Category: Horror

The Night House (2021)

Directed by David Bruckner

For those of you who have never heard of this movie, don’t worry, I had no idea it was coming out either. I try to stay on top of the new release schedule but for some reason, this one slipped by me until a few days ago, which I must shamefully mark as a personal failure of a wannabe movie critic. But with the wacky release schedules of everything right now, it is understandable though to lose track so I guess I can absolve myself of this crime. With that inner turmoil solved, let’s get into The Night House, a movie I knew nothing about going in, save two things, 1) It’s a horror movie, and 2) It’s a ghost story. That’s enough for me to give it a shot, but did The Night House manage to exceed the no expectations I went in with?

M. Night Shyamalan has emerged as one of the more divisive filmmakers in recent years, a far cry from the praise he received when he burst onto the scene with The Sixth Sense. I’ve seen some of his movies (I’ve watched The Last Airbender probably 10 times and it is funnier every single time) but I’d never seen a few of his better-regarded entries, so therefore we have the Shyamathon! I watched these over a few days and there is more Shyamalan in my head than I ever wanted. How did this all go? Let’s get right to it with The Sixth Sense! 

Old (2021)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

To coincide with Shyamalan’s first feature in years, I decided to get a little more intimate with the divisive filmmaker’s body of work. I’ve been doing a bit of a Shyamalan marathon, a Shyama-thon if you will, with some family, and it’s been fascinating seeing the ebb and flow of his career. More than just watching them as individual movies, seeing his style become obvious, his likes and dislikes, and his little quirks all emerge in these movies has been a hell of a ride. There have been high and low points, but regardless of that, this was all a great primer for his latest film Old, a movie that is very much in line with his previous works. Will Old stand the test of time with The Sixth Sense, or crumble into infamy with The Happening? Let’s get into it.

Censor (2021)
Directed & Co-written by Prano Bailey-Bond

In the early 1980s British society collectively clutched their pearls at a wave of releases of violent and graphic films that they dubbed ‘Video Nasties’. These films were blamed for all manner of social problems by just about everyone, which was certainly a lot easier than trying to solve any of those problems, and by the mid-80s, a newly empowered Film Classifications Board stepped in to protect the British Isles from the terrible siege of movies they deemed harmful through the magical power of censorship. My thoughts about censorship are probably easy to guess – like a lot of horror fans, it rubs me the wrong way. But there is at least one good thing to come out of this era, the British horror film Censor.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
Directed by Michael Chaves

I’ve talked about two spin-off movies from The Conjuring Universe, Annabelle Comes Home which was alright, and The Nun, which would have been tough to sit through if I had been sober, but I haven’t talked about any of the main series yet, and there’s a reason for that: I don’t like them. That’s not to say I hate them, I recognize that The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 are slick well-made movies that happen to not appeal to me in any way at all. It’s not that I dislike exorcism or possession movies, I happen to love The Last Exorcism, but there’s just a blandness to The Conjuring series that I can’t stomach. I’m going to try to be fair here, but I wanted to make my starting point clear as to my thoughts on this popular franchise. All that said, let’s talk about The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Remove The Number From My Title!

Slaxx
Directed By Elza Kephart

You may be wondering why I’m talking about a movie you’ve probably never heard of when there’s a shiny new Conjuring movie that was just released. The honest answer is, I’m on vacation right now. My vacation started before Conjuring 3 came out and is still going on as we’re nearing its second weekend in theatres. I do plan on seeing this as soon as I get back but for now, a movie that I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while is going to take the spotlight. Also, I should probably see The Conjuring 2…and rewatch The Conjuring because I remember next to nothing about it. Now that that’s all out of the way, let me tell you about the Killer Jeans movie you didn’t know you needed in your life, Slaxx.

Separation
Directed by William Brent Bell

A lot of you are probably wondering what this movie is, which is a sensible question because even though it was out in theaters for weeks, I never saw a single ad for it. Not a trailer, not a poster, no buzz online, the only way I found about it was from glancing through the ‘Now Playing’ list at my local theater, and even then I was a little apprehensive. A lot of what’s playing right now, Spiral, A Quiet Place II, that new 101 Dalmatians thing, I saw trailers for all of them before the movie theaters shut down last year. Not so for Separation. Separation was snuck into theatres right as they were opening up, and now it’s being ushered out when real movies like A Quiet Place II will be taking up that real estate. I can’t blame anyone not wanting to promote Separation though, because it is mind-bogglingly awful. Such a shockingly bad movie that I’m fascinated how it even got made and how no one caught any of the mistakes that any viewer would notice no matter how little attention they were paying to the screen. Now that I’ve played my cards and revealed how I feel about Separation I’ll just say that spoilers are incoming and this is going to be more of a rant session than a review. Hope you can still have fun with that.