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‘THE DJINN’ a Threadbare Supernatural Home Invasion Snooze

Little more than a collection of audio-visual horror movie clichès stitched atop a daddy’s-gone-for-the-night campfire tale, David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s The Djinn feels like a short film puffed out to feature length without the content sufficient to support said feature status. The film follows Dylan (Ezra Dewey), mute son to a late-night DJ and single father (Rob Brownstein) who decides to mess around with a haunted book and ends up summoning a djinn, which for the purposes of this film is basically an evil genie.  Read More

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‘RIDERS OF JUSTICE’ and the Misguided Calculus of Revenge 

It’s almost Christmas time in Denmark. That magical time of year when family gathers, magic happens, and, if you’re Mads Mikkelsen’s military man Markus, the body count continues to pile up. In the Danish black comedic drama Riders of Justice, when a teenage girl asks her grandfather for a blue bicycle, flap flap flap go the wings of the butterfly and one thing leads to another resulting in the “accidental” death of Markus’ wife in a tragic train accident. Returning home to care for his grieving daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), Markus’ militant ways fail to provide the emotional comfort she needs and he lashes out at the world around him, a simmering strong and silent type in desperate need of some therapeutic activity.  Read More

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‘WRATH OF MAN’ A Vengeful Layer Cake of Crime

With a dozen films under his belt, British filmmaker Guy Ritchie has dedicated his career to the criminal ensemble. From his roots directing blue-collar Cockney capers (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch) to his more mainstream tentpole films (The Man for U.N.C.L.E., King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and – to a degree – even Aladdin), Ritchies film involve crews of small-time thieves stylishly trying to land the big score. In what is both a natural evolution of his thread of storytelling and perhaps even a maturation of his themes, Wrath of Man wonders what happens after the heist has been committed.  Read More

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Scottish ‘LIMBO’ Stuck Inside the Plight of a Syrian-Refugee Llewyn Davis 

A dark, curly-haired musician wanders through a blustery, frigid no-man’s-land in Ben Sharrock’s Limbo. The man in question is indeed not Llewyn Davis, though the similarities to that Coen Brother’s characters are noteworthy.  Both are men out of place, out of time even, assaulted by the realities of a society who not only doesn’t welcome them but struggles to see their humanity and worth.  Read More

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Decent ‘VOYAGERS’ Is Teenaged Outer Space ‘Lord of the Flies’ 

In William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, a shipment of young boys escaping the nightly bombardment of WWII England crash land on a remote uninhabited island and, left to their own devices, attempt to organize rescue and their own society. Reward and punishment is doled out with the knee-jerk brashness that would conceivably come with children-led governance and their laissez-faire island society quickly turns to brutish power struggles and, soon, murder. Neil Burger’s Voyagers borrows Golding’s premise and jettisons it into outer space, stirring in a rudimentary thought experiment about control, pleasure, and autonomy, to mixed results. Read More

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Geriatric Horror ’HONEYDEW’ Serves Hospitality With a Heaping Side of Hostility

In Devereux Milburn’s Honeydew, the window-dressings of dustbowl farmland hospitality flakes off to reveal a disturbing underbelly; one crusted with human sacrifice, religious devotion, and, more likely than not, a good-sized serving of man-meat. The flame has been long extinguished between Sam (Steven Spielberg’s son Sawyer Spielberg ) and Rylie (Malin Barr), a waiter/aspiring actor and botanist graduate student respectively, but the two head to rural Massachusetts with plans to camp out and do some research for Rylie’s thesis on a medieval wheat-based neurodegenerative disease. When they’re forced off the property of a grumpy old timer named Eulis in the middle of the night only to discover that their car will not start, they seek assistance at a nearby farmstead. You can probably guess where this goes next. Read More

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He Did It, He Actually Did It: The Journey of ‘ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE’

Pluck the plumage off the bird because I’m prepared to eat some crow. For years, I doubted the fact that the long-rumored Zack Snyder director’s cut of Justice League would ever exist in a format suitable to be watched outside of a producer’s screening room. It just didn’t make one iota of sense. With WB having moved on from Snyder’s vision after the director was forced to leave the film mid-production when his daughter tragically committed suicide, the “Snyder Cut” was incomplete, with tens of millions of dollars in VFX shots never even brought into post-production. Read More

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Gratuitously Fun ‘NOBODY’ a Reverse John Wick Where Bob Odenkirk Kicks All the Ass

You’ve seen it all before: a middle-aged off-the-grid specialist gets forced out of retirement when circumstances beyond their control stir up their humdrum life and curry them back onto a path of violence. Bryan Mills had a particular set of skills and hit the ground running when his daughter was kidnapped by Albanian human traffickers while John Wick’ skill with any sized caliber weapon came into sharp focus when Russian criminals killed his dog. In Nobody, no one has to kidnap his daughter or slay his pup to get Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell all fired up, his pent-up rage and years of living live on his belly reaching a tipping point when some amateur home invaders break into the wrong house. Like a nobody should, he does nothing.  Read More

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Talking with SXSW Breakout Mallory Everton: Star, Writer, and Director of ‘RECOVERY’

Look, just about the last thing on earth that anyone is craving nowadays is more COVID-19 talk. No one wants mask jokes or commentary on toilet paper shortages nor do they want to deep dive into the horrors of having lost 550,000 Americans and counting to a pandemic that quickly became a hot-button political issue. And yet, Mallory Everton has managed to make a pandemic-set COVID comedy that feels rejuvenating and alive, maybe disproving the age-old adage that laughter is the “best” medicine (vaccines still probably have it beat) while underscoring enduring importance of comedy in a time of crisis.  Read More

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SXSW 2021: ‘SOUND OF VIOLENCE’ Is the Ultra-Campy ASMR Slasher You Didn’t Know You Needed

There is a scene early on in the absolutely bonkers horror camp-fest Sound of Violence where murderess-musician-mistress Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) kidnaps a homeless man and rigs him up like an electric drum set. Part-hardware, part-flesh, done up as if Kevin Mcalester and Jigsaw were there to help perfect the evil mastermind mechanics. A meat tenderizer dangles above his skull, a mallet aimed at his kneecaps, scalpels bisecting his wrists like cello bows. Alexis nervously puts on her earphones and gets to work.  Read More