I really enjoyed The Wretched mainly because it’s evocative of movies produced in the early to mid-eighties by directors like Steven Spielberg and Tom Holland, which is to say it’s a true horror film, but it’s also a pretty charming one. It’s also not a mean-spirited despite the subject matter – a witch preys (literally, […]
I have to admit that I was less interested in House at the End of the Street as a movie than because it was directed by Mark Tonderai, who last I heard was interested in tackling the reboot of Marvel Studios’ Blade. Though let’s look at the movie anyway. House at the End of the […]
When I first saw a commercial for Ben Hernandez Bray’s El Chicano I was thinking to myself that maybe Latinos would be getting a superhero they could call their own, in the same way African-Americans led the way in making Black Panther (2018) into something greater than his comic book origins. Now maybe that’s too […]
A teaser for Halloween Kills – the sequel to Halloween (2018) – which itself was a reboot of John Carpenter’s Halloween from 1978 – dropped earlier today, and…it’s definitely a teaser trailer, which is to say not much more than a bunch of images thrown together that amount to not very much beyond letting people […]
I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial when I proclaim most Americans don’t have much of a grasp of either history or literature, which is why Oleg Stepchenko’s Iron Mask bothers me a bit. Seemingly cribbed from Alexandre Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask, it goes to places that the original novel likely never […]
I was more than impressed by Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix because beyond being wildly entertaining, it’s an exemplar on how horror can be more than what people typically expect of it, which is to say entertainment that’s well-acted, well-written and visually beautiful. And that’s not at all unusual if you’ve […]
For a long time I didn’t understand the career of Paul WS Anderson. I mean his movies aren’t terrible but neither were they particularly good either and whenever you thought he might be reaching for something more like in Event Horizon (1997) or Soldier (1998), he quickly reminded you that subtext mattered about as much […]
In watching Rupert Wyatt’s (Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes) Captive State I was constantly reminded of Star Wars (1977) because both movies are relatively simple in terms of their story, yet to very different effect. Star Wars takes works well within the confides of a narrative that is no richer that the typical […]
I have never been a fan of remakes, mainly because they often serve no purpose other than money grabs, attempts to exploit the name of a property people are already familiar with. Which isn’t to say that they’re not some that manage to rise above – like Jean-François Richet’s remake of John Carpenter’s Assault On […]
The first full-length trailer for Mike Flanagan’s second Netflix series, The Haunting Of Bly Manor – based on Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw – dropped a few hours ago and it’s familiar and not-so-familiar at the same time. It’s familiar because visually it looks similar to The Haunting Of Hill House (2018) and […]
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