[6] After a car accident, a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) finds herself prisoner in an underground survivalist bunker where a creepy John Goodman convinces her that the world has been invaded by either Soviets or aliens, and that if they open the bunker door, they’ll soon be dead from toxins in the air. The script does a more convincing job than me in making …
[7] Actor Bill Paxton makes his feature directorial debut with Frailty, in which a man recounts to an FBI agent how, as a boy, his religious-freak father forced him and his young brother to help murder alleged ‘demons’ and bury their bodies. Matthew McConaughey plays the storyteller, Powers Boothe plays the FBI agent, and Bill Paxton plays the scary dad in the flashback-driven half of …
[4] Julianne Moore stars as a psychiatrist who discovers the multiple personalities of a patient are actually murder victims. Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors) plays the patient, and normally I love these two leading actors. But we’ve seen Moore do this kind of thing before and Rhys Meyers never quite convinces me that he’s not just showing off with all the different accents and quirky …
[8] A 14-year-old goes home with a guy in his 30s. What follows is a nightmarish power struggle. Hard Candy is an intense character-driven thriller that succeeds primarily for the incredible performances of Patrick Wilson (Watchmen) and Ellen Page (Juno). The screenplay dives into murky moral waters, asking us to empathize with a young girl who inflicts torture and a grown man who may or …
[8] Frank Darabont dives back into the Stephen King well and comes out with a winner. The Mist is about a disparate group of people who end up trapped together in the local grocery store when a strange, scary mist suddenly engulfs the town. Anyone who travels out into the mist is killed by mysterious, unseen creatures. In addition to the apocalyptic angle, you can …
[8] Neil Marshall follows up his auspicious feature directorial debut, Dog Soldiers, with this all-female plunge into the claustrophobic depths of Appalachian caves. The Descent reminds me of From Dusk Til Dawn in that it’s really two completely different movies jammed together at the middle. The first half is harrowing enough just watching the women climb, crawl and wiggle their way deeper and deeper into …
[8] This monster movie from the creators of Lost and Felicity combines low-budget ingenuity with high-budget production values for a thrilling movie going experience. The whole film is hand-held ‘found footage’ documenting a group of friends’ attempted escape from Manhattan after the city is attacked by a raging leviathan. The monster’s design is fresh and original, and the young cast do very good jobs running …
[8] A group of college kids go to a cabin in the woods, but that’s as far as we get into the story before director Drew Goddard and producer Joss Whedon turn the trope on its head. In a Scream-like fashion, The Cabin in the Woods subverts the familiar and offers a good time for horror fans. Pandering? Maybe. Entertaining? I say ‘hell, yeah.’ The …
[8] A pregnant woman waiting for the ambulance to pick her up from home must suddenly fight for her life when a scissor-wielding mad-woman invades her house with the aim of cutting her unborn baby from the womb. The concept of this French flick is unsettling enough, but what got me the most was the sheer volume of bodily fluids that ooze, drip and splash …
[7] Joel Schumacher (The Lost Boys, Flatliners) directs this weird, gloriously convoluted horror flick involving Nazis, the occult, and zombies — all on a farm in New England, beginning during World War II and ending today. As usual, Schumacher casts a hunk in the lead (God bless him). This time, it’s Henry Cavill from Man of Steel and TV’s The Tudors. Cavill and the cast …
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