Horror Archives - Page 30 of 41 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Illustrated Man (1969) – DVD

February 22, 20071960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas, Don Dubbins
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek, based on the book by Ray Bradbury
directed by Jack Smight

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man (hereafter The Illustrated Man) lays its cards out on the table right from the start. There's not much going on, just a couple of drifters named Carl (Rod Steiger) and Willie (Robert Drivas) taking a dip in the river, unaware of each other's presence. It should have been fairly simple to communicate this, but director Jack Smight is no simpleton: he throws the cuts at you, struggling to achieve with sweeping helicopter shots and other ephemera an effect he ultimately can't articulate. This pretty much sums up the movie, a series of attempts to look like somebody's working when nobody has any idea why they bothered. Coupled with Steiger's obnoxious persona and Drivas' blankness, The Illustrated Man is largely a hole in the screen that turns Ray Bradbury's gripping anthology of the same name into something sluggish and unpleasant to behold.

The Devil’s Rain (1975) – DVD

February 13, 20071970s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Zombie

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner
screenplay by James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, Gerald Hopman
directed by Robert Fuest

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Devil's Rain is like a bad song you can't get out of your head. It isn't a successful film, or even a particularly good one, but it's made with sincerity, verve, and an understanding of the horror genre's potential for kinetic filmmaking and potent allegory. Moreover, it isn't a cheat–this isn't just another cheap cash-in on the "Satan" craze of the 1970s. The last thing director Robert Fuest and screenwriters James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, and Gerald Hopman are looking to do is take your money and run. And though this is largely a trend of the mid-to-late-'80s onward, they aren't looking to vindicate their reputations by condescending to the material, either. I actually feel a little protective of The Devil's Rain; its failure is one more of incompetence than of cynicism, and that's really rather reinvigorating in an age where self-consciousness reigns supreme in horror films both good (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and bad (See No Evil).

The Addams Family: Volume One (1964-1965) + Bones: Season One (2005-2006) – DVDs

January 31, 20071960s, 2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Television

THE ADDAMS FAMILY: VOLUME ONE
Image B Sound B- Extras B+
"The Addams Family Goes to School," "Morticia and the Psychiatrist," "Fester's Punctured Romance," "Gomez, the Politician," "The Addams Family Tree," "Morticia Joins the Ladies League," "Halloween with the Addams Family," "Green-Eyed Gomez," "New Neighbors Meet the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets the V.I.P.s," "Morticia, the Matchmaker," "Lurch Learns to Dance," "Art and the Addams Family," "The Addams Family Meets a Beatnik," "The Addams Family Meets the Undercover Man," "Mother Lurch Visits the Addams Family," "Uncle Fester's Illness," "The Addams Family Splurges," "Cousin Itt Visits the Addams Family," "The Addams Family in Court," "Amnesia in the Addams Family"

BONES: SEASON ONE
Image A Sound A+ Extras C-
"Pilot," "The Man in the S.U.V.," "A Boy in a Tree," "The Man in the Bear," "A Boy in a Bush," "The Man in the Wall," "The Man on Death Row," "The Girl in the Fridge," "The Man in the Fallout Shelter," "The Woman in the Airport," "The Woman in the Car," "The Superhero in the Alley," "The Woman in the Garden," "The Man on the Fairway," "Two Bodies in the Lab," "The Woman in the Tunnel," "The Skull in the Desert," "The Man with the Bone," "The Man in the Morgue," "The Graft in the Girl," "The Soldier in the Grave," "The Woman in Limbo"

by Ian Pugh Charles Addams's darkest cartoons for THE NEW YORKER were routinely hilarious, not just for their brazen denial of the nuclear family unit, but also because, unlike so many of the publication's other strips, they take their one-panel restrictions to heart without coming off as smarmy. Moreover, Addams's scenarios were simple without being stupid, e.g., family of ghouls about to dump boiling oil on Christmas carollers. The problem in turning these characters into a half-hour sitcom, namely "The Addams Family", should be self-evident: it bloats the brisk silliness into a particularly tiresome game of "Opposite Day"–thirty minutes of a family that cheerfully approves of the macabre and homicidal while despising normalcy and respectability.

Sundance ’07: Fido

January 24, 20072000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Sundance, Zombie

*/****starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelsonscreenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Curriedirected by Andrew Currie by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes a grade-school teacher turns on the lights…

Sundance ’07: Teeth

January 24, 20072000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Thriller

*½/****starring Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Applemanwritten and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein by Alex Jackson I was very excited when I first stumbled upon the notion of the vagina dentata, as it provides for a distinctly female version of sexual aggression: Unlike the male rape drive, it's not about power, it's about taking power away from men--cannibalism and castration. I should have known that Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth would not be the film to really explore this notion as soon as I learned that it's literally about a teenage girl who discovers she has teeth in her vaginal cavity.…

See No Evil (2006) – DVD

January 12, 20072000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Kane, Christina Vidal, Luke Pegler, Samantha Noble
screenplay by Dan Madigan
directed by Gregory Dark

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gregory Dark started out directing adult films–I've been told that his award-winning Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout White Chicks is a classic of the miscegenation genre–and had moved up to music videos when he was offered See No Evil, his first feature film (as well as the first film produced under the WWE banner). The idea that Dark sees this movie as his ticket to the big leagues is as good an explanation as any for its smarmy tone. Still embarrassed about making a slasher picture (and, by extension, his stigmatic beginnings), he distances himself from the material by condescending to it: If he's better than B-movie claptrap, then that means he's an A-list filmmaker, right? I have no idea where Dark wants to be near the end of his career, but the attitude he brings to See No Evil is that of a climber and not of a serious artist who happens to be relegated to the periphery of the mainstream.

Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster (1965) – DVD

December 6, 2006****/****, 1960s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image B- Sound C+
starring Marilyn Hanold, Jim Karen, Lou Cutell, Nancy Marshall
screenplay by R.H.W. Dillard, George Garrett and John Rodenbeck
directed by Robert Gaffney

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Now, I think we're allowed to define these terms for ourselves (fans of exploitation movies being a friendly and decidedly unpretentious bunch), but the way I see it, there's a sharp difference in style between B-movies and Z-movies. B-movies are your creature features. Their narratives are actually quite strongly defined and they tend to produce a rather primitive but potent and genuine emotional reaction from the audience. You can picture yourself seeing these films at a drive-in double feature or maybe a Saturday matinee. In contrast, Z-movies are all jumbled noise. The audience does not exactly have an emotional reaction to Z-movies, they just watch them in a sort of dissociated daze. You could never imagine seeing Z-movies at an actual movie theatre or drive-in. The only place where they could possibly play is on a local unaffiliated television station at three in the morning.

Henry II: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1998) + Tales from the Crypt Presents Ritual (2002)

November 1, 20061990s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Horror, Thriller, ZERO STARS, Zombie

Henry Part 2
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Part 2
ZERO STARS/**** Image C Sound D Extras D
starring Neil Giuntoli, Rich Komenich, Kate Walsh, Carri Levinson
written and directed by Chuck Parello

RITUAL
*½/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Jennifer Grey, Craig Sheffer, Daniel Lapaine, Kristen Wilson
screenplay by Rob Cohen and Avi Nesher, based on the screenplay for I Walked with a Zombie by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray
directed by Avi Nesher

by Walter Chaw John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is that rare exploitation film that at once transcends and wallows in the ugly strictures of its sub-genre. A commentary on itself by dint of its honesty and intelligence, it lives and dies by the irony that despite the extremes to which it goes in its imagining and depiction of atrocity, it succeeds mainly through the quality of its reserve. It's maybe the first realistic-seeming film about a serial killer in that any prurient satisfaction one derives from the events depicted therein one suspects is entirely due to the angle of twist to one's own shadow. It's both a personality and an endurance test–and at the end of it we're left feeling as though we've witnessed some kind of emotional documentary about the psychic toll of murder on the societal organism. At its heart, it's an experiment in collectivism where the individual is tested against the insurgent: the body politic challenged to cohere against an anarchist. The power of Henry is that it engenders something like hope–an almost naïve belief that the humanity represented by the audience will identify with the dregs of society because said dregs, likable in no other way, are being preyed upon by something other than human. And humans, no matter how irredeemable, are still the "home team," as it were.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – DVD

October 30, 2006****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country's history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we're not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor–and we're glad that he's dead, too.

Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes (2003) – DVD

October 26, 20062000s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Television

Image A Sound A Extras A-
"Naked Beach Frenzy," "Stimpy's Pregnant," "Altruists," "Ren Seeks Help," "Fire Dogs, Part 2," "Onward and Upward"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There are, believe it or not, those who miss the days of the Production Code as a tool for making writers try harder to suggest things instead of spelling them out. I never really bought into the argument, but it seems almost sensible to me now that I've seen Ren and Stimpy unleashed and uncensored. To be sure, no loyalist can be without the six adventures contained on Paramount's new-to-DVD "Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes" (only half of which ever reached the airwaves, under the banner "Ren & Stimpy 'Adult Party Cartoon'"), whose scripts were suppressed by Nickelodeon for being too raunchy for kids; and when they're on, they take the formula out of the cage of decency so that it might run around free and unfettered. Alas, the introduction of naked women and actual foul language somehow dampens the charm of the Nickelodeon run. The thrill of "Ren & Stimpy" lies in its childish, anal-stage irresponsibility, with its suppression of the sexual in favour of the scatological–to say nothing of the florid insults ("You bloated sack of protoplasm!") with which mere expletives can't possibly compete.

Slither (2006) – DVD

October 23, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Rooker, Gregg Henry
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw Paying tribute to his Lloyd Kaufman roots with a shot in which The Toxic Avenger is on TV in the background, James Gunn's Slither is more in line with the hipster revisionism of his screenplay for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. Postmodernism its point, then, drying up the musty cellars somewhat of the films it riffs on, Slither misses when it does only because it has little resonance beyond the basic Cronenbergian sexual-parasites thing and the shopworn idea that Americans are voracious, disgusting, ignorant swine. (In truth, the one moment that really bugs me is a fairly demented rape sequence (involving more infant-menace than anything in the new The Hills Have Eyes) and its played-for-giggles fallout.) In place of useful sociology, it does for redneck archetypes what Shaun of the Dead did for workaday slobs, poking fun at the thin line between slack-jawed yokels (initiating deer season with a barn-busting hoedown) and beef-craving, slug-brained zombies (recalling that NASCAR now boasts its own brand of meat). The biggest surprise is that Gunn appears to have seen and liked Night of the Creeps, and that, like that film, Slither does what it does without sacrificing too much of its good-natured, self-deprecating sense of humour along the way.

Marie Antoinette (2006) + Tideland (2006)

October 19, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Canada, Coming of Age, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, France, Horror, Japan, Theatrical, UK

MARIE ANTOINETTE
**½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
directed by Sofia Coppola

TIDELAND
***½/****
starring Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Brendan Fletcher, Jennifer Tilly
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni, based on the novel by Mitch Cullin
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw In going from The Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola appears to be charting the arc of her own soft, unstructured dive into the morass of melancholia and regret, discovering her voice along the way in the bell tones of Kirsten Dunst, who plays a fourteen-year-old in The Virgin Suicides and, at the start of Coppola's latest film, a fourteen-year-old again, the Austrian Archduchess Marie Antoinette. Coppola's "Fast Times at Palais Versailles" opens with Marie loping through her Austrian palace, just another sleepy, stupid girl with a tiny dog, one poised to have the fate of two countries riding on her ability to produce a male offspring. Betrothed to nebbish French King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), she's put into a French court ruled by gossip and bloodline (in one of the film's few literal moments, Marie offers that her waking ritual attended by what seems the entire family plot is "ridiculous") and, while crowned with the mantle of governance, thrust into the role of most popular girl in school, sprung fully-grown as the captain of the football team's best girl. It's impossible for me to not see something of Coppola's own premature coronation as the emotional centre of her father's own royal court, the third Godfather film–and to see in the intense media scrutiny afforded her in the wake of that fiasco the source of all these films about lost youth and the pain of hard choices made on her behalf. Marie Antoinette isn't a historical film so much as it's a dress-up picture; and like most any work of honesty, it's autobiographical (as indicated by its selection of '80s punk-influenced pop) and intensely vulnerable–at least for most of its first hour.

Feast (2006) [Unrated] + The Woods (2006) – DVDs

October 9, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

FEAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Navi Rawat, Clu Gulager
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by John Gulager

THE WOODS
***½/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Agnes Bruckner, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel Nichols, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by David Ross
directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw I’m surprised that more great films aren’t shuttled to the direct-to-video twilight zone, seeing as how mainstream taste-makers, particularly in regards to genre pictures, seem primarily invested in churning out the same pre-masticated gruel. At the very least, prefab garbage like School for Scoundrels might as well have been dumped on the home market without a ripple in the fabric of daily life. (Something like Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game, on the other hand, deserved a theatrical release: Disguised as a dtv unload, it’s the best thriller in years.) Between their low budgets, how they perform without bankable leads, and how they pretty much guarantee a healthy return on their investments, it’s almost inexplicable that horror movies get exiled to Blockbuster as often as they do. You can learn a lot about a people from the mythologies they construct to frighten and warn, although because horror films are bankable product (and always were), they fall prey to the same venal, filthy lucre-inspired pitfalls of formula drudgery. Still, I like to refer to them as the “indicator species” of our cultural swamp in that they’re not only ugly, dirty, bottom-feeding, what have you, but also the first species of entertainment to reflect the elements polluting the spirit of this exact moment in our social history. If you can find the pulse of it, a horror movie will tell you a lot about that quickening in your own chest when you watch the evening news.

Three… Extremes (2005) + Hellbent (2005) – DVDs

September 26, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, South Korea, Thriller

THREE… EXTREMES
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
DUMPLINGS-The Hong Kong Extreme: starring Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling
screenplay by Lilian Lee
directed by Fruit Chan
CUT-The Korean Extreme: starring Lee Byung-Hun, Lim Won-Hee
written and directed by Park Chanwook
BOX-The Japan Extreme: starring Kyoko Hasegawa,Atsuro Watabe
screenplay by Haruko Fukushima
directed by Takashi Miike

HELLBENT
***½/**** Image C- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dylan Fergus, Bryan Kirkwood, Hank Harris, Andrew Levitas
written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts

by Walter Chaw My favourite working cinematographer is Harris Savides. His collaborations with Gus Van Sant and his contribution to Jonathan Glazer's Birth demonstrate to me an agility with aspect ratio and rhythm that's particularly pleasing to my own ways of seeing. A close second, though, is Christopher Doyle, the great Australian cinematographer who teams almost exclusively with Asian directors (most notably on the bulk of Wong Kar Wai's visually arresting filmography, Zhang Yimou's Hero, and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe)–his stuff indicative of a kind of lyrical, ritualistic devouring that matches the best of the Asian sensibility in pace and narrative. Doyle joins an elite crowd (Greg Toland, James Wong Howe, Raoul Coutard, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall, and a select few others) of cinematographers worthy of the auteur label: a certain mood, a certain style, haunts every frame on which he works with a distinct, unmistakable bouquet. He's an interesting choice, then, as the only constant of an anthology film, Three… Extremes, a sequel in structure to an Asian portmanteau from a couple years back, featuring, again, three different frontline Asian directors, each enlisted to provide a horror-based short film.

TIFF ’06: The Last Winter

September 18, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Iceland, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

***/****starring Ron Perlman, James Le Gros, Connie Britton, Zachary Gilfordscreenplay by Larry Fessenden & Robert Leaverdirected by Larry Fessenden by Bill Chambers Larry Fessenden has always been an artist and a consummate professional, but there's a newfound commercial glaze to The Last Winter--however ironic its use of widescreen--that makes one feel somehow less inclined to coddle it. An ambiguous statement, I know; I guess what I'm saying is that if I have any reservations about the piece (and I had fewer about Wendigo and Habit), I don't really fear seeming anti-intellectual in voicing them. Fessenden's own private The Thing, The Last…

Eaten Alive (1977) [Special Edition] – DVD

September 18, 20061970s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror

a.k.a. Death Trap, Legend of the Bayou, Murder on the Bayou, Starlight Slaughter, Horror Hotel, Horror Hotel Massacre
**½/**** Image C+* Sound B Extras B+
starring Neville Brand, Mel Ferrer, Carolyn Jones, Marilyn Burns
screenplay by Alvin L. Fast, Kim Henkel and Mardi Rustam
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Alex Jackson The disparity between the reputation of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and that of everything he made thereafter had been eating away at me ever since I polished off his 1977 follow-up, Eaten Alive. You see, Eaten Alive seemed to me to be very much the same movie as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, only instead of a maniac with a chainsaw and a sledgehammer, it had a maniac with a sickle and a man-eating crocodile. Why exactly is it that critics and audiences alike consider The Texas Chain Saw Massacre canonical, a masterpiece of the genre, while Eaten Alive floundered in relative obscurity until being referenced in a Quentin Tarantino film?

The TIFFing Point

September 14, 2006Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Blog, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Horror, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF, UK, War

Two more days until I turn back into a pumpkin (or something like that), probably for the good of not only my health, but also that of FILM FREAK CENTRAL. Anyway, some more stopgap coverage for you…

FAY GRIM (d. Hal Hartley)
As far as this unlikely sequel to the brilliant Henry Fool is concerned, those hoping for a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. The movie feels like it came out of Hartley sideways (or, conversely, all too painlessly), and it never really catches fire until Thomas Jay Ryan makes his long-delayed cameo as Henry Fool. By then, it’s too little too late. **/****

The Protector (2005) + The Covenant (2006)

September 13, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Thailand, Thriller

Tom yum goong
***/****
starring Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Xing Jing
screenplay by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee & Napalee & Piyaros Thongdee and Joe Wannapin
directed by Prachya Pinkaew

THE COVENANT
½*/****
starring Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Laura Ramsey, Taylor Kitsch
screenplay by J.S. Cardone
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Tony Jaa is a bad motherfucker. There's a moment in his latest export The Protector where it appears as though he's killed someone with his penis (lo, how I would love to avoid that epitaph), and in the meantime, he dispatches foes with the heedless joy of obvious predecessor Jackie Chan (who has a cameo in the film shot so ineptly that it suggests a Jackie Chan impersonator smeared with Vaseline). Alas, there's a plot (something about the kidnapping of two elephants, one of which is turned into a gaudy tchotcke in an evil dragon lady's den of inequity), too, told through a lot of howlingly incompetent narrative chunks you could seemingly rearrange in any order with no tangible disruption of sense. (The Butchers Weinstein may of course be partly to blame.) The film is easily the funniest, most exhilaratingly ridiculous picture in a year in which Snakes on a Plane aspired to the same camp/cult heights, and it does it the only way that you can: by being deadly serious.

TIFF ’06: The Host

September 10, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, South Korea, TIFF

Gue-mool ***½/**** starring Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doo-na, Ko Ah-sung screenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Hah Joon-won, Baek Chul-hyun directed by Bong Joon-ho by Bill Chambers I knew I would love The Host as soon as I realized that the man in the surgical scrubs was none other than national treasure Scott Wilson, who, in his most heinous role since In Cold Blood (or maybe Shiloh), observes dust on the jars of formaldehyde in the morgue of a South Korean military base and bullies a reluctant attendant into disposing of them by dumping their contents down the sink. It's…

My TIFF So Far

September 9, 2006Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Mexico, Sci-Fi, South Korea, TIFF

Seems we’re all a little constipated right now but rest assured reviews are on the way; here’s a quick rundown of TIFFpix screened thus far by yours truly.

BABEL (d. Alejandro González Iñárritu)
It coheres better than 21 Grams, but Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga are really spinning their wheels at this point. A few funny extratextual lessons are imparted: never take a Fanning to Mexico (Elle has almost as harrowing an adventure there as sister Dakota does in Man on Fire); and never trust a director who includes a post-script dedication to his children. As with 21 Grams, though, Babel doesn’t make room for any intentional levity, eventually desensitizing you to all the calculated anguish. *½/****