Tag Archives: movie podcast

Screening Room: Yesterday, Annabelle Comes Home, Ophelia, Echo in the Canyon

In today’s podcast, George considers doing the whole show with a fake British accent and Hope says no. Also, we cover Yesterday, Annabelle Comes Home, Ophelia and Echo in the Canyon, plus all that’s new in home entertainment.

Listen to the full podcast HERE.

Screening Room: MIB: International, Late Night, Shaft, The Dead Don’t Die

Big week! So many movies! Some of them are even great. This week we break down Men in Black: International, Shaft, Late Night, The Dead Don’t Die, Halston plus everything worth your time in home entertainment.

Listen to the full podcast HERE.

Fright Club: Sea Beasts

Why fear the sea? The same reason to see menace in the deep, dark unknown of space or the dense and dizzying claustrophobia of the forest: because it’s really hard to see what’s in there.

That leaves us to our imagination, and when is that ever a good idea? Here, then, are some of the most imaginative ways horror filmmakers terrorized us with tales of what lies beneath.

5. Godzilla (Gojira) (1954)

Up from the depths, 30 stories high, breathing fire…you know the rest. Surely we had to have a Fifties science run amok beastie on this list, and while there was some stiff competition, nothing really bests Godzilla.

As Japan struggled to re-emerge from the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, director Ishiro Honda unleashed that dreaded kaiju—followed quickly by a tidal wave of creature features focused on scientists whose ungodly work creates global cataclysm.

Far more pointed and insightful than its American bastardization or any of the sequels or reboots to follow, the 1954 Japanese original mirrored the desperate, helpless impotence of a global population in the face of very real, apocalyptic danger. Sure, that danger breathed fire and came in a rubber suit, but history shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.

4. Open Water (2003)

Jaws wasn’t cinema’s only powerful shark horror. In 2003, young filmmaker Chris Kentis’s first foray into terror is unerringly realistic and, therefore, deeply disturbing.

From the true events that inspired it to one unreasonably recognizable married couple, from superbly accurate dialog to actual sharks, Open Water’s greatest strength is its unsettling authenticity. Every element benefits from Chris Kentis’s control of the project. Writer, director, cinematographer and editor, Kentis clarifies his conception for this relentless film, and it is devastating.

A couple on vacation (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) books a trip on a crowded, touristy scuba boat. Once in the water, they swim off on their own – they’re really a little too accomplished to hang with the tourists. And then, when they emerge from the depths, they realize the boat is gone. It’s just empty water in every direction.

Now, sharks aren’t an immediate threat, right? I mean, tourist scuba boats don’t just drop you off in shark infested waters. But the longer you drift, the later it gets, who knows what will happen?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4fxtHQtt4Y

3. The Lure (2015)

Here’s a great Eastern European take on reimagined Eastern European fairy tales, like Norway’s Thale (2012) and Czech Republic’s Little Otik (2000).

Gold (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek) are not your typical movie mermaids, and director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s feature debut The Lure is not your typical – well, anything.

The musical fable offers a vivid mix of fairy tale, socio-political commentary, whimsy and throat tearing. But it’s not as ill-fitting a combination as you might think.

The Little Mermaid is actually a heartbreaking story. Not Disney’s crustacean song-stravaganza, but Hans Christian Andersen’s bleak meditation on the catastrophic consequences of sacrificing who you are for someone undeserving. It’s a cautionary tale for young girls, really, and Lure writer Robert Bolesto remains true to that theme.

The biggest differences between Bolesto’s story and Andersen’s: 80s synth pop, striptease and teeth. At its heart, The Lure is a story about Poland – its self-determination and identity in the Eighties. That’s where Andersen’s work is so poignantly fitting.

2. The Host (2006)

Visionary director Joon-ho Bong’s film opens in a military lab hospital in 2000. A clearly insane American doctor, repulsed by the dust coating formaldehyde bottles, orders a Korean subordinate to empty it all into the sink. Soon the contents of hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde find its way through the Korean sewer system and into the Han River. This event – allegedly based on fact – eventually leads, not surprisingly, to some pretty gamey drinking water. And also a 25 foot cross between Alien and a giant squid.

Said monster – let’s call him Steve Buscemi (the beast’s actual on-set nickname) – exits the river one bright afternoon in 2006 to run amuck in a very impressive outdoor-chaos-and-bloodshed scene. A dimwitted foodstand clerk witnesses his daughter’s abduction by the beast, and the stage is set.

What follows, rather than a military attack on a marauding Steve Buscemi, is actually one small, unhappy, bickering family’s quest to find and save the little girl. Their journey takes them to poorly organized quarantines, botched security check points, misguided military/Red Cross posts, and through Seoul’s sewer system, all leading to a climactic battle even more impressive than the earlier scene of afternoon chaos.

1. Jaws (1975)

What else – honestly?

Twentysomething Steven Spielberg’s game-changer boasts many things, among them one of the greatest threesomes in cinematic history. The interplay among the grizzled and possibly insane sea captain Quint (Robert Shaw), the wealthy young upstart marine biologist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the decent lawman/endearing everyman Brody (Roy Scheider) helps the film transcend horror to become simply a great movie.

Perhaps the first summer blockbuster, Jaws inspired the desire to be scared silly. And in doing so it outgrossed all other movies of its time. You couldn’t deny you were seeing something amazing – no clichés, all adventure and thrills and shocking confidence from a young director announcing himself as a presence.

Spielberg achieved one of those rare cinematic feats: he bettered the source material. Though Peter Benchley’s nautical novel attracted droves of fans, Spielberg streamlined the text and surpassed its climax to craft a sleek terror tale.

It’s John Williams’s iconic score; it’s Bill Butler’s camera, capturing all the majesty and the terror, but never too much of the shark; it’s Spielberg’s cinematic eye. The film’s second pivotal threesome works, together with very fine performances, to mine for a primal terror of the unknown, of the natural order of predator and prey.

Jaws is the high water mark for animal terror. Likely it always will be.

Screening Room: Missing Link, Hellboy, Little, After, Master Z

Lots and lots to cover in the Screening Room this week: Missing Link, Hellboy, Little, After, and Master Z: Ip Man Legacy.  Plus just as many new home entertainment releases. Strap in!

 

Listen to the full podcast HERE.





Screening Room: Shazam!, Pet Sematary, Best of Enemies, The Public, The Wind, The Aftermath, Diane

Whew! That is a lot of movies. We will talk you through all of them: Shazam!, Pet Sematary, The Best of Enemies, The Public, The Wind, The Aftermath and Diane—plus all that’s fit to watch in new home entertainment.

Listen to the full podcast HERE.





Screening Room: Climax, Captive State, Five Feet Apart, Wonder Park & More

This week in the Screening Room we run through the many little movies that come out the week after Captain Marvel: Climax, Captive State, Five Feet Apart, Wonder Park, Birds of Passage, Ruben Brandt Collector plus everything new in home entertainment.

Listen to the full podcast HERE.





Fright Club: What’s On the Slab

Come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab.

The cold, sterile morgue. That basement examination room with those drawers that should really never open on their own. Those rows of tables with sheets that should not just blow around. It’s a quiet, peaceful place where, in horror movies, attractive naked women lay prone and yet onscreen without a line of dialog for 90 minute stretches.

That’s not to say that they do nothing. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they even bite.

Thanks to Jenny from Cali for the topic idea.

Here are our favorite autopsy/morgue horror movies.

5. Re-Animator (1985)

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.

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.

4. Anatomy (2000)

Franka Potente leads a medical school mystery in Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film about Germany’s ugly history with medical experimentation and societal hierarchy.

Ruzowitzky would go on to direct the Oscar winning foreign language film The Counterfeiters in 2007, but back in 2000 he was still riding high on the surprise success of this mid-budget medical horror.

Potente is Paula. She’s new and maybe a little frigid for her prestigious medical school. In one of her classes she recognizes a corpse. Her curiosity piqued, what she stumbles into may look like a by-the-book slasher, but it digs into the scars of a generation whose beloved forebears were either implicit in heinous crimes against humanity, or who participated willingly.

3. The Corpse of Anna Fritz (2015)

Young hospital orderly Pau (Albert Carbo) attends the morgue, where the famous actress Anna Fritz (Alba Ribas) awaits an autopsy come morning. He secretly texts a selfie with the body to two buddies.

Soon, three young men are alone with a beautiful, naked, dead woman with absolutely no chance of being interrupted for hours. If you’re a little concerned with where this may lead, well, you should be.

Sort of a cross between 2008’s irredeemable rape fantasy Deadgirl and Tarantino’s brilliant Kill Bill, Volume 1, The Corpse of Anna Fritz will take you places you’d rather not go.

As a comment on rape culture, the film is a pointed and singular horror.

And while contrivances pile up like cadavers in a morgue, each one poking a hole in the credibility of the narrative being built, The Corpse of Anna Fritz has a lot more to offer than you might expect – assuming you stick it out past the first reel.

2. I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016)

Billy O’Brien (Isolation) finds a new vision for the tired serial killer formula with his wry, understated indie horror I Am Not a Serial Killer.

An outsider in a small Minnesota town, John (Max Records) works in his mom’s morgue, writes all his school papers on serial killers, and generally creeps out the whole of his high school. But when townsfolk start turning up in gory pieces, John turns his keen insights on the case.

Records, who melted me as young Max in Spike Jonze’s 2009 masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are, serves up an extraordinarily confident, restrained performance. His onscreen chemistry with the nice old man across the street – Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd – generates thrills enough to offset the movie’s slow pace.

For his part, Lloyd is in turns tender, heartbreaking and terrifying.

Bursts of driest humor keep the film engaging as the story cleverly inverts the age-old “catch a killer” cliché and toys with your expectations as it does.

1. The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2017)

Back in 2010, Andre Ovredal established himself as a filmmaker of unusual vision with his found footage style gem Trollhunter. His first English-language film takes him into the basement examination room of father and son coroners.

Both stars Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch are underappreciated actors, and each one turns in a wonderfully familiar, tender performance. Their kinship and associated dysfunction are played with enough restraint to keep it from weighing down proceedings, instead creating a believably protective relationship that causes certain scenes to hurt.

As the two dig in to the mystery of their latest patient, an unidentified woman found underground in a nearby basement, an intimate and claustrophobic but always smart and creepy mystery starts to unveil itself. The result is a chilling and effective thriller.





Screening Room: Greta, A Madea Family Funeral

Captain Marvel is still a week out, which makes for a pretty quiet weekend at the box office. Join us as we run down the highs and lows: Greta, A Madea Family Funeral plus all that’s fit to watch in new home entertainment.

 

Listen to the full podcast HERE.





Fright Club: Looking for Love

Love is in the air! God help us, especially those who are throwing themselves into the love game. It’s horrifying, right? Scary, vulnerable, awkward, and really bloody once the power tools come out.

Horror filmmakers know a good subject when they see one. Here are our five favorite films focused on the quest to find and secure love.

5. Berlin Syndrome

Aussie photographer Clare (Teresa Palmer, better than she’s ever been) is looking for some life experience. She backpacks across Europe, landing for a brief stay in Berlin where she hopes to make a human connection. Handsome Berliner Andi (Max Riemelt) offers exactly the kind of mysterious allure she wants and they fall into a night of passion.

What follows is an incredible combination of horror and emotional dysfunction, deftly maneuvered by both cast mates and director Cate Shortland. The mental and emotional olympics Palmer goes through from the beginning of the film to the end showcase her instincts for nuanced and unsentimental performance. Clare is smart, but emotionally open and free with her own vulnerability. The way Palmer inhabits these characteristics is as authentic as it is awkward.

Even more uncomfortable is the shifting relationship, the neediness and resilience, the dependency and independence. It’s honest in a way that is profoundly moving and endlessly uncomfortable. Riemelt matches Palmer’s vulnerability with his own insecurity and emotional about faces. The two together are an unnerving onscreen pairing.

4. The Love Witch

Wes Anderson with a Black Mass fetish and a feminist point of view, Anna Biller wrote/directed/produced/edited/set-designed/costume-designed/music-supervised this seductive sorcery headtrip.

Elaine (Samantha Robinson – demented perfection) needs a change of scenery. Driving her red convertible up the seacoast highway toward a new life in northern California, her troubles – and her mysteriously dead ex-husband – are behind her. Surely, with her smart eyeshades and magic potions, she’ll find true love.

Expect a loose confection of a plot, as Elaine molds herself into the ideal sex toy, winning and then tiring of her trophies. This allows Biller to simultaneously reaffirm and reverse gender roles with appropriately wicked humor.

3. Alleluia (2014)

In 2004, Belgian writer/director Fabrice Du Welz released the exquisite Calvaire, marking himself a unique artist worth watching. Ten years later he revisits the themes of that film – blind passion, bloody obsession, maddening loneliness – with Alleluia. Once again he enlists the help of an actor who clearly understands his vision.

Laurent Lucas plays Michel, a playboy conman who preys upon lonely women, seducing them and taking whatever cash he can get his hands on. That all changes once he makes a mark of Gloria (Lola Duenas).

Du Welz’s close camera and off angles exaggerate Lucas’s teeth, nose and height in ways that flirt with the grotesque. Likewise, the film dwells on Duenas’s bags and creases, heightening the sense of unseemliness surrounding the pair’s passion.

Duenas offers a performance of mad genius, always barely able to control the tantrum, elation, or desire in any situation. Her bursting passions often lead to carnage, but there’s a madcap love story beneath that blood spray that compels not just attention but, in a macabre way, affection. Alleluia is a film busting with desperation, jealousy, and the darkest kind of love.

2. The Loved Ones (2009)

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 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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olB5Wrg8Sxc

1. Audition (1999)

The prolific director Takashi Miike made more than 70 movies in his first 20 or so years in film. Among the best is Audition, a phenomenally creepy May/December romance gone very, very wrong.

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.

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.

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.