Beauty And The Beast (2017)
Obligatory “tale as old as time” reference.
Disney’s original Beauty And The Beast holds a special place in my heart: it was, according to my parents, the first film I ever saw in the cinema; aged just eighteen months.
Tag: horror
CINEMATIC GRAB-BAG: A Cure For Wellness & Patriots Day
A Cure For Wellness
A Cure For Wellness is a film I wish was better.
A psychological horror with grandiose ambitions, it stars Dane DeHaan as Lockhart, a callow young stockbroker with ice-chip eyes dispatched to retrieve his company’s CEO from a remote “wellness center” in the Swiss Alps.…
LFF Days 4-6: The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Voyage of Time, Bleed For This, Personal Shopper, & A Quiet Passion
Sorry for the delay if you’re trying to stay up-to-date on the London Film Festival. I’ve been a bit lax in getting it written up.
Even so, enjoy these capsule reviews of everything I saw over the course of Days 4-6.…
Blair Witch gets a bit lost in the woods
There’s something ironic about having your phone confiscated when going in to see a found footage movie, as I did.
Initially marketed as an original project, The Woods – complete with misleading trailer footage of a very non-Maryland forest – Adam Wingard’s arboreal horror was unexpectedly revealed as a sequel to the genre-launching Blair Witch Project, which famously grossed almost a quarter of a billion off a budget of $60,000 all the way back in 1999.…
Lights Out: too self-illuminating to be truly terrifying
Is there any fear more primal than that of the dark?
After all, what you can’t see can kill you, especially if the what is Diana, a twitchy, pinhole-eyed wraith with an attraction to the mentally ill.
Based on a genuinely creepy short that went viral back in 2013, Lights Out, the feature début of David F.…
REVIEW: The Witch
The Witch is a theological nightmare that will get under your skin – and, just possibly, that bit deeper.
Is there a more potent symbol in American mythology than that of the witch? Though an export of the old world, the witch is also a symbol of modernity – a frightening sort of progressiveness.…
Cooties is a indie zombie flick that won’t give you the lurgy
There are many opportunities for dread offered by the zombie genre. The shambling, increasingly putrefying undead. The threat of losing one’s own humanity. Cooties introduces in a new one: chickens.
A new horror comedy from first-time directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, Cooties the gruesome passage from battery farming to school meal via flies, maggots, and pink sludge.…
Crimson Peak: the height of Gothic thrills and chills?
With Crimson Peak, beloved horror director Guillermo Del Toro sets about creating another period ghost story.
While his previous work of course includes The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, both of which are set in and around the Spanish Civil War, this entry on his filmography takes its cues more from classic Gothic melodrama.…
Don’t Grow Up is a conflicted kid torn between arthouse and genre
The challenge with “genre fiction” is how to to blend the recognizable tropes, the cliches even, with new and exciting elements. Take Don’t Grow Up, the latest film from director Thierry Pouiard.
Opening at a mysterious youth facility amidst a misty forest of dark evergreens, six troubled teens find themselves abandoned and alone.…
The Messenger delivers some originality from a hackneyed premise
