Category: Horror

Hellraiser (2022)
Directed by David Bruckner

As a franchise, Hellraiser has been through a lot. With evil video games, trips to space, multiple police procedurals, and a low-budget remake so bad that Doug Bradley refused to appear in it; the Hellraiser brand has kind of taken a beating. Revitalizing franchises has been all the rage for these past few years, with Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Predator all getting new entries recently, so I wasn’t shocked when I heard that Hellraiser was going to get a new entry, the 11th in its franchise. What did surprise me was who was announced at the helm, David Bruckner, who directed the excellent film The Night House. Bruckner made an impression on me with The Night House’s gothic atmosphere and supernatural horror elements, a lot of which reminded me thematically of Hellraiser, and he seemed to be a logical choice for this reboot. After all the pain it’s gone through, Hellraiser deserves another good movie, did we finally get one?

Barbarian
Directed & Written by Zach Cregger

Pearl
Directed, Written, and Edited by Ti West

If you’re not into independent horror then both of these movies may have flown under your radar, but for horror nerds like myself, this was a super fun double feature that is only really possible around this time of year. Both of these are kind of on the same wavelength and I don’t want to go into too much detail on either one, so I’ll combine these into one post.

We’re All Going To The World’s Fair
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Things have been a little slow around here lately, I’ve missed out on some big movies that came out, ones that I even enjoyed, and I am planning to talk about Nope and The Black Phone, but I’ve been extremely busy with life and stuff. Seeing as Spooktober is almost upon us, I’m going to get back into the swing of things by talking about a new movie that was recently added to HBOMax, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair. All the drama going on with HBOMax aside, there are some quality original horror movies up there, like The Empty Man, which you should see before it gets removed in a few days, so I was hoping this would be another good addition to their library and was looking forward to this coming out. Has it lived up to that hope? Let’s get into it!

Mad God (2022)
Written & Directed by Phil Tippett

Some of you may not have heard about Mad God before, which is understandable. Even though its creator, Phil Tippett, has worked on big-name franchises like Star Wars and RoboCop, Mad God was a Stop Motion animated passion project that Tippett worked on for 30 years, a true labor of love that left a lot of weird horror fans, like me, waiting as patiently as we could for it to finally be released. It’s here. And it’s everything I hoped for and more!

Men (2022)
Directed & Written by Alex Garland

Alex Garland may not be the biggest name in film, but he’s worked for the past decade on a series of movies that have generally received critical approval, if not always box office success. I personally am a fan of Garland’s, from his work on Dredd, to the great visuals and concepts in Annihilation, and of course Ex Machina, Garland’s science fiction masterpiece that introduced me to the wonders of Oscar Isaac being allowed to act. So when a trailer for a new Alex Garland film came out, even an incredibly vague trailer, of course, I was quite hyped. After a series of scheduling conflicts stopped me from seeing it sooner, I’ve finally gone out and experienced the latest Garland weirdness, so I can now judge whether it stands up to his previous films. And the answer is a resounding ‘kinda?’.

Morbius (2022)
Director: Daniel Espinosa

There’s been a lot of negativity around Morbius, so I wanted to start this review by saying something positive for a change. Morbius really stimulated my intellectual curiosity, I left that theater and my mind buzzed with questions. Sure, they were questions like, “Why would Sony unleash Morbius on an unsuspecting world?”, “At what point did everyone on set give up?”, and, “Why didn’t anything happen in that movie?”, but those are questions nonetheless. I’m still trying to figure out why Sony took Morbius, a character that isn’t exactly iconic or particularly deep, and gave him a feature film as a debut. I could see introducing him as a side character in Venom 2 and then, if he becomes a fan favorite, getting a spin-off, but not an immediate solo film. That’s enough of that though because now I need to get into the nitty-gritty and explain why Morbius is the cinematic equivalent of waiting two years to cross a street, taking one step into a crosswalk, and getting immediately hit by a bus.

Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City
Directed by Johannes Roberts

I was in denial for a long time, but the warning signs were always there. A Thanksgiving release to avoid competing with other horror movies, not a single review up and no buzz online, a final trailer that used the He-Man meme song for irony(?), and really rough-looking CGI in the trailers that actually showed something. Even with all of this, I still hoped that somehow Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City would be okay. Not even okay, just, entertainingly bad. I would settle for laughing at the movie, so long as I was having fun. Resident Evil didn’t even rise to that. This is one for the record books. Whenever people talk about the worst video game movies, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is going to have to be part of that conversation, because this movie hurt me.

Last Night In Soho
Directed by Edgar Wright

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Edgar Wright, but really how can you not be? The Cornetto trilogy alone is a wonderful collection of movies that has a little something for everyone, and even his foray into documentaries with The Sparks Brothers was a rollicking good time that captured the wit and creativity of a band that I hadn’t even heard of before and turned me into a fan. Needless to say, I was excited to learn that Wright’s new project was a straight horror movie, and the trailers immediately grabbed me with their unique premise, sense of style, and not giving the entire plot away in the preview. After finally seeing Last Night in Soho, I can happily announce that it did not disappoint!

Last Night in Soho focuses on Ellie, a young aspiring fashion designer who leaves the countryside for London to attend a prestigious school of fashion. While dealing with the difficulties of adjusting to city life, Ellie, who is also mildly psychic and no that isn’t a spoiler it is from the first scene, begins having dreams about the life of another young woman from the 60s who she feels connected to, dreams that begin pleasantly but soon take a dark turn, a turn that may endanger Ellie in the present. There’s so much about Last Night in Soho that I love that I won’t even attempt to get into due to spoilers, but let me start by saying that the performances here are phenomenal. Thomasin Mackenzie, who was also great in Leave No Trace and Jojo Rabbit, Anya-Taylor Joy, Matt Smith, even all the side characters we meet, are pitch-perfect and doing exactly what they all need to do to sell this as distressingly real.

Great Edgar Wright movies are generally also well written, and Last Night in Soho is no exception. The main plot is a clever use of horror movie conventions, there’s a lot of A Nightmare On Elm Street Influence without this ever feeling like a ripoff, more of an evolution of the concept, but beyond the story, there’s a thematic richness where everything builds on itself and provides insightful commentary on the nature and dangers of nostalgia, and how to deal with that in the real world. All of this is done while advancing the story, crafting memorable characters, and dazzling the audience with Wright’s established visual style. I’m such a big fan of Wright’s and Last Night in Soho is a rundown of everything that makes his work great. And I would be remiss to not comment on the stunning soundtrack featuring Anya Taylor-Joy’s surprisingly great singing.

I can’t recommend this movie to everyone though, and I won’t give spoilers per se, but I will get into some of the bits people might find triggering. One of the bigger themes of Last Night in Soho is the real danger that women live with on a day-to-day basis from men, a theme that carries through and informs the harder-edged segments of Last Night in Soho. Sexual trafficking is a big part of certain plot points, and while the film never gets too graphic in the gory details of this, it is super uncomfortable, intentionally so, and would definitely make this movie very difficult for some people to watch. The realism I mentioned earlier makes it even more difficult, this isn’t some throwaway shock value plot element, this is realistic and serious and upsetting. If that is something that would make you unable to enjoy the movie, I understand and would never want to pressure you to watch this, but if you are okay with these feelings, I would strongly recommend Last Night in Soho. If you can still catch it in the theater, do so. If not, it’ll be streaming soon enough.

Antlers (2021)

Directed by Scott Cooper

My memory isn’t quite what it used to be, but I’m pretty sure I saw a trailer for this Indigenous folklore themed horror film before the pandemic and was looking forward to it. Smash cut to one apocalypse later and it finally came out, arriving strangely at the end of October rather than in the middle (I guess they really didn’t want to compete with Halloween Kills) ready to try to satisfy my need for folk horror. I was stoked for Antlers, it’s based around the story of the Wendigo which is super cool, its setting of the poor rural Pacific Northwest is unique, and it even has the always delightful Guillermo Del Toro producing. With all that said, it’s really disappointing that Antlers is just okay.

To briefly describe the story, a teacher in a small town in Oregon investigates what’s going on with a disturbed student of hers, finding that the boy is involved in a weird situation with some type of spirit. This narrative winds up going a lot of different places and touching on a lot of different ideas, probably because this was based on a novel that would have had more time to flesh these ideas out, but there isn’t enough time spent on any individual concept, so Antlers reads more like a watery soup of social problems than a sharp satire of rural culture. The big problem here is that Antlers is built very much as an artistic satirical horror film; the atmosphere is oppressive, the pacing is methodical, the plot takes itself incredibly seriously and touches on topics like addiction, child abuse, the problems of rural policing, poverty, environmental destruction. None of those things are bad, but when the plot is aimless, the characters are dull, the dialogue is screenwriting 101, seriously someone says “There has to be a rational explanation for all this!” *gags*, then all the posturing and good intentions can’t make the movie interesting. I don’t hate Antlers but it didn’t really do anything for me, which is a shame because the visuals were pretty decent and the actor who plays the disturbed student is surprisingly good. I’d say give this one a pass, if you’re in the mood for folk horror that’s got shades of fantasy maybe go for Pan’s Labyrinth instead or Midsommar.