Thoughts on movies, comic books, life, and other nonsense, by someone who should know better
I admit, I gave up watching Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England about half an hour in (I’ll return to it, though), but because I still wanted to watch a movie, I went with The House On Pine Street, a 2015 independent horror movie summarized as “a woman with an unwanted pregnancy moves into a haunted house”. Seemed pretty decent from that brief logline. And that’s pretty much how I would rate it. Continue reading “Movie Review: THE HOUSE ON PINE STREET”
As someone with a deep attachment to the horror genre I consistently find myself thrilled or disappointed by it – there’s rarely a middle ground for me. Being a purist, that limits my options even more. I have no patience for schlock horror, and over reliance on gore is a real turn off for me too, mostly because it eschews the need for strong writing. I don’t shy away from sub genres, though. It’s just that the piece itself needs to contain strong characters and a sense of internal logic – once those two boxes are ticked, I’m largely good. Continue reading “Movie Review: THE WITCH”
I decided to finally watch It Follows after reading someone’s “best of” list of recent horror movies. It wasn’t someone I knew, just a clickbait title. It was pretty high on the list too – maybe the top slot – and it made me recall similarly high praise elsewhere when it was released, so I took the plunge. My immediate reaction was similar to the befuddlement I experienced after watching Mad Max: Fury Road: a good movie, but nothing remotely deserving of the insane hype surrounding it. [weird factoid: although I had no reason to think so, I went into the movie believing it to be a British independent movie, so the opening was a bit jarring].
Maggie, the most unusual Arnold Schwarzenegger movie since, well, ever, is something I’d strongly anticipated for the better part of a year, since first hearing about it. It’s kind of like Cop Land, that “serious” movie that Sylvester Stallone made back in 1997 – a decent try that never really did much to break him away from the action genre. Now, I don’t think that Schwarzenegger took this movie to try to carve out a new stage of his career (considering he then made Terminator: Genisys), but the end result is pretty much the same – Maggie isn’t going to give him any new credibility. Continue reading “Movie Review: MAGGIE – a different kind of zombie, and Ahnuld, movie, but mostly underwhelming”
AT THE FOOTHILLS OF MADNESS 