Tag Archives: movie reviews

New In Theaters

Undead Again

Leave a comment

Train to Busan: Peninsula

by Hope Madden

Back in 2016, filmmaker Sang-ho Yeon made the most thrilling zombie film since 28 Days Later. Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, always exciting and at least once a heartbreaker, Train to Busan succeeded on every front.

You can’t chalk it up to newness, either. Busan was actually a sequel to Yeon’s fascinating animated take on Korea’s zombie infestation, Seoul Station. So the guy was 2 for 2 in gripping zombie thrills.

Can he make it a hat trick?

Train to Busan: Peninsula begins on that same fateful day that South Korea falls to the zombipocalypse. Those fleeing Korea by ship are turned around for fear of global contamination, so all survivors descend upon Hong Kong. Four years later, the city’s overrun, survivors are living in poverty, and a rag tag bunch is so desperate, they’re willing to go back to the Korean peninsula to pull a job that will make them rich.

But if Hong Kong looks bad, wait til they see what’s happened since they left the peninsula.

Things feel much more borrowed this time around. Peninsula plays like a mash up of Friedkin’s 1977 adventure Sorcerer (or Clouzot’s 1953 Wages of Fear) and the 4th in George Romero’s line of zombie adventures, 2005’s Land of the Dead. There’s also a little Dawn of the Dead, plus one scene lifted wholesale from 28 Days Later. And you cannot miss a great deal of a great number of Mad Max flicks.

Both the claustrophobia and the relentless forward momentum of the 2016 film are gone, replaced with tactical maneuvering around a fairly stagey looking city scape and military compound. And while you have to believe Yeon had a bigger budget to work with based on the success of his previous effort, Peninsula’s zombie effects are weaker here.

That’s not to say the film is bad, just a letdown. Dong-Won Gang makes for a serviceable quietly haunted hero. Scrappy Re Lee and adorable Ye-Won Lee infuse the film with vibrance and fun, and both Gyo-hwan Koo and Min-Jae Kim create respectably reprehensible villains. (Although the high water mark in zombie villainy was reached with Train to Busan.)

The story is tight, if highly borrowed, and the action scenes are plentiful. Compare it with nearly every other zombie film to come out in the last two decades and it’s a creepy way to spend a couple of hours. Compare it to Yeon’s last two movies, though, and it comes up lacking.  

New In Theaters

First Impressions

Leave a comment

Making Monsters

by Hope Madden

Call me superficial, but I really enjoy those old school, pre-credit scares in horror films. (I am also a sucker for post-credit stingers, if I’m being totally honest.)

Done well, they set a tone, freak you out, and make you simultaneously afraid to watch the rest of the film and unwilling to turn away. Writer/co-director Justin Harding knows this, obviously. With a brief but exceptionally chilly opening sequence, he and co-director Rob Brunner dare you to finish their film, Making Monsters.

Christian (Tim Loden) and Allison (Alana Elmer) are planning for their wedding, beginning steps toward IVF, and struggling with the changes this is going to mean in their relationship as well as their livelihood. Apparently, their whole gig is a popular online prank show consisting of Christian scaring the poop out of Allison twice a week.

And she’s marrying him?

They run into an old friend, he invites them to his rustic new digs way out in BFE, and they sneak away for a quiet weekend. Or is it another prank?

If you think the viral prank horror premise is weak and tired, you are spot on. Luckily, Making Monsters doesn’t beat it to death, nor do they rely on found footage or a ton of shaky cam or even a lot of slickly produced viral videos. It’s all in there, but some of it serves a narrative purpose and none of it really wears out its welcome.

Elmer is especially solid, delivering a nuanced and believable character who loves and accepts Christian and remains optimistic that he, too, is ready to grow up. Allison is dimensional, and though it takes some time to realize it, so is Christian.

Jonathan Craig is a good time in a weird role, although he pulls too many tricks from Mark Duplass’s bag of magic to be truly fresh. Still, he’s fun in his own way and the rapport among the three main players rings true enough to elevate the material around them.

Not everything lives up to that first shock, but the next 80ish minutes of Making Monsters are worth a watch.

New In Theaters

Things that Make You Go Hmmm

1 Comment

Donny’s Bar Mitzvah

by Christie Robb

According to Jewish Law, a bar mitzvah is when, at 13, boy becomes a man and can be held accountable for his actions. The film Donny’s Bar Mitzvah seems to have been written by a 13 year-old who needs to be held accountable for his actions.

Seriously. It’s gross.

Ostensibly a found footage VHS cassette, this cinematic gem depicts a 1998 Oscar Night-themed party for Donny (Steele Stebbins) – It’s the The First-Annual Donny Awards! – shot and edited by a hired videographer. There are a few nods to 90s culture that might make the olds smile (remember giant cell phones, pop-up video, the Whassup commercial?).

But writer/director Jonathan Kaufman’s film’s raison d’etre is a celebration of the random, repellant, and pubescent that transcends decade. And like the lukewarm buffet offerings at a reception, it offers a variety of things, none of them particularly done well. You want butt chugging? It’s got it. You want small dick jokes? There’re plenty of  ‘em. Recurrent vomiting? No problem. Tits? There is a pair.

The wooden acting, sometimes bizarre plotting, and sound design reminiscent of ASMR performed by a hot dog and a jar full of lubricant, isn’t quite terrible enough to elevate Jonathan Kaufman’s film to the level of a masterpiece of BAD MOVIEDOM like The Room. But I imagine that with the right people watching it and the appropriate amount of brain cells murdered beforehand, this thing could be fun to watch.

Oh, and I guess Danny Trejo is in it for a little while?

New In Theaters

Imitation Games

Leave a comment

The Courier

by Hope Madden

Your regular Joe Schmo can do anything. He can save the world. He can even learn to love ballet.

Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) was a garden variety salesman in England in 1960, right about the time a highly decorated Soviet leader and member of Khruschev’s inner circle found a clever way to announce to the right people in the West that he wanted to share intel.

Think of The Courier as England’s version of Bridge of Spies, sort of. There’s even some cast in common.

Essentially it is a solidly made if tight-lipped political thriller about an unlikely duo racing against time to save humanity.

A bit like The Imitation Game. (Again, cast in common.)

Director Dominic Cooke has had remarkable success directing the British stage. His first foray into features, 2017’s On Chesil Beach, suffered from a choice to keep the protagonists at arm’s length. The same problem hampers the effectiveness of The Courier.

Merab Ninidze does what he can to come closer. As Oleg Penkovsky, or Alex, as his friend Greville calls him, Ninidze finds opportunities for the character to surrender to his own warm nature. He gives the Russian “traitor” a tenderness and heart that brightens even the greyest scenes.

Cumberbatch is characteristically solid, his demeanor just the right mixture of vanity, insecurity and good-natured humility to make him the perfect salesman. Likewise, Jessie Buckley (Oscar-worthy in last year’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things) and Rachel Brosnahan (I’m Your Woman) provide spot-on support as Greville’s wife and CIA contact, respectively.

The true story itself is tragic, astonishing and in need of public airing. We should know that these men existed and what we owe them. But regardless of a slew of sharp performances, Cooke plays it too safe, leaving us with little to remember.

There is nothing wrong with The Courier. It’s well made and informative. Which is to say, it’s kind of a waste of a great cast and an even better story.

New In Theaters

Picture This

Leave a comment

Martha: A Picture Story

by Phil Garrett

We have certain expectations when it comes to documentaries. Maybe we expect to be informed, enlightened, sometimes moved, and when we’re really lucky, taken on a journey that both surprises and delights us. That’s the case with Selina Miles’s Martha: A Picture Story.

In Martha, Miles has crafted a multi-layered film that paints a vivid portrait of photographer Martha “Marty” Cooper as an artist who is, above all else, true to herself. We also see Cooper as a pioneer from 1963 when at the age of 20 she joined the Peace Corps to be able to “take pictures in foreign places,” followed by her solo motorcycle ride from Thailand to England, her role as the first female intern at National Geographic, and her position as the first female staff photographer at the New York Post in the 1970s.

The heart of the film is Cooper’s personal history of her work in photographing the graffiti scene in New York City of the 70s and 80s, which took it from a national phenomenon to a global phenomenon. Miles goes further in shining a light on the origins of hip-hop culture, the casitas and community gardens that sprouted in vacant lots of a city trying to rebuild itself, and Sowebo, Southwest Baltimore as an impoverished neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification. Cooper photographed it all and we learn that her work is virtually the only meaningful documentation of some cultures.

As Steve Zeitlin, Founder of City Lore at the New York Center for Urban Folk Culture puts it in the film, “She’s photographing these corners of life which are often forgotten about. Having that record of how people lived is important. That’s the only way that we have of transcending time. And the only thing we’ll have to go back to is the record that Marty left.”

In the early 80s, Cooper teamed up with photographer Henry Chalfant. Both were attracted to the vibrant graffiti scene and as Cooper puts it, “He was very interested in the art and I was interested in the culture.” Their combined efforts in capturing the art form gave rise to the book, Subway Art, released in 1984 by a German publisher. While the book was a financial loss in its time, it inspired generations of new artists over the following decades and changed visual culture all over the world. Many street artists refer to it as their Bible.

Miles’s filmmaking style parallels and complements Cooper’s story: it’s kinetic and holds our interest. Tight and artful editing keeps the story moving. The music score supports and elevates Miles’s telling of the story of Cooper’s work and her global impact on generations of people and artists worldwide. The contemporary footage, much of which was shot by Miles herself, grounds the film and shows Cooper at the age of 75, still shooting pictures on the street, meeting fans, and even accompanying German graffiti artists on illegal, clandestine hits, racing along with them as they tag subway tunnels and train yards.

Together, Miles and Cooper explore themes such as accepting when something has run its course, the sidelining of marginalized cultures, and the ongoing battle over what is valued as art. At one point, Cooper tells us, “I’m not comfortable with the idea that I’m a legend or icon.”

It’s clear from Miles’s film that she’s both.

New In Theaters

Through a Tent Darkly

Leave a comment

Koko-di Koko-da

by Matt Weiner

What about Groundhog Day, but with unrelenting psychological dread? That’s the premise of Johannes Nyholm’s horror fable Koko-di, Koko-da, and it’s a testament to writer/director Nyholm that the film’s excruciating time loop manages to go from torturous to therapeutic.

After a family vacation takes a shocking turn, Tobias (Leif Edlund) and Elin (Ylva Gallon) lose themselves in their own private grief, their marriage one submerged argument away from total annihilation. What better time for a camping trip in the foreboding Swedish forests to get that old magic back?

Their unresolved trauma starts to literally stalk the couple in the shape of three carnivalesque figures, with each nightmare encounter ending the same way: some gruesome death, and then Tobias wakes up to repeat the loop all over again.

The horror of Koko-di Koko-da rarely gets gory. Tobias and Elin continually suffer extreme violence and torture, but it’s all (thankfully) implied. Instead, what’s so unnerving about the film is the inescapable dream logic that suffuses their fateful loop: no matter how hard Tobias tries or how fast he runs, it’s only a matter of time before the first strains of the fateful nursery rhyme on which the title is based start up, and the couple’s shared torture begins anew.

The film’s main down side is that we aren’t allowed to see or know much beyond the confines of this inexorable—and unrelenting—loop. And once the metaphor is clear, there’s little else to do besides feel like an eavesdropper in a long overdue couples therapy session. (An unconventional one, sure, with more murder and animal attacks than the APA likely recommends, but who knows what they get up to in Sweden.)

Still, it’s impossible not to feel for the grieving pair. Anyone deserves some kind of catharsis after enduring such tragedy, and both Edlund and Gallon manage to make it feel earned, even with their thinly detailed characters.

Koko-di Koko-da is not a pleasant film to watch, but it is often a beautiful one. And it lays bare the truth that there’s no escaping misery in life—that the only way to break the cycle is to confront it, pain and all.

New In Theaters

Good Night and Good Luck

Leave a comment

Come True

by Hope Madden

There are elements of Anthony Scott Burns’s sci fi horror Come True that put you in mind of early David Cronenberg, although what Canadian filmmaker hasn’t been inspired by the master?

Like Cronenberg, Burns sets his unnerving tale amid the humming florescents, beeping machines and grainy medical equipment displays of an institution—someplace hospital-like, if not quite hospital-proper.

But where Cronenberg usually populated these dreary medtech landscapes with the most disturbing body horror, Burns has other, slower terror in mind.

This is where 18-year-old runaway Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) finds herself. Nights spent on friends’ couches or at the local playground have Sarah strung out enough that a two-month sleep study sounds exactly like the safe, sound rest she needs.

Unfortunately, Sarah suffers from nightmares.

This is where Burns develops a marvelous sense of universal dread. As his camera (he also acted as cinematographer) weaves through hallways and caverns too dark to truly make out, human shapes or something like them hang, drape, congeal and otherwise loom in shadows. They are at unnatural angles and heights. Some seem to be looking at you.

What Burns sets in the corridors of Sarah’s mind abandons the Cronenberg universe in favor of a terror more reminiscent of Rodney Ascher’s documentary, The Nightmare.

Whew—heady stuff, and big shoes to fill. Burns follows through with the tone and look of the film, creating a dreamy, retro vibe that he amplifies with a score by Anthony Scott Burns, Pilotpriest and Electric Youth.

He also has quite a find in Stone, whose elfen look perfectly suits the project. She projects something scrappy, vulnerable and otherworldly and she carries this film on her narrow shoulders.

The cast around her does wonders to suggest a backstory that isn’t shared, each pair or group with its own lingo and worn in rapport.

Where Come True falls short is in its story. The slow pace eventually works against the film. Worse still, it’s hard to see the climax as anything other than a cheat. Come True leaves you feeling massively let down, which is truly unfortunate after so much investment in a world this well built.

New In Theaters

No Treat

Leave a comment

Dutch

by Rachel Willis

Drug kingpin Bernard “Dutch” James (Lance Gross) rules the streets of Newark, New Jersey. In co-directors Preston A. Whitmore II and David Wolfgang’s film Dutch, we watch the primary event that frames this crime thriller: Dutch is put on trial for an act of domestic terrorism.

There is some mystery when the film opens. Is Dutch truly guilty of the crime? Is he being railroaded by the system? We get a glimpse of Dutch committing a crime as a teenager, but nothing at the level of what he’s on trial for. It’s easy to wonder if this is a set-up.

Whitmore and Wolfgang don’t sustain the mystery for long. It’s quickly forgotten as we bounce between past and present. You sense a powerful theme, but the movie isn’t interested in more than a surface reference to the legal system’s injustices.

Dutch maintains a decent balance between the events of the past and the present drama. Unfortunately, the film contains quite a few dull moments. We’re forced to watch a prosecutor’s entire opening statement, which is about as boring as they are in real life. There’s a lengthy discussion about a meatball that could’ve been funny had it been delivered with more conviction by characters with a little more meat to their roles.

And the acting is sometimes painful. Gross is the best of the bunch, but Dutch never seems truly dangerous. Gross brings the right amount of charisma to the character, but there’s nothing sinister. His history, as it plays on the screen, speaks to heinous crimes, but there’s never a moment where we feel we’re in the presence of someone who is capable of that level of cruelty – even as we’re watching him commit these shocking acts.

This is the first film in a planned trilogy, but it’s hard to muster up the interest in any sequels after a painful first installment.

New In Theaters

Nothing to Rave About

Leave a comment

Dreamcatcher

by Brandon Thomas

The music world and the horror world have a simpatico relationship. The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Phantom of the Paradise are quintessential cool horror rock operas. More recently, Deathgasm – the New Zealand love letter to metal – has gained momentum as a cult classic with its fun mix of gory carnage and shredding guitars.

Where does the world of underground DJing fit into this legacy? Well, if Dreamcatcher is any indication, any legacy might be over before it starts.

Pierce (Niki Koss) and her friend, Jake (Zachary Gordon), tag along to a hot-ticket underground music fest with Pierce’s sister, Ivy (Elizabeth Posey), and her friend, Brecken (Emrhys Cooper). As the show winds down, tragedy strikes and the friends are thrust into a world of deceit and violence.

It’s hard to get excited about slasher flicks these days. Heck, it was hard to get excited about them by the mid-80s. These are movies built on tropes – it’s what the fans expect – and Dreamcatcher is no exception, despite a few clumsy attempts to be something different. The film swings big, trying to be more character-focused. This approach does nothing but put a spotlight on the incredibly weak script, and pad the running time to an excruciating hour and 48 minutes.

The parts of the movie that are your standard stalk-and-slash clash with the other side that wants to be something more akin to a 90s thriller (think Kiss the Girls or other Silence of the Lambs wannabes). Director Jacob Johnston handles the slasher elements well. These scenes are shot in a more grounded and brutal fashion. When the story starts to dip its toe into character motivation or anything resembling drama, the suspense falls apart.

The characters in Dreamcatcher run the gamut from unlikeable to downright loathsome. Scene after scene of Pierce, Jake, and Ivy airing their petty grievances wear out fast. Dreamcatcher lacks even one character for the audience to latch onto as a surrogate. This ends up making the horror shallow and meaningless. 

Dreamcatcher might satisfy die hard fans of the slasher genre, but those looking for something a little more challenging will find themselves checking their watches on more than a few occasions.