not, and here the film veers into unsteady narrative territory as reality bends and all sense of linear cohesion is thrown to the wind for some truly trippy mind-games. They encounter other players personified by a rogues gallery of Cronenberg regulars like Sarah Polley, Ian Holm, Callum Keith Rennie, Don Mckellar, Christopher Eccleston and Willem Dafoe as a nasty, treacherous gas station attendant whose name is literally… Gas. The film is a sort of paranoid, uneasy game of virtual Russian roulette to see who’s who, who’s not who they say they are, what’s real, what’s not and who is going to end up dead or insane from playing this very dangerous game for too long, and goddamn is it ever fun until it’s last, ruthless, kick in the nuts final beat before the credits. Leigh is wonderful and adds a deliriously sexual connotation to the already very sexual, body penetrating nature of the tech used for gameplay, she puts her sly, playful yet shady smile to great effect and it’s one of the best actor/director collabs with Conenberg I’ve seen since Jeff Goldblum for The Fly. The special effects are excellent too, all kinds of gorgeously grotesque organ mimicking tubes, fleshy portals and genitalia reminiscent weaponry that will have all the parents in the audience getting uncomfortable. It’s a great picture, the mix of virtual paranoia, worlds within games within worlds and freaky, glistening practical viscera is a delicious flavour and one of my favourite cinematic recipes yet from our Canadian master of the macabre. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Night Of The Demons

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Night Of The Demons is a ton of cheesy 80’s fun, maybe a bit more loopy and silly than I was expecting it to be at times but still a blast of hectic screeching monsters and gooey practical effects. It’s story is so simplistic and it’s characters such overblown archetypes of their time it almost feels like the “movie within a movie” that characters in an 80’s horror that took themselves a bit more seriously would be watching at some point, for meta flair. Various dudes, chicks, jocks, nerds and one jersey boy sounding guy all head to a spooky abandoned house to party for the night where, naturally, they fall prey to unseen spirits that possess their bodies (mainly the girls) and stir up one noisy, gory night from hell. The special effects, demon transformations and evil performances from possessed cast members are all dialed up, theatrical and super super hyperactive, which at worst can be aggravating and at best makes for a pleasantly shrill Evil Dead vibe. There’s one sequence that’s a real charmer where two girls rob a convenience store blind, one of them hiking up her dress to nonchalantly flash the clerks some panty, the other sneakily loading up a bag with their booze, snacks and smokes for the night. Now *thats* how you party prep, folks. It’s a good time, and like I said it got a bit mindless in the noise and characterization department, but it’s still a solidly bonkers 80’s horror effort.

-Nate Hill

Jim Cummings’s The Wolf Of Snow Hollow

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

There’s one moment in The Wolf Of Snow Hollow where a character suggests that everyone in the room pause for a moment of silence and it made me chuckle because I didn’t believe anyone in that room, let alone any character in this film, to be capable of a moment of silence, since most of them spend their scenes yelling, shouting, arguing and making noise at a thoroughly exhausting, mile-a-minute pace. Writer director star Jim Cummings has attempted to make an oblong Christmas themed werewolf comedy fused together with a hectic, dysfunctional family drama and the result, although competently made, is a bit unwieldy and all over the place for me. In a snowy Utah mountain town that could almost be called sleepy if everyone weren’t so over caffeinated, some sort of huge wolf like beast has been attacking people and leaving a trail of corpses. It falls on the impossibly stressed out county sheriff (Cummings) who has large boots to fill as he prepares to take over the job permanently from his semi-retired father (the late great Robert Forster in his final film appearance). He’s also navigating a shaky relationship with his ex wife and daughter, plus regular AA meetings, some truly incompetent deputies and a coroner who is borderline insubordinate in the investigation. There’s just too much going on and it started to give my brain the zoomies to be honest. The werewolf is cool enough, it’s attacks vicious and well staged but the final resolution and explanation for the creature felt a tad… underwhelming. It’s definitely worth a look to see Forster on his game one last time, and there are some genuinely hilarious moments written, acted and directed by triple threat Cummings, who no doubt has talent. I just feel like a snowy werewolf family comedy set around Christmas is such a goldmine of a genre concept, this should have been an instant classic and for me, felt only alright.

-Nate Hill

Santiago Menghini’s No One Gets Out Alive

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

No One Gets Out Alive is a hell of a title for a horror movie and the movie therein better live up to it, which in this case it sure damn does. This is a sensational film, one that has ghosts, body horror, Aztec lore, demonology, leering psychopaths, social commentary and some of the most chilling, effective scares I’ve seen of late. The story tells of young Mexican girl Ambar (Christina Rodlo) living illegally in the US and working for cash at a depressing sweatshop, trying to save up for a forged American visa. She rents a room in a spooky old converted mansion ran by weary, creepy Red, played by Mark Menchaca who seems to be carving out a nice little niche for himself these days in playing memorable horror antagonists. Something is very, very wrong in this house and no sooner has she unpacked her bags she’s seeing phantasms behind every corner, hearing weird noises all over the place and having terrifying waking nightmares. Is it haunted? Or something far worse? The film takes the already unfortunate and desperate situation of a woman of colour living alone and off the record in the USA, the danger of deportation always an element, and then whisks her right out of the frying pan into the fires of a dangerous supernatural predicament and the result is, intense to say the least. I won’t spoil what’s really going on in the house but I will say that the film offers up one of the most visually staggering, indescribably bizarre, nightmarishly breathtaking movie monsters I’ve ever seen in horror. Seriously, if you think that weird deer demigod thing in The Ritual was odd, just wait til you see this one, it’s truly imaginative nightmare fuel and took me right off guard. Director Santiago Menghini has his feature debut here and it’s one of the strongest I’ve ever seen. Spatially aware camera movements, optical tricks and careful layers of light, darkness and colour make this an unnerving haunted house to get lost in. The gore is truly shocking, the characters are well drawn and realistic and like I said, that monster is simply one for the books, in this case the Guinness Book of Coolest Horror Movie Monsters Ever. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Netflix’s The Chestnut Man

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Scandinavians really seem to like their grim, chilly serial killer procedurals, The Chestnut Man being the latest Netflix offering from Denmark that gets about as grim, nasty and dark as these kind of narratives ever do. It’s a bit of a jumble to be honest, needlessly overstuffed with characters, subplots, hairpin turns, red herrings, dead ends and asides. As the story opens, police in a rural town outside Copenhagen discover a string of ruthless murders, each crime scene eerily decorated with a little figurine made from chestnuts. That’s their main clue going into an investigation involving a dozen different cops, social workers, a coroner, a bunch of old sealed records dating back to foster homes and adoptions and so many moving parts and dense plot content it made my head spin. I’m sure the story is in fact a concise series of events that check out logically and the reason I got so lost was because I binged this entire thing on a night where I was spectacularly exhausted and just could not focus. I will say that this production has some gorgeous spooky Fall vibes, they seem to have shot in autumn, which makes sense for a killer that needs a constant supply of chestnuts I suppose, but there are some truly breathtaking overhead shots of seasonal forests all steeped in golden brown and auburn hues. There’s also some razor sharp, terrifying suspense that’s extremely well orchestrated and effectively scary as well. Sometimes the material gets oppressively dark and so bleak it can be off putting, there are themes of child abuse that are directly depicted, and the murderer himself is one heinous motherfucker who doesn’t discriminate one bit in victim selection or brutal methodology, so just bring an iron lined stomach for this one. It’s got great atmosphere, thrills n’ chills that mostly work and it’s a quick six episode binge, but I almost feel like it could have been a two and a half hour feature film and in doing so, strip away a lot of the excess narrative clutter because at times I felt like I needed a big pinup board with photos of all the characters in relation to each other, just to keep track.

-Nate Hill

Witchboard

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

80’s horror veers all across the board from campy to atmospheric and everywhere in between but I think my favourite specific aesthetic from that era is, and it’s a bit hard to describe in written words, the sort of super dialed-up sexy, billowing curtains in night breezes set to spooky kinky sax/electronic music, permed hair, Ken-doll, Harlequin Romance-esque, impossibly attractive stars, ridiculously lurid 80’s style horror. Make sense? Stuff like the original Fright Night, Spellbound, parts of Hellraiser fit the bill. I am pleasantly surprised to be able to add Witchboard into the category as well, it’s a spectacular horror film I’d never heard of until it popped up on shudder but one that now owns the Ouija board sub-genre for me. It stars Todd Allen, Stephen Nichols and the late Tawny Kitaen as three childhood friends who grew up but never got out of the dysfunctional love triangle they’ve always been in. After fooling around with a Ouija board one night they find themselves in deep supernatural shit when two long dead spirits fixate on them, one the ghost of a little boy who is more or less harmless, the other a frightening, dangerous phantasm who wants them all dead. Now, this could have easily been a cheesy, routine haunting flick full of bumps in the night, POV shots and endless chase scenes but instead they’ve made it packed with dripping atmosphere, full of measured suspense and some writing and characterization that was far more mature and grounded than I was expecting. The two male leads have a genuine history together and their arc develops with believable friction and camaraderie. It’s so sad that Tawny Kitaen passed away so young, this is the first film I’ve ever seen with her but she’s just the *perfect* badass scream Queen in every way. Gotta give a shout out to Kathleen Wilhoite (Twin Peaks, Colour Of Night) too as an outlandish spiritual medium who is so impossibly over the top and adds the only element of genuine camp to the film. The score by Dennis Michael Tenney (Night Of The Demons, Leprechaun) is a beautiful, occasionally legit scary composition that for me stands with the best Carpenter electronic jangles and adds so much to the film. This is one of the coolest 80’s horrors I’ve seen in some time, and I can’t wait to check out the sequels to complete the trilogy.

-Nate Hill

Neil Marshall’s Hellboy

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Why we couldn’t have just gotten a third Hellboy movie with Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman at the wheel is beyond me, instead of this grossly miscalculated, eye melting mish-mash of bad CGI and disorganized storytelling. It’s sad too because it could have even been decent, they got an accomplished filmmaker I really love and a handful of super awesome cult icon actors to cast the material appropriately, but somewhere along the line of creative process, Neil Marshall’s Hellboy just shits the bed and comes out largely a piss poor effort. I love David Harbour too, he’s a terrifically charismatic and versatile artist but he just doesn’t fit the bill here, his Hellboy comes across as whiny, dour and all the wisecracking fells inorganic and forced. Plus let’s face it, there just wasn’t any hope for any other actor than Perlman to properly sell the character, plain and simple, he was born for it. Harbour’s Hellboy is stuck in a murky plot line about an ancient evil sorceress called the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich) who has been resurrected by a human/wild boar hybrid to wreak havoc on humanity in some vaguely malicious ritual that involves knockoff Del Toro creatures stomping around London ripping people in half, cue the tiresome CGI. It’s loud, messy, the gore is off putting and there’s just too much noise and commotion to properly discern story or character. Does it do anything effectively? Yes, credit where credit is due, there’s a wonderfully eerie sequence where the pace mercifully calms down a bit as Hellboy visits a terrifying monster called the Baba Yaga, it’s essentially an expository interlude but it’s handled incredibly well, full of tangible atmosphere and genuine terror. Some of the cast fare pretty well, Ian McShane is always awesome and adds a brittle, corrosive edge to Trevor Broom where John Hurt was more subdued. The lovely Sasha Lane is quite effective as a member of the paranormal defence team who is a medium and can summon dead spirits in a genie-like mass of ectoplasmic slime, but Daniel Dae Kim comes across painfully lifeless as a guy who can only be described as the offspring of a werewolf and a cheetah. Most of the supporting cast are just drowned out in a flurry of noise including Sophie Okonedo as a ghost lady, Brian Gleeson as Merlin (yes, that Merlin) and a brief, bizarre appearance from Thomas Haden Church as some dude whose name is Lobster (can you tell I haven’t read the comics?). The film just doesn’t work, aside from a few exceptions that come too little, too late. Everywhere the Del Toro films were tactile, colourful, atmospheric and well written this one is obnoxious, needlessly gory, rushed and unwieldy. You’re better off just revisiting those and pretending this one doesn’t exist.

-Nate Hill

Gigi Saul Guerrero’s Bingo Hell

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Gigi Saul Guerrero’s Bingo Hell is a clever, super gory, socially conscious little slice of societal satire wrapped in a vicious, slimy cautionary tale, it comes to us as part of the yearly round of borderline anthology output called “Welcome To Blumhouse”, ostensibly a mini horror film festival with fierce, imaginative original entries from new filmmakers. Set in an obscure L.A. barrio that’s halfway towards tofu eating, hipster overrun gentrification and halfway hanging onto the old school ways for dear life, a group of elderly friends finds themselves forced into a jarring new way of life when their beloved, modest bingo hall gets bought out by a mysterious magnate named Mr. Big (the inimitable Richard Brake). Led by feisty Lupita (Adriana Barraza), these old timers make a stand and fight to fend off the advances of this sinister businessman who is using obviously supernatural methods to lure members of their group in with promises of big wins and big bucks, an act of selling their soul to the grind of progress that has hellish, gory, ill fated consequences. The themes are surprisingly grounded for such a quick, breezy Grindhouse flick and one gets a real sense of care put into the script. Barraza is a fierce protagonist and Brake, as usual, makes a leering, memorable, deranged cartoonish villain in the best way, a living personification of of Big Money mania, he’s a presence that serves any film well. I’m reminded of last years VFW, a somewhat similar horror film about old timers defending what’s theirs from encroaching forces. They both have the same neon soaked, madcap gory vibes that I love to see in the genre. This is a solid effort from an exciting new voice in horror, and I’m stoked to see what she creates next.

-Nate Hill

Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I love a good aquatic set horror movie, whether the events take place down below in the depth in a submarine or on the surface in a boat. Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever is a solid offering that features a bit of both of these worlds, set aboard a trawler somewhere off the Irish coast that encounters something previously undiscovered in the animal kingdom. Captained by a veteran couple (Dougray Scott & Connie Nielsen, always welcome in my book), the boat soon finds itself marooned way out in open water as some massive, otherworldly creature attaches itself to their hull with with powerful phosphorescent tentacles and holds them in stasis. It’s up to a loner marine biology major (Hermione Corfield) to try and discover the nature of this animal and how to get it off their craft, but soon it becomes clear that this thing has a terrifying way of reproduction that involves tiny spores ending up in human anatomy systems after which some truly shocking body horror commences. The scenes of horror are bloody, frantic and genuinely disturbing but they’re juxtaposed with an ethereal beauty and reverence for this creature, and the power that nature has over us as a species. One character even observes that this animal isn’t malicious or evil but simply mistook their boat for another large animal and did what is in its nature: attempt to feed and reproduce. There’s a compassion there in the scriptwriting that you don’t often have in these types of horror films, and it gives it a different aura overall. We never truly see the creature in its entirety but the luminous encroaching limbs emanating ghostly blue light from the deep and the vague suggestion of a vast body mass below it are incredibly haunting, almost profound images that linger with you. If you’re a fan of aquatic horror in the vein of things like The Abyss, DeepStar 6, Leviathan and The Rift you’ll get a kick out of this. It’s restrained yet scary, brutal yet lyrical and does a great job at evoking atmosphere.

-Nate Hill

Ant Timpson’s Come To Daddy

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Come To Daddy is a fairly… unnerving title for a horror movie, it just suggests all manner of demented depravities, so needless to say I went into this one expecting to be… jarred, lol. It was a bit less messed up than I was geared up for, but it’s still a slice of darkly humorous, cheerfully sadistic fun that is genuinely tough to predict as each bizarre new plot point barrels along like a sideshow act at a circus freak show. Speaking of freak shows, Elijah Wood has been deliberately choosing some of the most crazy, weird, off the wall horror scripts in the last few years, stuff like Wayne Kramer’s Pawn Shop Chronicles, Grand Piano and Maniac. This can be squarely added in that category and might even be the strangest in his latter day run of Midnite style horror stuff. Here he plays a fellow called Norval, a semi celebrity DJ (or so he says, anyway) who journeys to Tofino, BC to see his long estranged father (Stephen McHattie) at his remote beach house. Things get odd pretty quick, as daddy seems to be acting anything but like a father, tension mounts, behaviours get increasingly nuts and… I’ll leave it at that, because the plot is one deranged ball of diseased yarn that unravels with stunning arbitration and hilariously madcap, nonsensical abandon, to the point where at times it feels like the writer had a mini stroke at his keyboard and the misfiring neurons took over for the third act. Wood is the Oxford definition of ‘wide eyed’ and while his presence in films can often irk me somehow (don’t even get me going on his fucking haircut in this one), it’s played to effect here where you’re almost supposed to mock this guy and his self applied role as some famous arthouse DJ (snicker). Aforementioned ‘wide eyed’ attribute goes along way here and I promise you my eyes somehow got wider than his as I watched this thing unfold alongside him, both of us confused, perplexed and utterly revolted. McHattie is Canadian acting royalty, an absolute invincible workhorse of supporting villains, indie leads and big budget character actor work, he’s been spinning gold in his craft for decades, often thanklessly, I love the guy to bits and he just lights up a screen with brittle, organic, terrifying charisma every time. His role here is hysterical, a hard drinking, volcanically unstable, verbally abusive, mentally corroded old fucker whose next move is always unpredictable, the guy could just as well pour you a drink as smash the glass across your face and laugh in it, and he lets it rip here. As much as I’d love to mention the rest of the cast (who are all terrific as well) I simply can’t do it without spoiling this thing, which I promised myself I wouldn’t do. It’s well worth a look, for the beautiful coastal Canadian cinematography (Tofino is a happy place for me), for the shocking, disarming black humour, for the certifiably insane performances, McHattie’s in particular, and just the sheer dedication to madhouse intensity, unpredictable thrills and grab-bag scriptwriting. Great stuff.

-Nate Hill