José Manuel Cravioto’s “Bound to Vengeance” is exploitation in its ugliest form. I’d love to be one of the many to decry the film as misogynist, but exploitation is by nature misogynist. Truth be told, “Bound to Vengeance” is unpleasant but it’s also not the worst movie I’ve seen all year. In its rare moments it’s a fine revenge thriller about a woman getting her vengeance on her kidnapper. In its worst moments, it’s unpleasant and kind of stupid.
Director Joe Lynch is a true indie auteur. He’s a man who knows how to get around obstacles, and uses his limited budget to bring audiences the entertainment that he wants, and never has it been so well realized than in “Everly.” One of the best action movies all year, “Everly” is a film set in one location with limited scenery, and yet it thrives as a grindhouse, slapstick, chopsocky bonanza that I adored. It’s filled with every single trope that Lynch is seemingly fond of, featuring kung fu, British gangsters, killer dogs, vicious sadists, and the like, all of whom paint the walls red with their own blood at one point or another.
It’s nice to know that “Mad Max” is a film that still holds up, and is arguably an action masterpiece. George Miller directs an apocalyptic opus that’s set in the wasteland of Australia where the apocalypse always tends to eventually catch up with the environment. “Mad Max” is one of the best of its kind, it’s a revenge film, but a very complex cop film about the losing battle between a biker gang and a police force.
“Dawn” is an absolutely devastating film which is belied by its unbelievably vivid visual style of its innocent decade. Director Rose McGowan has a keen directorial sense, delivering one truly dark and vicious short film that is made even more gut wrenching thanks to the eerie performances by the entire cast.
It’s great that such a polished film like “Gone Girl” doesn’t opt for a more safe and Hollywood bound climax where we’ve seen a labyrinth of lies unfold in to a new bow. By the time “Gone Girl” has ended, director David Fincher has written his characters in to a corner, and they’re not at any point going to squirm out of it. I loved “Gone Girl” mainly because it’s a murder mystery without the kind of surprises you’d expect. Our characters are amoral and unlikable, and director Fincher has a keen sense of cynicism toward marriage and how it can be a fiasco that devolves in to a play.
While the rights for “Candyman” are currently tied up, Scream Factory instead offers fans up the chance to watch the brutally boring sequel by Bill Condon. “Farewell to the Flesh” features more of the tragic hooked horror character, who is a combination of Freddy Krueger and Beetlejuice. Once a slave who was lynched for having an affair with a white woman, he emerges for vengeance every time someone mutters his name five times in a mirror.
I appreciate what Clive Barker set out to do with “Lord of Illusions” by introducing us to Harry D’Amour, a reluctant private eye who’d be thrown in to horrifying situations that far outstretched mobsters and cheating wives. In “Lord of Illusions,” Scream Factor gives Barker the chance to present audiences with the director’s cut. This new cut is longer, re-edited, and given a heavier emphasis on the neo-noir crime investigation by D’Amour that leads him to the front door of a satanic wizard that intends to destroy the world, and everything in it. I really wish I could have seen what D’Amour would get in to in future cases. Perhaps the cenobites? Something Lovecraftian?