All Things HORROR

Sundance Review: Rape Revenge Horror 'Reversal'

The film is genuinely disturbing, but not fun-scary in any way. Every move is telegraphed from miles away, and nothing truly shocks. “Reversal” is only terrifying because this kind of sex-trafficking actually does happen in real life. It’s scary because it’s real, but it’s definitely no issue movie, trying to expose the realities of this world. It’s just a very bad, unfun, not scary movie masquerading itself as badass chick horror. NOPE.
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Yes...it looks silly, relatively low budget and...AWESOME!!!!!!! And I would watch Stormare do his taxes...even in the smallest part in the worst movie he ALWAYS brings it.
 
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night Collector's Edition Blu-ray

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Kino Lorber will release on Blu-ray Ana Lily Amirpour's romantic horror thriller A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), starring Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, and Marshall Manesh. The release will be available for purchase on April 21.

Special Features:

70 page Booklet with the First Issue of the Graphic Novel and Essay by Eric Kohn
Behind-the-scenes Documentary
Deleted Scenes
Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour
Location Scouting
Makeup Tests
Stills Gallery
Trailer
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Pre-ordered. Was going to wait on this, but... look at it. The week after The Babadook, too.
 
Tales From the Darkside Finds its Star; Plot Details Revealed
http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/92077/tales-darkside-finds-star-plot-details-revealed/

We’ve been keeping a really close eye on The CW’s reboot of the classic television series “Tales From the Darkside,” and today the show’s star has been revealed along with some plot details.

Deadline is reporting that Kris Lemche (pictured below; “The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) has been cast as the lead in The CW pilot, a remake of the 1980s horror/fantasy/thriller anthology series that hails from writer Joe Hill and producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

The anthology series will feature only one regular character, Newman (Lemche). A weathered and tortured young man, Newman is the guide to the unsuspecting who come across The Darkside. Newman – a man with his own desperate, wrenching secrets – knows exactly what’s causing the terrifying Darkside Events that drive the series. What he doesn’t know is how to stop them.

Hill, Kurtzman, and Orci executive produce with Heather Kadin, Mitch Galin, and Jerry Golod for CBS TV Studios.
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So...not a strict anthology????
 
jerseydevil said:
David Robert Mitchell Talks IT FOLLOWS, His Original Nightmare, the ?It? and More
http://collider.com/david-robert-mitchell-it-follows-interview/

Lots of love for this one(from critics, I have not seen yet)... think The Ring as a venereal disease. Pretty sure it may be getting a small theatrical release.
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I just happened to see this trailer on Yahoo and I'm hooked. I checked your link and didn't see a trailer. Not sure if it has been posted yet but here it is.
https://www.yahoo.com/movies/opening-scene-it-follows-scariest-movie-of-the-113525955942.html
 
UNFRIENDED Review | SXSW 2015
http://collider.com/unfriended-review/



Ok. You watch that trailer and it's all eye rolls right? Apparently not.

The whole entire movie takes place on Blaire’s computer screen during the Skype video call with the other characters. Occasionally she navigates over to iMessage, sometimes she checks Facebook and every once in a while she turns on a song via Spotify. That probably doesn’t sound too thrilling, but it does work because all of her actions are motivated. Even before things get creepy, the format is surprisingly engaging and dynamic. While watching a video on YouTube, she switches it to full screen at the precise time any user might. She writes her boyfriend Mitch a message, assesses it before hitting send and then edits it, again, just as anyone might. And things continue to feel surprisingly logical and relatable even when they get to the more extreme and horrific parts of the film.
You know that familiar feeling you get while watching a horror movie and catch yourself thinking you’d make a better choice than the characters do? For the most part, that’s impossible here. First time feature writer Nelson Greaves does an incredible job making the characters feel completely helpless. If they disconnect, billie227 will kill them and it’s a brilliant limiting factor that winds up forcing them to make decisions that seem completely logical given the situation. On top of that, it also gives Unfriended an especially unnerving claustrophobic quality. Billie227 essentially has the characters trapped and thanks to the wildly impressive cinematography, you feel trapped right along with them.

Gabriadze and cinematographer Adam Sidman do some astounding work with extremely limited locations. There’s no cheap tricks like cutting to security cam footage to offer more perspective. Gabriadze, Sidman and editors Parker Laramie and Andrew Wesman just build suspense through solid shot composition, simple yet extremely effective blocking, and spot-on sound effects. In fact, sounds like the Facebook messenger chime, the Skype incoming call jingle and the Mac reminder alert are so well timed to the scares in the film that when I came home to write the review and my iCal sent me an alert for an event tomorrow, I jumped
Unfriended isn’t perfect, but it is one heck of an accomplishment. Not only is it an entertaining thrill, but it also gets inside your head and, I must admit, that has a lot to do with the way Gabriadze and Greaves decided to end the film. Again, it didn’t quite work for me in the context of the story, but by incorporating that idea, I’m now sitting at my laptop with my heart skipping a beat every single time I get an alert or message.

Grade: B+
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THE FINAL GIRLS Review | SXSW 2015
http://collider.com/the-final-girls-review/

The Final Girls has rock solid performances across the board, but it is a highly stylized piece and there’s absolutely no way it would have worked as well had director Todd Strauss-Schulson not had such a firm handle on the visuals and tone of the film. Like the characters, his shooting style plays up familiar horror movie cliches. There’s shots of Billy wielding his machete while stepping out of the fog in the distance, a fun play on flashbacks, this especially clever 360-degree rotating shot and more standout visuals that let the movie go beyond just stating that the characters are stuck in Camp Bloodbath and rather, truly making it feel as though they’re trapped in it.

The Final Girls is an insanely entertaining horror spoof, but it’s also got enough authorial expressivity to make it feel like its own thing to a degree. Based on a mere synopsis you could certainly say that The Final Girls is doing what The Cabin in the Woods did a few years ago, but as far as the full feature goes, this is a fresh and highly effective approach to having fun with the genre cliches we love while finding even more ways to enjoy them.

Grade: A-
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After some lean years it looks almost as if there is a renaissance in the horror movie category. For f's sake...It Follows was the MAIN movie reviewed in this weeks Entertainment Weekly and they gave that an A.

It Follows: EW review
http://www.ew.com/article/2015/03/12/it-follows-review

You might want to buckle up. Because the opening sequence of the new horror film It Follows is a honey. The camera fades in on a tree-lined suburban street at twilight. There’s something unsettlingly peaceful and dreamy about this place. If you didn’t know any better, you might think you were watching the beginning of John Carpenter’s wide-screen masterpiece Halloween. Then a disoriented teenage girl bolts out of one of the cookie-cutter houses and frantically stumbles up and down the block, her head swiveling in every direction. She’s terrified—and clearly being chased by something, only we can’t see what it is. She jumps into a car and peels off, winding up at the beach at night, where she cowers on the sand and leaves a frantic phone message for her parents telling them that she’s sorry and that she loves them. She knows she doesn’t have much time. And she’s right. The next morning as the sun rises, we see her lying dead on the beach with her limbs twisted into queasy jackknife angles. At that moment, I whispered one word to myself: Sold.
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SXSW 2015 Review: ‘Unfriended’ is Worth a Poke
http://www.craveonline.com/film/reviews/835023-sxsw-2015-review-unfriended-is-worth-a-poke

But it’s in the moral grey area that Unfriended really embeds itself, taking aim at a brand new form of socially acceptable cruelty and firing kill shot after kill shot. The characters in Unfriended are just the sort of self-obsessed young a-holes we’ve all met at one point in our lives, full of judgment and lacking wisdom. They raise our ire but also eventually our pity, as their superficial preoccupations become their desperate undoing. They want to live in public but free from scrutiny, even while they take advantage of everyone else’s online vulnerabilities. And for that, Unfriended argues, perhaps they really should be punished.

And yet, it’s that very attitude that Unfriended takes towards its own victims that Unfriended is actually condemning. For all its goofy gimmickry and crowd-pleasing “boo” scares and dumb jokes, the disturbing relationship the filmmakers have with their own argument is genuinely horrifying, pushing what could have been just a fun time at the movies into a more complex and satisfying territory. It’s like being locked in a room with someone who hates you and might just want you dead, who gradually forces you to admit that you deserve their judgment. And that’s scary as hell.
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Late Phases: Night of the Lone Wolf
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/17542/latephasesnightofthelonewolf.html

Was just Late Phases when I was pimping this before. Got it in the mail the other day, so I will share my thoughts eventually...

“People don’t come to places like this to live, they come here to die.”

Horror films are a tough genre to do right, whether you’ve got vampires traveling oceans of time, zombies taking over the earth, or have a werewolf that terrorizes an isolated retirement community. Thankfully for horror fans, ‘Late Phases’ goes a long way towards getting so much right that it makes you forget any small grievances. For an independent horror movie, this is a breath of fresh air in a stifled genre.

Ambrose, a fantastic Nick Damici, is a surly blind Viet Nam veteran who is being taken to his new home by his exasperated son Will, played by Ethan Embry. Will can’t seem to drop off his father fast enough and Ambrose seemingly can’t get rid of his son soon enough. Ambrose is a man who in his mind is getting dropped off to die - little does he know that’s more accurate than he’s aware. Ambrose’s first night in his new duplex home is disrupted by the brutal murder of his next door neighbor and the vicious attack on his service dog.

Still a soldier at heart, Ambrose is a man of action, only at first he doesn’t know where to direct his attention. After the death of his dog, he learns that these attacks are fairly common, in fact they happen every month on the full moon. Without the ability to see the world, all he can do is rely on his hearing and his acute sense of smell. The creature that attacked his neighbor and killed his dog, had a particular smell, one that when he finds it again he’ll have solved the mystery. Since these attacks happen with the full moon, he’s given an entire month to prepare his home, retrain his body for war, and find the killer before he, she, or it strikes again.

When the horror genre is treated with respect, it is a great day for genre fans. With ‘Late Phases,’ fans get a solid werewolf movie that is easily the best of its kind to come around in a great long while. For every ‘The Howling’ or ‘American Werewolf in London,’ there is a ‘Skin Walkers’ or ‘American Werewolf in Paris’ to push the subgenera back a step or two. In this case, ‘Late Phases’ does the best thing you can do with any horror film and that is to take its time. If helps to know a character before bad things start happening. ‘Late Phases’ also goes the opposite direction of many horror films in that it shows it’s monster very quickly albeit in fleeting quick glimpses. It’s there. We know it’s werewolves, our main character has figured it out, there’s just no need for us to be blind of this fact… so to speak. But because we know the stakes, it adds to the growing tension as the days tick by to the next full moon.

Lending itself to this film is a wonderfully assembled cast, in particular lead Nick Damici. He brings an almost Clint Eastwood meets Charles Bronson level to his performance. Ethan Embry is also a welcome sight, especially in this role as the removed son. Their father son relationship could have easily slipped into cliche to be a joke, but it never goes over the top and remains believable. Then you have two more great additions to the cast in the form of Tom Noonan as the empathetic Father Rodger and Lance Guest as Griffin - both play their parts as men who know more than what they’re letting on, but never tip their hats, nicely prolonging the mystery element to this film. For genre fans, Tina Louise of ’The Stepford Wives,’ Rutanya Alda of ‘When a Stranger Calls,’ Caitlin O’Heaney of ‘Wolfen,’ Larry Fessenden, ‘Session 9,’ Dana Ashbrook, ‘Twin Peaks,’ and Karen Lynn Gorney of ’Saturday Night Fever’ are all given fun little roles that work beyond simple cameos and actually forward the plot in their own way.

On top of the performances viewers can expect some outstanding creature and makeup effects. Little if any digital effects were used, and while the appearance of the monsters can skew a tad goofy in places, the transformation scene is a wonderful ode to practical effects and is a refreshing sight to see. Lots of gore to be appreciated in the final act to say the least! Then you have the assured direction of Adri?n Garc?a Bogliano and the talented storytelling sense by Eric Stolze. As I said before, horror is a genre that is very easy to do wrong, but these guys killed it, bringing a movie that while a tad predictable is still a fun and thrilling ride. As a score hound, I was easily lost in composer Wojciech Golczewski’s (Munger Road) music - and I’m more than a tad irritated that it hasn’t been released on digital or disc - and unless something changes, it probably never will be.

Is this a perfect horror film? No, not perfect, but still really, really good. There are some little plot contrivances, like Ambrose seemingly being the first person to put the evidence together about what is terrorizing his retirement community, but if you focus on the little things like that, you’re going to miss the greater and more important whole that this was a good movie. I am a horror movie nut, so discovering this one, not knowing really anything about it other than that it existed is a real treat. Easily recommended.
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Here is a review of the movie I teased in post #2397 (page 240) that y'all seemed to like...

We Are Still Here (2015)
http://www.dreadcentral.com/reviews/92948/we-are-still-here-2015/

Growing up in the 1970s was a real trip, man. Many of you don?t remember things like the TV Movie-of-the-Week, but I sure do. Why? Because that?s where a lot of people drew inspiration for their own films. From classics like Don?t Be Afraid of the Dark, Gargoyles, and Dark Night of the Scarecrow to obscurities like When Michael Calls and The Horror at 37,000 Feet, you just can?t beat them.

The question ?What made those movies so good?? is a really easy one to answer. Back then filmmakers weren?t worried about catering to any particular demographic; they were just trying to make the best movies they could. Man, how I miss those days. The cool thing, though, is that the feature film debut of Ted Geoghegan, entitled We Are Still Here, would have fit perfectly with even the best of those films. But more on that in a bit; first let?s get to the plot crunch.

Forever goddess Barbara Crampton and Andrew Sensenig play Paul and Anne Sacchetti, a couple grieving over the loss of their son who are very much still in love but completely out of sync. As a means to get away from it all, they purchase an old home in a rather rural community known as The Dagmar House? a new beginning to help them get on with their lives. Yet, something is a bit off about their new digs. It soon becomes apparent that they?re not alone in their humble abode, and what?s there could be anyone or anything. Anne soon believes the spirit of their son, Bobby, is haunting them so she calls in her dearest friends, Jacob (Fessenden) and May (Marie) Lewis, who are known to be quite gifted in the ways of contacting the other side. They make contact all right? and along the way all hell breaks loose on a truly frightening scale.

We Are Still Here is the first incredibly scary and pure horror film of 2015. There?s just nothing out there like it, and there hasn?t been in quite some time. In fact, even though it shares a lot in common with the aforementioned classic films from the Seventies, it also displays a great deal of affection for some of Lucio Fulci?s finest efforts. Not only do we get some good old fashioned shivers, but each one is chased with a surprising amount of gore (all practical) that goes down wonderfully and overall adds to the experience, making it that much more visceral.

Also worthy of mention is the film?s cast, which delivers in spades. We all should consider ourselves lucky that Barbara Crampton decided to resume her acting career because this lady brings a lot to the table that?s been sorely missing. She nails her performance of a grieving mother dealing with extreme and insane circumstances to a ?t,? and you cannot help but feel her every emotion, especially her fright and horror.

Another shining star is TV/film legend Monte Markham, who at 79 years old still manages to bring a delightful amount of believability and vigor to his role. What we have here is a damned fine performance from one of the most beloved yet underrated actors of our time.

Couple these two with solid performances from the always great Larry Fessenden, the wonderfully odd Lisa Marie, and the ever-frazzled Andrew Sensenig; and we have a winner here, folks.

Another great thing about the flick is its big bads, the Dagmar family portrayed by Elissa Dowling, Guy Gane, and Zorah Burress. These cats? They?re as vengeful and evil as they come, and they look damned scary. When they?re on the screen, they?re there for one purpose? cause bloody chaos while scaring the hell out of the viewer. Mission accomplished.

Geoghegan himself definitely deserves a great deal of recognition as well as he?s managed to make a movie set in the 1970s without a high-cost budget to make it look like the 1970s. Everything feels very authentic, and he directs his characters with a confidence that bleeds over onto the screen. It?s clear that he had a vision of what this film should be, and kudos to Snowfort Pictures and Dark Sky Films for letting him paint a truly ghastly, fun, and beautiful picture. We hope this movie opens a lot of doors for him, and we?re willing to bet it will. It definitely should.

Nowadays it?s hard to make an effective haunted house movie as we?ve pretty much seen it all. They range from extremely minimalistic to over-the-top silly. We Are Still Here hits the sweet spot effortlessly and is a horror film that is not only firing on all cylinders but delivers on all counts. Keep your eyes out for this one. It?s an old school spookshow that is NOT to be missed!
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