If you have disdain for the Scream films, there’s nothing in Scream 4 that will change your mind.
If you haven’t seen 4 and are on the fence, the new Meta version of the 15 year-old franchise is the best of its sequels as it’s a marked improvement over 2000’s Scream 3 and slightly better than 1997’s Scream 2.
Scream 4 is also a huge step up from director Wes Craven’s previous project, last fall’s 3D (the ‘D’ stands for ‘Dull’ and ‘Dumb-as-fuck’) failure My Soul to Take.
Is the movie worth the 11-year wait? Sure, why not. If the moronic Saw sequels can be bowel-evacuated every Halloween with straight-to-DVD production values, then there’s no reason you can’t have 4 movies in 3/4ths of a generation that actually make some money. Especially one as nostalgically entertaining as this. Is it perfect? Far from it, but you can only see Insidious so many times, and unless your kids are going to force you to see Rio, there’s nothing else worth watching.
Continue reading ‘Movie Review: Scream 4 (2011)’
The Lamberts are you average American family in a above-average American horror film.
There’s-
Josh (Hard Candy’s Patrick Wilson)- He’s a high school teacher and you learn two times within 30 minutes that there aren’t any photographs of him as a kid. Hmmmmm…
Renai (28 Weeks Later’s Rose Byrne)- She’s raising 3 kids (but only one of them matters) and taking some time off to work on her singer/songwriter career. Judging from her Browneye song in Get Him to the Greek, she’s on the right track. One of her pet peeves is telling everyone her name is pronounced like Renee even though it’s spelled so funky…
Don’t let the “From the Director of Twilight” tag dissuade you. Red Riding Hood is nowhere near as ________ (insert your own synonym for boring). It’s a marginally entertaining diversion that should satisfy its core audience (teenage girls) while not making the people they drag along (everyone else) wonder what they’re missing during the Battle: Los Angeles: Skyline 2 (click here to win Skyline on DVD) screening (you’re not missing much). Just to compare, for those of you who actually paid money to see last month’s atrocious tween-oriented I Am Number 4, Hood (directed by Catherine “Thirteen” Hardwicke and written by David Johnson) is a marked step up.
One supposes that any discussion/review of the I Spit on your Grave remake (on DVD February 8th) has to be prefaced by a mini-dissertation on the original cult classic. But looking all that up would take too long and why bother when you could just Wiki the entire thing.
The only thing I need to look up is how to spell Meir Zarchi.
Like most of you, I’ve seen the original Day of the Woman (look kids, Irony) a couple of times. The most recent being about 4 years ago and I remember thinking it was a very effective piece of exploitation. I understood why it was so shocking back then and can sorta understand the following it’s received over the years.
None other than Stephen King called Let Me In (on DVD February 1st) the “Best American Horror movie in the last 30 years” and his favorite movie of 2010, at least that’s what it says on the jacket of the screener, so it has to be true. That King said it, not that Let me In really is.
At short last, the inevitable sequel to last falls gajillion dollar grossing smash, Paranormal Activity is here, much to the delight of its producers wanting to cash in some more before the treasure teat runs dry. One couldnt go onto any entertainment site last October without seeing an ad for Paranormal Activity or watching it reap more and more millions as the weeks went by. I seem to remember it making a bunch of Top 10 Horror lists on both the Best and Worst sides. A year removed the movie seems oddly quaint as no film could live up to the hype bestowed on it but it still manages to do something a Saw movie couldnt in 3 craptacular sequels: Deliver a genuine fright.
As you’ve no doubt guessed, the items on this list are things that are terrible. So one might presume that the powers that be behind the marketing of the new “horror” movie Devil would maybe want to reduce the typeset on that whole “From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan” tag, unless of course your goal is to make as little money as possible. And yes, I was in one of those screenings last summer when they showed the Devil trailer and everybody began booing and laughing mockingly after his name appeared.
Finally. A Good movie weekend after the post Iron Man 2 blahs. It was beginning to look like summer 2008 all over again where we’d have to wait 2 and a half months for a Christopher Nolan film after an Iron Man opened while the filler in between ‘er was forgettable trash. Thanks to this week’s Splice and Get Him to the Greek, you no longer have to fear wasting your hard earned money on a flaccid Robin Hood, Jake Gyllenhaal’s slo-mo wall jumping in bloodless Disney battles and the latest, dullest, and hopefully last Shrek in a series that should have been mercy killed after the second one.
The Human Centipede is further proof that white movie tourists can be the stupidest motherfuckers on the planet. Or the least likely to have seen a horror movie that wasn’t PG-13 or star somebody from the CW.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that the poor girls in the movie deserved what they got, but there’s no way that anyone who’s actually seen a real horror movie would let this happen.
After 2007’s horrendous POV film Diary of the Dead, you’d think that George A. Romero couldn’t do anything more to tarnish his legend as father and master of the zombie flick. After watching the lifeless mass that is Survival of the Dead you’d be wrong. Undead wrong…
After Diary and 2005’s laughably pretentious Land of the Dead (starring Simon Baker no less because everyone else was smart enough to say no) George Romero has officially George Lucas’d his own zombie franchise and he has nobody to blame but himself. The cure for something like that is simply to make a good movie, but odds are that that’s not going to happen anytime soon. As I tried to stay awake through Survival, I felt sad more than anything else watching Romero make a copy of a copy of a copy of his own stuff, yet saying nothing at all that couldn’t be conveyed by watching his classics Night of the Living Dead and the Dawn of the Dead. Even Day of the Dead has its moments while Survival has nothing but extras from old Irish Spring commercials.
Shutter Island is the best movie of 2010.
I realize that with competition like When in Rome, Valentine’s Day, Dear John, Book of Eli and Extraordinary Measures, that’s like being the least effeminate boy band member. But if Island were released in 2009 like it was supposed to be, there’s no doubt it would fill one of the 10 Best Picture Slots, taking the place of something idiotic like The Blind Side. As it stands, come next fall as Awards season rolls around, it’s almost a surety that Shutter Island will be forgotten. Too bad.
After a long week of waiting, the miserable half of the audience that were forced to make Dear John the movie to finally, inexplicably knock Avatar off the #1 spot now have an avenue for cinematic payback. Hopefully after being browbeaten by your wives/girlfriends into seeing Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried express their virginal love as only a PG-13 movie can, you got rimmed or at least a handjob. You deserve that much, at least.
As an alternative, The Wolfman is no great furry shakes as a movie as it’s barely a couple of paws up from Jason Bateman’s Teen Wolf Too, but some decently graphic shots of gore should expunge some of the truly disgusting stuff you saw last week while Tatum and Seyfried were doing some hardcore nuzzling. Congratulations, Amanda Seyfried, something you’re in that’s actually worse than the $20 sets and Pierce Brosnan’s eerily accurate portrayal of a braying donkey in Mamma Mia!
As another October nears its end, yet another Saw movie makes its way into theaters.
If this was say, 2006, you might have given a shit. But the Junior Varsity Saw trilogy has more than succeeded in turning a halfway decent horror series into a punchline. Hey, I guess we all have to laugh sometime until another Scary Movie comes out, but at least that series has the decency to stop at 5.
Yes, the Saw series sucks now but I can’t bring myself to hate it because there’s something entertainingly interesting watching how awful the Saw franchise has become as the series tries and new and dim-witted ways to breathe life into itself. Saw has become the Muhammad Ali of Horror: You sorta feel sorry for it as it stumbles its way about like a retard…
Orphan is unlike any of the Creepy Kid movies you’ve been inundated with over the years…
Actually, it’s a lot like the Creepy Kid movies you know backwards and forwards, except Orphan’s much, much better. Yes, the trailer feels overly familiar, and to an extent the movie is, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t have good gory fun with it.
There’s something wrong with Esther- That’s putting it mildly
You’ll never guess her secret- You might, but I didn’t, and nothing about it is a cheat. It’s one of those reveals where you watch the movie a second time or play it back in your head in a whole new light and you realize Esther’s more fucked up that you initially thought
One goes into Terminator Salvation with more questions than actual anticipation…
A mere quarter of a century after James Cameron launched his Terminator series with future Cali governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, we get a quad-quel in Terminator Salvation we really didn’t ask for, but will probably watch anyway because it stars Batman. If this movie starred anyone else but Bale, would you even care, considering the trailers were less than whelming and looked a little too much like Transformers…but dustier?
T4’s also PG-13, which is almost always a debit as that kiss of death has pretty much punctured the sac of the horror genre. Look at what happened two years ago when the Die Hard franchise was saddled with the emasculation of only being able to say “fuck” once, no gore to speak of, and watered-down action. I’m not against PG-13 in general, considering one of the greatest action movies of the past 20 years, The Fugitive, was also PG-13, but it’s proven to be the exception to the unfortunate rule.
