I’d heard mixed reviews about 10 Cloverfield Lane, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Despite having the same director and with a similar running title to Cloverfield, the premise is completely different. A young woman wakes up after a car crash to find herself in an underground bunker with two men who claim that there has been a chemical attack. John Goodman leads with a fantastic performance as a paranoid and tempermental apocalyptic theorist who built the bunker underneath his farm.
The whole idea of being stuck underground with two random men, as a woman, is my worst nightmare, so very quickly I was drawn in by the sinister nature of her situation.
But it isn’t your typical ‘captive’-style story. The film then takes you on a nail-biting roller coaster leaving you guessing the real motives of the two men and the truth about the attack. The truth is revealed at the end of the film in an explosive and unexpected showdown – it will leave you like WTF!
I have to say, I really enjoyed it and I think it’s thriller/horror style would appeal to most.
Of course, we have a degree of empathy when we watch any film. For example, when we watch comedies we laugh at the actors and situations unfolding onscreen, particularly if it’s something which resonates with us. But when watching horror we almost don’t see the actor (or actress wearing skimpy nightwear, more likely) as they creak the bedroom door open, as they look underneath the bed, as they slowly turn around to see… Our connection with the victim is achieved, in part, because horror films (especially the jumpy bits) are often filmed with a first-person camera angle as a deliberate window for the eyes of the viewer – when watching a horror film we become that vulnerable girl in skimpy nightwear, bracing ourselves for the inevitable. Hence the birth of found-footage horror.
Watching horror is all about building tension and atmosphere, not only on screen, but in your room at home. It’s immersive by its very nature, so it lends itself to VR without adaptation of style and form. And film makers have certainly copped on to this. The VR horror I’m watching in the reaction video is Sisters: A Virtual Reality Ghost Story – a three minute or so film about two dolls, available to download and watch on the Samsung Gear VR Lite. When you have the goggles and headphones on there really is nowhere to hide – you have no pillow to hide behind and you’re unable to cover your ears, which makes it all the more terrifying! Perhaps the best thing about this film is that it reacts to where you’re looking, so you get the scares at all the right time. This is in comparison to The Conjuring 2’s short VR promo and, while it’s pretty creepy, the film runs in its own time, so the timing of the scares was out if I was ever looking the wrong way.
Out of all of the film genres, I expect horror is going to do particularly well out of VR and I cannot wait to see film makers get creative with it as the technology picks up momentum.
Bone Tomahawk isn’t what you would call a classic horror film – more like a western/horror hybrid. In fact there isn’t really much horror until the end, but it makes for a great build up without being slow.
Let’s face it, Kurt Russell was born to do Westerns and, if this film is to go by, he’s not half bad in horrors either. Playing the sheriff, he heads up a team of townsmen who set off to rescue a woman who has been kidnapped by a tribe of cannabalistic natives. The woman’s husband, played by Patrick Wilson, who you will recognise from other horror/thrillers like The Conjuring, Insidious and Hard Candy, goes along with the group despite having a broken leg which presents all sorts of problems along the way.
What makes this film is the decent cast and character development in true Western style. The script is peppered with dark sarcastic one-liners, but the pacing and foreboding cues never let you get too settled in the dialogue to forget about the reason for the townsmen’s journey. By the time the group reach their grisly destination, you realise you have developed a fondness for each character making the dangerously high stakes even higher.
The unique merge of two genres makes it a good option for your friends who ‘don’t like horrors’, but the gore factor is strong enough to satisfy horror fans. I can’t really say any more without leaking spoilers, but it’s definitely worth a watch.
Eden Lake is one of those films where you need to get up halfway through to make a cup of tea just to remind yourself that what you’re watching isn’t real – although it may as well be. It cleverly echoes all of those child crime stories that stick in your mind weeks after seeing them headlining the news and plays on the British middle class’ fears of kids hanging on street corners.
So the story goes, a loved-up couple travel to a secluded lake for a romantic weekend when a gang of kids turn up with their Rottweiler and start playing loud music and being a nuisance. From there the story takes a darker turn.
Unlike so many other dark thrillers where you find yourself screaming at the screen ‘JUST KICK IT IN THE FACE’, Eden Lake leaves you with no such frustration. In almost, if not every, instance the characters do exactly what any well-wishing movie watcher would tell them to do, but it rarely pays off.
The film also benefits from a quality star cast led by Michael Fassbender and Jack O’Connell, although they weren’t quite as famous when Eden Lake was released. O’Connell, most famous for his role as Cook in Skins, is at his very best playing the villain – a chav with a cruel depravity akin to Game of Thrones’ Ramsay Bolton. Not to forget that Kelly Reilly, who has since played alongside Robert Downey Jr. in the Sherlock Holmes films, plays a fantastically strong, but credible female lead.
And finally it’s British and British horror is the best, although I am biased.
Anyone who sees the trailer for Goodnight Mommy will agree that it’s pretty unnerving.
As soon as I saw it I was desperate to watch the full film as the whole concept seemed completely unique from anything I had seen before – the idea of two little boys left isolated with their mother, the one person who is supposed to protect them, with whom something is clearly very wrong.
Based in Austria (with English subtitles), the mother appears to be some sort of B-list TV presenter who returns home to her two sons after undergoing facial cosmetic surgery – and she is weird.
The trailer itself is representative of the first hour of the film, with lots of slow building, unsettling scenes and nail-biting moments all amplified by the silence and isolation of the house’s location on the edge of a forest.
Then a major twist is introduced and, if I’m honest, I felt a bit mislead more than anything else. There are still some well-put-together gore scenes that will make you squirm.
Maybe I built up this film too much in my mind before seeing it, but I stand by my gut feeling that without the twist we would have been on to a winner. There are certainly worse horrors out there, and few are as aesthetically filmed as this one, but I’d recommend going in without any expectations and enjoying it for what it is.
I’ve been waiting for The Witch to come to cinema for some time, ever since I’d heard ‘the horror film of the year’ being bandied about. I wasn’t disappointed.
The film follows a farming family of puritans in 1630 New England who are exiled from their village and forced to set up home in a secluded spot on the outskirts of a forest. This bleak, isolated setting gives a you a feeling of melancholy hopelessness from the very beginning and a premonition that not all will end well. It also offers a refreshing step away from the classic haunted house plot line and allows for new kinds of scare moments.
The atmosphere in this film is a big part of what makes it creepy. It is a slow build, but, at just 1 hour 32 mins, it doesn’t drag. Fans of films, like The Conjuring or The Grudge, should be warned that it’s not a jump-a-minute horror, but the scares you do get are gritty and have a very real substance. While in most horrors scares come in the form of a surprise ghost appearance which predominantly lack in consequences, in The Witch you are in no doubt that what will happen is very sinister. There’s a scene with a raven that will make you wince.
My only word of warning is that you will need to turn the sound up and pay close attention to what is being said – the olde English can be a bit tricky to hear at times.
Otherwise, a much welcomed feature-length debut from Robert Eggers. I’m certainly looking forward to see what he pulls out of the bag next.
Creepy Critic 