How do you promote a great looking misfire these days? You tell people that it was written and directed by the same man who wrote the superior Spanish film “The Orphanage”. As much as I wanted to like his latest effort, “Marrowbone”, I have to be honest in […]
I can picture a studio meeting in Hollywood: “hey why don’t we revive the “Saw” franchise? It’s been 7 years since “Saw VII” (supposedly “The Final Chapter”) hit theaters and it’s time to bring back Jigsaw to the big screen. That’s a brilliant idea! The suckers who paid […]
Movies like “Happy Death Day” are so easy to get wrong, but director Christopher Landon (who wrote “Disturbia”) has managed to pull it off. It’s best to describe his movie as a cross between “Groundhog Day” and basically any slasher film you can think of (the movie even […]
In a genre that suffers from extreme tiredness, filmmakers like James Wan are still delivering solid scares with such movies as “The Conjuring” and “Insidious”. Not the case with “Amityville: The Awakening”, a dreadful “kind-of-a” sequel to the 1979 movie. Even the actors make fun of the 2005 […]
I’ve been spending a lot of time watching Netflix shows. Every now and then they drop a new movie (avoid “Death Note” at all costs), so naturally I was intrigued when Stephen King’s “Gerald’s Game” was up next. This isn’t an easy movie to endure, mainly because the […]
It’s the end of the summer, a time where some studios start preparing for Oscar season, while others dump their summer leftovers. Case in point: “Flatliners”, a truly awful thriller (if we can call it that), that ranks among the worst films of the year. A remake of […]
Movies based on Stephen King’s novels tend to range from terrific (“The Shawshank Redemption”) to just plain awful (“Cell”), but being one of his scariest and most popular stories, I approached “It” with high expectations. Filmmaker Tommy Lee Wallace had already adapted the story into a mini-series back […]
If you’ve seen Joel Edgerton in “Warrior” and “The Gift”, you probably know he’s an actor who means business. In “It Comes At Night”, an indie horror film that distances itself from the multiplex formula, Edgerton sinks his teeth into the complex role of a family man who […]
It wouldn’t be completely unfair to call the new “Mummy” movie pointless. After all, if you want to reboot a series, at least do it right. I’m a sucker for the original Universal monster films, made famous by Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the early 1930’s. That’s […]
“Berlin Syndrome” is terrifying because it feels real. I can’t remember the last time I liked a character in a horror movie from the get-go and then found myself rooting for her to survive. So props to director Cate Shortland and her lead actress Teresa Palmer for turning […]