New Line Cinema
The Conjuring: Last Rites is much more confident in tone and execution than its immediate predecessor, staying sharply focused from start to finish.
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Well… fans had high hopes for the fully rated-R adaptation of the ultra-gory Mortal Kombat video game series – especially since we were denied the blood and spine-rips in Paul W.S. Anderson’s PG-13 guilty pleasure from 1995 – and here it is. In all its squicky glory. That’s what you’re going to watch this for, […]
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It’s a tough thing trying to find your voice. From first babbles as an infant, to the raging teenage struggle to be heard, to further shouts into the eternal void, establishing one’s own identity through any kind of expression begets a lot of pain and angst. Mostly toward the people you wish would listen to […]
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The Wikipedia entry for Collateral Beauty prior to its release summarized the film thusly: “When a successful New York advertising executive suffers from a great tragedy, he retreats from life. When their business suffers, his coworkers conspire to make him look crazy, in an effort to discredit him and keep their jobs.” The first sentence […]
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Do me a favor before you read this review – click the “Play” button on this video and turn your computer’s sound system up to about 65%. Be warned: it’s kinda frightening. Get ready to be scared. Don’t worry… I’ll wait. Creepy, huh? That’s a taut nailbiter if I ever saw one. Writer/director David F. […]
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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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In the early minutes of “Vacation”, a grown-up Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms), now a pilot for a discount commercial airline, pronounces to his family that this “Vacation” will be a little different from the first “Vacation”. Because this time around, he points out, it’s two boys instead of a boy and a girl (referring to a […]
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Four teens find themselves on the run from an obscure noose-wielding phantom in “The Gallows”, a poorly executed horror flick and further evidence that the rising popularity of the found footage sub-genre has nothing to do with quality. Reese (Reese Mishler) is a high school jock-turned-thespian set to star in a revival of a stage play entitled “The […]
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Oh, how late producer Irwin Allen would have enjoyed San Andreas. How would he have not? Allen produced some of the greatest disaster films in the 1970s, such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, carving out his own niche and establishing the modern-day disaster film genre. Eventually, as all things do, quality is […]
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Last year’s The Conjuring was an unexpected surprise for me; I saw it at an 8p showing the night before it came out in a theater that only had (at most) 20 other paying customers, and it genuinely scared all of us into submission. When the news broke that Annabelle, the doll featured in the […]
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