Blumhouse Productions

To paraphrase critic Armond White, whose career is based on being a contrarian : “Get Out” is an attenuated comedy sketch that is tailored to please the liberal status quo”. Really? If that’s what you’ve taken away from this movie—hardly a comedy, by the way, though not without its comic relief—then I might say your […]

When thinking about Split, the new horror/psychological thriller from M. Night Shyamalan, I keep thinking about magic tricks. I’m a huge sucker for magician shows and the like, and Split is a magic trick unto itself, a kind of trick I don’t think I’ve ever met before. Sure, Shyamalan is known for his films having […]

Essentially “John Wick” in a Spaghetti Western, only with a fraction of the body count, this dusty flick leaves us hankering for a bit more “bang” for your buck. Luckily, it’s available for only $5.99 on VOD. The non-committal tone of “In A Valley of Violence” vacillates between Tarantino/Rodriguez and Raimi, grindhouse and campy, yet […]

Admittedly anxious for the upcoming slew of indie horror films I’ll be screening at the Spooky Movie Horror Film Festival next month (Oct. 8-17 at AFI Silver), I was overjoyed to discover a scary little gem that had somehow,  under my radar, worked its way from a great reception at last year’s SXSW fest, through […]

To this day, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s best work remains 1999’s “The Sixth Sense”, a film by which most supernatural suspense flicks are still measured. That same year, another bench mark movie was released, “The Blair Witch Project” from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, which hit box office gold by way of the found footage medium, planting a new sub […]

One of the most brilliant and unnerving thrillers to hit mainstream theaters in some time, “The Gift” marks the writing/directing feature debut of Joel Edgerton, who made his mark starring in such films as “Warrior” and “Animal Kingdom”, and has proven equally effective on both sides of the camera here. He’s penned a memorably haunting role for himself as […]