joanneburton-66331 Reviews

X (II) (2022)

Slasher With Heft

[9/10 · 29 March 2022]

Ti West made a big splash when he landed on the indie horror scene and has brought us several terror tales of varying subject matter, subgenre, and quality, but can't say he's not interesting and open to trying new things.

X is West's attempt at making a classic 70's style slasher film along the lines of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but he puts his own unique stamp on the proceedings with his trademark attention to characters and mood. The pace might be a little lethargic for some, but it delivers with it's bloody last act.

Gore fans will rejoice when the film's lead villain starts going on a rampage and taking down the participants of a low budget porno shoot. Eyes are gouged out and people are fed to crocodiles in between your more traditional pitchforkings and stabbings.

Master (I) (2022)

Who Are We Afraid of Here?

[5/10 · 20 March 2022]

Racism is alive and well in this country and, if you don't believe me, all you have to do is turn on the news. Master seems to want to tackle these real world problems and especially the small, insidious microaggressions that POC have to deal with on a day to day basis. If that's all Master has set out to do, it has succeeded, but it's also forgotten to give us a compelling story to go along with it and tie its themes into something worthwhile.

Regina Hall plays the new "master" of a mostly white college who is having issues trying to fit in with her white colleagues and come to terms with the school's racist past (and present). At the same time, a new student is struggling with trying to fit in as the only black girl in her class and is becoming the scapegoat for every issue on campus while thinking the spirit of a witch is coming to her at night and attacking her.

While Master does a great job in creating an oppressive mood and making us feel for the characters having to wade through this pond of both subtle and obvious forms of racism, it never really establishes what the threat is. Is it the rumored witch that haunts the campus? The ghost of another black student who apparently killed herself in her dorm room in the 60's? A deranged slasher who goes around targeting students of color and making their deaths look like suicides? Maggots that appear out of nowhere and are never brought up again? Are these characters making these things up in their heads or are they being gaslit? Master had no answers and feels like 5 different college-set horror films shoved together.

Scream (I) (2022)

A Fine Sequel

[6/10 · 20 March 2022]

It's been a decade since the last Scream and without Wes Craven at the helm, this new sequel seemed like a fool's errand without a lot of hope, but the filmmakers are clever enough to justify this film's reason for existence and bring enough new material to the table to keep it from being a total loss.

Ghostface has returned and lured Samantha, a former Woodsboro resident, back to town to help solve the mystery and figure out who could be behind the infamous mask this time. Could someone be trying to make a "requel" by rebooting the series with a fresh new cast while still bringing the legacy characters back to make things more legitimate?

It's nice to see Arquette, Campbell, and Cox back and given more than just fan service cameos. Not all the twists and turns work and Kevin Williamson's ear for dialogue is notably absent, but this new Scream has a few nice surprises and it's not a bad way to kill two hours.

Fresh (2022)

Well-Seasoned Horror Comedy

[8/10 · 20 March 2022]

Sebastian Stan takes a break from playing superheroes to star in this at times charming and disturbing horror comedy about the dangers of dating in our current times.

Stan plays a charming stranger who runs into Daisy Edgar-Jones seemingly by accident after she's been through a really bad date. They have excellent chemistry and, soon, they're seeing a lot more of each other and agreeing to go off to a secluded vacation house for a weekend of fun.

In classic horror fashion, this would-be romance is turned on its head the minute they leave town and the film's heroine discovers that Mr. Perfect isn't so perfect after all.

Fresh has too many excellent surprises to risk spoiling them all, but one could see some of them being a little too gory for the comedy crowd. Don't watch if you have an aversion to a little blood and guts with your rom com.

Dominique (1979)

Slow and Unexciting

[5/10 · 22 June 2020]

Take a bit of Gaslight and a shred of Diabolique and you might have some idea what you're getting yourself into with Dominique - a well made and, at times, painfully tedious chiller that never really rises to the occasion.

You have a wealthy woman named, you guessed it, Dominique who recently had an accident and is having trouble getting back to normal. She believes her home is haunted and everyone around her thinks she's just being silly. Things heat up a bit when Dominique is found having, apparently, committed suicide, but what happens when her body disappears from the grave? Is she out for revenge?

Dominique at least has a stellar cast between Jean Simmons, Jenny Agutter, Cliff Robertson and many other well known faces. There's also a good deal of atmosphere and mood, but there aren't many scares or genuinely thrilling moments mainly because it's hard to care about most of the characters. One immediately suspects Robertson's husband character of foul play from the start, so making him the center of the film without humanizing him seems like a major mistake.

The Final Conflict (1981)

The Least Effective in the Series

[5/10 · 4 May 2020]

As good as Sam Neill is as Damien, The Final Conflict never feels like it rises to the occasion. Certainly, there are still a few stand out murder set pieces that made the first two films so memorable, but the story itself is much less interesting and the ending becomes downright laughable.

If you're a completeist, give it a watch. If not, there are better things you could be doing.

Billy Club (2013)

Fantastic Camerawork for a Forgettable Story

[6/10 · 16 October 2019]

Most great indie horror films are a testament to hard work, a good script, and great cast in spite of lesser production values and a series of technical flaws. There's potential in them even if they need a fresh coat of paint. Billy Club is, surprisingly, the opposite.

Billy Club looks like a million bucks. There's no doubt the people behind this movie worked hard, long hours to make this movie look as professional and polished as its low budget would allow. Framing and angles are inventive and cinematic and most sound cues are crisp and well-mixed.

Billy Club should be a head above the rest of these low budget slasher flicks, but it's not. Despite the impressive glow up, this owes more to the no-budget absurd straight to video slashers of the early 2000s than any of the golden age classics like My Bloody Valentine or Prom Night.

As a concept, Billy Club seems promising. You see, in the early 80's, a few kids and their baseball coach were found murdered on the field and a crazy kid named Billy was sent away for it. Years later, he's let go from the nuthouse and starts taking out the rest of his surviving teammates because they once pulled a near-deadly prank on him. He's actually starting to make sense and I can understand his reasonings. These people are awful.

Billy Club suffers from that ever-present likability problem most post-2000 slasher flicks have. No one in this movie is worth caring about and, even if they are, they end up doing something incredibly stupid just seconds later. The amount of characters in this film who get out of a car in a secluded area and just start walking into the woods for seemingly no reason is staggering. You can feel the screenwriters realizing they desperately need to find a reason to get these characters alone, but this was the best they could come up with. And who can blame them? With characters as shallow as this, that probably was the thing that made the most sense for them at that point in the story.

What Billy Club does get right, it really gets right. The kill scenes are incredibly grisly and there are a few unforgettable images throughout the film. When the film's heroine comes across a macabre art installation of her friends at a secluded lake, you'll be hard pressed to not gasp in awe. It's a truly unforgettable image and any film is lucky to possess at least one of those, so you can't write Billy Club off completely.

It could have used another draft or two before production, but Billy Club does have its saving graces.

The Wife (I) (2017)

Glenn Close Makes It Worthwhile

[6/10 · 11 September 2019]

One of the finest actors in the business, Glenn Close gives an excellent performance in what is an, otherwise, pedestrian and predictable slog of a movie called The Wife. It deals with the wife of a prominent writer who's getting a lifetime achievement award at one of those pretentious European festivals and her facade of subservient womanly goodness begins to fade as she comes to terms with how little she was able to accomplish due to her doting and fixating on him.

It's an important story and one that deserves to be told (and told well), but The Wife never connects when the camera strays from Close's face. It's almost as if the script she's performing has huge chunks in it that no one else got. When we see her face, it's alive and brimming with the suggestion of a life wasted. It's brilliant, subtle work that deserves a better film.

Jonathan Pryce as the writer can only play the cliches he's been written, but he doesn't elevate the material as Close does and feels like a second banana most of the time. Christian Slater gives off a nice smarmy sleaziness as a writer who wants the truth about who the real talent in the family might be.

The Wife is mostly frustrating and could have used a few more passes of the script. Glenn Close makes it worth seeing.

House of Wax (2005)

Well Made "Remake"

[8/10 · 2 August 2019]

House of Wax may be inordinately long for a slasher film, but it's not without its perks. It doesn't share much with the original Vincent Price film besides the title and the concept of dead people being encased in wax to make the exhibits extra lifelike, but its story is worth telling anyway.

House of Wax tells the well worn story of a carload of young people who, due to a series of bad circumstances and poor planning, end up in an abandoned town where the star attraction is a wax museum (that's actually MADE of wax - don't think about that too much) and the only people alive are a mechanic and his psychotic, bloodthirsty brother who have been killing people and dipping their bodies into wax to use as exhibits.

The cast of young people are better than average and even Paris Hilton doesn't embarrass herself in her tiny role (she's also given one of the smartest lines in the script where she urges one of her friends not to investigate a funky smell in the woods). The characters are given a little bit more material to chew on that usual with the first 20-45 minutes being mostly character development, which is a rarity for horror (especially slasher) films. Some of it is worthwhile and adds some dimension to the characters and some of it could have definitely been streamlined to shave off a good 5-10 minutes.

The real star here are the effects which are appropriately nasty featuring severed fingers, pole jammed into heads, knives in feet, brutal baseball beatings to the face, tendon cuttings, and one particularly grisly premature wax burial.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Lands Squarely In The Middle

[5/10 · 27 July 2019]

We all need to learn that nothing is truly sacred in Hollywood, so we might as well just embrace these remakes and hope that, every now and then, one of them will turn out ok and be able to hold itself up to the original on its own terms. A Nightmare on Elm Street comes incredibly close to standing out from the original film, but for every leap forward, it takes a few steps backwards until it's straddling the line between the two and not really committing fully to anything original.

The story is, more or less, the same with a group of teenagers experiencing horrific nightmares involving a burnt man with a glove of knives who is slicing and dicing them. In both films, it's revealed that this man was someone their parents murdered in a fit of vigilante justice after he'd been let free for molesting their children. The new film adds a twist questioning if Freddy was actually guilty or innocent.

The new Nightmare has a much bigger budget than the original film, so it's odd that the effects work isn't nearly as impressive as the original film. A bit of Freddy's makeup seems computer generated and a few of the other effects resemble a cheap 90's video game. The cast is fairly strong with Katie Cassidy, Kyle Gallner, and Thomas Dekker standing out as three of the terrified teens. Rooney Mara is the weak link among the them as Nancy. She's made the choice to play the character as moody and depressive, which makes her hard to root for and dull to watch.

As Freddy, Jackie Earle Haley can only do so much to step out from the shadow of Robert Englund, but he does a good job and brings a different, more pervy energy to the character which adds a little threat that his silly makeup job keeps threatening to take away.