Tag Archives: Horror

Mar 31 2021
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Lists, The Scope

Top 10 Worst Movies Of The Decade

Does anyone else feel like 2021 isn’t so much a new year as much as it is an epilogue to 2020? In just three months, we saw our former President incite an attack on the United States Capitol, got kicked off of Twitter, impeached again by the House of Representatives, only to later be acquitted by his loyalists in the Senate, then banished into private life, only resurfacing once or twice to send out one of his idiotic would-be tweets via press release. That’s not even accounting for all of the crazy things going on down here in Texas such as all businesses opening up 100%, the mask mandate being lifted, and oh yeah, a bloody SNOWSTORM crippled the state’s power grid, leaving millions without power for several days and killing over a hundred Texans from hypothermia. But hey, at least Ted Cruz was nice and warm in his private jet to Cancun. Thank you AOC, for doing Ted’s job for him.

Regardless of all of the crazy 2021 has offered so far, it does have its positive points. For one thing, Joe Biden’s presidency was certified for the 60th time, so yes QAnidiots, Joe Biden is in fact your duly elected President. And thanks to the unlikely election of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock (which Georgia Republicans are desperately trying to overturn), everybody received $1,400 stimulus checks, so thank you Georgians for having some common sense for a change. And thanks to the fast-acting response from the current administration, millions of Americans are getting vaccinated from COVID-19 daily, so it’s possible we’re going to reach the 200 million threshold very soon. With all of these wins after a year as dismal and pathetic as 2020, I might be lucky enough to go back to a movie theater soon, though I’m knocking on wood when I say that.

Either way, 2020 is behind us, and there’s no better way to celebrate than by looking at the absolute worst the last decade had to offer. So without further adieu, here are my 10 most hated films from the last decade.

– David Dunn

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Jul 31 2020
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Reviews

“THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020)” Review (✫✫✫1/2)

SOURCE: Universal Pictures

What you can’t see can hurt you. 

An invisible threat haunts Cecilia Kass (Elizabeth Moss) at the beginning of The Invisible Man – and despite what you might expect, it isn’t the film’s titular villain. Instead, the invisible threat that looms over Kass is the same one that has followed Kelly McGillis, Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Kesha, Taylor Swift, E. Jean Carroll, Christine Blasey Ford, and several other women: abuse.

We see how it’s affected Kass early on in the film; how she fears sleeping next to her boyfriend Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and how she quietly and meticulously creeps around the house so as not to wake him. She’s lucky enough to escape from her abusive relationship and stay at her friend James’ (Aldis Hodge) place as she recovers and picks up the broken pieces of her shattered life. Then one day she receives news that brings her a sigh of relief: Adrian killed himself shortly after Kass left him.

At least, that’s what Kass is told at first. But then she starts noticing strange things around the house. She finds an old pill bottle in her bathroom that she left behind at Adrian’s place when she left. Her belongings keep getting shifted around, moved from one place to another, and sometimes disappearing altogether. And despite being told over and over again that Adrian is dead, Kass can’t help but feel that he’s still around, always watching her close by.

I didn’t have high hopes for The Invisible Man prior to seeing this movie. Why would I? For one thing, it’s a remake of the 1940s Invisible Man movies by Universal, and horror remakes go over just about as well as Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho. It’s a February release, and spring movies tend to be among the worst films released on any given year. And to top it all off, The Invisible Man was originally planned to be an inclusion in Universal’s Dark Universe franchise – and if you want to know how bad of a start that franchise got off to, go watch Tom Cruise’s Mummy remake.

So I had no expectations of this movie being any good, let alone even remotely entertaining. Yet The Invisible Man blew away all of my expectations, immersing me in a harrowing, haunting, and nerve-wracking experience that doesn’t fail to send chills down your spine or stick the hairs up on your neck.

One of the many ways that this film succeeds in doing that is in its clever and carefully-crafted cinematography, which evokes a sense of dread and angst throughout the whole picture. Director Leigh Whannell and longtime collaborator Stefan Duscio smartly frame each shot slightly off-center, leaving plenty of white space between its characters and their environments. If this were any other film, you might think the shot was simply framed sloppily and the crew was just too lazy to readjust it. Instead the framing is used for artistic effect, creating the uneasy presence of another character despite never being able to see him. You feel like somebody is always watching Kass, and therefore, somebody is always watching you.

Elizabeth Moss is especially convincing in portraying a traumatized survivor still haunted by her seemingly dead boyfriend. We already knew that she was a skilled and talented actress in television shows like “Mad Men” and “The Handmaiden’s Tale,” but here she demonstrates another layer of expression that feels especially raw and vulnerable. If you removed Elizabeth Moss completely from this movie and put her into another movie where its protagonist was dealing with PTSD from an abusive relationship, it would still work very well. That’s because she isn’t portraying a stock final girl archetype you usually find in many of these horror movies: she’s playing a fleshed out and fully-realized character dealing with her own unique problems and isolation. That depth and complexion adds a lot of emotional weight to this seemingly simple horror movie, establishing a strong connection to its main character and making us root for her throughout the picture.

All of this contributes to Leigh Whannell’s exemplary ability to elevate this picture beyond its original expectations. While the movie is all sorts of exciting and riveting on its own, Whannell uses the thrills and jump scares to tell a deeper narrative about the mistreatment of women and how we respond to them speaking their truth. We’ve seen this in a few other movies now where they use their blockbuster appeal to share something deeper and more compelling, such as the topic of racism in Get Out, mental health and well-being in Joker, wealth inequality in Parasite, and artificial intelligence in Leigh Whannell’s own Upgrade. Here, Whannell is utilizing a classic premise to pioneer a powerful pro-feminist anthem, not unlike other blockbusters such as Alien or Mad Max: Fury Road.

Of course, the movie is not without its flaws. The first act specifically uses a lot of time for setup and drags in terms of pacing. With this being a horror movie, you’re bound to get at least one or two groan-inducing moments where characters seem to be begging to get killed through one stupid mistake or another. And there’s one scene in particular where the invisible man is slaughtering a whole hallway full of guards, all while the security cameras capture the whole scene. You’d think people would see that footage and believe Kass’ outlandish claims, yet the moment is dropped as quickly as it is brought up and is never revisited again.

None of this changes how ingenious and unsettling The Invisible Man is in its eerie premise: how brilliant it is in guiding its audience through one jaw-dropping scare after another and how even more brilliant it is in weaving deeper feminist themes into its narrative. I wondered before going into this movie why its planned sequel was titled The Invisible Woman. Now I know why.

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Nov 29 2019
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Reviews

“DOCTOR SLEEP” Review (✫✫✫1/2)

SOURCE: Warner Bros. Pictures

Redrum and redemption. 

Doctor Sleep answers a decades-long question that I thought didn’t need answering: what happened to Danny Torrence after his father tried to kill him in The Shining? We know that he survived the encounter with his mother and much post-traumatic stress to spare. But what happened to him when he grew up? Did he let the demons haunt his gentle spirit, or did he grow from the experience and learn to help others that were as afraid as he was?

In Doctor Sleep, Danny’s epilogue is intertwined with two other stories of other people who “shine” as he does. In his elder age, Danny is played by Ewan McGregor as a man who wants to leave the supernatural world behind but is inevitably pulled back into it when an elusive spirit writes messages to him on his chalkboard. His mysterious friend is Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), a brilliant and curious young teenager who dreams and shines brighter than Danny ever did. And mixed into these two’s unusual friendship is Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), a huntress who leads a troupe that feeds on the souls of children who shine – and she’s caught Abra’s scent.

Now caught up in a hidden war between psychic wolves and sheep, Danny needs to decide what he’s going to do in the midst of all of this confusion and calamity, and where his place fits in all of it.

I never asked for a sequel to The Shining. I never wanted a sequel to The Shining. Who did? With The Shining being one of the greatest horror experiences ever put on film, who on Earth would have even thought of building upon Stanley Kubrick’s insanity and innovation? What I didn’t realize, however, was that this sequel didn’t spawn from the mind of corporate Hollywood – it came from the mind of Stephen King himself. After penning The Shining in 1977, King revisited Danny’s universe when he wrote the sequel Doctor Sleep in 2013. That puts his film adaptation into a tight pinch, because King infamously didn’t like Kubrick’s 1980 adaption of The Shining. As such, whoever adapted Doctor Sleep for the big screen had a unique challenge: they had to satisfy both Stephen King fans and Stanley Kubrick fans at the same time through the same story.

The great news is that writer-director Mike Flanagan (Oculus, Ouija: Origin of Evil) is more than up to the task. One of the most impressive aspects of Doctor Sleep is how it builds on The Shining mythos without taking away from the appeal of the original movie. The Shining was special because its premise was limited to an enclosed and claustrophobic environment inside of an abandoned hotel, and it worked so well because its characters were slowly losing their minds in lonely solitude. Doctor Sleep is not limited to the madness or the seclusion of The Shining. It is much more free, open, and intentional with its structure and world-building.

You would think that this change in setting and tone would hinder, maybe even harm Doctor Sleep as a whole. Yet, it’s nearly as effective as Kubrick’s original Shining was. Although they’re not locked away in some haunted hotel, the characters inside Doctor Sleep are so caught up in the eeriness and the mystery behind their strange abilities that it feels almost inescapable to disillusion yourself from it – almost like being trapped inside of a cage that moves with you no matter where you go. Flanagan and his cinematographer Michael Fimognari illustrate a forced perspective that feels very vivid and immediate with its tension and unease. I was surprised to find that in many moments, not only was I scared for Danny and the little girl he was protecting in Doctor Sleep – at times, I even felt scared for Rose and her crew as well. It takes a good director to invest you in the plights of the film’s protagonists, but it takes a great director to invest their audience in the film’s antagonists as well. Flanagan does both in Doctor Sleep, and the scares stay with you regardless of whether Danny or Rose experiences them.

Another unexpected element to the movie is its emotion. While it would have been too easy to simply plop its audience halfway into the movie and dive right into the blockbuster horror, Flanagan takes the time to build up Danny’s backstory and elaborate how he came to this point in his life in the first place. That means for about the first hour of the film, Danny isn’t fighting spirits or soul hunters but is simply facing his life as it is, alcoholism, addiction, nymphomania, recovery and all. You might think that this sounds boring or uneventful for a Stephen King movie, but these personal moments were actually very meaningful and significant. One of the most touching moments early in the film was when it showed how Danny got his titular nickname “Doctor Sleep,” and why. I appreciate this movie being able to slow down and thoroughly give its characters the development they deserve, and McGregor likewise does a great job in portraying Danny’s sense of vulnerability, grief, and eventual redemption. It’s too easy to write in a generic one-note horror movie hero and call it a day. Doctor Sleep shows Danny as something much more significant than merely the film’s protagonist – it shows him as a person.

I have one and only one complaint with the film, and that is its third act. While most of the movie pulls you in with its intrigue, wonder, and grotesqueness, the third act slows down to a screeching halt and loses much of the film’s sense of identity. This is especially ironic because the third act has the strongest connection to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Strange, that this movie’s most culturally recognizable element also possessed the story’s weakest crux. The film worked much better when it was exploring its own premise and ideas, not revisiting older ones when they were done first, better, and more hauntingly.

Still, Doctor Sleep is a mysterious, eerie, and memorable entry into the Stephen King mythos, and one that has earned the right to call itself the sequel to The Shining. I’m glad Danny turned out okay after the horrifying events of The Shining, and I’m even more happy that I found it out through a movie that is nearly every bit as captivating and enigmatic as its predecessor is. The film may be called Doctor Sleep, but I guarantee you sleeping will be the last thing you do in this movie.

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Oct 07 2019
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Reviews

“IT CHAPTER TWO” Review (✫✫✫)

Why, Pennywise! What big teeth you have!

It Chapter Two opens on a scene of horror, not from the titular clown mind you, but rather from the prey he’s supposed to be hunting. It’s 2016 in Derry, Maine, and a gay couple just left the local carnival to go home. But on their way, they are attacked in the street by a gang of homophobic teenagers who beat them, taunt them, and then throw one of them over the bridge and into the river despite knowing that he can’t swim. It’s a harrowing, disturbing, and unsettling scene, especially since it’s something that doesn’t have to come from a horror movie. For many, it’s a reality they have to face every day they wake up. That’s scarier than any clown could ever be.

Of course, this encounter inevitably ends with the murderous Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) eating somebody. Thought to be dead, Pennywise has reawakened after he was defeated by the Loser’s Club 27 years ago. The now older Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa) is the first to discover Pennywise’s return and reaches out to the rest of the Loser’s Club. His first call is to Bill Denborough (James McAvoy), a famous writer whose brother Georgie was eaten by the vicious clown 27 years ago. There’s Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain), who now works as a fashion designer with her abusive husband. There’s Ben Hapscomb (Jay Ryan), a famed architect who lost a ton of weight and replaced it all with raw muscle. There’s Eddie Richmond (James Ransom), a hypochondriac and risk assessor from New York. And then there’s Richie Tozier (Bill Hader), the smart-aleck of the group that grew up to become a standup comedian.

Mike reunites all of the Losers together for one reason: because they swore that if Pennywise ever returned, so would they and finish him off for good. So the Losers Club reunite to find Pennywise, kill him, and end his reign of terror against Derry once and for all.

If you liked It Chapter One, chances are you will like It Chapter Two just as well. Even with Chapter Two being an obvious two-parter, there are still several elements from the first movie that are replicated faithfully in the sequel here. Take Bill Skarsgard’s Pennywise as one example. He was an eerie, hair-raising presence in It Chapter One, and he’s just as creepy, haunting, and darkly comedic here as he was in the first movie. I’ve watched his performances back-to-back in Chapter One and Two and compared them both side-by-side, and the thing that keeps impressing me is how much he’s able to build on the character despite how little we know about him. From his maniacal laughter to his side-eyed stare to his drooling, creepy smile, Skarsgard lines up all of the qualities that make Pennywise a wacky, haunting, and unsettling figure. He surmises all of Stephen King’s appeal into one charmingly twisted character.

But its not just Skarsgard that works so well in this movie: much of the newer cast keeps up with him just as much. James McAvoy does a fantastic job as the stuttering Bill and performs brilliantly under the pressure in expressing his paranoia, grief, anger, guilt, and frustration. Jessica Chastain is just as phenomenal in playing Beverly, and she does a wonderful job in portraying the character’s psychological trauma while at the same time being the glue that holds the Loser’s Club together. Bill Hader is particularly my favorite as Richie. I spent half of the film’s runtime laughing, and most of the time it was because of Hader’s snappy quips and one-liners (especially when it had to do with Eddie’s mom).

What surprises me the most about this movie is how much it relies on flashback sequences to tell its story. It Chapter Two is two hours and 50 minutes long, and probably about a quarter of that time is used in flashback sequences. That means that much of its runtime flips between James McAvoy and Jaeden Martell, Jessica Chasten and Sophia Lillis, Bill Hader and Finn Wolfhard, etc. Mind you, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The younger cast members, after all, were great in the first film and are just as reliable here. Still, I wasn’t expecting them to be featured so prominently in Chapter Two. I would have rathered the movie focus more on the adults rather than their younger counterparts. It would have given the new cast more space to build on and more opportunity to dive into the background of their older selves.

The rest of the movie carries out its typical horror movie routine. Pennywise pops out in a few jump scares, there are some heartfelt drama and lighthearted comedy to break up the action, and a giant CGI monster appears for the Loser’s Club to fight at the end of the movie. Granted, it doesn’t look nearly as terrible as the original monster did in the 1990’s television miniseries starring Tim Curry. Still, why do these movies have to end with a generic movie monster battle in the first place? Because it was in the book? Because it was required in Stephen King’s contract? Or because Bill Skarsgard got tired near the end of filming and told the animators to digitally edit him in so he could go home early?

Of course, I have to answer the inevitable question: which movie is better? It Chapter One or Two? My preference is It Chapter One, not only because it was such a lightning bolt of horror entertainment, but because it was a tightly-knit and brilliantly woven story that carried through fluidly without much confusion or interruption. There was a clear beginning, middle, and end to Chapter One, and we were easily able to immerse ourselves in the Loser’s Club’s plight and their terror of Pennywise. Chapter Two is a little more broken up and convoluted in its narrative, and the scares don’t land quite as hard as they did in Chapter One.

Still, It Chapter Two is a thrilling movie and a reliable sequel to one of the most unique and original horror experiences of our time. Movie fans are sure to be pleased by this duology, and Stephen King fans even more so. Just please, please stick to the book’s ending and don’t bring Pennywise back for another sequel. Otherwise, he’ll take the form of my greatest fear as It Chapter Three.

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Oct 30 2018
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Reviews

“HALLOWEEN (1978)” Review (✫✫✫✫)

SOURCE: Compass International Pictures

The shape will pursue you. 

There is a reason why Horror icon Michael Myers was credited as “The Shape” in John Carpenter’s first horror movie Halloween: it’s because he didn’t need an identity to make him terrifying. In fact, giving him one might have weakened him as an antagonist. Too often horror movie villains are fleshed out so much to the point where they are empathized with more than they are apathized. We are expected, after all, to be terrified by these horrifying figures: not understand them. But with Halloween, John Carpenter achieves an uncanny reaction through Michael Myers. He doesn’t even have to be doing much, yet the sheer sighting of him never fails to send shivers down our spine.

My first experience with Halloween wasn’t even with the movie. Sitting alone in my bedroom in my junior year of high school, I was eager to learn more about the screenwriting process and started tracking down movie scripts to read from. One of the earliest screenplays I read was John Carpenter’s Halloween, and from just the first few pages it completely haunted me.

The opening scene illustrates a six-year-old child stalking his older sister and her boyfriend around the house on an eerie Halloween evening. As the child makes his way into the kitchen, pulls out a knife, and sneaks his way up the stairs, he makes his way into his sister’s room and proceeds to stab her repeatedly, over and over again until she’s dead. When he exits the house, the most disturbing thing is not the bloody knife in his hand, but rather his young, innocent-looking stare: unfazed by the horrible act of violence he just committed against his own sister.

That boy is Michael Myers, and 15 years later, he escapes his insane asylum and returns to his hometown to wreak havoc on the same night he did several years ago.

When I first read the original screenplay for Halloween, I was entranced by the details Carpenter paid attention to in his script: the normalcy of the character’s everyday lives, the disturbingly methodical movements of this pathological child, the way he stalked his victims as an adult like a predator stalked his prey through the woods. But when I watched the movie, I found myself even more encapsulated by Carpenter’s spellbinding technique. He doesn’t just illustrate a feeling of paranoia, isolation, or unease: he places you right in the middle of it. It echoes of Hitchcock’s technique from 1960’s Psycho. In the iconic shower scene, you weren’t just seeing Marion getting stabbed in the bathtub: somehow, you could feel the blade digging into your own skin as you saw Marion’s blood drawn over, and over, and over again.

A large part of that immersion is how Carpenter chooses to frame his shots, and how cinematographer Dean Cundey tracks the action throughout the movie. In the movie’s early moments, nothing of major significance happens in the picture: some creep just throws on a janitor’s suit, puts on a Halloween mask, and stalks some people around town. But it’s not the actions that are so encapsulating, but rather how Carpenter chooses to capture that. A scene could be playing out naturally like any other moment would. For instance, a high school student and her girlfriends could be walking down the street, gossiping about rumors and romance. Not exactly anything out of the ordinary. But then when out of the corner of somebody’s eye, they spot a tall, stoic figure just slightly placed out on the edge of the frame, then a blink later… he’s gone.

This is why it was appropriate to label Michael Myers as “The Shape” in the end credits. It’s because he isn’t a character, but a point of fixation: something to divert our attention towards. When the Shape is noticed for a brief second, our focus shifts directly towards him. When he’s absent from the frame in the next take, we let our guard down. That’s why when Michael brutally murders someone in a violent, gruesome fashion later on, it shocks us so much: because we aren’t conditioned to the violence up until that point.

I would be remiss if I ended this review without mentioning this film’s eerie music, which builds up with such unease that it feels like someone is peering through your window watching you. Carpenter composed the music in three days, recorded it off of a few keys on his piano, and from it comprised one straightforward melody. But its impact on the film is electrifying. The keys shifting back and forth between notes feels like feet moving at a quick pace, while the crescendoing buildup feel like a pursuer gaining on his victim. Carpenter once said in an interview that he could play just about any note on a keyboard, but he couldn’t read or write a note. How was it, then, that he was able to write music as impeccable as this? It’s because he wasn’t writing music. He was writing a manhunt.

The worst thing that can be said about the original Halloween is the endless string of copycats that it inspired in the slasher genre. Several films have followed the same formula of the lone killer stalking the rebellious teenagers. Nightmare on Elm Street. Friday the 13th. Even the later Halloween sequels lost their edge. And yet, the original remains invigorating. Why? Because it understands the environment that it’s inhibiting. John Carpenter’s Halloween is an elaborate, masterful, and bloody game of cat-and-mouse: and we are the mouse.

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Sep 30 2018
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“A QUIET PLACE” Review (✫✫✫1/2)

SOURCE: Paramount Pictures

Shhhhhhhh.

Eli Roth once said if you don’t want to be scared in a horror movie, you don’t close your eyes; you close your ears. That’s because the scariest things in most movies are often not seen, but rather heard. That’s why we’re terrified of the shadowy corridors when we hear the Xenomorph’s snake-like hiss echoing off of the chambers in Alien. That’s why we shutter at Freddy Kruger when we hear his maniacal laugh and his claws scratching against the walls in Nightmare on Elm Street. And in Jaws, we’re never scared of the monstrous shark chasing Chief Brody and his friends, mostly because we rarely even see the creature. But every time we hear John Williams’ iconic theme building up beneath the water, it never fails to send shivers down our spine.

Environmental sound can often be used to build thrills in most horror pictures effectively. The ingeniousness behind A Quiet Place is that its sound is not an accompaniment to the film’s tension and unease. Instead, it is the film’s tension and unease. Too many times in other horror movies do we hear an orchestra of loud noises, screaming, and stomach-churning sounds as the movie’s victims react helplessly to the on-screen calamities. But in A Quiet Place, the scariest part of it is not the expression of sound: it is the inhibition of it.

Written, directed, and starring John Krasinski, a.k.a. Jim Halpert from “The Office,” A Quiet Place occurs in the not-too-distant future where aliens have taken over the planet and are hunting the remaining humans who have survived. The key to staying alive? Silence. With the aliens being blind, they use their hypersensitive eardrums to listen to any sound and strike their prey where they hear them. With Krasinski on the run with his family (portrayed by his real-life spouse Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, and Noah Jupe), he has to protect his family and find a way to fend off these monsters for good.

One of the immediate things you recognize about A Quiet Place is how expertly Krasinski manipulates sound to pull out the biggest reactions from viewers. In one of the earliest scenes, Krasinski and his family are rummaging around an abandoned convenience store for supplies. Even though we don’t understand the movie’s premise yet, we can read the family’s precise and careful movements and understand that they’re anxious in avoiding something.

The kids are tip-toeing around the aisles like they’re playing hide-and-seek. The mother is carefully picking through pill bottles like she’s trying to avoid the tripwire of a bomb. And when one kid nearly drops a toy onto the floor, the entire family is on-edge and tense from the child’s mishap.

Nothing has even happened yet, but the framing and the movements here are so meticulous that it’s easy to tell that something is wrong with this family. When the full threat is revealed later on and we witness the consequences of noisiness, we understand what’s a stake here and we are concerned about the family’s well-being. From then on, our attention to the film is unwavering and riveting.

This is what makes Krasinski’s work as a director here truly outstanding: he pulls the most significant reactions out of you from the most minuscule implications. Good directors do that, utilizing smaller details to build upon an escalating sense of dread and paranoia. Ben Affleck did that while directing his political thriller Argo in 2012, and Fede Alverez did the same thing in 2016’s Don’t Breathe. Now John Krasinski is following their lead, and he’s pulled off the tension of effect here masterfully.

The key lies in the editing. Not only does film editor Christopher Tellefsen expertly track between all of the different characters perspectives at once, but sound designers Erik Aadahl and Brandon Jones are impeccable with editing and mixing the sound and making it immediately relevant to their viewers. This makes sense, of course, given how much of the film’s premise is based on sound manipulation. Still, I’m impressed with their attention to detail here. Some sound levels, like the rolling of dice on a carpet, are increased to bring attention to the family’s sense of caution, while others like the creatures’ echolocation are brought down to emphasize their limits on tracking prey. One deaf character in the picture even has sound cut entirely during scenes where it’s showing her perspective. Small things like that subtly lend towards the film’s subversion, and the sound team’s work on this film is definitely deserving of an Oscar nomination. If they’re snubbed this year, it will be the first time I will be outraged over a sound category at the Oscars.

A Quiet Place is a masterful exercise in horror cinema, an expert example of subverting the genre and proving that things don’t have to be constantly blowing up to be exciting. In that, I have to give due praise not just to Krasinski, not just to the cast and crew, but to Michael Bay as well (yes, that Michael Bay). His production company Platinum Dunes produced this feature, and I’m grateful that they saw the value in Krasinski’s vision here and was confident enough to bring it to life in the theater. It shows that even Bay understands the value of subtlety and its importance to cinema. Hopefully Bay will take the lessons he learned on this production into the next project that he works on in the near future. Imagine this film if Optimus Prime were in it.

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Sep 21 2017
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“IT” Review (✫✫✫✫)

SOURCE: Warner Bros. Pictures

Be afraid.

Stephen King is a master at personifying fear. Whether it’s with haunted hotels in The Shining, or rabid animals in Cujo, or even with female puberty in Carrie, King always finds a way to scare us in the most unorthodox of ways. Most horror writers are content with scribbling in the clichés of the genre (the teenagers that have sex dies first, group gets picked off one by one, female survivor is the only one to live at the end) and calling it a day. But like a literary sadist, King feeds off of his readers and their absorption into his material. And like any skilled predator, he likes to play with his prey.

In It, Stephen King gives us his most terrifying personification of fear yet in Pennywise the dancing clown (Bill Skarsgard), an omnipotent apex predator who comes out of hibernation every 27 years to feed off of children’s fears. If you were terrified of clowns before, you don’t even want to see what Pennywise is like. This is a creature that can take the appearance of any fear that you possess, from decapitated corpses, to zombies, to even paintings. If you can think it, Pennywise can be it.

His victims mostly consist of one group of children who dubbed themselves “The Loser’s Club.” Their leader Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) lost his little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) to the clown months ago during a rainy afternoon. One by one, the kids meet Pennywise and his many different forms as he terrorizes them using their own fears against them. As they continue to learn more about Pennywise and the history of Derry, the Loser’s Club decides to unite together and put an end to Pennywise’s villainy once and for all.

One of the most terrifying things about It is that we don’t even know what “It” is. Throughout the film, we see Pennywise use different approaches to terrify the children and to make them more susceptible to his manipulation, but even after finishing the film we still don’t get a clear idea of who or what he is. Maybe that’s the point. When we’re confronted by a threatening force, do we really care about what it’s supposed to be? Are we more interested in the facts surrounding our fears, or are we only caught up in surviving them? I thought about the animals in the natural food chain while watching this movie. When a gazelle is face-to-face with a lion, does he care about what exactly is hunting him, or is he more concerned about getting out alive?

In that sense, Pennywise does not inspire fear like his horror icon counterparts (Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, etc.) but rather embodies it, filling it with our own emotions, anxieties, and perceptions of fear and subverting them against ourselves. Bill Skarsgard, who is the son of actor Stellan Skarsgard (Good Will Hunting, Thor), demonstrates an impeccable understanding of Pennywise and appropriately embodies the madness and bloodlust that a being like him would possess. Any other actor who would have taken on the role might have mistaken Pennywise as evil or insane. Skarsgard rightfully doesn’t make that inference because Pennywise is not human like any of the kids are in this movie. To human beings like us who possess moral compasses and value of life, we obviously see Pennywise as an evil that must be destroyed. But to Pennywise, a natural predator, there is just his meal and the meal he’s having after that. If beings like Pennywise are beyond concepts such as right and wrong, does that mean that he’s still quote-unquote “evil”, or is he immune to such labels because of his ignorance to the concepts? Circling back to the lion metaphor for comparison, is the lion evil for killing the gazelle, or is he only acting off of his instincts?

These are endlessly complex concepts here made simple by director Andy Muschietti, who years ago helmed the eerie and unusual horror film Mama. In It, Muschietti smartly juxtaposes human nature with that of a predator’s nature, and in that sense asks us if these two concepts can exist in the same society. After seeing the film, I’ll admit I have no answer to his query. I just know that I’m terrified of Pennywise and that I never want to see him again. That is, until the sequel comes out a few years from now.

Technically, the film is immaculate. The cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung (2003’s Oldboy) is smooth and calculated, following the action while never getting distracted by it. The child actors all give passionate performances, with Lieberher demonstrating the most layers as a kid grappling with the guilt and grief of his brother’s death. And the makeup work done on Skarsgard is among the best I’ve seen in years. I actually saw Skarsgard earlier this year in David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde. Yet in the first moment when he appears on-screen as Pennywise, I didn’t even recognize him.

As always, I don’t like all of the violence and the trauma that these kids go through, and some scenes I think would be difficult to stomach even for adults. And of course the kids swear it up in typical R-rated fashion, as if they’re trying to meet the F-word quota by the end of the month. Yet none of these things change the thoughtful concepts being explored here, the scares that the film builds up to, or the great demonstration of acting and art on display here. Take caution while watching It: you don’t know which of your fears Pennywise will use against you.

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Feb 24 2017
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Reviews

“SPLIT” Review (Zero Stars)

24 personalities to hate.

I hate acts of violence committed against children. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Now you know. Besides it’s obviously unsettling and disturbing nature, there’s no purpose to inflict this type of trauma on children of any age in a movie. What good does it do? What does it contribute to the story, really? Would it really have killed the film if any of these actors were at least five years older? Three?

Split is a sick, disgusting, cancerous movie that mistakes little girls’ suffering for entertainment. Those girls are Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula, all of them playing high school classmates. After attending a birthday party, the three girls are kidnapped by Kevin (James McAvoy), who gases the girls in their car until they pass out. Hours later, they wake up in a small room that looks like prime territory for an experienced rapist. Kevin never does anything, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch if he ever did.

The girls eventually find out that “Kevin” is not exactly one person, but multiple. Suffering from Disassociative Identity Disorder, Kevin has 24 personalities in his head, and the girls converse with all of them. The one that kidnapped them is named Dennis, an OCD clean freak that will rip your clothes off if you so much as have a smudge on them. There’s Clarissa, an almost-motherly figure were it not that she (he?) ordered Dennis to kidnap the girls in the first place. There’s a nine-year old named Hedwig, who’s the most friendly to the girls out of Kevin’s personalities. And then lurking in the back of Kevin’s mind is the 24th personality, who the other personalities refer to as “The Beast.”

First of all, I need to address Kevin’s disorder. The film’s portrayal of the disease is inaccurate at its best, demonizing at its worst. There are multiple inconsistencies with the film’s portrayal of the disease, including:

  • The different personalities having conversations with each other (they don’t).
  • Kevin’s body composition and appearance changes based on what personality has taken over (it doesn’t).
  • Kevin’s original personality can be summoned forward if you say his full name (he can’t).
  • The different personalities can get so extreme that it can make Kevin bulletproof and have super strength (definitely not).

That, however, isn’t even the worse part of Split’s portrayal of DID. With Kevin kidnapping, torturing, and brutalizing these young girls, the film portrays the victims of this disease as dangerous and threatening, when in most cases they’re relatively harmless to anyone except themselves. As someone who personally suffers from another mental disorder, I’m offended by the movie for demonizing Kevin’s disease and for making it look more dangerous than it actually is. It makes people suffering from this disease look like horrible people, when in fact they’re suffering in ways none of us can understand. These people deserve to be sympathized with, not apathized.

But hell, forget about it. This is a movie, after all, and filmmakers are allowed to take artistic license for the purpose of advancing their art and storytelling. At least, that’s the excuse I would give if this movie had any sort of art or storytelling to it. From start to finish, the only purpose of Split is to see little girls get hurt by a megalomaniac who tortures them differently with each of his personalities. Seeing anyone being tortured by one assailant is enough. Seeing three girls being manhandled by 24 assailants in one body is revolting.

A few things these girls are forced to go through after being kidnapped include: dancing, urinating on themselves, fondling, being stripped from their clothes, separated into other rooms, taunted by a knife, forced into small spaces, psychologically tortured, having their intestines ripped out, and eventually eaten alive, although by what exactly I won’t say. I’m watching all of this absolutely mortified, not only by what I’m seeing on-screen, but also knowing that this movie was rated PG-13. My mind raced, wondering how many teenagers might have also watched this atrocity and told their friends about it enthusiastically afterwards.

The violence against these girls serve no purpose. None. It is not fun. It is not thrilling. It is not exciting. It is ugly, twisted, and demented, and it’s even worse when you think about studio executives approving of this sort of on-screen torture porn against children. How can you look at everything Kevin is doing here and think “Hey, this teenage suffering is worth some money. Let’s market it to teenagers.”

I say all this knowing full well that I have praised other horror films with teenage protagonists, including Halloween, Scream, and Nightmare On Elm Street. Other horror films, such as Poltergeist, Sinister, and The Shining have had even younger children in them. So how come I’m more forgiving of these movies and not Split?

I think it has to do with intentions. In the aforementioned films, the children are either ignorant or unsuspecting of the overlying threat looming over them, whereas the adults are fully aware and terrified of it. That enhances the horror experience and makes us bite our nails at the action happening on-screen. And in the case of Halloween, Scream, and Nightmare, the screenplay says they’re teenagers, but they look more mature in their on-screen appearance. It’s not hard to see Jamie Lynn Curtis, Neve Campbell, or Heather Lagenkamp as seniors, maybe even as college students.

But the girls in Split look very much like young girls, as in 12 to 13. Even though they’re all older than 20, they all look like somebody’s kid that just came out of recess. To see them like this and have the camera watch them eagerly as they’re being tortured with very little clothing on is sickening and disgusting. It makes me wonder if the actresses parents were bothered at all while watching them. If they weren’t, what does that say about them?

What caused these personalities to emerge in Kevin? The reason implied is sexual abuse, as Kevin’s mother always grabbed a coat hanger any time she saw mess in her house. There’s sexual abuse implied for another character too, although I won’t spoil by saying who. Kevin refers to himself and the other individual as “pure”, saying that they are the special ones who will inherit the Earth. To imply that you have to be sexually abused in order to become genetically superior is both disgusting and insensitive. I would love to hear some sexual assault victims opinions’ on this film, and I would love the studio heads to sit down and listen to it as well.

This is a new low for writer-director M. Night Shyamalan, unmatched by most of his recent failures. The Happening. The Last Airbender. After Earth. And now Split. At least with the previous films, they were just poorly made or insulting to our intelligence. But Split fails with something far, far worse. It insults our dignity, it insults what the PG-13 rating allows into theaters, and it insults what consumers consider as “entertainment.” This can’t fairly be labeled as the worst film of the year because it’s technically immaculate. But it’s the film with the worst intentions, and that matters more.

I recognize James McAvoy as an outstanding talent, and the fact that he can brave through all of these different personalities and perform all of them enthusiastically speaks to his range as an actor. But I’m not here to review his performance. I’m here to review the film. And the movie is poisonous, harmful, and disingenuous, no matter how great of a performance may be in it.

Split is an immoral, abhorrent waste of film, made all the more worse because we’re seeing kids suffering no less in it. The studio heads were wrong to make a movie like this, and they’re damn wrong if they think we’re supposed to accept it as entertainment.

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Jun 16 2016
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Reviews

“ANNABELLE” Review (✫)

Barbie is scarier than this. 

Remember how I wrote in my review for The Conjuring that the Annabelle doll was one of the creepiest elements of the movie? I take it all back. Annabelle is not creepy. Silence is creepy. Moving objects are creepy. Unexplainable sounds, noises, or occurrences are creepy. The unexpected is creepy. A rotted doll turning its head around to stare at you is not creepy, and it doesn’t get creepier as you repeat it 15 more times in a movie.

I realized this while watching Annabelle, a terrible prequel that is the complete antithesis of its predecessor. The Conjuring was masterfully orchestrated in its suspense. Annabelle is haphazardly assembled. The Conjuring knew how to exercise its elements conservatively. Annabelle throws them at the screen like a toddler with temper tantrums. The Conjuring understood the importance of silence and subtlety. Annabelle scoffs at these as it vomits out flashy effects and useless images that do nothing to intensify the plot or its stakes. If The Conjuring advanced the horror genre a few steps forward, Annabelle slowed it down to a baby crawl.

How boring is this movie? So boring that even attempting to write a synopsis for it nearly drifted me to sleep. Dear reader, I tried. I truly did. But what do you need from me? What do you need to know besides that this movie is a prequel? You already know there’s a family, a demented spirit, a doll, and too many jump scares to count. Where else have we seen this before besides in The Conjuring, The Exorcist, The Last Exorcism, The Amityville Horror, The Shining, and every other horror movie in existence, ever?

Talking about the characters is a waste of column space. Why waste talking about them, when the writers make them so plain and dull? In The Conjuring, we cared about Ed and Lorraine Warren because they were so different from the typical horror protagonists. They’re paranormal investigators, arguably the most equipped to handle demonic threats, and yet, they’re still fearful of the forces against them in that movie. The fact that they were strong characters and were still afraid made The Conjuring all the more potent in its dread. These characters, in comparison, are just lining up for the slaughter. You have the made-for-TV housewife, the ignorant father, a helpless priest, and a clueless child, all of whom you don’t care about or even feel slightly interested in. Actually, I retcon my statement: they’re all clueless, helpless, ignorant, and made-for-TV.

The pacing is as sluggish as its cast is. The score, stock and overused. In a movie like this, you would expect its only strength to lie in its visual effects, but even those are garbage. In one laughable scene, the heroine is running down the stairs from… lightning. Yes, dear reader, blue lightning. We go from dolls to demons to lightning, and it looks just as cheesy as it sounds. It looked so bad on the screen that the film’s editor might as well just have drawn blue crayon over the frames. It would have looked just as unconvincing, but at least you wouldn’t be wasting the budget. 

And then we get down to the movie’s biggest offense: poisoning the chilling nature of Annabelle. In The Conjuring, she provided the movie’s more unexpectedly scary moments. That’s because director James Wan knew how to save her, use her, conceal her, then reveal her in shocking moments that surprised you. Wan understood, more than anything else, that the doll by herself was unsettling, but with the right moment when the audience’s guard was down, she would pop out and frighten you with her mysterious and malicious nature.

Our guard is down when we watch Annabelle too, and it stays down after we see her tricks repeat over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. Director John Leonetti took a great element from The Conjuring and thought that copying and pasting it would have the same effect. It didn’t. Leonetti even worked as the cinematographer for The Conjuring. Couldn’t he see through the camera lense that it wasn’t Annabelle that made the film scary, but rather its deliberate pacing and dreary mood? Couldn’t he see that the film didn’t frighten its audiences because of one doll, but rather, because of all of the elements in the picture? Wan understood his cohesion of lighting, editing, and timing and how it delivered the movie’s biggest thrills. Leonetti, in comparison, is a one-trick phony.

Annabelle is a reaffirmation of why I hate horror movies. In good horror movies, like the original Halloween or The Conjuring, they use their premises as a springboard to build up to bigger moments of suspense and eeriness. Annabelle’s mistake was thinking that it’s flimsy premise was the suspense and eeriness. The result is a movie that is long, overbearing, tedious, tiring, and boring. I hope Annabelle stays in the glass jar that the Warrens trapped her in. Putting her in a woodchipper isn’t a bad idea either, along with this movie’s film stock.

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Jun 16 2016
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“THE CONJURING” Review (✫✫✫1/2)

Be afraid of what you can’t see.

The Conjuring is a revelation in horror cinema: a genuinely creepy and disturbing movie, infesting every nerve of your body with consistent tension, anxiety, and unease. In a long failing genre that mistakes horror for sick images and macabre violence, at last we find a movie that gets it. True horror does not come from the gruesome things we see on the screen: it comes from the things that we don’t see, the things that we suspect are hiding in dark corners, quietly leaning over our shoulders.

The fact that The Conjuring is based on two real-life paranormal investigators, Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) makes the film’s events all the more unnerving to watch, and it makes you question how much of it is fiction. In the film, the Warrens are investigating the Perrons, a family that recently moved out to a house in Rhode Island where they think they will be able to peacefully raise their five children. It doesn’t even take a day for unexplainable occurrences to start happening in the house. The clocks always stop at exactly 3:07 in the morning. Picture frames fall to the floor all at once. Strange clapping can be heard in the house every now and then. And after a while, the Perron’s youngest daughter Christine (Joey King) persists that she sees a malevolent spirit late at night. The Warrens commit to the case to find out what is causing the occurrences and help the family before it is too late.

The Conjuring reaffirms an idea I’ve believed in for a long time now: ghosts by themselves are not scary. Neither are poltergeists, demons, monsters, psychotic murderers, serial killers, or supernatural entities. None of these things are scary on their own. What makes them truly scary is the environment around them, the sounds of feet shuffling, the crunching of leaves as they are being stepped on, the chairs creaking, the wind blowing out of nowhere, the chill running down your spine that you can’t explain where it came from. True fear comes from knowing that the threat is near, and yet, not being able to see or sense them.

Director James Wan plays on the senses brilliantly in The Conjuring. He doesn’t evoke sensationalism. He evokes moods, tones, feelings, paranoia, confusion, hopelessness, distrust, and dread. Because he relies on these things instead of the usually cheap jump scares, the picture lasts longer and leaves a heavier impact on you than most other horror pictures do.

Compare one of this film’s creepier antagonists, a small ceramic Annabelle doll, to most of today’s horror icons, such as Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers. Maybe once they were scary, but nowadays they’re just big, brainless buffoons that groan at their victims, swinging sharp objects around, their brutish bodies invulnerable to every hazard imaginable. That’s not scary, that’s overkill. How are you supposed to get invested into a story where its main threats are indestructible? How are you supposed to be surprised or shocked when you can see them lumbering 50 miles away? In the Friday the 13th and Halloween movies, you don’t go to get scared: you go to watch teenagers get hacked to death, with no suspense or investment to supplement their bloody deaths.

Annabelle, however, is a different story. She’s not scary because of one specific instance: she’s scary because she represents something much larger than herself, which is the obvious risks of the Warrens’ career choice. In one moment, the Warren’s professional life crosses over into their personal life, and the threat that entities like Annabelle poses to the Warrens is truly frightening. It made me really think, if this story were true, and malicious spirits like Annabelle are really out there, what defense would we have against them? What would we do if our families were haunted by them? We would be truly helpless, just like one of Annabelle’s victims.

Some might argue that the pace is too slow or deliberate in this picture. I guess I would agree with you, if James Wan hadn’t made Insidious before this, which truly was a slow, deliberate picture that didn’t have half of the thrills as The Conjuring does. Most horror pictures take their genre for granted, thinking that they will be successful just by following conventions. Not The Conjuring. It cherishes its horror, lingers on it, and smartly builds up to unexpected moments, surprising you in the most profound of ways. Like a poltergeist, The Conjuring possesses you, and no incantation can lift the spell it has on you.

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