Horror Archives - Page 11 of 40 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

FrightFest ’18: The Night Sitter

August 30, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

***/****
starring Elyse Dufour, Jack Champion, Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum
written and directed by John Rocco and Abiel Bruhn

by Walter Chaw From the first synth chords of Rob Himebaugh's awesome '80s-inspired score; from the first glimpse of DP Scotty G. Field's gorgeous, neon-soaked lighting schemes; from the first look at world-weary heroine Amber (Elyse Dufour), herself a feat of lighting and colour coordination, The Night Sitter announces itself to be a major player. Filmmakers Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco's feature debut, it covers one really bad night in the life of poor, terrified Kevin (Jack Champion). His dad (Joe Walz) a wannabe reality-show host of one of those paranormal shows, hires Amber to sit for him and his girlfriend's (Deanna Meske) horrible kid, Ronnie (Bailey Campbell), leaving them alone with a locked door, behind which are all the demonic artifacts dad's been hoarding throughout his misspent career. That he's a loser is never a question (he times his reel to "accidentally" play for the benefit of pretty Amber), but he's a rich loser–meaning that as soon as dad is gone on his date, Amber calls her friends (Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum, J. Benedict Larmore) to come help her loot the place. Unfortunately, Ronnie has found where dad keeps the key to the demon room.

FrightFest ’18: The Golem

August 29, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Israel

***½/****
starring Hani Furstenberg, Ishai Golan, Brynie Furstenberg, Lenny Ravich
written by Ariel Cohen
directed by Doron Paz & Yoav Paz

by Walter Chaw Hanna (Hani Furstenberg, The Loneliest Planet) is listening in while a council of elders gives her husband Benjamin (Ishai Golan) the option of leaving her for being unable to provide a son for years after the loss of their child. It's 1673 Lithuania. There's a plague, so there's a lot of death, and there's palpable fear in the air. Fear, among the other things it attracts, is irresistible to religion, and one day in this small Jewish community in the middle of a wilderness, the villagers discover that the plague has returned to the countryside and is encroaching on their isolation. Naturally, they retreat into religion. Ted Chiang has a short story called "The Seventy-Two Letters". It takes Hebrew mythology and wonders what it would be like if religion were treated as science. (And maybe, you know, it is.) The seventy-two letters are the name of God. You write them on a small piece of paper and roll that tightly into a little scroll. Insert it in the mouth of a mud effigy to infuse it with life. What materializes is a guardian, a protector, a golem that can be guided to the extent your id can be guided. Dario Argento played with a version of this in Phenomena; George Romero did, too, with Monkey Shines. The Golem is the true fana.

FrightFest ’18: Secret Santa

August 29, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

*/****screenplay by Adam Marcus & Debra Sullivandirected by Adam Marcus by Walter Chaw There's a line between homage and rip-off and I think you cross it when you quote lines in their entirety, without a lot of irony, from better movies. The "insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase" from Raising Arizona, the entreaty to be untied from a chair lest they spend the winter there from Carpenter's The Thing, dropped from the mouths of a terrible family drugged with an id-freeing cocktail during Christmas dinner as punchlines and, I think, probably, in-jokes for the…

FrightFest ’18: Incident in a Ghostland

August 29, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, France, FrightFest, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Ghostland
**½/****
starring Crystal Reed, Anastasia Phillips, Emilia Jones
written and directed by Pascal Laugier

by Walter Chaw Pascal Laugier, if he had made no other film than Martyrs, would still have made Martyrs: the cornerstone picture of the short-lived New French Extremity and one of the most startling (and nigh-unwatchable) films about faith ever made. It would be remarkable as the second half of a double-feature with Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc–maybe as part of a trilogy with Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Mad Mel’s Passion of the Christ would fit in there, too. Make a weekend of it with Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew–martyrdom and ecstasy and the cinematic arts. Laugier’s follow-up, The Tall Man, failed in comparison to Martyrs, as it must. He was briefly attached to a Hellraiser reboot with Clive Barker’s blessing (of course with Barker’s blessing: Martyrs is a film made by a Cenobite), but the franchise is cursed and it fell through. Folks have been waiting for Laugier to make another masterpiece. Incident in a Ghostland isn’t it, but like The Tall Man it’s a strong, technically-proficient genre exercise that deals in an interesting space with at-times striking images. Laugier is one of the only filmmakers who makes me queasy. His films aren’t kidding around.

FrightFest ’18: The Dark

August 28, 20182018, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

**½/****written and directed by Justin P. Lange by Walter Chaw What Justin P. Lange's hyphenate debut The Dark, a variation on Let the Right One In, lacks in freshness it makes up for in look and vibe. Better, probably, as a short film, it opens strong with a bad man on the run, Josef (Karl Markovics), stopping at a convenience store, where he gets the usual warning about going into the woods. Lange subverts convention immediately, and then goes to the remote house in the wood where the monster lives. Said monster, a little-girl ghoul named Mina (Nadia Alexander), has…

FrightFest ’18: The Witch in the Window

August 28, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

**/****written and directed by Andy Milton by Walter Chaw Life as a House as a different kind of horror movie, Andy Milton's The Witch in the Window is an allegory for marriage, attachment, fatherhood tied up with restoring an old house in the country that appears to be haunted by a witch. Half of it is pretty scary, half of it is an overwritten, mawkishly-sentimental, and slow-moving drama between estranged dad Simon (Alex Draper) and his delinquent son, Finn (Charlie Tacker). It seems that Simon has bought a flipper and invited Finn to come over to help restore it, the…

FrightFest ’18: The Night Eats the World

August 27, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, FrightFest, Horror

La nuit a dévoré le monde
***½/****
starring Anders Danielsen Lie, Golshifteh Farahani, Denis Lavant, Sigrid Bouaziz
screenplay by Guillaume Lemans, Jérémie Guez, Dominique Rocher, based on the novel by Pit Agarmen
directed by Dominique Rocher

by Walter Chaw A spiritual companion piece to “The Twilight Zone”‘s “Time Enough at Last,” in which a bookish, harried loner survives a nuclear holocaust (to his delight), gathers all the books he wants to read, and then accidentally breaks his glasses, Dominique Rocher’s The Night Eats the World has angry, awkward loner Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie, who broke my heart in Oslo, August 31) find a little safe space only to discover that the zombie apocalypse has happened. It opens at a party thrown by his ex-girlfriend Fanny (Sigrid Bouaziz), where he’s come to collect a box of tapes she’s accidentally taken with her upon her departure. He’s irritated that her attention’s divided and that she’s invited him to get his stuff during a party. Her public displays of affection with a new, aggressive boyfriend (David Kammenos) seem calculated, too, to make him uncomfortable, small. The first ten minutes of the film see Sam floating through the party, nursing his drink, trying to get Fanny’s attention. Hours pass with Sam on the periphery of every interaction. In a very real, visceral way, The Night Eats the World is a character study of introversion and depression. Fanny, frustrated instantly, asks Sam why he can’t just mingle, meet some new people, “try for a change.” It’s clear why they’ve broken up. She doesn’t understand what it’s like to be depressed. He doesn’t understand what it’s like not to be. She tells Sam to go in a back bedroom for his things and stay there because it’s quiet. They’ll talk later. She does understand at least that Sam might have some audio processing issues related to his overlapping conditions. Yeah, don’t we all.

FrightFest ’18: St. Agatha

August 27, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

*/****written by Andy Demetrio, Shaun Fletcher, Sara Sometti Michaels and Clint Searsdirected by Darren Lynn Bousman by Walter Chaw The title music announces a debt to Rosemary's Baby and indeed Mary (Sabrina Kern) is with child and at the mercy of a religious cult. Her boyfriend Jimmy (Justin Miles), however, is a decent fellow for 1957, nothing like Rosemary's husband. The only hint he's a beatnik is that he likes to blow that horn. There are a few problems with St. Agatha: it's overly familiar, it's tame as nunsploitation goes, and its twist is obvious and unimaginative. Before long, Mary's…

FrightFest ’18: Ghost Stories

August 27, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, UK

**/**** written and directed by Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman by Walter Chaw A throwback anthology film that alas plays more like a Cat's Eye or a Trick 'r Treat than a Dead of Night or a Black Sabbath, Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson's Ghost Stories is a handsome, safe-feeling prestige-horror production that trods no new ground, though it trods old ground pretty well. Paranormal debunker Professor Goodman (Nyman) needs a good knocking off his high horse and gets it in the form of three supernatural occurrences he's tasked with explaining. Three tales--the first a haunted hospital/factory thing, the second…

FrightFest ’18: Tigers Are Not Afraid

August 26, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Fantasy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Mexico

Vuelven
***½/****
starring Paola Lara, Hanssel Casillas, Rodrigo Cortes, Ianis Guerrero
written and directed by Issa López

by Walter Chaw Estrella (Paola Laura) is just a little girl. Her mother's been disappeared by a local drug cartel and she's living by herself in their tiny apartment. She has three pieces of chalk that a teacher's given her to represent the three wishes little girls without mothers sometimes get in fairy tales about abandonment in times of great evil. She uses the first one to wish for her mother to return, and so her mother does. But her mother's dead, of course, and now Estrella is living on the roof with a small band of other young orphans led by Shine (Juan Ramon Lopez) in hopes that the gangster from whom Shine has lifted a gun and cell phone don't find them. It's W.W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" set against the backdrop of the troubles plaguing modern Mexico, and while it's not entirely clear to the children if Estrella's wishes are actually coming true, it's never really a question for writer-director Issa López, who manifests the subjects of the kids' hopes and fears as animated street graffiti and the sudden animation of a stuffed animal. There are echoes of a lot of things: of Stephen King's short story "Here There Be Tygers", of Isabel Allende's City of the Beasts, and most of all of Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, to which it owes its structure and allegorical strategy. But Tigers Are Not Afraid is most of all its own lyrical thing.

FrightFest ’18: Lasso

August 26, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

***/****written by Roberto Marinasdirected by Evan Cecil by Walter Chaw Trish is the star of Lasso. Ostensibly a secondary character, she's played by trans activist Skyler Cooper (who identifies with masculine pronouns) with confidence, beauty, and strength. After the initial "is she a boy or a girl?" question asked by congenital screw-up Simon (Andrew Jacobs), Trish is just accepted as this embodiment of strength and empathy. When Simon beats himself up for causing the death of a few of his buddies, it's Trish who recognizes the importance of preserving his confidence for the long night ahead. She takes the lead.…

FrightFest ’18: F.U.B.A.R. (2018)

August 25, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, UK

**½/**** written by Ben Kent & Joel Wilenius directed by Ben Kent by Walter Chaw A lark, and often a good one, in the Very Bad Things vein where murder spoils an evening of debauchery, Ben Kent's feature debut F.U.B.A.R. offers up a twist by setting its shenanigans at one of those paintball courses where people pretend to be zombies for the pleasure of the armed guests. It's a bachelor party for nebbish Sam (Sean Verey), who, saddled with his obnoxious chums, hopes the weekend goes well so he can impress his future father-in-law, Gerald (Mark Heap)--Gerald being an ex-Navy…

FrightFest ’18: Upgrade

August 25, 2018****/****, 2018, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/****
starring Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Benedict Hardie
written and directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw I can't imagine I'll ever see a better Venom movie than Leigh Whannell's Upgrade, the story of a mild-mannered Luddite mechanic named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) who one day, after delivering a tricked-out antique ride to cyber-genius Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), is paralyzed in a terrible accident and forced to watch his girlfriend, tech-company functionary Asha (Melanie Vallejo), get assassinated by modded-out thugs led by psychopath Fisk (Benedict Hardie). In the film's near-future, there are limited Tetsuo: The Iron Man body modifications like guns embedded in gunsel's palms and enhanced limbs and vision alongside more common advances like self-driving cars and A.I. assistants. The tech, in other words, is entirely credible at first, as the film eases us into nanotechnology and an A.I., STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden), implanted in Grey to not just "cure" his paralysis but also, when allowed to operate independently, turn Grey into a one-man vengeance puppet. The first scene of STEM's emancipation is a glorious invention of fight choreography and performance philosophy: Grey is literally possessed, doesn't really "invest" in what his body's doing to other bodies, and, at the end of the sequence, begs with the last not-dismembered bad guy to please not get up off the floor. It's a Buster Keaton gag, really–the stone-faced centre of a violent storm. Marshall-Green's performance reminded me of both Steve Martin's in All of Me and Jeff Fahey's in Body Parts. In a year that saw another instalment in Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible series, this here is the year's best action scene.

FrightFest ’18: Boar

August 25, 20182017, 2018, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

***/****
starring Simone Buchanan, John Jarratt, Melissa Tkautz, Bill Moseley
written and directed by Chris Sun

by Walter Chaw Chris Sun doesn't appear to have any boundaries, at least when it comes to violence and gore in his movies; over the course of four films, he's proven himself to be a vital voice in splatter/exploitation. He dealt with cultures of masculine toxicity in Come and Get Me and pedophilia and vengeance in Daddy's Little Girl, before hewing closer to the genre line with a straight inexorable-killer slasher flick (the ferocious Charlie's Farm) and, now, eco-horror, with his really fun Boar. An odd, mostly inappropriate comparison can be made to the Coens' early career, in which it seemed like they were trying to cover every genre in turn: Here's this guy knocking off horror subgenres with films tied to each other only by their grisly extremes. Eco-horror was popular in the United States in the immediate aftermath of Jaws, because films like Grizzly and John Frankenheimer's Prophecy could be pitched simply as "Jaws in the…" The trend peaked with Australian Russell Mulcahy's Razorback, featuring almost impressionistic work from The Road Warrior DP Dean Semler. Mulcahy's film is unexpectedly artful, almost lyrical in parts, until the end when it pays out in nihilism. For my money, of the two mid-Eighties releases inspired by the death of Azaria Chamberlain, the infant who was carried off by dingoes, it's better than the one that sticks to the facts (A Cry in the Dark).

FrightFest ’18: Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich

August 24, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, UK

½*/**** written by S. Craig Zahler directed by Tommy Wiklund & Sonny Laguna by Walter Chaw The thirteenth instalment in Charles Band's "Puppet Master" epic is the first real reboot of the series, one that transforms titular master Toulon (now played by Udo Kier, of screenwriter S. Craig Zahler's own Brawl in Cell Block 99) from a Holocaust survivor into a full-on Nazi. It's a dangerous creative decision that, I think, fatally misunderstands the appeal of the previous twelve films in this VHS-quickie-born series, which was mainly an opportunity for cheer-worthy cheap-o practical effects work and a loose mythology about…

FrightFest ’18: Summer of ’84

August 24, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Summer of 84
**½/****
starring Graham Verchere, Judah Lewis, Caleb Emery, Rich Sommer
written by Matt Leslie & Stephen J. Smith
directed by Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell & Yoann-Karl Whissell

by Walter Chaw From the first strains of Le Matos' Tangerine Dream-influenced score (borrowed most heavily from Risky Business, for some reason), even before the Class of 1984 title font tells it to you raw, you know that Summer of '84, from Turbo Kid helmers Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell (collectively known as RKSS), is going to be another '80s throwback flick. That's not bad in and of itself, but it comes with some built-in pitfalls. "Stranger Things", for instance, the setting is all it has going for it and it doesn't even get the vernacular right, whereas something like It well and truly knows the notes and hears the music, too. Summer of '84 falls somewhere between these two contemporary touchstones. It spends most of its time as a high-concept movie that rumbles along with cozy familiarity and an exceptional cast, and then in its last five minutes, it discovers its purpose and nails the landing. Pity that it didn't find its feet sooner. A greater pity, perhaps, that it didn't get another pass through the typewriter.

FrightFest ’18: Bad Samaritan

August 23, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

**½/****written by Brandon Boycedirected by Dean Devlin by Walter Chaw One-time Roland Emmerich beard Dean Devlin drops Bad Samaritan, a slick, old-school genre exercise in the mold of stuff like Bad Influence, Malice, and maybe a little of the Tom Holland Fright Night starring one of the Dr. Whos as a serial-killing millionaire scumbag. It's high camp, of course, played to the rafters by David Tennant as Cale, the murderer-cum-Richie Rich with not only a torture dungeon, but also a summer torture cabin to which he spirits poor Katie (Kerry Condon), who assures that she's cleaned herself using the proper…

FrightFest ’18: The Devil’s Doorway

August 22, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, UK

***½/****
starring Lalor Roddy, Ciaran Flynn, Helena Bereen, Lauren Coe
screenplay by Martin Brennan, Michael B. Jackson, Aislinn Clarke
directed by Aislinn Clarke

by Walter Chaw Aislinn Clarke's hyphenate debut The Devil's Doorway is a found-footage concept shot on 16mm and set in a Magdalene Asylum circa 1960. Two priests are dispatched from the Vatican to investigate statues of the Virgin Mary that are apparently weeping blood. "Type O negative, female, pregnant," says wizened, world-weary Father Thomas (Lalor Roddy, a real discovery), who finds himself in the midst of a crisis of faith. It won't be a miracle, he's sure. When his young charge and de facto cameraman Father John (Ciaran Flynn) asks him why not, Thomas responds, "Because it never is." He's Fathers Merrin and Karras, both, from The Exorcist: the man of the cloth who can wield his faith, and the man of the cloth who wonders if he's lost his faith entirely. Thomas–dubbed "doubting" by John, naturally–expresses his rage and disgust at the asylums, also called "laundries," in Ireland where young "fallen" women were sent to hide the shame of unwanted pregnancies, nervous disorders, and other socially-objectionable "maladies" from judgmental neighbours. He's unimpressed, then, by cold, patrician Mother Superior (Helena Bereen), who lacks nuance in the way she sees her charges. And when things become inexplicable, as they are wont to do in haunted asylums, there's something like relief for Thomas to discover that if there's no God, there might at least be the Devil.

The Ranger (2018)

August 18, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Chloe Levine, Granit Lahu, Jeremy Pope, Jeremy Holm
written by Jenn Wexler, Giaco Furino
directed by Jenn Wexler

by Walter Chaw Jenn Wexler's hyphenate debut is anchored by a tremendous performance from Chloe Levine–good enough that it peanut-butters over some of The Ranger's thematic gaps, its troubles with pacing and its identity crisis. The picture opens well, with a group of punks–of which Levine's Chelsea is a reluctant member–raising hell and eventually killing a cop. Chelsea takes her buddies to her uncle's cabin to hide. We're introduced to the cabin in the film's prologue as a stolid Ranger (Jeremy Holm) comforts young Chelsea (Jete Laurence) about something terrible while she nibbles on a sandwich. He compares her to a wolf, because she's "a fighter." Once removed from the urban environment, Chelsea finds her pals obnoxious: smoking inside, setting fires, painting trees, and generally being disrespectful of the woods in which she was raised. Her boyfriend, Garth (Granit Lahu), is especially the kind of lost youth who desperately deserves to get drop-kicked into a canyon.

FrightFest ’18: An Introduction

August 14, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

by Walter Chaw One of the major misconceptions about film critics and scholars is that they aren't fans of film first, and if they are, then surely they wouldn't be fans of a genre as disreputable as horror. But I've long held that horror is an indicator species in our socio-political quagmire. That often with only limited studio oversight, and because they're entirely possible to execute with a small budget in a short amount of time, horror films, by talking about what a society fears, can tap into the collective unconscious more quickly and effectively than any number of "prestige" presentations. There's a reason most myths and fairy tales have strong horror elements. Get Out is a lot of things, for example, but its closest analogue is George Romero's landmark civil rights masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. I wonder if the horror movie's primal simplicity has anything to do with the disdain with which even its creators sometimes approach it. In any case, horror is important, essential, vital. When it's right, there's not much else righter.