Horror | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Ayla [2018]

2018/03/302020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

You still see her sometimes, don’t you? It doesn’t matter that it’s been thirty years since Elton’s (Nicholas Wilder) sister died at age four. He still sees her in the corner of his eyes, the shadows, and his mind. This sense of longing has taken hold of his actions many times throughout his life as evidenced by the scars on his forearms—a pattern of self-violence for which his mother Susan (Dee Wallace) and younger brother James (D’Angelo Midili) are keenly aware. But the hope is that those days are behind…

REVIEW: Unsane [2018]

2018/03/192020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Your life slips away from you, you know? The tagline to Steven Soderbergh‘s Unsane reads as follows: “Is she or isn’t she?” Its context stems from Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) being presented as an unreliable narrator. She’s picked up her life and moved it from Boston to Pennsylvania to escape the troubles of her past—namely a stalker whose lack of boundaries instilled enough fear to make her see him in places he wasn’t. We understand this struggle is real due to a one-night stand ending with her scream after the…

REVIEW: Black Wake [2018]

2018/02/162020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

I’m the prophet and you’re the messenger. The amount of zombie properties flooding the market these days has created an unavoidable sense of fatigue. As a result artists have begun turning certain aspects on their heads in order to differentiate one vision from any other. Sometimes this means crossing genres, manufacturing elaborate new mythologies, or playing with aesthetic. Jeremiah Kipp‘s Black Wake attempts to do all three as it utilizes a found footage format to reveal a calamity that’s more invasion than viral apocalypse. There’s still a horde of blood-hungry…

REVIEW: Winchester [2018]

2018/02/012020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

I died. You wouldn’t think to use the word timely to describe a horror movie about a place known as the Winchester Mystery House wherein a black lace-veiled woman feels the presence of ghosts and locks them away in specially built rooms with thirteen nails, but here we are. The reason stems from why this woman does what she does. She is Sarah Winchester—the widow of the son of the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—and she believes her family is cursed. To hear her say it, every victim…

REVIEW: Mom and Dad [2018]

2018/01/142020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

Whatever. I have to imagine every parent at some point wonders where their life could have gone if they didn’t have children. This doesn’t make them bad people—only those who actually act on the urge by abandoning their families without so much as a goodbye fall under that label. It just proves they’re human. It’s merely a manifestation of fatigue and frustration as the late-night parties and carefree, irresponsible attitudes necessary to let loose disappear. Gone are the dreams you can try and fail at knowing you don’t have a…

REVIEW: Psychopaths [2017]

2017/11/272020/04/18 Jared Mobarak

Evil’s a straight and simple ‘just because’. It’s hard to reject a film as having no substance when its narrator apologizes for that very fact. Was its hollowness therefore an intentional commentary on the empty nihilistic void that we call life or was the filmmaker throwing us for a “meta” loop with a tongue-in-cheek laugh that knowingly commends our having sat through it in its entirety nonetheless? In this vein Mickey Keating‘s Psychopaths could be profound or worthless. It could be a full-fledged movie that seeks to entertain in its…

REVIEW: Mercy Christmas [2017]

2017/11/252020/04/18 Jared Mobarak

Fresh is best. Michael Briskett (Steven Hubbell) awakens in a dark room with plastic sheets covered in blood hung behind him. It’s imagery you’ve seen countless times in horror films—butcher accoutrement readied for torture porn carnage. But writer/director Ryan Nelson (alongside Beth Levy Nelson as co-writer) is only giving us a tease of what’s to come before rewinding two days to show the unfortunate circumstances that led poor Michael to an unknown basement decorated for Christmas. First we have to meet his douchebag boss Andy Robillard (Cole Gleason) as he…

REVIEW: Curtains [1983]

2017/11/082020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

Call it research. By the end of Peter R. Simpson‘s Curtains—I use the producer’s name since he ultimately finished the film two years after original director Richard Ciupka left with only forty-five minutes shot—there are just three surviving characters. One is the potential victim being chased, another the homicidal maniac under a plastic old woman mask who’s killed the rest, and the last of the trio off-screen somewhere so we’re left to question the murderer’s identity. Will it be revealed that it’s been the person we’ve thought it was since…

REVIEW: Mayhem [2017]

2017/10/302020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

I just wanted the corner office. If you’ve ever worked an office job wherein every single one of your bosses has been promoted above his/her aptitude, you know what futility feels like. You slave away at your cubicle to reach beyond your pay grade only to have someone that knows nothing about what you do—or worse, throws you under the bus for something you’ve never even heard about—derail everything with the stroke of a pen or click of a button. What’s your recourse? Unless they stupidly cc’d you on the…

REVIEW: The Killing of a Sacred Deer [2017]

2017/10/262020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

You’re too young to worry. Writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos is an artist who deals with consequences through elaborately skewed and often-uncomfortable scenarios just left of the off-putting spot that’s just left of center. He uses absurdity and humor to provoke us in order for his complex existential and social messages to hit home in a way strict realism never could. His films are thus morality plays of sorts pitting characters against one another in a puzzle that may or may not be of their own choosing. They are presented with a…

REVIEW: Halloween III: Season of the Witch [1982]

2017/10/212020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

They’re fun. They’re frightening. And they glow in the dark. After the insane success of John Carpenter‘s Halloween and the modest follow-through of its sequel Halloween II ($70 million on a $300,000 budget and $25.5 million on a $2.5 million budget respectively), the director readied to leave Haddonfield, Laurie Strode, and their malevolent predator behind. How many times can you bring the same supernatural monster back to life anyway? (Wink, wink.) His idea was to therefore pivot the franchise into an anthology series wherein the generic title/holiday would constitute the…