Thoughts on movies, comic books, life, and other nonsense, by someone who should know better
Literally, everyone I knew who had seen Netflix’s The Ritual urged me to watch it. Not one person had anything bad to say about it – I was planning on watching it anyway just from catching the trailer, which intrigued me, but mostly because while watching that same trailer, I felt I was seeing a few already familiar movies. I finally got around to viewing it, and it turned out mostly as I expected: good, but far from great, for a number of reasons.
Being as The Blair Witch Project is my favourite horror movie, and I decided to Watch The Objective last week because it was directed by Daniel Myrick, half of the team who made that movie, it seemed to be the right time to watch Exists, a 2014 found-footage horror movie directed by the other half of the duo, Eduardo Sanchez.
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.
Pod, from prolific indie auteur Mickey Keating (Darling, Carnage Park) is another entry in the Cabin In The Woods subgenre, but while it lacks ambition in terms of story, that’s the perils of low budget moviemaking. It’s more a testament to Keating’s skill and ambition as a moviemaker that he can get so much work done and with such diverse storylines that you can’t help be swayed to his side. For me, he’s a middle of the road writer/director, but I have wondered how much growth could happen in his work if he were to be given a budget where he doesn’t have to worry about the small stuff.
Spurred on by Spring, one of the best movies I’ve watched recently, I wanted to see if it marked an evolution in form and style on the part of moviemakers Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson by catching up on their 2012 feature debut Resolution. Ostensibly billed as a “horror” movie, it has less in common with the genre than that – it’s more of a mystery movie than anything else, and it’s a good one. Unfortunately, both movie posters I’ve seen (including the one I chose) do the movie a huge disservice. Continue reading “Movie Review: RESOLUTION”
AT THE FOOTHILLS OF MADNESS 