Tag: horror
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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…
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The Pod People Film Festival: The Invasion
Nicole Kidman must be one of the unluckiest stars in Hollywood, having recently starred in at least two big-budget catastrophes. Frank Oz’s The Stepford Wives (2004) was sabotaged by cast members dropping out, extensive reshoots, and competing script revisions that left significant logical plot holes in the finished film. Next, Invasion is best described as…
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The Pod People Film Festival: The Faculty
We interrupt this retrospective look at the four official feature film adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers with a kind of bonus track, a remake in all but name, Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty. It may be a touch campy, but hugely entertaining. All four official versions are deadly serious, so it’s refreshing for…
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The Pod People Film Festival: Body Snatchers (1993)
Yet another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers might seem an odd project for iconoclast director Abel Ferrara, known for gritty urban crime sagas centered around profoundly compromised protagonists. In stark contrast, the lead in Ferrara’s most conventional movie is a good-natured teenage girl, a world apart from the crazed Harvey Keitel of Bad…
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The Pod People Film Festival: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Philip Kaufman’s re-imagining of Don Siegel’s 1956 classic paranoid nightmare Invasion of the Body Snatchers immediately signals its uniqueness with a strange and beautifully abstract opening sequence. Psychedelic spores float off the surface of an alien planet, traverse through outer space, and fall to Earth as gelatinous rain. A glimpse of a newspaper headline describes…
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The Pod People Film Festival: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
For a pulpy 1950s horror flick relating the strange tale of an invasion of giant brussels sprouts, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a startlingly gory, paranoid nightmare positively loaded with political subtext. Its themes of identity, mistrust, and subversion have remained relevant and influential for decades, inspiring three official remakes and even…
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John Erick Dowdle’s Zombie Fauxmentary Quarantine
Quarantine, remade by director John Erick Dowdle (co-written with brother Drew) from the Spanish movie REC (2007), follows in the now-firmly established horror fauxmentary tradition. Previous entries Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, and Cloverfield are all ostensibly comprised of found footage recovered from cameras found at the scenes of horrific disasters. Quarantine‘s only…
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A Vampire’s Secret Daily Toil: Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)
Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) is unapologetically a vampire story. It follows most of the rules of the genre but avoids the standard trappings of spectacular bloodletting (like, say, Blade) and simplistic sexual metaphors (we’re looking at you, Twilight). Director Tomas Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide (adapting his own novel)…
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A Disease Immune to Bureaucracy: Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness
Director Fernando Meirelles has examined desperate pressure cookers (City of God) and institutional corruption (The Constant Gardener) before. Blindness proves perfect to meld both themes, with a science fiction twist imagining the downfall of civilization itself. Blindness is part of a special subset of the horror/sci-fi/disaster genre: the dystopian end-of-civilization nightmare. Whereas the typical entry…
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Believer Meets Skeptic, in The X-Files: I Want to Believe
The first X-Files feature film Fight the Future (1998) was so tightly bound to the complex mythology of the original television series that it was mostly incomprehensible to anyone not already a deeply committed fan. I myself had only seen the odd episode over the years, and as such could barely follow what was going…