30 Days of Night (2007)
DIRECTOR: David Slade
CAST: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster, Mark Boone Junior
REVIEW:
30 Days of Night, adapted from the graphic novel by Steve Niles (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Stuart Beattie) and a product of director David Slade and producer Sam Raimi’s (director of the Spider-Man films) Ghost House Pictures, isn’t the groundbreaking, revolutionary entry in the vampire genre that some have hyped it up to be, but it’s got a few attributes that make it an above-average bloodsucker flick: if the characters occasionally make dubious strategic decisions, they at least remain plausible characters and a level above the brainless vampire fodder we sometimes see, and the vampires themselves are no-nonsense, badass ravening killers who seem like they’d go through the foppish, angst-ridden types from Interview With The Vampire like mincemeat. The best, or at least most original thing about 30 Days of Night is its devious premise—a remote Alaskan town where the sun doesn’t show for thirty days—that seems so obviously perfect for a vampire flick that it’s a wonder no one ever thought of it before. The movie itself doesn’t achieve the nerve-wracking tension of something like 28 Days Later—which it is occasionally reminiscent of—but it supplies a healthy helping of suspense, plenty of bloody mayhem to satisfy hardcore gore fans, and most importantly, keeps the audience riveted from start to finish. Continue reading
28 Weeks Later (2007)
DIRECTOR: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
CAST: Robert Carlyle, Catherine McCormack, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Mackintosh Muggleton, Imogen Poots, Harold Perrineau, Idris Elba
REVIEW:
WARNING: THIS REVIEW WILL DISCUSS ELEMENTS OF THE FILM’S PLOT
Another day in the film industry, another superfluous and uninspired sequel…28 Days Later was one of the most frightening movies of 2003 (or any other year), but while tension-packed and involving, it wasn’t a movie that especially cried out for a sequel, and like most unessential sequels, 28 Weeks Later fails to justify its existence, regurgitating more generic retreads of the first movie’s chills and action while lacking its strengths. Continue reading
28 Days Later (2003)
DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle
CAST:
Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Megan Burns, Christopher Eccleston, Noah Huntley
REVIEW:
Hailed as one of the most frightening movies ever made, 28 Days Later is one in a long series of films addressing mankind’s fear of and fascination with the end- a catastrophic apocalypse that nearly wipes out the human race, but in a different vein than most. Director Danny Boyle’s and screenwriter Alex Garland’s vision of the end isn’t nuclear war or environmental disaster, but disease, specifically a genetically engineered virus known as rage. One drop of infected blood and the victim is almost instantly driven into a berserk frenzy by uncontrollable rage. This leads to it generally being considered a zombie movie, but this isn’t your daddy’s zombie movie, where the decaying walking dead somehow manage to get the petrified victims despite moving like molasses. The zombies here are fast, vicious predators, the characters are three-dimensional individuals rather than cardboard zombie food, and the filmmakers supply a little depth alongside scaring the living crap out of the audience. The result is that rare breed, a film that is both smart and scary. Continue reading
Alien Resurrection (1997)
DIRECTOR: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
CAST:
Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Michael Wincott, Dominique Pinon, Gary Dourdan, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Leland Orser, Kim Flowers
REVIEW:
Like many a film franchise, the Alien series started out strong, then didn’t know when to quit. Greed to make more money overrode the artistic integrity of stopping when the series was ahead and had fresh, original places to take the story. Alien Resurrection is at least not the dreary, depressing experience of the morbid Alien 3, but that’s damning with faint praise. Continue reading
Alien 3 (1992)
DIRECTOR: David Fincher
CAST:
Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S. Dutton, Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Pete Postlethwaite, Lance Henriksen
REVIEW:
The phrase ‘third time’s the charm’ doesn’t ring true for the Alien series. Alien was a solid start, and Aliens represented the series at its peak; everything else was downhill from there. Given the notoriously tumultuous production, with the storyline going through various and wildly contrasting versions, ever changing directors, a multitude of screenwriters, clashes between directors and producers and lead actress Sigourney Weaver, and the production running significantly over budget, with millions of dollars wasted on elaborate set pieces that never ended up being used due to the script in continuous rewrites throughout filming, it’s a small wonder the movie ever ended up getting finished in halfway watchable form at all, but in retrospect I’m not sure if it was worth the effort. Alien 3 is a dark, dreary, and depressing experience. Which is not to say that Alien or Aliens were uplifting movies, but the third entry smacks of a lot of pointless nastiness without redeeming qualities. Continue reading
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme
CAST:
Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Anthony Heald, Diane Baker, Brooke Smith, Chris Isaak, Charles Napier, Daniel von Bargen
REVIEW:
Few cinematic villains are a source of as much morbid fascination as Hannibal Lecter. Like the heroine Clarice Starling, we are frightened and disturbed by him, and yet we are too intrigued to turn our eyes away. Dr. Lecter is undoubtebly the character best-remembered from the psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs, and the acclaim showered on Anthony Hopkins for his Oscar-winning performance sometimes threatens to overshadow Jodie Foster’s also Oscar-winning lead role as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, a fine performance and a well-developed character in her own right. Clarice and Hannibal are two of the strongest characters ever written and acted in a horror movie, and they are given a script that does them justice, a dark, intelligent thriller that relies much less on blood and guts than on well-honed characterizations, a few scenes of indelible purely verbal interactions, and a vivid sense of atmosphere. All of these elements combined to make The Silence of the Lambs a classic of the thriller genre and earned it five Academy Awards in 1991. Continue reading
Misery (1990)
DIRECTOR: Rob Reiner
CAST: James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen, Lauren Bacall
REVIEW:
Following 1986’s Stand By Me, Rob Reiner has now chosen to bring another one of Stephen King’s stories to the screen, this time Misery, an adaptation of King’s same-named 1987 novel. Misery delves further into the horror genre—well-traversed territory for King—than the coming-of-age story Stand By Me but avoids any supernatural elements. The horror here is of the comparatively banal variety but one suspects may be a fear sprung from Stephen King’s own imagination: the obsessed fan.
Continue readingAliens (1986)
DIRECTOR: James Cameron
CAST:
Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, William Hope, Mark Rolston, Al Matthews
REVIEW:
Aliens, along with James Cameron’s sci-fi hit five years later, 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day , is both among the best sci-fi action thrillers ever made, and a rare example of a sequel surpassing the original. Continue reading
Alien (1979)
DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
CAST:
Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt
REVIEW:
In some ways, Alien could be seen as moving the Halloween-style slasher horror movie into outer space, but its achievement was more than that. While the best-known sci-fi at the time was the fairly lightweight Star Wars and Star Trek, with Alien Ridley Scott looked through the glass darkly. The movie is a dark experience, a slow-moving thriller that gradually and inexorably builds up the suspense until certain scenes and the climax in particular ascend to nerve-wracking tension. It’s the kind of movie that’s dark and harrowing to the extent that it’s questionable to call it conventionally “enjoyable”, but it is undeniably skillful filmmaking that shows a keen understanding of building suspense. Continue reading
Peeping Tom (1960)
DIRECTOR: Michael Powell
CAST: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Moira Shearer
REVIEW:
Coming out only months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom narrowly beat it out for staking a claim to fame as the original founder of the slasher movie genre (although by modern standards, or even the standards of the likes of Halloween or Friday the 13th in the next decade, there’s precious little “slashing”). One has to remember the year of its release; for a movie that feels exceedingly tame in its usually implied violence today, it was shocking and controversial at the time. It’s also strange to consider that Psycho, which premiered only months later and had even more depraved subject matter, was a huge hit and acclaimed, while Peeping Tom was a notorious flop that was pulled from theaters, virtually ended its director’s career, and was savaged by the British press. Critics seemed to be in a competition for the most hyperbolic and pearl-clutching condemnations. Derek Hill, reviewer of Tribune magazine, stated colorfully that “the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Len Mosley, writing for the Daily Express, stated even more hyperbolically that the film was “more nauseating and depressing than the leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay, and the gutters of Calcutta”. Such was the scorn leveled at the film that star Carl Boehm later recalled that no one at the premiere wanted to shake his or his director Powell’s hand. However, in following decades the film eventually earned a more favorable critical reappraisal as an ahead-of-its-time psychological horror thriller and gained prominent admirers like Martin Scorsese, who praised the film in writings and even chipped in $5,000 to help the relatively obscure and forgotten film find a wider audience with a 1978 re-release.
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