Reviews

This update/reboot of the Hellraiser saga is a lot better than many of the later sequels in the franchise, but it's missing the sexuality and sense of naughtiness of the first two films. Because of this, it can't be considered as a complete return to form. Characters are also poorly drawn giving the actors very little work with. Jamie Clayton does make Pinhead her own, but even she isn't given as many delicious zingers to deliver as Doug Bradley was throughout the original series. She does what she can, but the material doesn't rise to the occasion very often.

A lot of the cinematography is also incredibly dark, making it tough to see a lot of the beautiful makeup and production design.

Michael Myers survives the fire set for him by revenge-minded Laurie Strode in the last film and continues his reign of terror throughout Haddonfield as he dispatches one personality-free victim after another.

Fans of gore will probably find a lot to love about Halloween Kills considering it has some of the best effects and most cringe-worthy death scenes of the entire series, but that's about all it has to offer. Characters are poorly developed, leaving us to root more for Michael Myers than any of the victims. Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie is given nothing to do and sits in a hospital bed lecturing everyone about the nature of evil the entire time.

The Ghostface killer returns to Woodsboro to carve up a fresh group of young victims, but can the surviving characters from the first four films help them unmask the killer before the town's population dwindles down to zero?

There's not much of a need for this sequel and, for every fresh and interesting sequel, there are five that feel like rehashes of better scenes from the other sequels. At the very least, the film does know what to do with it's legacy characters more than the recent Halloween Kills and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

A young woman loses her mind after suffering childhood abuse and she goes after the people responsible. It's up to her childhood friend to stop her before she goes even further off the deep end.

This is violent and brutal piece of French cinema that has a lot in common with the torture films Hollywood had been putting out in the years prior, but this one has a lot more on it's mind than severed limbs and skin being peeled off. It's smarter than that and very moving at times.

A chance encounter in a supermarket brings a down on her luck woman and man together and a relationship quickly blossoms. When they go out of town for the first time together, his true nature is revealed and the woman will have to keep her wits about her to survive.

It's nice to see Stan playing against type and having a good time hamming it up. The film balances dark comedy and horror extremely well, keeping the stakes high, but having fun with the outlandish concept at the same time.

A teenage girl's date exposes her to a deadly sexually transmitted curse that will follow her and kill her unless she passes it on to someone else.

It Follows understands slow burn horror and how to create an unsettling mood, but it makes the fatal mistake of placing some of it's scariest moments early in the film, leaving it with nowhere to build to for the big finale when it should be at it's most intense and frightening.

Toni Collette plays an artist filled with grief over the death of her mother that threatens to tear her entire family apart. Once she finds out her mother might have been involved in a strange cult, things get even stranger.

Collette anchors the entire film with the kind of performance awards are made for. The horror is of the quiet, slow burn variety with moments of unpredictable violence and shock even if the final scenes threaten to take things into a silly direction.

Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch play a father and son who operate a funeral home and who become tasked with trying to figure out what exactly killed a mysterious body found on the scene of a grisly murder. As the night unfolds, things take a frightening and supernatural turn.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is smart enough to know that what we can't see is much scarier than the biggest makeup and computer effects that money can buy. Cox and Hirsch sell the fear very well and the sound design is spectacular. When we do glimpse a ghost or vision of some sort, it's genuinely alarming.

Last Night in Soho feels like a beautifully rendered take on all those lurid and colorful Italian exploitation horror films from the 60's and 70's with a fantastic soundtrack, memorable visuals, and a very strange twists to keep the audience on its toes.

It's nice to see Dame Diana Rigg get one final role before her passing and it's much more memorable and juicy one than what I'd initially expected.

Pet Sematary II discards the more serious tone of the original film and almost turns into horror comedy at times. It's not as emotionally harrowing as the original, but maybe that's ok.

Clancy Brown is the standout as an abusive stepfather cop who turns into something even more monstrous in death. Effects work is strong for the most part with the exception of an obviously fake dead dog that looks more like a stuffed animal.

Would it surprise you to know that Tower of Evil, a British proto-slasher from 1972, probably contains more gore and sex/nudity than most of the early 80's slasher flicks? It's true and quite a pleasant surprise to see a film from this vintage being so explicit and all in service of a silly, but fun story.

A nude young woman (see, right out of the gate, this movie is sleazy) is discovered on a deserted island where all of her friends have been murdered. She's taken to a hospital where they try to figure out what exactly happened to her. A group of investigators head to the island and find themselves picked off one by one by someone or something. It might be a creature or just a mad slasher, but why are they doing this?

Tower of Evil is a nice mix between the slasher genre and a Hammer film with a good deal of grindhouse sleaze thrown into the mix. Pretty much everyone gets naked or has sex at some point and almost everyone meets a gruesome, bloody end.

Some movies get a bit lost in the shuffle and The First Power seems to have suffered from bad timing if anything. Released at the start of the 90's when horror was on the decline, it didn't seem that there was much of an audience for this kind of movie, but it's not a bad movie at all and a lot of fun.

Lou Diamond Phillips plays a cop whose track record for finding and imprisoning serial killers is some sort of legend. He gets an anonymous tip from a mysterious woman about the whereabouts of a killer named The Pentagram Killer, but warns him to only catch him and imprison him - not to kill him. He catches him, but the killer ends up getting executed in prison and his evil spirit is now free to torment and kill more people - this time, by jumping into other people's bodies.

The First Power might have a few missteps here and there (the killer's need to crack jokes reeks of late-stage Freddy Krueger and the nun character only seems to show up when necessary and is pure plot device), but the pacing is pretty even and the performances aren't bad with Phillips holding down the fort well as the lead and Tracy Griffith does well as the psychic.

Right off of the runaway success of Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts starred in Sleeping With the Enemy as a battered housewife who fakes her death to escape from her psychotic husband. She changes her name and starts a new life in a small town where everything seems to be better for her...until her husband discovers she's still alive.

Sleeping With the Enemy is fairly by the numbers as thrillers go. It's inoffensive and fairly predictable, but Roberts is incredibly likable in the leading role and director Joseph Rubin knows how to craft suspense which goes a long way in making the film work. Jerry Goldsmith's music score is lush and hauntingly beautiful.

Sleeping With the Enemy is the kind of movie you can relax on the couch with on a Saturday afternoon and it has a great rewatchable quality.

Listen, I've suffered through a lot of bad movies in my day, but the exciting thing about them is that, sometimes, they're so awful they almost turn into bizarre comedies full of weird line readings, insane dialogue, completely inhuman responses to big twists, etc. For me, the worst thing a film can do is be boring or mundane without a single inspired moment and, honestly, most bad films are usually far from boring.

This brings me to Sorority House Massacre - a film so dull, passionless, and lacking in anything remotely resembling excitement that I'm surprised I remembered it enough to give this review.

It manages to cram the plots of Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street into one, but it does absolutely nothing of note. Usually, in even the worst of slasher films, there's a character or death scene or two worth remembering, but there's absolutely nothing to latch onto here. It's all just going through the motions.

If you value your time, skip it.

I think it'd be fair to say that, if Cutting Class didn't have Brad Pitt, the entire would would have forgotten about it in '89.

On the surface, the concept of Cutting Class isn't terrible. It seems like it would have potential to be fairly fun. Plus, we're given the fabulous Jill Scholen as our leading lady and her track record with horror projects is pretty solid from The Stepfather to Popcorn. Surely, she wouldn't sign on to a turkey, right?

Sadly, this is wrong. Very wrong. Poor Scholen has very little to do, nor does the rest of the cast, including a very strangely placed Martin Mull and Roddy McDowell who must have owed someone a favor.

The tone varies between weird comedy and bland slashings, but neither work well by themselves and they certainly don't gel well together. Maybe the script read better than the film turned out. It's also shot with zero style and looks like an impossibly bland TV movie.

Cutting Class isn't worth a revisit. Bank some erasers together instead.

Everyone wants Jordan Peele's follow up to his breakthrough smash, Get Out, to be equally as brilliant. Us has some great ideas and performances, but ends up a bit shaky due to odd tonal shifts.

Us lays on the mood fairly thick during its first 20/30 minutes as our heroine, Addie (a terrific Lupita Nyong'o) is plagued with what she describes as a "black cloud" over her family's vacation to a beach where she had a traumatic incident as a child. Fairly soon, Addie's fears prove to be well founded when a family of scissor-wielding dopplegangers break into their vacation house and terrorize them.

Oddly enough, the moment the dopplegangers break in is the moment where the film's tone starts swerving in and out of the horror and dark comedy lanes. Granted, a few of the jokes do land because they feel like something a real human being would say/do in this same situation, but a lot of them feel far too goofy and this leads the film into a fairly bizarre 2nd act that feels more like a feel good/kick ass zombie-killing movie from the 80's, destroying the somber tone conjured in the film's first half hour.

This isn't to say that the 2nd act of Us isn't a rollicking good time - it is, but it seems so far removed from what the film had originally been building towards. Imagine if you switched the channel midway through The Innocents and happened upon Night of the Creeps or Waxwork. They're all great movies, but their styles couldn't be further from each other and, if you tried to mix them together, you'd probably get something like this.

Us wraps up with a fairly odd twist that'll probably leave you scratching your head. Perhaps if the film had been more goofy from the start and carried this tone throughout, one could laugh it off and just chalk it up to a fun, cheesy time, but it seems like Us wants us to be scared sometimes, too. It wants us to laugh at the strange, inhuman growls of its antagonists and be petrified of them at the same time and that's just not going to happen.

Don't get me wrong - Us is far from the dreaded sophomore slump for Jordan Peele. He still has an eye for great shots, tongue in cheek humor, and creative storytelling, but it doesn't come together the way it should. It's still worthy of a watch, though.