I watched Return of the Living Dead Part II hoping for something on par with its gleefully fun predecessor. Let’s see how that worked out, shall we? Original Sequel A cast filled with young adults trying very hard and some genuinely good actors, like Clu Glulager. James Karen, a lot of fun in…
Margaret, the long-delayed second film from Kenneth Lonergan, expends great effort to feel as real as possible throughout its achingly long three hour running time (I watched the Extended Cut – the Theatrical is “only” 2.5 hours). As the camera gently moves through scenes, the audio often picks up snatches of unrelated conversation, obfuscating the…
The Devil’s Rejects is Rob Zombie’s sorta-sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. Its concept is genius: take the psychotic, white trash murder-family from the first film and send them out on the road, pursued by police. Sadly, the execution leaves much to be desired. Zombie abandons the attention-deficit style of 1000 Corpses for a more…
Some horror films succeed thanks to a carefully constructed atmosphere of dread, conveyed through a minimalist soundtrack and disconcerting cinematography. Others succeed with nuanced, subtle performances in a bare-bones, unsettling story. House of 1000 Corpses isn’t one of those films. Its cinematography is all over the place: Zombie knows where to place a camera, but…
Return of the Living Dead is the epitome of the B-movie. It’s an honest-to-goodness classic, stuffed with campy humour, cheap yet effective special effects and the first appearance of now-ubiquitous zombie movie tropes like zombies that run rather than shamble and groan “Braaaaains…” It’s full of funny moments: a young punk girl gets involved with…
If you watched the trailer above for Zero Dark Thirty, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a cinematic Call of Duty, a jingoistic portrayal of the war on terrorism, an action film where Bert Macklin, Drazic and Joel Edgerton kill Osama Bin Laden. Certainly, the last hour of the film is a tense, cavernous…
The early Nightmare on Elm Street films – whether they’re good (one and three) or bad (the rest) – focused on maximalist scares – full of big special effects, buckets of gore and a sneering Freddy centre-frame. In New Nightmare the scares are subtle, building upon real fears – a child’s fear of the boogeyman…
When I picked up this “part-sequel part-remake” of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre second-hand from a video store for a couple dollars, I was fully expecting a very bad movie. And, hoo boy, it did not disappoint! This film actually warrants the description “so bad it’s good.” It loosely rips off the plot of the original,…
Frontière(s) is the best horror film I’ve seen from the last decade. It’s been characterised as “torture porn” or a French ripoff of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and while neither description is completely inaccurate, they don’t capture the blistering intensity, the bone-shaking strength of the film. Frontière(s) is set after the election of an unseen…
The Driller Killer is a scabrous pustule of a film, grotesque, ugly, but transfixing despite this. It was the directorial debut of Abel Ferrara (best known for Bad Lieutenant), but there’s little to suggest future promise here, with murky, grimy cinematography and clumsy editing – plus a superfluous lesbian shower scene suggesting Ferrara’s porn pedigree.…
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