TITLE & REVIEW
An old white woman (
Meg Foster
) casts a voodoo curse, but it goes badly wrong for her.
A few months later, Alma (
Mena Suvari
) hires a nurse to look after the old lady.
The nurse's friend is suspicious,
and does the necessary background research.
This story is about a young woman (
Essie Davis
). She is a single mother, widowed on the night her child was born.
Her son, now six years old, is obsessed with the idea
of there being an invisible monster living in their house.
This is basically The Sixth Sense , except told from the mother's perspective. Is she suffering from a case of Folie A Deux? Has the constant stress and sleep deprivation driven her insane?
The female writer/director ( Jennifer Kent ) delivers a story with the monster as a metaphor for grief. This takes pride of place in the new Elevated Horror subgenre, scary with complex emotional and thematic underpinnings.
Holly (
Sienna Guillory
) works as carer for her dying husband,
but he speeds things along and suicides himself.
Worse, her eldest daughter Bethany (
Jessica Alexander
) loses her appetite and stops eating altogether.
Despite this, she does not lose any weight.
Grandma ( Lindsay Duncan ) visits several times, and each time she tells progressively scarier stories. The tension is slowly ramped up, and the family starts to tear itself apart. Of course, they are all female so they want to fix the blame and not the problem.
Beau (Joaquin Phoenix -
Joker
) is a troubled man who lives in a city
filled with people who are homeless, drug-addicted, insane
or some combination of all the above.
Beau has to trek across the country to get to his mother's house and attend her funeral. En route he encounters a strange variety of characters, such as Roger (Nathan Lane - Penny Dreadful: City of Angels ).
Finally, Beau arrives at his mother's house and is reunited with his childhood sweetheart Elaine ( Parker Posey ). However, nothing is quite what it appears to be. This seems to be the story's major problem. Beau is a mentally unbalanced character, and he certainly halucinates in at least a few sections of the film. We are left with what could be the ultimate case of the untruthful narrator.
Ari Aster delivers what might be called a surreal masterpiece, but realistically is just self-indulgent. The movie has a massive cast and goes on for almost three hours, but has relatively little to say for itself. The theme of blurring fact and fiction seems to recurr throughout the film, but this may just be because the run-time is padded. One can only presume that after the success of previous films, Aster just has people throwing money at him. This could have been told in ninety minutes, but instead we get a masterclass in style over substance.
Tobey Kebbel (
Hurricane Heist
) and his girlfriend go on a road trip.
They stop off to visit his distant cousin.
Unfortunately it all goes wrong, and Tobey gets possessed by an alien spirit or something.
A survivor, Jason Patric ( Lost Boys ), is hunting the monster.
Jonathan (Frankie Muniz -
Stay Alive (2006)
) is a lonely loser who works as a clerk in a convenience store.
He has a one-night stand with a girl who is completely out of his league,
and wakes up with an unpleasant rash.
Not entirely unlike
It Follows
.
Jonathan seems to be halucinating, and eventually gets remanded to live in the custody of his parents. He discovers that the girl was a witch, and she has cursed him with a spell that will turn him into a gateway to Hell. Either that or he is halucinating due to sleep deprivation.
Muniz is best-known for playing a frantic child in Malcolm in the Middle. Now he is a grown-up (well, tweenage) version of the same character.
A trio of college students move into an old disused house.
Predictably they find themselves being stalked by a monster,
just like always in a supernatural suspense thriller.
The rules of this particular beastie is that it only appears when you think about it. Not unlike certain monsters from Dr Who (2005) , which become more or less active depending on the victim's awareness. The trick is Don't say it, don't think it.
The monster's trick is to make the victims halucinate. As a result, it makes them become a danger to themselves and others. Despite being aware of this, the victims allow themselves to be manipulated into bad situations.
The sheriff ( Carrie-Anne Moss ) investigates as the bodies start to mount up.
A yuppie (Dane Dehaan -
Valerian
) is sent to Switzerland by his boss (Carl Lumbly -
Alias
). His mission is to retrieve his company's CEO (Harry Groener -
Buffy: Season 3
). The missing man is in a clinic deep in the alps.
Thanks to a car crash, the yuppie ends up as a patient in the clinic. His paranoia is accentuated by the fact the place is run by a creepy Doctor (Jason Isaacs - Event Horizon ). The doctor's daughter ( Mia Goth ) wanders around, reminding people of River Tam ( Summer Glau ) in Firefly .
The Yuppie is haunted by strange visions of eels in the water. A long-term resident ( Celia Imrie ) tells stories about the building's past. Apparently it was originally the castle of a mad baron, like in Frankenstein . The paranoia descends into torture-porn.
The story has a perfectly judged arthouse ending. But there is also a tacked-on blockbuster ending too. All this makes it seem somewhat generic and unoriginal. Almost as if it is a Hollywood adaptation of a much better European movie.
A young boy has an imaginary friend named Daniel.
His mother (
Mary Stuart Masterson
) is troubled by this, so gets the boy to lock Daniel in a mental prison.
Decades later, the boy has grown up. Unfortunately he has even more problems now. The answer is to unleash Daniel, who has grown up to be Patrick Schwartzenegger. Unfortunately this causes more problems than it solves.
Keri Russell
and her family live in suburban USA.
Their house seems to have a mysterious intruder.
They set up a few CCTV cameras, like in
Paranormal Activity
. However, a burglar or stalker would not explain
the blackouts and memory loss.
The title is from the TV show Dark Skies (1996) , an alien invasion story that was cancelled after only one Season. That pretty much gives away the twist.
The parents consult an Alien Abductions Expert (JK Simmons - Spider-Man (2003) ). Luckily he turns out to be an expert in exactly this kind of thing, and delivers a great piece of exposition. This reveals a lot about the film itself. It is basically a bog-standard haunted house movie, but instead of the family being harrassed by supernatural entities they are being victimised by extra-terrestrials.
A scientist (Arjun Gupta -
The Magicians
) tries to save his girlfriend (
Ali Larter
).
A scientist (Thomas Kretschmann -
Stendahl Syndrome
) is obsessed with the death of his son,
who was taken by a mysterious supernatural entity that only the boy could see.
Over the next few years,
the scientist develops a serum that will supposedly help him see the the monster.
Then, under the guise of running a scientific study,
he recruits a bunch of people and locks them in a haunted house.
The list of potential victims is quite impressive. Nadine Velazquez is a feisty Latina, while Bex Taylor-Klaus looks very fetching with blonde highlights in her hair. Josh Stewart ( The Collector ), a familiar face from many TV shows, is also among the mix.
So what went wrong with this film? It is certainly not the cast, who have strong credentials (unlike the usual teeny-bopper crowd in slasher movies). Perhaps it is the fact that this is a suspense movie, so the director denied the audience any really impressive kill scenes. Also, the fact it takes place at night means there is pretty lousy lighting.
A bunch of tweenagers go to hang out at a
Cabin in the Woods
. Wow, how original.
The one thing that makes this different is the casting.
The now-brunette
Mena Suvari
wants to spend quality time with her boyfriend (Brian Austin Green -
Cross Wars
), while the nerdy girl (
Joanne Kelly
) just wants to get caught up on her reading.
The tweenagers seem oblivious to creepy scrawls that say things like help me and don't blink. However, the nerd and the jerk discover that the lake has frozen over and there is no animal or insect life in the area.
Normally the hero character would be finding solutions and the jerk character would be obstructing him. The Mayor in Jaws is probably the prime example. However, in this movie it is the other way around. The jerk wants to get everyone to safety, while the so-called hero type wants to sit tight at ground zero of the disaster.
People start to disappear. The tweens do not understand how or why, but it seems to happen when nobody is looking at the victim. The rules do not seem to make sense. If two people are in a room together and they stop looking at each other, only one of them disappears.
The jerk character has brought a revolver with him. The intent seems to be to make jerk synonymous with gun. It turns out to be Chekov's gun, insofar as it is used before long but not in the expected manner. However, this just makes the jerk more jerkish than ever.
Finally, things get back on track. The cannon fodder are disposed of to raise the tension, and we get down to a manageable number of main characters. All basic archetypes, of course, behaving in the predictable fashion.
Finally a Man in Black (Robert Picardo - Star Trek: VGR ) appears. Will he be able to solve the mystery?
This starts with four tweenage American hikers in the Himalayas.
They encounter the local culture,
in the form of a mysterious ossary in a cave.
A quarter of a century later, an ex-cop (James Badge Dale - ) runs a security business in smalltown USA. He gets hired to find a missing teenage girl. Police Detective Villiers (Ron Canada - Star Trek: DS9 ) is less than happy to have the PI involved in the case.
The disappearance is linked to an urban myth. However, the PI discovers a cult-like conspiracy.
This is a tense film, if somewhat slow-moving. The unusual architecture, which adds to the unnerving sense that something is wrong, can be explained by the fact that this was largely shot in South Africa.
Alexandra Shipp
is in a car crash that kills her boyfriend.
His mother (
Famke Janssen
) holds her responsible.
This is quite reminiscent of The Invisible , but without the criminal underworld subplot.
The story starts in a boarding school.
A couple of female pupils there have to stay over for winter,
while the place is snowed in and everyone else has gone home for the Xmas holidays.
Unfortunately there seems to be a problem.
Elsewhere, another tweenage girl ( Emma Roberts ) is hitchhiking towards the school. She gets a lift with the suspiciously friendly James Remar ( Shannar Chronicles ) and his suspiciously stand-offish wife ( Lauren Holly ).
Eventually the two plot-lines converge, in a predictably unexpected way.
A pair of park rangers go into the jungle
for routine check-ups on trail cameras and suchlike.
They get split up, and one of them gets injured.
She discovers that there is a hostile presence in the woods -
and not just the pair of white men who live there garbed as bushmen.
Instead of being stalked by man-eating beasts, like The Ghost and the Darkness , this is something worse. The vegetation itself has become hostile to humans. Not in a disappointing way like in The Happening , but in a fungus-turning-people-into-zombies way like in The Last Of Us . That said, this is not about the fungal zombies like The Girl With All The Gifts . Rather, it gets its suspense from the eerie environment - like In The Earth .
The rangers speak in English, but the white survivalists use Afrikaans. This helps with the othering, especially combined with the Final Girl's nightmares about getting infected. The survivalist believes that the fungal entity is nature's response to mankind's pollution that began with the Industrial revolution.
A police detective investigates a strange double homicide.
The suspect has been seeing a psychiatrist (
Niamh Cusack
). With the help of the team's profiler (
Alice Lowe
) the detective pretends to be mentally ill so he can attend the same shrink.
The title puts this in the Horror genre, since it follows the monster-movie rule of being named after the monster. Unfortunately, like the movie Sorceror (1977) , this seems to have been somewhat mis-named. The only time the term ghoul is used is by the protagonist, in order to provide personification to his chronic depression - in the same way that Winston Churchill referred to his own as The Black Dog.
The suspects have a strange obsession with the mobius strip. A stranger (Paul Kaye - Zapped ) points out that the protagonist is uncertain whether he is a police officer pretending to be a mental patient, or a mental patient who only fantasises about being a police officer.
This is set during the Covid-19 lockdown,
probably in part because that was when it was filmed.
The plague lockdown is also an important part of the movie,
since the theme is intertwined with it.
A young woman is tormented by nightmares, stalked by a mysterious figure dressed as a medieval plague doctor. The victim calls in her former college roommate for support, but this just means the roommate starts getting the dreams too. An online video-chat with a demonologist reveals that the dream demon is not a slasher, like Freddy Kreuger in Nightmare on Elm Street , but a memetic boogeyman like Booghul in Sinister .
This demonic entity, known as The Harbinger, travels from victim to victim and infests their dreams. When it has sufficient control, the Harbinger removes the victim from the fabric of existence. Not just physical removal, but even memories of that person are deleted. Sometimes a fragment is left behind, some kind of relic like a photograph. This just adds to the level of creepiness, as we watch reality shift around the protagonists.
In the modern day, a writer (
Alice Eve
) and her boyfriend (Joel Fry -
Our Flag Means Death
) take a tour of the permanently docked liner, the Queen Mary.
This somehow ties in with events aboard the ship on a transatlantic voyage in 1938. A Third Class family bluffed their way into the First Class dining room, attending a halloween masquerade where only the richest passengers were allowed. Things do not end as expected, and one of the characters ends up going on a kill-crazy rampage.
The pressure builds magnificently as these two storylines build to a climax and eventually overlap.
Annie (
Toni Collette
) has to cope with the death of her mother.
She attends a grief counselling group with Joan (Ann Dowd -
The Leftovers
).
Later, a horrendous accident leaves the family with further tragedy. Annie finds her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne - Excalibur ) becomes distant. Luckily Joan has discovered a way to contact the deceased. What could possibly go wrong?
The family tears itself apart with grief, but there is supernatural interference. They all blame each other, so the film has a lot of emotional intensity, but the characters make a lot of strange choices that make them hard to relate too. They live in a rural McMansion - not exactly a Cabin in the Woods , but it serves to keep them physically isolated. When they have a dead body, they do not contact the police or the coroner - instead preferring it to be discovered by another family member.
A couple of African refugees move into a council-owned house in an English city.
The council officer (Matt Smith -
Dr Who
), seems to be a closet racist with his Be one of the good ones advice.
That said, the African woman is also a bit racist – mistaking the white man's kindness for weakness.
This is one of the few horror movies set in a big city rather than a Cabin in the Woods . However, isolation is still a major feature of the setting. The neighbourhood is poor, and the locals seem resentful of the newcomers. Even the black kids say go back to Africa. However, this xenophobia is not the worst thing the Africans have to worry about. They have brought something else with them.
The dodgy council flat seems to have a monster living in the walls. This is not a racist English monster – like The Babadook , it is the living embodiment of the psychological trauma that the victims have undergone. They were driven from their home by a genocidal civil conflict, and now they are in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable place their trauma cannot heal. The monster cannot drive them out, because they have nowhere else to go.
Bruce Cogburn (Guy Pearce -
Memento
) is a retired novelist who quit after his first published work.
Now he gets pestered with letters from an obsessive fan.
Things get easier with the intervention of a police officer, Laura Higgins (
Alice Eve
).
The film is set in an alternate universe, in 2006. This explains the old-fashioned Internet access, from the CRT computer screens to the Marco Polo search engine. Cogburn himself is a version of JD Salinger, the reclusive one-hit-wonder also pastiched in films like Finding Forrester. In this reality, Cogburn did not inspire the death of John Lennon. Instead, his work convinced Dwight Tufford (Alex Pettyfer - In Time (2011) ) to commit a Charles Whitman-style shooting spree with a high-powered rifle from atop a bell tower on a college campus.
The film is slow-moving at first, but there is a lot of backstory. We get flashbacks to the time before Cogburn's success, when he tutored creative writing students like Elijah Barrett (Jeremy Davies - Lost ). As the story becomes more convoluted, these flashbacks become more relevant.
This certainly reminiscent of Secret Window , since the story is about the writer's harrassment. However, it takes a few twists and turns of its own. That said, it was written and directed by only one person so it lacks the amount of insight that teamwork would have provided. This film has a lot of good ideas that are taken from other movies that did a better job of the same thing.
The world has been hit by a devastating virus,
so when this was made in 2021 they took the opportunity to make a movie
about the world being hit by a devastating virus.
A park scout (Joel Fry -
Plebs
) escorts a scientist into the woods in search of a cure.
They discover the camp of a loner (Reece Shearsmith -
League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse
) who claims to know what is really going on.
This is the contribution of Ben Wheatley to the CoVid-19 era film industry. It has the same kind of weird Folk Horror feel of A Field in England , with something terrible in the landscape itself being responsible.
This is an ultra-low-budget supernatural suspense film,
with more in common with Asian horror movies like
Ringu
than the American slasher movie genre.
It was shot with a cast of unknowns in the rotting remains of the city of Detroit.
The protagonist ( Maika Monroe ) is a teenage girl who contracts a sexually-transmitted demonic haunting. The demon is invisible to the uninfected, but it disguises itself telepathically to the infected. It walks towards the victim, and when it touches them …
Monster movies are a bit old-fashioned, in the era when the Supernatural audience simply ask themselves what would Sam and Dean Winchester do?
A married couple split up after the death of their child.
Years later they encounter supernatural forces
which force them to confront their grief.
If this sounds familiar, it is also the plot of
Collateral Beauty
.
The protagonist (Lee Pace - The Hobbit ) has not emotionally recovered from the death of his son six years earlier. He visits his former marital home, which he has tried renting out but to no avail, and meets the neighbour ( Amy Smart ).
The dead son, unchanged for the last six years, is in the house. Is the father halucinating? The ghost boy wants to see his mother again, so the protagonist invites her over. She is Carrie Coon , best known for a reverse role in The Leftovers which saw her as the sole survivor from a whole family that disappeared.
How will they share custody of their son's ghost?
This is the film that began the career of British director
Ben Wheatley
. It starts as a domestic drama between husband (Neil Maskell -
Utopia
) and wife (
MyAnna Buring
), but moves into a couple of other genres quite quickly.
Rather than stick rigidly to a Hollywood formula,
Wheatley trusted his impressive cast to handle the scenes.
Maskell is a hitman, who works with a partner (Michael Smiley - The Aliens ). Ironically the next time Maskell played a hitman was in Utopia , when Smiley was one of his victims.
The hitmen are hired for a contract to kill a series of people. Things are a bit creepy to start with - the contract is signed in blood. Then the victims themselves are an unusual bunch.
Finally this takes a turn into full-on Folk Horror, reminiscent of The Wicker Man (1972) .
Cameron (Jim Gaffigan -
) is a middle-aged man who runs his own TV show.
The good news is that it gets taken up by a big TV network.
The bad news is that they re-cast his role,
hiring a younger-looking version of himself.
This is a bit reminiscent of
The Double
, but the coincidences double down on themselves.
It seems like he is trapped in some kind of weid time-loop.
In the Third Act, everything is made clear. This is not a weird remake of Donnie Darko , but has its own internal logic.
The title is a quote from a poem by Robert Frost,
best known from the 1970s thriller movie Telefon
but more recently referenced in the Grindhouse movie
Death Proof
. It seems inoccuous, but refers to
the 19th Century american literary tradition
of using the woods as a metaphor for death.
Lennon ( Georgina Campbell ) is a trainee Park Ranger, under the watchful eye of more experienced Ranger Jackson (Nick Blood - Agents of Shield ). She has a remote cabin in the woods , and goes on patrol by herself.
Lennon has her own agenda. When she was a child, her family visited the park and her sister went missing there. She blames herself, and wants to find out what happened. Rather than stay put as ordered, she goes off by herself and discovers the forest's secret.
Ultimately this kind of thing was done best by Picnic at Hanging Rock . The story is a mystery, and some answers are given, but those answers just create more questions. This means there is no closure or catharsis, just confusion created by a filmmaker who thinks they are being artistic.
This is one of many cheap horror movies shot in the US State of Georgia.
A police psychologist ( Olga Kurlyenko ) is called in to help investigate a strange murder. A woman is accused of killing her own husband in his sleep. It turns out that the woman was being treated for a sleep disorder, and other members of her group
Once the nature of the killing is established as supernatural, this switches from being a police procedural to being a basic horror film. The Final Girl is stalked by the dream demon, and tries to stay awake. She gets help from another sufferer, who provides exposition courtesy of his wall-of-weird collection of newspaper clippings. There is also a scientist who runs a sleep experiment lab.
If the story sounds a bit familiar, it is not unlike Nightmare On Elm Street . The big difference is that instead of a slasher villain like Freddy Kreuger, this features a creepy slo-mo female of the J-Horror type ( Ju-On, Ringu ).
Maya (
Florence Pugh
) suffers a horrendous family tragedy.
Her boyfriend (Jack Reynor -
) is now stuck with her,
since it would be ungentlemanly for him to abandon her
while she is in the grieving process.
This forces him to take her with him
on a supposedly boys-only once-in-a-lifetime trip to Sweden.
The location in Sweden is not a holiday camp for tweenagers, but a remote pagan community. Mark (Will Poulter - Maze Runner ) is an asshole, so he will inevitably transgress. Josh (William Jackson Harper - The Good Place ) wants to do his thesis on the local culture, so he will play by the rules as long as it suits him.
The director ( Ari Aster ) manages to keep suspense elevated with lots of long shots - both in duration and distance. This means the film has an artsy feel that elevates it above the likes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre .
This movie has been described as Fight Club for girls. Well, there are certain similarities. Both concern a protagonist who feels uncomfortable in society, who enters a new grouping which seems unusual at first and ends up as a full-on Cult. The difference is that while Ed Norton's character rejects the Cult, Pugh's character makes entirely different choices.
A young woman is disgraced as a professional journalist,
when she got carried away posting unproven allegations,
so she starts a podcast instead.
When she gets an anonymous email with a strange story
about a strange black brick, she uses it as a topic for her next episode.
However, the more she investigates the stranger things get.
Other people have received the bricks,
and they have had halucinations as a result.
Eventually she discovers a strange black brick in her house.
There is a subplot about the protagonist's childhood. She starts to remember details about her birthday party, and eventually has to come to terms with her own privilege as a massively spoiled upper middle-class CIS female.
This was shot during the Covid-19 lockdown, and it shows. The protagonist lives alone, and only acts with other characters via phone-calls. Worse, the story itself is about a strange inexplicable pandemic.
A single mother (
Christina Ricci
) and her son move into a remote wooden farmhouse, like the one in
Annabelle: Origins
. The landlady (
Colleen Camp
) is unhappy at the arrangement.
Worse, there seems to be an unwelcome presence in the house … something like
The Babadook
.
The protagonist (
Jennifer Lawrence
) find her life begin to unravel when her husband (Javier Bardem -
Skyfall
) invites a stranger (Ed Harris -
The Abyss
) to visit their house.
Before long the stranger invites his own wife (
Michelle Pfeiffer
) to stay.
Things slowly start to spiral out of control,
as events become more and more surreal.
This is an arthouse movie written and directed by Darren Aronofsky . As a result, many people who watched it as Lawrence fans and expected a mainstream glossy blockbuster like Passengers .
Jesse (
Elle Fanning
) is a naive young girl who wants to be a supermodel in Los Angeles.
She quickly gets accepted by Modelling Agent
Christina Hendricks
, and befriends Ruby the make-up artist (
Jenna Malone
). But it seems that everyone she meets is out to use her and exploit her in some way.
This is a slow-moving drama, following a familiar storyline that was already old when it was used in Valley of the Dolls. However, in the final act it morphs into a Body Horror reminiscent of the early works of David Cronenberg . Well, what else can one expect from Nicholas Winding Refn ?
Tasya Vos (
Andrea Riseborough
) is an assassin who can control the body of a proxy
and use it to kill the intended target.
She is part of a mainly female team, led by Girder (
Jennifer Jason Leigh
). However, because the targets are mostly male
there is little chance of this passing the Bechdel test.
The next target is John Parse (Sean Bean - Goldeneye ). Vos possesses the body of his son-in-law, who is married to Ava Parse ( Tuppence Middleton ). Unfortunately, something goes wrong. Vos has been losing her grip, and the proxy's mind starts to re-exert control.
While the Canadian auteur David Cronenberg specialises in on-screen body horror, this movie's writer/director Brandon Cronenberg delivers a story that relies on suspense and leaves both audience and characters questioning what they see.
A tweenage girl goes into the woods
and casts a spell to get rid of her mother (
Laurie Holden
). Then she discovers that the spell might have awakened some supernatural force,
and it might actually come true.
A man wakes up in the middle of nowhere.
People start to drop dead when he gets near them.
The women are drop dead gorgeous,
reminding us of the scene in
Last Action Hero
where the kid points out that the video clerk is too attractive for such a random encounter.
Luckily, he meets someone who is immune to his curse. She is Jane Doe ( Charlotte Sullivan ), and if she looks familiar it is because she is a Canadian actress who has been in everything. They team up and search for the cause of this curse.
There is a cliche in modern movies that the Third Act becomes a slasher movie, and the Final Girl gets chased around by a serial killer. This movie nicely subverts that trope.
Veronica (
Alice Krige
), a fading movie star,
isolates herself in the remote Scottish countryside.
Her mansplainer of an art tutor (Rupert Everett -
) gives us the necessary exposition -
that the place was once site of witch-burnings.
The ashes, and thus the undead spirits,
of the dead witches now remain there.
The movie Producer who gave Veronica her career, Eric Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell - Clockwork Orange ), is now under a #MeToo investigation in London.
Written and directed by Charlotte Colbert , this is a slow-moving drama about how every man is toxic. All womyn are victims and they are entitled to take supernatural revenge on their perceived oppressors, AKA men.
This is set during the CoVid lockdown of 2020.
It starts with a stalk-and-slash scene reminiscent of
Scream
, when a young man gets creepy text messages on his mobile phone.
This is actually very well done, using steadicam work
and lots of rehearsal to create what seems like a single shot.
The choice of a male victim is reminiscent of the modern feminist slasher trend,
with movies like
The Initiation
targeting expendable males instead of the traditional Scream Queens.
However, it is nice to see a victim who can actually fight back.
The main story concerns the Final Girl and her best buddy who isolate together in a Cabin in the Woods . Well, horror movies rely on isolation - and the CDC's advice to avoid CoVid was to isolate too. Naturally, the stalker/slasher killer starts stalking the girls ...
The old trope was for the killer to cut the landlines. More recently, characters in isolated locations would be unable to get a signal. Now the stalker just steals the victims' mobile phones.
The slasher is not just the usual lumbering brute, like Frankenstein's Monster - he is a sprinter and a fighter, which takes the violence to another level. That said, the girls can out-fight him even if the boys cannot.
This was written and produced by Kevin Williamson , best known for starting the genre-breaking Scream series, so it follows in that tradition. That said, it does follow in the modern feminist slasher trend of having far more male deaths than female.
Ruth (
Maika Monroe
) and her live-in boyfriend Harry go for a hike in the woods together.
Despite knowing she has anxiety issues,
Harry proposes marriage to Ruth.
This leads on to a relationship fall-out ...
The previous night, a meteorite landed nearby. It turns out the meteorite had a passenger, a shape-shifting alien that replaces one of the bickering couple. Now the survivor flees through the woods.
This is not the first film to use possession as a metaphor for relationship doubts. The ending is a cross between a couple of other films, implying the story would become more straighforward if there was ever a sequel.
A True-Crime writer, Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke -
Gattacca
), moves his wife and kids into a house where a mass murder happened.
He discovers a secret stash of
8mm
cine-film snuff movies.
Unfortunately, ten years previously his poorly researched book
meant a guilty suspect got the benefit of the doubt.
This means he is persona non grata with the local county mounties.
He decides to solve the murders himself.
The murders appear to involve cultish symbology. Oswalt contacts Professor Jonas (Vincent D'Onofrio - Men In Black (1997) ), an uncredited cameo that promises more than the sequel can deliver.
Unfortunately, at the mid-point of the film there is a genre shift. Just like in Jeepers Creepers , we discover that our expectations have been subverted.
The deputy from the first film is now on a quest.
He locates every house that can be linked to the pattern of murders,
and then torches it so the pattern will be ended.
Unfortunately the next one on his list has a family living there.
A single mother (
Shannon Sossymon
) is hiding out there from her abusive husband.
She has her two young sons with her,
who are easy prey for Mister Boogle.
The deputy has been in contact with Professor Jonas (Vincent D'Onofrio - Men In Black (1997) ). Unfortunately, Jonas has mysteriously disappeared while investigating a link between Boogle and the so-called Number Stations that transmit numerical codes over the radio waves. Well, he only had an uncredited cameo in the original and there was no guarantee that he would be in the sequel.
The original had a generic family. This time, with a seperated couple and a pair of twins, things are somewhat different. The fact that the boys are so completely different, violently opposed personality types, is plausible but not entirely convincing. Also, the rules concerning Mister Boogle are now a bit vague.
Dr Rose Cotter (
Sosie Bacon
) witnesses her patient Laura Weaver (
Caitlin Stasey
) commit suicide.
Later she starts to halucinate that
the dead patient is now stalking her.
Her boss Dr Morgan Desai (Kal Penn -
Superman Returns (2006)
) gives her the week off,
although her psychiatrist Laura Weaver (
Robin Weigert
) refuses to prescribe her some anti-psychotic medication.
Luckily, Rose's friend Joel (Kyle Gallner - Veronica Mars ) is a Police detective. His home laptop has direct access to the police database, which he uses to trace back the chain of suicides. There have been twenty deaths, each within a week of the previous one.
The third act has Rose attempt to break the chain. Since the monster thrives on trauma, there are a couple of ways to do this.
A slacker moves into a new apartment in Los Angeles, USA.
He discovers an unusual crystal in the new place,
so he and his new neighbour decide to make a documentary about it.
The result is a mix of found footage and what turns out to be dramatic reconstruction.
A woman is pregnant with twins.
She successfully gives birth to one, but the other is stillborn.
Then she begins to suspect that a supernatural evil wants to devour her surviving son.
A psychiatrist (Michael Ironside -
Total Recall (1991)
) offers to help,
but she will not take the risk of telling a scientist about the paranormal.
Is there really a baby-eating undead witch after the child? Or is she just suffering the side-effects of post-partum depression?
A tweenage girl (
Margaret Qualley
) has an unexplained pregnancy.
She asks for help from the mother of her High School boyfriend,
who she suspects is the father ... even though he died five years previously.
The mother is the protagonist. She suspects her ex-husband (Greg Kinear - Mystery Men (1999) ) preserved their dead son's sperm and used it for artificial insemination.
The pregnant girl lives with her guardians, Blythe Danner and Brian Cox ( Manhunter (1986) ). They have a subplot of sorts, as befits their big-name status.
The final girl (
Odette Yustmann
) is a college girl who starts to have visions of a ghostly child.
This is not helped by her part-time job as babysitter
for the creepy little kid from The Middle.
Our heroine is also troubled by flashbacks of her mother ( Carla Gugino ) and father (James Remar - Vampire Diaries ).
It turns out that a demonic possession is at work. She calls in the services of exorcist Arthur Wyndham (Idris Elba - 28 Weeks Later ) and Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman - Fifth Element ).
A grieving couple move into a remote old farm-house.
Instead of tweenagers the couple are middle-aged, which is original.
Their presence awakens a family of murderous entities.
Before long the couple find themselves caught between the ghosts
and a lynch-mob of locals who blame them for awakening the spirits.
This is a low-budget effort, but that means the SPFX are make-up based rather than CGI. The ghosts resemble the ones in the John Carpenter version of The Fog (1979) , an acknowledged classic of the genre.
Mrs Winchester (
Helen Mirren
), widow of the weapons manufacturer,
is subject to an investigation by the company's board.
She chooses Jason Clarke (
Terminator: Genesys
) as the assessor.
As the assessor settles into the creepy mansion for his stay there, he meets her servant (Angus Sampson - Insidious ).
The movie seems to feel that all the people killed with Winchester weapons were good people who deserved better. The reality is that when they died they were only the victims of their own decisions, such as the choice to enlist in the poorly-armed Confederate militia and engage in treasonous sedition to support the institution of slavery.
In 1630, a Puritan (Ralph Ineson -
Hurricane Heist
) and his wife Catherine (
Kate Dickie
) and family are exiled from the New England colony by Julian Ritchings (
Supernatural (2005)
). The sinister tone of the film is set by an incident that features heavily in the trailer -
the daughter Thomasin (
Anya Taylor-Joy
) is baby-sitting her newborn brother when he mysteriously disppears.
Apparently there is a witch-woman living in the woods,
who uses human sacrifices to make her potions.
The family's new farm, outside the colony, seems cursed. Worse, the young son is hitting puberty and is curious about his sister. This is a stress-filled suspense drama, in a folk horror set-up like Blood On Satan's Claw (1973) . Especially creepy is the mysterious rabbit that turns up from time to time.
The setting evokes The Crucible , the famous play about the Salem Witch-trials in the New England colony, about the true story of teenage girls being used as scapegoats for the sins of the community. Naturally, Thomasin gets the blame for everything bad that happens. Everything spirals down from the start, as the family try to explain events through the lense of their religious fanaticism. Of course, this being a horror movie there is some actual supernatural threat involved.
The protagonist is a teenage boy.
His parents are divorced, so he moves in with his father and stepmother (Jimmy Olsen's lesbian sister from
Supergirl
). Unfortunately, his teenage problems quickly collide with a supernatural evil.
There is a body-snatching, baby-eating monster in the woods. It takes over one of the hero's next-door neighbours. Of course, the hero notices something is amiss - but nobody believes him. Yes, this is another version of Rear Window.
The protagonist is a schoolgirl in Dublin, Ireland.
She has normal things to worry about, like the mean girls at school.
Things get worse when her mother mysteriously disappears.
The mother returns home again, but something is different about her. The daughter is suspicious, but glad to have her back. However, the suspense is ratched up as other family members are put at risk. Has the mother been replaced by a changeling, to get at the daughter?
This was written and directed by Kate Dolan . Normally a single writer-director is a bad sign, but she has the advantages of being both Irish and female so she meets the criteria for directing a female-led film set in Ireland.
Joel (Kyle Gallner -
