TITLE & REVIEW
This is an Italian effort from the mid-1970s.
An aristocratic woman starts having visions of a past life.
Is she being possessed by the spirit of an ancestor
who made a deal with the devil?
The climax owes something to previous efforts like The Exorcist . Unfortunately, the film-makers lacked the budget for anything more than a bit of dodgy blue-screen work. And some pea soup, of course.
Rebecca Hall
looks like a young
Saffron Burrows
, and seems to be Britain's answer to
Lynn Collins
- she has been in a lot of major films, but nobody recognises her.
Until now.
Our heroine is an expert in fraudulent hauntings, in 1922 England. The land is still suffering from the loss of life in the First World War. She is summoned to investigate a haunting in a remote country house. The result is a stack of references to other ghost movies.
The house is now in use as a boarding school for young boys. Dominic West (The Wire) is the Headmaster, and Imelda Staunton (a vicious teacher in the Harry Potter series) is the cook.
In 1943, a British hospital ship is torpedoed in the mid-Atlantic.
Dexter Fletcher (
Kick-Ass
) and Nurse
Olivia Williams
end up being rescued by an American submarine.
Then the spooky events start …
The sub's dead Captain seems to be haunting the vessel. Specifically he is targeting the senior officers - Bruce Greenwood ( The Core ), Scott Foley (Scrubs, The Unit) and Holt Mcallany ( The Losers ). Luckily, the Final Girl has Matthew Davis ( Vampire Diaries ) on her side. Yes, there are a lot of very pretty (and unrealistically well-groomed) folk on this boat.
Despite the overly attractive main cast, the director ( David Twohy ) does a great job with the visuals and the atmospherics. The spookiest aspects come from the script, written by Darren Aronofsky . Unfortunately, the submarine set was built 33% larger than a real submarine. This facilitates access for the cameras and crew when filming. However, it undermines both the authenticity and the claustrophobia of the unique environment.
Cherie Lunghi
and
Neve Campbell
stay in a stately home haunted by Patrick Stewart (
Star Trek: TNG
). For once, dramatic thespian Stewart plays an actual Shakespearean!
Florida criminal attourney Keanu Reeves (
The Matrix
) is hired to join the New York law firm of Al Pacino (Heat).
His wife ( Charlize Theron ) hangs around with Tamara Tunie , and begins to hallucinate. Is she going insane? In truth, she did a better version of this in The Astronaut's Wife . However, this story is focused on Keannu - the small-town boy being corrupted by the temptations of the big city. He finds himself fantasising about co-worker Connie Nielsen (who looks just like Dina Meyer ).
Barbara Hershey
is stalked and molested by an invisible demon in this
Poltergeist
rip-off.
Shockingly, every time the monster appears (invisibly)
a pounding Heavy Metal theme song starts up.
Ron Silver ( Time Cop ) tries to save her. He is a Parapsychologist, and he plans to freeze the demon with liquid nitrogen!
This is a Hollywood remake of an Asian horror film,
itself giving a supernatural twist on blind-girl thrillers like Jennifer 8.
A blind girl (
Jessica Alba
) gets an eye transplant,
but as she begins to see things again she starts to see things that may not be there.
She is not merely halucinating,
instead she is seeing ghosts.
Alba is playing a Caucasian, her sister is Posey Parker and she needs Doctor Alessandra Nivola ( Face/Off ) to translate for her when they visit Mexico!
Tom Wellings (
Smallville
) and
Maggie Grace
live in a small fishing port in the USA.
On the anniversary of a famous shipwreck,
they come under attack from ghosts of the victims.
Was the remake of Halloween worth watching? Or Assault on Precinct 13? Disk Jockey Selma Blair is a poor replacement for the original ( Adrienne Barbeau ), and the rest of the movie is similarly disappointing.
This low-budget lightweight shocker is also known as
Haunted High School, which gives away most of the plot.
The ghost of former headmaster MC Gainey ( Lost ) and his demonic sidekick start to bump off pupils and staff. Victims include School Librarian Charisma Carpenter , in a blink-and-you-miss-it scene that wastes her talent.
This is a Mexican horror film,
subtitled and with no major Hollywood stars.
A young woman motorist has a creepy encounter at the Kilometre 31 road-marker outside Mexico City. Her twin sister investigates the ghostly goings-on.
The ghost in this case is La Llorona - also used as freak-of-the-week in Grimm. In an interesting stretch, the river she haunts flows past the mile-marker, and through a storm drain under the city.
The problem seems to be that the TV show Supernatural has ruined this entire genre. The Winchester brothers would sort this all out in 42 minutes, plus time for advert breaks and the end-credit sequence.
Lance Hendricksen (
Aliens
) and Sketchy from
Dark Angel
act out the plot of
Ghost Ship
. Judd Nelson (Breakfast Club) and
Scarlet Chorvat
round out the cast.
Saoirse Ronan
is murdered by Stanley Tucci (
Captain America
). She watches from Purgatory while her parents Mark Wahlberg (
The Happening
) and
Rachel Weitz
try to get on with their lives. Like
Ghost
, but with less emphasis on the romance angle.
This was Peter Jackson 's adaptation of a popular novel. It is a divisive film - made to cash in on a book, it is uninspiring as a stand-alone piece.
Psychiatrist Dr Manuel Davalos (
Medium
) gets a young man released from the asylum on his 21st Birthday.
The man teams up with his sister (
Karen Gillen
) who is obsessed with destroying a magical mirror.
The film is basically a rehash of 1408 , with predictably excessive use of the untruthful narrator. There are one or two powerful scares, but once it becomes apparent that the characters' perception of reality is corrupted beyond all recognition by the mirror itself the whole story becomes essentially meaningless.
Pa Winchester (Jeffery Dean Morgan -
Supernatural
) is divorced from
Kyra Sedgwick
, and gets shared custody of their two daughters.
But the youngest one buys a cursed demon-box in a yard-sale ...
This was produced by Sam Raimi , who wrote and directed the far superior Drag me To Hell . That film featured Gypsy magicks, whereas this one has Yiddish mysticism. Both are examples of the Magic Negro cliche, where any non-mainstream culture is only involved insofar as its purported magical concepts.
The result is quite a let-down. Supernatural possession in the American suburbs was done to death by the Paranormal Activity series, and this effort is not in the same league. Quite disappointing, in all.
For some reason,
Charisma Carpenter
is not glamourous or naked.
Instead she is surrounded by a cast of unknowns.
As an American author, she moves into a remote house in England. There she has visions of people being brutally murdered.
As with many terrible horror movies, the individual behind this effort both wrote AND directed it. That said, there is actually a nice twist ending
It is the 1970s, just like in
The Conjuring
. Mad Professor Jared Harris (
Fringe
) investigates mad virgin
Olivia Cooke
.
This is only partly found footage, so like Insidious the pseudo-realistic feel means the writers can use the usual cliches.
Professor
Sigourney Weaver
and her sidekick, Cillian Murphy (previously seen as a psychiatrist in
Batman Begins
), debunk fake psychic phenomenon.
Elizabeth Olsen
, a young student, joins them in their investigations.
Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro -
Hide & Seek
), a Yuri Gellar type, comes out of retirement.
Murphy becomes obsessed with exposing him.
Then bad things start to happen ...
This is billed as This year's Sixth Sense . From that, one gets a sense of predictability. A supernatural thriller with a twist in the end? The same route has been ploughed by all four leading stars lately: Olsen's big break was the disappointing effort Haunted House , Murphy did Redeye , Weaver was in Cabin in the Woods , and (if you go back a few years) DeNiro was in Hide & Seek . If anything, this particular twist is … unforeseen despite being foreshadowed. But it is ultimately a bit unsatisfying. As if the whole thing really did not amount to much. The ending of Sixth Sense makes you re-interpret the entire film, and allows you to enjoy it on subsequent viewings. This effort ends on something of a non-sequitor.
A young embalmer, son of Rutger Hauer (
Blade Runner
) goes to a Catholic seminary.
But after his final exams he realises he is an atheist.
The Principal sends him to the Vatican, where he is assigned to help Exorcist Anthony Hopkins (
Hannibal
).
A pregnant teenage girl displays supernatural knowledge, but the newbie stays in constant denial.
The climax is creepy exorcism - but there is nothing original.
The Last Exorcism
is better, though not original either.
This was supposedly inspired by a true story. The moral of the tale - magic is real?
If Satan and JHVH were real, we would use prayers instead of science and technology on a daily basis.
Instead of electrons whizzing around, creating electricity,
we would have little angels dancing in pin-sized hamster wheels to make our machinery work!
An asbestos-removal crew are set to work in a derelict asylum.
The result is a great suspense thriller,
combining a creepy setting, subtle direction and a great cast.
Instead of a bunch of teenagers we get Josh Lucas (
Hulk
), David Caruso (CSI: Miami) and Peter Mullan.
This is a remake of a Spanish-language film,
and while it has its moments there is very little original about it.
The one redeeming feature about it is that it looks like a low-budget horror, shot in real-time ...
Our protagonist is Elizabeth Olsen - taller and more buxom than her sisters, and already being spoken of as a potential Oscar-winner. She, her dad and her uncle are fixing up their decrepit holiday home. The house has been targeted by local criminals in the past, so all the windows are boarded up. Combined with the fact the power is shorted out, and the sun is setting, means there is no light to speak of in the house. The lonely, remote house with no land-line or cell-phone coverage, plays the perfect venue for a suspense/horror film. It is a Cabin in the Woods.
The middle Act of the film consists of the protagonist being chased through the darkened labyrinth of rooms by unseen stalkers. This was done so much better in George Clarke's film The Last Light . Is she up against bloodthirsty hill-billies or murderous ghostly presences? She does not care, she just blubbers like Heather Donahue in Blair Witch Project .
The climax has a twist ending. Yes, how predictable. There are three other films mentioned in this review, and all three are better than this one. Its redeeming feature, other than the buxom protagonist, is the real-time aspect.
This is a found footage film with a difference.
Three twenty-somethings video themselves on a road trip across the USA.
First the cameraman starts to see peoples' faces blur - like in
The Ring
. It seems that everyone he films is doomed.
This is a supernatural thriller set in England.
Five college students get a call from the College Accommodation Officer
telling them they have been allocated living space in a shared house.
They turn up and indulge in the typical teenager/student type activities
including hard drugs and a seance.
One of the students is a very young-looking Sam Troughton ( Robin Hood 2006 ), and another is Billie Piper (who looks the same as she always looks).
Jason Behr (
Roswell
) is the title character, a young American tattoo artist who wanders Asia plying his trade.
He wears a long-sleeved jacket in most scenes.
He winds up in New Zealand, where he shacks up with Xena - a young Maori woman, not Lucy Lawless . A demonic ghost hunts down and murders everyone he tattoos. His only option is to find out who the ghost was, and appease the undead spirit.
A pair of college students drive across America.
An ill-advised shortcut along a back-road
So far, the most original thing about the film is the casting of English actress
Emily Blunt
as the female half of the duo, instead of the usual bikini babe.
The pair get trapped in a snowdrift on a lonely mountain road. They start bickering as they fall apart under the strain. This is one of the better things about the film - the Blair Witch Project type examination of a group under stress. They enounter ghostly figures - first some mysterious hooded monks, then a vicious Highway Patrolman.
As well as an unoriginal script, the film is also let down by choppy editing.
A happy upper-middle-class family in California falls victim to a series of unfortunate events,
which are recorded on the house's CCTV system.
Naturally, since this is a sequel it has to be more extreme than the original.
This ties in with the original film in a surprising way, providing additional backstory to the demonic haunting occurance.
After the disappearance of key characters in the first two movies,
a woman and a young boy move into a house in suburban USA.
The protagonist is a teenage girl,
who (thanks to her BF) sets up webcams to watch everything in the house.
Unfortunately they never bother to watch any of the spooky footage,
or things might have ended differently.
Her mother is played by genre star Alexondra Lee , a fact that destroys suspension of disbelief built up by the Found Footage setup.
This is the fifth entry in the series.
Like the others, it is presented as found footage,
although the characters tend to record themselves at the most unusual times.
The story follows a pair of latino teenagers in a working class area. They suspect that their neighbour is a witch. This follows on from the previous film, where the demonic entity was linked to a coven.
A family move into a house in 2013,
and discover a 1980s camcorder among the previous owner's old stuff.
It has additional filters wired in,
which allow it to see paranormal entities that are invisible to the human eye.
Pretty soon, people using the camcorder start to see weird things.
The camcorder contains a tape from 1988. When they play it back, they see events from the family in Paranormal Activity 3 , the prequel movie. The young girls on the tape seem to have precognitive powers, and it appears that they can see the people watching them on video.
Skyler ( Olivia Taylor Dudley ), a friend of the family, is into yoga and feng shui. She gives a bit of exposition about spirit photography. There is also a local priest who knows a bit about exorcisms. Will the victims actually have a chance of surviving this time?
Young lawyer Daniel Radcliffe (
Harry Potter
) is sent to oversee the sale of a remote country house.
The superstitious locals try to dissuade him,
but he will not take the hint.
Local landowner Ciaran Hinds (
Ghost Rider
) helps him.
Young Harry ends up in the house,
which turns out to be haunted by a CGI banshee.
And then the village's children start to die ...
This is adapted from a novel, but there was actually a British TV version in the early 1990s. Despite being adapted by Jane Goldman ( Kick-Ass ), this version is actually a bit disappointing. It has been inflated up for the big screen, giving the ghost a lot more screen time. The original was a masterpiece of suspense, where the ghost was sometimes heard but rarely seen. This time, the sounds are more akin to the Lewton Bus, when it is all just a fake scare. The ghost itself is seen regularly, about as frightening as CGI can get (i.e. not at all). And the ending? Well, the facts have been altered so the tone is not so bleak. Basically, a dumbing-down for the mass-market audience who want a happy ending.
The haunted house has lain empty since the events of the previous film.
But forty years have passed, and it is now the Blitz.
A small class of half-a-dozen children are evacuated to the house.
They have two teachers to look after them –
nice to see that class sizes were so small in the good old days.
However, the ghostly Woman In Black awakens and starts to do typically creepy things.
The ghost can apparently read the minds of her victims, as well as possessing them. The young lady teacher (the Final Girl horror movie trope) has a secret – she once had her own child up for adoption, and never found him. One of the boys in the class has been orphaned, and he also gets special treatment from the ghost.
The problem with this film is that it is basically just a ghost story. There are a lot of jump-scares (AKA the infamous Lewton Bus) – but while ghosts can make you jump, they really cannot do much to you. Except in the inevitable over-blown climax, but that is a different matter. The truth is, as with all ghost stories there is a lot of suspense but no pay-off.
This is a prequel to the other films in the series.
It starts in a small town in New Mexico,
where a young girl has developed psychic powers.
We flash forward to the year 2010, before the events of the first movie in the series. Lin Shaye and her team of parapsychologists are called in by Kirk Acevedo ( Arrow: Season 6 ) who is now living in her childhood home. The ghosts and demons are still on the loose.
Delivered by the brains behind the
Saw
series, this is their version of the new
Paranormal Activity
type of suburban horror.
But it lacks the realism of a Found Footage story.
A young boy is haunted - not by a ghost, but a Dream Demon, like something out of Nightmare on Elm Street . His mother ( Rose Byrne ) tries everything. They eventually have to call in parapsychologist Lin Shae .
Rose Byrne
tries to settle into normality after the events of the first movie.
For some reason, her husband is behaving strangely.
The parapsychologist team have info on a haunting when he was a child. Lin Shae was the original investigator.
This is a prequel to one of the movies in the
Conjuring
series.
It works well as a stand-alone,
but the ending ties into the other movie.
The doll-maker (Anthony Lapaglia - ) and his wife ( Miranda Otto ) lose their daughter in a terrible accident. Twelve years later, the couple invite a nun and a half-dozen orphaned teenage girls to live in the house. Creepy things start to happen.
Annabelle is not just a killer doll, like Chucky in the Child's Play series. She is more of a conduit for a demonic entity. This means that by the climax, there is a massive demon on the loose to terrify the victims. It also seems to teleport, because it possesses
This film achieves the three main things that any good horror movie should deliver, but so few actually do. It creates an atmosphere of suspense, it introduces characters that the audience cares about, and it subjects them to convincing jeopardy.
This story is about a pregnant woman (
Annabelle Wallis
) who collects dolls.
Luckily the opening credits sequence has a title card which explains what dolls are,
or else the audience might have been confused by this.
The woman and her husband live in a city that lives in fear of satanic cultists. Just like Los Angeles in the late 1960s, with the Manson family on the loose. And by incredible coincidence, one of the cultists lives next door.
The woman's creepy new doll seems to be possessed by the ghost of one of the Cultists. However, it turns out that the Cultists were trying to summon a demon. All this seems to contradict the events of the prequel, which indicates the doll was possessed by a previous demon from
The woman and her husband regularly attend church. The preacher (Tony Amendola - Stargate SG-1 ) does his best to help. However, the real help is from an African-American woman ( Alfre Woodward ).
To up the ante, the pregnant woman gives birth to her child. This reduces the movie to the old child-in-jeopardy storyline, which is a step up from the tweenager-fem-jep one.
This story is set in the early 1970s,
so the compulsory sense of isolation and helplessness is compounded
by the lack of Twentyfirst Century communications like internet or cell-phones.
A family (including five daughters) move into an old farmhouse. They eventually explore the basement ... Yes, this is a trope that has already been done in Cabin in the Woods , and this should advise you what kind of film this is. The director also made Insidious , so the suspense level is high. But there is nothing really original or surprising in it.
The husband is often away, so when spooky things happen the wife ( Lili Taylor ) calls in a couple of Ghostbusters - Patrick Wilson ( Watchmen ) and Vera Farmiga .
This film has been condemned as anti-female, because the antagonist is the ghost of a witch-woman. But with strong roles for a couple of critically-acclaimed actresses (both aged over 35), this is about as good as it gets for a film set in the Seventies.
This story is set in the early 1970s,
so we get the compulsory soundtrack of anachronistic music
and montage of Margaret Thatcher clips from the 1980s.
A family (two sons and two daughters) move into an old house. They play with a ouiji board ... Yes, this is a trope that has already been done in The Exorcist , and this should advise you what kind of film this is. The director manages to keep the suspense level is high. But there is nothing really original or surprising in it.
The husband has abandoned his family, so when spooky things happen the mother ( Frances O'Connor ) calls in a couple of Ghostbusters - Patrick Wilson ( Watchmen ) and Vera Farmiga . As befits the Magic Negro trope, the outsiders happen to be experts in the exact same superstition of the demon. The Ghostbusters work for the Roman Catholic Church, so it turns out that the demon is a Catholic one. Surely it should be an Anglican Episcopalian one, since that is the State religion of England.
This is a Found Footage documentary following a fake Exorcist (the Professor from
Veronica Mars
) as he does one last job ...
The Exorcist and his camera crew go to a small farm in Louisiana. En route, they interview some locals like in Blair Witch Project and end up hearing tales of a satanic cult. Of course, they ignore everything they hear. After all, since the exorcist is a fake they assume the demonic possession is fake too.
Things get creepy soon enough. The combination of night-time shooting and gun-toting rednecks hostile to strangers is enough to guarantee that, even without the supernatural element.
The original was found footage but this is more straightforward.
As with many sequels, this is quite unoriginal.
It is not merely a stack of cliches, but it is completely predictable.
The film starts slowly, with repeated use of fake tension to make it seem suspenseful. We see things from the protagonist's perspective, so we are unclear (until the end) as to whether she is insane or if the demonic events are actually happening.
Nell, the possessed girl from the first film, is the sole survivor of a blaze that apparently killed her entire family. She is unscathed, although thanks to daylight she seems to have aged about ten years.
This is the infamous sequel to the classic 1970s horror movie.
It is much derided, but is not an entirely terrible film.
It suffers in part to the fact that the original is held in such high regard.
It is several years after the events of the first film. Reagan ( Linda Blair ) is an attractive young teenager, trying to get on with her life. She has to see a psychiatrist ( Louise Fletcher ) for her bad dreams, but on the surface she has gotten over her possession.
An exorcist priest (Richard Burton - Medusa Syndrome ) is assigned to investigate Reagan's exorcism, which was the last case of his mentor. His interviews with her (using a machine with flashing lights that apparently allows people to merge consciousnesses or something) allow the seamless integration of scenes from the original film.
The backstory of the demon is completely different from the other movies in the series. In this it is called Pazuzu (as in the gargoyle from Futurama ). Apparently Pazuzu is the demon of the air, the embodiment of a massive locust. The priest becomes obsessed with the demon, and travels to Ethiopia to find the demon's first victim (James Earl Jones - Conan The Barbarian ).
So what is so bad about it? The actors tend to stare into the camera a lot. Some of the dialogue is particularly dreadful. Also, the musical score by Ennio Morricone is typically overwrought. Worst, Director John Boorman reputedly hated the script.
