Tag: horror
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Elisabeth Moss has a villain problem in The Invisible Man
For a movie named after the antagonist, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man has a villain problem. At one point, Cecelia (Elisabeth Moss) asks an interesting question: her husband is famous and wealthy, and can have anyone — so why her? In one question, she essentially admits her longstanding insecurity at having a handsome rich man […]
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Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die is an unaffectionate homage
I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that Jim Jarmusch would make a zombie movie, since he’s already cycled through idiosyncratic interpretations of westerns (Dead Man), vampires (Only Lovers Left Alive), samurai (Ghost Dog), and thrillers (The Limits of Control). But unlike these, The Dead Don’t Die reads as an unaffectionate (or to coin a word, […]
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Scream 4 makes a few half-hearted stabs… at relevance
By the time Scream 4 appeared, over a decade after the original trilogy began, the horror genre had moved on from the ironic, winking mode the series popularized. A character in Scream 4 complains that most horror movies traffic more in outright gore (“I hate that torture porn shit”). On television, The Walking Dead characters […]
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Scream 3 is the movie-of-the-book-within-the-movie
The Scream franchise disappears even further up its own backside as the action moves to a Hollywood studio making a movie dramatizing a book relating the events seen in the original movie. We’re invited to take the moral point of view that the book-within-the-movie and the movie-of-the-book-within-the-movie are exploiting tragedy, but it’s not clear if […]
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Scream 2 is a self-fulfilling prophecy
There’s nowhere else the Scream franchise could have gone other than here: an ironic, self-aware sequel to an ironic, self-aware horror film. When one the characters states “Sequels suck! Oh please, please! By definition alone, sequels are inferior films!”, it’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a fine line between winking at your audience and […]
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Once revolutionary, Scream now feels quaint
It’s easy to forget how revolutionary Wes Craven’s Scream seemed in 1996, and how influential it’s been since. Rewatching it 17 years later, I’m struck by how… well, quaint it seems in retrospect. Now every post-Scream horror movie is required to be a postmodern deconstruction of the genre. Maybe the trend reached its apotheosis with The Cabin […]
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Untangling The Terminator Timeline
The Terminator franchise is cooked from a recipe of cyborgs, time travel, bullets, and explosions, seasoned with themes of destiny, paranoia, and technophobia. Subtract or substitute too many of these ingredients and you wind up with something not-Terminator. Terminator Salvation is the first episode to dare to omit the foundational time travel element. Its “present” […]
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Terminator Salvation is oppressively feel-bad apocalypse porn
Terminator Salvation was released in a year curiously rife with apocalypse porn. The visions of world’s end in theaters that year varied wildly in tone: everything from illuminating art to alarmism to escapism. The competition to bum you out included Roland Emmerich’s 2012, which utilized the best special effects technology money could buy to ritually […]
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People Are Vectors: George A. Romero’s The Crazies
George A. Romero practically invented the lucrative zombie subgenre with Night of the Living Dead in 1968, simultaneously trapping himself within it for most of his subsequent career. Romero’s zombies served him well enough for six films and counting, at least two of which transcended the genre and are still discussed in serious terms. His […]
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Pandorum is all premise and no logic
I rented Christian Alvart’s Pandorum solely on the strength of the premise: two men awake from suspended animation, on a spaceship, in a locked room, not knowing where they are, what their mission is, or if there even is a mission. It’s well cast with Dennis Quaid and the very intense Ben Foster. This is […]