REVIEW: Creepshow [1982]

Seven years before HBO brought EC Comics’ 1950s-era horror strips to life for their long-running anthology series “Tales from the Crypt”, Stephen King and George Romero delivered their own homage to the style with Creepshow. The former served in the role of screenwriter with two of the five chapters being adaptations of short stories he had written previously. The latter took his spot behind the camera to orchestrate King’s madness and mayhem with the help of special effects legend Tom Savini, each tale proving to be a mixture of black…

Read More

REVIEW: The Craft [1996]

Nothing makes everything all better again. There’s a ton of untapped potential in Andrew Fleming‘s The Craft. It delivers four embattled teenage girls faced with tragic circumstances out of their control who seek to empower themselves against the internal and external struggles presented by them. This is a premise that allows for empathy and understanding because they each know what it’s like to be on the other side of nightmare. Maybe their acquisition of powers through the occult will present a period of dominance as a knee-jerk reaction to going…

Read More

REVIEW: Videodrome [1983]

“Better on TV than on the streets” To watch David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome today is to acknowledge his clairvoyance as far as technology’s capacity to control via (mis)information. He filmed this body horror classic about subliminal messaging in mass consumption in 1983: years before the political firestorm in 1992 revolving around ubiquitous violence in videogames via Mortal Kombat, the 2007-08 television writers strike that spawned the proliferation of reality TV, the 24-hour news cycle that transformed real-life tragedies into entertainment, and social media placing false content at our fingertips with an…

Read More

REVIEW: mother! [2017]

“His words are yours” Paramount has taken pains to ensure you know as little about Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! as possible. I know this because they’ve made it very difficult to find any images with which to populate this review. Their press site has no entry. The Toronto International Film Festival site contains no stills. And my local publicist made it very clear that press wasn’t allowed to bring a plus one to the screening. I’m surprised the studio let it play TIFF and Venice at all since that only means…

Read More

TIFF17 REVIEW: Verónica [2017]

“You have to do right what you did wrong” The story goes that the police were dispatched to a Madrid residence in June of 1991 only to find a teenage girl screaming from what appeared to be self-inflicted wounds. Strange phenomena was seen/found throughout the apartment, so much that the detective assigned the case could do nothing but corroborate the paranormal explanation being delivered by those close to the family. Everything supposedly stemmed from a séance gone wrong three days earlier at the exact time of a solar eclipse. The…

Read More

TIFF17 REVIEW: The Lodgers [2017]

“Our curse is to live” A family’s shame marks them forever—their fate sealed by birth, bound by a poem’s rules. They must be locked in their rooms by midnight, never let a stranger through the door, and remain together or else the one who stays dies. Rachel (Charlotte Vega) and Edward (Bill Milner) have lived these edicts like their parents before them and onwards back two centuries. But now on their eighteenth birthday, it’s time for these twins to fulfill their roles within this enduring lineage. Knowing everyone before them…

Read More

REVIEW: It [2017]

“Welcome to the Losers’ Club” There was a lot said about the new cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s It when Cary Fukunaga signed on a few years ago. Enough about him as a rising auteur capable of infusing some magic into a story so intrinsically tied to the Tim Curry-starring miniseries from 1990 that his departure for Mama director Andy Muschietti was met with groans. For me personally, however, the fact that a movie was still being made—and with an R-rating no less—was enough to stay excited. A lot of…

Read More

TIFF17 REVIEW: The Crescent [2018]

“Yeah, sweetie. Daddy got lost.” It starts by enveloping us in marbleizing paint—overlapping colors raked to warp dots into abstract patterns—and the loud aural pulses of a musical soundscape as heavy and permanent as those oils are fluidly malleable. We assume it’s merely a sensory aesthetic Seth A. Smith constructs to provide the tone for the subtle horrors still on the horizon, but don’t be surprised if you begin to interpret each new artwork as a self-portrait of characters we’ve yet to meet. Treat them as mood rings simultaneously displaying…

Read More

REVIEW: Zombi 2 [Zombie] [1979]

“It never pays to ignore native superstitions” While Zombie may be known as a horror classic, its origins are almost farcical. Helmed by “Godfather of Gore” Lucio Fulci, the Italian-produced project was already in development (from a script by Dardano Sacchetti before wife Elisa Briganti took over) when the European release for George Romero‘s Dawn of the Dead began its repackaging as Zombi. The latter was a re-edited cut by Dario Argento complete with new Goblin score, so its success screamed for a quick Italian follow-up. Suddenly Fulci’s film became…

Read More

REVIEW: It [1990]

“It just isn’t empirically possible” Considering I was around ten-years old when first seeing Tommy Lee Wallace‘s “It”—I’m pretty sure it was post-1990 since I was only eight then—my memory held its adaptation of Stephen King‘s novel in high regard. I probably watched bits and pieces over the next could decades, always believing it to be scary for more reasons than just Tim Curry‘s performance as Pennywise the clown. Something about the underbelly of suburbia and the idea that malevolence exists to force its residents into doing nightmarish acts struck…

Read More

REVIEW: Lycan [2017]

“I don’t want to go into the woods” There’s a monster in the forest—or at least the rumors purport it. Horrific murders occurred on land not too far from a small Southern town’s local college, the stuff of urban legend that unfortunately concluded with the predator’s dead body in a grave hidden on private property nobody ever thought to find. Were those stories based on truth? A cover-up? Or perhaps complete fairy tale? Thanks to Professor Anderson’s (Vanesssa Angel) final project, an assigned group of six students have the opportunity…

Read More