Category: Horror
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There’s nothing wonderfully terrible about Friday the 13th. It’s not like any of the cast are bad in funny ways, not even Betsy Palmer who’s doing inept histrionics. Are any of the cast members good? Not really. Some are better than others. Kevin Bacon’s probably the most useless (and annoying, due to an affected Southern…
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Instead of establishing Evil Dead II’s tone at the start of the film, director Raimi waits a while, veering between horror and comedy–pushing each to their absurdist extremes–until they meet. And, by then, the viewer is fully comfortable in the world of Evil Dead II. Bruce Campbell can be simultaneously sympathetic, hilarious, horrifying. Campbell spends…
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There's definitely a good movie somewhere in Jaws 2; maybe just one without so much shark. Sadly, most of its narrative problems seem obvious to fix. For example, if the shark isn't confirmed and Roy Scheider might just be suffering post-traumatic stress… maybe they didn't want to go dark. Instead, the filmmakers go bright, shiny…
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At some point during Innocent Blood–I think it was the lengthy sequence with recently resurrected Robert Loggia wrecking havoc at attorney Don Rickles's house–I realized it was hilarious. The movie moves so fast, director Landis never lets up long enough for a laugh. There's one other really good pause spot a few minutes earlier involving…
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One of the great tragedies for soap operas has to be Fly II director Chris Walas being too good with special effects–his company does them on the film–to have to direct soap operas. With the exception of these high angle shots of impossibly expansive sets, presumably to emulate thirties horror films, Walas is a supremely…
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The Fly starts with perfect economy. Director Cronenberg does not waste time with introductions or establishing shots–whenever there’s an exterior shot in the film, it comes as surprise, even after Cronenberg opens it up a little. There’s Jeff Goldblum, he’s a scientist, and there’s Geena Davis. She’s a reporter. The film conveys this expository information…
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Ghost of Goodnight Lane is nearly okay. It's definitely amusing throughout–director and co-writer Bijan inexplicably throws on a terrible epilogue thing–and the constant joking really helps it. Most of the scenes play like a horror movie spoof, only one where the movie doesn't take the time to laugh at itself. There's a joke, there's a…
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Jaws 3-D is one part advertisement for Sea World, one part disaster movie, one part monster movie, then figure the rest is character stuff. It does really well as the Sea World ad, not so well as a disaster movie, a little better as a monster movie… and shockingly well on the character stuff. Alves’s…
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Cat People is so brilliantly made, often so well-acted, it's surprisingly those elements can't make up for its narrative issues. Screenwriter Alan Ormsby has a big problem–he's got to turn his protagonist from a victim to a villain to a victim. Sadly, he and director Schrader choose to employ the lamest technique possible towards the…
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Could Beware! The Blob be less competent? Possibly not. Screenwriters Jack Woods and Anthony Harris approach Beware! like a spoof. It’s a comedic early seventies handling, complete with hippy jokes, racism, some cracks at small businessmen, pot, Eastern Europeans… Woods and Harris cover just about everything they can except maybe feminism. Some of these jokes…
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The Blob is a mixed bag. On one hand, director Russell does a good job throughout and he and Frank Darabont’s script is well-plotted. On the other hand, the script will occasionally have some idiotic dialogue and the actors just stumble and fall through it. Similarly the special effects. There’s a lot of good work…
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What’s startling about Bloodlust! isn’t how bad it gets–the film opens on a docked ship, with the principal cast pretending it’s moving violently so the bad is obvious straight away–but how many not bad elements there are to the film. None of them are enough to make Bloodlust! worthwhile, unless someone’s a big June Kenney…
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Maybe Danny Boyle isn’t the right guy to direct a stage play of Frankenstein. When he goes to close-ups–this Frankenstein being a filmed performance, with a lot of overhead shots and close-ups to make it somewhat filmic (along with terrible music choices)–he doesn’t seem to recognize some of his actors aren’t really doing enough emoting…
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Maybe the National Theatre Live just recorded a cruddy night for the Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature performance of Frankenstein. Maybe there was some immediate reason that night to explain why Cumberbatch’s performance consists of little more than speaking when inhaling and occasionally giving an angry look. It’s not like Nick Dear’s play is good…
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Mike Nichols has a very peculiar technique in Wolf. He does these intense close-ups, sometimes zooming into them, sometimes zooming out of them. He fixates on his actors–usually Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, but all of the actors get at least one intense close-up (except maybe Eileen Atkins). It’s like he’s drawing attention to the…
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The Funhouse is terrifying. Director Hooper opens the film with a dual homage to Halloween and Psycho and then proceeds to do something entirely different in the end of this film. Like those two films, he takes a while to get to the violent acts. He does, however, announce he’s going to terrify the audience…
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Silent Night, Bloody Night is notable for three things. First, but sadly not foremost, is Adam Giffard’s daytime photography. Not much of the film takes place during the day, but when it does, Giffard makes it look fantastic. Even though he’s shooting questionable settings… which contributes to the second notable item. Director Gershuny is not…
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From the first scene of Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski establishes the style he’s going to use until the big reveal at the end. He shoots a lot of over-the-shoulder shots with people moving around out of frame, causing a startling effect when the viewer finds out they’re now in a completely different location. He does…
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It might be too easy just to call The Terror terrible or to go into the various puns one could make with “terrible” and the title. It’s not a surprisingly bad film at all. It’s an expectedly bad film, given it opens with a pointless scare attempt. Boris Karloff shows up in the first scene-walking…
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The first half of Dementia 13 is surprisingly good. From the first scene–pre-titles even–Coppola establishes some great angles to his composition. He keeps it up throughout with close-ups jump cutting to different close-ups; excellent photography from Charles Hannawalt makes it all work. During that first half, the film is basically an old dark house picture,…
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Until the unfortunate deus ex machina finish, A Bucket of Blood is a small wonder. Even with the finish, the film manages to succeed; the performances are just too strong. Dick Miller plays a simple, well-meaning bus boy–who also takes drink orders, apparently for no tips–at an art café. The beatnik patrons condescend to him,…
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For almost fifty percent of its run time, every shot one of Michael Mann and Alex Thomson’s shots in The Keep is extraordinary. Mann’s seems more concerned with precise composition than he does narrative and Thomson’s photography perfectly complements it. So, while the film isn’t much good in its first half, at least it’s wondrous…
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My favorite moment in The Rage: Carrie 2–and favorite is a stretch–is when the camera pans over a hippy playing guitar as the soundtrack plays ska. There’s a disconnect between the audio and visual; it’s disruptive, the kind of subtle move utterly absent in director Shea’s terrible work. Shea’s a female director so one might…
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The television version of Halloween has an interesting story–the original film ran so short, when the network wanted to run it on TV, there wasn’t enough film after they cut out the violence. Carpenter was producing Halloween II at the time so he came back and filmed some more scenes to pad it out. Most…
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Village of the Damned has three major problems. In no particular order… I’ll start with the stunt casting. Christopher Reeve, Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill and Michael Paré are all–to varying degrees–genre actors. While Reeve and Paré are both fine, Alley’s out of her depth and Hamill’s just terrible. Some of Alley’s failings–and some of Hamill’s…
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Halloween H20 is a mishmash. It’s a sequel to a seventies slasher movie, it’s a post-modern slasher movie of the Scream variety, it’s a thoughtful sequel, it’s a somewhat successful rumination on redemption and the cost of such redemption. Director Miner’s composition is, appropriately, more John Carpenter homage than mimicry. He and cinematographer Daryn Okada…
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In terms of De Palma’s direction, Carrie is a little bit of a mess. It’s a combination of Hitchcock as camp–which really cuts into the effectiveness of the finale–more religious imagery than, say, The Ten Commandments and, finally, some truly brilliant composition from De Palma. He, cinematography Mario Tosi and editor Paul Hirsch create a…
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Given the filmmakers are members of an organization dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft stuff, I’m going to assume the plot problems with The Whisperer in Darkness are from the source material. As in, the stupid stuff is in the original and they just left it in. Maybe they thought it was good, maybe they thought it…
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For the first three quarters of Die, Monster, Die!, the biggest mystery in the film is how wheelchair-bound Boris Karloff gets around so well. The lifts become visible in the last act. Karloff’s British upper crust whose family name has fallen on hard times thanks to an embarrassing father. Satanic ritual embarrassing, not hounding the…
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There’s not much to recommend Poltergeist II: The Other Side, but it does promote family “values” while quite literally demonizing Christianity. That juxtaposing alone, however, does not make it worthwhile. The film is the perfect example of a bad sequel. There are budget issues, plotting issues (the death of villain Julian Beck during filming couldn’t…
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