Tag: horror
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
I just saw I Saw the TV Glow and it was honestly fantastic. What starts as a typical if somewhat atmospheric YA drama about disaffected high schoolers in the ‘90s bonding over a television show becomes stranger and spookier until it’s an almost David Lynch-ian mystery, with resonant themes of fear and self-loathing. When I…
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MaXXXine (2024)
I just saw MaXXXine and it was somewhat disappointing, sadly. The terminus of what until now had been a pretty great trilogy, starting with ‘70s-set slasher pastiche X (2022) and then World War I-set prequel Pearl (2022) – the latter shot back to back with its predecessor and starring writer/director Ti West’s collaborator Mia Goth…
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In a Violent Nature (2024)
I just saw In a Violent Nature and it was really good. I would have thought that there were no more places to take the slasher film, a subgenre that’s been played both straight and ironically in just about every permutation imaginable. But this Canadian entry manages it, pitching somewhere between (very) black humour and…
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Kinds of Kindness (2024)
I just saw Kinds of Kindness and it was certainly an experience. A trilogy of short stories themed around sex, relationships, abuse, and power, it may be director/co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ coldest and most contemptuous film, with a title as playfully un-apt on a surface level as Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), another film about sad and…
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The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
Somewhat dismissed as a weak entry in the Hammer canon of horror and monster movies, including by AllMovie as the worst of the studio’s Frankenstein strand, The Evil of Frankenstein, the 1964 continuation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, actually isn’t bad at all, really. It stars Peter Cushing as Dr Frankenstein, this time assisted by…
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Motel Hell (1980)
All the way back in 1980, over 15 years before Scream (1996), slasher films were still being parodied. Back then, movies like Motel Hell were referred to as “sleazoids” and “geek shows” by unimpressed critics including Roger Ebert, who nonetheless gave this film a rare-for-the-genre 3/4 for bringing laughter to the formula. A sun-scorched and…
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The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)
So I just saw Da Strange Peeps: Chatper Wun, and surprise surprise, it was a colossal mound of turd. Full disclosure: I’m not really the person to review this movie because I hate the Strangers franchise and concept. The first film, written and directed by then-newbie Bryan Bertino in 2008, was in his words loosely…
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Dracula AD 1972 (1972)
Dracula AD 1972 is one of the not fondly remembered Hammer films to star Christopher Lee as the eternal bloodsucker, the penultimate entry before The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) finally stuck a stake in the franchise’s heart. When AD came out it was widely panned and it seems to have retained its dire reception…
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The Baby (1973)
One of the… stranger horror films of the 1970s, director Ted Post’s The Baby was recently reviewed on YouTube channel RedLetterMedia’s “Best of the Worst” strand and described as one of the best that they’ve seen on that show. It’s certainly something. The plot sees Mrs Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) meet social worker Ann Gentry (Anjanette…
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Immaculate (2024)
You’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re in a glut of the sub-genre that is Catholic horror movies, after last year’s The Nun II (2023), the upcoming First Omen (2024), and now Immaculate, directed by Michael Mohan and written by Andrew Lobel. How about, for once, a horror movie where a couple of atheists sit…
I Just Saw 