Tag Archives: horror movies

Fright Club, Slider

Fright Club: Incest in Horror

Leave a comment

Well there’s an uncomfortable topic! Of course, that’s what makes it so perfect for horror. Any idea that automatically induces a wince or a grimace, anything you want instinctively to turn away from, immediately creates the kind of discomfort that only horror can truly manipulate.

It’s been used for lurid ends in films like Flowers in the Attic, and has become the source of comedy in others – Tromeo and Juliet springs to mind. But often, it creates a particular kind of tension that drives a film in truly horrific directions: Jug Face, Crimson Peak, Pin, Angel Heart, The Crazies.

Here are the films we think handle the topic best. SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

6. 100 Bloody Acres (2012)

A testament to the entrepreneurial spirit and the bonds of family, 100 Bloody Acres is Australia’s answer to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Same body count and more blood, but a far sweeter disposition and loads more laughs.

Brothers Reg (Damon Herriman) and Lindsay (Angus Sampson) sell organic fertilizer. Business is good. Too good. Demand is driving the brothers to more and more extreme measures to gather ingredients.

Interesting the way writing/directing brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes explore sibling rivalry, but the film’s strength is in its humor: silly enough to make even the most repugnant bits enjoyable. (I’m looking at you, Aunt Nancy. Oh, no! Why did I look?!)

5. The Woman (2011)

There’s something not quite right about Chris Cleese (an unsettlingly cherubic Sean Bridgers), and his family’s uber-wholesomeness is clearly suspect. This becomes evident once Chris hunts down a feral woman (an awesome Pollyanna McIntosh), chains her, and invites the family to help him “civilize” her.

The film rethinks family – well, patriarchy, anyway. You know from the opening, sunshiny segment that nothing is as lovely as it seems, but what lurks underneath this wholesome facade begins with some obvious ugliness—abuse, incest—but where it leads is diabolical.

Nothing happens in this film by accident – not even the innocent seeming baking of cookies – nor does it ever happen solely to titillate. It’s a dark and disturbing adventure that finds something unsavory in our primal nature and even worse in our quest to civilize. Don’t even ask about what it finds in the dog pen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL50yBcw5wA

4. Bad Boy Bubby (1993)

Writer/director Rolf de Heer’s astonishing film is horribly marred by the fact that a cat is, in fact, killed on camera, so buyer beware. For most people, that will be reason enough to miss this one. But that just makes the director’s choice that much more tragic, because this is a really good movie.

Nicholas Hope is astonishing as the titular Bubby, a 30-year-old manchild who’s never, ever left the room he keeps with his mum.

Remember the Oscar-winning indie film Room? Remember how tragedy is somehow skirted because of the courageous love of a mother for her son? Well, this was not Bubby’s mum. Bad things are happening in that room, and once Bubby is finally free to explore the world, his adventure is equal parts deranged and soul-crushing. Hope is so frustratingly empathetic in the lead that no matter what he does, you root for him. You root for friends who will love him, for someone who will care for him, but it’s the resigned cheerfulness with which he faces any kind of abuse that really just kills you.

This taboo-shattering film is so wrong in so many ways, and yet it’s also lovely, optimistic, sweet, and funny. And just so, so fucked up.

3. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

Director John McNaughton’s picture offers a uniquely unemotional telling – no swelling strings to warn us danger is afoot and no hero to speak of to balance the ugliness. He confuses viewers because the characters you identify with are evil, and even when you think you might be seeing this to understand the origins of the ugliness, he pulls the rug out from under you again by creating an untrustworthy narrative voice. His film is so nonjudgmental, so flatly unemotional, that it’s honestly hard to watch.

What’s diabolically fascinating, though, is the workaday, white trash camaraderie of the psychopath relationship in this film, and the grey areas where one crazy killer feels the other has crossed some line of decency.

Rooker’s performance unsettles to the bone, flashing glimpses of an almost sympathetic beast now and again, but there’s never a question that he will do the worst things every time, more out of boredom than anything.

It’s a uniquely awful, absolutely compelling piece of filmmaking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcM5L-ZBmXk

2. The Loved Ones (2009)

Writer/director/Tasmanian Sean Byrne upends high school clichés and deftly maneuvers between gritty drama and glittery carnage in a story that borrows from other horror flicks but absolutely tells its own story.

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 end of school dance. He politely declines, which proves to be probably a poor decision.

Inside Lola’s house, 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.

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.

1.Oldboy (2003)

This is the one that’s utterly spoiled by the upfront knowledge of incest. It’s also easily the best example of the topic’s handling in a horror film, plus the movie is 17 years old, so we went ahead and included it. Sue us. You were warned.

A guy passes out after a hard night of drinking. It’s his daughter’s birthday, and that helps us see that this guy is a dick. He wakes up a prisoner in a weird, apartment-like cell. Here he stays for years and years.

The guy is Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi). The film is Oldboy, director Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece of subversive brutality and serious wrongdoing.

Choi is unforgettable as the film’s anti-hero, and his disheveled explosion of emotion is perfectly balanced by the elegantly evil Ji-tae Yu.

Choi takes you with him through a brutal, original, startling and difficult to watch mystery. You will want to look away, but don’t do it! What you witness will no doubt shake and disturb you, but missing it would be the bigger mistake.

Shudder Premiere

Hey Overlook Me Over

Leave a comment

Lingering

by George Wolf

So there’s a big, old hotel that’s creepy now that it’s off season and no guests are around. There’s a little kid who likes to wander the halls of this empty hotel, and there’s one specific room that’s off limits.

This hotel’s in South Korea, though, not Colorado, so Lloyd the bartender must have had an expired passport.

Shudder premiere Lingering (originally Hotel Leikeu) finds Yoo-mi (Se-yeoung Lee) coming to the aid or her young half sister Ji-yoo (So-yi Park) after the death of their mother. Yoo-mi has no means to look after the child, so they head to Hotel Lake, which is run by “Auntie” (Ji-Young Park), their mother’s oldest friend.

The plan is to drop Ji-yoo off quickly, but Auntie invites Yoo-mi to stay awhile, where she’s quickly drawn into a mystery of missing persons, murder and one surly, drunken maid (Park Hyo-joo).

Writer/director Yoon Een Kyoung’s feature debut is light on originality, but heavy on common K-horror tropes and the usual superficialities of jump scares, music stabs and hallucinations.

The director’s camerawork is occasionally fluid and effective, but most of the set pieces are more noteworthy for the atmospheric cinematography and sharp sound design that manage to punctuate the dark, empty rooms.

Lingering feels like it’s doing just that, hanging around after its welcome has worn. Holding attention becomes a problem, as does the lackluster payoff waiting at mystery’s end.

Maybe a guy in a bear suit would have helped.

New In Theaters

Involuntary Tributes

Leave a comment

Triggered

by Rachel Willis

If you’re looking for a not-so-scary, violent, sort-of funny horror film this post-Halloween, Triggered might be for you.

Director Alastair Orr’s (Indigenous) latest effort starts with a violent opening, but quickly shifts focus to nine twentysomethings camping in a remote location in the woods. We learn this is a reunion of friends who were involved in a horrible event back in high school.

After a night of partying, the nine wake to find themselves hooked up to bombs, each with a countdown timer. As the friends learn the rules of the “game,” we suddenly find our characters locked in a Hunger Games-type situation. (There’s even a character named Kato.)

It’s hard to root for people fighting for their lives when none of them are very likable. It’s also nearly impossible to give the characters more than superficial identifiers (the smart one, the quiet one, the bad boy, etc.) when there are so many involved. However, the filmmakers do a good job of introducing them slowly over the opening scenes so we can better keep track of who’s who.

If you don’t remember their names, it doesn’t really matter. They’re pawns in a game, not people to care about. It’s a wise move, limiting the time spent getting to know the characters. It thrusts us more quickly into the “kill or be killed” situation, which is a lot more fun.

Some of the film’s jokes land, but most don’t, and it’s hard to build tension when so much of dialogue is a forced attempt at humor. There are a couple of lines that elicit a few good laughs, though. (“That’s the herpes talking!”) If you can ignore some of the weaker moments, you’ll be happier for it.   

A few of the actors really get into their roles, bringing some entertainment value, but others play their parts without enthusiasm, clarifying an imbalance of talent among the nine.

There are few surprises in a movie without much imagination, so don’t expect too much of the revelations as they come – you’ll likely predict most of what’s going to happen before it happens.

However, it’s easy to have fun with this movie – as long as you check your expectations at the door.

New In Theaters, Slider

Waiting On a Friend

Leave a comment

Come Play

by George Wolf

In a vacuum, Come Play is a fairly smart and mildly jump-scary slice of PG-13 horror for your Halloween weekend. It even finds an unexpected and satisfying way out of the monstrous concept that it fosters.

But the feature debut for writer/director Jacob Chase has trouble escaping the shadow of two other films. One is Larry, Chase’s own short from 2017, and the other is the modern horror classic that clearly inspired him.

Larry is the star of Misunderstood Monsters, a story app that Oliver, a non-verbal autistic boy (Azhy Robertson from Marriage Story), has stumbled onto. Larry says he just wants a friend, but he’s too scary, and Oliver resists.

But Larry just won’t be denied. And it isn’t long before Oliver’s estranged parents (Gillian Jacobs and John Gallagher, Jr.) have to admit they really are being terrorized by an entity let in through the screens on their many devices.

A monster from a troubled child’s story manifests itself in a home unsettled by emotional turmoil. Though the metaphors in Come Play are geared more toward multiplex than art house, the blueprint is plenty familiar.

Chase does prove himself to be an able technician, exhibiting some nifty camerawork and a fine sense of visual creepiness. But the road to his effective finale drags from a lack of solid scares and the feeling of filler that can plague a short film stepping up in class.

There are some valid ideas at work here. They’re not terribly urgent or original, but Come Play isn’t pretending they are. It’s a film with little interest in overthinking, for horror fans not interested in films that do.

New In Theaters

Because You’re Mine

Leave a comment

Spell

by Hope Madden

Spell is here to let you know that fear of backwoods folk is not for white people only.

Omari Hardwick is Marquis, an enormously successful corporate lawyer who is not above defending clients against class action lawsuits that would primarily benefit people of color like himself. Why does he do it? Because that’s his job, he’s good at his job, he makes a lot of money, and he worked very hard to get where he is.

How do we know that last bit? Well, nightmares about abuse wake him in the morning, plus he knows how to pick a lock when his wife somehow locks herself in her own bedroom. Marquis came from somewhere he’s not proud of, and now he has to pilot his own airplane with his wife and two teens back to Appalachia to go to his father’s funeral.

Spell is a by-the-numbers backwoods thriller. Our hero has forgotten where he comes from. This film plans to scare him into remembering.

Marquis wakes up all James Caan style in the bedroom of some helpful but controlling woman who wants him just to rest. He does not not want to rest, though. Quite reasonably, he wants to know where his family is, what happened to him, and why Miss Eloise (Loretta Devine) keeps the door to his room locked.

Deep in Appalachia, it seems, you will always find a creepy granny type who conjures a bit, an amiable grampa type who’s not as nice as he seems, and an extra-large, extra quiet Jethro kind of guy in bib overalls.

Screenwriter Kurt Wimmer doesn’t drum up too many surprises there. His screenplay borrows heavily from about a dozen films from Misery to The Skeleton Key to Green Inferno, not to mention every flick where a group stops off at a creepy gas station only to realize they’ve gone too far off the map for their own safety.

Wimmer is white, though, which makes this particular story an unusual one for him. Director Mark Tonderai does not get a screenwriting credit, so I guess we assume that this vernacular sprung from the head of Wimmer. I really hope not. It would be problematic enough coming from a Black writer.

Marquis’s foot, though. For gore hounds and the squeamish looking for a nasty thrill, that foot alone is almost worth it.

Until the third act. I am not one to suggest that ambiguity equals plot holes. I like movies that leave questions unanswered. Unless those questions are: Where did the entire cast of villains go off to, leaving the hero all the time in the world to travel wherever he needs to go in these woods? And why isn’t he even limping?

Shudder Premiere

The Beast in Me

Leave a comment

May the Devil Take You Too

by Hope Madden

Alfie (Chelsea Islan) is a badass survivor. You can tell because she’s really mean to everyone and she and others repeatedly mention the ordeal she’s already survived.

One problem: if you haven’t seen writer/director Timo Tjahjanto’s 2018 film May the Devil Take You—and you probably haven’t—you’ll need to take this film at its word. May the Devil Take You Too (also called May the Devil Take You: Chapter Two) revisits the hero of that little known Indonesian film two years after the incidents you likely don’t know about.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you totally know all about Alfie, young Nara (Hadijah Shahab) and some kind of demonic parenting issues. If you haven’t seen the original—and I haven’t, by the way—you should probably still be able to make heads or tails of this sequel’s story. More or less. Kind of.

So here’s the skinny. Meanie-pants Alfie, badass survivor, and young Nara find themselves the involuntary guests of seven foster siblings. Like Alfie, the group has some diabolical paternal concerns. It’s never at all clear why they think Alfie could help them, why Nara had to come, or why the whole thing is staged as a kidnapping.

The point is, best not to look closely at the details.

The filmmaker has his own take on religious ritual, possession and afterlife horror, although he is unafraid to wear his American influences on his sleeve. Evil Dead references are a lot less fun when delivered so humorlessly, though. (You may also detect several Nightmare on Elm Street references, and just a touch of Constantine.)

Chapter Two does a lot with a limited budget, relying mainly on old fashioned practical effects and makeup for scares—with frequently decent outcomes. There is some grisly fun to be had in Tjahjanto’s nightmare funhouse.

The filmmaker’s strength is certainly more in staging and effects than it is in writing, however. Contrived and often counter intuitive, the plot is little more than an opportunity to string together kills and the dialog is weak. Not one character makes natural decisions— mainly they stand around in a group looking shocked and screaming each other’s names while something happens.

But once it gets going, Chapter Two is pretty relentless with the bloody action. That’s probably not reason enough to see it, unless you’re a huge fan of the original. Maybe that one was good.

New In Theaters

Bottle Feeding

Leave a comment

The Empty Man

by George Wolf

Okay, so here’s the story: if you’re on a bridge at night and blow into an empty bottle, you’ll conjure the Empty Man. And in three days, he’ll find you.

Right, so it’s a bit of Candyman, some of The Ring, lots of jump scares and kills for Halloween, got it.

I don’t think you do…unless you’ve read Cullen Bunn’s graphic novels.

Writer/director David Prior adapts the series with James Badge Dale in the lead as James, an ex-cop still grieving from the loss of his wife and son. When the daughter of his good friend Nora (Marin Ireland) goes missing, James sidesteps the local Missouri cops for a rogue investigation of his own.

Prior, a video vet making his feature debut, lays down an atmosphere that gets plenty creepy, but seldom horrific. As James digs in, the film becomes a dark mystery, one full of freaky cult members with aspirations of total consciousness and malevolent chaos.

Dale keeps your interest with a terrific performance full of wounded determination, getting solid support from Ireland (plus Stephen Root in a memorable cameo).

But at nearly two hours and twenty minutes, it’s a bit too much of wandering slog in need of a leaner path.

Come in looking for a tidy little slasher, and you’re going to be disappointed. But if you’re down for a dark and moody rumination on grief, metaphysics and itchy brains, you could conjure up worse than The Empty Man.

Shudder Premiere

Casa de los Muertos

Leave a comment

32 Malasaña Street

by Hope Madden

What is it about haunted houses that always sucker in big families? We saw it in The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror before it. And now another big old clan is about to regret that bargain dream house over at 32 Malasaña Street.

Albert Pintó’s nightmare follows the Olmedos, who take their two teenagers, their 5-year-old, an aging grandfather, and their shame to Madrid, leaving the country and their old lives behind. But haunted houses smell shame and secrets, don’t the Olmedos know that?

Pintó creates a dreadful, dreamy quality to the haunting, every shot’s framing and color, light and shadow taking on a painterly quality. He conjures a mood, a vintage era where hope and freedom bumped up against tradition and oppression.

The film is set in 1976, and like those other films of dream homes gone wrong, Malasaña creates concrete tension. The first response to any haunting is to just get the F out, but where are you supposed to take three kids and an elderly father? Where’s abuela supposed to plug in his C-Pap? The “down to our last penny and nowhere to go” vibe feels authentic under these circumstances.

But Pintó seems out to do more with the size of the family than simply convince you that thre’s nowhere to go. 17-year-old Amparo (Begoña Vargas) dreams of becoming a flight attendant, of flying up and away from this life, but the house itself is the metaphor for the family as a trap.

Faith and culture beget big families and poverty, and old-fashioned thinking creates monsters.

Where Pintó takes the metaphor is less inspired than it might be. Troublingly, the filmmaker’s throwback vibe retains that old horror trope of the physically disabled character as conduit to the supernatural, and enlightened lip service can’t excuse the way the film falls back on cliches of the monstrous “other.”

32 Malasaña Street sets complicated characters in motion within a familiar world. It just doesn’t use them to tell us anything new.

New In Theaters

Freedom Is Slavery

Leave a comment

The Antenna

by Rachel Willis

The installation of a state-sponsored satellite dish on the roof of an apartment building is the inciting event for ominous, Orwellian horror in writer/director Orçun Behram’s first feature, The Antenna.

A commentary on the political situation in modern day Turkey, Behram’s debut film is focused on oppression. Though oppression takes many forms (the oppression of youth, the patriarchy, the status quo), the movie is most interested in the state’s suppression of speech and expression.

From the moment the satellite is fitted onto the roof of the building, sinister events occur. A black ooze, which emanates from the antenna, leaks through the walls, something Mehmet (Ihsan Önal), the building’s evening landlord, discovers when he’s called to a tenant’s bathroom to address the seeping goo.

The ooze creeps through the building, infiltrating more and more apartments as the night progresses toward the launch of the new state-run programming.

The kick-off event for the state’s broadcasting system is the “Midnight Broadcast.” Building superintendent, Mr. Cihan, has been advertising it to all the residents to ensure maximum audience participation. The Leader (who bears a certain resemblance to Recep Erdoğan) hosts the broadcast, and while the Leader’s delivery seems benevolent, the underlying message is a sinister reminder that dissent will not be tolerated.

Helping to tie the film’s many many pieces together is Mehmet. As odd and menacing events happen in the hours leading up to the Midnight Broadcast, he becomes increasingly invested in the fates of the residents in his building. Mehmet experiences a few disturbing visual and auditory assaults, all of which propel him to action.

The black ooze is a not-so-subtle metaphor for the insidious nature of state propaganda. But when you want to deliver a warning to your audience, knocking them over the head with the message is sometimes worth doing.

There is a lot working for Behram’s film. As we watch the events unfold, dialogue between characters is replaced by broadcasts from a threatening voice that emanates from every radio and TV. The tense score puts you on edge, and the climax is almost unbearably stressful as the auditory assaults reach their peak.

This is a reminder of what’s at stake when you take your freedom for granted in a world that seeks to rob you of it at every turn.