Horror Archives - Page 20 of 40 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Burning (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

August 21, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Lou David
screenplay by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein
directed by Tony Maylam

by Walter Chaw The pleasures of Tony Maylam’s The Burning, such as they are, arise when one engages it in an extra-textual conversation about why at the end of the American ’70s there suddenly bloomed an exploitation slasher subgenre to provide a nihilistic gateway into the Reagan ’80s. Really, when you look at the wonderland of ’80s blockbuster cinema, there is throughout an undercurrent of Friday the 13^ths and Elm Street flicks, of course, but also stuff like Slumber Party Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Maniac, Camps Cheerleader and Sleepaway, Mother’s Day (which Roger Ebert referred to as a “geek” show–the kind that bit heads off chickens, not the kind that founded Apple)…all the lurid VHS covers that made browsing the neighbourhood rental joint such delicious taboo delight. It’s that thrill that The Burning captures and evokes still–that feeling adolescent boys of a certain age got, pre-Internet, by renting something they shouldn’t rent with the suspicion, nay, promise, it would provoke the same erotic tingle as hardcore porn would in a couple years’ time. It’s a movie very much like Tolkien’s writing: if you don’t discover it in junior high, you’ll never appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated again.

Europa Report (2013)

August 13, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvyst, Sharlto Copley
screenplay by Philip Gelatt
directed by Sebastián Cordero

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Cordero’s found-footage sci-fi flick Europa Report tells the tale of the first manned trip to the titular moon of Jupiter in search of some kind of lifeform lurking there beneath a thick layer of ice. Never mind that this is a premise Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two already explored to similar consequence, nor that Europa Report is essentially an intergalactic The Blair Witch Project: best to focus on an unfortunate framing story that dumbs down the proceedings, emotionally and intellectually, at the exact moment the picture appears to be gaining momentum. It’s all the more puzzling, given the existence of something so pandering and condescending, that the group apparently most enamoured with this movie is the scientific community, who I would have guessed would have taken more offense at being talked down to. Maybe they’re so beaten into submission by the idiotic things Damon Lindelof passes off as “science” that they’re willing to forgive Europa Report its more minor trespasses.

The Fog (1980) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|The Howling (1981) [Special Edition] + The Fog (1980) [Special Edition] – DVDs

July 29, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Werewolf

The-fog-1

THE HOWLING
**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan, Christopher Stone
screenplay by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless
directed by Joe Dante

John Carpenter’s The Fog
***/****
BD – Image C+ Sound A Extras A
DVD – Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Houseman, Janet Leigh
screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw The theory is that gangs of artists working at around the same time in the same place, in complementary milieux, can lead to something like artistic Darwinism, a certain macho brinkmanship that pushes genres towards a kind of organic evolution. Within a very few years, artists like John Carpenter, John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Rob Bottin, Rick Baker, Sam Raimi, Brian DePalma, Bob Clark, Dan O’Bannon, Sean S. Cunningham, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Stan Winston, Larry Cohen, and on and on and so on, were working in and reinvigorating the horror genre–many under the tutelage of Roger Corman, still others the initial products of formal film school training, almost all the consequence of a particular movie geekism that would lead inevitably to the first rumblings of jokiness and self-referentiality-as-homage that reached its simultaneous pinnacle and nadir with Craven’s Scream. In the late 1970s into the early 1980s, however, that cleverness wasn’t so much the hateful, patronizing post-modernism of the last decade’s horror films as what feels like a genuine affection for the genre–an appreciation of the legacy of the Universal, Corman, and Hammer horror factory traditions.

6 Souls (2013) + Dead Souls (2012) – Blu-ray Discs

July 25, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Television, Thriller, Zombie

6 SOULS
Shelter
**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Julianne Moore, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Jeffreey DeMunn, Brooklyn Proulx
screenplay by Michael Cooney
directed by Marlind & Stein

DEAD SOULS
½*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C
starring Jesse James, Magda Apanowicz, Bill Moseley, Geraldine Hughes
screenplay by John Doolan
directed by Colin Theys

by Walter Chaw The best scene in the surprisingly-not-awful 6 Souls happens in a toothless hinterland, up yonder in them thar hills, ’round campfires and lean-tos and a wilderness of patchy facial hair, where forensic psychologist Cara (Julianne Moore) meets a Granny Holler Witch (Joyce Feurring), who is just indescribably awesome. She’s like a refugee from The Dark Crystal–the very incarnation of Aughra, blind but seeing through an albino familiar (Katiana Davis) as she performs psychic surgery, sucking up souls with her mouth and depositing them in a jar she calls “shelter.” Indeed, it’s such an awesome scene that it shows up how perfunctory the rest of Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein’s 6 Souls is; how the idea of a demon jumping bodies (like The Evil Dead, yes, but more like Fallen) can look very much like an early-’90s mid-prestige thriller and therefore not anything interesting or special. A shame, as the talent assembled for the piece is exceptional–Moore, certainly, along with the always-fabulous Jeffrey DeMunn as Cara’s dad Dr. Harding. It’s his fault that Cara gets involved with psych-patient Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who, in the process of manifesting multiple bad-accent theatre personalities, also seems to be manifesting their physical traits (like paralysis, say, and bad acting, too). Turns out it ain’t science afflicting our man Adam, but you knew that already.

Would You Rather (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

July 23, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller

½*/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Brittany Snow, Jeffrey Combs, Jonny Coyne, Lawrence Gilliard Jr.
screenplay by Steffen Schlachtenhaufen
directed by David Guy Levy

by Bill Chambers Iris (Brittany Snow) is a demure blonde vegetarian with a brother named Raleigh (Logan Miller) who’s dying of cancer. These traits, the only things we ever really learn about her, add up to a plucky determination that preordains Iris to be the Final Girl, though it means her character arc hinges on a reversal of expectations that haven’t been well established. In any case, mysterious philanthropist Lambrick (Jeffrey Combs, magically transformed into Stuart Wilson from Lethal Weapon 3) spots potential in her and invites her to join the eponymous high-stakes parlour game in David Guy Levy’s Would You Rather. Iris is poor as shit, and even if she did get that hostess job she’s interviewing for in the opening scene, the money it pays is hardly cancer money, ergo, she takes the bait: the promise of the best, most expensive medical care for her brother should she emerge victorious at Lambrick’s next gathering. What she doesn’t know is that the alternative to winning isn’t as easy as losing.

Lifeforce (1985) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

July 22, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire, Zombie

Lifeforce2

**/****Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May
screenplay by Dan O’Bannon & Don Jakoby, based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer The early 1980s must have been a weird time to be Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had made him one of the most notorious directors in the world, and Poltergeist vaulted him onto the A-list. He would have been on top of the world if not for an extended controversy over that film: Poltergeist was produced by Steven Spielberg, and there were widespread rumours that he actually directed it, too. Hooper denied it and Spielberg issued oddly-worded statements that permanently muddied the waters. Whatever the truth of their collaboration, the controversy was a blow to Hooper’s reputation. His Texas Chain Saw felt almost like outsider art–raw and twisted, it was the antithesis of the burnished Spielberg style. Poltergeist, on the other hand, was the very quintessence of a Steven Spielberg film, from its familiar suburban family in distress to its richly detailed mise en scène‎. If Hooper really did direct it, it doesn’t say much for his authorial voice that he left virtually no discernible fingerprints on the final product.

The Conjuring (2013)

July 19, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that a pineapple is an apple, James Wan’s latest exercise in jump-scare theatre is the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The Conjuring. In it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film begins lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of ghost-hunting, confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they’re called to the modest New England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former home of a WITCH! Can you fucking believe the luck? An evil witch lived in this house. Fuck. A witch. Motherfucker, am I right? You buy a house and you think that…anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts out innocently enough with the largely indistinguishable Perron girls getting jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of hide and clap (which sounds venereal but isn’t, unless you’re doing it really wrong) that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight of stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That’s when daddy Roger (Ron Livingston) calls the Warrens… Well, he doesn’t, because he’s away on a week-long business trip, and he’s a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn after the fact… Um… He’s not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan seems distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

Evil Dead (2013) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 15, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror

Evildead131

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
screenplay by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues, based on the screenplay by Sam Raimi
directed by Fede Alvarez

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The greatest irony of Fede Alvarez’s otherwise laudably straightforward reboot of Sam Raimi’s Spam-in-a-cabin classic The Evil Dead is that the moments where it references its primogenitor are actually the movie’s weakest. I’m thinking, in particular, of handsome young hero David (Shiloh Fernandez) getting thrown around a wet cellar in high Raimi smash-zoom style, which only underscores how much the original films drew their tone from Bruce Campbell–and how much this new one misses him. The danger of casting a group of beautiful people and taking itself deadly seriously (and jettisoning the “The,” in a gesture that reads as hipster insouciance) is that Evil Dead might draw closer to the mainstream and farther from its grindhouse roots. The small miracle of it, then, is that in both its absolute glee in finding the line of how much gore to show and then crossing it (a pair of glasses stop a hypodermic needle…but only for a moment) and its surprising efforts at locating a deeper thread in a frayed brother/sister relationship and the impact of drug addiction, Alvarez’s film is a solid, even affecting genre piece that allows for an abundance of memorable money shots. Compare its intelligence and earnestness, its infernal energy, against the disrespectfulness and self-satisfaction of The Cabin in the Woods to see that Evil Dead is not just a taste of the old religion, it’s really pretty great.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.

World War Z (2013)

June 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Zombie

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 17, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Romance, Television, Vampire

Image A- Sound A Extras B
“Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Authority Always Wins,” “Whatever I Am, You Made Me,” “We’ll Meet Again,” “Let’s Boot and Rally,” “Hopeless,” “In the Beginning,” “Somebody That I Used to Know,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Sunset,” “Save Yourself”

by Bill Chambers In general, TV series aren’t built to last beyond four seasons. I think it has something to do with how the educational system teaches us that four-year cycles end in graduation. Showrunners consequently feel an obligation to symbolically reboot in season five–to send the high-schoolers off to college (“Dawson’s Creek”), to recast the leads (“The Dukes of Hazzard”), to have Fonzie waterski over Jaws (“Happy Days”). To be fair, redefining the status quo doesn’t always mean jumping the shark: for every Cousin Oliver, after all, there’s a Dawn Summers. Unfortunately, “True Blood” is not one of the exceptions to the rule, as it goes off the rails in its fifth season in a way that is different from those countless other times it seemed to be flying a kamikaze mission towards ratings oblivion. (This is a show that has elevated jumping the shark to an artform.) A good chunk of the season is devoted to vampires–creatures who can, in the “True Blood”-verse, run like The Flash, fly, and fuck like pornstars–sitting around a conference table debating politics and religion, and the other “super” groups don’t exactly pick up the slack, what with the werewolves holding auditions for a new pack leader and the faes throwing slumber parties with their new BFF, Sookie.

This Is the End (2013)

June 12, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Horror, Theatrical, Zombie

**½/****
starring James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel
written and directed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg

by Angelo Muredda Whatever its dramatic hiccups, This is the End can at least boast that it’s one of the better full-length adaptations of a trailer. In 2007, Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel starred in a 90-second sizzle reel–co-scripted by Rogen and Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg–about their efforts to stay alive amidst an unspecified global catastrophe. As scrappy comedy skits go, “Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse” was pretty good, a charming riff on the actors’ schlubby personas as well as a pitch for more time and a bigger budget to drive home their unlikely survival story. The trouble with This Is the End, a funny but belaboured riff on that premise, is that it’s still trying to close the sale long after the project’s been greenlit, ingratiating itself to an audience already on board. In their joint directorial debut, Rogen and Goldberg show a knack for characterization but seem anxious about where to go from there, squandering a gifted ensemble in a procession of spotty “what if” scenarios that don’t resemble a movie so much as a glimpse into a celebrity edition of charades in Judd Apatow’s basement.

Warm Bodies (2013) – Blu-ray + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

June 4, 20132013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Romance, Teen, Zombie

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Rob Corddry, John Malkovich
screenplay by Jonathan Levine, based on the novel by Isaac Marion
directed by Jonathan Levine

by Bryant Frazer The American zombie movie was born in October 1968 with the release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and it’s a measure of how subversive that film and its sequels truly were that zombies only became palatable to the major studios in 2004, when a kid named Zack Snyder stripped Dawn of the Dead of its original class-conscious, anti-consumerist premise–inverted it, even, by making a zombie movie that pandered to the shopping-mall multiplex crowd rather than ripping into it. Given its success, it’s hard to believe it has taken almost another ten years for the sub-genre to be completely transformed by a Hollywood establishment that’s turned so timid and equivocal in its thrill-seeking ways that it begrudges even the zombies their killing sport. Yes, somebody somewhere decided that what zombies really need, more than forty years on, is a redemption story. Director Jonathan Levine doesn’t put a stake through the heart of the sub-genre, quite, but he does something that might be worse. With Warm Bodies, he’s made the first middle-aged zombie film.

Dark Skies (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

May 27, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

Darkskies3

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, J.K. Simmons
written and directed by Scott Stewart

by Bill Chambers Dark Skies takes place in the days leading up to the Fourth of July. The movie thus promises fireworks–and it delivers, albeit on a modest scale befitting its humble suburban milieu. Like Signs, it’s such an insular take on the alien-visitation genre it could almost be performed on the stage; unlike Signs, it’s not pious to a fault (surprisingly, given that writer-director Scott Stewart previously made Legion and Priest), and its lapses in logic aren’t as maddening because they’re built into the film’s very ethos, with a Whitley Streiber type (lent unexpected pathos by a Hunter S. Thompson-dressed J.K. Simmons) opining late in the proceedings that aliens are unfathomable to us in the same way that humans are unfathomable to lab rats. There are a lot of superficial similarities to Signs, actually, such as the way the picture uses asthma and walkie-talkie devices as narrative keystones and its climactic transformation of the family home into a fortress. For that matter, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are liberally paraphrased as well; over three films, Stewart has shown himself to be nothing if not a magpie artist. The good news, which would normally be upsetting news, is that the producers of Dark Skies are Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who seem to rein in Stewart’s other bad habits, like snail’s pacing and a tendency towards arcane mythology. Third time’s the charm.

Mama (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + Ultraviolet

May 13, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, DVD, Horror, Spain

Mama1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nélisse
screenplay by Neil Cross and Andy Muschietti & Barbara Muschietti
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Bill Chambers Mama is about a woman who doesn’t want kids being forced into motherhood by her pigheaded boyfriend. Yes, it’s a horror movie, but that’s ostensibly not the scary part–that would be the titular ghost who challenges our heroine to a mom-off for the souls of two little girls. Mama has watched over them since their crazed father Jeffrey (the suddenly omnipresent Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), still smarting from a bad day on Wall Street that saw him going postal, tried to execute them in a remote cabin in the woods. Five years later, Jeffrey’s brother Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) finally hits pay dirt in his obsessive search for his nieces when a routine check turns up the cabin with the girls inside, now feral and living on cherries.¹ Not that I’m asking for a prequel, but I’d love to–and would perhaps rather–see those lost years, the gradual breakdown of these kids’ language, hygiene, decorum. Alas, the Western cinema is preoccupied with domestication, which is where this sincerely well-made movie gets into trouble.

The Blob (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 22, 20132013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, The Criterion Collection

Blobcap1

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Steven McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, George Karas
screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, from an idea by Irvine H. Millgate
directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.

by Jefferson Robbins Burt Bacharach and Mack David’s sock-hoppin’ title-track lyrics aside, the key creature of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s The Blob never “leaps.” Sure, it sort of lunges up a stick to absorb an old hermit’s paw, but mostly what it does is ooze around, digest flesh, and act as the centring point for the film’s fine balance of character, pacing, and grace in the face of certain doom. While The Blob has its light moments, it’s seldom again as carefree as its opening credits would seem to portend. The blob crashes within its meteor case into a riven small-town society and drives it–the way all good monsters do–to better know and reconcile with itself.

Evil Dead (2013) + Beyond the Hills (2012)

April 4, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Romania, Theatrical

EVIL DEAD
***½/****
starring Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
screenplay by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues, based on the screenplay by Sam Raimi
directed by Fede Alvarez

BEYOND THE HILLS
****/****
starring Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuta, Dana Tapalaga
screenplay by Cristian Mungiu, inspired by the non-fiction novels of Tatiana Niculescu Bran
directed by Cristian Mungiu

Countess Dracula (1971)/The Vampire Lovers (1970) [Midnite Movies Double Feature] – DVD|The Vampire Lovers (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

March 24, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Vampire

COUNTESS DRACULA
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A
starring Ingrid Pitt, Nigel Green, Sandor Eles, Maurice Denham
screenplay by Jeremy Paul
directed by Peter Sasdy

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
***/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
BD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Ingrid Pitt, George Cole, Kate O’Mara, Peter Cushing
screenplay by Tudor Gates, based on the story “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu
directed by Roy Ward Baker

by Walter Chaw Britain’s Hammer Studios all but defined the period horror film from the late-Fifties on, making matinee idols of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and erstwhile vampire hunter Van Helsing. But musty is what most Hammer productions remain (with notable exceptions like Quatermass and the Pit), and as the drive-in exploitation ethic of Herschell Gordon Lewis began to redefine the limits of what could be shown with regards to gore and nudity in the United States (arguably, the European films that found currency in the Sixties with a more sophisticated audience had as much or more to do with the “opening” of America’s notorious piety), the studio found itself distressingly out of touch–Merchant/Ivory doing The Matrix.

The Vampire Diaries: The Complete First Season (2009-2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 7, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Romance, Teen, Television, Vampire

Image C+ Sound B- Extras C-
“Pilot,” “The Night of the Comet,” “Friday Night Bites,””Family Ties,” “You’re Undead to Me,” “Lost Girls,” “Haunted,” “162 Candles,” “History Repeating,” “The Turning Point,” “Bloodlines,” “Unpleasantville,” “Children of the Damned,” “Fool Me Once,” “A Few Good Men,” “There Goes the Neighborhood,” “Let the Right One In,” “Under Control,” “Miss Mystic Falls,” “Blood Brothers,” “Isobel,” “Founder’s Day”

by Walter Chaw You can diagnose things like Kevin Williamson’s tween opera “The Vampire Diaries” by how much of the dialogue consists of peoples’ names. “Hey, Ben is with Carrie down in the tomb with Josie and Halley. Chris said he and Caroline would meet us there, but then Damon said that Stefan was going instead, but Stefan still has feelings for Elena…” OMFG, amiright? Add to that a liberal use of music by the likes of Matt Kearney, The Fray, and Bat for Lashes, mix sloppily with flavour-of-the-month genre fetish, and, voilà!, the kind of thing everyone describes as a “guilty pleasure”–which basically means they’re not telling you they also enjoy “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”. The remainder of the dialogue is interested in secret parentage, secret siblings, and this and that about lore to establish credibility while simultaneously demonstrating that everyone involved in this one has read more books than Stephenie Meyer (a low bar) and is aware of Stephenie Meyer…and Heath Ledger…and Emily Brontë. Never mind, you wouldn’t understand. Similarly difficult to understand are magic rings that allow vampires to walk around in daylight, ancient tombs sealed by Creole witches led by that bitch from “A Different World”, and a complex series of events that need to happen before one of this show’s vampires are able to turn one of this show’s hot little nymphos into a vampire. It’s a metaphor–not for abstinence, per se, but maybe for embarrassing tumescence. That’s right, “The Vampire Diaries” is a boner joke.

The Apparition (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 27, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror

Apparition6

*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras HILARIOUS
starring Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton, Julianna Guill
written and directed by Todd Lincoln

by Walter Chaw I think you enter into a handshake agreement with The Apparition that it’s never, not for a moment, going to be scary when in its prologue, we’re introduced to Harry Potter alum Tom “Draco” Felton as a grad student or something in a Doc Brown helmet prattling on about “anomalistic psychology” in that affected, pained way the Harry Potter alums (see: Emma “Hermione” Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower) seem to have adopted post-franchise. Or maybe it’s the first scene between central pretties Kelly and Ben (Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan), which, without fail, sports extra, meaningless, unintentionally hysterical blank reaction shots, thus announcing, in addition to hyphenate Todd Lincoln’s inability to cast, his inability to frame shots or hire an editor (or three, as the case may be). To The Apparition‘s credit, though, milquetoast hero Ben is wearing the Bauhaus T-shirt I used to wear in high school when I wasn’t trying to be hip, so…yay for being old enough to have a direct connection to a hipster reference. As for the rest of it, it’s kind of astonishing that this didn’t land as a dtv relic submitted for the immediate disapproval of the Netflix-streaming peanut gallery.