Alice Englert is awesome in 2014’s In Fear
By Steve Newton
The world can be a very disturbing place right now, what with all the political violence and starving kids and fear of nuclear war and such.
Many people seek an escape from the real-life events of today by watching horror movies, which means a lot of them are currently scanning the streaming channels, trying to find decent fright flicks.
There’s a lotta lousy ones out there, though, so to save you the trouble of searching around, here’s my roundup of the 10 best horror films currently available on Amazon Prime.
These are my original reviews, which were published when the films were first released in North American theatres.
Have a happy, horror-heavy Halloween! And try not to worry so much about human extinction and stuff.
Get Out
Review originally published on February 23, 2017
If you only see one horror movie this year, let it be Get Out. And if you only see one movie of any kind this year, same thing. It’s about as entertaining as celluloid gets.
The film opens with a young black man wandering an upscale suburban neighbourhood at night, talking on his cell, expressing mild fear that he’s out of his inner-city element. Then a white car with an unknown quantity of passengers starts stalking him and doesn’t let up until he turns around to head back where he came from.
But before he gets far a tall figure in a knight’s helmet sprints from the shadows and chokes him unconscious, drags him back to the car, stuffs him in the trunk, and drives off.
So what unspeakable evil awaits the innocent captive, you ask? Hell if I’m gonna tell. I have way too much respect for writer-director Jordan Peele’s brilliant, bar-raising horror flick to ruin it for anyone. That’s exactly how I felt about 2012’s The Cabin in the Woods, the last fright flick to leave me totally slayed by its blackly comic commentary on the evil that men do.
Speaking of TCITW, that film also featured ace weasel-portrayer Bradley Whitford, who this time plays surgeon Dean Armitage, a self-proclaimed liberal who likes to brag that he would have voted for Obama for a third term. He and his laidback psychologist wife Missy (the consistently strong Katherine Keener) have invited their beloved daughter Rose (Allison Williams of HBO’s Girls) to their mansion in the woods so they can meet her new photographer boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya).
He’s worried because she hasn’t yet told them that he’s black, and in Breitbart-era America, that can be cause for concern. But Chris is just a nice, easygoing guy who cares so much for her that he decides their love can trump any hate.
He’s wrong.
When the two lovebirds arrive they do their best to ride out the tide of awkward conversation and racially motivated tension, which is upped by the Armitage’s habit of employing black servants, and the freakiness ratio multiplies when Rose’s protective brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) shows up. Having honed his skills playing warped hick Caleb in 2010’s underrated The Last Exorcism, the scarily pale Jones brings just the right amount of casual creepiness and simmering anger to get the film rolling on its jolly nightmare-making way.
And what a ride it is! Who knew that Peele–best known for the edgy comedy skits of TV’s Key & Peele–would prove so adept at creating tone and building tension. And the top-notch performances he coaxes from all involved–including The Purge: Election Year‘s Betty Gabriel as weird smiley/teary servant Georgina and Stephen Root as twisted art-dealer Jim Hudson–keep you ever interested.
Peele no doubt had the most fun crafting LilRel Howery’s wiseass TSA agent Rod, Chris’s best friend, who could easily be one of his more outgoing Key & Peele homies. But Rod’s feisty comical presence doesn’t dumb down the movie the way it surely could have.
There’s hardly a moment during the keenly edited Get Out that isn’t either funny, touching, thought-provoking, or scary as hell. I’ve been reviewing horror movies professionally sans bullshit since 1988–although I wound up writing this one just for fun–and I can honestly say that it’s in my top 10 of all time.
Bravo, Mr. Peele. Bravo.
The Descent
Review originally published on August 10, 2006
A few weeks ago, we went camping at a lake near Powell River, and by camping I mean sleeping in a camper. I chose to crash at the very back of the rig, against the wall in the little bunk above the truck cab. Maybe it was the mixture of hot dogs, Pilsner, and smores, but I woke up in the middle of the night with a freaky feeling. I felt trapped and had to get out of that cubbyhole quick.
It was the first time in my life that I’ve experienced claustrophobia, and it wasn’t pretty.
The uncomfortable vibe returned last weekend, even in the spacious atmosphere of SilverCity Metropolis. It came while watching The Descent‘s six thrill-seeking girlfriends, on a weekend caving expedition in the Appalachians, squeeze themselves between tiny passageways of water and rock.
Writer-director Neil Marshall, who’d previously impressed genre fans with his 2002 soldiers-versus-werewolves saga, Dog Soldiers, does a brilliant job of preying on people’s natural fear of physical confinement.
The Descent is a regular Das Boot for the horror crowd.
Mind you, the Second World War German U-boat crew of that film only had Axis torpedoes to worry about. Here, the six chicks run into a race of humanoid creatures with faces that resemble the batlike vampire from Salem’s Lot but who have much nastier dispositions.
These blind but ferocious beings like nothing more than to rip open the tender necks and torsos of underground adventurers, but they find worthy opponents in this gaggle of adrenaline junkies, which include a blond Brit (Shauna Macdonald) who’s already survived the worst hell a wife and mother could endure.
The Descent is from Maple Pictures, the take-no-prisoners studio responsible for such gruesome terror titles as High Tension, the Saw films, and the ultra-disgusting torture epic, Hostel. So it goes without saying that the blood in this movie flows like an underground river; at one point, characters are actually submerged in it.
But the most disturbing scenes don’t involve the subterranean beasties getting their milky-white skulls impaled by climbing tools or their gooey eye sockets skewered by female fingers. Most of the audience’s squeals and squirms are reserved for the sight of a severely broken leg, the type that occurs on the world’s roadways and sports fields every single day.
It’s this skillful juxtaposition of the unreal and the common–along with believable performances, sharp editing, and crafty suspense–that makes The Descent a big winner. Although I wouldn’t quite agree with the joblo.com writer who claims it’s “the best horror-thriller since Alien”, I dare say that it’s in the running with The Hills Have Eyes as top horror flick of the year.
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.
The Silence of the Lambs
Review originally published on February 21, 1991
In Richard Attenborough’s superb 1978 thriller, Magic, British actor Anthony Hopkins played a struggling ventriloquist who loses touch with reality and transfers the murderous side of his personality into his wooden dummy. Hopkins portrayed the doomed performer as so pitiable that–even while he was knocking off good guys (his agent, played by Burgess Meredith) and creeps (an Ed Lauter-portrayed wife-beater)–you kept hoping he’d somehow snap out of his psychosis and destroy the creepy doll that embodied his madness.
In The Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins plays another sick killer with heroic tendencies, the imprisoned psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, and even though Lecter gains his nickname “Hannibal the Cannibal” by chomping on the inner organs of his victims, Hopkins once again manages to portray a sympathetic side to the human monster.
He achieves this duality with a chillingly believable performance that even tops that of the always-great Jodie Foster.
Foster portrays FBI trainee Clarice Starling, who’s been chosen by her mentor, agent Frank Crawford (Scott Glenn), to interview Lecter in hopes of gaining some insight into the motivations of a serial killer nicknamed “Buffalo Bill”, who kills women and uses their skin to sew dresses.
In return for clues and hints about Bill–whose identity Lecter knows–Starling must open up to him about her own tortured past (the death of her policeman father; her horrifying childhood memory of lambs “screaming” before slaughter).
The odd psychological interplay between the gutsy, but green, Starling and the deranged, yet fascinating, Lecter provides the basic tone for Jonathan Demme’s well-made, insidious shocker, the same way it did for the Thomas Harris novel on which it’s based.
While the last film made from a Harris thriller (1986’s Manhunter) spent half its time dealing with the technicalities of investigative police work, The Silence of the Lambs forgoes the FBI lab and keeps the camera on Starling as her Lecter-inspired hunches put her hot on the grisly trail of Buffalo Bill, a.k.a. Jamie Gumb (played with giddy, demented relish by Ted Levine).
Demme’s passion for vibrant colours and clever pacing makes the film’s few gore sequences–a decapitated head in a jar, a bloody fingernail jutting from a wall–all the more effective.
Following an FBI foul-up, the inexperienced Starling gets in over her head and is forced to take on the killer in a nail-biting showdown, and Demme, known for his quirky, stylish comedies Something Wild and Married to the Mob, leaves things wide open for a sequel.
With director Demme and all the principal actors reportedly keen on doing the follow-up that Thomas is currently writing, it shouldn’t be long before thriller fans are lucky enough to see Starling and Lecter in action again.
Wolf Creek (2005, Roadshow Entertainment)
Review originally published on December 22, 2005
The intro to Wolf Creek claims that 30,000 people are reported missing every year in Australia and that 90 percent of them are found within a month. Of those who are never heard from again, there’s little doubt that some are murdered; there’s been a spate of backpacker killings down under in recent years. Writer-director Greg McLean’s uncompromising take on such real-life cases shocks with the same gritty realism as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The movie opens with rugged Aussie good guy Ben (Nathan Phillips) buying a cheap used car and picking up two friends, British holidayers Liz and Kristy (Cassandra Magrath and Jennifer Aniston look-alike Kestie Morassi). The carefree trio have plans for some outback sightseeing, and after a routine run-in with rednecks at a remote gas station, they reach their destination, a meteorite crater at Wolf Creek National Park.
Everything goes fine until after their hike, when it’s time to leave, and the newly purchased clunker won’t start. As the group hunkers down for the night, a jovial hick named Mick (Oz screen veteran John Jarratt) shows up in a big truck and offers to tow them back to his place, where he’ll fix the car for free and send them on their merry way in the morning.
At first, their talkative host seems harmless enough; he’s the type of macho, eccentric loner you’d expect to find living out in the boonies. But when one of Ben’s smartass remarks draws a long, cold stare from Mick, it becomes pretty clear that the party has to end.
Sure enough, after being drugged with spiked rainwater, the guests awaken to find themselves bound and at the mercy of one well-armed and extremely sick puppy.
McLean’s digital videocam doesn’t pan away from Mick’s casually administered yet shockingly gruesome tortures, and the ghastly images are hard to shake. The tension meter gets stuck on high for the last 30 minutes of the film, culminating in an action-packed highway sequence straight out of Mad Max.
Wolf Creek relies as much on the extreme environment as the twisted motivations of a sadistic killer to instill fear and compound dread. The sheer, desolate expanse of the outback makes it obvious that even if the victims manage to escape the psycho’s grimy lair, their chances of survival are slim.
McLean’s cliché-free script and the believable performances by Phillips, Magrath, and Morassi keep you focused on their characters’ grim, life-or-death struggles against the unfathomable evil of man and the unforgiving power of nature.
Low-budget horror doesn’t get much better than this.
The Cabin in the Woods
Review originally published on April 11, 2012
The Cabin in the Woods is crammed with so many twists and turns that the mere thought of reviewing it and ruining the fun for others is scary in and of itself. But I don’t feel bad about revealing at least one huge surprise: it’s the best horror flick ever made in Vancouver.
A gaggle of attractive young victims-to-be head out for some weekend fun in what looks like your typical Friday the 13th–style slaughterfest, but for some reason the group’s every move is being tracked by a shadowy team using state-of-the-art gadgetry. The operation is overseen in a NASA-like control room by a pair of total dickheads—brilliantly played by Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) and Bradley Whitford (TV’s The West Wing)—whose manipulations drive the action once the human lab rats arrive at the titular location.
Why, exactly, these two assholes subject their innocent prey to deadly torment won’t be exposed here, but the hoops the victims are forced to jump through in order to survive (if they’re lucky) makes for some of the most exhilarating horror action since Scream revitalized the genre back in 1996.
Working from an idea of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Joss Whedon, cowriter and director Drew Goddard goes hilariously nutzoid, testing people’s preconceptions of scary movies while at the same time questioning humanity itself. Things just keep getting wilder and more intense as the shocks and bodies pile up, but the entertainment level never wavers.
The Cabin in the Woods really is the most fun you can have at the movies with your clothes on.
The Gift (2015, STX Entertainment)
Review originally published on August 5, 2015
If you thought Jason Bateman could only play affable sad-sacks, prepare for a nice surprise with The Gift. The actor best known for his gentle portrayal of the put-upon Michael Bluth in Arrested Development discovers his dark side in a big way in this unsettling revenge thriller about the terrible cost of youthful misdeeds.
We first meet sales exec Simon (Bateman) and his interior-designer wife, Robyn (Rebecca Hall), as they’re being shown around a new home in the Hollywood Hills. The picturesque place comes equipped with a surplus of windows, but there’ll be a lot more peering in than out.
While out shopping one day the couple run into Simon’s old high-school buddy Gordon (first-time writer-director Joel Edgerton), who exudes a harmless demeanour but soon worms his way into their lives with unannounced visits to the new place. His strange behaviour leads an increasingly frustrated Simon to admit that his nickname back in the day was “Gordo the Weirdo”.
After one too many troubling interactions, Simon and Robyn cut social ties with Gordo and focus on their main goal—becoming parents—while Simon also aims for a big promotion at his computer-security firm. It’s around this time that the real story behind Gordo’s weirdness starts to reveal itself—along with Robyn’s vulnerable psyche and Simon’s simmering menace.
The sure-handed Edgerton sets a slow-burning pace in the lead-up to The Gift’s harrowing revelations, and all three leads give well-controlled performances, their conflict never stretching believability past the breaking point—at least, not until that climactic “gotcha” moment.
After striking it rich with demon-based, supernatural franchises like the Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Sinister series, it seems as if charmed production company Blumhouse has found a winning way with human-based horror as well.
In Fear
Review originally published on March 28, 2014
A couple of weeks ago the fine folks at Anchor Bay Entertainment sent me a DVD copy of their latest horror release, In Fear, a British film that saw only limited theatrical release in North America last year, and never even made it into Vancouver theatres.
The cover art shows a young woman sitting in a rainsoaked car, smearing the window with her bloodstained hand. Just above that subtly disturbing image are four quotes from various online sources, describing the movie as “chilling” and “a white-knuckle ride”.
“Genuinely terrifying…an instant classic,” raved the Huffington Post, but I watched it last night anyway.
And I gotta say, the Post was bang on. In Fear is the most engrossing and entertaining horror fick I’ve seen all year. Not that I, Frankenstein and the latest Paranormal Activity flick were that hard to beat.
The movie concerns a young couple, Tom and Lucy (Iain De Caestecker and Alice Englert), who’ve only known each other a couple of weeks but are obviously smitten and wanting to see where the relationship leads. They decide to take in a music festival in the Irish countryside (actually Cornwall, England), but on the way Tom reveals that he’s booked a nice hotel for one night.
Things take a sinister turn after the two stop in at a roadside pub, and some type of confrontation between Tom and a group of regulars takes place. Soon after he and Lucy get trapped in a maze-like system of narrow roads that are supposed to lead them to the Killarney House Hotel, and–between the fear of being hopelessly lost and wondering if they’re being stalked by vengeful locals–the terror quotient gets ramped up to 11.
Then it gets dark.
In his debut feature, writer-director Jeremy Lovering elicits performances from De Caestecker and Englert that always ring true. He accomplished this in part by encouraging them to improvise and, in some cases, not even letting them know where the script was heading.
The result is a masterful example of lean ‘n’ mean outdoor nightmare-making that resonates with the same power of Wolf Creek, but without all the torture and gore.
The Crazies
Review originally published on February 24, 2010
If you’ve never been particularly concerned about the safety of your drinking water, The Crazies might make you think again. It’s a rip-roaring, topnotch terror fest that’s sure to boost sales of Brita filters.
Smalltown Iowa sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) is cheerfully mingling with citizens at the local ballpark when the carefree vibe is shattered by the sight of a shotgun-wielding resident striding in from left field. It’s a classic Stephen King moment—lethal, unexplained evil tainting pure, all-American goodness—and sets the tone for an engrossing portrait of a community devoured soul-first by the military-industrial complex. Ponder the ramifications of Dick Cheney being on the board of DuPont instead of Halliburton and you’ll get the idea.
And, of course, it helps that there’s zombie action too.
For the next 90 minutes, director Breck Eisner skillfully crafts a horror fan’s wet dream with his reinvention of George Romero’s 1973 film of the same name. A government plane loaded with biological weapons has crashed into a lake, poisoning the water supply and causing large portions of the nearby population to go violently insane before dying. When the order is given for military containment of the infected area, the chills ’n’ thrills come fast and furious.
Armed with little more than their sidearms and a serious will to live, Dutton—along with his deputy (Joe Anderson), his doctor wife (Radha Mitchell), and her secretary (Danielle Panabaker)—must evade and/or engage both their zombiefied neighbours and the gas-masked U.S. marines.
The ensuing action is feverish and nonstop and deftly paced by Mark Isham’s compellingly creepy score. Activism-minded moviegoers will welcome the second coming of Romero’s cautionary tale, but they’ll have to sit through one hell of a nasty pitchfork scene to get the message.
Hostel
Review originally published on January 5, 2006
The horror scene seems to be in the grip of a hardcore revolution these days. It’s as if a cabal of serious fright-film fanatics got together and organized a bitter backlash against hokey Hollywood body-count flicks with cookie-cutter plots and predictable outcomes. In the last couple of years, there’s been a resurgence of grim, graphic, in-your-face scare films.
Shock-rocker Rob Zombie kickstarted the trend in 2003 with his blood-spattered love letter to ’70s exploitation flicks, House of 1000 Corpses, and the hugely popular Saw grabbed the gore torch from him in 2004. Both of those films spawned sequels in 2005 that ratcheted up the sadism and nastiness, and then just last month Aussie fearmonger Greg McLean topped off the year with his torture-the-tourists entry, Wolf Creek. Now comes Hostel, the most extreme, punishing, pain-filled gorefest yours truly has ever cringed through.
It doesn’t start out that way, though. Writer-director Eli Roth is a sly one, so he lets us believe that this follow-up to his 2002 killer-virus debut, Cabin Fever, could be just a routine tale of nauseating Yank backpackers getting snuffed over in Europe. The film opens in Amsterdam, where randy American college buddies Paxton and Josh (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson)-along with their Icelandic travelling companion Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson)-act like immature bozos, get in barroom scraps, and call a prostitute with a bit of flab on her a “hog”.
You can hardly wait for these jerks to get sliced and diced by some maniac in a Dutch hostel, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, they take the advice of a slimy Russian geek-pimp who impresses them with digital photos of himself frolicking with a bevy of naked Slovak babes. He convinces these lawyers- and writers-to-be that if they book into a certain hostel in Bratislava, the beautiful women there will be crawling all over them. So they catch the next train out. Sure enough, as soon as they get to the place two scantily clad Euro-foxes suggestively invite the bug-eyed guys to join them at the spa.
Jackpot!
Around this time, though, the pussy-hunt vibe starts to erode like the decaying surfaces of the Slovakian buildings. Their Icelandic buddy disappears, along with a Japanese tourist, and a sinister gang of pint-sized street kids threaten Josh. Then, in one harrowing scene that sets the ghastly tone for things to come, Hostel switches from being an overseas American Pie-type romp to being a no-holds-barred look at the international pay-to-kill trade. If there is a place in the world where wealthy businessmen can spend upward of 50 grand for the opportunity to torture someone to death, Roth has done a killer job of depicting it.
There is one particular moment of torture that literally had me gritting my teeth in revulsion, and it’s sure to go down in the annals of film as one of the most stomach-churning images ever released in theatres. If you thought The Exorcist was famous for making people puke and/or pass out, just wait till Hostel‘s little snip-snip scene.
Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
To read more than 350 of my original reviews of scary movies released theatrically in North America go here.