2011’s “The Rite” is built around the Hollywood doctrine that any movie, big or small, can be made automatically horrifying if including Anthony Hopkins as one of its stars. Unfortunately that’s not the case for “The Rite” a truly terrible exorcism film that dabbles in the religious hysteria of losing faith and includes about as much exorcist crapola to keep audiences watching with baited breath unsure if they’ll get anything even remotely shocking as what was seen in the William Friedkin classic film from the seventies.
Tag Archives: Mystery
Puppet Master: The Legacy (2003)
Ah, the search for Toulon’s formula, this is what accounts for plot with “Puppet Master Legacy.” It’s not uncommon for horror films to feature clips from their earlier films, but the Puppet Master series has made it ridiculous by saving money through obvious manners. One is showing the puppets but only in their docile form, and two is padding the film with about as much filler as possible. This filler is clips from the past movies that the director uses to compensate for lack of fresh footage of the puppets. This method would later be included in the rank “Axis of Evil.”
Unknown (2011) [DVD/Blu-Ray/Digital]
The key to a great mystery is the lead in, the ultimate catch and macguffin that will bring us in to the cusp of a surprise. “Unknown” has the surprise, there’s no doubting that, it’s jut the problem that the lead in provides that makes it an entirely mediocre piece of thriller that’s almost about a nonsensical as you can imagine. The writers literally write themselves in to conundrums throughout the movie as plot points go unexplained, only for them to completely undermine their previous direction, and you can sense them almost trying not to destroy the narrative from minute one.
Scream 3 (2000)
Bereft of the typical doldrums of the previous films, “Scream 3” at least tries for something new and unique in the end. And while that doesn’t result in a watchable movie it’s at least admirable for its attempts to do something interesting. While “Scream” examined the crime, “Scream 2” examined the fall out from the crime where the idea became the institution, all while “Scream 3” explores the institution becoming so steeped in sensationalism that the crime has all but been snuffed out as a memory and urban myth. This sets the stages for Sydney’s return in the final installment of the first trilogy of “Scream” where she’s not a recluse living among her own devices avoiding the outside world. But fate comes knocking at her door when Ghostface returns anxiously looking for Sydney who has gone in to hiding and has taken on a new moniker and profession.
Scream 4 (2011)
What with so many horror movies offering up a surprise ending we will not see coming for the last ten years, it’s a given that the lure for “Scream 4” is not so much the surprise ending and the revelation, but the nostalgia. Hallelujah Wes Craven on the way to career hell is finally taking “Scream” seriously again in what promises to be a reboot to please the fans and no one else. The problem with “Scream 4” or “Scre4m” is the inability to be about as entertaining as it possibly can. The only thing worse than a bad horror movie is a boring one and “Scream 4” manages to be boring in about as many wave lengths as possible, delving in to the same old tropes we saw in the original series, and lacking the balls to even off core characters to keep us grinding our teeth and our guards low.
Scream 2 (1997)
With “Scream 2” you can pretty much sense Craven and writer Williamson struggling to create a sense of atmosphere that they did with the original. And the movie series that claims to dodge the slasher clichés while also mocking them, eventually became so clustered with attempts to bring audiences a new experience they pretty much relied on clichés and a formula they streamlined in the original. We have someone offed in the beginning, we introduce the old cast, we get to meet a new cast of characters, someone is killing the cast members, Sydney has to find out who or whom is doing the killings, a load of red herrings are thrown at the audience, there’s the obligatory thought that perhaps one of the original three cast members are behind it, and then there is the grand stand off in the climax where we’re given a bunch of “gotchas!” Officers and all authorities are also immensely useless.
Scalene (2011)
Margo Martindale is amazing. That was my first reaction upon viewing her portrayal as the mentally anguished mother Janice Trimble in Zack Parker’s brutally demented and compelling revenge drama “Scalene,” a movie about points of view and how sometimes our own is all we need to get us through the night. Martindale commands an ingenious movie about the end of a tragedy and the beginning of lunacy where mom Janice Trimble is forced to confront many issues in the run time of the film. One of which is the possibility that her mentally disabled son brutally raped a college girl.