In the upcoming indie chiller “The Vigil” a troubled young man encounters a malevolent spirit while watching over the body of deceased man from his Jewish community in Brooklyn. It’s a religious ritual where the person watching (called a shomer if male, a shomeret if female) both protects and comforts the deceased’s soul until time […]
Shawn Linden’s “Hunter Hunter” wasn’t at all what I expected. Its crafty advertising sells a deep woods thriller about a wolf terrorizing a wilderness family. To be fair that is a big part of the movie. But as the film sets your eyes in one direction it then broadsides you with a story full of […]
REVIEW: “Hunter Hunter” (2020)
I realise this might be slightly controversial view, based on what I have read about this movie right after seeing it, but… I need to say what I feel. The ending didn’t work for me the way it (apparently) worked for most of the people on the Internet. Which slightly hinders my enjoyment of the […]
Ready or Not (2019) Review – All About That Ending
“Yeah, I’ll do your little movie,” the pitch meeting ended, probably a short one, probably handled by phone. But the Oscar winning actor had one rider he insisted on in his contract. “I’ll do it so long as I don’t have to talk.” Say this for the quixotic career of Nicolas Cage, Academy Award winner, […]
Movie Review: Let’s turn Nic Cage loose in “Willy’s Wonderland”
A part of me would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the crazy idea for “Spontaneous” was pitched to the studio heads. “It’s an adaptation of a book about high school students who inexplicably begin exploding in class. And I mean literally blowing up, spraying blood all over their classmates […]
Prisoners of the Ghostland is a collaboration between America’s most bonkers actor, Nicolas Cage, and Japanese auteur Sion Sono, known for grotesque violence, extreme eroticism, and surreal imagery. I’m not the biggest fan of Nic Cage’s recent reincarnation as a b-movie cartoon, but I thought this combination was made in movie heaven and couldn’t wait to […]
Sundance 2021: Prisoners of the Ghostland
Really bad decisions and horror movies go together like peanut butter and jelly. There are countless examples: reading the blood-inked Necronomicon, attempting to tame a zombie, reaching down to pull the mask off a downed serial killer, saying Candyman’s name five times to a mirror. In the upcoming “The Devil Below” a group of amateur […]
First Glance: “The Devil Below”
Iranian-American director Kourosh Ahari delivers a striking feature film debut with “The Night”, a cerebral slice of psychological horror that impresses as much with its style as it does with its ability to get under your skin. Set within the creepy confines of an old history-rich hotel, “The Night” does what so many other good […]
One of the biggest surprises coming out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival has been “Eight for Silver”, a gory old-fashioned horror movie that offers a fresh spin on the age-old werewolf story. The film comes from British writer-director Sean Ellis who is no stranger to debuting his films at Sundance. His latest film looks […]
SUNDANCE REVIEW: “Eight for Silver” (2021)
By the time it reached streaming screens in 2021, The Empty Man was so buried that it might as well have never existed. Although filming wrapped in 2017, 21st Century Fox didn’t release it before they were acquired by the Walt Disney Company in early 2019. Realising that this type of horror didn’t really sit […]
Her name is Enid, and she’s a film censor, the person who negotiates the bad language, graphic violence, drug use, and nudity of a film, deciding just how much can be kept in and retain an R rating, and which films will either need to be edited, or bumped up to NC-17 and so on. […]
Whatever you do don’t confuse Jayro Bustamante’s “La Llorona” with 2019’s promising but ultimately disappointing “The Curse of La Llorona”. The two couldn’t be more different, their only real connection being the ubiquitous Latin American folk tale of “The Weeping Woman”. Bustamante has a much more sobering ambition, using the ghostly legend as a means […]
As far as “fears” go, I typically prefer mysterious and unknown peril to frights shoved in my face, explained, back-storied and underlined. But that’s now how the “Wrong Turn” movies work. For twenty years these films have gotten good looking actresses and actors lost in America and the world’s fast-disappearing wild places, menaced by whatever […]
Movie Review: “Wrong Turn” leads to terror and torture porn on the Appalachian Trail
MY CALL: Although far from great, this was a pleasantly surprising SyFy original TV movie. The acting and creature effects were more than sufficient to entertain me through this otherwise very familiar story. MORE MOVIES LIKE Dead in the Water: Well, first off, Sea Fever (2019) did it better. Looking for much better horror at […]
John’s Horror Corner: Dead in the Water (2018), a serviceable SyFy original creature feature at sea.
As the powerhouse explains, a neck injury enhanced her demented turn as Shirley Jackson. But other than that, Moss insists she’s no method actor.
Elisabeth Moss Runs on Pain, Real and Imaginary, in ‘The Invisible Man’ and ‘Shirley’
MY CALL: This is top-notch science fiction, complete with horror like action and a fantastic monster, and gift-wrapped in an atmospheric thriller. Huge recommendation. I loved this! MORE MOVIES LIKE Sputnik: The best double-feature suggestion I have for this would be Life (2017). Distantly related, much less pithy, and more to the tune of grimy […]
Sputnik is a film I knew very little about before watching it. Okay, I guess the title is a bit of a giveaway but I hadn’t watched any trailers or read any reviews. It was just the simplicity of the poster above that made me believe this film was worth watching, and when that happens, […]
Sputnik 2020. Find Earth and Reep.
Sinema izleyicisine karşı takınılması gerektiği tavır sinema tarihi boyunca tartışma konusu olmuştur. Film, izleyicisine ne tür bir deneyim sunmalıdır? Onu mutlu mu, yoksa mutsuz mu etmelidir? Filmlerin amacı duyguyu yansıtmak mıdır, yoksa izleyicinin kendi içindekine dokunmak mıdır? Sinema, estetiği itibariyle iyi ve güzel masalsı bir dille mi anlatmalıdır, yoksa bizi suratımıza yumruğu mu patlatmalıdır? Gaspar […]
Rahatsız Ediciliğin Doruk Noktası: Climax
Director: Christopher Landon Starring: Kathryn Newton, Vince Vaughn, Celeste O’Connor Review Author: Tony Synopsis: Millie is a high school student forced to survive the cruel world of high school while comforting her damaged mother following the recent death of her father. To make matters worse, the town’s infamous serial killer, The Blissfield Butcher, has reemerged. After a faithful […]
Now I’ve watched all the Final Destination films, here are my final thoughts. I was initially drawn to the franchise due to the interesting concept. In too many horror films the villain is something solid and escapable whereas here you’ll get caught eventually no matter what. What started out as an interesting concept quickly became […]
My Final Thoughts on Final Destination
