A bit of a weird horror film and since weird is good, “Longlegs” is somewhat interesting.
A young FBI agent is put on a decade long running serial killer case in which families end up dead around the birthdays of their daughters.
With interesting camera work and colours, including vague, surrealistic scenes, Perkens tells a story of the ominous “Longlegs” (Nicholas Cage, hardly recognisable) who haunts little girls.
The atmosphere is decent, the weird scenes amusing and the overall result not bad at all.
I suppose I saw the original “Stephen King’s It” (1990) as it was quite a thing back in the say. But I do not even remember that this appears to have been a mini series. In any case, this remake is also already 7 years old. It was not high on my list.
Muschietti’s version has strong “Stranger Things” (2016-8) vibes. A group of young outsiders team up to fight a supernatural evil. The presence of Finn Wolfhard adds to the similarity.
I suppose you will know the story. A rural American village is terrorized by the clown Pennywise. Children disappear, but it are also children who set out to fight it.
Just a horror. “Stranger Things” is way better, both in the 1980’ies atmosphere and storywise.
A Netflix short (19 min) horror. A tormented mother leaves her baby in a church. Many years later the church is turned into a soul disco. The female half of a dance couple has some frightening experiences while she is in the church for a dance event.
The story brings no real surprises. “Disco Inferno” is an alright short.
Another revamp of a ‘modern classic’. Fortunately it was made by Burton himself. Burton got a part of the old cast together. Michael Keaton plays Beetlejuice, just as in 1988. Also Winona Ryder returns in the same role (Lydia Deetz), but then 30 years older and Catherine O’Hara as her mother. New actors are Monica Belluci as the evil ex; Willem Dafoe as a dead cop; Justin Theroux as Lydia’s husband-to-be and an amusing Dani deVito.
Burtons opens with the introduction of old and new story lines. Delores comes back from the (un)dead and Lydia Deetz is the hostess of a ghost TV show who has to travel back to the house where the first movie played. Her daughter wants as little as possible to have to do with her mother and grand mother, but she has to join the family at the villa.
There are no big surprises in the film. Needless to say that Beetlejuice has returned after 30 years with his gruely humour. The family has to travel through the ghastly world of the (un)dead and the world of the living in order to prevent things from going awry. Burton came up with a descent level of ‘joke density’ often referring to the first film. The film is still very much “Beetlejuice” and very much Burton, but -of course- more ‘contemporary’.
I ran into this “independent film” on Amazon Prime. Well, in the time you had “B-movies” (perhaps still), but “Sharker” would be more of a “C-movie”. Bad acting, hardly a story, cheap special effects, an attempt to shock by use of sex, drugs and violence. “Sharkers” looks like a group of people having a laugh making a movie.
And so we follow Harry, who gets replaced by his girlfriend for the colleague he invited for a threesome. Snorting his pain away in a club, he meets a drug dealing couple and goes to their house. From then all everything goes wrong and Harry finds the whole drug scene after him.
The film goes from corny humour, drug abuse and violence to splatter horror. Add some psychedelic drug infused scenes and you have got an idea of “Sharkers”.
Not a particular good film, more of a fun-watch so to say.
We follow the simple life in a rural part of Athens where a small community goes to a bar to sing Greek folksongs every night. There is one foreigner there looking for his biological father.
It takes quite a while before the film turns into the horror that usually describes it. There are strange sounds to be heard, people walk like zombies into the sea, but nobody is really alarmed until some sort of flying octopuses start to appear from the fog and eat people. When the group of familiars realise what is going on, they set up a plan to fight the monsters.
“Minore” is an alright film. It is a little weird, but nothing that you have never seen before. The typical Greek elements are nice, the horror towards the end is somewhat amusing.
A zombie film with quite a cast. Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, Bill Murray.
We start with the nerdy Columbus who so far survived the zombie apocalypse by following his strict rules. Trying to reach the town where his family lives, Columbus runs into the rugged Tallahassee.
The two decide to travel along for a bit when they run into two sisters who outsmart the men on a few occasions. Of course you get the usual zombie slasher scenes and bloody splatter horror along with crude humor and weird dialogues.
I found this film because it supposedly had comic book elements, but that is not really more than Columbus’ rules that appear on screen when he mentions them.
In any case, amusing, but it is but a zombie film.
A while ago I heard that there was a new Brandon Cronenberg coming up. The date seemed to be set for halfway July, but when the date came, it appeared that the movie still was not available in my country. Just like with “Possessor” I had to get a copy abroad.
I am afraid I have to say that Cronenberg has a downward trajectory. Contrary to the IMDb.com ratings, I really like “Antiviral”, “Possessor” is alright and “Infinity Pool” is alright as well.
James is an aspiring writer with a writer’s block for his second novel. He married rich and him and his wife Em go on holidays to an exclusive resort on some tropical island. There they meet Gaby and Alban. Especially Gaby is very manipulative and uses her charms to guide James into a direction of her choosing.
The story of “Infinity Pool” is highly unlikely and very far fetched. Island authorities have ruthless methods of maintaining order and an extraordinarily odd way for rich tourists to avoid death penalty. A group of resort regulars seems to think themselves untouchable because they have the means to employ the rich tourists treatment.
James is navigated towards more and more extreme ways of making fun, while it becomes clear that is actually himself who is being made fun of. Cronenberg comes with some bloody gore, extreme violence, nudity and explicit sex, but also psychedelic scenes which make “Infinity Pool” somewhat more interesting. The music of Tim Hecker also helps some.
Again, the new Cronenberg is not your average film, but I cannot say that it is particularly good.
The strange title for a horror series caught my interest. In this 8 episodes Netflix series we follow Lisa Nova. Lisa had made a short horror film which is picked up by a one-time big film producer who wants to turn it into a feature film. The two meet up, agreements are made and Lou Burke starts to tutor Lisa in the world of movie business.
When it becomes clear that Burke gave the project to another director, Lisa is furious and she hires a witch that she met before to curse Burke. For the curse Lisa has to drink and eat the weirdest things which prove to have a bigger effect on herself than on Burke. Slowly things start to run out of hand.
Early in the series the two creators seem to have taken much inspiration from David Lynch. The atmosphere is dense, dark and weird. With a bit of a Cronenberg note, the series shift more towards more typical horror and my interested started to go down. The ending is particularly weak.
Perhaps it is only good that there are only eight episodes. There are a few good elements, but a bit too many open doors as well. It is not all that often that I get to see something weird, so I rate “Brand New Cherry Flavor” in the middle.
