I’ve recently seen the first season of Amazon’s The Boys and I honestly don’t see what the hullabaloo is about. It’s not terrible by any metric that I can see though unfortunately it’s not great, either. Part of my problem is that it’s based on the work of Garth Ennis, who’s known for his darkly […]
Ciarán Foy’s Eli is a surprise because Netflix is at best uneven as far as their horror offerings go. In other words, for every The Haunting Of Hill House there’s at least three Hemlock Groves. Luckily Eli is closer to the former than the latter. Foy has a faculty for directing younger people, and Eli […]
With Doctor Sleep being released next month I thought it was high time I caught Ouija: Origin Of Evil, which is also directed by Mike Flanagan. And it’s a pretty good movie–and plays like a prequel to The Haunting Of Hill House that came two years later; an impression encouraged by Origin Of Evil starring […]
Steven Monroe’s I Spit On Your Grave–a remake of the 1978 movie of the same name–isn’t terrible or anti-woman, despite the subject matter. The problem is it that it shortchanges women in the sense that the movie doesn’t appear to take them terribly serious (unless they’re being victimized by men). We see this tendency during […]
I didn’t much like 2008’s The Strangers because I had the feeling that it didn’t quite know what it was supposed to be. Despite the movie being based upon a real crime, the Keddie murders, the antagonists appeared almost supernatural, vanishing and appearing in various places without a sound. Locked doors were no obstacle, which […]
Netflix’s Marianne is a pretty entertaining horror series, which is worth mentioning because there’s plenty of horror out there, and not all of it is worth watching. The series–coming in at a lean eight episodes–revolves around a writer, Emma Larsimon (Victoire Du Bois), who’s drawn by tragedy back to her home town, which begats even […]
Alex Merkin’s House Of The Witch has a great opening that hints at all sort of scary things and while it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, it’s pretty well done. Then you see the rest of the movie, where all that promise built up with that opening is blithely discarded because it isn’t terribly good. […]
El Camino is a sequel of sorts to Breaking Bad (2008-2013) arguably one of the best television shows ever made. And that’s not hyperbole. So obviously El Camino has a lot to live up to and while I have no idea if it’s up to the task, the trailer, both stylistically and ambiance-wise, says “No […]
I honestly think the short story should be treated as a higher form of literature than long form storytelling. Think about it. You have a fixed amount of pages to establish the motivations of your characters, the world they live in and why things are proceeding however they happen to be. As I said, it’s […]
You can say a lot of things about Netflix, but they do Stephen King adaptations right. So far they’ve done two, 1922 and Gerald’s Game, and both are really, really good perhaps for the reason that they concentrate on human stories with supernatural overtones, as opposed to supernatural stories that revolve around people. The latest […]
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