When a Stranger Calls is, essentially, two well-produced, scary scenes bracketing a meandering, uninteresting private detective movie. It’s a shame, because the premise is actually interesting: introducing a faceless psychopath then treating him with some sympathy, revealing him to be a real, irrevocably damaged, person. This premise is executed without effort or imagination. The opening…
The Omen is silly when it should be scary, despite the stately sets and sombre acting surrounding it. David Warner (not the cricketer) does an admirable job of delivering a huge chunk of ominous exposition without it sounding too absurd (until he loses his head) and Gregory Peck is always reliable. The soundtrack and special…
Yes, another horror movie… Sinister is, for its first half, a genuinely scary film populated by reasonably well-developed characters. Ethan Hawke, writing a true crime novel, finds a handful of creepy snuff films in the attic of his latest house (the site of a recent murder, naturally) and watches them, one by one, late at…
A horror “classic,” starting Wes Craven’s career, The Last House on the Left is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good film. The cinematography and editing can be generously described as amateurish, the screenplay (a loose reinterpretation of The Virgin Spring) decides that the best thing to play against a harrowing rape/murder sequence…
Another horror movie remake! This one tries is particularly faithful to the Wes Craven original, even recreating a number of scares shot-for-shot. Not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, but the new interpretations are pedestrian interpretations, without flair or creativity. There’s no emotional throughline in the first half; the film focuses on one character for…
The Mist is a good movie that could have been great. The first element that lets it down was inescapable with its low budget: the special effects. The film is intended to be serious, meaningful and to capture real fear, and the acting and composition support this, but the creature special effects appear goofy and…
The appeal of the Scream films (well, the first two – Scream 3 was an abject failure) is their diversity. Each is a slasher, a whodunit and a satirical take on the horror genre; even if they fail in one, they normally manage to be entertaining in another. Scre4m fails as a slasher film –…
The challenge of the Nightmare on Elm Street films is that they need to create fear in an environment where the normal rules don’t apply, which makes scares that would be shocking in a realistic context less effective. The second sequel answers this challenge by not trying to be a horror film; it’s more of…
The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s power stems from its verisimilitude, how it feels like a gritty documentary. The remake largely abandons any attempt at this and makes a host of baffling choices: The film seems compelled to make its leads as unlikable as possible, setting them up as crass, unsympathetic drug traffickers –…
For a self-professed “movie geek,” there’s some significant holes in my film knowledge, but the largest are certainly in the horror genre, a genre I’ve only recently embraced. One such hole is J-Horror – I’ve only seen Pulse (and thoroughly disliked it), and have yet to see the original Ringu. This means that I can…
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