The one thing about Sam Raimi’s movies is that good or bad, very few of them age poorly. Even for a movie made in the early nineties at an age where every studio were seeking to duplicate the success of “Batman,” Raimi makes “Darkman” his own movie. It’s a superhero movie in the horror vein where our masked dark avenger is also a deformed an unhinged Frankenstein monster. Something in the vein of Brundlefly, Liam Neeson really does offer up a wildly unique and off the rails performance.
Tag Archives: Thriller
Lights Out (2024)
A former soldier looking for his way meets an ex-con who sees the potential in this man to become the best fighter in the underground fight world. Soon, they find themselves entangled in something much more complex and riskier. Continue reading
No Way Up (2024)
It seems like not many remember what a good survival film is, anymore, and while so many present prime opportunities for knuckle biting tension, often times they tend to fall so flat. Claudio Fäh’s “No Way Up” is a great idea for a survival thriller where the odds are deliriously stacked against a group of people. It’s just shocking that so much of this opportunity is wasted in favor of what is mostly a flat, redundant, and dull thriller. I don’t know how you take a great idea like “No Way Up” and leave it feeling like nothing is ever really fleshed out or fully developed.
Last Night at Terrace Lanes (2024)
Now Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
An obvious but loving ode to “Assault on Precinct 13,” Jamie Nash’s horror survival comedy is probably one of the more entertaining indie films I’ve seen in a while. It’s a movie that is obviously small in budget, but makes the most out of a single setting horror film through the end. I was surprised by how much director Jamie Nash was able to pull out of this premise as they’re able to really justify why the film is confined to one place and is set during one night rather than multiple days. “Last Night at Terrace Lanes” is that classic siege horror film but with a dose of familial drama and coming of age.
The Warriors (1979): 2-Disc Limited Edition [4K UHD]
Now Available from Arrow Video.
It’s no secret that I Love “The Warriors.” I’ve loved it for years, and I talk about it constantly. I own a massive poster, the vinyl soundtrack the entire funko pop wave, the PS2 video game, and most of the editions on DVD and Blu-Ray. It’s a movie that’s had an interesting genesis starting out as a novel, transformed in to a notorious feature film, which then became fodder for video stores and was played quite often in syndication on cable and network television. It then evolved in to a cult classic and now a more widely celebrated cult masterpiece. And rightly so.
It’s a movie that works on so many levels as a streamlined, sleek, gritty, and exciting gang picture that Walter Hill directs with pitch perfect efficiency, and it’s garnered another well deserved special release from Arrow Video.
BAD MOVIE MONDAY: A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975)
It’s a bit of a misconception about me to say that I hate modern movies and have a particular loathing reserved towards the superhero genre. I do not. Well, not exactly anyway. What has happened is that I’ve grown extremely weary of films that are written in this very mundane “Screenwriting 101” style. Almost every movie made these days is about a hero’s journey or a redemption arc or some sort of variation on a theme outlined in SAVE THE CAT! Which is a book about screenwriting that Hollywood seems to treat like it’s the Holy Bible of Cinema.
This is why I really respect a movie like A BOY AND HIS DOG. If nothing else, it’s definitely not formulaic.
Rhyme or Die (2021)
I love Max R. Lincoln’s whole twist on the idea of people waking up in an abandoned warehouse and being tormented by a cruel game master. While “Rhyme or Die” sounds silly it actually manages to end as a very entertaining, gory and twisted short that uses the whole device of music as a test, rather than morality. Ironically the whole challenge of rhyming is used as a means of testing the morality of the players as we’re never sure what kind of weird games these people will play on one another to survive.