Oculus is a sloppy horror movie about a possessed mirror and the vengeance that a grown woman, whose family was destroyed by the mirror when she was a girl, attempts to wreak upon it. There are a couple of shock moments — not shocking, just shock — but for the most part the plot dreamed…
People have said that mirrors are pathways to other dimensions. Even ones where pure evil resides. So it’s not a big leap to see them used in a horror movie as a catalyst for some paranormal shit to break out from (others like “Mirrors” and “Candyman” come to mind that have used them with limited…
There are some good things to say about the newest film by director James McTeigue (“Ninja Assassin,” “V For Vendetta“), a combination of “Sleepy Hollow,” “Saw,” “Se7en” and the latter-day Sherlock Holmes films. First, it acquaints the uninitiated with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s most creative and tortured writers (Poe, while…
Daniel Espinosa’s Safe House is a lesson in “Filmmaking with Parkinson’s.” The choppily edited actions sequences — onslaughts of bright colors and enough “shaky-camera” to make Jason Bourne nauseous — are hard to endure. Moreover, they’re built on clichés: Coincidental protests (allowing the protagonists some cover), accidental assassinations, and a handful of close calls. Because…
I must say, when Denzel Washington plays a badass motherfucker, no one can compare. In his latest, Safe House, he takes on the role of Tobin Frost, a wanted, rogue CIA agent — one responsible for the deaths of many agents and informants. When he suddenly turns up in Cape Town with a secret, all…
Creepy describes the situation Edgar Allan Poe finds himself in. In the dark thriller The Raven, it seems a serial killer has taken to Poe’s writing and is using it as a template to spectacularly kill people (think “The Pit and the Pendulum”). Poe, enlisted by Baltimore detectives, puts his macabre mind to work to…
