Tag Archives: Thriller

Spellcaster (1988)

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Director Rafal Zielinski’s “Spellcaster” is so damn good, I want to hug it, and love it, and cuddle it to pieces. An unabashed childhood favorite, “Spellcaster” originally began life in my household as a VHS purchase from a closing video store in our neighborhood. Soon enough my brother and I enjoyed it so much it became a favorite on VHS, on constant rotation whenever we wanted to have a blast with a goofy eighties horror film. And rest assured, “Spellcaster” is about as goofy an eighties horror film as it gets.

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Hold Your Breath (2012)

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hybJust think: Someone at the Asylum offices dug through their piles of Chinese food menus and eventually found the script for “Hold Your Breath” (I’m not including the superfluous hashtag) tucked away. And someone read it thinking this would be the perfect theatrical debut for an Asylum movie. In reality, “Hold Your Breath” should just be another Asylum clunker on DVD, but it warrants a theatrical debut by virtue of the fact that it has minor horror starlet Katrina Bowden attached.

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Life of Pi (2012)

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6vFCjCdBasically, Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is a brilliantly directed and incredibly beautiful film, with amazing special effects and just breathtaking visuals. It is also a tedious sermon wrapped up in an agnostic package that will leave viewers clinging to whatever they want to believe. When it comes to confronting the themes of faith and religion, “Life of Pi” seems bold in explaining that they’re all just basically good for the soul and rejuvenating, but in the end the film seems to stick to the notion that there is only one real God and that’s the Catholic/Christian one.

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Cujo (1983)

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Cujo_(quad)What I love about Lewis Teague’s “Cujo,” is that while it is a story about a rabid dog mercilessly ravaging a mother and son in their car, the movie seems to be more about karma gone awry. Dee Wallace as Donna Trenton is a woman who is devoted to her son, but is also very committed to the affairs she’s currently having on her husband. The first half of “Cujo” is spent on familial discord and how Donna’s misdeeds with a colleague seems to be rotting this unit from the inside out.

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Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

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I love the storytelling and directorial subtleties of Kathryn Bigelow in her concerted effort to explore the folly of war and violence in the name of patriotism. In the end of the film Maya stands in the belly of a massive jet that is ready to carry her home, and she’s lavished with praise by the pilot who insists she can sit anywhere. Maya sits at the very end of the massive passenger wagon out of ear shot from the soldier. When asked where Maya wants to go, we see the fallout from the raid on Bin Laden once and for all. What was it all for? And in the end, did we really manage to gain something of ourselves back when we finally eliminated Osama Bin Laden? Or did Osama really win when he brought down the towers, destroying our very identities? “Zero Dark Thirty” is a very thoughtful and objective look at the events that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden. And for folks convinced Bigelow would stage a rah rah America film are wrong in their assertions.

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Cult

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The premise of “Cult” feels like a new age serial version of John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness.” Wherein the former title examined the rabid fandom of literary fans with author Sutter Cane who was an amalgamation of HP Lovecraft and Stephen King, the new “Cult” examines the sheer lunacy that can arise from the fandom of television shows. The series so far isn’t an indictment on the dangers of fandom, but it does explore how passionate fans can be, and how they can often breed a cult-like following that’ll do anything to honor the spirit of their favorite series.

What’s interesting is that much of the pilot of “Cult” is constructed like the aforementioned Carpenter horror film, where the episode is so absolutely meta and self-contained, that we can never be sure what is reality, nor can we be certain what is a clue for our audience, or what is merely a red herring. What we think is the prologue of the show is something else entirely, the dialogue is often cryptic in delivery, and there are many subtle subliminal clues peppered throughout the episode that could lead the fictional and actual audience to decode the mystery of “Cult.”

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Tag (2011)

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TAGSTILL2This is a side of director Shane Ryan that I’ve never seen before. Intended to be in competition for the winning slot in the highly publicized 2013 horror film “The ABCs of Death,” Shane Ryan gives us “T for Tag.” Now known as “Tag,” Ryan’s short film is a spooky, unnerving, and gruesome bit of revenge cinema that channels the likes of Takashi Shimizu for a short that’s based heavily on violence, murders, and the ever merciless demon of guilt that plagues our young protagonist.

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