We needed a drink, so we threw back a few and brainstormed the best bars in horror movies. Some of them were dives we’d love to haunt. Others were just really, seriously scary. All of them set the stage for something important in horror.
Who wants a cocktail?
6. The Slaughtered Lamb (An American Werewolf in London, 1981)
What is going on with these guys?! How hard would it have been to just ignore the yanks and let them hang around? What harm could have come of it? But no! They ask one silly question and the next thing you know…
“Enoof!”
5. The Gold Room (The Shining, 1980)
“Little slow tonight, isn’t it Lloyd?”
Great line, even better delivery, in a scene—and a room—that haunts Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece interpretation of Stephen King’s best novel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJVVGzEbJC0
4. Mahers (Grabbers, 2012)
Sea monsters have come to Ireland. They crave the water but they hate alcohol. The only way to save yourself is to get blind drunk and stay inside the pub.
Most Irish movie ever.
3. The Winchester (Shaun of the Dead, 2004)
It’s familiar, you know where the exits are, and you can smoke. It’s The Winchester, best place to hole up and wait out the zombipocalypse.
How’s that for a slice of fried gold?
2. Titty Twister (From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996)
A couple of nogoodnik brothers go from frying pan to the pit of vampire hell as they and the family they kidnapped wait out the night at a strip club of death.
1. Green Room (2015)
You may not catch its name, but that’s OK by the clientele. This Boots & Braces establishment likes its music loud, its patrons white and its dogs bloodthirsty.
Those are six of the very few spoken words in Aquarela, and they quickly establish the stakes in Victor Kossakovsky’s immersive documentary. His aim is to get you startlingly close to the world war between man and water.
There is power, there is beauty, there is death. And there’s some death metal, which isn’t as out of place as you might think.
In case you haven’t noticed, this is a great time to be a documentarian, and thus, a fan of documentaries. This year alone, we’ve seen technological breakthroughs make possible the wonders of Apollo 11, They Shall Not Grow Old and Amazing Grace.
Like those, Aquarela (“watercolor” in Portuguese) employs cutting-edge wizardry for an experience that begs for the biggest screen you can find.
Monstrous ocean waves build and crash, huge chunks of ice fall prey to rising global temperatures, and a hypnotic narrative emerges. Mankind has battled the shapes of water for centuries, in hopes of lessening its dangers and harnessing its power, and Kossakovsky feels it’s time to hear from the other side. The few humans who speak feel like party crashers.
Don’t expect explanations, you won’t get any. What you will get in Aquarela is an utterly astounding profile of a living, breathing, dying force of nature.
Even if you know nothing of Molly Ivins, you won’t be long into Raise Hell before you’re wondering: WWMID?
After a lifetime of speaking truth to power was ended by cancer in 2007, what would Ivins do – or more pointedly, what would she say – about the cesspool of blatant corruption that is American politics in 2019?
And as entertaining as Janice Engel’s documentary is, its biggest takeaway is just how badly Ivins is missed in a profession now facing unprecedented threat.
Engel is clearly a fan, but her portrait of Ivins as one of a kind is hard to rebut. A six-foot-tall Texas native who could out-drink the Bubbas while she skewered their elected reps, Ivins blazed a gender trail through newsrooms across the country.
Ivins even covered Elvis’s obit and funeral for the New York Times before settling in as a Pulitzer-nominated political columnist and author, the role that brought her legions of what one longtime colleague called “not readers…constituents.”
Her writing was smart, informed, and extremely opinionated, laced with acerbic wit, a passion for civil liberties and an undeniable voice. And Engel, as director and co-writer, makes sure you realize how unnervingly prescient it was, as well.
Of course, all this also brought Ivins plenty of haters, and though Engel isn’t preaching to that choir, she doesn’t completely shy away from the personal demons that dogged Ivins throughout her life.
Like its subject, the film is fast-paced, smart, fun and funny, as Engel deftly uses Ivins’s timeline as a microcosm of shifting political landscapes. But more importantly, Raise Hell is a fitting tribute to a woman who wasn’t afraid to, and an urgent call to follow her lead.
In a near future world full of wondrous space travel, the presence of t-shirt vendors and war zones on the moon provides apt bookends for the struggle to balance both hope and conflict.
The continued search for intelligent alien life keeps mankind gazing “to the stars” (Ad Astra in Latin), but that search has hit a dangerous snag.
Strange electrical surges are amassing casualties all over the globe, and a top secret briefing blames the Lima Project, a deep space probe led by hero astronaut Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) that hasn’t been heard from in years.
McBride’s son Roy (Brad Pitt) is a decorated astronaut himself, so who better to task with finding out just what happened to dad and his crew?
Daddy issues in zero gravity? There’s that, but there’s plenty more, as a never-better Pitt and bold strokes from writer/director James Gray deliver an emotional and often breathless spectacle of sound and vision.
The film’s mainly meditative nature is punctured by bursts of suspense, excitement and even outright terror. Gray (The Lost City of Z, We Own the Night) commands a complete mastery of tone and teams with acclaimed cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Dunkirk, Interstellar, Let the Right One In) for immersive, IMAX-worthy visuals that astound with subtlety, never seeming overly showy.
And speaking of subtle, Pitt is a marvel of piercing restraint. Flashback sketches of an estranged wife (Liv Tyler, effective without dialog) and reflective voiceovers help layer Roy as a man lauded for his lack of emotion, but lost in a space devoid of true connection. Though the role is anchored in common masculine themes, Pitt’s take never succumbs to self pity. A new tux for award season would be wise.
We’ve seen plenty of these elements before, from Kubrick to Coppola and beyond, but it is precisely in the beyond that Ad Astra makes its own way. It’s a head trip, and a helluva rocket ride.
A perversion of childhood innocence in an attempt to create anxiety and fear—that, basically, is the definition of carnivals, circuses, theme parks. Maybe that’s why the amusement park and its inhabitants make for such excellent horror movie fodder. Let’s discuss.
5. Zombieland (2009)
Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Deadpool) take the
tried-and-true zombiepocalypse premise and sprint with it in totally new and
awesome directions. An insane cast helps: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg,
Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, Bill Murray. That’s eight Oscar nominations and
one win, that’s what that is. Plus, I cannot imagine a better cameo in a film
than Murray’s in this one.
I give you, a trip to a loud and well-lit amusement park is not a
recommendation Max Brooks would make during the zombiepocalypse. Still, you’ve
got to admit it’s a gloriously filmed piece of action horror cinema.
Between the sisters trapped on a ride slowly lowering them toward hungry mouths (good thinking on those boots, ladies!), Columbus’s rule breaking heroism with that effing clown, and the all-time great Tallahassee shoot out, director Ruben Fleischer directs the hell out of the amusement park portion of this movie.
4. It (2017)
Clowns are fun, aren’t they?
The basic premise of It is this: Little kids are afraid of
everything, and that’s just good thinking.
Bill Skarsgård has the unenviable task of following a letter-perfect Tim
Curry in the role of Pennywise. Those are some big clown shoes to fill, but
Skarsgård is up to the challenge. His Pennywise is more theatrical, more of an
exploitation of all that’s inherently macabre and grotesque about clowns.
Is he better than the original? Let’s not get nutty here, but he is great.
Director Andy Muschietti shows great instinct for taking advantage of foreground, background and sound. Yes, It relies heavily on jump scares, but Muschietti’s approach to plumbing your fear has more depth than that and he manages your rising terror expertly.
3. The Last Circus (2010)
Who’s in the mood for something weird?
Unhinged Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia 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.
Like Tarantino, Igelsia pulls together ideas and images from across cinema
and blends them into something uniquely his own, crafting a film that’s
somewhat familiar, but never, ever predictable.
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.
2. Us (2019)
From a Santa Cruz carnival to a hall of mirrors to a wall of rabbits in cages, writer/director Jordan Peele draws on moods and images from horror’s collective unconscious and blends them into something hypnotic and almost primal.
But Us is far more than a riff on some old favorites. It’s as if Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turned into a plague on humanity.
And it all starts innocently enough with a family outing to the carnival—an environment that has always been a perversion of innocence, a macabre funhouse mirror of the playthings and past times of children. Peele takes advantage, using this stage to create an even wilder and more bewildering look at who we are.
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 us to say. We suspect you may be a bad person, perhaps
even a serial killer. Or maybe that’s us. What we can tell you for sure is that
the film is unsettling, and the final, rainy act of vengeance is truly creepy
to watch.
“You don’t have to believe me. I’m used to people not believing me.”
“Destiny” (Constance Wu) is telling her tale to Elizabeth (Julia Stiles), a writer in the midst of a story on a gang of high-end strippers who were busted for drugging clients and fleecing them for thousands.
The disclaimer is a clear yet-not-overbearing sign that our window into the world of Hustlers may not necessarily be the most clear and reliable. It’s one of many wise choices made by writer/director Lorene Scafaria in her adaptation of Jessica Pressler’s article on “The Hustlers at Scores.”
Wu is terrific as the naive newbie, overshadowed only by a completely magnetic Jennifer Lopez as Ramona, the stripping legend who teaches Destiny (and by extension, us) the ropes of spotting the highest-rolling Wall St. d-bags to milk for all they can.
But when the crash hits in ’08, times get tough for everybody, and it isn’t hard to justify hatching a plan to swindle the swindlers.
Scafaria ((Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, The Meddler) is not shy about the Scorsese influences, and seeing Will Ferrell and Adam McKay as executive producers makes The Big Short-syled humor all the more understandable.
No matter. This is still a supremely assured vision from Scafaria, cleverly constructed with visual flair, solid laughs, a sizzling pace and some truly memorable sequences.
One of the many great soundtrack choices comes right out of the gate, as Scafaria sets the stakes with Janet Jackson’s spoken-word opening to “Control.”
Who’s got it? Who doesn’t? And who’s badass enough to go get it?
It’s a wild, intoxicating high of girl power. And when it all comes crashing down, the moral ambiguities are scattered like dollar bills under the pole. As Ramona is quick to remind us, if there’s money being thrown, there will always be people ready to dance.
