Tag: Thriller

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

The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Jodie Foster had an interesting and edgy first leg of her career, with The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane being one of threw weirdest thrillers I’ve ever seen and certainly the strangest project shes been attached to that I’ve come across. Foster, age 13 or so here, plays Rynn, a girl living alone in a drafty house in a desolate Maine village that manages to be frightening and picturesque in the same stroke. The film doesn’t tell you right away why she’s alone but instead shows us a regular onslaught of visitors to her house who range from benign to eccentric to downright dangerous. Her landlady (Alexis Smith) is an overbearing bitch, the local police officer (Mort Shuman) is kind and compassionate and a teenage magician (Scott Jacoby) is someone she finds companionship and even romance with. The real trouble is in Martin Sheens violent, creepy sex offender who has a habit of showing up while she’s alone and getting real rapey on her. So who is this girl, and who thought up such a bizarre, unwieldy concept for a film? Well, as illogical, clunky and tasteless as I can’t be, I still found it pretty compelling, for Foster’s ethereal performance, for the sheer lunacy of its central premise, and I appreciated it in a sort of ‘dream logic meets modern fairytale’ way, which I’m not sure if the filmmakers were going for instead of a straightforward horror/thriller approach (it doesn’t work at all from that angle) but let’s just pretend that was their intention. Either way it’s a curio worth checking out simply for the audacity of the thing, and for Foster completists making their way through the cobwebs of her early career genre stuff. Also fun fact for David Lynch fans, the man directly references this film in his Twin Peaks: The Return and it’ll be fun for any avid Peaks fan to figure out why as they clamber through this narrative.

-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

Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Sometimes a film just effortlessly and uncannily combines several elements that just resonates with me and lands as an all time favourite on the first time watch. In the case of Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True it’s the gorgeous mix of SciFi/horror, analog/VHS inspired aesthetic, dream and REM sleep centred storytelling, surreal artistic visuals and the synth dripping, supersonic original score by Electric Youth that just makes this film something so special I don’t even have the words. The story concerns a runaway teenager (Julia Sarah Stone) who sleeps on playground slides (theres a metaphor in there somewhere), lives a restless nomad life and suffers from paralyzing nightmares. She agrees to participate in a sleep study for cash by a shady group that has patented technology that maps and visualizes people’s dreams onto video screens, but this only seems to exacerbate her nightmares and literally give them the power to cross over into waking life. That’s just the diving board from which we plunge into a roiling subconscious abyss of daring, unapologetically strange narrative and atmospheric substance and it soon becomes clear that director Burns, although meticulously in control of his craft and vision, wishes to let this story run completely wild and go off the edge of the map, which is a great fit considering this is a film about dreams. Some folks will undoubtably dismiss this as confusing and inaccessible but for me it pierced a frequency in my psyche that few films are able to tune into and is just the perfect soul food for my warped perception and taste in film that always hungers for the different, the weird, the boundary pushing. Actress Stone has an ethereal, pixie-like aura to her that lends itself nicely to the overall vibe. We are treated to numerous extended dream sequences which are all shot through this sort of of perpetual POV forward propulsion movement, a technique that tricks us into thinking we are ourselves moving directly into both our TV screens and the dreams themselves, then we are presented in horrific inevitable fashion with the powerful antagonistic forces on display in dreamland and it feels just about as terrifyingly tactile and immersive as being in our own dream worlds, a genius filmmaking choice really, not to mention all of the dazzlingly surreal, stark monochrome imagery and artistic flourishes along the way. Electric Youth kind of got screwed in their first original score which was for a film called ‘Breathing’ that for whatever reason was never finished or released, but their wonderful work on it can still be heard on Spotify. Here they get another shot and go absolutely synthwave ballistic for an original composition that is so beautiful your ears will bleed neon and you’ll hear it in your own dreams. It brings the story to life in ways that transcend traditional narrative at times and lures you into its world until you are transfixed right up until the ballsy twist ending that will have some people rolling their eyes and some people’s minds blown, I thought it capped the story perfectly. I don’t often use the M word but to me, and my sensibilities of what I look for in film, this is a flat out masterpiece.

-Nate Hill

The SuperDeep

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The SuperDeep is a Russian SciFi horror flick that lives up to its title in the most literal of ways, considering it’s about a research term that descends down a borehole wayyyyy below the earth to investigate something that’s so far down there it’s closer to the core than it is to the surface. We meet microbiologist Anya (Milena Radulovic), who has a guilt ridden past but agrees to lead the group, which consists mostly of Russian military, on the condition that whatever they find down there, she gets academic credit for the discovery. What could go wrong? A lot, it seems, and when you’re in one of the most remote, unfamiliar frontiers in our realm, it’s tough to get help, find your footing in an otherworldly environment and simply survive. There seems to be some horrific microorganism that lives in the permafrost and has now thawed and gotten loose, a life form that uses fungal spores to spread into the air kind of like seed dispersal and as soon as a human breathes them in… well, it ain’t a pretty sight and the special effects team take FULL advantage of the opportunity for ooze, slime, goo and body horror of every orifice invading fashion. I had one complaint; the version I watched on Shudder only had dubs available, no subs, and baby I’m just not a fan of dubs, I wanna hear the actors talking in their real voices, I don’t care how exotic and impenetrable the language is. That aside, this is a wonderfully atmospheric piece with some truly standout moments of filmmaking and a beautifully eerie score that sets up atmospheric tension and world building terrifically. There’s a hair raising sequence where they free fall down into the earth for hundreds of miles in a few minutes time for a kind of prolonged ‘Hellavator’ experience that would have been a showstopper on the big screen. An almost black and white colour timed scene sees Anya fall through a fissure in the earth into utterly unknown territory in this kind of languid, near zero gravity airspace accompanied by a particularly surreal score cue for an almost indescribably artistic visual and auditory effect. The climax is haunting and disquieting where it could have been loud, gory and cacophonous, choosing awe and wonder over grisly spectacle. It’s a slower burn, a more relaxed take on classic stuff and obviously comparisons to John Carpenter’s The Thing will be drawn but this is its own beast, a neat infusion of mood piece, body horror, artistic expression and classic B movie aesthetics for quite the experience. Streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Guy Ritchie’s Wrath Of Man

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Wow man, Guy Ritchie isn’t fucking around with this one. What I mean by that is, his body of work in film thus far is marked by rambunctious characters, robustly flavourful dialogue, cartoonish mayhem, jubilant humour and just an overall house party vibe. His new heist/revenge/horror film Wrath Of Man is a jarring, impressive and welcome change of pace that plunges headlong into an aesthetic wrought with darkness, grim portent, ominous atmospherics, ruthless violence and nary a trace of whimsy to be found; Playtime is over. Jason Statham is Ritchie’s perennial muse and his gives what might be a career best performance here or at least their finest collaboration, playing a mysterious individual named H who infiltrates a no nonsense armoured truck syndicate as one of their employees, silently and lethally carrying out some dark agenda that is revealed beat by beat, flashback by flashback, scene by meticulously edited scene in a carefully calibrated nesting doll of a narrative. His coworkers are a varied bunch of assholes, tough guys and eccentrics including the top dog and natural born leader Bullet (Holt McCallany) and a dysfunctional pretty boy played by Josh Hartnett, who I was very happy to see in something again and does great cast just about as against type as possible for him. The supporting cast extends into very solid work from Andy Garcia, Jeffrey Donovan, Laz Alonso, Eddie Marsan, Post Malone, a scene stealing Darrell D’Silva and a vicious standout turn from Scott Eastwood who is looking so much like his dad these days it’s getting scary. I don’t want to spoil too much in terms of narrative because this is one serpentine, labyrinthine piece to work through and although the overall story isn’t the most complex or revolutionary endeavour, it’s in execution, tone, atmosphere and mood that Ritchie and his team do something thoroughly extraordinary. Statham makes H a truly elemental force here, like Keyser Soze, Hannibal Lecter, Michael Myers or The Devil himself he just exudes this inky menace and doom soaked ethos that fills the screen in every frame. One of the film’s strongest features is its dark, grinding, methodically rhythmical score by Christopher Benstead, full of guttural, agonized strings and stabbed by jagged notes in between the chords, standing out in the vividly stylized and blessedly old fashioned opening credit sequence and accented by several key soundtrack picks including a haunting, ghostly rendition of Folsom Prison Blues playing alongside one of the most visceral sequences. The film works as an action heist flick as it has many propulsive, bloody shootouts and chases but what really makes it something special, and for me the best of the year so far, is the time it takes in between beats, the measured, steady and grisly slowed down sequences that immerse you in its world using score, trademark colourful Ritchie dialogue albeit of a dark variety this time, hellishly overbearing, dreamscape-esque atmosphere of danger, anger and slowly burgeoning, ultimately cataclysmic vengeance. Absolutely sensational film.

-Nate Hill