Don’t Breathe (2016, Sony Pictures)

Review originally published on August 28, 2016

Director Fede Alvarez blasted onto the scary-movie scene in 2013 with his twisted Evil Dead remake. It was the most shocking and intense horror flick to get widespread theatrical release in North America that year.

The Uruguan-born filmmaker shows no signs of changing his ways with his followup feature, Don’t Breathe, which is destined to battle it out with the likes of Green Room and 10 Cloverfield Lane for the title of Top Hollywood Fright Flick of 2016.

B&E artists Rocky, Alex, and Money–Jane Levy, Dylan Minette, and Daniel Zovatto, respectively–target the home of an Iraq war vet (Stephen Lang) who’s had it rough. As well as being blinded in action, his only child was killed when a rich kid ran her down. He received a large cash settlement, which he keeps in his big old barred-up house, guarded by his vicious rottweiler, and located in a derelict neighbourhood where all the other homes are abandoned.

Easy pickins for one last score, figure the three thieves, if they can just take care of the mutt.

But Lang–best known for playing the biggest macho dickhead in Avatar–really shines in his tables-turning role as The Blind Man. You go from feeling sympathy for all his suffering to realizing he’s one mighty sick and twisted fuck.

Equally impressive is Levy, whose punishing role as junkie-turned-demon-battler Mia in Evil Dead no doubt prepared her for the relentless nastiness on display here.

Alvarez–who also cowrote the script–guides the ensuing mayhem with a sure hand, ratcheting up the suspense and keeping the thrills coming long after other directors would have packed it in. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with for feature number three.

It Follows (2014, RADIUS-TWC)

Review originally published on March 25, 2015

Every once in a while a low-budget indie fright flick comes along that makes everything on the major studios’ horror plate look like a pile of steaming crap. It Follows is that film, right now.

Maika Monroe is note-perfect as Jay, a pretty 19-year-old college student getting by in her average Motor City life. But while they’re out on a date, her new boyfriend, Hugh (Jake Weary), chloroforms her after sex in the back seat of his car and binds her to a wheelchair in her undies in the middle of an abandoned parking structure.

Just when you fear that It Follows might turn into yet another gruelling Hostel-type torture-porn epic, we learn that Hugh has only restrained Jay so that he can explain something very important to her. When she comes to, he wheels her around until they spy a naked woman in the distance, shuffling toward them. “This thing, it’s gonna follow you,” he warns. “Somebody gave it to me, and I passed it to you.”

Hugh tells Jay that she can only rid herself of the “follower” by sleeping with someone, but fails to mention that, while slow-moving, it’s powerful enough to rip her limbs off. The rest of the film is a terrifying portrayal of the goodhearted girl’s ordeal as she tries to save herself from the converging ghouls—visible only to her (and us)—without bringing death to those around her.

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell takes the puzzling premise of It Follows and runs it straight into your nightmares. He’s aided by a standout cast of young actors whose naturalistic performances play out against an eerie-as-hell soundtrack by Disasterpeace that echoes the spooky ’70s-style synth work used in drive-in movies by the likes of Goblin, Tangerine Dream, and John Carpenter.

Depressing footage of a decaying Detroit heightens the sense of hopelessness that fuels the engine of fear propelling It Follows, which ultimately leaves you heavy with dread and the notion that it’s the finest horror flick you’ve seen in years.

1408 (2007, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

Review originally published on June 20, 2007

Unforgettable haunted-house flicks are extremely hard to come by; the only two I can think of are 1963’s The Haunting and The Shining. The subgenre of haunted-hotel-room flicks is promising in that the number of hotel patrons passing through maximizes the potential for untimely death and subsequent souls in limbo.

More importantly, the hotel-room setting allows guys like John Cusack to study the minibar menu and declare: “Eight bucks for beer nuts? This room is evil!”

In 1408, Cusack plays jaded author Mike Enslin, a specialist in debunking ghostly haunts who sets his cynical sights on Room 1408 (the numbers add up to 13) at Manhattan’s Dolphin Hotel. The upscale establishment is managed by the smooth-talking Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), who does his oily best to persuade Enslin from occupying the cursed room, where 56 people have died.

“I don’t want you in 1408 because I don’t want to have to clean up the mess,” Olin argues, attempting to sway Enslin with a free upgrade to penthouse digs and an $800 bottle of cognac. But since the stubborn writer doesn’t believe in anything but good liquor, he snarfles the booze and defiantly heads up to the 14th floor to see what all the fuss is about.

The tedium of 1408‘s first half-hour quickly fades once Enslin gets trapped in the suite and tormented by everything from scalding tap water to the ghost of a masked slasher. Through well-paced flashbacks, we’re shown exactly how Enslin lost his faith in everything: his only child died at a young age from some godforsaken disease. The film is based on a short story by Stephen King, who, knowing full well what scares people the most, never backs away from exploiting the dead-kid angle.

Derailed director Mikael Håfström effectively counterbalances the scenes of throat-clenching sadness and claustrophobic shocks, which unfurl in a Groundhog Day delirium. But things go overboard when the unbridled effects crew turns Room 1408 into a set from The Poseidon Adventure–and, honestly, who really needs another shot of dirty-looking liquid seeping from cracked walls.

Cusack is convincing as the unravelling writer who, hollowed out by grief, must fight to survive a supernatural ordeal. The success of 1408 rests squarely on his Hawaiian shirt–clad shoulders, and he pulls it off.

The role, that is.

The tacky shirt stays on pretty well the whole time.

A Quiet Place (2018, Paramount Pictures)

Review originally published on April 6, 2018

In A Quiet Place, Lee Abbott—played by director, co-writer, and executive producer John Krasinski—has it rough. He lives in a post-apocalyptic world teeming with fierce alien monsters that hunt humans through sound. The slightest noise will have them racing towards you out of nowhere, and then it’s game over, man. Game over!

To make staying alive even more challenging, Abbott has three young children, and you know how noisy kids can be. Then to top it off, his wife Evelyn (Krasinski’s real-life spouse Emily Blunt) is pregnant and about to give birth. Now, I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as silent labour. Both times I was in the delivery room all the shushing in the world couldn’t get my wife to keep it down. And have you ever tried shushing a newborn?

So the Abbott clan certainly has its work cut out for it as far as surviving goes, but they make the best of their muted existence. Everyone is adept at sign language–the oldest child is deaf–and everyone goes barefoot, walking on tippy-toes when needed. Outdoor pathways are plied with sand to deaden footfalls. Even the pieces of their board games are padded, with the dice rolled only onto soft, quiet cloth.

Strong performances by Blunt and the particularly impressive Millicent Simmonds help you get over the film’s implausible moments, and there are a few. Krasinski’s deft direction keeps you involved with the Abbotts’ precarious situation, though, and ultimately A Quiet Place emerges as an effective nightmare-maker for parents that is one of those rarest and most welcome commodities for fright-flick fans: horror with heart.

The Faculty (1998, Miramax Films)

Review originally published on December 31, 1998

I’m not sure which is scarier in The Faculty, the way the alien-infested high-school teachers go about their violent take-over-the-Earth mission or the way the supposedly typical students treat each other on a day-to-day basis.

By setting his sci-fi-tinged horror flick in your common hotbed of alienation and conformity, screenwriter Kevin Williamson (the Scream films, I Know What You Did Last Summer) has really found a way to make you squirm. If the sluglike parasites scurrying around underneath the skin of villains’ faces don’t do the trick, the sight of intellectual outsider Casey (Elijah Wood) being rammed balls-first into a flagpole by a gang of jocks will.

Casey is the unlikely hero who bands together with a group of fellow Herrington High students after they discover that their underfunded school is being taken over by aliens, with the disillusioned staff the first to go.

The faculty—which includes Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s Robert Patrick as a bullying football coach and Carrie’s Piper Laurie as an idealistic drama teacher—gets alienized (and given nicer personalities) after a number of gory set pieces, including the old pencil-through-the-hand trick.

But the film’s slasher-flick intro soon eschews Scream’s maniac-stalker route for more science-fiction territory, with plenty of nods to the excellent 1987 alien-invasion flick The Hidden and more recent and less decent outings such as Species (featuring a naked alien chick) and Deep Rising (with a giant-squid-like monster).

In keeping with Williamson’s self-reflective style, much is made in the dialogue of the plot’s similarity to popular sci-fi stories like Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers.

Hey, if you’re gonna plunder the classics, you might as well be up-front about it.

But even with its secondhand backbone, The Faculty succeeds as a youth-oriented shocker due to director, editor, and frequent camera-operator Robert (El Mariachi) Rodriguez’s provocative eye and frantic pacing. Apart from some of the hokier computer-animated scenes, most of the alien FX are topnotch.

And with a cast that isn’t peppered with hip young TV stars, the film keeps you guessing as to which potential victims might actually survive for the inevitable Faculty 2: We’ll Need Some Slug Bait Over Here.

The Platform (2019, Festival Films)

Review originally published on March 30, 2020

My teenage son suggested we watch The Platform on Netflix last night, and man is that one crazy-ass, whacked-out dystopian horror flick.

Gory as hell too, if you’re into that kinda thing.

Iván Massagué stars as Goreng, who wakes up in a grubby concrete cell with a copy of Don Quixote and a freaky older guy named Trimigasi (Zorion Eguileor). Turns out they’re confined to a tower-like prison where each level has a big hole cut in the floor and ceiling, through which the titular table-like structure passes once a day. On the platform is a vast array of delicious food, which each prisoner gets to eat from for two minutes before it carries on down to the next level.

Sure, it might sound like an okay way to do time, reading about the Man of La Mancha and waiting to pig out, but the problem is there’s over 200 levels in the tower, and the grub comes from the top, so if you’re stuck way down in cell #171 there’s not much left to snack on by the time the smorgasbord hits your floor.

The notion is that, if each person took just enough to get by, there’d be plenty for everyone. But that’s not always how people act. Have you tried buying toilet paper lately?

As social commentary The Platform couldn’t be more timely, but director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia isn’t concerned with just making people think: he wants to shock them even more. So besides the gross scenes of people squishing food and spitting it up there’s cannibalism, decapitation, stabbings, bludgeonings, and doggy disembowelment. One poor sap even gets shat on right in the face.

The goodness of humanity triumphs in the end, though.

I think.

Hereditary (2018, A24)

Review originally published on June 6, 2018

Hereditary has been generating a lot of buzz lately as the scariest horror flick in years, and I gotta admit that it’s pretty damn frightening in spots. It’s also brutally unsettling throughout, so be warned.

The movie opens with a shot of a typewritten obituary, and the fact that it doesn’t include one positive word about the deceased in its three paragraphs sets the tone for writer-director Ali Aster’s punishing portrait of grief, psychological trauma, and Satanism.

Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense) stars as Annie Graham, a diorama artist working on a project for an upcoming big-city gallery exhibit. Thanks to the exquisite camerawork of cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, we are taken right inside the meticulously crafted rooms of the miniature homes Annie builds—faithful re-creations of the ones in her own house, a beautiful wooden mansion in a forest. (The film was shot in Utah.) She’s joined in a mostly joyless existence there by dour husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), typical teenage son Peter (My Friend Dahmer’s Alex Wolff), and odd 13-year-old daughter Charlie (enigmatic newcomer Milly Shapiro).

At the funeral for her mother—the subject of the terse obit­—Annie reads a harsh eulogy that portrays the matriarch as secretive, eccentric, and anything but the ideal mom. Soon after the dead woman’s grave is desecrated, a tragic and shocking car accident cloaks the family in despair. The Grahams seemed pretty messed up to begin with, but the recent events take things to a whole new level of anguish.

In obvious need of help, Annie is befriended by Joan (Ann Dowd), a woman from the grief-support group she occasionally attends, who raves about the therapeutic benefits of holding a séance to communicate with lost loved ones. But Annie’s guilt-driven attempt to contact the other side only proves that you should never, ever mess with the occult.

With so much real-life emotional torment going on, by the time Hereditary’s supernatural set pieces arrive you’ve already been horrified to the max. The wrath of Satan seems pretty tame compared to the suffering that damaged family members can inflict on one another.

The Babadook (2014, Umbrella Entertainment)

Review originally published on December 3, 2014

Is The Babadook a slow-burning, Repulsion-style psychodrama depicting a lonely woman’s paranoid descent into madness? Or is it more of a flat-out horror show that introduces a freaky new being—the titular pitch-black, long-taloned, top-hat-wearing demon thingie—to the fearscape?

Who cares? Fact is, it’s the most moving and memorable fright flick of the year!

Aussie writer-director Jennifer Kent’s impressive debut feature follows the day-to-day routine of nursing-home worker Amelia (Essie Davis) as she struggles to raise her intense six-year-old son, Samuel (the remarkable Noah Wiseman). Sam is a hard-to-control kid with a wild imagination who’s obsessed with devising ways to protect himself and his mom from the “monster” he thinks is coming for them.

He rigs homemade weapons that wind up either breaking windows or getting him in trouble at school. “This monster thing has got to stop!” declares his beside-herself mom, but of course it’s only starting.

It doesn’t help either of them that little Sam was born the day his father died driving Mom to the hospital. While the frazzled Amelia still deals with the tragedy of losing her much-loved husband—“It’ll be seven years!” proclaims her judgmental sister Claire. “Isn’t it time you moved on?”—Sam blames himself, thanks in no small part to insensitive taunts from kids on the playground.

Even before the Babadook shows up to spook the shit outta you—seemingly coming to life from the ominous pages of a children’s pop-up book—the offhand cruelty of tiny humans ramps the tension meter up to 10.

With her own family seemingly against her—along with her demanding boss, Sam’s strict teacher, and the snooping child services—the sleep-deprived Amelia’s shaky mental state crumbles in time with the Babadook gaining strength and making its move from the depth of her (and the now-sedated Sam’s) nightmares.

Forget Insidious and its ilk, The Babadook is where it’s at for supernatural horror in the home.

Creep (2014, Netflix)

Review originally published on August 9, 2015

I had a hankering for a scary movie late last night so took a look at the Horror Movies section on Netflix to see what was available.

The first five offerings were Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Prometheus, The Conjuring, Orphan, and World War Z, all of which I’d already seen, and all of which–apart from the totally decent WWZ–sucked the biggie.

The sixth pick was something from 2014 called Creep, which caught my attention with its eerie image of a man’s silhouette at the top of a flight of stairs. It stars Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice, which didn’t bode well because I remembered Duplass unfondly from The Lazarus Effect, that lame Flatliners rip-off from last February.

But I went ahead and watched Creep anyway, and man was it enjoyable.

It’s about an easygoing videographer named Aaron (co-writer and director Brice) who gets hired by a man named Josef (cowriter Duplass) to film him non-stop for a day at his semi-remote cabin. Josef explains that he’s been diagnosed with a baseball-sized tumor in his head, and only a couple of months to live, so wants to leave a video document for his unborn soon, like Michael Keaton did in My Life.

Josef comes off as bit of a strange bird, but at first you think that maybe he’s just quirky, or that his weirdness might be due to the fact that he’s facing imminent death. Soon enough, though, you come to see that he’s a total freak–especially when he confesses to a terrible crime against his own wife.

The bizarre relationship that develops between Josef and Aaron is hugely compelling, made more so as Josef’s potential danger to Aaron is both hinted at and revealed.

The fact that Aaron records every damn thing–even when he should be dropping the camera and running away–seems ridiculous at times, as it is in most found-footage horror flicks. But if you give yourself over to the idea that he’s a videographer whose instinct is to keep the camera rolling, it’s not so hard to take.

Duplass’s whacked-out performance keeps you fairly riveted to the screen, wondering what crazy shit Josef’s gonna pull next–and how the tormented Aaron will respond. It’s one of the most memorable sicko roles I’ve seen in a while.

It definitely makes up for his wasted effort in The Lazarus Effect.

Creep is yet another project from Blumhouse Productions, which is best known for its supernatural horror franchises like Paranormal Activity and Insidious, but lately–with the thoroughly impressive The Gift–is doing great work portraying the evil that mortals do as well.

Way to go, Blumhouse! At this rate we might one day even forgive you for The Boy Next Door!

To read more than 350 of my reviews of horror movies released theatrically in North America between 1988 and 2018, go here.