Movie Review: THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT – classic piece of scifi cinema that holds up well thanks to a dark, Lovecraftian tone.

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quatermass

No great secret here: I am a fan of the work of HP Lovecraft.  That’s an easy thing to say these days I guess, if you want to get some kind of credibility in the horror genre, but I find it easy to weed out the real fans.  The Fake Ones are all about tossing the name of Cthulhu around, while qualifying his work with a disclaimer that distances themselves from him.  “I really love his stuff, but he was so racist …”.  It’s the kind of surface-level thinking that shows in “Lovecraftian” fiction peppered throughout the Amazon .99c specials.  Throw in The Elder Gods, some tentacles, Cthulhu, and hey presto, a Lovecraft pastiche.  Very few people actually get the work of Lovecraft, they only get the pop culture tropes, then hit a brick wall.  Fewer still moviemakers get it, but there have been some.  There’s an article in me someday that will list my top 5 Lovecraftian movies, but this is a review of 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment, renamed The Creeping Unknown for the US market, a much more fitting title, I feel.

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Movie Review: THE OBJECTIVE – A disappointing ending, but the bulk of this X-Files-meets-Zero-Dark-Thirty is pretty good.

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2008’s The Objective is by now an “old” movie, at least in terms of reviews, and I normally wouldn’t bother, but it’s notable because I think it’s relatively obscure, AND it was directed by Daniel Myrick, who co-directed my number one horror movie, The Blair Witch Project.  I literally had never heard of this movie at its time of release, and might have gone a long way without hearing of it if I hadn’t just finished the revised Danse Macabre, by Stephen King, in which he mentions it in his new foreword to that book.  King isn’t the greatest of critics, but my first reading of Danse Macabre in the late 80s provided a giant reading list, which I plowed through, and since he was complimentary about The Blair Witch Project, maybe The Objective wouldn’t be so bad.  Turns out, it isn’t.

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Movie Review: BLACK MOUNTAIN SIDE – some miniscule-budget indie horror movies can be great, but this isn’t one of them.

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black-mountain

The world of indie horror is something I’ve been championing for a while now, as any readers will recall, but like the macro universe of moviemaking, the indie horror scene is full of duds.  For every Darling or Southbound, there are at least a hundred genuine pieces of crap.  All you have to do is look at the horror listings on Netflix to see that.  Now, I understand that many people watch bad movies (of any genre) with their MST3K hats on and blithely rip the bad writing, the cheap FX, the amateur-hour acting – I’ve never been that kind of viewer.  Not that I’m taking the high road here – bad movies offend me, sometimes anger me when I realize I invested my time in something that just wasn’t worth it.

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Movie Review: THE NEON DEMON – Nicolas Winding’s Refn’s pretentious horror piece reflects the vacuousness of its modeling world setting

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neon-demon

The Neon Demon is one of those self-aggrandizing pieces of cinema fluff that seems designed purely to win  (or at least compete) during awards season.  It’s relatively easy to spot them: they trade in style over substance in both plot and character, and they are darlings of the art-cinema set.  Since moving from Europe to the US, Nicolas Winding Refn has become largely a purveyor of the kind of ponderous languid drama that’s generally hailed by film-school analysts as works of brilliance, and derided by critics as bland, featureless pap.  No secrets here: I’m in the latter camp.  In The Neon Demon, he invites derision from the get go, intentionally or otherwise: not only does the movie throw his name ahead of the credits, when the actual title card appears onscreen it’s also accompanied by his initials in a small vertical strip.  I hate using the word pretentious to describe movies, but I’ll certainly use it here.

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Movie Review: THE BROOD (1979) – Cronenberg’s seminal horror movie goes a lot deeper than just “evil children”. Modern filmmakers could learn a lot.

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thebrood

I get that it seems redundant to review old movies, but then again, “movie reviews” is a catch all term, right?  I probably won’t make a habit of this, but who knows!  Right now, it’s more of a thought exercise for me, having not seen this particular movie in about 20 years.  I felt that had put enough distance between myself and it so that even if it wasn’t exactly “new to me”, watching David Cronenberg’s 1979 move The Brood in 2016 might allow me to see it with a different set of sensibilities.  I know back then I didn’t so much absorb movies as I try to these days, I was more of a casual watcher.

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