If you’ve read my review of Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods, you already know I liked it. But even a thousand words can’t fully convey just how much I loved the film, so here’s the first additional two thousand words of an additional four thousand. In this first entry, I discuss the film’s meaning as a love letter and admonishment to the horror genre itself. Continue reading »
A middleground horror film mostly absent of good scares, The Possession serves as a cautionary tale warning horror aficionados that not everything with Sam Raimi’s name is associated to meets the high standard of his legacy as a genre great. Continue reading »
A daring foray into an ongoing real-world disaster, accented by some great, spooky, atmospheric imagery, doesn’t do anything more with its concepts than serve up sub-standard horror driven by amazingly bad decision-making skills. Continue reading »
With Cabin in the Woods, Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon have crafted the new yardstick by which all horror films released in its wake will be judged. That analogy’s somewhat mild and unseasoned. More accurately, they’ve saturation bombed the genre with barb-filled ordnance wrapped up in one enormous love letter, launching a payload containing their affections … Continue reading »
You may remember some weeks back that I happened into an opportunity to participate in a round table interview the effervescent Joseph Kahn regarding his second feature film, the multi-genre mind-bending slasher-time travel-teen drama-comedy-kung fu-cultural commentary bonanza, Detention. Well, it’s Friday the 13th– and that means that not only am I barring my doors to keep … Continue reading »
I’ve said before that Steven Soderbergh is a genre chameleon; if this year’s Haywire doesn’t unequivocally prove that, then last year’s Contagion should, and soundly at that. Contagion may not be a straight genre film in the way that the multi-faceted filmmaker’s bone-snapping arthouse action film is, but it nonetheless exists as a synthesis of numerous filmmaking categories– essentially, … Continue reading »
Categorizing Ti West’s The Innkeepers accurately seems tricky at a glance; is it a horror film with comedy elements, or the other way around? Invariably, the film falls under the horror umbrella without much debate but its blend of scares, charm and laughter makes it a genre standout among more recent haunted house fare. Dread … Continue reading »
Kill List‘s very nature makes it an incredibly difficult film to review properly. In point of fact, it’s the sort of film in which any foreknowledge of its events beyond the barest of essentials nickel and dimes you, robbing you piece by piece of its overall impact. Trailers and posters only hint at its secrets, … Continue reading »
Lightly populated, quiet, creepy woods in the South– littered with fallen trees just waiting for someone to impale themselves on them– naturally read as lairs for ravening hillbillies just waiting to crush, burn, melt, torture, suffocate, slice, dice, eat, or otherwise violently send unsuspecting young people (and other incidental victims) to an early passing. In … Continue reading »
More than fear, the great takeaway of The Ward is disbelief. How could the man responsible for 1982′s masterwork The Thing have it in him to churn out something so horrid as this? It’s hard to see anything of the John Carpenter of twenty-nine years ago in his latest offering, the first cinematic effort he’s made in a … Continue reading »
