Horror - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Train To Busan’

To be honest I thought we had hit peak zombie interest around 2008 and 2009, as pop culture’s fascination with the stumbling, bumbling, and sometimes running, brain munching undead and that the genre would be dying down for awhile as everyone moved on to the next thing. And then the long running comic book series The Walking Dead got turned into the AMC series “The Walking Dead” in 2010 and now it seems like these damn zombies are gonna be around for much longer than I originally thought. What a shock. I was wrong about something.

Again.

So now in 2016, what makes a zombie movie worthwhile? What can be done with the genre? “Train to Busan” answers these questions by setting up its own rules for their undead, coming up with distinct characters with clearly defined motivations for what they do, and finding a new setting for this type of story, in this case, on a South Korean bullet train during the morning commute right at the very beginning of a cataclysmic outbreak.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Blair Witch’

“Blair Witch” is a sequel to one of the breakout horror hits of 1999, “The Blair Witch Project,” the super low budget movie that popularized the “found footage” genre, which unfortunately persists to this day. So if we are going to get another found footage horror movie set in the woods, might as well go back to the original and pay respect by just coming up with a sequel that builds off the mythology of the first in interesting albeit confounding ways.

(As “Blair Witch” chooses to totally ignore “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” then we shall as well.)

James (James Allen McCune) sees a YouTube video that claims to be more found footage from the Burkittsville, Maryland woods in which people have reported strange things for years, and which is the same woods that a trio of documentary filmmakers became lost forever, the footage of their horrors and tribulations being found by someone and coldly edited together and released as a movie (as the conceit of these films would lead you to believe if you follow them to their logical conclusions).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Don’t Breathe’

“Don’t Breathe” is a horror movie that is mostly about suspense and tension, as a group of teenage delinquents in economically depressed Detroit decide to break into a blind man’s house in order to steal some money they believe he has, but the old blind man is an Army veteran and can take care of himself, which he does when he discovers the intruders, killing one almost instantly, and spending the rest of the movie hunting down the other two within the confines of his house. The robbers soon discover that this old loner has some secrets which he is determined to keep within the house, and he can’t let any of them get out, which means they have to get out of his house before he can kill them. The stakes don’t get much higher than that.

The only real problem I had with this movie is how the lead characters all suck, as in, they are shitty people. Much like the recent “Hell or High Water” or other fairly recent movies like “99 Homes” and “The Big Short” and “Take Shelter,” this is a movie that takes place in post-recession America, with the ultimate evil forces at play being the destroyed economy and the lack of opportunity for people left in the wake of this destruction. It is a tough road when you have a lead character that sets out to hurt others in some way just so they can get ahead, even if their reasoning is ultimately righteous. In “Don’t Breathe,” one of the three robbers in the movie is given the obligatory family-member-needs-them burden, which is shown and explained in one scene, so while this is the character’s motivation, it still feels like something thrown in just to try to justify this character’s shitty decisions.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Apollo 18’

The “found footage” mockumentary genre has been going surprisingly strong since “The Blair Witch Project” popularized the filmmaking style in the 1990’s, and it was only a matter of time before the genre found its way into outer space. In what might be the first totally lunar-based horror film, “Apollo 18” purports to be an assemblage of discovered NASA footage detailing a secret Moon mission and revealing the apparent horrors that have prevented humans from returning.

Three astronauts go up in Apollo 18 in a secret mission to plant little radars for the Department of Defense, apparently to help keep an eye on Soviet missiles that might come their way. Once at the moon, John Grey (Ryan Robbins, AVPR: Aliens vs Predator – Requiem) stays in the spacecraft in orbit, and the lunar module is taken down by Ben Anderson (Warren Christie, Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation) and Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles). After they touch down, Anderson and Walker set on their two-day mission to install the DoD radars and motion sensor cameras, though they never explain why these cameras are installed (obviously it’s so we can have a movie in the first place, but still, they never explain it and the astronauts don’t question it). Very quickly, these two guys discover that something is a little strange on the surface of the moon, and the cameras catch little glimpses of movement here and there, and it’s a slow burn to the gradual reveal of what’s really going on.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Ghostbusters’

“Ghostbusters” is the story of a trio of scientists with expertise in the paranormal and how they opened a company in New York City in order to investigate a series of ghost sightings and supernatural activities. As they develop their tech and grow closer as a group, they find themselves at odds with the city and federal government who want them to stay out of public view and not cause a panic, which becomes difficult for this new team as they find themselves facing bigger and bigger threats, until finally it all comes to a head when they have to engage in a very public battle against a gigantic, building-sized foe determined to destroy the city and everyone in it.

Yup, that’s the plot for both the original 1984 movie and this new “Ghostbusters.” The details, however, all the little things that connect these big plot points are all very different. These are different characters with their own sets of problems, and the way these ghosts are summoned and the nature of these ghosts and what they do is all very different, and even the bickering between the city officials and the team takes on a different tenor, as this NYC mayor and his employees are much more media savvy. It is completely the same but also totally different and in a good way, making for an experience that is alternately classic and surprising. That doesn’t mean this movie couldn’t have been better, but it also works on its own terms in a pretty endearing way.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Purge: Election Year’

“The Purge: Election Year” is the capper to the trilogy no one saw coming, the third film in a series written and directed by James DeMonaco, and if you’ve been following along since the first movie, then you will be a little surprised to see the scope of this world opened up even more, and now a rather complete picture has been painted in a very visceral manner, with the thematic elements of class warfare and wealth inequality become the driving force behind an insane premise for a movie, let alone three of them.

The basic premise was barely laid out in the first movie, in which Ethan Hawke played a guy who installed security systems in the homes of people who could afford to barricade themselves up during Purge Night, the one night of the year in which all crime is legal for 12 hours, in an effort to let people “get it out of their systems” so that they would be cool to each other for the other 8,748 hours of the years. His character quickly discovered even his family wasn’t safe, as a bunch of psychopaths broke into their home and terrorized them all. The second movie drops this character and picks up with a new guy, who was going to use Purge Night to kill the guy who DUI-manslaughtered his son, but instead wound up saving people out on the streets and not going through with the murder. In this second movie, it is explained that people suspect the Purge was a tool by the government to eliminate the impoverished portions of their constituency. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Neon Demon’

“The Neon Demon” is the latest fetishistic ode from Nicholas Winding Refn to the violent and off kilter exploitation films of the 1970’s. His movies like “Only God Forgives” and “Drive” and “Valhalla Rising” center on a violent, malevolent entity roaming through life and dispatching others in increasingly intense and terrible ways, and this violent entity has morphed into something altogether different, into a terrible malaise and overriding sense of danger, definitively draped over the entirety of “The Neon Demon,” as we enter a surreal world of modeling that takes more from Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” than it does any Victoria Secret catalog or runway fashion show. What if David Cronenberg and David Lynch teamed up to make “Zoolander?” That’s the direction we’re going with in “The Neon Demon,” equal parts gorgeous and grotesque, a nightmarish descent into the seedy underbelly of models and haute fashion.

And while being beautiful and striking to look at and definitely unique when compared to the rest of the movies out there for consumption right now, I do wish that “The Neon Demon” was better because while I liked it, I did not love it like I wanted to, and that’s because while it is beautiful it is also pretty vapid. Now, is that itself a remark on the fashion industry? Is this a snide critique of models and their chosen profession? More than likely it is a coincidence that a movie involving fashion is almost entirely artifice but it fits the subject matter nonetheless. And a movie does not have to be profound or “deep” to be good or entertaining, but if it is going to be shallow, than it better move briskly and efficiently, and unfortunately “The Neon Demon” does take a little while to get to the real craziness and once that’s done, the movie has about three different places it could have ended but decides to do one more scene. And then one more. And then one more. The overall film could have been tightened in editing, that’s for sure. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Shallows’

“The Shallows” is a surprisingly good killer shark thriller, a straightforward story of survival against all odds, a classic mankind versus nature tale, well shot and well acted by the one actor tasked with carrying a huge chunk of this movie on her own. It gets tense and exciting and even a little scary here and there and at just under 90 minutes long, this is the kind of movie that gets started quick, hits the gas pedal the whole way and slams headlong into a pretty spectacular ending.

Outside of “Jaws,” the killer shark movie bar has been set VERY low and “The Shallows” does a good job of elevating this bar much higher, eschewing the goofiness and campiness of the much more baffingly popular killer shark movies out there and going for more of a naturalistic approach, allowing the intensity of the situation and the bleakness of our main character’s odds to be the prevailing characteristics of this story.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Crush The Skull’

“Crush The Skull” is an indie horror-comedy, which is something that is pretty hard to pull off. Comedy always works well with horror, but usually when jokes and gags are used sparingly to help alleviate some of the tension built up by the film, but making a movie that is equal parts is much harder, because how do you make something scary while constantly making fun of the situation but also how do you make something scary if you keep deflating the horror with a bunch of silly jokes? Throw on top of that the fact that this is obviously a low budget movie with a somewhat ambitious idea, and you have a recipe for something that threatens to not come together and leave the audience dissatisfied.

Somehow “Crush The Skull” does manage to find a nice middle ground between the two genres. Ollie (Chris Dinh) and Blair (Katie Savoy) are a couple and they are also burglars. A screw up in the beginning gets them in some debt that they need to get out of quickly, which forces them to make a bad decision and agree to work a job set up by Blair’s incompetent brother Connor (Chris Reidell) and his one-man crew Riley (Tim Chiou). Very shortly after starting this job, the foursome realize that they unknowingly broke in to the home of a deranged killer of some sort, the type of creepy weirdo who apparently kidnaps girls and keeps them locked up in a dingy basement of torture and murder, and they have to try to get out of this makeshift prison before they become the killer’s next victims. A simple yet effective set up that is a blend of “The Collector” and “The Ladykillers,” this movie is mostly quite solid and entertaining, though it definitely isn’t perfect.

Review: ’10 Cloverfield Lane’

According to producer JJ Abrams, “10 Cloverfield Lane” is not a direct sequel to the 2008 found footage monster movie called “Cloverfield,” but instead is hopefully the beginning of a series of movies that will fall under a Cloverfield-themed banner, essentially an anthology of genre movies that will be similar in spirit and tone to each other but will be different stories going in different directions. Like “The Twilight Zone” or “Tales From The Crypt,” the word Cloverfield will theoretically start to mean something more to people than just “giant monster.” And with “10 Cloverfield Lane,” it appears that they have started this journey of a thousand miles with the proper first steps.

The cool thing about “10 Cloverfield Lane” is how the story and plot are both quite small and contained to a single set and only a few characters, but the scope of the movie ends up being pretty epic. It’s actually a great example of how a movie can give an audience just enough so that they can make bigger leaps with their imaginations, wondering how the details provided actually continue to extend throughout this world logically. We don’t need to actually see the full picture, just give a few smartly chosen details and let the audience do the rest.