Plenty of filmmakers remade or reimagined George Romero’s flicks, but none did it as well as Zack Snyder. Snyder would go on to success with vastly overrated movies, but his one truly fine piece of filmmaking updated Romero’s Night of the Living Dead sequel with the high octane horror. The result may be less cerebral and political than Romero’s original, but it is a thrill ride through hell and it is not to be missed.
The flick begins strong with one of the best “things seem fine but then they don’t” openings in film. And finally! A strong female lead (Sarah Polley) who seems like a real person. Polley’s beleaguered nurse Ana leads us through the aftermath of the dawn of the dead, fleeing her rabid husband and neighbors and winding up with a rag tag team of survivors hunkered down inside a mall.
In Romero’s version, themes of capitalism, greed and mindless consumerism run through the narrative. Snyder, though affectionate to the source material, focuses more on survival, humanity and thrills. (He also has a wickedly clever soundtrack.) It’s more visceral and more fun. His feature is gripping, breathlessly paced, well developed and genuinely terrifying.
Plus, one truly good guy, one effective change-of-heart character, an excellent slimeball, and solid performances all around keep you invested in the characters.
You’ve got to kind of make up your own mind about the zombie-baby, though.
We don’t watch a lot of TV, but when we do, it usually stars a bloodthirsty Jessica Lange. The 4th season of American Horror Story premiers this week, putting us in the mood for some carnival side show prep work. If you, too, are eager for the new season, here are some flicks – some great, some magnificently awful – to help you gear up.
9. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival comes to Greentown, IL, drawing the attention of most of the lonely hearts in town. It is especially appealing to two lads, but Will and Jim quickly learn that Mr. Dark has nefarious schemes in mind. Jason Robards to the rescue! The film is dated in that nostalgic Disney live action way, but there is still something sweetly spooky about it.
8. Passion Plan (2010)
Mickey Rourke falls in love at a side show. That sounds about right. In this enormously flawed yet weirdly watchable mind bender, Bill Murray, Megan Fox and Rhys Ifans help a down-on-his-luck trumpet player find redemption at the carnival.
7. Stitches (2012)
There are a lot of scary clowns in films – the best being It’s Pennywise and Robby’s terrifying toy in Poltergeist. But, not that many can carry an entire film. Stitches can. This Irish import sees a half assed clown accidentally offed at a 6-year-old’s birthday party, only to return to finish his act when the lad turns 16. Dark yet bawdy humor and game performances elevate this one way above teen slasher. Gory, gross, funny and well acted – it brings to mind some of Peter Jackson’s early work. It’s worth a look.
6. Vampire Circus (1972)
Here’s one of Hammer Horror’s early Seventies vampire flicks, replete with oil painted vampires, nubile and naked (sometimes striped) women, costumes, torches, and a nay-saying scientist/doctor. But there is one piece of novelty: these vampires work in a circus. Handsome Emil – kind of a cross between Jim Mrrison and Pauley Shore – comes to town and soon midgets, acrobats, panthers, strongmen (played by David Prouse – that’s right, kids, Darth Vader!), and gypsy women are killing all the children in town. But they don’t know that the hero possesses the power to make a cross glow. Think of how that would have been totally wasted had he been born during the Zombiepocalypse rather than an old timey vampire infestation!
5. The Funhouse (1981)
Double dating teens hit the carnival and decide to spend the night inside the park’s funhouse. What could go wrong? Well, as would become the norm in every carnival-themed horror film to come, the ride is the secret hideaway of a carny’s deformed and bloodthirsty offspring. Director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) develops a genre-appropriate seediness among the carnies, as well as an unwholesome atmosphere. This one’s no masterpiece, but it is a tidy, garish, claustrophobic and unsettling piece of indie filmmaking.
4. Nightmare Alley (1947)
Tyrone Power plays a carnival barker and conman trying to get mystic Madam Zeena’s secret clairvoyance trick. Once he does, he hits the bricks with his new love interest and swindles gullible richies, but ruin is never far away for ol’Tyrone, and when you start off a carny, down is the wrong direction to go. A lot of real carny folks and a surprisingly dark storyline make this a standout era flick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVfqtQaiac
3. The Last Circus (Balada triste de trompeta) (2010)
Who’s in the mood for something weird? Unhinged Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia (Perdita Durango) returns to form with The Last Circus, a breathtakingly bizarre look at a Big Top love triangle set in Franco’s Spain. Describing the story in much detail would risk giving away too many of the astonishing images. A boy loses his performer father to conscription in Spain’s civil war, and decades later, with Franco’s reign’s end in sight, he follows in pop’s clown-sized footsteps and joins the circus. There he falls for another clown’s woman, and stuff gets nutty. The Last Circus boasts more than brilliantly wrong-minded direction and stunningly macabre imagery – though of these things it certainly boasts. Within that bloody and perverse chaos are some of the more touching performances to be found onscreen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM2corZvDTI
2. La Strada (1954)
Fellini’s beautiful tragedy of naïve Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) and the brutish strongman (Anthony Quinn) who purchases her casts the life of the traveling performer with surreal poetry. Beautiful, melancholy, sometimes absurd and often punishing, it’s perhaps the auteur’s saddest, dreamiest effort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OJZ_nm6G-M
1. Freaks (1932)
Short and sweet, like most of its performers, Tod Browning’s controversial film Freaks is one of those movies you will never forget. Populated almost entirely by unusual actors – midgets, amputees, the physically deformed, and an honest to god set of conjoined twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton) – Freaks makes you wonder whether you should be watching it at all. This, of course, is an underlying tension in most horror films, but with Freaks, it’s right up front. Is what Browning does with the film empathetic or exploitative, or both? And, of course, am I a bad person for watching this film? Well, that’s not for me to say. I suspect you may be a bad person, perhaps even a serial killer. Or maybe that’s me. What I can tell you for sure is that the film is unsettling, and the final, rainy act of vengeance is truly creepy to watch.
A lurid Korean fairy tale of sorts – replete with dreamy cottage and evil stepmother – Jee-woon Kim’s Tale of Two Sisters is saturated with bold colors and family troubles.
Kim would go on to direct the also outstanding, although entirely different, I Saw the Devil, but where Devil breathes masculinity, Tale of Two Sisters is a deep, murky, and intensely female horror.
A tight-lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear timeframe, and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.
Tale masters the slow reveal, and the dinner party scene is a pivotal one for that reason. One of the great things about this picture is the fact that Tale always has something else up its sleeve. Or, under its table.
The director’s use of space, the composition of his frame, the set decoration, and the disturbing and constant anxiety he creates about what’s just beyond the edge of the frame wrings tensions and heightens chills. The composite effect disturbs more then it horrifies, but it stays with you either way.
The film opens with a black screen, a child trilling a spooky tune about a heartbroken girl weeping beneath the willow where she and her lover once lay. Then the ghostly image of hands in prayer, and a woman’s whispered:
“All I want to do is save the children, not destroy them.”
Are those the only options? Maybe split the difference with some pizza and bowling? Kids enjoy bowling, especially if the alley allows bumpers. Fun for everyone, really.
But bumper bowling is not in the future for little Miles and Flora, the orphaned nephew and niece of a selfish London bachelor. Uncle hires the clearly brittle governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) based on her letter confessing that more than anything, she loves children.
The ease with which he charms her into taking the position, and the first of the film’s regular mentions of imagination as a gateway to the truth, predict quite a lot.
Quietly desperate and delicately high strung, Kerr’s performance is the perfect central image in The Innocents, the best of many screen adaptations of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Is Kerr’s hypersensitive governess turning delusional as she spirals toward spinsterhood, or are her angelic charges in danger of becoming possessed by the spectral lovers who seem to haunt the property?
Thanks to Kerr, the wickedly cherubic turn by Martin Stephens (the most popular child actor in England’s Fifties and Sixties) as young Miles, and Freddie Francis’s gorgeous black and white photography, this eerie ghost story is a glorious study in the shadowy line between reality and imagination.
Breck Eisner’s The Crazies, retooled from George Romero’s little-seen 1973 gem, offers solid scares, inventive plotting, and far better performances than expected in a genre film.
Building a cumulative sense of entrapment and dread, the film relies on a storyline whisper-close to the overplayed zombie tale, but deviates in a powerful way. The slight alteration plumbs for a different kind of terror, and Eisner’s sense of timing provides a fine balance between fear of the unknown and horror of the inevitable.
The Crazies sometimes plays like a more languid 28 Days Later (a film that clearly found inspiration in Romero’s The Crazies). All three films begin by articulating humankind’s repulsion and fear of infection before introducing the greater threat – our own government. Eisner’s film never accomplishes the heights Boyle achieved in each area, but his slower pace builds dread and flirts more often with an effectively disturbing sense of compassion.
Eisner’s greatest strength is his cast. The eternally under-appreciated Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, unerringly realistic as husband and wife, carry most of the grisly weight, aided by solid support work from folks who are not afraid to be full-on nuts. They may not scare you silly, but they’ll keep you surprised and a little grossed out, which ain’t too bad, considering.
Eisner pulls Romero’s most notorious punch, but he also knows how to examine individual insanity. Eisner is less interested in government conspiracy and irony and more interested in bloodthirsty lunacy, which is why his film is more fun to watch.
It’ll make you rethink the car wash, I’ll tell you what.
David Fincher makes a lot of good films, but in his best films, he seems to be having wicked fun. Such is the case with Gone Girl.
Don’t let the trailers fool you. This is not a dour whodunit tragedy. It’s a brightly crafted melodrama that embraces its pulpy center as lovingly as its razor sharp edges. Infused with acerbic wit and delivered with stellar performances, Gone Girl is an absorbing twist-and-turn-athon and a ton of fun.
Ben Affleck stars as Nick Dunne, suspect #1 in the disappearance of his beautiful wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), and he’s never been better. That’s not such a strong statement, because in general his performances are blandly likeable, but here he’s able to channel his inner douchiness and it works wonders. He’s the exact mix of endearing everyman and disappointing schmuck the film needs to work.
But Pike is the reason to watch this movie. It’s easy to see why every heavy hitter in Hollywood – including the film’s producer Reese Witherspoon – banged on Fincher’s door in search of this role. Amy Dunne is a hell of a character and Rosamund Pike gives a hell of a performance – fluid enough to meet the high, constantly changing demands.
Fincher’s casting throughout is slyly wonderful, with unexpected faces in exactly the right roles. Tyler Perry is a hoot as Nick’s high-powered ambulance chaser and Neil Patrick Harris is just as unconventionally cast and just as enjoyably spot-on.
Fincher takes aim at current American culture – tragedy groupies, local law enforcement, the media and Nancy Grace-style “news” programs, in particular – and scores bull’s eyes every time. It gives the film an air of self-satisfaction, sure, but the barbs are so very precise and relevant that any smugness can be forgiven.
Fincher’s craft is on full display here, dreamily weaving multiple points of view and saturating the mystery with wit and tension. What feels stilted and flat in early scenes evolves into a series of “aha!” moments for viewers.
Gone Girl is not a heavy, thoughtful awards season drama. At its heart, it’s paperback trash, and in Fincher’s exceedingly capable hands, that’s all it needs to be to amount to a memorable, satisfying, constantly surprising movie.
Who doesn’t love a creepy-ass doll? Someone must, right? Doesn’t everybody’s old auntie keep a display case of them right in the guest bedroom where you have to sleep when you visit? And you really want to close the windows because the curtains are blowing in that menacing way, but you’d have to walk right past the display case. Well, that old auntie needs to see Annabelle. It’s for her own good. Because you have been right about those nefarious dolls all this time.
Yes, the horrid looking doll that introduced us to The Conjuring – hands-down the best horror film of 2013 – is back with a film all her own. It’s the dawning of the Seventies and a young pregnant housewife gets a gift from her devoted husband – a hideous vintage doll. Oh, how they cherish her…until she tries to eat their souls.
Old fashioned dolls are absolutely terrifying, but only in small doses. Luckily, director John Leonetti (upgraded from cinematographer on The Conjuring) understands this and presents three different faces for the scares. None is overplayed, each is genuinely frightening in its own right, and the anxiety over which might show up where keeps the tension tight.
Annabelle Wallis (seriously, the lead’s real name is the same as the doll’s!) turns in a solid enough performance as the vulnerable mom looking for the strength to protect her newborn from evil. Alfre Woodard manages to find some dignity in an obvious and underwritten character.
Ward Horton has less luck showcasing a pulse as supportive husband John. If you don’t pay close attention you might mistake him for a walking slice of Wonder Bread.
But they don’t really matter, do they? What matters is this: how scary is the doll and how cute is that baby she’s trying to harm?
Very and very.
The screenplay by Gary Dauberman throws in enough fun, unexpected scares to keep you jumpy while Leonetti tosses in some knowing nods toward iconic genre flicks. And while he cannot touch the timestamp authenticity of The Conjuring, the film has some fun with early Seventies images and ideas.
Annabelle never comes close to the near-classic status The Conjuring reached, but it’s a fun seasonal flick. Take your aunt. You may just save her soul.
The prolific director Takashi Miike made more than 70 films in his first 20 or so years in movies. Among the best is Audition, a phenomenally creepy May/December romance gone very, very awry.
Audition tells the story of a widower convinced by his TV producer friend to hold mock television auditions as a way of finding a suitable new mate. He is repaid for his deception.
The story itself follows a far more linear path than what’s commonly found in Japanese horror, but the usual preoccupations with hair, decorum, and bodily horror still abound. My favorite quote from the movie: “The police tried to recompose her body. Three extra fingers and an ear came up.”
That’s just solid detective work!
Nearly unwatchable and yet too compelling to turn away from, Audition is a remarkable piece of genre filmmaking. The slow moving picture builds anticipation, then dread, then full-on horror.
Midway through, Miike punctuates the film with one of the most effective startles in modern horror, and then picks up the pace, building grisly momentum toward a perversely uncomfortable climax.
By the time Audition hits its ghastly conclusion, Miike and his exquisitely terrifying antagonist (Eihi Shina) have wrung the audience dry. She will not be the ideal stepmother.
The last time Stephen King wrote a screenplay the results were, to be polite, disappointing. The film was Sleepwalkers and to be impolite, it sucked out loud.
But hey, that was 22 years ago, so let’s forget about the past and focus on how much better his latest screenwriting project turned out. With A Good Marriage, King expands his own short story into an intimate, no frills feature built on love, secrets, sex and murder.
Anthony LaPaglia and Joan Allen are Bob and Darcy, a longtime couple who are still plenty hot for each other, and who have the type of marriage others point to as being ideal.
The situation around their New Hampshire home is a bit more troubling. There is a serial killer in the area, and though news reports of the latest victim dominate the evening news, Bob and Darcy have family matters to attend to.
Their daughter’s wedding is at hand, and after the happy day, Bob leaves on a business trip. Alone in their big house, Darcy is tackling some household errands when she happens upon a secret stash of evidence that undoubtedly links her loving husband to a very dangerous double life.
From there, King and director Peter Askin have some fun with the thriller genre, leaving you unsure just how much of Darcy’s life with her now-suspicious husband is really happening. As you might expect, the two veteran leads take full advantage, with Allen especially delivering a rich performance that effortlessly swings between domestic bliss and survivalist cunning.
Scene-stealing honors go to Stephen Lang(Avatar) as an old-time detective tracking the killer. King gives him some juicy dialogue, and his scenes with Allen display a delicious back and forth tinged with a darkly comical mutual admiration.
In fact, it’s a shame A Good Marriage doesn’t explore its wickedly humorous edges more completely. It could have beefed up a story that’s stretched thin at times, and ridden three fine performances to even higher ground.
Come back to a time when TV stations went off the air late at night, after running the national anthem. Yes, it’s the early Eighties, an era that delivered Poltergeist, spawn of the dissonant marriage between Steven Spielberg and Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper.
Their aggressive take on the haunted house tale wraps Hooper’s potent horrors inside Spielberg’s brightly lit suburbia. Indeed, the put-upon Freeling family lives in a little California neighborhood, Cuesta Verde, that bears a striking cul-de-sac-riddled resemblance to the development where Elliot and his outer space buddy once rode bikes. In both of Spielberg’s ’82 films, the charade of suburban peace is disrupted by a supernatural presence. In E.T., though, there’s less face tearing.
That particular scene, where paranormal researcher Marty (Martin Casella) watches in the mirror as his hands rip the flesh from his skull, caused quite a stir when the film was released. Today it looks a bit goofy, but overall, Poltergeist still packs a real wallop.
Part of that success emerged from pairing universal childhood fears – clowns, thunderstorms, that creepy tree – with the adult terror of helplessness in the face of your own child’s peril. JoBeth Williams’s performance of vulnerable optimism gives the film a heartbeat, and the unreasonably adorable Heather O’Rourke creeps us out while tugging our heartstrings.
Splashy effects, excellent casting, Spielberg’s heart and Hooper’s gut combine to create a flick that holds up. Solid performances and the pacing of a blockbuster provide the film a respectable thrill, but Hooper’s disturbing imagination guarantees some lingering jitters.
