Category: Movie Reviews

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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Movie Review: THE HALLOW

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the-hallow

I went into The Hallow (directed by Corin Hardy, written by Hardy and Felipe Marino) with no prior knowledge of the movie: like most people who want to form their own opinions, I generally avoid advance reviews, features, or cast and crew interviews.  All I had for this one was the movie poster and the fact that it won some kind of horror movie competition, beating out the likes of It Follows, a movie with a premise I loved, but felt was otherwise mediocre.  I’d never heard of Hardy before, and had no idea who was in it, so I was definitely flying blind.

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Movie Review: GREEN ROOM

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green room

Not until I started watching Green Room, did I realize that Jeremy Saulnier, the writer/director, had previously made Blue Ruin, a movie that started out pretty good, but then became much less interesting as the story went on.  I think it was around the time towards the end of Act 1 when the actor Macon Blair (who played the protagonist in Blue Ruin) appeared.  Up to that point in Green Room, the story was okay, but felt poorly paced.  I think a lot of this was to do with what I knew in advance of the story, and my expectations for it moving in that direction.

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Movie Review: THE ATTICUS INSTITUTE

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the-atticus-institute

What is it with these “best of lists”?  In my quest to watch and review the “best” horror movies of various years, I’ve watched a couple of clunkers recently from these lists.  The Atticus Institute, written and directed by Chris Sparling isn’t a bad movie like The Hallow, it’s more of a great-premise-executed-poorly movie, like It Follows.  I can’t get my mind around movies that are badly written like The Hallow, because it makes me wonder how a script like that gets green lit in the first place – in the case of movies like The Atticus Institute, the vast potential of the premise is wasted by a script that never really gets going and continues to plod along without hitting any kind of great heights of characterization or, indeed, horror.

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Movie Review: DARLING – Everything works in Mickey Keating’s best movie to date, with a terrific lead performance by Lauren Ashley Carter

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Darling

I’m not exactly sure which came first of Mickey Keating’s Carnage Park and Darling, but I know they were filmed fairly close together, and are wildly different from each other.  It’s fair to speculate that while Keating’s still finding his feet, he has the potential to become a “name” director in a few years.

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