Ten years after audiences were terrorized by the now infamous trio of masked Tamara-searching psychopaths in The Strangers, Dollface, the Pin-Up Girl, and the Man in the Mask return to terrorize a family of four stranded in a desolate trailer park in Johannes Roberts' (47 Meters Down) follow-up to what many consider one of the most frightening horror films of the 2000s and a sentimental favorite among genre fans.
The Strangers: Prey at Night
Released: March 9, 2018
Director: Johannes Roberts
Screenplay: Bryan Bertino & Ben Ketai
Tagline: "Let Us Prey"
Cast:
Christina Hendricks as Cindy
Martin Henderson as Mike
Bailee Madison as Kinsey
Lewis Pullman as Luke
Damian Maffei as Man in the Mask
Emma Bellomy as Dollface
Lea Enslin as Pin-Up Girl
Cindy and Mike are taking their teenaged children, Luke and Kinsey, on a visit to their aunt and uncle for one last attempt at family bonding before Kinsey is begrudgingly sent off to boarding school. When they arrive, the family discovers that the trailer park that is home to Aunt Sheryl and Uncle Marv, now in the off-season and almost entirely empty, has become the latest hunting ground for a trio of masked, murderous stalkers whose visages will be all too familiar for fans of the original slash-and-stab chiller.
While The Strangers was a traditional home invasion movie, Prey at Night expands the hunt to an entire trailer park, but it has the interesting effect of making the new film feel more claustrophobic than the original. Certainly, this is true when the killers are terrorizing the family within the trailer itself, but it's also true when the kids are trying to hide in the playground, when the fenced-in pool becomes a literal bloodbath during a particularly tense chase scene, and when the only road out of the trailer park is turned into the ultimate death trap.
All these great hiding places mean there are constantly Strangers appearing from the shadows, barely letting the audience catch their breath between attacks. At first, the children and parents are separated, then the men and women pair off together; this allows for different layers of character development so that then when the eventual deaths hit, they hit hard. There's a great sense of dark desperation over the film, not only in the heroes attempting to survive but in the killers as well. They're relentless in their pursuit, and in that sense, the film shares a certain bleak fatalism with classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and the original Halloween (1978).
There's also, arguably, nods to another Carpenter classic, Christine (1983), in how the Strangers utilize vehicles. To them, a car is just another home to invade and so rather than a tool of escape for the victims, cars become just another weapon for the killers to terrorize them with. Prey at Night thus succeeds in bringing the scares surrounding the original film to the next level while also delivering a satisfying story with believable characters the viewer wants to root for but knows that such optimism is foolish in the masked face of random evil.
The Strangers: Prey at Night
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror
Netflix is dropping all sorts of freaky features for spooky streaming this month. Some are hyped, like the new Haunting of Hill House adaptation and Apostle, and others have just popped up quietly, like the new haunted house film Malevolent. Creaky steps and slamming doors abound, but is it anything more than yet another attempt to rip off The Conjuring? Read on and find out...
Malevolent
Released: October 5, 2018
Director: Olaf de Fleur
Screenplay: Ben Ketai & Eva Konstantopoulos
Cast:
Florence Pugh as Angela
Ben-Lloyd Hughes as Jackson
Celia Imrie as Mrs. Green
Scott Chambers as Elliot
Georgina Bevan as Beth
Angela and her brother Jackson run a paranormal investigation business wherein Angela, using her "gift," gets pesky spirits to cease tormenting the living and grant them peace. The trouble is, Angela is a fake, and the business is a scam. When Angela develops a conscience and grows tired of fooling people, she attempts to put an end to the lies; but Jackson has run afoul of the mob and he needs her to continue to pay off his debt. He convinces his sister to help him with one last job at an old manor house where several young girls were murdered years prior. Once there, it's not long before Angela begins experiencing real contact with the dead and becomes resolved to find out what happened to the girls and put their souls to rest.
Are you bored yet? Good Lord if that isn't the blandest description of a ghost movie ever. But let's see if we can compliment-sandwich this bad boy, out of our societal loyalty to Netflix. The actors, though not given much to work with, do a fine job. The brother-sister duo play convincing siblings and do their best to communicate a depth to their characters that no one in the writer's room bothered with developing. Hughes is convincingly desperate when faced with his mounting debt, and Pugh gets a chance for some interesting physical work when Angela is struck ill by her repeated visions of the little girl ghosts because...well it's never really clear why.
Quite a lot about this movie isn't clear, in fact. The villain's motive, the connection between the dead girls and Angela, why anyone would want to make this movie...but worse than all of that, it's an exceedingly dull movie. Nothing even remotely scary happens, at any point, ever. Every moment that's coded as frightening is broadcast from miles away with tractor-sized high beams, and nothing's original. Every scare is ripped off from older, better movies which makes the end result all the more frustrating because clearly, the writers know horror cinema. But instead of using their knowledge to avoid well-trodden material, they just retread it in the most vanilla way imaginable.
Malevolent is a waste of good streaming time and especially heinous given all the great horror material Netflix could be promoting on their server, not to mention the content that they're in competition with on other services. Avoid the paint-by-number characters, the Swiss cheese plot, and the corny dialogue and keep swiping on this one, or the only one feeling malevolent will be you.
Malevolent
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror
Either you remember it fondly as a lame 90's gem or you don't remember it at all. Either way, it's time to take a look at The Faculty, where dehydrated teachers turn out to be aliens, high schools become intergalactic battlegrounds, and Jon Stewart teaches biology for some reason.
The Faculty
Released: December 25, 1998
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Screenplay: Kevin Williamson
Tagline: "And you thought YOUR teachers were weird..."
Cast:
Elijah Wood as Casey Connor
Josh Hartnett as Zeke Taylor
Clea DuVall as Stokely "Stokes" Mitchell
Jordana Brewster as Delilah Profitt
Laura Harris as Marybeth Louise Hutchinson
Shawn Hatosy as Stan Rosado
Robert Patrick as Coach Willis
Fawke Janssen as Miss Burke
Bebe Neuwirth as Principal Drake
Piper Laurie as Mrs. Olson
Daniel von Bargen as Mr. Tate
Usher Raymond as Gabe Santora
Jon Stewart as Mr. Furlong
Salma Hayek as Nurse Harper
At Herrington High School in Ohio, several teachers begin acting strangely. Or rather, stranger than usual. It's not long before the odd mannerisms of a few staff begin to spread among the student body as well, with only a select few pupils, led by Elijah Wood's Casey, noticing the subtle shifts and sensing that their school, and their world, are in terrible danger. That's the set-up of The Faculty, the sci-fi/horror mashup penned by Scream's Kevin Williamson and directed by From Dusk Till Dawn's Robert Rodriguez. It's a campy, fun ride that still brings in the violence and tension one expects from a good ole monster flick. Rodriguez's direction combined with Williamson's script help elevate both the characters and the story above the mindless tropes that so many high school-set horror films had fallen into by the late 90's.
The dialogue, in particular, is praise-worthy for managing to both create a unique, believable world populated by fleshed out characters and poking fun at the alien invasion cliches that the film inevitably uses to advance the plot. The assembled ragtag crew of students, all from different cliques and social circles, are all likable and rise above what their appearance suggests they might be; this allows the viewer to get taken in, giving a pass to an otherwise goofy story we might write off because we want to see what happens to these characters. The titular faculty are all great as well, with some great genre talent committing fully to their alien-possessed personalities.
Sure, the CGI is dated, but there's a healthy use of practical effects as well, which prevents the film from reading as cheesy. Like Scream, Williamson's story is self-aware, nodding to the great alien invasion films of the past like The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Thing. The characters admit that the idea of aliens taking over the bodies of their teachers is absurd, and some resist the idea entirely. While being meta, this also allows room for humor, making The Faculty stand out as one of the few 90's films focusing on teenagers that doesn't take itself too seriously while still delivering decent scares and playful gore.
The Faculty is clever, funny, and packed with a great cast who manage a balanced story of mystery and farce. In a rarity for the era in which it came, it was never franchised or sequeled to death. I think that helps add to the charm that the movie still carries today. Like a memory of senior year, heartwarming and just a little bit icky. Class dismissed.
The Faculty
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror
Pulling pages from everything from A Nightmare on Elm Street to The Craft, debut director Kevin Phillips' Super Dark Times is like the emo, nihilistic older sibling of Stranger Things; a psychological horror-drama that explores the aftereffects of trauma during adolescence and the terrible acts one can be driven to in the name of self-preservation.
Super Dark Times
Released: September 29, 2017
Director: Kevin Phillips
Screenplay: Ben Collins & Luke Piotrowski
Cast:
Owen Campbell as Zach Taylor
Charlie Tahan as Josh Templeton
Elizabeth Cappuccino as Allison Bannister
Max Talisman as Daryl Harper
Sawyer Barth as Charlie Barth
Amy Hargreaves as Karen Taylor
Best friends Zach and Josh are typical suburban teenage boys. They ride their bikes, trash-talk each other while playing video games, and lust over the pretty girls in their school, especially Allison. When hanging out in Josh's older brother's room with friends Daryl and Charlie, they find a samurai sword and head to the woods to chop up milk cartons and generally dick around, ninja-style. In the midst of their misguided mischief, however, a scuffle breaks out and something goes terribly, tragically wrong. As dusk approaches, the boys make a decision that will ripple throughout their lives and their community in the cruelest possible ways.
Super Dark Times is all about trauma management. It's a Hitchcockian examination of secrecy, guilt, malice, and mental stability. The characters are fleshed out, real people, and watching their self-destructive path is riveting. We see them deal with bullies, go to parties, vie for the attention of cute girls, and generally struggle with what it means to be a young adult, all before the violence that turns the story on its head. This is what sets the film apart and makes every scene after the turning point so uncomfortable to watch. It's dark times, indeed.
SUPER dark times, to be exact. Josh, in particular, does not cope with the aforementioned trauma well. Charlie Tahan gives an incredible performance, portraying Josh with great sympathy that magnifies the horror when Josh's odd behavior finally becomes clear to Zach. It's a shocking, disturbing revelation that drives the third act to a tragic conclusion that will have you biting your nails and hiding behind pillows. For all the pure tragedy of the film, it's still authentic and honest, aiming to take shots at the dark underbelly of suburbia and succeeding with aplomb. A mesmerizing, beautiful yet bleak film that's impossible to look away from and destined to become a genre favorite.
Super Dark Times
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror
An effective, bone-chilling film weaving together timely themes and thought-provoking social subtext, internationally co-produced, set in the turbulent end days of the Iran-Iraq War. Interested? Then by all means, peer Under the Shadow...
Under the Shadow
Released: September 30, 2016
Director: Babak Anvari
Screenplay: Babak Anvari
Tagline: "Fear will find you"
Cast:
Narges Rashidi as Shideh
Avin Manshadi as Dorsa
Bobby Naderi as Iraj
Ray Haratian as Mr. Ebrahimi
Aram Ghasemy as Mrs. Ebrahimi
Arash Marandi as Dr. Reza
Tehran, late 1980's. Political activist Shideh is attempting to gain re-entry to medical school, but her outspoken reputation has left her blacklisted. Devastated, she is resigned to return home to her doctor husband Iraj and their stubborn daughter Dorsa. She locks her textbook away and resigns herself solemnly to domestic duties. But then, Iraj is drafted to serve in the war with Iraq, and Shideh must take care of Dorsa all on her own. As the conflict drags on, and strange things begin happening in the apartment building, Shideh begins to suspect that the danger of the outside world is not all that threatens her sanity, her family, and her life.
Under the Shadow is a confident, well-paced film from a debut director that feels seasoned and measured. It's the familiar story of a determined mother trying to figure out parenthood while protecting her daughter from harm but grounded in the specific historical timeframe of Iran in the eighties. This setting allows for layers of nuance and depth unique to the story; sirens blare in the background, characters hide in bomb shelters, dud missiles crash through walls, all of it adding flavor and character. There is danger all around Shideh and Dorsa. But perhaps closer than they realize, as well. Shideh's neighbors believe a specter has latched itself to Dorsa, but Shideh thinks the missing objects and strange hallucinations she's having are a result of her sleepwalking and insomnia.
What's interesting and compelling about this particular mother-daughter dynamic is that Shideh is not the prototypical caring and sensitive mother that horror viewers might be familiar with from films like The Others (2001) or The Babadook (2015). She loves Dorsa, certainly, but she's also struggling with the frustration and resentment at having had to abandon her career as a doctor and become a full-time mother. There's a feminist critique throughout the film that we see in Shideh and Iraj's tense conversations about gender roles, and it all comes to a head when Shideh, fleeing from a terrifying apparition in the night, is reprimanded by the authorities for being in public without her headscarf. She is scolded and must return home in shame, unable to get anyone to investigate what prompted her actions to begin with.
There are several great observations like this throughout the film, none of which are heavy-handed. This allows Anvari to craft a realistic foundation for the supernatural horror that unfolds, telling a tale of the instability of war and the insecurities that citizens face in the midst of conflict. Even watching the film, with the restless camerawork, suggests destabilization, preparing us for a world slowly being enveloped by chaos and shadow.
Under the Shadow
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror
There's no doubt that the Insidious franchise is one of the stronger horror series to emerge in the 21st century, but even the mighty must fall. The quality scares started with the James Wan (The Conjuring, Saw)-directed original back in 2011 and was followed by a lackluster but passable sequel, Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) also directed by Wan. Series writer Leigh Whannell then took over the director's chair for Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015), a prequel to the first movie that was surprisingly solid and which the fourth film, Insidious: The Last Key, follows. Confused by that timeline, yet? Anywho, though the magnificent Lin Shaye delivers another great performance, the requisite jump scares and plodding story don't add anything exciting or original to the Insidious universe and we're left with yet another unnecessary sequel-prequel.
Insidious: The Last Key
Released: January 5, 2018
Director: Adam Robitel
Screenplay: Leigh Whannell
Tagline: "Fear comes home."
Cast:
Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier
Angus Sampson as Tucker
Leigh Whannell as Specs
Spencer Locke as Melissa Rainier
Caitlin Gerard as Imogen Rainier
Bruce Davison as Christian Rainier
Kirk Acevedo as Ted Garza
Shortly after the events of Chapter 3, Elise Rainier and her two tech assistants receive a call for help from a man named Ted Garza, who is living in Elise's childhood home in Five Keys, New Mexico. His plea for aid in dealing with ghostly apparitions convince Elise to return to the home where he was ostracized and beaten by her father for her spiritual gift, and where, after being tricked by a demon, tragedy ripped her family apart. While confronting old memories, Elise also reunites with her estranged brother, Christian, and his two grown daughters, pulling them into the dangerous problems of the past.
The Last Key attempts to pack in a lot, and I suppose we have writer-actor Whannell to thank for that. The overlong prologue concerning Elise's childhood is illuminating in that it provides layers to the woman who has become the icon of the Insidious franchise, but those new layers feel somewhat hollow and glib. The abusive backstory sparks a certain interest for the viewer, but it doesn't actually add anything new to Elise as a character. Given that she's the focal point of the film, we have to view this as a failure on Whannell's part.
Narratively, The Last Key follows the map set out by the previous Insidious films, culminating in a third act confrontation deep inside The Further. It's here that we see the one or two tricks unique to the film rather than the recycled jump scares laden throughout the rest of the runtime. There's also a brilliant but brief plot twist that could have taken the story in a very intriguing direction, but it's quickly glossed over once the movie reverts back to its expected narrative path, you can feel the air drain out of the story as everyone slogs to the end credits.
For all these faults, though, there are some shining moments that set The Last Key as an okay movie worth your time on a lazy afternoon. Elise has become one of the best final girls in horror, and it's all thanks to Shaye, who owns the film. It's pretty miraculous that a septuagenarian woman can headline a major horror film in 2018 and on that merit alone, we should applaud The Last Key and everyone involved in the production.
The Last Key is a passable sequel-prequel, but it is also the weakest of the Insidious movies by far due to the fact that it plays it far too safe with the scares and opts to offer up more of the same fare rather than conjure up new nightmares. But given Shaye's heartfelt performance, horror hounds could do a lot worse. And we certainly have before, haven't we?
Insidious: The Last Key
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror
Horror anthologies can be tricky demons. When done right, they tend to become legendary among fans (Tales From the Darkside, Creepshow, Trick r' Treat, etc.), but they can also easily become overstuffed, leaving the final product a dud (looking at you, ABC's of Death). Southbound, from the minds behind V/H/S, isn't quite in the legendary category, but it's on the better side of the quality scale, for sure. Comprised of five segments each taking place on a deserted unnamed highway, the film deals with themes of escape, punishment, revenge, and the afterlife. So, you know. Pretty light-hearted.
Southbound
Released: February 5, 2016
Directors: Radio Silence, Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, & Patrick Horvath
Screenplay: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Roxanne Benjamin, Susan Burke, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, & Dallas Hallam
Tagline: "No matter which road you choose, it's all going south"
Cast:
Chad Villella as Mitch
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin as Jack
Fabianne Therese as Sadie
Hannah Marks as Ava
Nathalie Love as Kim
Mather Zickel as Lucas
David Yow as Danny
Tipper Newton as Jesse
Hassie Harrison as Jem
Beginning with "The Way Out," Southbound establishes a mood of desperation and plight as two blood-soaked rednecks are trying to escape from something not immediately revealed to the audience. Dementor-like specters haunt their rearview mirror and seem to be keeping them trapped on a loop, forever pulling up to an out-of-the-way diner until they're willing to confront what it is that got them so bloodsoaked in the first place. From there, we segue into "Sirens," the strongest story of the bunch, where a girl band en route to a gig break down in their van and are taken in by a seemingly harmless country couple. I'm sure you can guess how that goes for them.
Their plight transitions into "Accident," where well-intentioned Lucas desperately tries to save a young woman he hits with his car. But something is not quite right about the 911 operator, or the small town in which he hopes to find medical assistance. Then comes "Jailbreak," where a man methodically tries to find his lost sister, only to be confronted with the shocking revelation that she does not want to be found, and the horrifying truth as to why. Finally, "The Way In," brings the stories full circle, ending on a maudlin, jarring note fitting to the framework of the film itself.
While the links between the stories are tenuous at best, Southbound doesn't come across as a hodgepodge of disconnected ramblings like other anthologies, but rather a mosaic of terrifying tales running along a common thematic thread. The filmmakers here aren't interested in neat, tidy tales with easy endings and clear meanings. They want to challenge the viewer with and symbolism and loose conclusions. Because what is more unnerving than ambiguity? It drives even the best of us wild. Or should I say south?
Southbound
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror
