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 […]
I didn’t catch the original Happy Death Day though I thought that the idea–essentially Friday The 13th meets Groundhog Day–was pretty clever and a twist on the traditional slasher film formula. I didn’t surprise me that there would be a sequel, after all Blumhouse released the original movie and their whole modus operandi is making […]
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (whom I really want to call ‘Atticus Finch’) are individually two talented instrumentalists/composers (the latter’s soundtrack for The Book of Eli is particularly good) and lately they’ve been working together for movies like The Social Network. Most recently they tackled John Carpenter’s Halloween theme and…it’s okay (and certainly different). For […]
As I have said time and again, I am not fond of remakes. More often than not they don’t add anything to the original–did we really need to know about Michael Myers difficult upbringing in Rob Zombie’s Halloween reboot?–or they add details that seemingly are there just to differentiate them from the original. The thing is, as […]
“There are worse ways to spend an hour and forty minutes. Unfortunately for Sorority Row, there are also better ones.”
How limited, you might ask? I have no idea, though according to The Daily Dead the free period began on the 16th, two days ago, so if you don’t already have in your collection, I’d take advantage of it before someone comes to their senses. Besides, the last “horror” film I watched was Children Of […]
Alex Garland‘s (the writer of Sunshine, 28 Days Later, The Beach, etc) directoral debut, Ex Machina, looks at least superficially like it covers similar territory as Transcendence, though hopefully more successfully. That being said, I assume it’s only coincidence that Ex Machina feels very similar to another film that came out earlier this year, The Machine, the trailer which […]
Though truth be told he was never really gone. John Carpenter, director of influential genre classics like Halloween, Escape From New York, In The Mouth Of Madness, They Live, StarMan, Big Trouble In Little China (perhaps his most underappreicated movie), among many others has been absent from theaters since 2010’s The Ward (an interesting movie despite thematic […]
“Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s classic horror film makes some bold choices, but cannot escape the long shadow of the original.” I get what Rob Zombie is trying to do with his remake of John Carpenter’s groundbreaking 1978 film, Halloween,” but it fails for me primarily because it gives so much information. The first […]
