I genuinely enjoyed Terrifier (2016) because it played more like a pitch black, ultra-violent horror comedy than anything else. Much to my dismay the sequel ditches the brunt of the humor, rendering it mostly of a study in the ways Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) can dole out grisly violence. And if it had […]
I saw Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania last week, and I’m wondering what all the dislike it about. Ant-Man has always been a palate cleanser of sorts and I can see why Peyton Reed would want to do something more expansive the third time around (and to be fair that’s the case with most comic […]
Mark Mylod’s The Menu by my reckoning is at its core a story about a cult leader/madman who lures a bunch of people to his stronghold and kills not only them, but himself. That the cult leader happens to be a chef, Chef Slowik (Ralph Finnes) and revolves around 12 people being invited to his […]
Based on the trailer for Nathaniel Martello-White’s The Strays one could be forgive to thinking that the movie is very much like Jordan Peele movies like Us, which is to say a horror movie with either vague or overtly supernatural overtones. And it isn’t, not at all. The story revolves around a woman, Neve (Ashley […]
I have to admit that for awhile I was wondering if Aaron Morehead and Justin Benson (Resolution, Spring, The Endless, etc) had lost their touch because while I was blown away by Resolution (2012) each subsequent film I’ve seen from the pair seemed to drop in my esteem. And it wasn’t that the followups were […]
What’s cool about werewolf films by my reckoning is their flexibility. They can be metaphors for sexual wakening, stories about coming into adulthood, whodunits or nothing more than a person changing to a beast. Vikingulven (or Viking Wolf) is the latter, which is to say that it appears to be saying nothing more than what […]
I’m not typically a fan of movies that depict characters that do things as the result of some vaguely defined mental illness because they’re often entirely geared toward sensationalism. And while such misinterpretations are the fuel that power most horror movies, sometimes they at least attempt something approaching reality. Which is what impresses me about […]
I really wanted to love Josh Rubin’s Werewolves Within – because ‘werewolves’ – and I just didn’t. Which isn’t to say that I hated it, but it leans hard into the humor, which I wouldn’t mind quite so much if it worked (even almost) as diligently at the horror. The movie revolves around a Ranger, […]
I don’t know where the Rian Johnson went who directed Brick (2005) and Looper (2012), but I don’t recognize the Rian Johnson who directed Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017) and Knives Out (2019) By my reckoning the latter movies don’t respect either Star Wars or the works of Agatha Christie, which […]
Scott Cooper is a director who tends to take on fairly heavy subjects in movies like Into The Furnace (2013), Hostiles (2017), Antlers (2021) and most recently The Pale Blue Eye (2022). And having only the latter two movies; it there’s anything to be taken away from the experience is that Scott Cooper makes serious […]
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