Horror
What do you do when you appreciate the heights to which a director aspires, but the finished film falls short of the mark? That’s how Bethany comes across; you can understand what director James Cullen Bressack is trying to achieve with his stream-of-consciousness journey into the psychological terror of his subjects. However, the result feels […]
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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children may be summed up by this simple statement: Tim Burton does Guillermo Del Toro. That notion alone is worth a trip to the cinema to catch this larger-than-life spectacle of fantasy, horror, and adventure, as the film blends the best of Burton’s whimsy found in Edward Scissorhands (to be […]
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When The Conjuring was released in 2013, I marveled at its daring step backwards to a time where scares were paramount, relying on mood, tension, and fear instead of the blood, guts, and crappy acting found in other contemporary horror movies. Director James Wan – who cut his horror teeth on the original Saw (which […]
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Usually, the best movies rely on subtext and nuance, leaving things for you to rediscover upon rewatching them. Other films make their statements like a boxer’s jab to the chest before stepping back and waiting to make their next move. The down-and-dirty Cooties is one of the latter films, being passable and enjoyable enough, but […]
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For 11 years, actor and writer Leigh Whannell has been scaring moviegoing audiences with his intense screenplays, creating two major powerhouse horror franchises with the Saw and Insidious films. Now, he steps behind the camera to direct for the first time with Insidious: Chapter 3, a prequel that takes place “A few years before the […]
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For the last ten years or so, we’ve seen a resurgence in the zombie horror genre. Starting with Zack Snyder’s bold remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the nerd world and beyond has been gobbling up stories, movies, television shows, video games, and other forms of entertainment all having to do with […]
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Maybe the biggest surprise of this Halloween season is Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s clever re-working of the 1976 film “The Town That Dreaded Sundown”, which itself barely cleared cult status outside of Texarkana where the string of grisly unsolved murders that inspired the film had occurred in 1946. Director Charles B. Pierce’s original was nothing to scoff at, […]
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The apparition in “Suburban Gothic” looks like something that David Lynch might have cooked up on the budget of a sock puppet show. Following 2012’s delightfully acidic coming-of-age-cum-horror tale “Excision” with this more deliberately cheeky flick that is several shades lighter than its pitch-black predecessor, director Richard Bates, Jr.’s vision is one part Coscarellian fever dream and one […]
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Well, the title kind of says it all. But for all its ambition as a schlocky drive-in exploitation flick/homage to author H.P. Lovecraft, “Call Girl of Cthulhu” only periodically amuses on the level to which it aspires. Feeling protracted even at a reasonable 93 minutes, the story follows virgin Carter (David Phillip Carollo), an artist […]
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Sevé Schelenz Interview: “PEELERS” Canadian Premiere
Sevé Schelenz is just a regular everyday guy trying to make a difference. In the stripper-horror subgenre. It’s been five years since my one and only meeting with the director, when Schelenz’s creepy minimalist found-footage flick “Skew” left much to our imaginations at the 2011 Spooky Movie Fest in DC (it went on to great […]
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