You’d think that in 86 minutes of screen time that the makers of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR’s 2005 incarnation could come up with at least one genuinely scary moment. Even if it’s just by accident aided and abetted by the law of averages. Alas, this dreary Z-grade schlock-fest is capable of producing only titters and yawns… Read More »
HOUSE OF WAX
My favorite moment in HOUSE OF WAX comes when Carly (Elisha Cuthbert), our heroine in peril, is fleeing from the crazy person who is brandishing the sharp and dangerous something or other and she smacks right into the wall of the eponymous house. I like it because under the circumstances, that’s what would probably happen.… Read More »
RED EYE
Most horror films are dedicated to the proposition that females are prey and little else.
SKELETON KEY
There is one perfect moment in SKELETON KEY, which is remarkable more for the fact that it’s the only good moment in the entire film than for its own innate effectiveness. In it, a character picks up a cigarette, lights it with the torpid evil inherent in supernatural films set in the swamps of Louisiana,… Read More »
THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE
THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE is overwhelmed with such an overweening sense of earnestness that one feels almost sinful for not being swept along with what its makers obviously consider a tale of great importance. The greater sin, though, is in taking a tale of exorcism, faith, and the law and not making it more… Read More »
VENOM
Screaming, stalking, and exsanguinating is just about all there is to VENOM, a putrid bit of bad filmmaking whose only virtue, and that is an extremely relative term here, is that it doesn’t try to pretend to be anything but. Alas, in the process it manages to make mere schlock look good. We, like the… Read More »
THE FOG
You have to admire the way director Rupert Wainwright never lets a little thing like the specifics of plot interfere with the plodding pace he has set for THE FOG. It is as though he is following the exacting beat of a metronome and be it a scene of a babysitter watching a game show… Read More »
SLITHER
SLITHER doesn’t just embrace the cheesy goofiness of those B-grade horror films from the middle of the last century, it also gives them a big wet sloppy French kiss. Taking what is so endearing about the ineptitude, it tweaks the bad dialogue and worst plot points, turning them into an homage to bad cinema that… Read More »
SILENT HILL
I’m going to do something that I usually try very hard to avoid in a review. I’m going to plop a spoiler into it. Not only that, I’m going to do it in the very first paragraph. I’m going to do it for two reasons. One, it’s integral to the bitch slap I’m about to… Read More »
THE OMEN
Liev Schreiber co-starred in one of the few remakes that worked, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. It was that remake, in fact, that restored my faith in the concept of re-visting a classic film. Alas, Mr. Schreiber’s latest adventure in remakes, THE OMEN, is much less successful. There are no new insights, no shift in perspective that breathes… Read More »