A Horror Film Blog

When all else fails, do a remake of a film which was already pastiche of other, better films I've heard fairly positive things about this remake.   I've always been ambivalent about the original - on the one hand, I liked the protracted origin story for the killer.  On the other, it was a bit overly schlocky and ludicrous, and too much attention being paid to winding up the Godly. And I, for one, wouldn't be boasting about my connection to the Terrifier films.

Downrange , directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, is okay, in a sort of super reductive way.  Instead of standard stalk'n'slash fare, which usually being stalked across various locations and slashed one by one, or even trapped in one fairly large location with lots of hidey-holes, this film is limited to one, very small location - the lee side of a car, with a sniper taking potshots at any part of the luckless road trippers huddling on the far side of their crippled vehicle.  It's impressively minimalist, and that bare-basics attitude is applied to the script as well as the narrative.   We get virtually nil character development beyond some basic young slash fodder stereotypes.    This isn't Wolf Creek , which took its time and developed pleasant, rounded characters before making bad things happen to them in the second half.   The sniper is never given any motivation or development - though we are allowed to see him - something denied his victims until the...

I enjoyed this.  It is obviously a low budget effort, with just three actors and a limited set (cabin / woods) but whatever money they had was spent wisely, getting capable performers and splashing out (pun intentional) on lots of gory wolf action. Has anything nice ever happened when people go to an isolated cabin in the woods? The first half is building up characters and relationships.  The second half is a fight for survival against some mean doggos.  Neither part is quite on-the-money but it is still engaging enough.   The characters and the conflicts are  a bit stock - you get the feeling we're in a mash up of the Hunger Games (Tough girl with bow in a love triangle with her rugged best friend and her soft city boyfriend) and ... uh ... something with wolves.  But the acting and setting is good.   The mis-en-scene helps you work out it is a love triangle, and it ain't the boys who are hot for each other The second half feels a bit rushed...

 Forgettable home-invasion-with-a-twist boiler. Social media star Mia agrees to pet sit her sister's doggo while said sister goes off to get some medical treatment.  Because someone is murdering local dogs, as you do.  While watching doggo, Mia is menaced by the creepy neighbour and her vapid influencer friends are simultaneously targeted by a Deranged Psycho (tm) who mutilates them as Mia fails to answer questions. So, yeah, we can assume someone watched Scream and thought they could do better.  They can't. If this seems familiar it is probably because you've seen Black Christmas.  Or Halloween.  Or Scream.  Or a any of a thousand better films. Daisye Tutor is very good as Mia. She effectively has to hold the whole film together as she is often the only character on screen for large amounts of time, and none of the rest have any development.  But the rest of the film is a mess, with an incoherent plot, poorly presented characters, a setting that ...

A young couple decide to have a weekend away at his daddy's beach house in a town perched on the edge of the ocean.  Damned if they don't choose the weekend of some terrifying ecological catastrophe for it. Emily and Randall smooch.  We don't get many essentially nice people smooching in horror films, so let's celebrate them. I enjoyed the first two acts of this of this film a lot. And they are distinct acts - the initial establishment and location of character, then confusion and mounting horror, followed by an action-orientated climax. I particularly appreciated the director's willingness to take things slowly and let unease and uncertainty build up. For the first half hour everything seems normal and mundane.  Our characters - Emily and Randall - arrive at the beach house.  They meet an older couple who are also planning on staying there.  Delightfully, and so unusually for films, no-one is unpleasant or acts like a total dick. Misunderstandings smoothed over...

Stop me if you've heard this one before ... Two women arrange to meet up with  male friends in an isolated cabin.  Once they get there, they find their friends are missing and are marauded by some distinctly unfriendly locals. "That's a warning sign, isn't it?  We should heed that.  We shoul go back ... Oh, wait, don't leave me alone ..." That is about as basic a horror film scenario as you can get, without involving babysitters and a masked killers.  The twist that makes The Retreat slightly - very slightly - different is that the cabin attendees are gay - two queer women meeting up with their queer male friends for a weekend away, unaware that the locals are distinctly unwelcoming to the rainbow community. It's not exactly a radical innovation - horror films have often focused on frowned-upon sexual activity, and you could argue the shift from villain to victim signals some advancement for the rainbow community.  But beyond this, the film is pretty obvio...

I really enjoyed Neil Marshall's debut, Dog Soldiers , back in the day; and though I didn't understand what all the excitement was about, lots of people praised The Descent , because apparently feminism is two women in a cave arguing over who owns a man; and I am a sucker for people being trapped in a cave stories and even more so when there are flesh eating monsters, so I didn't not like that film. I can't think of anything amusing to say here, so I will say nothing. But The Lair is a very, very poor excuse for a monster movie - even if large parts of it are set underground and, yes, there are flesh eating monsters. It's an entirely predictable Aliens -but-in-Afghanistan nonsense. Plodding and dull, without surprises or innovation.  So, Lt Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk) is an RAF pilot deployed in Afghanistan.  We see Sinclair in a plane in the skies above Afghanistan, in the throes of getting shot down.  Then there is a brief flash back, to TWO DAYS EARLIER, as ...

Having watching Jane Schoenbrun's  We're All Going to the World's Fair it is almost impossible to say quite what I have watched. My initial comments on Shudder were condescending, faintly praising the director doing something other than a slasher clone.  There's an implied criticism in that, suggesting (not too far below the surface) that what ever they did they did not do it terribly well.  And I imagine a lot of people watching We're All Going to the World's Fair would have left it at that.  At best, a sporadically interesting attempt at micro-budget film-making.  At worst, a near unwatchable pretentious mess. But thinking about the film again as I tried to write this review, I found myself feeling much more positive and intrigued, about the film itself.  Its refusal to give a conventional narrative or establish a diegetic reality with observable rules prompted an intellectual response and forced me to either reject the project altogether (as I suspect m...

1988, Idiana.  Three girls attend a heavy metal concert, pick up some guys and take them to one of the girls' parents nice pad to drink, take drugs, play Never Have I Ever, get jiggy ... and carnage ensues. I will admit I watched wanting next to nothing in terms of mental stimulation, and was really in search of things lurid and sleazy.  But We Summon the Darkness was ... much better than I expected.  So much so that I didn't feel disappointed when it failed to deliver the lur and sleaze. Instead of a flatlining exploitation flick channeling Last House on the Left, what I got was surprisingly fun comedy.  The cast are good, the direction shows flair (and on one occasion, flare). "This is not what I meant when I said I wanted things to get hot!" While no-one will mistake the screenplay for Tolstoy (thank God) it is witty and clever, addressing the (resurgent, if it ever actually went away) conservative Satanic panic nonsense associated with rock music, drinking, drug...

This is a hilarious black comedy.  It has everything virtually apart from zombies - a creepy babysitter, a demonic child, a lunatic mother and a selfish, perverse father, child abuse, LSD, necromania, multiple murders, dead rabbits ... So much the script writers are clearly struggling to keep all the different plot elements moving in sync, but they just about pull it off. We meet Millicent attending at job interview as a baby sitter for a very high needs child.  Millie presents as 21-year-old, and says she is studying medicine.  She quickly forms a rapport with the boy, Johnny. Parents, Jacob and Rebecca, hire her. Turns out Millie isn't quite what she seems - addiction to LSD being just one 'problematic' aspect.  She casually disregards Becca's rules about child care - which are many - and seems not unresponsive as Jacob starts making advances on her.  And there is more, so much more, about her. Okay, so she's a psycho.  That isn't any big reveal.  I...

If you can overlook the ludicrous premise of this film there is a lot of fun to be had here. The story is nonsense but the film makers play it absolutely straight. Christmas Eve, and foul mouth record store owner Tori (the awesome Riley Dandy) is knocking off.  Reluctantly, she allows her employee Robbie (Sam Delich) to talk her out of going on a Tinder date and get wasted with him instead.  They drink and bicker, which makes up the first act of the film.   Meanwhile, the ex-military war robot, reprogrammed as a Christmas Santa at a local toy store (I told you it was stupid) develops a bug and - I guess - re-sets to factory settings, which means it is looking for people to kill, ho ho ho.  For reasons unclear, in the second act, it decides Tori is its prime target and sets out to rain Hell fire down on her boozy 'default date' with Robbie.  Being a true and worthy Final Girl, she doesn't take to this idea, and the final act consists of the two of them mauli...

 In his 80s, Dario Argento could be forgiven for not bothering any more, or for having absolutely nothing left to shock or surprise us with.  Glad to report, he still cares a bit, and he can still startle his audiences, though not with the trade mark gore you might expect. His last few efforts - Giallo was described as "a deeply disappointing work from a director who seems to be yellowing with age, his vision progressively jaundicing" and Marc Kermode - perhaps forgetting he was talking about a Dario Argento film - decried it as a "depressingly sleazy shocker."  Marc, sleazy and shocky are what makes a good Argento film. Sleazy, geddit?  Mark? And before that there was The Third Mother , an incoherent (again, an expected trait in any Argento film) banal (very un-Argento quality) conclusion to the sequence started with the mind blowingly lunatic Grand Guignol brilliance of Suspiria . So it comes as a pleasant surprise to encounter Dark Glasses , a likeable late ...

 A frustrating missed opportunity to do something awesome. There are some tropes that never get old, in my humble opinion.  One of the oldest, most over-used yet evergreen is the one about the squad of tough-as-nails  (or, less often smart-as-fuck scientists) who have to investigate a Terribly Mysterious Happening and discover Things Man Was Not Meant To Know that eats their faces before the Plucky Final Guy / Girl blows it up or flushes it into space or whatever.  Love it.  Any film like that is almost guaranteed a sympathetic viewing - and (weirdly) the closer they stick to the template the better they mostly are.  Mostly. Milena Radulović spends almost the entire film looking various sorts of bad ass. Which is what makes Superdeep disappointing.  In theory, it should be among the greatest of such films - it is essentially The Thing and Aliens and a bunch of lesser genre examples ( Leviathan , Ghost Ship , Event Horizon ) stuck into a blender and ...