Blumhouse Productions
Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill have cooked up some gruesome and effective frights for us in Black Phone 2.
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Sometimes, it’s hard to look at a movie for what it is instead of what you wish it could be. Maybe hoping for director Leigh Whannell to take the strengths of his 2020 thriller The Invisible Man and expand upon them with Wolf Man might’ve been asking too much, as The Invisible Man is a […]
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Last year, Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions surprised the hell out of us with their sleeper hit M3GAN, a rather effective man vs. machine sci-fi/horror tale. Based on the trailer for Night Swim, which came out of nowhere only two months before its release, it wasn’t too much of a leap to think that Blumhouse […]
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When the trailer for M3GAN smashed onto the internet in October 2022, it was an immediate hit. A story about a life-size AI doll charged with protecting an orphaned child from anything, including other kids? And it also danced? There was nothing that social media didn’t love about it, turning shot sequences from the trailer […]
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Halloween Kills works best with a repeat viewing. Firstly, to watch it expecting the sudden shocks of relentless gore and violence; second, to focus on what director/co-writer David Gordon Green is giving us with this entry in his Halloween trilogy. While still obviously a slasher movie, there’s something else going on here about the cycle of violence […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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