Posts Tagged ‘horror’

Short Take: Genuinely creepy thanks to impressively competent direction

Listening only to the sound of an 8mm projector reeling away, we see a family of four with burlap bags covering their heads, hands behind their backs, and ropes around their necks. They stand together side-by-side under the limb of a large tree, with each member’s rope suspended high above, their feet barely touching the ground. No movement can be seen from any of them, and only the continuing clicks of the projector give us a sense that time is moving. Our anticipation mounts. Finally, as the counterweight branch falls from the opposite side of the tree, all four souls lift high into the air, legs kicking in desperation. After only a minute, their legs stop. The family perishes as one.

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Short Take: More finely crafted than one would expect, but still largely unoriginal

Director: Ole Bornedal

Screenwriters: Juliet Snowden, Stiles White

Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Natasha Calis, Kyra Sedgwick, Madison Davenport, Matisyahu

Length: 1h 32m

Synopsis: Clyde (Morgan) is a divorced father of two girls, Emily (Calis) and Hannah (Davenport), who shuffle back and forth between his new house and their mother’s (Sedgwick). One day while Clyde and the girls are perusing a nearby yard sale, Emily stumbles upon an antique wooden box with mysterious markings on it. Bought for cheap and taken back home the box slowly takes up more and more of Emily’s attention, but when she’s finally able to get it open she finds herself absolutely obsessed. Her unwillingness to part with it is accompanied with sharp personality changes, such as an uncharacteristic tendency towards violence. She is not herself. In an effort to help his daughter Clyde has the box examined by a professor he knows, who tells him it was designed to imprison a Jewish demon called a “dibbuk” whose preference is to feed on the souls of children. Before the dibbuk is able to fully possess Emily, Clyde pleads for help from the Hasidic community to perform an exorcism. Weighing the dangers involved with such an endeavor, Clyde is left to hope that Emily won’t be beyond saving once help finally arrives.

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Short Take: It's everything you have a right to want it to be

Director: John Gulager

Screenwriters: Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, Joel Soisson

Cast: Danielle Panabaker, Matt Bush, David Koechner, David Hasselhoff, Katrina Bowden, Chris Zylka, Christopher Lloyd

Length: 1h 23m

Synopsis: At a lake far from the one we last left infested with prehistoric piranha there lives Maddy (Panabaker) and her stepfather Chet (Koechner), who owns a soon-to-open extravagant water park. Maddy’s romantic interest, a local deputy (Zylka), is in cahoots with Chet to keep hush-hush the fact that the park’s water is set to come from a newly discovered subterranean lake. In that lake (you guessed it) rests countless bloodthirsty piranha that begin surfacing in small groups but are bound to begin doing so in schools. When signs of their infestation arise Maddy and her secret crush Barry (Bush) try to warn Chet to stop pumping the water and their friends to avoid the park, but their counsel falls on deaf ears. Once the inevitable happens, will anyone make it out alive?

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Short Take: Probably not what you would expect, but definitely exciting on several levels

As this was a film that demanded extra attention, you’ll first find a review by Cliff Bugle and a second by Marisa Carpico. And even these wont cover everything there is to be said.

Director: Ridley Scott

Screenwriters: Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green, Guy Pearce

Length: 2h 4m

Synopsis: In the near future, astronomers Elizabeth Shaw (Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Marshall-Green) make a key discovery that leads them to thinking that the Earth played host to alien visitors during a time before man even conjured the invention of language. They form up with a group of explorers that includes mission supervisor Meredith Vickers (Theron), several biological, geological, and technological specialists, and a robot named David (Fassbender) who is charged with mastering all human-made forms of communication. The expedition destination is a planet (later named LV-223) they suspect holds answers to the genesis of mankind. What ruins they find there, it turns out, were not only made by intelligent life forms, but incredibly ancient beings which share the exact same genetic makeup as humans. What those ancestors, referred to by the scientists as “Engineers,” were developing on that planet, however, proves to be treacherous in ways that could not have possibly been foreseen. With each new discovery the team’s mission faces greater peril, putting everyone’s lives in jeopardy – including Earth’s.

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Short Take: Entertaining, clever, and original. Not a combination that comes around often

Director: Drew Goddard

Screenwriters: Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard

Cast: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford

Length: 1h 35m

Synopsis: Five painfully typical college students escape to a cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway, where they are helpless to and unaware of the manipulations of a secret organization that’s trying to orchestrate their deaths at the hands of supernatural evils. The cabin itself rests on a secluded plot of land that is cut-off from the outside world, and underneath it is where the horror waits to be unleashed. Through various means the organization encourages the nubiles to break the appropriate genre rules so as to warrant their imminent deaths, which come at the hands of a randomly selected terror. The peculiar thing about all of this is that the puppeteers of the organization do not bother with such elaborate plotting for their own twisted amusement. Indeed, they do it for a much greater cause. But what on Earth could that be?

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Short Take: Delightfully ambitious, but fails to give what it promises

Director: Chris Kentis and Laura Lau

Screenwriter: Laura Lau; Gustavo Hernández, Oscar Estévez, Gustavo Rojo (original)

Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese, Eric Shefter Stevens

Length: 1h 25m

Synopsis: This film is a remake of Gustavo Hernández’ Uruguayan ‘The Silent House’ (2011). Sarah (Olsen) is up at her family’s summer retreat home with her father (Trese) and uncle (Stevens) trying to collect the last few bits of personal items so they can finally finish renovating, move out for good, and sell the place. It seemed that whenever they were away from their lakeside estate it would be broken into by squatters and vandals, and the upkeep costs from this just weren’t worth the aggravation. As Sarah packs in the dark, electricity-wanting dwelling she suspects that one of those regular intruders could have gotten into the house. With her uncle stopping into town with the car, and her father found lying unconscious and bleeding, she is trapped and alone, and properly frightened. It is all she can do to somehow avoid this violent invader long enough until help arrives or she can somehow find a way out. And as she hides about, she discovers that more had happened in that house than she ever suspected.

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Short Take: An all around solid effort on a cool premise, but couldn't reach the point of excellence it was trying to

Director: Gonzalo López-Gallego

Screenwriter: Brian Miller

Cast: Warren Christie, Ryan Robbins, Lloyd Owen

Length: 1h 17m

Synopsis: In 1973 astronauts Ben Anderson (Christie), John Grey (Robbins), and Nathan Walker (Owen) are asked to lead the originally canceled Apollo 18 lunar expedition in order to place missile-detecting equipment on the moon in defense against the Soviet Union. Unlike the other Apollo missions, however, this one is Top Secret. Not even the astronauts’ families know where they’re going, but what’s worse is that they never return. Fast-forward to present day: 84 hours of video footage which captured what went on during the mission somehow made its way onto the internet, and the film we see is a spliced together version of it all. The fate of the astronauts, we find, was a horrifying one. Aside from finding themselves stranded, they faced creatures that give new meaning to the word “extraterrestrial.” For those wondering why we haven’t been back to the moon, Apollo 18 provides the answer.

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Short Take: Not without intrigue, but flawed in its invention

Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

Screenwriter: Eric Heisserer; John W. Campbell Jr. (Who Goes There? novella)

Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Eric Christian Olseen, Ulrich Thomsen

Length: 1h 43m

Synopsis: The following story takes place shortly before the events of John Carpenter’s 1982 film of the same title. A great scientific discovery has just been made in the wastelands of Antarctica, and top experts of various kinds are being assembled to research and document it. Paleontologists Kate (Winstead) and Adam (Olseen) are recruited by the venture’s director Dr. Halvorson (Thomsen), but exactly what their tasks will be remains a mystery to them until they’re shown what their dealing with. What the inexplicably curious discovery turns out to be is the remains of a giant alien spacecraft and a frozen specimen suspended in ancient ice. That specimen, they regret to find, is not as inanimate as one would assume. Incredibly, there is still cellular activity, and each cell is capable of imitating any foreign cell it comes into contact with. Before long, the abstraction is able to, after killing them, perfectly impersonate whole people. Kate, Adam, and the rest must determine which of their fellow researchers are “things,” and fight to make sure they don’t reach civilization to infect the rest of the world. With so dangerous and cunning a species, this is far easier said than done.

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Short Take: Has the best combination of humor and horror since "Drag Me to Hell"

Director: Craig Gillespie

Screenwriters: Marti Noxon, Tom Holland

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, David Tennant, Imogen Poots, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Toni Collette

Length: 1h 46m

Synopsis: Charley (Yelchin) is a normal teenage boy whose suburban town has recently welcomed a new neighbor named Jerry (Farrell), who Charley’s friend Ed (Mintz-Plasse) is convinced is a real-life vampire. Ed tries his hardest to convince Charley of this truth, but the absurdity of the accusation is just too great. Soon after pleading for assistance in killing the preternatural being Ed goes missing, and with little hints here and there Charley cannot help but come to the incredible conclusion that his missing friend was right. Unsure of what to do he consults a Las Vegas stage celebrity named Peter Vincent (Tennant), whose forte is the magical and the gothic. Vincent, it turns out, has long since been obsessed with vampires, and so he agrees to help Charley in his dangerous mission to rid his quiet town of the undead predator who threatens to feed on everyone he cares for. Jerry’s cunning and resilience are not to be underestimated, however, which makes Charley’s and Vincent’s task all the more dangerous.

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Short Take: Contains satisfyingly creative deaths, and nothing else

Director: Steven Quale

Screenwriter: Eric Heisserer

Cast: Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, David Koechner, Tony Todd

Length: 1h 32m

Synopsis: Sam (D’Agosto) is an office worker who in his free time is trying to pursue his passion for the culinary arts and win back his ex-girlfriend Molly (Bell), who is also an office coworker. The two join some fellow coworkers and their slimy boss Dennis (Koechner) on a bus to an office retreat, but while in route they narrowly survive a terrible bridge collapse that, were it not for Sam’s advisement to abruptly leave, would have caused their untimely and gruesome demises. The days following this divine intervention, however, prove to be no less perilous. One by one each survivor meets a grisly, macabre fate, leading the remaining few to assume that Death has intentions of correcting his oversights at any given moment.

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