Monthly Archive: September 2018

Ju-On: The Grudge

Directed by Takashi Shimizu

Viewed on Vudu

Summary: A horrible crime leaves a house burdened by a curse. More and more people get involved, leading to a disastrous outcome for everyone involved, including the viewer.

I have a confession to make. There are a ton of classic horror movies that I have yet to see. I do hope to change that soon, that is what most of Spooktober will be dedicated to, but as it stands there are tons of horror movies with killer reputations that for one reason or another I just never got around to seeing. I can’t say for sure where this movie falls on the ‘classic’ meter but Japanese horror has been revered by horror film nerds for some time now so I figured this was as good a place as any to start checking off boxes. There will definitely be more Asian horror films discussed here in the coming weeks so let’s kick that off by talking about one of the first movies to get an American remake, Ju-On: The Grudge.

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American Psycho

Directed by Mary Harron

Viewed on Amazon Prime

Summary: A narcissistic corporate exec indulges his increasingly deranged appetite for sex and violence. This movie is also a wonderful satire of corporate culture.

I’ll be honest and upfront with you all before we get too deep into American Psycho, I have seen this movie before. Usually I only review movies if I see them for the first time but I’m making an exception here because the last time I saw this movie was almost a decade ago and I figured that was enough time apart to come back with renewed interest. Also I really like American Psycho and I just wanted to talk about it.  I hope you can forgive me for this transgression, because the rest of the reviews this week will be for new movies.

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Asylum: The Lost Tapes (2015)

Directed by Dan T. Hall

Viewed on Amazon Prime

Summary: A group of people are interviewed about something while we review footage of people wandering around an abandoned building. This movie is exciting as it is original. Also the answer to the upcoming question is no.

Welcome to the latest review in my series of “picking random things from Amazon video that had short run times”! I was thinking of looking at another movie from Manny Velazquez, director of Clown Footage, but I figured that maybe I should cast a wider net to see if I find anything interesting. I kind of did, but not really in the way I expected when I found Asylum: The Lost Tapes, a found footage horror movie in the genre of “people walking around an abandoned building with spookyness edited in” with a slight twist. Now I haven’t really talked about a lot of these haunted  abandoned building movies but I have seen quite a few of them, movies like Grave Encounters and Archivo 253 among many others that kind of make this style of movie all blend together. So the real question is, does Asylum do enough to make it stand out from this ocean of haunted mental hospital movies?

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Mandy (2018)

Directed by Panos Cosmatos

Viewed In Theatre

Oh Nicolas Cage…you’ve had so many cinematic adventures over the years, your intensity and odd mannerisms have made you one of the most recognizable Hollywood stars in recent memory, even if your movie choices haven’t been the best. What has been a constant though is Cage’s unwavering commitment to giving every role 110% whether it deserves it or not. Not all of these roles need or even really benefit from Cage’s 110% but that’s just part of his charm, and the real challenge is finding a movie that makes proper use of his specific performances. Cage is definitely capable of showing a bit more nuance but there’s nothing more fun than an over the top Nicolas Cage performance when it is matched with the right film. And Mandy is the first film in years that has perfectly utilized Cage’s unique charms.

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Creep 2 (2017)

Directed by Patrick Brice

Viewed on Netflix

A few weeks ago I wrote about a little found footage movie that captured my heart, Creep. Creep immediately sucked me in with its devotion to the exact kind of horror that I love in found footage, and that is horror that is focused on things that aren’t quite right. Now that is pretty vague but what I mean by that is it achieved an atmosphere where I was presented with characters/events that were just a little off, not unrealistically off, just weird enough that they put you slightly on edge without knowing why. To know all my feelings about it you should just go back and read that review, but you don’t have to have seen the first movie to understand the second. But it helps. Because there are a TON of spoilers here if you haven’t seen the first film, so be warned all ye who read past here.

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The Bride (2017)

Directed by Svyatoslav Podgayevsky

Viewed on Amazon Prime

Hey guys! Back again with everyone’s favorite kind of movie, obscure Russian psychological horror films! Okay, so it isn’t THAT obscure, it is a somewhat recent wide release film, but I don’t watch that much foreign horror that isn’t Asian so any Russian movie would be a bit obscure for me. Let me paint you a picture of the exact circumstances that I watched this under; it is Labor Day and my fiance’s family had just left and we were looking for ways to unwind. We were relaxing and having a few drinks, which I don’t normally do when I watch things that I am planning on writing about, and we were trying to decide on a movie to watch. I wanted something lighter but we eventually ended up in the psychological horror section of Amazon Prime, like you do, and we picked The Bride, based on its interesting summary. From the first frame things didn’t go quite as we planned. Because the movie is dubbed. Very badly. And there was no option to watch it with subtitles. Hooray.

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Searching (2018)

Directed by Aneesh Chaganty

Viewed In Theatre

Summary: A young woman goes missing and her father tries desperately to find her in this insanely tense and emotional thriller.

I remember many months ago when I was seeing a movie, I forget which one, and one of the trailers started playing that I hadn’t seen before. I was vaguely aware that a sequel to Unfriended was coming out at this time so when I saw that this new movie was a screen based thriller I just assumed this was going to be that sequel, and that surprised me a bit because the trailer that I saw that day was actually intriguing. I kind of forgot about that trailer for a bit, those damn dog movies have done a number on my brain, so when I saw the trailer again a few weeks ago I remembered how excited I was to see some a movie done in this style that might be good. Although Unfriended 2 was generally disappointing I left that theatre hoping that someone might capitalize on this new style of found footage movies and make a movie that exemplified why this style could work and how good these kinds of movies could be. My hopes have been answered remarkably quickly, because Searching is that movie.

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