Horror | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: The Lodge [2020]

2020/02/122020/03/21 Jared Mobarak

She can’t go to Heaven! It’s almost too perfect. After reading Sergio Casci‘s spec script and wondering who’d be best to steward it towards its next stage, Hammer Films saw Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala as easy marks. Their debut Goodnight Mommy dealt with the psychological strife that occurs when two young children are trapped inside a house with a woman they cannot trust and it does so with ample deflection, half truths, and narrative manipulation. Casci’s The Lodge is so similar that I’m surprised Franz and Fiala chose to…

REVIEW: The Fall [2019]

2020/02/112020/03/21 Jared Mobarak

Taking from his music video background of surreally nightmarish visions, director Jonathan Glazer delivered a surprise seven-minute short last year entitled The Fall. The description says it all: “a masked mob cruelly punish a lone masked man.” We see them shake the tree to which their victim clings tightly, pick him up off the forest floor, affix a noose around his neck, and let him descend through a seemingly never-ending pit beneath the gallows. The ordeal is off-putting in its lack of context and eerily disturbing in its use of…

REVIEW: Color Out of Space [2020]

2020/01/222020/03/21 Jared Mobarak

A dreamy dream together is reality. **Potential spoilers** Arkham’s citizens colloquially describe the Gardner family’s farm as “blasted heath” at the start of H.P. Lovecraft‘s short story The Colour Out of Space. Their reasoning stems from the deathly gray dust covering the area as though a fire had wiped everything but a stone well away. That they’re mentioning it at all is the result of Lovecraft’s nameless narrator’s appearance as a surveyor discerning whether or not a water reservoir should be installed atop what’s grown into a legend those who…

REVIEW: Daniel Isn’t Real [2019]

2019/11/162020/10/02 Jared Mobarak

Not insane. Awake! The title truly says it all: Daniel Isn’t Real. So when a little boy takes his stuffed animal down the street to escape his parents’ screams only to walk by a gruesome murder scene marked by a bloodied body lifeless on the ground, we understand the significance of his also finding a new friend. A young kid unable to process fear, rage, and death, Luke would naturally project his distressed mother’s (Mary Stuart Masterson‘s Claire) visage upon the homicide victim now haunting his memory before creating a…

ANOMALY19 REVIEW: VFW [2019]

2019/11/092020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

Same mud. That co-writer Matthew McArdle remains shocked even after seeing the film he and Max Brallier wrote on the big screen shows how tough the accomplishment proves. Best friends since childhood, the two began their script for VFW with transparent intentions as far as harkening back to the no-holds-barred VHS gems they’d scour video store shelves to find. Using John Carpenter‘s Assault on Precinct 13 as inspiration, they created a group of aging vets decades-removed from service yet still thick as thieves with a drug-fueled, zombie-esque horde threatening to…

REVIEW: Doctor Sleep [2019]

2019/11/072020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

We don’t end. I’m not going to lie: seeing Stephen King endorse Mike Flanagan‘s cinematic adaptation of his novel Doctor Sleep worried me. After being so vehemently vocal against Stanley Kubrick‘s changes to The Shining, the film version of the sequel would seemingly need to be religiously faithful to the text for him to laud it. The only way that happens is for it to conversely diverge from Kubrick’s masterpiece instead, rendering a middle ground between them impossible. Either Flanagan wrote and directed a continuation of the movie (hedge maze,…

REVIEW: Depraved [2019]

2019/09/222020/03/24 Jared Mobarak

You brought the war home with you. So much of what we do in our lives comes down to a matter of could versus should. Many of us want to prove ourselves worthy by doing something nobody has ever done before, yet the hubris of such a desire often leaves us paying a price we neglected to realize had to be paid. Even if “should” factored in, however, the end result still wouldn’t be guaranteed because good intentions aren’t enough to offset that cost. Just because the pain and suffering…

REVIEW: It Chapter Two [2019]

2019/09/202020/03/24 Jared Mobarak

We all need to remember. When last we left Derry, Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård) had fallen to his presumed death after a brawl with the Losers Club in his sewer lair. What we didn’t see as he slipped out of view were the Deadlights extinguishing—those bright beacons of insanity that caused countless children to “float” as this centuries old evil fed upon their fear. In the moment, however, these seven brave kids couldn’t think that far. To them this victory meant survival and the final time they’d be…

TIFF19 REVIEW: The Lighthouse [2019]

2019/09/072020/03/25 Jared Mobarak

Bad luck to kill a seabird. You can stop yourself from worrying about story the moment you sit down for Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse since there is none—at least none of value besides the simple premise of two men isolated on a foggy island with nothing but their wits (and nightmares) about them. Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) is the seasoned veteran and thus the man-in-charge of assigning tasks. That process is simple too: he gets to man the light from evening to morning while his latest compatriot Ephraim Winslow (Robert…

TIFF19 REVIEW: Sea Fever [2019]

2019/09/072020/03/25 Jared Mobarak

Don’t think. Just jump. Ever the scientist too enthralled with work to bother making friends, Siobhán (Hermoine Corfield) will stop at nothing to gaze upon a school of fish whose swim pattern might be crucial to her research. This means bumming onto a trawler owned by Gerard (Dougray Scott) and Freya (Connie Nielsen) thanks to an acquaintance with a crush (Jack Hickey). The fishing couple are short on cash (late payroll the reason Ardalan Esmaili‘s engineer Ahmed is about to quit), so they take her money, agree to one scuba…

TIFF19 REVIEW: Entwined [2019]

2019/09/032020/03/25 Jared Mobarak

I long for the old ways. The death of their father triggers Panos (Prometheus Aleifer) and half-brother George (John De Holland) to take stock. The latter wants to stick together and move forward while the former chooses to start anew. Panos is a doctor who now recognizes the delicacy of life too well and wants to hit the country in Alyti so his services can do some real good away from the city. George incessantly calls in the hopes of persuading him out of this altruistic dream he assumes will…