He Never Died was recently shown as part of the Spooky Movie International Film Festival, currently ongoing at the AFI Silver theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. In it, Henry Rollins plays a solitary grump who’s trying to escape from his past. That grump, Jack (Rollins, “Wrong Turn 2: Dead End”), lives in a beat-up apartment…
On the third day of the Spooky Movie International Film Festival, showing at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, I caught the home-invasion thriller Crush the Skull, directed (and cowritten) by Viet Nguyen. It’s a reasonably solid movie, with agreeable performances and some slick dialog, but it begins to fall apart about halfway…
Clumsy action thriller Momentum may as well be retitled “Further Proof That Morgan Freeman Will Star in Anything.” The towering talent who has played everyone from Robin Hood’s sidekick to God is cinematically ubiquitous and yet has long since remained respectable while slipping deeper into embarrassing paycheck territory. One has to think that the reason…
Opening night at the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival, held annually in Silver Spring, Maryland, is always a treat. This year, the opener was The Final Girls, a thriller/comedy that subverts many horror-film conventions — indeed, the very notion of movies themselves. Teenager Max (Taissa Farmiga, “Anna”) happens to be the daughter of the…
Looking is different than seeing in the same way in which seeing is different than watching. Looking necessarily entails as much the eyes of the one who looks as the eyes of the one who’s been looked at. A look is impossible without reciprocity, for no look can be given if no look can be…
Horror fans, like myself, are a funny bunch — we sit comfortably on the couch, happily eating popcorn while onscreen characters are tormented and terrorized. We devour film after film, most of them admittedly poor in quality, in the hopes of finding the diamond in the horror rough — the one film that manages to…
Films inspired by video games usually fall into two categories: Bad (“Doom,” “Super Mario Bros.,” “Tomb Raider”) or terrible: (“Mortal Kombat,” “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li,” “Max Payne”). Hitman: Agent 47 (a remake of the 2007 picture starring Timothy Olyphant) neatly fits into that last category. There are many reasons for this, including poor…
