Horror Archives - Page 16 of 41 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Legacy (1978) – Blu-ray Disc

October 20, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK

Legacy1

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Katharine Ross, Sam Elliott, Roger Daltrey, John Standing
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, Patrick Tilley and Paul Wheeler from a story by Sangster
directed by Richard Marquand

by Bryant Frazer One in a spate of post-The Exorcist, post-Rosemary’s Baby potboilers about ordinary people confronting ancient evil in the modern world, The Legacy has an enduring reputation as a big slice of horror cheese and not much else. Certainly, it’s derivative–just another old-dark-house yarn set in the English countryside, spiced up in ’70s fashion with a sinister, Satanic backstory that never quite clicks together. It’s one of the last horror movies to come out in the handsomely-mounted classic style favoured by Hammer before contemporary slashers and body-horror changed the game completely in the 1980s, but what it lacks in originality and coherence it makes up for in comfy genre atmosphere. Co-scriptor Jimmy Sangster was one of the top dogs at Hammer Film Productions (his writing credits include Horror of Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein) and Welsh director Richard Marquand was a BBC documentarian making his fiction debut (he would go on to direct Return of the Jedi). That’s not a world-beating combination, but if you like your occult thrillers played straight, The Legacy‘s workmanlike style is an asset.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Short Films

October 16, 2015****/****, 2015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Romance, Satire, Sci-Fi, Short Films, Sweden, ZERO STARS

by Walter Chaw

The Babysitter Murders ****/**** (d. Ryan Spindell) For certain artists working in the short-film format, I don't have any idea how or why it is they haven't been called up to the big leagues yet. This speaks as much to my prejudice, obviously: there's nothing wrong with the short form. In literature, many of my favourite writers are best in the short form. In film, though, there's so little real opportunity for distribution that it seems a particular shame when guys like Ryan Spindell have only produced shorts. I'm not complaining (his work is excellent), merely hoping he has the means to continue. Spindell's latest, The Babysitter Murders, is so expertly composited that it would be kind of a shame to dissect it at all. Sufficed to say that it unearths a new place to take Wes Craven's Scream meta funhouse, and does it without a hint of smugness or show-off-y insecurity. It's beautifully paced, conceived, and executed. Look at a cooking scene early on, set to "Fast & Sweet" by Mondo Boys feat. Kestrin Pantera–the way it's shot and edited, the way Elie Smolkin's camera stalks and Eric Ekman cuts it all together. The movie's premise–a babysitter alone on a stormy night when a psycho escapes from an asylum–is as rote as they come, but Spindell, as he did with The Root of the Problem and dentists, finds something new to say. The performances are to a one pitch-perfect and the gore is appropriately horrifying; it's a film balanced in that space between hilarity for its excess and hilarity for its brilliance. I'm out of superlatives. Spindell is one of the finest voices working in genre right now, carving out a niche that's neither self-serious nor self-abnegating. He's full of joy, this one, and his movies are treasures.

Crimson Peak (2015)

October 14, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Jim Beaver
written by Guillermo del Toro & Matthew Robbins
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I love Guillermo del Toro. I love the ethic driving Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone and the Frankenstein and Pinocchio myths driving Mimic. I love the Prodigal Son of Blade II, the ferocity, of course, and vision of Pan’s Labyrinth, and all of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, my favourite of his films; every frame is wonder. I didn’t like Pacific Rim but I did think it was at least all-in and there’s something to be said for that. And now here’s Crimson Peak, which is just, you know, really bad and for no one. I have a friend who referred to del Toro’s book version of The Strain (I’ve never read it) as arrogant. I didn’t understand that, but it tickled during Pacific Rim and has found full flower now in Crimson Peak. There’s a point at which someone who is an expert in something can go from teacher to pedant. What begins as a conversation, nurturing and full of joy, becomes patronizing and solipsistic. I myself probably crossed over years ago. Now I have company. Del Toro at his best shares what he loves. At his worst (and Crimson Peak is del Toro at his worst, by a long shot), he believes that he’s talking over your head. You couldn’t possibly understand. You’ll never catch all his references, he says. And suddenly the party’s over and he’s all by himself in his self-aggrandizing echo chamber of curiosities.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Sensoria

October 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Horror, Sweden, Thriller

**/****directed by Christian Hallman by Walter Chaw Swede Christian Hallman's first feature, Sensoria, sports a couple of nice, creepy moments but ultimately adds little to the "we have always been here" subgenre of haunted-house movies. In this iteration, Caroline (Lanna Ohlsson), freshly single and lamenting that her circle of friends consists largely of digital phantoms offering ephemeral support through social media, discovers that her new bachelorette pad is maybe haunted by the ghost of a little dead girl, My (Norah Anderson). Not helping her isolation and increasing paranoia are a pervy landlord and a dotty old lady of the kind that…

Ghoulies (1985)/Ghoulies II (1988) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

October 7, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

GHOULIES
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelikan, Michael Des Barres, Jack Nance
screenplay by Luca Bercovici and Jefery Levy
directed by Luca Bercovici

GHOULIES II
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Damon Martin, Royal Dano, Phil Fondacaro, J. Downing
screenplay by Charlie Dolan and Dennis Paoli
directed by Albert Band

by Jefferson Robbins Not rip-off, not homage, but something in the water. Luca Bercovici’s 1985 Ghoulies, from the lo-fi film factory of Charles Band, felt on release like a ploy to frack cash out of Joe Dante’s Gremlins from the year before. In fact, it had a parallel development, launching pre-production in 1983 under the working title Beasties and formally premiering in Britain in November of 1984. It also boasts a far weirder strain of presentation than Dante’s peak, something Lynchian that goes beyond the mere presence of Jack Nance. It has its passel of ’80s “teen” types harassed by horrors, sure: the stoner(s), the ladykiller, the nerd–not to mention their attendant ladies, none of whom are given much personality, resulting in a deeply uninteresting film debut for young Mariska Hargitay. But their mannerisms, in large part, are so outré and alienating that it’s at times like watching an underfinanced dinner-theatre preview of 1986’s Blue Velvet. And then the dead warlock bursts out of the ground to be attended by a clutch of grody puppets.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Yakuza Apocalypse

October 2, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Horror, Japan, Vampire

**½/****directed by Takashi Miike by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike makes one, sometimes two, sometimes three movies a year, which is not so remarkable as the fact that they're often exceptional. He's as fecund as a Fassbender and hasn't shown signs of the same catastrophic burnout. Even his middling projects have moments in them to recommend--no less so his latest, Yakuza Apocalypse, a return to the Yakuza genre that gave him mainstream credibility (such as it was) and the supernatural horror genre that gave him cult immortality. This one isn't about anything that I could ken, really, but it is technically…

Fantastic Fest ’15: February

September 30, 2015****/****, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

****/****
starring Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar
written and directed by Oz Perkins

by Walter Chaw Osgood Perkins's hyphenate debut February is haunted. It plays like a boarding-school version of Rob Zombie's extraordinary Lords of Salem, coloured by the same sadness and sense of inevitability and doom. Like it, February features a female protagonist cast adrift in a mostly-empty building, waiting for something to take her away–to Heaven or to Hell, it's not clear. Not clear, either, if there's much of a difference at the end of the journey. Here it's Kat ("Mad Men"'s Kiernan Shipka), who has a terrible dream one night that her parents aren't going to arrive to take her home from school over the mid-winter break and then wakes to find it come true. She's marooned there with two guardians and a Heather, the beautiful Rose (Lucy Boynton), who's engineered her own abandonment, the better to spend an extra week with a boy who may have knocked her up. February is obviously about young female sexuality, locating its girl heroes right there, teetering on the cusp of still calling out to their mothers when they're hurt. And it's about grief. Grief for the passing of innocence to experience, literalized in the loss of parents and the desire for their surrogates. It wonders what would happen if Rosemary's baby were a girl, and met her real father for the first time as a young woman going through puberty. It's a lovely metaphor for the sensual horror of that transformation, for the little deaths that separate children from their parents, literally or figuratively.

Nomads (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

September 21, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lesley-Anne Down, Pierce Brosnan, Anna-Maria Monticelli, Adam Ant
written and directed by John McTiernan

by Bryant Frazer Director John McTiernan’s film debut is a true ’80s oddity. Pierce Brosnan sports an ersatz French accent in his first big movie role. He’s billed opposite Lesley-Anne Down, riding the downhill slope of her post-Sphinx career, but the two have only one scene together. McTiernan’s script, to date his only screenwriting credit, is some superficial fluffernutter about restless inuat (spirits of Inuit mythology) haunting the L.A. living–except when it’s a diffuse meditation on the stateless qualities of Angelenos and California in general. Even the score, an improvisational guitar-and-synth freakout by Bill Conti and (I shit you not) Ted Nugent, is genuinely weird.

TIFF ’15: The Girl in the Photographs

September 18, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

*/****directed by Nick Simon by Bill Chambers Written by the son of Norman Bates and directed by a protégé of the late Wes Craven, The Girl in the Photographs is an illusorily-pedigreed resurrection of the slasher genre featuring scattered compositional glories courtesy of legendary DP Dean Cundey, returning to horror for the first time since, what, Psycho II? The picture opens with its Janet Leigh (horror muse Katharine Isabelle)--literally named Janet--being abducted from her home by a pair of masked fiends (one's a harlequin, the other a Trash Humper) who eventually leave a photo of her corpse on the bulletin…

Telluride ’15: 45 Years

September 6, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2015, UK

***½/****
starring Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay
written and directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw Andrew Haigh's 45 Years turns on a fifty-year-old mystery that resurfaces in the week before the 45^th wedding anniversary of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), causing the couple to reassess what they know of each other and their place in their relationship. It's a slow unravelling, and Haigh trusts his cast to a laudable extent. In the film's best, most visually interesting moment, he has Kate look at slides projected against a sheet in the extreme foreground. Kate herself, visible to the left of the sheet, is crammed into the eave beneath a slanted attic ceiling. Her interpretation of what she's seeing dawns on her face–creeps across it like shadows pulling back across the course of a day. It's an extraordinary moment in a film full of them. Look, too, to the scene immediately following when Kate picks Geoff up from some afternoon event, and how she holds the steering wheel while he rails on about exactly everything that isn't important. The very definition of an actor's workshop and a character drama, 45 Years attacks the idea that things get easier as you get older. Geoff's toast at their anniversary party speaks to how when one gets older life provides fewer big decisions, so all one's left with is regret at the big decisions already made. In many ways, the film is about that sort of nostalgia. In many others, it's as bitter as Make Way for Tomorrow. Imagine that film, or Tokyo Story, without children.

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) [Collector’s Edition] + Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Packs

August 12, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

SLEEPAWAY CAMP II: UNHAPPY CAMPERS
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Pamela Springsteen, Renée Estevez, Brian Patrick Clarke, Walter Gotell
written by Fritz Gordon
directed by Michael A. Simpson

SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Pamela Springsteen, Tracy Griffith, Michael J. Pollard
written by Fritz Gordon
directed by Michael A. Simpson

by Bryant Frazer Say what you will about the original Sleepaway Camp–you can’t accuse it of lacking ambition. All writer-director Robert Hiltzik had to do to sell a movie with that title in that era was cast a bunch of teenagers in a wan Friday the 13^th knock-off and splash some Karo blood around in the woods. Yet he made something dark and unique, with queer undertones: the first gender-identity horror film. The story goes that Hiltzik’s script for a follow-up was rejected by producer Jerry Silva, who thought it was too dark. Instead, he forged ahead with plans to shoot two overtly-comic sequels back-to-back in Georgia under the direction of local talent Michael A. Simpson. A 24-year-old writer named Fritz Gordon got the gig on a recommendation from U.S. distributor Nelson Entertainment.

Unfriended (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 10, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Unfriended1

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki
written by Nelson Greaves
directed by Leo Gabriadze

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Unfriended‘s formal constrictions–the action unfolds entirely as a screenshot–aren’t unique (the Canadian short film Noah got there first, and then there was that one segment of V/H/S), but they still make for a novel storytelling engine, especially in the uncharted realm of feature filmmaking, where Unfriended‘s closest precursor may be 2000’s hugely-dated Thomas in Love. (Dated less by its technological crudity than by its unprophetic view of cyber-living as deviant behaviour.) It’s fascinating to see the effect that being tethered to a computer monitor has on cinematic syntax. The task of laying out the horror-bogey’s tragic backstory is here accomplished with a couple of YouTube clips, for instance, and this kind of graceless infodump in lieu of structured flashbacks or verbal exposition feels perfectly valid. Moreover, the moment the protagonist, Blaire (former Miss Teen USA Shelley Hennig), is revealed via webcam feed as the computer’s owner, these videos–conveying the suicide of a high-school student named Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman)–become retroactively poignant: the idle guilt-surfing of a teenage girl. Everything is diegetic in Unfriended; even the on-the-nose soundtrack cues come straight from Blaire’s playlist. For a century, people have argued the superiority of books over movies because the latter “can’t tell you what a character is thinking,” but Unfriended and its ilk have stumbled on something: To espy a person’s mouse-clicks is to be privy to their mood, their impulses, their leaps of logic. It’s like reading their mind. While I wouldn’t want to watch too many movies in this narcissistic key, the innovation is undeniable.

It Follows (2015) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 13, 2015****/****, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

New Year’s Evil (1980) – Blu-ray Disc

June 14, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace, Grant Cramer
screenplay by Leonard Neubauer
directed by Emmett Alston

by Bryant Frazer Every 1980s slasher movie needed a gimmick, and New Year’s Evil has two: a Halloween-inspired holiday tie-in and a youth-culture exploitation angle. A Hollywood-based serial killer promises to murder a victim at the stroke of midnight in each of the four continental U.S. time zones, announcing his intentions by calling “Hollywood Hotline”, a New Year’s Eve countdown TV show hosted by Roz Kelly (the erstwhile Pinky Tuscadero on “Happy Days”) that features live performances by punkish new wave acts. The results are surprisingly watchable. The psycho-killer story is actually a bit twisty as these things go, with a mid-film reversal of fortune aiming to give audiences a rooting interest in the villain. And though the bands on screen (Shadow and Made in Japan) seem to be employed mainly to help pad out the film’s 86-minute running time, their proto-Guns N’ Roses sounds are not entirely disagreeable.

Vampire’s Kiss (1989)/High Spirits (1988) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

May 5, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Vampire

VAMPIRE’S KISS
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Nicolas Cage, Maria Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Ashley
screenplay by Joseph Minion
directed by Robert Bierman

HIGH SPIRITS
**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Daryl Hannah, Peter O’Toole, Steve Guttenberg, Beverly D’Angelo
written and directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw Delightfully, extravagantly bizarre, Robert Bierman’s Vampire’s Kiss houses arguably Nicolas Cage’s most peculiar performance in the service of a piece the contemporary in every way of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and the precursor, in every way, to Mary Harron’s American Psycho. It excoriates the boy’s club of the executive boardroom, treats sexual harassment and assault like real things with real consequences, and has something to say on the subjects of race and the economic caste. It’s a canny satire of the vampire genre even as it’s an honourable addition to it, exploring those metaphorical elements that transformed vampirism in the ’80s into the equivalent of being the “cool kid” (The Lost Boys), the rock star (The Hunger), and the eternal demon lover (Fright Night). Working from a script by Joseph Minion, who not only wrote Martin Scorsese’s brilliant (and in some ways similar) After Hours but also the Scorsese-helmed episode of “Amazing Stories” called “Mirror, Mirror” (itself an antecedent to David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows), Bierman proves himself an able navigator of Minion’s liminal cartography. Vampire’s Kiss is about the spaces between and the things that fall in there.

StageFright (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Italy, Thriller

Deliria
StageFright: Aquarius
Bloody Bird
***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Robert Gligorov, John Morghen
screenplay by George Eastman
directed by Michele Soavi

by Walter Chaw After years spent working alongside such luminaries as Joe D’Amato, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento, Michele Soavi made his directorial debut with 1987’s StageFright (onscreen title: StageFright: Aquarius)–not an update of Hitchcock’s underestimated Jane Wyman vehicle, but a carrying of the giallo torch from one generation ostensibly into the next. For the uninitiated, giallo, when done right, is a perpetual-motion machine that runs off its own mysterious energy. Taking its name from the yellow covers of lurid Italian paperbacks, films in this genre split, broadly, into two sub-categories: the ones that give a passing nod to ratiocination; and the ones that don’t bother to make any rational sense at all. StageFright is of the latter school, aligning it with stuff like Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy over something like his Tenebrae (on which Soavi served as second assistant director). Sense is antithetical to StageFright. It’s a vehicle for atmosphere and delivers it in spades.

Blacula (1972)/Scream Blacula Scream (1973) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

April 7, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire

Blacula1

BLACULA
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring William Marshall, Denise Nicholas, Vonetta McGee, Charles Macaulay
screenplay by Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig
directed by William Crain

SCREAM BLACULA SCREAM
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring William Marshall, Don Mitchell, Pam Grier, Richard Lawson
screenplay by Joan Torres & Raymond Koenig and Maurice Jules
directed by Bob Kelljan

by Bryant Frazer It takes some nerve to turn an exploitative, possibly racist script treatment from a low-budget movie-manufacturing plant like Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American Independent Pictures (AIP) into a tragic meditation on the legacy of slavery in contemporary urban society, but that’s what director William Crain and actor William Marshall damn near pulled off with Blacula. Originally conceived as a blaxploitation programmer with the ersatz jive-talking title Count Brown Is in Town, the project that would become Blacula took on some gravity when Crain cast Marshall, a trained Shakespearean actor, in the title role. Marshall insisted on alterations to the script that gave the film a subtext: he would play the lead as an 18^th-century African noble who, while touring Europe in an attempt to persuade the aristocracy to oppose the slave trade, was turned into a vampire and imprisoned for more than 100 years by the rabidly racist Count Dracula. In Marshall’s imagining of the story, it was Dracula who, seeking to demean the uppity foreigner, saddled him with the dismissive, derivative moniker Blacula.

Don’t Look Now (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 5, 2015****/****, 1970s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania
screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is about looking, about ways of seeing and layers of understanding. It’s about memory and its intrusion into and influence on current states of being. It’s about the impossibility of faith or love or human relationships to illuminate truth; or it’s about how faith and love and human relationships are the only truth. It shows images out of order, presenting them in ways that will only make sense once the gestalt in which the images exist becomes clear. In every way, Don’t Look Now is designed for multiple viewings. The film warns that a life spent unexamined will end brutally and nonsensically. Without context, there is nothing, but context is nigh impossible before the end. It’s something William Carlos Williams would understand.

Penny Dreadful: The Complete First Season (2014) – Blu-ray Disc

March 3, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Television

Pennydreadful1

Image A Sound A Extras C
“Night Work,” “Séance,” “Resurrection,” “Demimonde,” “Closer Than Sisters,” “What Death Can Join Together,” “Possession,” “Grand Guignol”

by Bryant Frazer One of the hallmarks of contemporary remix culture is derivative artistic ventures that seek shortcuts to the id, making a playful, self-aware succotash of genre tropes in lieu of inventing new cosmologies. Cleverly done, the approach can yield brainy ruminations on form and content along the lines of Alan Moore’s Watchmen or alternate-universe joyrides like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds. When the endeavour is shabby and commercial, executed with no love, you end up with smug mediocrities like The Cabin in the Woods or smarmy trash like Dracula Untold. (Nobody–not George Lucas, not Ridley Scott–seems to grok less about what made the original properties they’re trying to exploit great in the first place than the fools charged with revitalizing the monster franchises at Universal.) Somewhere in the middle, you get a project like “Penny Dreadful”, a monster mash-up set in late-Victorian London that earns no originality points for series creator John Logan, best known for his screenwriting credits on Hugo, Skyfall, and Rango. Named after the pulpy serial publications that sold in old London for a penny each, his show is even more specifically derivative of latter-day pastiches like Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula than it is of their own 19^th-century sources. Still, at its best, his knock-off has an engaging flamboyance that makes it, if not must-see TV, at least agreeable popcorn drama.

Annabelle (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 14, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gary Dauberman
directed by John R. Leonetti

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Some kind of as-yet-unclassified spin-off/rip-off hybrid, Annabelle is a prequel to The Conjuring‘s prologue that recycles said prologue for the purpose of reacquainting viewers with its title character, even though Annabelle is in fact an origin story. The Conjuring, of course, purports to be based on the actual exploits of the paranormal researchers fictionalized in Poltergeist, which was shot by Matthew F. Leonetti, brother of The Conjuring‘s DP John R. Leonetti, who moves into the director’s chair with Annabelle, a movie that arguably owes less to The Conjuring (despite labouring to evoke it) than to the malicious clown doll from Poltergeist. That low-frequency thrum you sometimes hear on its soundtrack is Hollywood getting ready to fold in on itself.