Latest Reviews
Entries from Deep Focus Movie Reviews + Weblog tagged with 'horror'
The Host (2006)
The Host is a fairly delightful combination -- dysfunctional-family comedy set against a Gojira-style monster movie about mutant Mother Nature run amuck.
Severance (2006)
Severance gets off to an amazing start — it plays like a The Office-style comedy of corporate manners crossed with a Friday the 13th style slasher movie with encoded satire on U.S./British foreign policy and birds coming home to...
Hannibal Rising (2007)
The carnivorous killer Hannibal Lecter, first introduced in an excellent Thomas Harris novel called Red Dragon and then made the focus of a follow-up, The Silence of the Lambs, and its sequel, Hannibal, has gotten a thorough workout in...
The Messengers (2007)
It’s hard to believe that, little over 15 years ago, I had never even seen a Hong Kong action movie, much less suspected that the Hong Kong mixture of gunplay and impossible heroics would become the dominant action form...
The Hitcher (2007)
The brutally violent 1986 B-movie The Hitcher starred Rutger Hauer as a murderous roadside psychopath and C. Thomas Howell as the young motorist who gets caught up in a bloody cat-and-mouse game leading him to increasingly dark places. It...
Perfume (2006)
Tom Tykwer is not a favorite -- I liked Run Lola Run well enough on a single viewing, but watching it a second time was an exercise in diminishing returns, and I had little use for The Princess and...
Grindhouse Hype Begins in Earnest
I like to keep these environs hype-free as a general rule, but I really like the posters that have come over the transom for "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof," the segments directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, respectively, for...
Turistas (2006)
The latest in a new cycle of horror film where the money shots depict beautiful young people getting terrorized, paralyzed, maimed, disfigured, dismembered or simply humiliated is Turistas, which explores cloddishness and xenophobia among the beautiful people traveling abroad....
Saw III (2006)
I couldn't watch Saw III without thinking of reality TV shows like Fear Factor. Can it be a deliberate parody?
IMPRINT (2006)
The newest Takashi Miike extravaganza arrived in the U.S. last week, and while many of his films are infamous for some bizarre content, Imprint is the first I know of that can credibly place the word "Banned" in a banner across its packaging.
Silent Hill
Snakes on a Plane may be a mediocre, lowbrow fright film, but Silent Hill is something much worse — a laughably pretentious one. Radha Mitchell, an actress who deserves better parts than this, plays Rose, who finds herself stranded in...
Four-Disc Dust Devil Coming on DVD
Bill Chambers was kind enough to send me word earlier in the summer of an impending exhaustive, four-disc (!) version of Dust Devil coming from Subversive Cinema. (I wrote about this and its predecessor, Hardware, at Cinemarati in December.) You...
The Great Yokai War (2005)
Imagine the Japanese unquiet-ghost anthology Kwaidan cross-bred with The Neverending Story and directed by Terry Gilliam. That's the gist of The Great Yokai War, an honest-to-god children's movie from the chameleonic Japanese genre director Takashi Miike.
Snakes on a Plane
Snakes on a Plane is cheerfully shitty, from the barely-diegetic sex scene that shoves some tits onto the screen to the cheap frights when phony-looking CG snakes explode toward the camera lens. (Why didn't New Line shell out for an Imax 3D version of this one?)
George A. Romero on political subtext
SCOTT FOUNDAS: Michael Moore notwithstanding, it still seems risky to make a movie [George A. Romero's Land of the Dead] this political in what is effectively a risk-averse Hollywood climate. I’m thinking particularly of those scenes where we see captive...
Don't Look Now (1973)
Seen from the uncompromising vantage of a quarter-century's passage of time, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now is showing its age. The injudicious use of the zoom lens, impressionistic editing techniques, and an ill-advised sound mix featuring mainly Donald Sutherland's...
Audition (2001)
The best way to see Takashi Miike's Audition might be to have it handed to you on an unmarked videotape by a friend who knows exactly what freaks you out. So you tabula-rasa types should check out of this...
