A man on the run with stolen cash (a la
Psycho
) ends up in a dead end ...
He gets lost, and by incredible coincidence arrives at a spooky abandoned-looking radio station.
The only inhabitant is John Billingsley (
Enterprise
) - who is almost unrecognisable, and gives an excellent performance.
A gang of tweenagers take a day-trip in a Cessna airplane.
However, they hit some bad weather and lose sight of the ground.
Worse, the plane itself malfunctions and they cannot descend.
Basically, this is the premise of
Langoliers
but with a smaller, younger group - more reminiscent of
Blair Witch Project
A pair of student types experiment with a mind-expanding drug
from the MK-Ultra brainwashing program.
What could possibly go wrong?
Student journalist Katia Winter investigates the incident. Despite the trappings of Found Footage, this actually appears to be Faux Footage - a lot of hand-held camera-work that tricks the audience into believing the potentially untruthful narrator.
The one thing that raises this above the mediocre is the introduction of a Hunter S Thompson-type Journalist played by Ted levine ( Silence of the Lambs ). He provides lots of exposition, such as the fact that the drug stimulates the pineal gland until the subject can perceive other dimensions. Unfortunately the creatures in those dimensions can see the subject too! This means that the victims are stalked by a slow-walking monster that only they can see. Just like in It Follows ... or the classic story Night of the Demon by MR James .
A young woman loses her sight in a car crash.
However, she also inherits her ancestors' castle in Albania
so things should balance themselves out a bit.
Luckily this was filmed on location in Albania,
so at least it looks authentic.
If the inherited mansion storyline seems familiar, that may be because it was also used in Texas Chainsaw 3-D . That movie has Leatherface living in the basement, while this one has a Lovecraftian abomination instead.
The Final Girl and her sleazy boyfriend move into the castle. To start with, all the monster-fodder is creepy locals. However, the boyfriend invites his buddies to visit. They are a pretty terrible bunch, although one is a hot chick who does a topless sex scene.
Luckily, one of the dudes is at Miskatonic University so he is capable of exposition. He is nicknamed The Professor - well, it might be a nickname or he might actually be the head of a department. Maybe Miskatonic is so desperate for staff that it hires tweenagers who look too young to shave. In all fairness, he is knowledgeable enough about the Necronomicon.
What modern audiences might find off-putting about this is, as well as the usual gory horror scenes, there are a couple of scenes of sexual assault. The deformed monsters in this film are happy to use their inhuman body parts against both males and females alike. Shockingly enough, this was both written and directed by women.
There is also a mid-credits scene which implies there may be a sequel - an adaptation of Re-Animator .
Autumn, 1914.
A meteorologist gets landed on a remote island
where he will spend his forseeable future.
His only companion is a crotchety old lighthouse keeper named Gruner (Ray Stevenson -
Rome (2005)
).
After his first night on the island, the newcomer is under no illusions about the real source of the danger. It is not the drunken crazy old co-worker he has to worry about. The hut is besieged every night by a horde of strange creatures. They are CGI mermen that act like the fast zombies in World War Z , with a better standard of animation than a B-List movie like this would normally get.
The younger man starts to earn his elder's respect. But it is not an easy task, and they maintain an uneasy relationship under extreme circumstances.
The conflict with the creatures intensifies, and escalates further as it turns out that a nearby sunken wreck contains a cargo of dynamite.
This is an extended feature-length version of one of HP Lovecraft's short stories,
The Colour out of Space.
The modern-day bookends to the story explain why the setting has switched
from New England, USA, to Weimar Germany.
An American OAP goes missing. His son goes to Germany to find him. A German OAP tells him an incredible story ...
Back in the 1930s a meteorite hit a remote farm. The rock from space dissolves into the ground, mysterious, creepy and suspenseful descent into insanity and horror.
The film was shot in black and white, which works well since the story is set in the 1930s. Also, since the story is about an alien - imperceptible - colour, we cannot expect to actually see it.
The climax - the colour itself finally appears - involves great SPFX. But it is too in-your-face to fit in with the relatively low-key film. The script is good enough, though - the confusions are tied up in a nice little twist.
A young woman named Jennifer (
Penelope Mitchell
) moves into a seedy appartment block in Los Angeles.
Unlike
Neon Demon
she is fleeing an abusive relationship rather than following her dream career.
Instead of having sleazy
John Wick
as a landlord she has unfriendly
Sally Kirkland
.
Terry the neighbour gives Jennifer a pet tortoise. They both refer to it as a turtle, although it is not an amphibian. This is simply so they can squeeze in a reference to Ike and Tina Turner, who were famous because of their abusive relationship. Of course, this is to underline the abusive nature of the relationship that the protagonist has fled.
Jennifer has a strange neighbour named Stella, who is sleep deprived and has nasty facial sores. It must be contagious, because soon Jennifer has the same symptoms. She assumes the strange bites all over her body are from bed-bugs. Nobody notices the strange jewelry box topped with a small carving that looks like a miniature one of Zuul's hell-hounds from Ghostbusters (1984) .
Jennifer needs a job, but her resume emphasises her work experience rather than the transferrable skills she built up with her extra-curricular activities at school. She goes for a job interview set up by a former friend from school. However, the lack of sleep and the open sores on her face make her look like a full-on drug-addicted meth-head. She turns up in a short-sleeved dress that ends above the knee, and does not bother with make-up. Yes, she lacks the intelligence to phone in sick and reschedule the interview. The interviewer does not bother to ask her any questions, and dismisses her immediately out of hand.
Eventually the Third act arrives, and Jennifer has to confront the monster. It is very small but very strong and fast. Not only does this minimise the need for dodgy CGI, it also makes the monster a reasonably viable threat to the character.
Michael Rooker (
Walking Dead
) goes ice-fishing with his wife, grown-up son and the son's fiance.
They do not catch any fish,
as if an apex predator has eaten everything in the lake.
What starts as a promising suspense film is let down by a poor rubber-monster pay-off. A bit like Jeepers Creepers , really. The director should have remembered how successful Jaws was, using the monster itself very sparingly.
This is set in Montenegro, on the Aegean coast.
A couple of locals hang around and enjoy the sunshine,
but when the sun goes down things get creepy.
As well as an underwater siren luring men into peril,
there is also a land-walking killer.
A couple of young American women arrive as tourists, and meet up with a local friend an his fiance. A creepy fisherman (Franco Nero - Django Unchained ) hangs around, reminding the girls of the character from I Know What you Did Last Summer .
The cinematographer makes good use of the spectacular local scenery. Locations include an abandoned submarine base and a derelict prison that served as a concentration camp in World War Two. Well, horror movies need isolation - and it seems that Exotic Island is the new Cabin in the Woods .
The tweenagers get trapped on the island and chased around, like in a generic slasher film. To add an element of supernatural interest, there is a mermaid seemingly imprisoned in a cave.
A young trainee (Robert Pattinson -
Twilight
) joins an old salt (Willem Dafoe -
Shadow of the Vampire
) as keepers of a lighthouse on a remote island.
This may cover the same territory as Cold Skin (2017) , but they are very different films. To start with, this is shot in black and white in order to evoke the feel of silent movies from a century ago.
As the days turn into weeks, the lighthouse keepers begin to lose track of time. The island evokes tales from legends - bad luck brought by the killing of a sea bird as in Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for example.
Eventually the uneasiness breaks into surrealism, as the younger man is beset with visions of mermaids and a kraken-like monster that seems like something from the Cthulhu mythos of HP Lovecraft himself ...
A young man takes his pregnant wife to his birthplace.
His mother recently passed away,
and he has inherited the house he grew up in.
It turns out that they left there when he was still a child,
when his mother did a midnight flit.
The red flags begin to pop up. The man discovers his father was murdered, and the killer was never found. The locals have some strange traditions, based on a cult that worships a mysterious sleeping god. This may be linked to the mythical Kraken, which would explain why the pub landlord refuses to serve calamari ...
The title certainly implies this is some kind of Wicker Man situation. When the locals discover the newcomer's bloodline, they are suspiciously happy to see him. And then there are the pregnant woman's nightmares ...
Two guys and a girl go off on a yachting trip together.
They discover a desert island where the only living inhabitant
is a Scandinavian supermodel type named Silka (as in Selkie).
She starts to seduce each of the group.
However, eventually they realise that they are having halucinations.
Can they escape from the island before it is too late?
A young man is out on his stag night with a couple of friends.
Yes, just like in
The Hungover Games
no good can come of this.
They go to a dodgy strip-club,
and the hero sets free a young woman who claims to be imprisoned there.
Unfortunately she is dangerously violent and develops an obsession with her rescuer.
Worse, the club-owner is a violent gangster.
What puts this apart from regular crime stories is that the criminals are actually monsters from Ancient Greek mythology.
Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci -
) is a young American man whose mother dies of cancer.
Since Evan is an only child, and his father is already dead,
this leaves him alone in the world.
The good news is that, after a run-in with the law,
he has no reason to hang around the USA any more.
In the Second Act, Evan jet-sets to Italy and back-packs around the place. He settles in a small town, where he meets Louise ( Nadia Hilker ). She seems to be his perfect woman, and every scene of their relationship as shown from his perspective is pretty dull. However, in the scenes centred around her reveal something far more sinister about her.
The Third Act has Evan discover Louise's secret. She is a genetic mutant, and her knowledge of Ancient Rome is more intimate than might be expected. They visit Pompeii together.
Kristen Stewart
works on an underwater drilling rig in a deep ocean trench - like in
The Abyss
. There is a typically diverse crew, including a French Captain (Vincent Cassell -
Brotherhood of the Wolf
) and a wise-cracking yank (TJ Miller -
Deadpool
).
The drilling rig is attacked by aquatic creatures. These monsters are CGI, seen in dim lighting and murky water. Instead of making them creepy, it just makes the indistinct. Finally, we get to see something inspired by Cthulhu - which means that this story might be some kind of prequel to Cloverfield .
This is an extended feature-length version of one of HP Lovecraft's short stories.
The screenwriter added a third act, to give the story a climax and some closure.
It is monochrome, shot in the manner of a 1930s Universal Studios-type Horror.
A scientist investigates a farmer's claim that aliens and cultists inhabit a mountain near his remote farmhouse. He is completely genre-blind, making every cliched mistake in the book. But Lovecraft's works are probably the SOURCE for most of the cliches, so we have to give it a bit of leeway. The execution is excellent, taking us from suspense to a dramatic climax that grows effortlessly from Lovecraft's premature ending.
Freelance scientist Mike Enslin (John Cusack -
Hot Tub Time Machine
) debunks haunted houses for a living.
He gets an anonymous letter suggesting he visits a haunted hotel room,
number 1408 in a swanky big-city hotel.
Hotel Manager Gerald Olin (Samuel L Jackson -
Deep Blue Sea
) tries to talk him out of it, to no avail.
The director lays on the tension pretty thick. Simple mundane acts like checking into a hotel room are treated as suspenseful in their own right. This sets the tone perfectly, so - despite Enslin's cynicism about ghosts - the audience are prepared for the supernatural developments.
The story consists mostly of Enslin stuck in the room, as some entity messes with his mind. However, the film has a lot of great cameos. Enslin is helped in the First Act by Mailbox Guy (Andrew Lee Potts - Primeval ) and publisher Sam Farrell (Tony Shalhoub - Galaxy Quest ). Later on he does a video call with his ex-wife Lily ( Mary McCormack ). However, the high point is Sam Jackson's ten minutes.
Novelist Pierce Brosnan (
Goldeneye
) moves to a small town, and befriends single mother
Melissa George
. But something nasty happened in the woods,
and now a ghostly presence is wreaking a terrible curse on certain bloodlines.
The woman's son is one of the accursed ...
This is yet another Stephen King piece, ruined by dumbing-down for the mainstream audience.
Carrie White (
Chloe Grace Moretz
) lives alone with her abusive, religious fundamentalist mother (
Julianne Moore
). At school the cast is rounded out by gymn teacher
Judy Greer
, Good Girl Chrissy (who looks like
Kate Bosworth
acting ten years younger than her real age)
and School Bitch Sue.
This is a remake of the classic 1970s film by Brian DePalma . The new Director ( Kimberly Pierce ) is one of the few females to helm such a large-scale project. Although the story was written by a man ( Stephen King ), the main five roles are all female. The male roles (originally played by William Katt and John Travolta) are held by new faces.
Moretz has to carry the film, and delivers a great performance as always. But she already covered this ground in Kick-Ass 2 , where she played a High School outsider persecuted by Mean Girls who delivers a violent reprisal.
John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson are reunited in another adaptation of a
Stephen King
story for the first time since
1408
. The unsolved mystery of that was, why is the room evil?
This time, the mysteries are – who did it, how and why?
A Graphic Novelist (John Cusack - Hot Tub Time Machine ) is at Boston Airport when it is site of an apparent terrorist attack. Someone sends a pulse through the cell-phone network that fries the brains of everyone who listens on their mobile phone. The main advantage is that anyone who tries to phone for help will automatically become infected too. The infected people become Fast Zombies, and attack the un-infected.
Cusack flees to the subway, where he teams up with Tom the train driver (Samuel L Jackson - Deep Blue Sea ). Together with a third survivor, a neighbour of Cusack's named Alice ( ), they try to walk across the post-Apocalyptic landscape in search of safety.
The trio meet up with a school headmaster (Stacey Keach - Weather Wars ), who provides some exposition. In exchange, he wants their help in exterminating a football field worth of the infected.
As the survivors continue on their quest, they discover a few things. The entity in charge, a man in a red hoodie, telepathically inserts himself in their dreams. He is called the President of the Internet, and he is waiting for Cusack's character to confront him. Most puzzling of all, Cusack dreamed about him before the apocalypse and used him as the template for a villain in his graphic novel.
John Carpenter
adapted this from a novel by
Stephen King
, so it has hallmarks of both Horror creators.
It starts by introducing the title character,
a car, on the production line in 1957.
She is easily identifiable,
because all the other cars are lilly white
while for some reason Christine is blood red.
She maims one worker and kills another
before she is even off the production line.
The action moves forward a couple of decades, and focuses on a pair of High School boys. Normally the story would be about the athletic one, while the nerd would be the sidekick. Now it is the other way around. The nerd gets the car, and also hooks up with the new girl ( Alexandra Paul ). However, the nerd gets cock-blocked by his own car.
This is like a gender-reversed version of Carrie , with Arnie the nerd as the main character. Christine the car has an intelligence of her own, but in real life a self-driving car would not be more intelligent than Cujo . The film hits the midpoint before she shows any truly supernatural abilities, relying on suspense and implication up until that point. However, this is not genre shift because we know from the opening scene that this has a murderous supernatural theme.
Like most horror films, we wait for a series of unsympathetic characters to transgress and then get punished for their misdeeds. A State Police Detective (Harry Dean Stanton - Alien ) investigates as the body count rises. However, it falls upon the teenagers to deal with their own problem.
This was directed by
Lewis Teague
, a mainstream Hollywood director-for-hire in the 1980s.
Unusually for a
Stephen King
horror story, there is no obvious supernatural element.
The protagonist ( Dee Wallace ) has a husband and a sickly child, but she also has a boyfriend Steve Kemp (Christopher Stone). Ironically, Wallace later married Stone and became Dee Wallaxe-Stone in the Lassie TV show. One would have thought that, after this, she would have had enough of dogs.
The protagonist takes her car to the local hillbilly mechanic, Joe Camber (Ed Lauter - ), to get it fixed on the cheap. Unfortunately the mechanic's dog is an enormous st bernard named Cujo, after one of the Symbionese Liberation Army terrorists who kidnapped Patty Hearst. Worse than a strange choice of name, the dog has also been bitten by rabid bats. It goes on a killing spree, which leaves the woman and sickly son trapped in their car. They are stuck ther for days, in blistering heat without a water supply.
When the husband returns from his business trip, he discovers his wife and son missing. The police detective, Masen (Jerry Hardin - The X-Files ), is not very much use.
This starts off like
Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief
. The protagonist is a young boy who lives in New York City
with his hot mother (
Kathryn Winnick
) and his wicked stepfather.
The boy has dreams about a magical otherworld,
then discovers he is the chosen one who can help save the universe.
The otherworld in this case seems to be a commentary on modern-day American politics. Villainous Texan good-ole-boy Matthew McConaghy ( Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4 ) harrasses a couple of African-American men in Union blue - the Gunslinger (Idris Elba - 28 Weeks Later ) and his father (Dennis Haysbert - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century ). It turns out that in their reality, the generic term Gunslinger now means a specific kind of soldier - just like the term Huntsman was re-defined in the film Huntsman: Winter's War . However, this one has superpowers - and his revolvers were made from the melted down sword Excalibur!
This movie is less than a hundred minutes long, but is comprised of a series of books that connects all the novels in the Stephen King universe. As a result, there is quite a lot of unexplained back-story. Strangely, none of this seems to matter. The story, simplistic as it is, has been told many times before and is easy to understand. There are good guys and bad guys, and beyond that everyone's motivation is irrelevant because they are all defined by their actions.
The boy teams up with the gunslinger, just like the protagonist in The Last Action Hero became sidekick to Arnold Schwartzenegger's character.
The villain has his own team, including Abby Lee , Fran Kranz ( Cabin In The Woods ) and Jackie Earl Haley ( Watchmen .
In the end, nothing is explained but everything is tied up. No six-movie series, this appears to be a stand-alone.
The story starts in 1980.
While Danny Torrance and his mother were being terrorized in the Overlook Hotel, Rose the Hat (
Rebecca Ferguson
) was hunting and eating children that had
The Shining
. Luckily Danny had his ghostly friend (Carl Lumbly -
Supergirl (2015)
) to give him helpful advice.
In New Jersey, 2011, Danny has grown up to be Ewan MacGregor ( Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999) ). His life consists of drinking and fighting and screwing. To get a change of scenery he takes a bus to a small town, where he befriends Billy Freeman (Cliff Curtis - Fear the Walking Dead ) and joins an AA group run by a doctor (Bruce Greenwood - Gerald's Game (2017) ).
Rose and her friends, the Knott, are still on the prowl for victims. Snakebite Andi ( Emily Alyn Lind ) catches their attention. Instead of sacrificing her on the spot, they offer to recruit her.
When the Knott sacrifice a young boy (Jacob Tremblay - The Predator (2018) ), this attracts the psychic attention of Danny and a young girl he has befriended - like a psychic pen-pal. She is a super-powerful telepath, and the Knott want her as their next meal.
Rose travels by astral projection, while her clan drive around the USA in a convoy of winnebagos. Meanwhile, the good guys can somehow travel at far greater speeds just in order to service the plot.
At the climax, Danny takes the girl to the one place he knows they can ambush Rose – at the remains of the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. This takes Danny's personal story full circle, as he confronts the ghost of his father and tries to finish what was started in the original film.
A young girl, Roberta (
Ryan Kiera Armstrong
), lives with her father (Zac Efron -
17 Again
) and mother (
Sydney Lemmon
). While daddy's superpower is the power of suggestion,
the child is a pyrokinetic.
Unfortunately, her difficulty in controlling her emotions
means that she will eventually come to the attention of the authorities.
Dr Wandus (Kurtwood Smith - Robocop ), the progenitor of the project, is the usual kind of rent-a-villain for this sort of story. He has been replaced by Captain Hollister ( Gloria Reuben ), a more diverse kind of antagonist. While Wandus advises her to terminate the girl, Hollister holds out hope the child can be controlled and weaponised.
Hollister sends a freelancer, Rainbird, a Native American with superpowers of his own. More than that, he has a hunting rifle and a willingness to kill anyone who gets in his way - including the cops.
This has great moments as a father-daughter road movie, with daddy trying to teach her that with great power comes great responsibility and All lives matter. They have a telepathic link, so if one gets caught the other will come to rescue them.
This is based on a story by Stephen King . The basic setup is that Carrie is weaponised against the US military-industrial complex instead of High School kids. As a result, the audience is meant to be more sympathetic towards her. In reality, this is just another retelling of Frankenstein's Monster .
This is the second adaptation of the novel.
The first version was a television mini-series that was filmed in 1989.
Naturally the made-for-TV show had limits imposed by network censorship.
In contrast, this is a full-on horror
with seamless Twenty-First Century SPFX that bring the story to life.
This movie is set in 1989, but it seems like the setting is anachronistic. After all, the original novel was set in the 1950s and that is what this feels like. For example, this is set in a small town that is murder capital of the world. The number of dead and missing is even greater than that of Cabot Cove in Murder She Wrote. Even in the 1980s this would have come to the attention of the State Police and the FBI. However, in this film the only law enforcement is a tin-badge sheriff who can barely keep control of his own son - a vicious schoolyard bully.
This story is about a group of children that hang out together in the summer of 1989. They are a bunch of outsiders, not easily defined like the group in The Breakfast Club. No, they are more like The Goonies , or the boys in King's other story The Body (AKA Stand By Me). The difference is that they are more diverse - there is a jewish boy, a black kid and a token girl. The bullies that harrass them are white trash, the kind that might grow up to become a Trump voter.
The kids discover that their town is cursed. They all have nightmare visions of the things that terrify them, and at the heart of it is always ... Pennywise the dancing clown. Of course, we are half way through the movie before they actually tell each other about it.
In the end the evil is defeated, albeit temporarily. The children bond emotionally with an exchange of bodily fluids. After all, the best way to defeat fear is with love.
However, the monster has only gone back to sleep for another 27 years. There is a sequel movie, to come out the next year.
This starts in the modern day,
twenty-seven years after the events of the first half of the story.
A gay couple are jumped by homophobic rednecks,
who proceed to brutally beat the gay men
the same way that Trayvon Martin beat George Zimmerman.
A friendly clown offers to help one of the gays ...
Since Pennywise is back, the Losers are summoned home to face him. The TBG stayed in town, while the rest all escaped and forgot about it. The girl has become Jessica Chastain , and when she returns she ends up in a love triangle with the writer (James McEvoy - Atomic Blonde ) and the formerly fat kid ( Beauty and the Beast ).
To get their memories back, the Losers have to split up and recover their memories individually. This might have been done in order to accommodate shooting schedules, but it simply seems a contrived way to weaken the group.
Pennywise's powers seem somewhat indistinct. He is not just a psychic emination that feeds on the fear of the victims, because he affects adults who do not believe in him. When he breaks the town's psychopath out of the mental asylum, he does so by resurrecting the psycho's dead buddy as a zombie. This is reminiscent of The Grudge , which uses ghosts of its victims as avatars. At least Pennywise can only operate within the town limits.
This is based on a short story by
Stephen King
, and directed by
Tobe Hooper
Detective Ted Levine ( Silence of the Lambs ) investigates an accidental death at a commercial laundry run by crippled old Robert Englund ( Nightmare on Elm Street ). Someone got pulled into a massive laundry press, and squished to a pulp. It turns out this is not the first time someone has been killed or mutilated by that particular machine.
This was directed by
Frank Darabont
, based on a novel by
Stephen King
. It is shot using video rather than film,
which makes it look cheap and nasty at the start
but really pays off later with the darkness, gloom and CGI monsters.
Thomas Jane ( Deep Blue Sea ) is an artist who creates posters for movies. His wall includes John Carpenter's The Thing , while his current masterpiece is The Dark Tower (the obligatory Stephen King reference). However, his domestic bliss is ruined by bad weather. An overnight storm is followed by a strange mist that blows in from the direction of a secret US Military lab.
Our hero and his pre-teen son end up trapped in the local supermarket with a variety of townies, including three familiar faces from The Walking Dead - Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn and Melissa McBride.
What raises this above the usual monster movie is the fact that it is basically an ensemble piece, a character-based drama with a cast of stars. The supermarket worker (Toby Jones Wayward Pines ) is the insightful voice of reason, while the redneck (William Sadler Roswell ) is a slave to his emotions. The Lawyer (Andre Braugher - Andromeda Strain (2008) ) is a rational thinker who assumes the others are only joking about monsters in the mist. The check-out girl ( Alexa Davalos ) just wants to spend quality time with her boyfriend (Sam Witwer - Being Human USA ), and he in turn is a military man who knows more about the mist than he is letting on.
The worst of all, worse even than the monsters in the mist, is the bible-thumper ( Marcia Gay Harden ). She thinks it is the Day of Judgement from the Bible, and tries to convince the others that she is a prophet so she can infect them with her own religion-inspired perjudices. Our protagonist quickly learns that the last place you want to be is trapped in a confined space with a gang of bible-thumping rednecks.
What makes this film controversial is the ending. While the original story is open-ended, Darabont gave this a definite conclusion. This is a love-it-or-hate-it scene, and if you read a negative review of this film then the ending is probably the reason. Watch the movie for yourself, and make your own mind up.
This was written by
Stephen King
, who has a cameo as the preacher who conducts a funeral.
It was directed by
Mary Lambert
, one of the few female directors in the horror genre at that time.
A doctor (Dale Midkiff - Time Trax ), his wife ( Denise Crosby ) and their two young children move into a house in small-town USA. The neighbour (Fred Gwynne - The Munsters ) delivers the necessary exposition about a nearby place that local children use to bury their dead pets.
The doctor has nightmares about the spirits of the dead, as if they are trying to warn him. Interestingly, his daughter also has predictive dreams - what a different expositionary character might call The Shining . Perhaps it is hereditary.
The family cat gets killed in a road traffic accident. Luckily the friendly neighbour shows the doctor how to bring the cat back to life. Unfortunately the cat seems to be homicidally insane, although the doctor is the only one who can see its eyes are strangely glowing. His own behaviour is as strange as the cat's - despite being medical doctor and thus a supposed man of science, he is in no way curious about how a cat can be resurrected from death.
The doctor's young son is later killed in another road traffic accident. The stress of this is unbearable, so the doctor does the unthinkable.
A scream queen (
Darlanne Fleugel
) gets killed in a horrible accident on a cheap horror movie set.
Her grieving son (Eddie Furlong -
Terminator 2 (1991)
) and his father (Anthony Edwards -
Thunderbirds (2004)
) move to the dead woman's home town.
This just happens to be the town where the events of the first movie happened.
Sheriff Gus (Clancy Brown - Highlander (1985) ) is a bit of a jerk, to say the least. He turns out to be the major antagonist of the story.
This was directed by Mary Lambert , who was also responsible for the original film. As a result, this may only have a few references to the original but it more or less has the same feel. That said, it can be watched as a stand-alone film.
Jason Clarke (
Terminator: Genisys
) moves his family to a new house, a
Cabin in the Woods
. His neighbour (John Lithgow -
Third Rock From The Sun
) tells him about the magical powers of the local Pet Sematary.
Once, the land could raise the dead.
Now, however, the land is sour and any freshly risen dead will turn evil.
Of course, the protagonist eventually transgresses.
This is basically a scene-for-scene remake of the original Stephen King adaptation back in 1989. There are a few minor tweaks, and there is more diversity among the undead. The spirit guide is now African-American, and the murderous smart zombie is a female. Other than that it really has little new to offer anyone who has seen the original.
Nancy Travis
and a group of no-name actors investigate a haunted house.
The story drags on for about four hours.
Stephen King
wrote it, ripping off bits of his far superior stories (
It, The Shining
). He even has a cameo as a pizza-delivery guy named Carrie.
This is set in the 1950s, when
Stephen King
himself was a child, and is probably his best work
since it sets the tone for the others.
For example, it has elements reused in
IT
. For some reason the story has been transposed to the state of Oregon,
presumably because the filmmakers were unaware that
there is a Portland in New England as well.
The protagonist (Richard Dreyfuss - Jaws ) narrates a tale from his younger days. His younger self (Will Wheaton - Star Trek: TNG ), accompanied by his best friend (River Phoenix - Explorers ) and a couple of their buddies - Corey Feldman ( ) and Jerry O'Connell ( Scream 2 ) - go on a quest together. They walk thirty miles along the railroad tracks in order to find the dead body of a boy who went missing.
The boys adventures include an encounter with leeches, which seems to have influenced a similar scene in Feldman's later movie The Goonies . There is also an antagonist, the brutal leader of a teenage gang - Kiefer Sutherland ( Dark City ), who was also the main antagonist in Feldman's later film The Lost Boys .
Director Rob Reiner delivers a movie that not only works as a good adaptation of the original material, but has also become influential in terms of the movies that followed. As such, it is something of a must-see.
This is the annual offering from
M Night Shyamalan
. The central character is a preacher (Mel Gibson -
Mad Max
) who has lost his faith, and the theme is his eventual rediscovery of it.
The preacher is basically Homer Simpson, living with his son (Rory Culkin - Scream 4 ) and daughter ( Abigail Breslin ). His wife is dead, and his brother (Joaquin Phoenix - Gladiator ) stays at their farmhouse to complete the family.
The farmhouse is amid acres of cornfields. And at night, person or persons unknown create mysterious crop circles. Just like in England, although English corn is wheat and American corn is maize.
It turns out that the crop circles are a signal from aliens. The aliens intend to invade Earth. Luckily, Bart and Lisa have what it takes to save the world. Bart goes to the local library where, out of every book in the paranormal phenomenon category, he manages to find the exact book that perfectly predicts the aliens' strategy. If this is not enough of a miracle, wait until you find out what Lisa's superpower is!
The movie's theme is one of faith. However, it could also be one of intolerance. Perhaps the aliens do not use weapons or clothes because they do not have them. Instead of invaders, they might be harmless refugees like in Alien Nation .
This is the annual offering from
M Night Shyamalan
. He was already on his downward slide, but the film is watchable.
The Village is a remote, isolated cluster of wooden houses. Its inhabitants are Amish-style folks led by the Elders - Edward Walker (William Hurt - Incredible Hulk ), Alice Hunt ( Sigourney Weaver ) and August Nicholson (Brendan Gleeson - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ). It is unclear what century this is set in, but the Villagers live in perpetual fear of Monsters that live in the woods.
Ivy Walker ( Bryce Dallas Howard ) is a blind girl who is in love with Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix - Gladiator ). Unfortunately, Noah Percy (Adrien Brody - Predators ) has other ideas.
This is the annual offering from
M Night Shyamalan
. It is the weakest film he has made,
based on a bedtime story he made up for his own children
and spiced with a heavy dose of self-indulgence.
A man discovers a young woman ( Bryce Dallas Howard ) in his community's swimming pool. She cannot speak English, so he deduces she is a mermaid like in Splash .
The director has described this as a story about story-telling. The protagonist discovers he is living out a fairytale story, so he has to discover the tropes and play along with them. To this end he asks advice from one of his neighbours - a film critic (Bob Balaban - ). Unfortunately this turns out to be a mistake of sorts. The critic is portrayed as a villain, or at best a cynical asshole, so we can take it that this is the director's view of people who review his films. And since a critic is merely a professional audience member, the director is thus taking umbridge against his own audience.
The director's hitchcockian cameo in Sixth Sense grew into the first man to defeat an alien invader in Signs . In this film he is literally John the Baptist, the man who inspires a messiah but gets himself martyred in the process. It seems that we can take it that this is the director's view of himself. He sees himself as a genius of biblical proportions who is being crucified by an audience who are blinded by their own ignorance. Okay, John was beheaded instead of crucified but the biblical mataphor still holds true.
Anyhow, the twist is never articulated on-screen but it turns out that the critic was right all along. The protagonist merely mis-interpreted the tropes that were laid out for him.
This is the annual offering from
M Night Shyamalan
. It lacks the twist ending that he is famous for,
and marks the beginning of his downward slide.
The story starts in Central Park, New York City. The young woman from Zoo is talking to a friend, when everyone starts to commit suicide. Since this film was made a few years after the WTC attacks, the instant suspicion is of a poison gas attack by terrorists. However, the truth is a lot more terrifying.
The story moves to a High School in Philadelphia. Principal Alan Ruck ( Star Trek: Generations ) orders the teachers to evacuate the pupils. A science teacher (Mark Wahlberg - The Big Hit ), his girlfriend ( Zooey Deschannel ) and best buddy (John Leguizamo - ) take the kids on a train to safety. Unfortunately the train crew leave everyone at a remote stop in the countryside.
One of the other survivors that they meet is a botanist, and he thinks that he knows the real cause of the toxin. This is the kind of role that Shyamalan normally reserves for himself - the John the Baptist figure who helps the hero understand how to win. The fact that the director does not do his usual Hitchcock cameo is explained by this casting.
The city folk go on the run in rural USA, heading cross-country once the roads prove impassable. They discover that, as always in survival fiction, the biggest threat is other humans. They encounter gun-toting hill-billies who are happy to murder children, but the climax involves a little old lady who seems to have wandered out of The Visit .
This is a supernatural suspense thriller written and produced by
M Night Shyamalan
, although he did not direct or act in it.
It has something of a twist in the ending, too.
Five people get trapped in an elevator. It turns out that one of them is the devil himself, come to claim the souls of the unwary.
The blood is mostly off-screen. While one might laud the use of suspense instead of a reliance on gore, the reality is that in this case the film seems anti-climactic as a result.
This is a found footage film about a pair of teenagers
who got to spend a week with their mother’s estranged parents.
However, the maternal grandparents start to behave unusually.
The visit takes place in a remote farmhouse. This remoteness is part of the standard setting for suspense movies. Naturally, they cannot get cell-phone reception. Surprise, surprise. However, the old-timers actually have broadband internet so the kids can plug in a laptop and use skype to talk to their mother! This is a nice twist on what is becoming a modern cliché, and actually plays an important part in the plot. Also, it illustrates that modern thrillers tend to use 1970s plots, disregarding modern technology (with the notable exception of the 24 television series). The term Techno-Thriller cannot generally apply to most modern thrillers, which is ironic considering that Blade Runner was set only a few years from now.
M Night Shyamalan was once the master of the twist ending. However, in this effort the structure has been changed - and not for the better. The twist reveal is done at the end of the second act, merely setting up a lacklustre climax.
Anna Taylor-Joy
is locked in a cell in a basement.
No, this is not a sequel of
Morgan
. Kevin (James MacAvoy -
X-Men: First Class
) has almost two dozen multiple personalities.
Two of them have conspired together to abduct a trio of teenage girls,
and she is one of them.
Kevin has to report to his psychiatrist for regular checkups. She realises that something is up, because Kevin's multiple personalities are conspiring. They are awaiting the arrrival of a new one, whom they have named The Beast.
This was directed by M Night Shayamalan , although the trailer is careful not to mention that fact. There is a lot of setup for several different amazing twist endings, but somehow the film manages to avoid all of them.
This is a direct sequel to
Split (2016)
, and takes up where the other movie left off.
The Beast (James MacAvoy -
X-Men: First Class
) has taken four cheerleaders hostage, and plans to murder them.
Luckily this is in the same universe as
Unbreakable
, so there is a superhero in town.
The Overseer (Bruce Willis - Die Hard (1987) ) is still living in Philly. He runs a private security business, and in his spare time he acts as a vigilante. Yes, he is within walking distance of the Beast's lair. Also, he has his son (Von Strucker Junior from Agents of SHIELD ) for communications and tech support.
M Night Shyamalan gets his Hitchcockian cameo over with at the start, and then gets down to giving the audience what they want. The super-hero and villain get down to their epic battle, but this is not a straight-up action-adventure film. The director is a suspense thriller specialist, and this is back in familiar territory for him.
Both hero and villain are incarcerated in a mental institution. Doctor Sarah Paulson has labelled them as delusional, and wants them to believe that they only THINK they have superpowers.
McAvoy delivers an amazing performance - well, a dozen performances. A pity that this kind of movie is rarely acknowledged by the Oscars. Okay, Heath Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for his role as a comic-book villain in The Dark Knight (2008) , but that is certainly the exception rather than the rule. Jack Nicholson won an Oscar for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but not for his own turn as the Joker. In other words, McAvoy may be at the mercy of Nurse Ratched but his status as a comic-book villain will prevent his recognition.
The movie's title character, supervillain Mister Glass (Samuel L Jackson - Deep Blue Sea (1999) ), is the longest-serving inmate of the asylum. He may just have been an obsessive comic-book fan when he went in, but he is now a super-genius who makes Hannibal (2003) look like a half-wit. And on that note, we must observe how security has gone downhill since Silence Of The Lambs (1992) . In that film, Hannibal Lector had two guards on each shift. Now, the three supers have one orderly per shift between them. It is only a matter of time before an escape takes place.
A bunch of unlikeable people go on vacation to a tropical island.
The only recognisable face is Rufus Sewell (
A Knight's Tale
), and he is the most unlikeable of all.
In a normal film, the First Act would be spent introducing the characters
by making them interesting and likeable.
This particular film introduces the characters
by literally asking them What is your name and what do you do?.
No characterisation, no personality,
nothing to actually make them interesting.
The tourists take a bus to a secluded beach on the other side of the island. Quickly enough, they begin to realise that something is going wrong. The children start to age noticeably, so it becomes evident that time is passing at a much faster rate than usual. Can the tourists escape before they die of old age? Even worse, as in Blair Witch Project the stress starts to make the characters come apart mentally and turn on each other.
M Night Shyamalan pops up as the bus driver. A pity that he does not do that for real, because his career as a film-maker should have ended after the terrible Lady in the Water .
A pair of gay men and their adopted Chinese daughter
are enjoying a weekend together in their
Cabin in the Woods
. This should be the first sign that they are in trouble.
Then they get an unexpected visit from four strangers, like in
Us
. Yes, it is that kind of movie.
The family are held prisoner by the newcomers. The four cultists are Leonard (Dave Bautista - Blade Runner 2049 ), Redmond (Rupert Grint - Harry Potter ), Sabrina ( Nikki Amukka-Bird ) and Adriane ( Abby Quinn ). They claim to have visions of the apocalypse, which can only be prevented if the family sacrifice one of their own.
To convince the family, Leonard shows them some television broadcasts. While waiting for the news bulletin to start, we catch a glimpse of director M. Night Shyamalan doing his Hitchcock cameo as a sales presenter. Unfortunately this is the only part that is reminiscent of his earlier works. There is some mild suspense, as the cultists' incredible claims are undermined by the family's logic. However, there is no massive twist at the end like in Signs , which is the closest of his other works. This lacks setup and payoff, it is basically too linear. Even his disappointing effort The Visit (2015) works better than this.
Guillermo Del Toro
delivers a film reminiscent of his biggest mainstream success,
Hellboy
.
It is 1944 in Franco's Spain. A young girl ( Ivana Banquo ) accompanies her sick mother and her wicked stepfather (Captain of Franco's cops) to a new home at a remote village in the mountains. The girl has magical encounters with a Faun and other supernatural creatures.
Meanwhile, the Allied Armies are liberating Europe. But the Communist resistance do not want to risk their lives fighting against the Nazis, so they spend their time harrassing the Spanish police instead.
This was produced by Guillermo Del Toro and directed by his protege J.A. Bayona .
A man goes postal, then becomes a family annihilator.
But when he takes his two daughters into the woods,
they discover a remote cabin …
haunted by the ghost of his female equivalent, a kind of La Llorona.
She wants to raise the kids as her own …
Five years later, the girls are discovered. They are nearly feral, but after a few weeks with a shrink they are suitable for suburban living again. Their uncle (Nicolai Coster-Waldaj - Game of Thrones ) gets custody of them. But they spend most of their time with his girlfriend Jessica Chastain . Yes, with a couple of exceptions (men who are quickly written off) the cast is mostly female.
This was produced by Guillermo Del Torro , and has his trademark creepiness. However, despite being spine-tingling it is actually a PG-13, due to its low body count and lack of gore. Thus it unhappily straddles two worlds (not unlike the ghost herself) - too scary for a family film, too bloodless for a full-on horror.
This is a case of gothic style-over-substance delivered by
Guillermo Del Torro
. In the 1800s a
Mary Shelley
wannabe (
Mia Wiasakowska
) is seduced by Baronet Loki (Tom Hiddleston -
Thor
). Her father (Jim Beaver -
Supernatural
) opposes their relationship, and has a Private Investigator (Burn Gorman -
Dark Knight Rises
) investigate the Baronet.
Loki's sister (
Jessica Chastain
) does not approve of the match either, but the marriage goes ahead anyway.
They move to his family home, a massive decrepit pile in rural England. She does not bother to ask what its nickname is before she moves in.
The problem is that the prologue establishes that the ghostly presence in the film is a death omen. This means that the cliched twist is not a twist, and the story is completely straightforward.
Kim Darby
moves into an old abandoned mansion.
The handyman, who locked the place up on the orders of her grandmother two decades previously,
refuses to help open the bricked-up fireplace.
Naturally, the Final Girl chooses to transgress ...
unleashing the predictable evil.
At first the monsters are not shown on-screen, instead portrayed as sinister whispers from the shadows. Later they come out as claymation-looking figures,
This was produced by
Guillermo Del Toro
, and has his typically suspenseful, supernatural feel.
It is a remake of a 1970s low-budget effort that starred
Kim Darby
.
A young girl goes to live with her father (Guy Pearse - Prometheus ) and stepmother ( Katie Holmes ) as they renovate an old mansion. However, the basement is infested with Tooth Fairies. These are like evil versions of the Pictsies in Terry Pratchett ‘s Wee Free Men .
Guillermo Del Toro
is best know for his work on the
Hellboy
series.
This is a superhero story based on a comic-book series,
something that the snobbish Academy of Motion Pictures would never deem Oscar-worthy.
However, it features retro 1950s-style technology
and a fish-man character who looks like
The Creature From The Black Lagoon
. Yes, just like this film.
So one might see this film as an Oscar-winning prequel to the Hellboy series.
The protagonist is a mute girl ( Sally Hawkins ) who works as a cleaner in a secret US government lab. She and her best friend ( Octavia Spencer ) get bossed around by the manager (David Hewlett - Stargate: Atlantis ).
Strickland (Michael Shannon - Midnight Special ) delivers a new specimen to the lab. It is the fish-man, a creature he caught in South America. They have developed a mutually antagonistic relationship. In contrast, the mute girl starts to bond with the creature. To complete the triangle, Strickland has a beautiful wife ( Lauren Lee Smith ) but becomes interested in the mute girl.
Like in Splash , the mer-person's love interest teams up with a sympathetic scientist and rescues the creature from its prison. That is where the similarities end. Daryl Hannah appeared to be a perfect specimen of humanity, while the fish-man is a scaly monster that eats raw cats.
The 1950s Cold War setting turns out to be important to the plot, with the intervention of a KGB man (Nigel Bennett - Lexx ). The General (Nick Searcy - Dark Skies ) gives Strickland an ultimatum - recover the creature, or else!
This was produced by
Guillermo Del Toro
, so even though he is not the writer or director it still bears his influence.
It is set in a remote town in Oregon, USA,
although this generic Pacific North-West setting
means it was probably filmed in the Vancouver area.
A young boy accompanies his father to work. The father works for Kenny Glass (Michael Eklund - The Divide ), a gun-toting drug-dealer. However, there is something around that is even scarier than the local criminal element.
Three weeks later, the boy attends class with schoolteacher Julia ( Keri Russell ). She voices her concerns to her boss ( Amy Madigan ) who then does what all good supporting characters do in horror movies. This works when the characters are male, but something does not ring true any more about a woman wandering alone and unarmed into a creepy old house. When a male deputy does the same thing later on, with a pistol and a two-way radio, it seems a lot more plausible.
That said, Julia's motivation seems a lot more clear. She relates to the young boy because she herself had an abusive childhood, so she will do whatever it takes to protect the boy from his own father because nobody protected her from hers.
Paul (Jesse Plemons - Judas and the Black Messiah ), the local sheriff, has to take time off from evicting blue-collar families when his predecessor Warren Stokes (Graham Greene - Wolf Lake ) discovers human remains. Even better, Stokes is the token ethnic character who gives all the relevant exposition about the monster. In this case it is a Native American spirit, the Wendigo.
Just as Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare drew parallels with Hansel and Gretel, this film is a take on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The grimy rustbelt setting has not been used this well since The Tall Man (2012) .
There is one point of uncertainty - the specific subgenre that this movie belongs in. While the opening expositionary title card and voice-over indicate that the monster has a supernatural origin, the story itself seems similar to the novel Totem by David Morrell . After all, they both involve a curse spread by bite - a scientific origin rather than a supernatural one. The monster is a traditional one, but this does not qualify as Folk Horror. Evidently that label only applies to monsters from English-speaking traditions.
