Tag: Thriller

Brian De Palma’s Domino

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I expected something mediocre from Brian De Palma’s Domino given the overall reputation, but I think people are just comparing it to his legendary pantheon of influential films because, for the most part, this is one intensely exciting crackerjack thriller. It sees Copenhagen detective Nicolaj Coster-Waldau joining forces with former Game Of Thrones costar Carice Van Houton to avenge the death of his partner, murdered by a known terrorism affiliate (Eriq Ebouaney). The problem is this guy is on CIA payroll and pretty soon his handler (a smarmy, scene stealing Guy Pearce) scoops him up for some other covert games in North Africa, forcing the pair to go rogue in order to both kill him and stop another impending terrorist attack. Now the film isn’t perfect, there’s a humdrum midsection where not much happens beyond people talking, planning, going through subplot motions and running about. But that weaker part is bookended by the absolutely sensational first and third acts, wonderfully shot and calibrated set pieces that feel like De Palma is steadily and assuredly at the helm making his suspenseful magic once again. The opener sees Waldau and his partner chasing the suspect all over a darkened tenement building, full of crackling tension, brutal violence and dynamic visual composition. The grand finale is set in a roaring bullfighter stadium somewhere in North Africa as the two race to smoke out the terrorists and stop them, with a drone sequence and villain death that is so bombastically, dementedly De Palma I had to let out a long deranged laugh. I see just by looking at IMDb that this isn’t held in super high favour by De Palma acolytes and fair enough the man has done more innovative, captivating work but to me this is still a perfectly enthralling thriller with solid, headstrong hero work from Waldau, an emotional core from the always excellent Van Houten, a sly, sleazy turn from Pearce who is *almost* a villain and some pulse pounding, musically invigorating action sequences as only this filmmaker can bring us.

–Nate Hill

Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Jack Clayton’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is Disney at its darkest and is a ton of spooky fun. Based on a novel by the great Ray Bradbury, here adapting his own work for the screen, it tells of a sleepy, picturesque Vermont town sometime in the 40’s, a place where not much of anything really happens until a mysterious travelling carnival shows up one night via train with little notice, as if borne on the very October wind that howls over the region itself. Their arrival peaks the interest of many townsfolk, especially two young boys who grow quickly suspicious of this outfit, especially its outwardly affable yet intangibly sinister ringmaster, a fellow called Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce). Pryce is an actor who has mastered the art of coming across as nervous, stressed and vaguely sympathetic but guards an untapped darkness beneath his terse half smile and he’s positively terrifying here, another sterling villain in his rogue’s gallery of a career. I won’t spoil what this carnival is really up to, but suffice to say it isn’t just to hand out cotton candy and wow the locals with their sideshows and Ferris wheels. There’s an innate, elemental supernatural force at work in each of these carnies, they’re like a pack of ravenous wolves that feed on the human element of both wish and wonder, collecting souls in the process. Most malicious of their group is a mute, animalistic sorceress called the ‘Dust Witch’, played by the always awesome Pam Grier in the kind of dark, fairytale oriented role that she doesn’t get casted in too often, she’s scary, sexy and severely compelling. Also terrific is Jason Robards as one of the boy’s father, his deep, clear speaking voice goes a long way with Bradbury’s wonderfully ornate poetic, prose. It’s a dark, sumptuous jewel of a spooky season watch, with heavy, hazy small town nostalgia captured in elegiac, wistful words by this legendary author and a genuine sense of both eerie wonder and horrifyingly immediate danger. Great stuff.

-Nate Hill

Joe Carnahan’s CopShop

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s always cool when one of my favourite filmmakers not only puts out two films in the same year, but that they both end up being ones I absolutely love. Joe Carnahan gave us the knockout action SciFi Boss Level earlier in 2021 (highly recommended) and now we have CopShop, a tough as shit, gritty as fuck, funny as hell homage to the lower budget, one location cop thrillers of the 70’s, particularly one I need not name drop but pretty much set the bar, and whose influences are there. Hitting new collaborative notes in his ongoing working relationship with Carnahan is Frank Grillo, who also headlined Boss Level and here plays greasy, self centred mob fixer Teddy, wanted by several hitman including gruff, violent Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler) and off the chain mega-psychopath Anthony Lamb (Toby Huss). Teddy deliberately gets himself thrown into county lockup which he thinks will be safe, but both contract killers follow him there for a bloody showdown as cops are picked off one by one, a cat and mouse game ensues and we gradually learn more about these characters. Grillo uses his hair as an asset to performance here and it’s hilarious to the point where one character makes fun of it in reference to a Tom Cruise flick. Butler is mean, efficient and darkly sarcastic while Huss, never an actor to back down from a challenge, is a terrifying nightmare tornado of perverse looney toons energy, a seriously diabolical, constantly hilarious and severely scary villain for the ages. As great as these three actors are, the real star of the show and my favourite character is Alexis Louder as Valerie, the toughest cop in the county and the real protagonist amidst this stable of shady scumbags. She’s terrifically resilient and charismatic, owning the emotional grounding, dark humour and lethal physicality of her role to the point where I wanted to see a sequel with just her pitted against a whole new roster of baddies. The film has Carnahan’s typically realistic, candid dialogue that I always appreciate so much and a kinetic, propulsive forward momentum that is reminiscent of his excellent 2006 Smokin Aces, although much lower in pitch, tone and budget. I enjoyed the morally sticky, ambiguous nature of Butler and Grillo’s characters who are genuinely hard to read and predict, while Huss’s mad dog cavorts around the precinct like a bull in a CopShop. This was a ton of fun for what it was, and I love seeing mean, unapologetically brutal, off the cuff genre efforts still surface in this day and age. Great times.

-Nate Hill

The Shed

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Shed is as simple a concept as they come: a teenage boy lives with his horribly abusive grandpa and suffers nasty high school bullies all the time until he one day discovers that a vicious vampire lives in the shed out back of his house, a creature that’s bound to stay in there but will happily devour anyone that’s tricked or convinced into wandering in. The young boy is a reasonably well balanced lad who isn’t too inclined to send people to their deaths and reacts with shock to the situation, but the problem is he has a buddy who is far more traumatized from the bullies, doesn’t have quite the mental fortitude of his friend and will happily abandon all moral compass and send anyone who looks at him wrong into the shed to be mauled by this thing. It’s a neat little flick with some great gore and although the performances sometimes reach a volume and intensity that’s a fever pitch beyond what was needed, they’re still enthusiastic, written with humour and performed with style and charisma. You barely ever see the vamp but he’s played by Frank Whaley from stuff like Pulp Fiction and Vacancy, he’s a good veteran talent who’s been around forever and makes the creature stand out. The poster font, synth score and teen vs monster vibe is blessedly reminiscent of the 80’s without being too heavy-handed in paying homage to its influences. It’s nothing special or too memorable, but if you’re looking for a retro feeling flick with practical effects about a vampire who lives in a shed out back, well this is your ticket. Streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Route 666

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I was a bit disappointed that at no point during a film about a haunted highway did the song “Highway To Hell” play on the soundtrack, especially a horror flick with the sort of shoot ‘em up, classic rock vibes that Route 666 has, but oh well. This is a mostly silly, sometimes entertaining bit of B trash with a fantastic premise that doesn’t quite get the mileage it may have in a better film. Lou Diamond Phillips and Lori Petty are a charismatic pair of US Marshals escorting a fugitive mob informant (Steven Williams, The X Files, True Detective, Jason Goes To Hell) from some heat scorched, one horse desert town into LA to testify against some very bad people. What they don’t know is that the particular stretch of desolate interstate they’ve picked for a shortcut is home to the ghosts of some even worse people, who have noticed them trespassing on their road and are now out for blood. If this simple concept had been stripped bare and milked for all its worth in blessed Grindhouse simplicity I feel like the film would have fared better, but there’s just so many dangling subplots including a Russian hitman dispatched to kill them, rival federal agents they clash with over jurisdiction and even an indigenous shaman (Gary Farmer) with supernatural powers who guides Phillips hotshot gunslinger into the path of his Native American lineage, which ties into the ghost convicts who were in an ill fated chain gang decades before. Then there’s the great L.Q. Jones as a very untrustworthy county sheriff who get involved in the whole mess too, and it all feels like wanton clutter orbiting a concept that could have stood rock solid on its own and feels like it would have made an awesome episode of Tales From The Crypt back in the day. While the shootouts are mostly lame, distended sequences that feel too long, not kinetic enough and filled with dingy, lethargic soundtrack choices, the special effects and editing used to bring the ghost convicts alive really fascinated me. Unconventional techniques, strange fade in/fade outs, surprisingly artistic makeup and just the way they move and interact with their surroundings had me thinking of the otherworldly Woodsman in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks The Return and it wouldn’t surprise me if the guy saw this random little horror flick and took sneaky inspiration. I’ll also say that Lori Petty absolutely rocks and I wish she’d had a more prolific career, she can take any role, no matter how creatively limited it’s written and give it this down to earth, punky personality that just radiates forth, she’s truly a wondrous talent. It’s a decent enough B flick with a great premise that gets a bit muddled, but has enough to entertain.

-Nate Hill

Hellraiser 8: Hellworld

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

And now we arrive at the final Hellraiser sequel, or the last one to star Doug Bradley as Pinhead anyways, so it may as well be a good a place as any to stop. Hellworld is the eighth, and silliest iteration of this story, a script that tries to properly usher the franchise into the cyber age with a sort of meta narrative that turns the Hellraiser characters and movies into an online game that college kids get hooked on. So with this one the movies exist, like this takes place outside the canon in a way, like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare took Freddy Krueger out of his own fictional narrative and placed him in the real world, except that it’s far less effective and properly utilized of a concept in this franchise. The main reason this one doesn’t fall into thorough mediocrity is Lance Henriksen, it doesn’t matter how shitty your sequel, threequel or eight-quel is in any given series, you cast him and immediately there’s a level of pedigree by default alone. He plays a mysterious rich dude who hosts a party at his remote, spooky mansion where players of the once popular online RPG game Hellworld can live out their gaming fantasies one more time. Of course, Pinhead and his buddies break the fabric of time, space and fiction to make their night a literal world of hell, facilitated by Henriksen’s treacherous collector/socialite. It’s a fun enough time, the actors who plays the teens are a silly bunch, but it was neat to see a very young Henry Cavill in their bunch. Decent kills too. One thing I did appreciate is that Henriksen’s character could have easily just been like, a nondescript cyber host type archetype or temporary avatar for Pinhead, as they sometimes do in these films. He’s a very real human character himself with his own fascinating arc and that at least gives the film some narrative fibre, as does his solid, creepy performance. Not the best, but also not the worst in this canon.

-Nate Hill

Neill Blomkamp’s Demonic

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

People really love to rag on Neil Blomkamp don’t they.. do you think it’s super fun being that miserable? Anyway he has a new horror film out this year called Demonic, his first feature since 2015’s Chappie. People are kind of tearing it apart in reviews, unreasonably so in my opinion because I had an absolute blast with it and one of the most fun time with a horror so far this year. It’s like this sort of odd, multi-genre amalgamation of different tones and ideas, so much so that one can’t really get a proper idea of it from trailers, posters or even word of mouth alone, which means you’re onto something already. It stars the excellent Carly Pope as a troubled woman who is dealing with residual pain of a mother who committed really, really horrible crimes when she was just a kid, and has been institutionalized in a coma ever since. She’s trying her best to forget, until two mysterious sleep tech researchers from a clandestine organization ask her help with a very strange experiment: be put under into REM sleep, enter the unconscious mind of her mother and establish communication within the dream world of both of their subconscious minds, linked via technology that feels simultaneously futuristic and sleek yet retro, analog and VHS themed as well. What are these researchers looking for, you may ask? Well that’s the fun, and that’s all I’ll say about the plot here, it’s a diabolically twisty game of horrors that spill out from the dream world into real life and this girl discovers much, much more about her mother’s state of mind, and whatever else may be in there with her. The film is not only shot but actually (for real this time, not just me stubbornly insisting so) set in and around Vancouver, with some of the story taking place near Kelowna on Lake Okanagan. I’m pretty sure that Blomkamp has seen Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond The Black Rainbow because one of the researchers is played by Vancouver actor Michael Rogers, who was the terrifying antagonist Dr. Barry Nyle in that and there are shades to his performance here that feel directly referential, which was a really nice touch. The film covers a LOT of ground in only 90 minutes, in terms of genre, and maybe it felt too rushed or hectic for some people but I just can’t wrap my head around the negative responses to it. It’s absolutely horrifying in some scenes, incredibly imaginative in an almost tongue in cheek way and stylistically so damn cool, it has the feel of a balls out, conceptually audacious type of horror SciFi flick you’d see in the 90’s. Picture something like The Cell meets The Exorcist meets Virtuosity meets Ghostbusters but still it’s own fiercely original creation. Great film, don’t listen to the haters, see it for yourself and form you own honest opinion. Mine is that it fucking rocks.

-Nate Hill

Hellraiser 7: Deader

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

After the dreary disappointment that was Hellseeker, I’m excited to report that Hellraiser 7: Deader is a wonderful, wicked return to form and one of the strongest sequels in the canon so far, trying some bold new ideas on for size and going to some shockingly depraved new places in the universe. This one shifts the action over to the UK where an American journalist (Kari Wuhrur) is sent by her boss (Simon Kunz, the adorable butler from The Parent Trap) over to Romania to investigate a mysterious cult called the ‘Deaders’, who are rumoured to have certain abilities that transcend the boundaries between life and death, our world and others beyond. Not much sooner after stepping off the plane she starts getting into trouble after she’s led by chance to the evil puzzle box, whereupon Pinhead and his gang show up and she has to juggle them plus the dodgy cult leader who is out to get her too. This one has a neat spin, I liked the cult angle as it ties in succinctly to the Cenobite mythology and feels organically developed. This is the most fucked up of the sequels too, because of one sequence involving a rogue subway train that barrels through the Bucharest underground system, with newspapers plastering its windows. At one point she has to get on it to gain information from a sort of darkweb contact, and let me tell you the kind of bizarre, hedonistic, vomit inducing euro-trash rave taboo horrifying WTF shenanigans going on inside this thing aren’t images I’ll soon forget, and careful watching that sequence because it’s among the most disquieting things I’ve ever seen in a film and may cause the more sensitive viewers to get upset. That’s a testament to the film’s effectiveness though because so few horror sequels are able to successfully push the envelope beyond what the first film established and be scary in new, innovative ways, but this baby pulls it off spectacularly. I’ve always loved Kari Wuhrur, she’s in a lot of edgy, cult horror type stuff, is gorgeous and super charismatic with an angelic tomboy presence that I vibe with whenever she shows up, she’s great here. This is the strongest Hellraiser film since Bloodline (the fourth) and one that gets positively shocking, down n’ dirty and reworks the motifs for something fresh, unsettling and dark as fuck. Solid stuff.

-Nate Hill

Just Before Dawn

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

You know in slasher flicks where the vacationing teens arrive in some godforsaken bumpkin-ville headed inevitably to slaughter and jokingly refer to the rural folk as ‘inbred’? Well most of the time they’re just mocking them but in the case of Just Before Dawn the pair of demented killers are legitimately inbred drooling simpletons, big lumbering… I’ll get in trouble if I use the ‘R word’ lol but… yeah. This is a creaky old horror flick from way back when that is surprisingly effective in creating atmosphere, suspense and some well placed gore. The story couldn’t be simpler: a bunch of teens on summer break drive their Winnebago a bit too far into a dense, remote Oregon mountain range mostly cut off from civilization and run afoul of two twin killers who hunt them down, with hilariously stealthy and tactical methods I might add, given their rotund stature and, uh, sunny dispositions. George Kennedy is fun as a salty old park ranger with a few quirks (he keeps bonsai trees) who saddles up his horse and goes looking for the teens once they don’t come back. The always awesome Gregg Henry gives a good early career turn as the ringleader of the group, so the cast has some pedigree to it. The film is shot on location in Silver Falls State Park, Oregon, so the lush, gorgeous, sprawling and overgrown PNW scenery is the strongest quality. Mighty rivers, thundering waterfalls, shadowy forests, deep ravines and treacherous mountain crests are the environment both the teens and the killers tread through here and it’s a terrifically rugged, high stakes setting for a slasher to take place in. I joke about the inbred thing because it’s funny, but I do feel like the film could have had another angle than just that, there’s not much imagination in the concept, but other than that this is a solid effort. Some thick, dreamy wildernesses atmosphere complete with eerie sound design that samples odd warps, warbles and spooky bird calls adds a lot too, with considerable suspense thanks to the elemental nature of the setting. Streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Hellraiser 5: Hellseeker

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The fifth Hellraiser sequel, Hellseeker, is nowhere near as fun or inspired as the fourth, sad to say. It’s hard to follow up a sequel that includes journeys into both French Revolution times and outer space, but even so this is a pretty dreary attempt other than the fact that it brings back Ashley Lawrence’s Kirsty from the first two films, albeit all too briefly. Most of the film focuses on her husband played by Dean Winters who seems out of place here and who I can never see as anyone else but the human personification of the OnStar navigation guide thing ever since he did those commercials. Kirsty is mostly out of the picture and he’s wandering listlessly through a drab desk job, a philandering lifestyle full of cheating and lying and strange memories of a hazy car accident where she apparently died, but he can’t quite get the facts or the recollections straight. Grisly murders start to happen in the city, crime scenes that he’s always conveniently around, and soon two suspicious detectives are on his trail, then slowly but surely Pinhead and his gang start to make themselves known. The first two thirds of the film are interminable, as it tries to be a noirish character study of this guy but I just. Didn’t. Care. He’s less than non-interesting and even a guy with Winters’s natural charisma just cannot bring him to life. Then the third act happens and there’s some sparks of life, with a twist that, although fascinating and unexpected, sort of negates the whole silly stream of events we see before with his character and kinda made me go WTF. This is by far the weakest story of the seven sequels I’ve seen so far. Not much in the way of memorable kills, gore, atmosphere or effects, a muddy, murky story, flatlined protagonist and a serious lack of screen time for Doug Bradley, who was all up in the fourth one like a scene stealing mad dog. This one can be avoided and skipped over for the sixth one, which is a fantastic return to form and I’ll get to reviewing tomorrow.

-Nate Hill