Nobody wants to go out, and even if you did, there is nowhere to go. So, hunker down and let us help you find something to watch. Here’s what’s new in home entertainment.
Click the movie title to link to the full review.
As we salute the tireless work of our great doctors and health care workers during this uneasy time, Fright Club looks at our favorite “bad doctors” in horror!
Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator reinvigorated the Frankenstein storyline in a decade glutted with vampire films. Based, as so many fantasy/horror films are, on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator boasts a good mix of comedy and horror, some highly subversive ideas, and one really outstanding villain.
Jeffrey Combs, with his intense gaze and pout, his ability to mix comic timing with epic self righteousness without turning to caricature, carries the film beginning to end. His Dr. Herbert West has developed a day-glo serum that reanimates dead tissue, but a minor foul up with his experimentations – some might call it murder – sees him taking his studies to the New England medical school Miskatonic University. There he rents a room and basement laboratory from handsome med student Dan Caine (Bruce Abbott).
They’re not just evil scientists. They’re also really bad doctors.
Re-Animator is fresh. It’s funny and shocking, and though most performances are flat at best, those that are strong more than make up for it. First-time director Gordon’s effort is superb. He glories in the macabre fun of his scenes, pushing envelopes and dumping gallons of blood and gore. He balances anxiety with comedy, mines scenes for all they have to give, and takes you places you haven’t been.
This film is about separation anxiety, with the effortlessly melancholy Jeremy Irons playing a set of gynecologist twins on a downward spiral. Writer/director David Cronenberg doesn’t consider this a horror film at all. Truth is, because the twin brothers facing emotional and mental collapse are gynecologists, Cronenberg is wrong.
Take, for instance, the scene with the middle aged woman in stirrups, camera on her face, which is distorted with discomfort. Irons’s back is to the screen, her bare foot to his left side. Clicking noises distract you as the doctor works away. We pan right to a tray displaying the now-clearly-unstable doctor’s set of hand-fashioned medical instruments. Yikes.
Irons is brilliant, bringing such flair and, eventually, childlike charm to the performances you feel almost grateful. The film’s pace is slow and its horror subtle, but the uncomfortable moments are peculiarly, artfully Cronenberg.
After a handful of middling Dutch comedies, Tom Six stumbled upon inspiration – 100% medically accurate inspiration. Yes, we mean the Human Centipede. Just the First Sequence makes the list, though.
For a lot of viewers, the Human Centipede films are needlessly gory and over-the-top with no real merit. But for some, Six is onto something. His first effort uses a very traditional horror storyline – two pretty American girls have a vehicular break down and find peril – and takes that plot in an unusual direction. But where most horror filmmakers would finish their work as the victims wake up and find themselves sewn together, mouth to anus, this is actually where Six almost begins.
Although the film mines something primal about being helpless in the hands of surgeons and doctors, it’s Dieter Laser and his committed, insane performance that elevates this film. That and your own unholy desire to see what happens to the newly conjoined tourists.
The formula behind this film has been stolen and reformulated for dozens of lurid, low-brow exploitation films since 1960. In each, there is a mad doctor who sees his experiments as being of a higher order than the lowly lives they ruin; the doctor is assisted by a loyal, often non-traditionally attractive (some might say handsome) nurse; there are nubile young women who will soon be victimized, as well as a cellar full of the already victimized. But somehow, in this originator of that particular line of horror, the plot works seamlessly.
An awful lot of that success lies in the remarkable performances. Pierre Brasseur, as the stoic surgeon torn by guilt and weighed down by insecurities about his particular genius, brings a believable, subtle egomania to the part seldom seen in a mad scientist role.
Still, the power in the film is in the striking visuals that are the trademark of giant French filmmaker Georges Franju. His particular genius in this film gave us the elegantly haunting image of Dr. Genessier’s daughter Christiane (Edith Scob). Her graceful, waiflike presence haunts the entire film and elevates those final scenes to something wickedly sublime.
Who else but Hannibal the Cannibal?
Anthony Hopkins’s eerie calm, his measured speaking, his superior grin give Lecter power. Everything about his performance reminds the viewer that this man is smarter than you and he’ll use that for dangerous ends. He’s toying with you. You’re a fly in his web – and what he will do to you hits at our most primal fear, because we are, after all, all part of a food chain.
by George Wolf (originally published 4/12/2012 in The Other Paper)
It’s rude, it’s crude, it’s vulgar, crass and brutal. And I enjoyed the hell out of Goon.
Should Mom be worried?
It’s also a sports movie, full of all the usual cliches. Credit the sheer joy of the filmmakers, then, for the way it entertains its way right through them. These guys are childish, sure, but they’re also funny, and smart enough to celebrate their sport with a reckless abandon that becomes infectious.
The script, based on a book about the exploits of former hockey enforcer Doug Smith, comes courtesy of Evan Goldberg (co-writer of Superbad) and Jay Baruchel (star of She’s Out of My League). It follows the heroic rise of lovable Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott, from the American Pie series), a bar bouncer whose face-punching skills earn him a new career as a minor league “goon.”
Doug’s an outcast in his well-to-do family, and a bit of a simpleton with a gentle soul, at least until it’s go time. Scott, who’s made a living being funny and likable regardless of the material, breaks out of his “Stifler” persona with a fine performance. He’s most effective when opposite Liev Schreiber, menacingly good as an aging goon on the way out.
Throw in able support from Alison Pill as Doug’s possible girlfriend, and Sons of Anarchy‘s Kim Coates as the coach, and there’s some actual acting to be found here among all the dick jokes and flying teeth.
Goldberg, Baruchel and director Michael Dowse revel in the locker room antics and on-ice brutality. Through it all, they’re also sly enough to cast a satirical glance in the direction of the “fighting is ruining the sport” crowd.
Maybe nothing can replace the Hanson Brothers and their suitcase full of toys from Slap Shot, but Goon gives a new generation a bawdy hockey flick to call its own.
by Hope Madden
Chris Pine plays against type in this 2009 pandemic horror currently streaming on most platforms including Netflix.
Pine plays Brian, a hardened young man who believes he may be immune to the virus that has decimated the global population. But, just to be safe, he chalks his survival up to a handful of rules he keeps. He also enforces these rules with three fellow survivors: his girlfriend Bobby (Piper Perabo), his little brother Dany (Lou Taylor Pucci), and Danny’s friend Kate (Emily VanCamp).
Following Brian’s rules to the letter (or else), the four cross the country in search of the childhood vacation destination the boys feel sure is a safe, quiet place to ride out the apocalypse.
Writers/directors/brothers David and Alex Pastor tread some familiar territory here, but their even-handed approach and ear for authentic relationships make for an involving and ultimately moving horror. Character behaviors rarely challenge believability, and the performances suit characters who’ve been dealing with this problem and with each other longer than the audience is aware.
There’s a natural pull between Danny and Bobby: the desire to just survive and the dread of surviving alone, a reluctance to do the wrong thing and yet an even stronger reluctance to wind up the sole survivor.
Character relationships have a real lived-in quality, which gives the film an emotional heft you may not be ready for. Pine, in particular, excels in a role quite unlike those he’s more famous for.
The body horror is effective, but it’s not the real source of horror.
As in all outbreak/infestation/apocalyptic flicks from the earliest Romero to the upcoming Quiet Place 2, this film understands that desperate humans are at least as dangerous as the cause of the pandemic. Interestingly, run-ins with other survivors, both the good and the bad kind, are played in Carriers with a real mixture of terror and sympathy. It’s one of the many reasons that the film delivers a harder emotional punch than you might be expecting.
by Cat McAlpine
Jeremy Camp is a good big brother, loves to play guitar, and is headed to college. His first day on campus he meets one of his Christian rock idols and locks eyes with a girl who captures his undivided attention. We follow his resulting journey through young adulthood in I Still Believe.
There are two important things you should know going into this film. First, it is based on a true story. And second, the final screen shows a hotline that you can call if you have questions about your faith or God. Being tied to a specific sequence of events and having a specific agenda limit the story, and ultimately deny it any true depth.
We never get to truly know the characters in I Still Believe. What they like, what they want, what their hopes or dreams are… When asked what she wants to do when she graduates college, Melissa (Britt Robertson) responds “I don’t know…everything?” We never learn what anyone, even Jeremy, has enrolled in school to do.
Jeremy never seems to make any other friends at college, and instead aggressively pursues Melissa in a way so straightforward that even the charming KJ Apa (Riverdale, The Last Summer) can’t hide all the red flags. Every character is wholly defined by their relationship with God. Either they believe, and events continue to happen to them, or they feel doubt, in which case they break some things in emotional torment before events continue to happen to them. The narrative plays out like a toddler retelling a long story “And then, and then, and then, and then….”
The original story is heartbreaking, filled with devotion to your loved ones, the power of faith, and how to continue being the person you want to be when your questions go unanswered. But that story never has an opportunity to develop because so little of this film focuses on character or relationship. And then, and then, and then…
The film is shot in the the visual style of other Hallmark and faith-inspo productions, all over-saturated golden hour shots. The style is very reminiscent of the “A Dog’s…” series, and coincidentally, Apa and Robertson last acted opposite each other in A Dog’s Purpose.
While Apa and Robertson are both masters of the recent “realism” acting style that comes with pauses, repeats, and “ums,” neither has an opportunity to deliver a great performance because of how hard they have to work against the script. Robertson most excels when she gets to interact with more emotional content and her turns in faith and fear anchor the middle third of the film.
Directed by Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin (The Erwin Brothers), there’s little offensive about the visual style of the film but also very little inspired. The strangest choice was to not update the film to modern time, and instead keep it in what looks like the early 2000s. The time and setting is never explained. I assume the setting is based on the real events, but the story doesn’t need a time-preserved setting, and the presence of flip phones and landlines pull you out of the viewing experience immediately.
I Still Believe is a guilty pleasure film for a specific audience. It doesn’t require any thought, it takes limp stabs at being profound, it sets up easy moments to sneak in a cry, and its real-life roots will make believers feel vaguely inspired. But, you’d be hard pressed to find any critical merit in the production.
by George Wolf
“Nobody wants to make any real decisions. They just want to feel like they have.”
For a movie that couldn’t have seen shutdown weekend coming, that’s one line in Bloodshot that feels pretty damn timely.
So whether or not there’s anyone in the theater to greet him, Vin Diesel brings the latest comic book hero to the big screen in a visual effects throwdown searching for any other resonant thread.
If, like me, you’re not familiar with one of the most popular characters in the Valiant comic universe, Ray Garrison (Diesel) is a battle-scarred soldier forced to watch his wife’s murder before he eats a bullet himself.
Waking up in lab of RST industries, Ray hears some hard truths from the brilliant Dr. Harding (Guy Pearce).
He died from that bullet, but he’s back now as the prototype “enhanced soldier” Project Bloodshot has been aiming for. Any injury Ray suffers will repair itself almost instantly, so he can soldier on for war and profit.
Does Ray have trouble accepting his reality? Not enough, which works in a way because the realities keep changing. While Ray only wants to track down his wife’s killer, the vast computer program that keeps Ray upright has surprises in store.
Bloodshot is director David S.F. Wilson’s debut feature after a ton of video game visual effects credits, which is probably why it looks like a giant video game drunk with budget allowances. And though that budget does buy some slick sequences, the film’s Matrix-type mainframe device leans too much on the buzzkill that is the computer keyboard.
Diesel’s guttural emoting is on auto-pilot, while Pearce gets to ham it up a bit and Baby Driver’s Elia Gonzales gets hung out to dry. As a fellow enhanced soldier, her superpowers seem limited to posing, pouting, and squeezing into the tightest wardrobe imaginable.
The screenplay, from the team of Jeff Wardlow and Eric Heisserer, does manage some needed self-aware humor about movie cliches, even as it’s serving them up alongside heavy doses of stilted, expository dialog.
By all means, support your local theater this weekend. And if you’re a fan of the Bloodshot comic, your decision to catch this big screen version will most likely be a good one.
Otherwise, there’s not really enough here to make you feel like it was.
by George Wolf
If you think Scorsese set the bar for three and a half hour mob epics, well, you may have a point.
But, although it clocks in at one hour south of The Irishman, Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor also uses one man’s true-life experience to frame an expansive reflection on a life in the mob.
Tommaso Buscetta, the youngest of 17 children in a poverty-stricken Sicilian family, found his ticket out through organized crime. Rising to the rank of “Don Masino” in Sicily’s Costa Nostra, he eventually lost many family members and allies to the mafia wars. Disillusioned, Buscetta became one of the very first to break the mob’s strict code of silence and turn “pentito,” or informant.
Pierfrancisco Favino, who probably gets women pregnant just from introducing himself, is tremendous as the “Boss of Two Worlds.” Unlike DeNiro’s Frank Sheeran, Buscetta is looking back with defiance, secure in his standing as the only man “honorable” enough to call out the less honorable. Favino brings a quiet intensity to this inner strength that comes to define Buscetta after personal loss drives him to the depths of despair.
The moral complexities of honor among killers is Bellocchio’s strongest play. Early in the film, he sets the stakes effectively through sustained tension and stylish violence (a set piece inside a window factory is especially impressive) offset with familiar loyalties. Bellocchio invites our sympathies for a career criminal, and Favino rewards them.
But once Buscetta starts singing to anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), the film gets bogged down in the minutiae of courtroom testimony. Though American audiences may be intrigued by some of the differences in Italian trial procedure, Bellocchio’s prolonged attention to these details makes us long for the pace of the film’s first two acts.
The scope of Buscetta’s story is grand and Bellocchio’s ambitions noteworthy, but even at 145 minutes the film ultimately feels like a finely-crafted overview. Favino has the goods to give us the The Traitor‘s soul, but not the freedom.
Maybe another hour or so would have done it.
by Hope Madden
About a year ago, Universal Studios pulled the release of The Hunt because of the amount of gun violence. Commendable.
Later that year, other studios released Ready or Not—critical darling, but didn’t do great box office. Then Knives Out, which was both a critical darling and box office giant. And, of course, Parasite would go on to win all the Oscars. Even documentary short.
While The Hunt does contain a goodly amount of violence—guns, knives, hand grenades, pens, stilettos, kitchen appliances—it also boasts the one thing that appears to be the universal key to entertainment. It hates rich people.
Who doesn’t?!
Director Craig Zobel (Compliance), along with writers Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof (both of TV’s Watchmen and The Leftovers), takes no prisoners as characters take a bunch of prisoners, drop them in a field somewhere and, you know, hunt them down for sport. The film gleefully skewers both the left and the right, often in ways you wouldn’t expect but should.
This is a meticulously structured horror film, the tidy beats allowing the writers to insert surprises that play on your preconceived notions in clever ways. Like Jordan Peele, Zobel proves a nimble manipulator of both horror tropes and social commentary.
And casting.
I have to think Betty Gilpin was the most disappointed when this film was shelved last year because it is her break out. No more support work as the hot mean chick, Gilpin’s Crystal is the wrong badass to underestimate. The performance is never showy but quirky and genuine, which goes a long way toward increasing believability.
Zobel populates the herd with familiar faces (Emma Roberts, Ike Barinholtz, Hilary Swank, Amy Madigan), mainly for sleight of hand. Though most get little screen time, and each is handed a fairly one-dimensional character, both the writing and the performances mine that gimmick for a lot.
Positioned to infuriate everyone in one scene or another, the film is brash and bracingly level headed. It’s violent AF, no doubt, but what it reflects back at us is far smarter than what you might expect. The Hunt is a darkly comedic, socially savvy, equal opportunity skewering and it is a blast.
by Hope Madden
Earlier this year, Oz Perkins retold the old Grimm Fairy Tale Hansel and Gretel from the perspective of the newly adolescent sister. It was a fascinating way to reexamine folklore and coming of age.
Likewise, director and co-writer Ben Zeitlin reimagines the old Peter Pan tale, this time through the eyes of Wendy.
It’s not entirely clear why, though.
Zeitlin and writing partner Eliza Zeitlin impressed—more than impressed, they flabbergasted—with their near-perfect 2012 feature debut, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Their sophomore effort delivers a similarly loose narrative structure, another game cast of mostly children and unknowns, and gorgeous visuals that emphasize the chaotic and restless beauty of childhood.
Wendy opens strong. Zeitlin’s impressionistic camera work evokes an intimate if raucous scene of a toddler (Wendy) charming patrons on her mother’s hip at a dodgy diner abutting a train station.
It sets up a thrilling first act that unfortunately settles into thematic confusion once we get to Neverland.
Not that J. M. Barrie’s original text was entirely rational. The underlying theme—being lost without maternal love—remains intact, but for the Zeitlins, that theme takes on an ecological nature. Mother, in the form of a giant glowing fish, represents Mother Nature (and also Tinker Bell—stay with me).
Who would want to grow up when grownups do thoughtless, destructive things that damage, perhaps kill, the mother that sustains them? It’s a heavy-handed idea, but Zeitlin’s clearly Malick-esque style of evocative visuals held together by whispered narration keeps it from feeling like a sermon.
Still, it doesn’t entirely work.
If Tinker Bell/Giant Fish is the mother character, where does that leave Wendy?
What a fascinating question! I wish the Zeitlins had a better answer.
The Zeitlins don’t seem to know. The Peter character, played with mischievous energy by Yashua Mack, is also depicted without real clarity, but that’s OK. Peter is supposed to be an enigma, his relationship with Wendy (Devin France) is meant to provide the backbone that holds the adventure together. But they don’t have much of a relationship.
Not much in the film actually seems to have a clear relationship to anything else, which makes for frustrating, often tedious viewing. Worse still, the Zeitlins’ voice over narration, clearly meant to hold the pieces together and provide some forward momentum, echoes with world-weary wisdom and regret that sounds forced and inauthentic in little Devin France’s voice.
Rather than a reimagining of Peter Pan, Wendy feels like a misguided reworking of Beasts of the Southern Wild, which did not need tampering of any kind.
