A French Deliverance with a satanic twist, Sheitan focuses on a group of crass twentysomethings who travel into the countryside following a flirtatious girl. These characters are exceedingly unlikable, and if you’re anything like me, fifteen minutes in you’ll be eagerly looking forward to whatever unpleasant plight awaits them. You’ll be waiting a while. The…
Tucker and Dale vs Evil is built on a simple germ of an idea – what happens if you use the hillbilly-slasher framework, but portrayed from the hillbillies’ perspective? And what if said rednecks are actually innocent sweethearts, the “murders” caused by freak accidents (that are hard to describe without mentioning Rube Goldberg)? It’s a…
Given the Academy Award nominations were just announced today, it seemed a good a time as any to finally publish my top 10 films of 2012 list. My criteria for inclusion is a little shaky, but critically acclaimed films like Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty and Flight are all yet to be released in Australia…
Beasts of the Southern Wild creates a world unlike any other I’ve encountered in either real life or fiction. It concerns the ragtag residents of “The Bathtub,” a small Louisiana community on the wrong side of a levee, in perpetual danger of disappearing beneath the ocean every time a storm hits. The tale is told…
Shallow Grave concerns the misguided actions of a group of university students upon discovering their new flatmate is (a) dead and (b) in possession of a suitcase filled with cash. It was the breakthrough film for Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor, and it’s easy to see why on both counts. Boyle’s filmmaking is flashy, energising…
Videodrome is a mad, grotesque nightmare, all writhing flesh and flicking hallucinatory visions. We switch from one scene to the next without a narrative umbilical cord to follow, like a torpid couch potato flicking between channels. The movie is dank and forbidding, dripping with amniotic fluid, an aborted mutation. Max Renn (James Woods) is the…
Noirs are at their best when they reveal the darkness hiding beneath a thin veneer of civilisation, with ever-present shadows stretching across the screen. Killer Joe is a grimy neo-noir, but its characters wear their darkness on their sleeves without the façade of civility. Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) discusses the murder of his mother with…
I was expecting, thanks to its marketing, The Loved Ones to be a tongue-in-cheek horror movie, with a broad, comedic take on the prom night slasher film. I certainly hadn’t anticipated the gutpunch of an early scene where a girl drives alongside a dog, who, recently stabbed, pants futilely for air. It gets darker from…
The fifth film in the Wrong Turn series changes setting again, moving from a mental hospital in the Bloody Beginnings to a small town in the middle of a music festival. Bloodlines introduces a genuine antagonist –named Maynard – with substantially more intelligence than the gibbering inbred psychopaths rampaging through the earlier films (though they’re…
This entry in the Wrong Turn series is the weakest so far. It follows a group of escaped prison inmates (plus supporting ‘victims’ – prison guards, police and a civilian). Like Wrong Turn 2, it features really clumsy introductory dialogue establishing these characters’ personalities; unlike Wrong Turn 2, you don’t get the sense that anyone…
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