I remain impressed – and a little perplexed – by filmmakers who choose to title their productions with nothing more than a person’s name. It’s not like there isn’t a storied history of such films doing well – Ben Hur, anyone? – but it strikes me as requiring some serious self-belief to throw a film…
When is a found footage film not a found footage film? When it’s Banshee Chapter, apparently, which borrows the grungy, handheld aesthetic of found footage without much actual found footage to be, uh, found. Writer/director Blair Erickson’s debut feature actually makes pretty good use of this questionable stylistic choice, surprisingly enough. Banshee Chapter ain’t pretty,…
The concept of a ‘controlled avalanche’ seems paradoxical; while engineers can predict the outcome of an avalanche set off by an explosion with some certainty, the expectation of complete control for thousands of tonnes of rolling snow is patently ludicrous. One such ‘controlled’ avalanche, tumbling towards the ski resort housing Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa…
A dark rider atop a white horse, a figure of nobility, mounts the horizon over an endless expanse of rutted mud. The horse trots into a landscape of wreckage and the rider – a Nazi officer, we now see – is knocked from his steed by a hitherto unseen assailant. The officer’s fate is swift…
“You don’t know what you’re getting into.” Small-time journalist Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) keeps hearing variations on that statement, delivered by Washington insider Fred Weil (Michael Sheen). ‘What he’s getting into’ is a national scandal involving the CIA, Nicaragua and thousands of kilos of cocaine smuggled into the United States daily. Webb is a 1990s…
I’m a total sucker for films exploiting the amnesia trope, as hackneyed as it is (if it’s good enough for The Bold and the Beautiful, it’s good enough for me!). There’s something immediately engaging in the character and audience sharing the same predicament: not knowing the specifics of the events that preceded the film’s beginning,…
It’s easy to forgive horror films their sins if they’re actually scary. If Annabelle had been a genuinely frightening film, I could’ve happily forgiven its hollow Polanski references – ranging from a host of Rosemary’s Baby quotations to a Charles Manson’s appearance on television. I wouldn’t have had a problem with how it mishandles/abandons its…
Is it an inevitability that horror franchises trend towards soft-core porn the longer they run? Probably not – Nightmare on Elm Street found its way to bad puns while Friday the 13th travelled to New York, Hell and, eventually, outer space. It’s certainly the case with the Wrong Turn series, which began as gory-hillbilly-survival-horror, took…
Shadow of the Vampire is a film of many genres. These include… …a historical revisionist re-telling of the filming of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, with John Malkovich playing “Herr Doktor” Murnau; Eddie Izzard playing Gustav von Wangenheim who plays Thomas Hutter; and Willem Dafoe playing a vampire who takes on the role of Max Schreck…
A Long Way Down begins with a potentially promising premise before it falls, well, you know, <gestures vaguely towards title>. For a film that opens with a suicidal quartet meeting atop a London skyscraper on New Year’s Eve, it demonstrates little actual interest in examining suicide, despites its half-hearted feints at undergraduate psychology. Instead A…
ccpopculture 