Tag: Thriller

Bryan Bertino’s The Dark & The Wicked

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Bryan Bertino’s The Dark & The Wicked is very dark and very wicked indeed, and as bleak, hopeless and suffocating as a horror film could be. This is a film whose narrative fairly simple and let’s the complexities come out in performances and atmosphere while the story itself is as stark and ragged as the Texas farmland it takes place on. This is one of those drab, rundown farms where tired, rusted equipment lays strewn carelessly, the barns have long since shed their paint, it’s somehow perpetually dusk and the animals scatter about their paddocks nervously, clearly freaked out by something only they can see. The farm is owned by a family, and the father (Michael Zagst) is dying of some unnamed terminal illness but has unwittingly also been possessed by a particularly nasty demon who is making life hell for the rest of the family. I don’t say that lightly either, this is one seriously mean, horrifically malevolent entity who torments this poor clan (and by proxy the audience) no end when they’re already at their weakest and doesn’t relent until they’re thoroughly broken and ruined. The aging mother (Julie Oliver Touchstone) begins to lose her head and get delusional while her son (Michael Abbott jr) and daughter (Marin Ireland) try to hold the family and the homestead together by a thread against the onslaught of visions, hauntings, attacks and intimidation from this entity. There’s also an archaic preacher played by the great Xander Berkeley who is not much help to anyone and seems to be just as spooky as the demon itself as he unloads additional portent onto these already suffering folks. Bertino is also responsible for the 2008 horror classic The Strangers and he brings the same sense of trapped desperation and fading hope he did there, obviously with a much more illusory antagonist than masked killers. Ireland is a terrific actress who already made vivid impressions in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and this year’s criminally under-seen The Empty Man, she’s once again utterly immersed, convincing and committed to her role here, conveying anguish and impending loss to chilling effect. There’s an impossibly creepy strings score by Tom Schraeder that piles on a lot of atmospheric mood too. This is a slow burn, psychologically taxing, wretchedly bleak piece of American gothic terror that’s impressively made in every arena and will give seasoned horror vets a case of the spoops. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Eli Roth’s Knock Knock

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What exactly was Eli Roth hoping to accomplish with Knock Knock? Awkward softcore porn? Crude exploitation? Trashy home invasion potboiler? Hard Candy-esque moral revenge fantasy? That Ana De Armas looks good in a blond dye job? Well I hate to break it to him but if it was any or all of the above, none of it works and this is just a hollow, misdirected, tasteless bit of pond scum trying to pass itself off as a thriller and I feel sorry for poor Keanu Reeves having to wade through the gauntlet of what has to be the worst film he’s ever graced his angelic presence with. He plays an upper middle class family man whose wife and kids go on a long weekend trip so he can stay home and get some work done. He’s keeping it mellow on a super rainy night until two unstable, whack-job gutter hoes (Ana De Armas and Lorenza Izzo) show up at his door under the pretence of being lost and insinuate their way into first his house, then his shower and eventually his bed, and you can guess where things spiral from there. These are two seriously disturbed, dangerous and fucked up individuals and both actresses are terrifically intense and deranged, while Reeves holds his end up nicely with a difficult role, the editing, photography, music and splashes of dark humour do what they can but to what purpose does the film work towards, and when it gets there, is it worth it? Not so much. If Roth has set out to convince us that the tables can be turned and men can be just as coerced, preyed upon, shamed and ruined by the other sex as women can by them then he’s somewhat succeeded in showing us a turn of events like that at a primal level, but any attempts at theme or subtext are buried or lost in translation and what could have been something of a message movie ends up simply being ‘two crazy bitches torturing Keanu Reeves for just over ninety minutes.’ There’s a haphazard attempt at *something* deeper involving words written on a mirror in lipstick and Armas going postal about something that seems like an event from her past but neither thread is explored or followed up on. I don’t even know whether to call this a missed opportunity or not because I can’t even tell if Roth set out trying to achieve anything of substance or just didn’t bother at all and deliberately aimed for below the audience’s belt. Also I didn’t buy that Keanu ‘John Wick’ Reeves could be physically outmatched to that extent by two college age chicks, but that’s the least of this film’s issues. There’s something to this idea on paper but it’s nowhere to be found in this film, which is simply an ugly, pointless fucking waste of time.

-Nate Hill

William Kaufman’s Daylight’s End

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The zombie genre is so saturated these days that most new entries just try and stir up the pot by default and do something innovative with the scenario, but it’s refreshing when a filmmaker goes for a simple, honest to goodness zombie film with little to no frills and we’re reminded of why we fell in love with the genre in the first place. William Kaufman’s Daylight’s End is an earnest, brutal and rousing undead post apocalyptic piece that benefits from a strong ensemble cast, wicked sharp tactical direction and a script that adds just the right amount of character work in between the gunplay and gore. Johnny Strong plays a lone gunslinger who bands together with a tight knit tribe of survivors protected by gruff leader Lance Henriksen, while undead forces gather against them and they try to fight their way out of a severely destroyed Dallas to somewhere safer. The only real deviation from classic zombie lore here is that these creatures can’t stand daylight and only come out when it’s dark, leaving the daytime scenes to have this eerie, desolate feel while most of the heavy action takes place atmospherically after dusk for a nice Vampirish flourish. Kaufman is a real master at staging tactical, realistic feeling action and as such blocks his actors, chooses his weapons and makes his kills feel exciting, propulsive and immediate. Strong is every inch action hero material, Henriksen makes a stoic and sage pack leader and surprisingly emotional work is provided by the usually cavalier Louis Mandylor as his son and top lieutenant. This is obviously a low budget film and one can see that but the story they’ve told and the world they’ve built using what they had is really impressive, and stands with some of the best zombie shoot-em-up’s out there. Check out Kaufman’s New Orleans set cop flick Sinners & Saints too, which also stars Strong as a relentless badass and also features flawlessly directed action scenes, they make a cool genre double feature together.

-Nate Hill

Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Not since LOST has a sentient tropical island caused a bunch of people this much trouble in this weird ass, misguided stab at a nostalgia reboot of content that it’s target audience is too young to even remember, let alone have been into. They shouldn’t be compared at all because LOST is overall a masterpiece and Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island is a short circuited fusebox of loose wire subplots, mish-mashed attempts at torture porn and overall anemic bunch of nothing stretched painfully over a feature length runtime. In the original 70’s show, each episode saw a bunch of vacuous, shallow individuals brought to fantasy island where polished Latin debonair Roarke (Ricardo Montalban) made their deepest wishes come true, with a little help from the island’s powers. In this version Roarke is played by a markedly disinterested Michael Pena and his agenda gets decidedly morbid as the fantasies of each guest on the island get a gnarly horror twist. That should be fun, right? Well not really, because they literally and figuratively missed the boat to making this island remotely fun, scary or memorable. There’s various visitors including the always lovely Maggie Q, whose fantasy involves a former fiancée she spurned, Lucy Hale who wants revenge on a high school bully and others, all of whose fantasies mingle like paint thrown violently at a wall without any sense of cohesion or logic. Michael Rooker shows up to skulk around the jungle swinging a machete and apparently the costume department misread his role on the call sheet as ‘flamboyant river pirate’ because that’s the only way I can describe what he’s dressed in here. There’s an evil musclebound doctor who runs around trying to slice and dice people, mostly ineffectively. The always awesome Kim Coates briefly brings a bit of much needed energy as a random Russian henchman (whose? The plot barely addresses it). A lot of bad films can be considered a swing and a miss but fuck man, this thing doesn’t even seem to want to swing in the first place. It’s lazy, written so thinly it makes the numerous anorexic bikini models look huge and it’s just not a scary, remotely engaging film.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: American Yakuza

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I mean what can you expect from a film called American Yakuza? There’s no lofty cultural metaphors at play here, it’s quite literally about infiltration of the infamous Japanese crime syndicate by a lone wolf FBI deep cover agent played by Viggo Mortensen, who had quite the fascinating career before Lord Of The Rings shunted him into the international spotlight. He’s an interesting guy who really broke the mold with Aragorn but before that Hollywood didn’t quite know what to do with him, casting him in a goody bag of incredibly eclectic roles that saw him serve as action hero, sage mentor, maniacal villain and even The Devil himself. Here he’s restrained, sardonic and carries the role of this somewhat renegade Fed well, underscored by solid action scenes and obligatory early 90’s melodrama. He’s caught between a ruthless yet honourable Yakuza boss (Ryo Ishibashi) who believes him to be one of the ranks, an equally ruthless mafia Don (scene stealing Michael Nouri) with no honour whatsoever who wants to wipe the Japanese out and a corrupt, unorthodox FBI section chief (Robert Forster) who is trying to pit both forces against each other and let the animals wipe each other out in a collective bloodbath. Viggo is stuck in the middle and I found his character fascinating because he’s alone in the world, the reason he joined the bureau is he had no family, nothing to lose and he sort of finds one in the Yakuza, before loyalties are tested and all hell breaks loose. This is a pretty substandard 90’s action flick that benefits a great deal from Mortensen, who could literally make interesting acting work out of portraying a soup cracker. Nouri is also a vicious treat as the Italian mob boss, an evil xenophobic asshole who loves to provoke others, intimidate his own men and is just an all round rotten bastard. Fun stuff, streaming on Amazon Prime these days.

-Nate Hill

Andrezj Bartkowiak’s Doom

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I mean who doesn’t wanna see Karl Urban and Dwayne Johnson blowing up demonic aliens with excessively heavy artillery on Mars? Well plenty of people didn’t if you look at the overall critic and audience reception to Doom, but I kinda enjoyed this cheesy, bloody, dimly lit and shamelessly lowbrow yet raucously entertaining bit of space action horror. Having not played this game series beyond a few vague rounds of Doom3 back when I was a stoned teenager, I can’t comment on the congruency in style, tone or narrative of the film versus the games but if that’s a dealbreaker and you hate the film because for you it betrayed the soul of the source material, more than fair enough. All I know is I put this thing on as background noise and it served as engaging, very silly intergalactic schlock with big monsters, bigger attitudes and *incredibly* big guns to shoot them with, one plasma cannon wielded by The Rock that’s so large it almost veers into parody. Dwayne is effectively tough as Sarge, leader of a ragtag bunch of mercenaries, among whose ranks we see various archetypes like the religious zealot (Ben Daniels), the rookie kid (Al Weaver), the loudmouth clown (a scene stealing Richard Brake) and of course the strong silent hero type Reaper, played solidly by Karl Urban. The pack of them are off to Mars using a weird teleportation device made of soap bubbles (not sure if that was a staple in the games) to engage murky zombie demon mutant things in vicious firefights down dimly lit space station corridors as a perky scientist (the lovely Rosamund Pike) does her best with unnecessary exposition that had me chuckling.. like it’s a film about space marines blowing up nondescript, raving mutant monsters, do we really need a few pages of explanatory pseudo genetic-science based verbal diarrhoea to try and make sense of it? I think not. Anyways, all the shooting, fighting, bleeding, limbs flying and fast-food action horror are kinda fun, especially seeing Dwayne and Karl in shameless early career genre mode set to a bangin’ metal soundtrack.

-Nate Hill

Richard Stanley’s The Colour Out Of Space

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I missed out on Richard Stanley’s Colour Out Of Space last year but I’m glad I caught up because wow what a trip into earthbound cosmic madness as only the mind of H.P. Lovecraft could dream up. When a weird meteor thing plummets into the backyard of Nic Cage and his average, slightly hippie family, things start to get strange in the surrounding area as a mysterious ‘colour’ from another part of the universe begins to transform everything around it into something else, sometimes just odd, sometimes beautiful and eventually downright terrifying. I love the idea of a meteor falling and being the setup for a horror film because there’s so much you can do with that concept in the realms of imagination. This film reminded me of Alex Garland’s Annihilation in a sense, but whereas the entity that came from a meteor in that used the genetic codes and biological structures of our planet to create something new, this Colour thing just shows up and begins fucking around with things on its own shocking, illogical terms, like any self respecting Lovecraft monster should. It’s a hoot watching this family slowly start to lose it, starting with Cage in one of his patented full on neurotic meltdowns filled to the brim with maniacal rants, grotesque physicality and pitch black humour. His wife is played by Joely Richardson who I haven’t seen in a while, since Girl With The Dragon Tattoo at least but I always love seeing her turn up. The cast is pretty darn eclectic too and includes the lovely Q’orianka Kilcher as the world’s bitchiest small town mayor and beloved Tommy Chong as a forest dwelling oddball with a cat he calls ‘G-Spot’ (*snicker*). The main draw for me here is the otherworldly, mystical horror elements and director Stanley pulls out all the stops in terms of atmosphere, visuals and things just going berserk. Everything turns pinky purple, the family loses their sense of coherence and time and eventually they begin to transform, and there’s one sequence in particular that is fucking miles beyond how horrific I thought they were gonna go with this film and is disturbing to the core. Great film.

-Nate Hill

Chad Faust’s Girl

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What if you returned to your hometown after decades away with plans on killing an abusive parent, only to find out that someone had already beaten you to the punch? Problem solved, right? Not quite, at least for troubled, angry teen Bella Thorne in Chad Faust’s Girl, a bleak modern western about a no-horse town and the Girl who blusters into it looking for answers and revenge. She’s come for her estranged daddy, who was volcanically abusive to her and her mother years before, and she intends to settle the score with him, for good. When she finds that someone has already killed him, instead of calling it a day and packing off home, she noses around the derelict backwater enclaves that were no doubt once a half prosperous township, and finds more trouble than she bargained for. Mickey Rourke has a good sized, scenery chewing role here as the dodgy county sheriff who, you guessed it, also moonlights as the local crime lord. I think in these deeply corrupt little slices of rural hell its just a job prerequisite for any sheriff to also be a vice kingpin, I mean taking on the two most powerful jobs on the roster is just killing two birds with one stone, no? Rourke is a leathery, hulking presence these days and makes this guy every inch the evil, murderous son of a bitch you’d hope from the role. Faust is a first time director and does a pretty damn good job considering, despite a few bloated passages of dialogue and choppy editing that could have used a bit of tough love. He also takes on one of the acting roles which he does with eccentricity and freakish exuberance. This is the first time I’ve seen Bella Thorne in anything and hadn’t even heard of her before this film, she’s pretty limited in terms of emotional range and line delivery and could use some work on her acting, but she’s got good presence, brooding in a faded hoodie and glaring out from behind a windswept mane of hair. Plus her weapon of choice is a hatchet, which she wields with startling lethality. The film’s strongest quality is atmosphere, and tons of it. IMDb doesn’t list any filming locations yet but wherever it is, it’s a place the rest of the world forgot. Boarded up buildings along the main drag, muttering drunks lining the lonely streets and pickling in a shabby dive run by an eternally pessimistic barkeep (Glenn Gould) and grey, washed out inland wilderness. It might be the most depressing place on the continent, but serves as quite the backdrop for this gnarly little tale to run its course. There’s also a wonderful, haunting original score by Dylan Baldassero that combines eerie lyrics and strange, unconventional instrumentals to great effect, as well as some very well orchestrated plot twists that spice up the narrative. Solid film.

-Nate Hill

Chris Peckover’s Better Watch Out

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s fitting when a film like this lives up to its title, and you really Better Watch Out for this ugly, pointless, infuriating, uncomfortable, sexist piece of wanton trash disguised as a Yuletide black comedy. It’s basically a home invasion fake-out where two sociopathic little brats, one a drooling simpleton (Ed Oxenbould) and the other a cold hearted monster (Levi Miller), kidnap their own babysitter (Olivia DeJonge) and subject her to humiliation, torture and intimidation for no other reason than they’re fucked in their little pea brained adolescent heads. There is no point to setting this film at Christmas time, the delicious irony found in other contradictory Christmas films about violence and misanthropy in a festive context (see The Ice Harvest, Black Christmas and The Ref for successful examples) lands with an ill favoured thud here and we’re left with an agonizing ninety minutes of pointless, anxiety inducing exploitative scumbaggery passing itself off as a movie. The one saving grace is Billy Hargrove from Stranger Things in an inspired cameo of comedic improv to himself in a rear-view mirror that is absolutely hilarious. Other than that, this is a bottom feeding piece of work. Even Patrick Warburton and Virginia Madsen look like they want to run for the hills and spend most of the film away from the action. There’s a scene that takes the paint can sequence from Home Alone to brutally realistic new heights and thinks it’s oh so clever and playful when really it’s unnecessary and sadistic. Miller does his best but the character is just such a horrific little snot-fuck I wanted to jump through the tv and cave his head in on the marble countertop, such is the level of mental distress, terrorization and abuse he inflicts on the babysitter it goes beyond gratuitous. Then there’s the ending. Don’t even get me started on how badly this movie cheats the viewer of an absolutely cathartic final resolution by being a cheeky shit and holding out on a finale it desperately needed to follow through on if it hoped to earn anything resembling redemption. It doesn’t seem to care about its characters, audience, story or the universe in general. Perhaps I’m being far too harsh and it just hit me the wrong way but whatever, every now and then I gotta have a ‘Roger Ebert emphatic intense rant review’ if something irks me and this one made me feel like shit all night after. Bah. Fucking. Humbug.

-Nate Hill

Janusz Kaminski’s Lost Souls

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The rise of Satanic Panic in the 1990’s always seemed to permeate into Hollywood, as the collective fears of a decade often do. Devilish cinematic efforts ranged from excellent (End Of Days, Fallen, The Devil’s Advocate) to lukewarm (Stigmata, The Order) to mediocre (The Ninth Gate) but I can now say that the only one I would consider an absolutely terrible film is Janusz Kaminski’s Lost Souls. This thing is one of the murkiest, muddiest, laziest, most bizarre pieces of celluloid I’ve ever sat through shaking my head at and I found myself wondering how it got past the pitch phase with such a paper thin script like that. Here’s the ‘plot’ and the only reason I know is because I IMDb’d a synopsis, there’s no telling what’s going on by watching the actual film itself: a catholic school teacher (Winona Ryder) with an apparent personal history of demon possession is recruited by her former priest (John Hurt) and his associates to find the human avatar for the Antichrist, who will soon take earthly form. This particular human is a bumbling atheist true crime author (Ben Chaplin) who is more than a little confused at these implications. There’s also an inexplicable subplot involving a serial killer making media headlines, another rogue preacher (Phillip Baker Hall) and other dimly lit gobbledygook that makes little to no sense. Ryder is listless and meandering, Chaplin never makes a huge impression anyways. Hurt barely registers beyond looking vaguely worried and you know your film is in serious trouble when even usual scene stealer Elias Koteas is cast in an inconsequential bit part with no lasting impression. Director Kaminski is a well renowned cinematographer who has shot all kinds of prolific stuff but he probably should have stepped out of the director’s chair back into a DoP position because this looks like it was shot through a burlap sack filter. Mucky browns, grainy greys and tinny blues abound and not in a good way. The score sounds like an amplifier being dropped onto a marble floor (not in a good way either I might add) and every actor in this thing either looks like they have no grasp on the flow of the story (which is almost nonexistent) or would simply rather be somewhere else. How this thing ever got released is beyond me.

-Nate Hill