Tag: scary

Jenn Wexler’s The Ranger

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Park rangers are always kind of benign, often goofy and only vaguely threatening figures in cinema, they’re not quite cops, not quite tradesmen and the archetype for writers has always been a blurred line. Jenn Wexler’s The Ranger brazenly shakes that up and draws a firm delineation in the campfire dirt here for an utterly ruthless, absolutely fantastic grindhouse romp that packs a punch to the gut and a kick to the nuts. Teenage punk runaway Chelsea (Chloë Levine) has fuzzy memories of an encounter with a strange park Ranger (Jeremy Holm) when she was young at her deceased uncle’s cabin, briefly before being carted off to the foster care system. Years later and she has fallen in with the wrong crowd, a group of heavy metal brats who inadvertently kill a cop and drag her on the run, eventually ending up in the same national park her uncle’s cabin is in. Naturally, the Ranger is still there too and has made it his personal mission to hunt and kill anyone who wanders into his jurisdiction which now includes Chelsea and all her friends. This is a grisly, fucked up, jaggedly stylish exercise in knowingly lowbrow horror in the tradition of stuff like Cop Car, Wolf Creek and The Hitcher where one archetypal madman roams the enclaves of his realm and stalks anyone who ventures there. Holm is a twisted revelation as The Ranger, possessive of the kind of stalwart, clean cut, Kennedy-esque aura that is all the more unnerving when we see just how cuckoo bananas mentally deranged and wantonly homicidal he is. I appreciated a really fascinating psychological dynamic between he and Chelsea as well, a mysterious mental link that goes back to her childhood near the cabin and is revealed bit by bit in hazy hallucinatory flashbacks. Set to a brain melting nebula of heavy metal and synth music that clashes wonderfully with the wilderness palette, acted to the nines by Levine and Holm (the rest of the teens verge on camp but that’s half the fun) and wound tightly into a blood drenched, visceral mind-game mentality that’s just scrappy enough around the edges, this is a rip-snortin indie worth it for any fan of raw, torqued up exploitation horror, streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea is about as loud, silly, gory and hilarious as you’d expect a ‘killer smart shark’ flick to be and is for the most part a lot of fun, even if it sometimes dissolves into eyeball melting pandemonium. The premise is actually a good one: a brilliant and obligatorily sexy scientist (the lovely Saffron Burrows) has developed a potential formula to treat Alzheimer’s using genetic material from shark brains, and she’s gotten a high level executive (Samuel L. Jackson) to convince his CEO boss (a brief, contemplative cameo from Ronny Cox) to sign off on funding, pending an inspection visit to her test facility out in the ocean. There we meet others including shark hunting guru Thomas Jane, gruff scientist Stellan Skarsgard, oddball cook LL Cool J and grunt Michael Rapaport, all who make great cannon fodder for the marauding sharks once they decide they’re too smart to be lab rats for these people anymore. There are some great gory kills here and the timing of them is sometimes genuinely shocking and inspired, including one death scene that is straight out of the book of nihilism and dark humour 101 and had me laughing hard. It’s basically a decent B movie souped up with Hollywood effects, tons of explosions and while it has the misfortune of being released when CGI wasn’t too great (it shows), it also has the advantage of being made at a time when shark horror films weren’t over saturated and done to death like they are these days and as such feels somewhat fresh, especially given its additional premise of sentient sharks. It’s fun, engaging and a bit cacophonous in some instances where it could have employed more stealth and suspense, but overall a good example of the shark sub genre.

-Nate Hill

Burnt Offerings

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Burnt Offerings (that stellar title deserves a much better film) doesn’t do much as far as innovation goes in the haunted house genre but it’s serviceable enough as an atmospheric diversion and benefits from a very strong and frequently cuckoo bananas performance from the great Oliver Reed as a family man and writer who moves his wife (Karen Black) and son (Lee Montgomery) into a suspiciously creepy manor in the English countryside in a sort of caretakers capacity. Now we all know from collective cinema experience how ill advised it is for writers to move their families into empty large buildings with threatening auras, but hey that’s half the fun. They should have especially known better here though because they’re hired to house sit the place by the weirdest people imaginable, two creepy old goats played by a half mad Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart, and let me tell you if these two tried to hire me to look after their weird empty English house I’d run the other way, but then we wouldn’t have a story I suppose. The film hinges on a dynamic that consists of Reed trying to be steadfast and responsible but slowly succumbing to some Jack Torrence level madness while Black’s ineffectual wife blathers on in ditzy mania and the poor kid is stuck between them. There’s a highly effective sequence in the manor’s pool where playful, benign roughhousing between father and son turns unexpectedly violent and grim very fast and is a nice example of tension building and infused menace on Reed’s part. Bette Davis shows up in a rather forgettable role and there’s a spooky grinning valet driver who may or may not be a ghost that sows seeds of narrative and tonal unrest too. It’s nothing fancy, nothing new or noteworthy but as far as routine, atmospheric haunted house flicks with esteemed actors go, you could do worse. Streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Gerard Johnstone’s Housebound

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

From early Peter Jackson to early Taika Waititi and many in between there has always been a steady low hum of horror output from New Zealand and Gerard Johnstone’s Housebound is a gorgeous little example of kiwi genre gold, an airtight, creaky would-be haunted house jaunt that knows how to be genuinely spooky while splashing just the right doses of dark humour in here and there and leading the audience down a breadcrumb trail of mystery that’s fun to discern alongside the main character. She’s called Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly) and as we meet her the NZ court system has finally reached its last straw as far as her methamphetamine and booze fuelled delinquent behaviour is concerned, placing her under ankle bracelet adorned house arrest with her weak willed mother (Rima Te Wiata) and meek stepfather (Ross Harper) in a rural enclave. The strained family dynamic is a sheepish joy to watch as this brat with a (deeply guarded) heart of gold makes life hell for her parental unit, but there’s something else in the house just waiting to make life hell for the three of them and soon weird sounds abound, creepy movements are observed and it becomes apparent that they aren’t alone. The cool thing is that the location scouts and set builders have created a house atmosphere that feels legitimately dusty, cluttered, oblong, weary and actually *lived in*, which isn’t always the case in haunted house outfits. Reilly is engaging and likeable as Kylie, even when she’s being a pain in the ass we never get the sense that this girl is truly a bad egg, just a lost and confused one who needs a rather intense outlet to channel her anger and pent-up negative energy into, and what better than a sly, possibly supernatural home invasion? I can’t go into too much detail about the central mystery and origins of the poltergeist shenanigans other than to say it’s a fun ball of yard to unravel alongside Kylie and goes to some narrative pitstops that are often fun, shocking and surprising. It’s goofy, it’s gory, it’s very well written and acted, it’s got tons of humour, a little heart, heaps of cobwebbed atmosphere and is just a great damn time at the horror movies. Streaming on Shudder now, highly recommended.

-Nate Hill

Roseanne Liang’s Shadow In The Cloud

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Some concepts just beg to not be taken seriously and in the case of Roseanne Liang’s Shadow In The Cloud we have Chloe Moretz as a WW2 fighter pilot fighting a nasty sky gremlin while also contending with Japanese planes trying to shoot her down and some incredibly sexist fellow officers who outnumber her ten to one. Surefire recipe for camp, right? Well… kind of, but what makes this film so much fun and so successful is that despite an outrageous premise it manages to feel like a real story and not some high flying Grindhouse lark. I haven’t seen Chloe act in some time so I kind of forgot how talented she is but she gifts this character with cunning, grace, badass physicality and genuine grit. As she boards a fighter plane last minute filled with all male officers and is sent straight to the hull turret, it starts with her being belittled and mocked by them, escalates into a breathless dogfight with enemy aircrafts and finally goes supernatural bonkers when this bizarre bat/rat/alien sky gremlin shows up and tries to kill everyone. The film clocks in tightly under 80 minutes and almost has that old timey radio play feel, especially in the first act when she’s alone in the turret, the camera focuses solely on her for a sequence and we only hear everyone else on the radio, thus some of the action left to our imagination just like entertainment mediums of that day. There are some flat-out spectacular action sequences here including Chloe firing up the turret gun and ruthlessly mowing down a Jap plane with brutal precision, a hair raising forced crash landing, a hilariously unbelievable yet absolutely thrilling instance where she falls out of a hatch and plummets a few hundred feet only to be BLOWN BACK INTO the plane by the force of another one exploding below and finally a bloody, ultra-violent hand to hand mortal kombat smackdown with the ugly little bastard gremlin that is laced with adrenaline torqued choreography. It’s just a damn fun film, Chloe has a blast in the best role I’ve seen her do in years, the score by Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper ditches usual war film orchestral notes for something sleek, electronic and rhythmically modern and just overall is badass, gnarly, r rated, rollicking action war horror hybrid good times. Streaming now on Netflix.

-Nate Hill

Tom Provost’s The Presence

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Presence is one of those horror films that sets itself up so perfectly, so evocatively and effectively drew me in so well in the first act that it was profoundly frustrating when the rest of the film kind of loses its way, to some degree anyway. Sometimes simplicity is key and films start off with a setting and aesthetic so pure and distilled they don’t realize their story would just be more powerful if they stuck with that instead of shoehorned over-complication that muddies up an otherwise pristine experience. The first third of this film sees a haunted looking Mira Sorvino as an unnamed woman at a cabin by a lake (cue some lovely Oregon scenery), on solo vacation to wrestle with some personal demons. From the first few frames we learn there is in fact a ghost also in this cabin and about the grounds, a mute and mostly still figure played by the gaunt, angular presence of Shane West, who we remember as the boyfriend in A Walk To Remember. There’s a hushed, hypnotic aura as Mira goes about her chores around the cabin in silence, sleeps alone and wanders the grounds of the island seemingly both searching and at rest, while West’s pale-faced spectre observes her in sentinel stillness from various spots. Then all of a sudden her boyfriend (Justin Kirk) arrives from the city and, like a vacuum, all the atmosphere is sucked out of the frame as a level of dialogue ridden dramatic heft shoves its way into an otherwise unique experience. There is tension between them almost immediately as the ghost continues to observe, she is clearly not excited to have him around and he presses a marriage proposal on her that seems rushed to her. Then as if that whole angle wasn’t enough clutter, another strange supernatural being shows up personified by Scottish actor Tony Curran as some kind of demon who influences both Mira and the ghost while wearing a black suit that seems jarringly out of place amidst the otherwise earthen, elemental tone and the whole thing just speeds up way too fast. There’s also a subplot involving a vaguely sinister shopkeeper (Muse Watson) who delivers supplies to the island by boat, and this ongoing romantic tension that permeates the atmosphere. One aspect I did find fascinating was that Mira’s character was sexually abused by her father as a child and part of her journey out to this childhood property is to confront the memory and trauma of that. But why all this Faustian narrative diarrhea that feels forced into the script somehow? The opening act is SO effective, so eerie and well wrought, why couldn’t we have just coexisted with her and the ghost and the trees for 90 minutes as she grapples with her traumas among a peaceful yet unnerving nature environment? This is all of course just my reaction to the film and some may have gotten a kick out of the ‘whispering demon’ angle but to me it felt like a crippling element to an otherwise engaging and immersive setting and premise. Shame, because the first third is really something worth watching, right up until the boyfriend shows up and the dialogue starts.

-Nate Hill

Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I didn’t really know what to think of Lisey’s Story for the first two episodes or so because it’s so disarmingly, otherworldly strange and surreal, but as the story unfolds in an almost subconscious vernacular, step by step I found my footing and it has become likely my favourite Stephen King adaptation ever undertaken. I think it’s the closest we’re ever gonna get to an ‘arthouse’ King story, and the sheer audacity and bizarro world sensibility of it might be why it’s not being received too well, but make no mistake, this is gorgeous top shelf stuff. The story, told in bold expressionistic strokes, tells of the core relationship between Lisey (Julianne Moore) and her deceased husband Scott Landon (Clive Owen), a famous writer and deeply troubled man who left a series of clues for her before passing that will lead her on a journey to the heart of his unfinished literary work and protect her from deranged homicidal stalker Jim Dooley (Dane DeHaan) who seeks to find his hidden manuscripts. That all sounds very straightforward but the creators opt to tell this story in deep, dense flashbacks, musical cues that take prescience over dialogue and an arresting, dreamlike visual palette that takes over for exposition. In Scott’s books he tells of another dimension called Boo’Ya Moon, a realm of the dead and half-dead that’s full of alien beauty and home to a terrifying monster called the Long Boy. This sort of exotic astral plane proves to be very real and integral in both putting Scott’s spirit to rest and killing Dooley, who becomes quite the force to reckon with for Lisey and her two sisters (Jennifer Jason Leigh & Joan Allen). Moore is fantastic as Lisey, full of emotional intuition and charisma, while Owen has never been better and his level of commitment and intensity to a role that is cast way, way against his usual type is staggering, I have never seen him so raw and vulnerable. There are frequent flashbacks to his horrifying childhood where he struggles to deal with his half mad Viet Nam vet father who is so mentally far gone he can barely get a sentence out. The dad is played by an unrecognizable Michael Pitt who manages to be despicable, relatable, pathetic, chilling and heartbreaking in the same notes, it’s a mad dog, candid performance you don’t usually see in mainstream stuff and he should win all of the awards. The show is just unlike anything I’ve ever seen, from the strikingly intense, almost David Lynch style work from the actors to the stunning mystical dreamscape of Boo’Ya Moon to the languid, formless narrative that’s free of peripherals or structure to the deep, haunting emotional core to the sweet, innocent and life affirming romance between Lisey and Scott to the wonderfully atmospheric, spine chilling score by ‘Clark’, this is just grand, unique storytelling that sweeps you away into its world. You have to be willing to go though, and I think that’s why so many people recoiled at this. Many were likely expecting an accessible, routine King adaptation firmly planted in the ground like we usually see wrought of his work, but this is simply something from another world altogether, it’s one that you feel your way through in images and impression rather than dialogue and drama. If you’re ready for that, I’d highly recommend it. Don’t listen to the hate out there, it’s truly, truly extraordinary stuff.

-Nate Hill

Netflix’s Blood Red Sky

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

You’ve heard of Snakes On A Plane now get ready for Vampires on a plane! Real talk though the new Netflix horror hybrid Blood Red Sky is a lot better, more vicious and effectively made than most gimmicky, chimera-like efforts of its kind. A sort of German American Scottish coproduction that seamlessly blends actors/accents from all three countries, it tells of a young German mother (Peri Baumeister, a dead ringer for Noomi Rapace) who finds herself and her son on a transatlantic flight that has been hijacked by multinational terrorists hellbent on crashing the plane in London and killing everyone onboard. There’s just one slight variable these assholes didn’t figure on: this girl is in fact a vampire, and not a slow, dramatic Dracula vampire either, she’s one of those sleek, terrifying, hyper-vigilant, high strung 30 Days Of Night Vampires, which when you consider the finite, constrained area of a plane interior, is just a nightmare waiting to happen. The big cheese terrorist is a sociopathic mercenary played excellently by Dominic Purcell but the real villain is a German maniac (Alexander Scheer) from his ranks that goes rogue, starts maliciously murdering hostages and is just downright nasty, if there was a German production of Batman he would land the Joker role for sure. The fights, chases, gore and intensity here are so well staged you barely get a moment to breathe and there’s genuine high-level suspense that had me on edge. What helps achieve that is that even amidst all the snarling, throat ripping, bloodletting and pandemonium and even under all that slick vampire makeup, actress Baumeister manages to give her performance a genuine maternal instinct and palpable pathos in caring for her son and protecting him from danger, she basically gives a multilayered, deeply effective performance as both a human being and a pissed off vampire. The film is built around a totally ridiculous premise and they could have made this just the cheesiest thing, but instead they’ve played the situation dead straight and approached this script with the very serious notion of “what IF a vampire found herself on a plane at the same time as a gang of evil terrorists,” and the result is something immersive, beautifully made, spectacularly violent and, in some scenes, surprisingly poignant. Highly recommended, streaming on Netflix now.

-Nate Hill

Rituals

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’ve had some gnarly camping trips into the Canadian wilderness myself, but none so brutal, backbreaking and harrowing as the Ontario expedition that five bickering middle aged doctors embark on in Rituals, a punishingly intense, staggeringly effective thriller that despite a low budget, is about as high impact as possible. The cast is headed up by the late great Hal Holbrook and Lawrence Dane, two pack leaders in a team of five career medical professionals who are so far from the white coats and fluorescent lit hallways they usually no doubt inhabit, on a ruthless trek through the harshest terrain made all the more strenuous by the fact that they are being tracked, hunted and terrorized by an unseen individual who knows the region, and the psychological complexity of predator vs prey, far better than these fellows. This obviously has a Deliverance vibe on paper but not only is it a far stronger film than that (Boorman’s piece is a tad over-celebrated in my book), it isn’t just that tired old ‘big city blowhards tormented by inbred backwood yahoos’, there’s an actual believable reason why this person has targeted them, revealed bit by bit as their heinous ordeal unfolds. What also makes this so effective is the writing and performances; every character is fully fleshed out and feels like a real human being instead of a token archetype of your classic group dynamic, thanks to a script that has both compassion and condemnation for its characters in the same complex stroke. These are genuine human beings and the actors, Holbrook and Dane in particular, play them uncannily well in perhaps the performances of their careers. Not to mention the lush, lake speckled Northern Ontario scenery that abruptly turns stark, threatening and very Mordor-esque later on in the third act to mirror the increasingly hopeless plight of the men wandering through this desolate and unforgiving realm. This is an exceptional film, with a few damaged reels (VHS lines and cigarette burns lovingly dot the celluloid landscape) and Shudder has done a great job restoring what it could into Blu Ray quality while retaining a frayed, Grindhouse visual aesthetic at the same time. Highly, highly recommended.

-Nate Hill

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome is a film I had slept on since I was a teenager and saw it it ominously leering off the shelf of Blockbuster with stark, gooey VHS cover art that promised a nearly sentient looking narrative and atmospheric horror experience that perhaps I wasn’t ready for, because I always passed it by. I’m kind of glad I waited until now to see it because I was fully able to appreciate what a rich, textured, detailed and seemingly impenetrable but inexplicably profound piece of art it is, not to mention just a gorgeously gonzo exercise in some of the absolute fucking BEST practical effects I’ve ever seen in cinema. James Woods is Max Renn, a freewheeling television producer whose time slot is dedicated to violence and scum because, as he cavalierly rationalizes it, that’s what people want to see. One day he discovers a mysterious scrambled signal broadcasting a show just about violence, murder and torture, a show that seems to be a bit too close to the real thing. His search for the origin and producer of this bizarre output takes him on a horrifying cosmic journey of mind-melding, body mutilating chaos as the signal begins to change both his external anatomy and internal mindscape. He hooks up with fellow TV host Nicki Brand (the great Debbie Harry) whose own dark impulses for boundary pushing S&M only further add to his unsettling environment. The plot is a dense, surreal and difficult spiral of reality shattering techno-horror, spectacularly splattery special effects and an editing process that aims to disorient while also keeping the viewer mesmerically rapt to the screen to see how it all plays out. There’s an undercurrent of warning regarding the psychological implications of technology and pornography that feels eerily ahead of its time, a commentary on the hypnotic and dangerous application of VR (WAY ahead of its time) and all sorts of elements woven together for a totally immersive, beautifully retro-futuristic experience. It also just knows how to have a blast at the simple level of being a visually effective horror film and believe me when I tell you that these FX are for the ages and might never be topped; from torso invading genitalia chasms to glistening prosthetic weaponry crudely fashioned onto human limbs to a TV set that lives, breathes and gives birth to roiling deformities behind the screen that serves to remind us of the worrying self awareness and startling agency we project onto and bestow unto technology. One of the finest horror films I’ve ever seen.

-Nate Hill