Who’s eager for another Dracula movie? Because that is not the single most worn out, overused, tired storyline in cinematic history. But wait – what if there was something you didn’t yet know about Dracula? Something untold?
If you’re thinking not even then, well Dracula Untold goes to show just how wise you are.
What amounts to the love child of Bram Stoker and George R. R. Martin, Dracula Untold takes a decidedly Game of Thrones angle to share the old bloodsucker’s origins story. Full of epic battles, impaling, damsels in distress, and even two Thrones actors (Art Parkinson and a woefully underused Charles Dance), it’s a medieval bloodbath and unfortunate snoozefest.
An oh-so-earnest Luke Evans (The Hobbit) trades in Middle Earth for the Middle Ages as Vlad, once The Impaler, now the peace-seeking prince of Transylvania. He had a crisis of conscience after all that impaling with the Turkish army and now just wants to live peaceably with his lovely wife and son. But the Turks are having none of it, and without a real army of his own, he turns to an evil force to help him protect his kingdom and his family.
Evans makes for a fine dreamy, noble, tragic vampire if you’re into that kind of thing, and if that’s your bag you might enjoy the first 60 minutes or so of this film. But then – by the time the rest of us are fidgeting in our seats, having abandoned all hope for a film with real bite – first time director Gary Shore throws some creepy, gory bits at you.
It’s not enough to make the film tolerable for horror fans, but probably too much for the romance lovers.
For anyone interested in a lucid film, first time screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless leave you with more questions than answers as they bend, introduce and retool vampire lore to suit them. Look past the moony love story and there’s a whole lot of silliness underneath.
Worse still are the dialog profundities. At one point, the Turks employ some Jedi shit, blindfolding the entire army because, “You can’t fear what you can’t see.”
What kind of counter intuitive nonsense is that? Plus, imagine how idiotic it looks to march an entirely blindfolded army up the side of a mountain. Ridiculous.
I know Game of Thrones Season 5 is a long way off, but Dracula Untold won’t satisfy your jones.
You have seen 2009’s Dead Snow, correct? If not, you should do so right now. Go ahead – I’ll wait.
Awesome, wasn’t it? Funny, scary, gorgeously filmed and utterly gross, Tommy Wirkola’s fable of Nazi zombies was an inspired, self-referential blast. And now, five years later, he launches the sequel Dead Snow 2: Red Versus Dead.
It’s dead Commies V dead Nazis, ya’ll, and it is a goretastic good time.
Last time around, a good looking group of college students headed to a remote cabin for Spring Break. There, they awakened something evil, and only Martin (Vegar Hoel) managed to escape. Well, sort of escape.
The sequel (filmed in English) picks up right at that same parked car where, back in 2009, Martin realized he still has one piece of that accursed Nazi gold. A few severed limbs, one disemboweled trucker, one monster car crash and some weeks later, Martin awakens in police custody inside a Norwegian hospital.
The good news – they sewed an arm back on!
The bad news – they didn’t use Martin’s arm!!
With a little ingenuity, the dark power of his new zombie arm, and the assistance of some American zombie hunters (read: nerds), Martin sets out to defeat the Nazi zombies once and for all.
Once again, Wirkola’s script is delightfully self-aware and full of bright comic moments. Betraying an encyclopedic knowledge of horror and SciFi, the filmmaker borrows lovingly and openly from some of the best splatter comedies in history.
There are few actual scares this time around, with Wirkola content to focus squarely on comedy… profoundly bloody, sloppy comedy. The jumps and startles have been replaced by boatloads of entrails and gallons of gore. There are not many taboos RVD isn’t willing to gut, trample or behead, either.
But the sunny Norwegian snowscape gives the whole affair a weirdly cheerful quality, and Wirkola balances comic timing with action pacing well enough to deliver a thrill a minute gore spattered laugh riot.
Psycho may have asked us to look at the weird relationships possible with mothers and sons, but fathers and daughters can develop dangerously close bonds, as well. For proof, just gander at this Aussie freakshow.
Writer/director/Tasmanian Sean Byrne upends high school clichés and deftly maneuvers between angsty, gritty drama and neon-colored, glittery carnage in a story that borrows from other horror flicks but absolutely tells its own tale.
Brent (Xavier Samuel) is dealing with guilt and tragedy in his own way, and his girlfriend Holly tries to be patient with him. Oblivious to all this, Lola (a gloriously wrong-minded Robin McLeavy) asks Brent to the school dance. He politely declines, which proves to be probably a poor decision.
Byrne quietly crafts an atmosphere of loss and depression in and around the school without painting the troubles cleanly. This slow reveal pulls the tale together and elevates it above a simple work of outrageous violence.
Inside Lola’s house, the mood is decidedly different. Here, we’re privy to the weirdest, darkest image of a spoiled princess and her daddy. The daddy/daughter bonding over power tool related tasks is – well – I’m not sure touching is the right word for it.
Byrne’s framing and use of color – especially pink – is truly inspired. His script is endlessly, horrifyingly quotable and his cast manages to balance gritty realism and absolute lunacy with aplomb.
The Loved Ones is a cleverly written, unique piece of filmmaking that benefits from McLeavy’s inspired performance as much as it does its filmmaker’s sly handling of subject matter. It’s a wild, violent, depraved to spend 84 minutes. You should do so now.
Out this week is the uncomfortable, hilarious gem that promises to go unnoticed this awards season, and that is a shame, especially for breakout lead Jenny Slate. Obvious Child could be narrowly labeled an abortion themed romantic comedy, which is not a crowded subgenre. In fact, it’s a refreshingly candid, surprisingly funny film that succeeds on its authentic direction, generous acting, hilarious writing, and one of the very strongest performances of 2014.
In case you, for reasons we won’t ask about, find yourself in the mood for a second frank comedy with the same central theme, you must naturally check out Alexander Payne’s brilliant 1996 effort Citizen Ruth. Plot points aside, both films’ most striking similarity is the absolutely stunning lead performance, this time with Laura Dern’s bold and amazing work as pregnant transient Ruth.
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.
