It’s amazing how James Wan once went from the man who brought us movies about a maniac torturing people to one of the most horrifying ghost tales ever brought to the big screen. “The Conjuring” lives up to its hype as a slow boil and immensely scary supernatural tale about an average family terrorized by a vicious demonic entity that’s intent on ruining their foundation from the inside out.
Director Jim Wynorski offers up a sometimes clever, but inferior follow up to the original Robert Englund film, that doesn’t really advance the narrative so much as it treads water. Rather than explore the themes of the apocalypse, and the eventual war of good and evil dictated by the hotline, we’re once again subjected to a tale about the hotline wreaking havoc.
Seven years after his adopted father failed to murder him and spare the world many lives, Damien now lives with his uncle and aunt. A famous industrialist, Richard Thorn is played with great zeal by William Holden, who is wonderful as the well meaning uncle of Damien who is seemingly the first among his family to realize who and what Damien is. “Damien: Omen II” is considered the lesser of the trilogy, and while it has its problem it’s a generally entertaining and creepy thriller. It just can sadly never get over one hurdle: How did Damien forget he was the anti-christ?
Director Richard Donner’s “The Omen” is the fall out of the success of “The Exorcist.” And while it does subscribe to the evil child formula that became prominent after the success of the William Friedkin movie, it doesn’t try to top the former in terror. “The Omen” reaches for heights of slow boil horror followed by immediate shocks, and even for a film once considered a wannabe of “The Exorcist” it stands alone as a wonderful horror thriller.
To Robert Englund’s credit, he might not have carved out a career as a film director, but “976-Evil” is like an extended EC Comic segment. It’s colored wonderfully, the direction is quite excellent, and Englund is able to create a bleak revenge horror film that ends on a note suggesting a wider story at hand. It’s too bad the sequel didn’t expand on these ideas, in spite of its guilty pleasure status.
Perhaps it’s because I’m just a slasher geek, maybe it’s because I’m basically forgiving when it comes to the Halloween series, but I’m not typically in agreement when people call “Halloween: Resurrection” the worst Halloween sequel primarily because as a standalone tale it would work as a wicked slasher film and thriller. This is an installment that arrived at the cusp of the reality television craze, and deep down it feels as if someone took a screenplay for another horror film and tagged buffers to connect it to the prior “Halloween” films and it shows often with a narrative that is seemingly disconnected from the rest of the series beyond the prologue.
For its time, I guess “Halloween H20” felt like a good idea. Jamie Lee Curtis who was once a scream queen spent most of her career attempting to re-invent herself beyond the horror brand. But the reunion of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers seemed inevitable. Since Donald Pleasance died during the making of “The Curse of Michael Myers,” his lack of presence sorely hinders the reunion between Michael and Laurie. Even with bringing back the nurse from the first film, and introducing Laurie’s son who happens to be Michael’s nephew, Donald Pleasance is very painfully missed.