Victim (2010)
[7] Grieving the loss of his daughter, a surgeon kidnaps and surgically alters a young man to take her place. Yeah, Victim is creepy and kinky, charging into some subject matter that is sure to make many viewers cringe. The…
Dreamscape (1984)
[4] At a government facility where psychics can enter people's dreams, a wave of deadly nightmares begins claiming lives. Once the President of the United States is affected, two psychics square off -- one wanting to save the president, and…
The Other (1972)
[7]
In The Other, To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan does a great job engendering sympathy for a schizophrenic child who is channeling the spirit of his deceased twin. Chris and Martin Udvarnoky do a commendable job playing the boy and his ‘other,’ and famed acting teacher Uta Hagen is good as the Russian aunt who begins to put two and two together after a series of tragic ‘accidents’ happen on the family farm.
Pacific Rim (2013)
[8]
Pacific Rim is good, dumb summer fun. It’s beautiful, sexy, exciting, funny, and it kinda made me feel like a kid again. The premise involves Kaiju and Jägers… scratch that. Let’s call it like it is: this movie is about big fucking robots fighting big fucking monsters. The monsters come from another dimension, entering our world from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The robots, each manned by two psychically linked people (often blood relatives), are humanity’s last hope for survival. The concept sounds like the germ of another big, loud, stupid summer movie — you know, the kind Michael Bay makes. But director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) handily beats Bay at his own game with Pacific Rim, imbuing the film with more style and substance than any of Bay’s Transformers movies ever had.
The Thing from Another World (1951)
[7]
In this Howard Hawks production, an arctic science team finds an alien buried in the ice, so they bring it back to their facility for closer inspection. Things go awry, the monster gets loose, and before long, all the men are in danger of becoming food for the alien’s progeny. This is a great atomic-age monster movie that well exceeds expectations for the genre and the period it was made.
The Frighteners (1996)
[6]
In this horror comedy from director Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings), Michael J. Fox stars as a charlatan ghostbuster who can communicate with the undead. After many of the local ghost community start disappearing, Fox gets roped into solving the mystery, which involves a 20-year old mass-murder at a nearby mental institution. If it sounds convoluted, it is. The narrative is over-complicated, involving too many characters and flashbacks, but there are enough elements here that you’re likely to find at least some of them interesting.
This Is The End (2013)
[7] Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson and Danny McBride play themselves, trapped in Franco's swanky pad during the Apocalypse in this weird little horror comedy written and directed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who also…
World War Z (2013)
[7]
Brad Pitt admirably carries this big-budget zombie apocalypse flick that has more in common with Outbreak or Contagion than it does your standard zombie fare — don’t expect blood and gore, horror fans. Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Stranger Than Fiction) succeeds in ratcheting up the tension with a script (based very loosely on Max Brooks’ book) that is essentially one dramatic escape sequence after another.
Warm Bodies (2013)
[7] In the great zombie apocalypse, a dead teenager (Nicholas Hoult) falls in love with a human survivalist (Teresa Palmer). Their affection for each other sparks enlightenment among the rest of the freshly dead, while the girl's militaristic father (John…
Maniac (2013)
[6]
If you wanted to remake William Lustig’s 1980 slasher cornerstone with an abundance of point-of-view shots, you probably couldn’t do a better a job than Franck Khalfoun did with this remake. Maniac is beautiful and imaginative, photographed almost entirely from the killer’s (Elijah Wood’s) point of view. You really only see him in mirrors and other reflective surfaces. On one hand, the conceit is clever and cool, but on the other hand, it ends up being what I’m paying attention to — not the thin storyline or the operatic depiction of its psychologically scarred central character. I think less would have been more where the back story is concerned, and I’m not sure the perpetual POV tactic is the best way to tell this story.