post

‘SMILE’ Curses Audience With a Bloody Good Time

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Grin and Bear It

For those who have experienced it, trauma becomes a dormant passenger. Quietly lurking, but always there behind the curtain. A pile of kindling awaiting a match. In Parker Finn’s supernatural-psychological horror movie Smile, trauma manifests as a suicide curse. When a therapist’s patients brutally kills herself in front of her, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) becomes the latest victim in a trauma cycle where a compulsion to commit suicide is passed on like a baton. In the world of Smile, if you watch someone kill themselves in spectacularly horrific fashion, you become doomed to die next.

Read More

post

‘BARBARIAN’ Is Part ‘DON’T BREATHE’, Part ‘WRONG TURN’ and it Rules

by Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , 3 Comments

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Between 2016’s Don’t Breathe and Barbarian, there’s an emergent sub-genre of horror: Detroit Dystopia. Both films put the urban wreckage of the city’s broken ecosystem under the spotlight to set the scene for unspeakable horrors. Barbarian, if not directly inspired by Fede Alvarez’s 2016 horror hit, shares a lot of the same DNA and influences. Both take place in Detroit’s most rundown neighborhoods – an almost post-civilization shadowland marked by abandoned, graffiti-stained houses, a lack of discernible social services, and the roving few who’ve never left. In the ruin of a once flourishing industrial neighborhood lurks a gaping hole. And in that absence sadism festers. Their tunnels run deep. Read More

post

‘CRIMES OF THE FUTURE’ Surgically Digs Into Society’s Bulging Guts

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

Surgery is the New Sex

The Canadian King of Venereal Horror, David Cronenberg, puts the perfectly bewildering capstone to his legacy of gross, mind-bending body horror with his latest feature Crimes of the Future. At once an exploration of the horrors of the post-post-modern human evolutionary track and a not-too-subtle cry for radical environmentalism, the 79-year old director’s latest stroke of squeamish cinema is a fitting encapsulation of the creator’s  entire demented body of work.   Read More

post

Kafkatesque ‘MEN’ Favors Allegory, Mood Over Plot

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

Men? Meh.

If we feel pain, are we doomed to it? Writer-director Alex Garland’s latest film, Men, is plagued by this one idea: the cyclical, unwavering nature of pain and abuse. Jessie Buckley is Harper, a woman suffering. After a traumatic incident involving her former husband (Paapa Essiedu), Harper retreats to the English countryside to find some quiet away from the city and the life she shared with her ex. While she intends to give herself space for emotional healing, Harper instead finds an intrusive, hellish male community seemingly dead-set on breaking her down further. Events turns more weird, then utterly hellish. Read More

post

Sundance ’22: ‘FRESH’ a Horrific Meat-Cute That Takes a Bites out of Modern Dating

by Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A one-of-a-kind allegorical delicacy, Fresh revels in taboo subjects to poke fun at the stomach-churning appetites of the modern dating world. A delirious mash-up of cheesy romance and body horror shlock, the debut film from Mimi Cave begins in deliciously grotesque fashion, showing flashes of both American Psycho and Martyrs as her devilish meat-cute puts a dark spin on the idea of “finding the right guy”. Overnight, chemistry and flirtation turns to imprisonment and cannibalism, giving new meaning to the phrase “eating butt.”  Read More

post

‘SCREAM’ Takes a Stab at “Requels” with Deadly Precision 

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Scream is back. And with a new Ghostface (or two) comes a biting deconstruction of not just the long-standing slasher franchise, or the nature of “requels” (a term coined in this very film), or the horror genre in general, but the movie industry writ large. Many films of recent years have tried to capture the imagination of audiences by commentating on their own storied legacy – most recently with both The Matrix: Resurrections and Spider-Man: No Way Home – but none have done it with quite as sharp a wit or a curvaceous a blade as the most recent Scream. Tapping into the meta repartee that franchise architect Wes Craven approached the material with from the very get go, this fifth installment of the 90s-born slasher whodunnit is as razor-sharp and bloody glorious as ever. Most importantly, it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.  Read More

post

Horrifying ‘ANTLERS’ is the Bleakest American Horror Movie of the Century

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The American horror movie has a tradition of not crossing certain boundaries. There’s a reason that the most disturbing horror movies in the world are often born outside the borders of the United States, imported from counties like Serbia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan, France, and Italy. Places with brutal histories (a commonality across all countries, unfortunately) wherein their countrymen acknowledge and grapple with their homeland’s wrongdoings through the medium of film. Something the American filmmaker, and the studio systems backing them, are oftentimes less comfortable with. The American appetite is just not as well-versed in particular extremities, like accepting the horrors of its own bloody past and desperate present. Read More

post

The Ghosts of Showbiz Past Haunt ‘LAST NIGHT IN SOHO’

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Dashed dreams and grubby hands reveal themselves to be the stuff of Edgar Wright’s nightmares in the stylish throwback Last Night in Soho. A ghostly haunter with one foot in the modern zeitgeist and one squarely in raging 1960’s London, Wright’s first foray into the horror grapples between serious social horrors and pure genre thrills, delivering a thoroughly entertaining slice of Giallo exploitation that warns of the temptation of nostalgia. Read More

post

‘THE FOREVER PURGE’ Is Redundant, Already Behind the Times

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Subtlety has never been the aim of James DeMonaco, the writer-director of the first trilogy of Purge flicks as well as screenwriter for the remaining sequels and all-around franchise figurehead, and that’s never been more clear than in The Forever Purge. Claiming to be the final film in the franchise that spawned four sequels and two seasons of a now-cancelled USA Network series, The Forever Purge puts our turbulent American politics front and center, creating a not-too-distant vision where MAGA-inspired insurrectionists continue the “legalized violence” at the film’s center beyond the allowed 12-hour window of the purge. A new dawn brings the continuation of violence as America enters a “forever purge”, a state of bullet-ridden eternal mayhem; a nightmarish ever after of racially-motivated violence. Read More

post

Franchise Fatigue Possesses ‘THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT’

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The Conjuring extended universe is one of the – if not the most – preeminent examples of a modern horror franchise done correctly. Expansive, with spin-offs shooting off into this direction or that, and an absolute box office powerhouse (with almost two billion dollars in worldwide gross),  The Conjuring’s terrifying rein is vast. And yet with three separate offshoots, including a full-fledged Annabelle trilogy, and more on the way, the haunting force of the series that began in 2013 comes sputtering to a decidedly indifferent halt with The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.  Read More