When making a thriller, especially ones with supernatural and psychological overtones, it is vitally important to at the very least not make the audience laugh unintentionally. HIDE AND SEEK fails to make it over even that low bar. Instead, it quickly devolves into a camp parody of everything it purports to be about, including Robert… Read More »
THE JACKET
THE JACKET begins as an intriguing, even unsettling consideration of time, space, and the nature of reality. But in a twist as breathtaking as it is unexpected, it commits the mortal sin of becoming conventional. Its all the more disappointing because of its director, John Maybury, a filmmaker and artist who was iconoclast Derek Jarmans… Read More »
RING TWO
Sometimes a film offers up an emblematic moment, one that crystallizes what is at the heart of the action and in RING TWO, that moment can be summed up in two words. Angry deer. They appear after Rachel (Naomi Watts returning after what may be the result of a lost bar bet) and her continually… Read More »
DOMINION — PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST
I can see why the folks at Warner Bros. watched the screening of Paul Schrader’s version of the EXORCIST prequel and panicked. They were, after all, working under the curse of the franchise sequels, which had all more or less tanked to critical brickbats and, further which, they might have hoped to avoid by making… Read More »
HIGH TENSION (HAUTE TENSION)
After seeing HIGH TENSION, I can only think that the French have not had the exposure to Hollywood slasher films that we here in the United States have enjoyed. Why else would writers Gregory Levasseur and Alexandre Aja, who also directed, subject their audience to every one of the genres clichés from PSYCHO to Freddie?… Read More »
DARK WATER
Anyone who has had to deal with the terrors of a leaky roof or faulty plumbing will find much to raise goosebumps, to cause the averting of the eyes, and, perhaps, to inspire one or two flashbacks to those unfortunate interludes while viewing DARK WATER. And if this were the intent of the makers of… Read More »
RED EYE
Most horror films are dedicated to the proposition that females are prey and little else.
THE CAVE
There are so many ways for a film to join the ranks of bad cinema. THE CAVE is daring in doing so in that it isn’t just tedious, it isn’t just silly, no, it goes the distance until it actually becomes a personal affront to the sensibilities of everyone concerned. The first misstep was in… Read More »
STAY
The failing of most very bad movies is that there was very little in the way of thinking that went into them. That is not the case with STAY. This overbearingly pretentious piffle has been overthought so much in its attempt to be clever and deep that rather than being engaging or mysterious or even… Read More »
SAW II
SAW II suffers the fate of many sequels, it mimics the original without quite catching what made that original worth seeing. In SAW I, it was the impish perversity filmmakers Leigh Whannell and James Wan celebrated while plumbing the psychology of victims who have fallen prey to a serial killer with a singular style. Dubbed… Read More »
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