Month: July 2016

Movie Review: JUG FACE

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Jug Face

I totally avoided Jug Face when it was streaming on Netflix – neither the title, nor the poster appealed, and I read a bad review – but I took a chance with it tonight on the strength of a great performance by Lauren Ashley Carter in Darling, and I wasn’t let down this time either.  Indie horror is definitely hit or miss, but unlike Big Studio horror that’s only concerned with how many teens they can open with on Friday night, the indie scene is more concerned with telling stories, and often some real talents emerge.

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Movie Review: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

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only lovers

You might know from reading my review of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (if you haven’t, go!  Now!) that I appreciate a good vampire movie, so, enthusiastic about said movie, I fast-tracked Only Lovers Left Alive written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, a movie-maker whose body of work I actually have very little experience of.  I know the name, of course, and I know he’s made a lot of movies, but any previews I’ve seen have never interested me too much.  I came to this movie because of the subject matter, expecting it to be arty and somewhat pretentious, and that’s exactly what I got.

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Movie Review: WHEN ANIMALS DREAM

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when animals

I’m quite fond of foreign language horror movies.  Mostly, they haven’t succumbed to the slick move toward PG-13 irrelevance, which isn’t to say an R (or 18) rated movie is full of blood and guts and everything that’s superficial about the genre.  No, I’m mostly talking about the fact that character-driven stories are the keys to good horror.  I know, I know, many people are all about the serial murders of a youthful cast within 120 minutes.  Whatever floats your boat, I won’t judge.  Especially because my own character-driven snobbery doesn’t necessarily produce great movies either.

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Movie Review: THE VISIT

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The visit

Night Shyamalan’s career is a real horror show itself (not “real horrorshow”).  For someone who built up a crazy amount of goodwill as a moviemaker with 1999’s The Sixth Sense, he appears to have instantly bought into the hype machine at the time, and then proceeded to self-destruct in an explosion of unfounded hubris.  I didn’t care much for the crushingly self-important Unbreakable, but it wasn’t a bad movie.  Signs was an improvement, despite one of the most badly-written endings I can recall seeing, but as the years passed, when producers kept throwing money at him, the movies just got worse.  

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