That Insidious is a frightfully good horror film shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It was directed by James Wan, the Malaysian-born Australian behind the first Saw flick and the criminally underrated ventriloquist-dummy creepshow Dead Silence. Like those efforts, it employs an unusual plot device, refreshingly emphasizes mood over gore and ends with an exquisitely [...]
Read MoreRubber is a movie about a car tire that suddenly wakes up in a garbage pile in the Mojave Desert and starts rolling along, soon discovering an appetite for murder and some gruesome psychokinetic powers to sate it. I’m sure I’ve lost some of you already, which is fine–this isn’t a movie that very many [...]
Read MoreThe characters in Vanishing On 7th Street spend most of the time running away from shadows, a notion that initially may sound as silly as seeing people flee from the wind in The Happening, but one that, in the capable hands of director Brad Anderson, gets turned into a nicely low-key hair-raiser of a horror [...]
Read More Brad Anderson, David, DVD, Hayden Christensen, horror, Jacob Latimore, John Leguizamo, Mystery, R, Thandie Newton, thriller, Vanishing on 7th StreetThe micro-budgeted horror hit from 2009 gets turned into a big-studio franchise with Paranormal Activity 2, a prequel very nearly as scary as its predecessor despite costing 20 times as much to make and featuring a few too many tricks of the Hollywood trade.
Read MoreIt’s not easy to believe in evil anymore. Evil acts from evil intent? They occur everyday, would that they wouldn’t. But evil bound in its own genetic helix? As its own reward? For its own sake? This is a broad attack to take in reviewing a horror film, but since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published [...]
Read More blu-ray, Chloe Moretz, drama, DVD, Fantasy, horror, John Ajvide Lindquist, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Let Me In, Matt Reeves, R, Tomas AlfredsonAfter being betrayed by the organization who hired him, an ex-Federale launches a brutal rampage of revenge against his former bossRR Someone once said, “The difference between good pornography and bad pornography is the addition of plot.” I think it might have been Gandhi.
Read More crime, DVD, horror, Mystery, Noah, R, SawBoobs and blood go hand-in-hand in Piranha 3D, director Alexandre Aja’s perfectly stupid but surprisingly fun rehash of the 1978 Joe Dante classic about those nasty little man-eating fish that, while hardly the scariest of horror flicks, may make you think twice about going skinny dipping.
Read More Adam Scott, Alexandre Aja, comedy, David, DVD, Elisabeth Shue, horror, Jerry O'Connell, Piranha 3D, R, Richard Dreyfuss, thriller, Ving RhamesHollywood apparently can’t get enough of evil children, because this week on DVD we get two–both of them girls–in horror flicks of varying quality. The one in The Last Exorcism, a Blair Witch-meets-Exorcist affair, is a sweet but possibly possessed Louisiana teenager, while the brat in Case 39 is an actual demon, one who makes [...]
Read MoreMilla Jovovich resumes her sexy gun-toting, zombie-butt-kicking ways in fantastic fashion in Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth and easily most entertaining entry in the horror-action franchise based on the best-selling videogame.
Read More action, adventure, Ali Larter, blu-ray, David, horror, Milla Jovovich, Paul W.S. Anderson, R, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Wentworth MillerWritten by M. Night Shyamalan, Devil is a film about a mixed crowd of angry everyday people who get stuck in an elevator. Catch is, one of them is the devil. The film had an interesting premise but the amateur script immediately struck me as something that Shyamalan wrote in the course of a few [...]
Read More Devil, DVD, Geoffrey Arend, horror, Jeremy, M Night Shyamalan, Mystery, PG-13, thriller