Horror

The Entire Halloween series (1978-2022) – Blecchh! I’ve see ’em all!
I have a theory that if you stare at enough bad movies, you can see infinity. I mean that’s kind of obvious. Staring at enough bad movies, you’ll find yourself wishing for eternity. This has generally been my experience when I am trapped in a theater between a movie that dares me to be entertained […]

Hypochondriac (2022)
Addison Heimann’s psychological horror drama Hypochondriac is the kind of movie that, as a critic, I find it difficult to describe in words, you watch it, you don’t explain it. That might work in terms of the movie but it does not bode well for a review. I could almost stop here and say, don’t […]

Mad God (2022)
I don’t know what to do here. I just spent an hour and twenty-three minutes beholding Phil Tippett’s Mad God, an ugly, unpleasant dystopian nightmare from which I exit the other side feeling unclean and confused. However, given it’s pedigree, particularly the fact that Tippett – The Oscar-winning special effects wizard who worked on everything […]

The Righteous (2022)
There is so much to love about actor Mark O’Brien’s directorial debut The Righteous, and so much a relief that a first-time filmmaker can engineer a mood piece this deliberately paced and this beautiful. It’s a psychological drama from Canada, spare on characters and heavy on tension, and I appreciated so much of it that […]

They’re (still) Heeeere!: ‘Poltergeist’ at 40
Steven Spielberg doesn’t talk about Poltergeist for reasons that I can only speculate. The last time that I recall that he even mentioned the film was on an AFI special 20 years ago in which he dismissed any suggestion of subtext by saying “Poltergeist was just meant to be a rollercoaster ride. I wasn’t trying to do […]

The Innocents (2021)
Norwegian director Eskil Vogt got a double-honor at this year’s Academy Awards, first by getting a writing nomination along with his collaborator Joachim Trier for The World Person in the World and also saw his film nominated for Best International Feature. That film, about the adventures of a young woman that could easily be written […]

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022)
Sometimes, just for laughs, I go YouTube and watch those videos where armchair eggheads like myself take a piece of filmmaking and trying to intellectualize it – in all honesty, I’ve seen enough analysis on The Shining to last me the rest of my life. I love hearing film analysis which either gives me a […]

Choose or Die (2022)
It’s funny, right before sitting down to watch Toby Meakins’ Choose or Die, I was lazily moving through the first installment of Zork – I do this a lot. For you kiddies out there, Zork was a text-based adventure from the early 80s that pits you against a vast underground empire where you have to collect […]