Reviews

Seniors at the local high school are spontaneously exploding. No one knows why, or when it will stop. This is the premise of Spontaneous, written and directed by Brian Duffield. Up until this point, Duffield has just been a very busy screenwriter. We’ve already reviewed him twice in 2020 alone, for both Underwater and Love …

The thing you have to understand about the 1998 Japanese horror film Ringu is that it isn’t about revenge. It isn’t about writing a wrong or having vengeance on those who have harmed. It is, as stated by horror academic Katarzyna Ancuta in her article “Ringu and the Vortex of Horror: Contemporary Japanese Horror and …

Understanding the fact that The Exorcist is fundamentally about the individual of Father Karras, who is the titular exorcist in the film, is central to full appreciating the film as a work of art. This small fact may seem either pedantic or obvious, but it is worth noting due to the film itself running contrary …

The Evil Dead might be the quintessential cult horror film. I’m sure there are some that came before and some that have come after, maybe you could argue with me that those films better embody the definition of “a cult film.” But I know that for me, this movie was the first I heard referred to …

It seems like every horror movie, when described by some sort of critic, is valued only for its originality. More than any other genre, horror films tends to be lambasted for being copy cats. The irony is, of course, that the creators of these sorts of movies may be the the most prolific mimics working …

Fury? That is a war movie not a horror movie. That might technically be a little true, but this film is almost portrayed as a monster film wearing the skin of a war movie. In this film, a tank crew who have grown close — more than brothers — through their shared trauma battle their …

Dawn of the Dead is George A. Romero’s zombie-splattering follow-up to Night of the Living Dead. It takes the premise of the end of the world through the uprising of corpses in the form of a Zombie Apocalypse, and shows these consequences on a world of the 70s — a time of increasing racial tensions …

I have to start with the caveat that I don’t really feel this is a true horror movie. I see it categorized as such so I thought I would review it here. This is a film from Bong Joon-Hoo, a master of Korean cinema. His films The Host, Snowpiercer, and Memories of Murder are some …

This is a remake, so I can’t say it is wholly original, but it is not just a rehashing of the old premise. It is a re-imagining. The character work here is amazing, the villain well-realized, terrifying, and interesting. This film works in 2020 amazingly-well. The horror here is in the toxic-masculinity relationship the protagonist …

Well performed, well cast, well produced film. Feels a bit like Gravity by way of Alien. In some ways it is a little reductive. It feels very familiar to these isolated space movies with aliens and astronauts and scientists. This does have the boon of having Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds, who are charming as ever. …