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 »
THE WICKER MAN
There’s no point in trying to pretty this up. T his remake of THE WICKER MAN, rewritten from Anthony Schaffer’s original screenplay by Neil LaBute and directed by him is a complete flop. With little more than the threat of an estrogen-fueled society to render audiences weak with fear, and none of the zeitgeist of an… Read More »
SLITHER — DVD
SLITHER has perhaps the worst poster of any terrific film released in 2006. It may have actually kept people away, what with the way its space slugs converging on a bathtub cradling a classically nubile nymphette. It fails in every respect to convey the wicked humor and superbly self-aware irony that permeates every frame of… Read More »
PAN’S LABYRINTH
The combination of war and her mother’s remarriage to a Fascist captain proves to be too much for Ofelia, the heroine of Gullermo del Toro’s arresting fable of power and powerlessness. The time is 1944, the place is northern Spain, but the landscape is that of the imagination and, in del Toro’s hands, that is… Read More »
THE MESSENGERS
There is much to be said for letting a horror film build slowly. The audience moves from the everyday world into one where the unknown lurks with intentions that seem anything but friendly. And so it is with THE MESSENGERS, the latest from the Pang Brothers, a duo that can make an empty room seem like the maw of hell using little… Read More »
THE REAPING
Just in time for Passover, Easter, and/or any other equinoctial festival on your liturgical calendar comes THE REAPING, an abomination of a film to put the fear of God in us all with its sheer awfulness. Then again, one can with some merit ponder why an all-knowing Being would allow such as this to happen.… Read More »