After a full week at the theater that resulted in reviews for Wadjda, Carrie, All is Lost, Kill Your Darlings, and The Fifth Estate, I took to catching up with some Halloween-themed movies at home. After taking the next step into the Paranormal franchise, I delved into Alex Proyas‘ The Crow, the Italian mob movie Gomorrah, and Frank Darabont‘s fantastic creature feature The Mist. Join us for Weekly Review.

The Crow

Predictable as all hell, The Crow is a dark vigilante tale whitewashed with major chord symphonics and a laughable lead in Brandon Lee. When he rises from the dead a year after he and his wife are violently murdered, Eric Draven transforms into The Crow, a face-painted vigilante, to exact revenge… and shred some gnarly rooftop solos on his jet black Stratocaster. Sadled with 90s standards like a moustachioed black cop and a smart ass streetkid on a skateboard, The Crow is all sorts of the wrong kind of dated. Killed by a live round during filming, this was Lee’s (son of Bruce Lee) first major outing as a certified lead. Although none can deny that his passing is a shame, he brings new meaning to the phrase “he couldn’t act to save his life.”

D+

Paranormal Activity 2

Building off the slow-burn premise utilized in Paranormal Activity, this simpleton sequel deploys similar tactics to lessening effect. While keeping it all in the family works to immediately solidify the interest of those who bought into the tall-tale-as-fact tactic of the first installment, the repetitive shots of nothing happening build a false tension that is more cumbersome than legitimately suspenseful. We’re awaiting a swinging door, anticipating a falling pot, wondering what’s going on in the pool and that’s not really what scares are about. As someone who is frequently startled by movies of this nature, I found myself more bored than frightened by its gruelingly slow pace and completely put off by its lazy (even by found footage standards) use of the selfsame angles over and over again. While not a shot-for-shot remake of the first, it explores similarly eerie material that totally fails to illicit the same effect the second time around.

C-

Gomorrah

The next time you’re in Italy and someone tells you they’re in the waste management business, watch your ass. At least that’s what Gomorrah tells you. But with filmmaking that is decidedly European, Gomorrah often feels cold and clinical, with no central characters to latch onto and many complex allegiances that may have you piecing together who’s working with who. By taking a more bird’s eye view of the mob situation in Italy, Matteo Garrone is able to cover a lot of territory and cut to the heart of not just one problem but the many microcosms that splinter off from that problem. At times, it feels scatterbrained and too wide-ranging to cement our attention but the sheer breadth of the tale is ambitious, albeit to a fault.

C

The Mist

About five years ago, I watched the first twenty minutes of this film and turned it off thinking that it was just more of the same. I couldn’t have been more wrong. While the monsters that lay the groundwork for the grocery store story of survival aren’t mind-bendingly inventive, the story of slipping humanity and the mental cost of the apocalypse is. As the movie heats up, the stakes grow larger and larger, building to a jaw-dropping finale with scarring potential. A fact that’s not too much of a surprise when you remember that director Frank Darabont was responsible for such stunners as The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. The Mist is an unforgettable, instant horror classic.