If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a shitty vampire movie. I’ve gone over this before in my reviews of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Only Lovers Left Alive, and What We Do In The Shadows, all three of which are very good additions to the subgenre. These movies are all very different to each other, with vampires being one of the only two elements that connects them. This is the sign of a very flexible subgenre within horror, something I hadn’t explicitly considered before, though in saying that, I have maintained for years that horror itself is perhaps the most flexible of any of the genres. I feel that there are very few aspects of the human condition that cannot be explored within it, and it is my preferred genre to write in exactly because of that.
Tag: Secluded
Movie Review: BLACK MOUNTAIN SIDE – some miniscule-budget indie horror movies can be great, but this isn’t one of them.
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.
Movie Review: 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.
Movie Review: GOODNIGHT MOMMY
Imagine my surprise when I discovered Goodnight Mommy was available to stream for free via Amazon Prime. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks looking for a good, English-subtitled version, and suddenly, there it was. No cash outlay, no rummaging through questionable torrents. The movie’s been on my watch list since I saw the trailer back in November 2015, so last night I put aside the night’s plans and settled down to watch.
Movie Review: WE ARE STILL HERE
There’s a lot to like about writer/director Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here, but it’s a mixed bag at the end of the day. Having gotten wind of it through some internet buzz, I rolled the dice, and I mostly came out ahead.