Breaking the cardinal rule of Ouija boards, an unnamed woman lays her hands on the planchette and asks the spirits of Halloween why Robert hasn’t called her yet. Growing tired of the game, she wanders aimlessly around her apartment until she hears a knock at her door. At her feet lies an old VHS tape,…
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…
The name “Stephen King” is synonymous with horror and indeed with movies in general. With such famous associations as “The Shining,” “Carrie,” “Misery,” “Salem’s Lot,” “Pet Cemetery” as well as “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” not to mention television horror “It,” “The Tommyknockers” and “The Stand,” the King brand is one that continues…
The Barber is a B-movie’s B-movie. While many of the tropes those well-acquainted with this type of film have come to know are present, several of them are approached uniquely or service the plot in ways far less tired than the tropes themselves. Truer to form still is the ridiculously overdone ending, another familiar element…
The problem with wisdom, we are told by a voiceover the moment Poker Night begins, is that you only get it after you need it. Hindsight, similarly, is like looking into a rear view mirror, unable to see what you’re going through until you’ve already passed it. Now that we know how important those words…
Phobias. They affect millions of people on a daily basis. Some, like the fear of the dark, public speaking and spiders, can be sympathized with. But having a fear of just about everything, up to and including laundromats? Well, that’s downright crazy, and Jack (Simon Pegg, “The World’s End”), the man who suffers from said…
By now those chosen few who’ve sought out Ben Wheatley’s latest, Sightseers (his next film, the English Civil War-set “A Field in England“, opens in UK cineplexes in July), have gotten their fill and hopefully developed an opinion. The film, unleashed upon U.S. audiences in limited release, is one of the darkest I’ve experienced and…
