A Film Studies graduate with a very healthy obsession with all things Kubrick, here I am surfing an internet awash with opinions to add mine to the ocean.
After a night of nookie and a passive-aggressive argument, Adam (Alex Breaux, “Bushwick”) leaves his girlfriend’s apartment and heads into the night. He is promptly stabbed to death. The end. Just kidding. Adam awakens on an operating table, in a theater belonging to a young, rogue surgeon. Dr. Henry (David Call, “Dark Was the Night”)…
It’s Sam’s (Hayley Griffith, “Five Years Later”) first day delivering pizzas, and what a day — and what a night — it will be. She must deliver to a property in an exclusive estate — specifically, the residence of a Satan-worshiping cult, led by the fearsome Danica (Rebecca Romijn, “X-Men 3 – The Last Stand”)….
Hot on the wicker heels of Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” is Blood Paradise, another chiller about uninitiated Americans travelling to a Swedish rural retreat. This time the victim is horror author Robin Richards (Andréa Winter, also co-writing with co-star and director Patrick von Barkenberg), whose last novel, “Return to Blood Paradise,” was a critical and commercial…
Finally getting a release in English-language regions is Latvian director Aik Karapetian’s follow-up to his grisly “The Man in the Orange Jacket,” Firstborn. Latvia sits between Scandinavia and Russia, so it’s perhaps apt that this stylish, moody thriller evokes some of the black-comic absurdity of the former and the miserablist austereness of the latter. From…
A middle-aged man (Surapol Poonpiriya) picks up a teenage girl (Prapamonton Eiamchan) from school. The way he’s smiling at her, you’d think he’s her adoring father. Suddenly he punches her for swearing and expects her to give him a handjob. He drives her to his shabby “love hotel,” Motel Mistress. Tot Niyom (Wissanu Likitsathaporn) is…
Red Room starts somewhere in Dublin, as a woman named Kyra (Amy Kelly, “Red Rock” TV series) walks home alone at night. A lost cellphone rings on the tarmac. She picks it up. Distracted, she’s grabbed from behind and bundled into a van. She wakes up in a room, locked in chains, along with two…
Reinert Kiil is the Norwegian director responsible for the sort-of-okay slasher “Christmas Blood” (“Juleblod”). If that film was a brooding modernization of “Silent Night, Deadly Night” then The House (“Huset”) must be his re-imagining of “The Conjuring.” On the surface it’s an interesting new twist on the familiar, demon-possessed madhouse setup. Two Nazi soldiers are…
