- The Shout is strange and moody and pessimistic, and it gets under your skin even if you’re not exactly sure you can say what it’s supposed to be about.
- Roger Ebert was probably more forgiving of Single White Female than I might have been when he wrote, “No genre is beyond redemption or beneath contempt, and here the slasher genre is given its due with strong performances and direction.” Maybe that’s because I’ve seen some slasher movies I’ve enjoyed more, or because I think the performances here are fine but nothing special. There’s a mad, off-the-rails energy here that the movie rightly embraces, but it’s also strangely kind of forgettable.
- The Last Year of Darkness never feels like a documentary, which more often than not very much works in its favor. Occasionally, it can cause the movie to feel a little aimless, as it sets no agenda or even appears to be following a specific narrative. But it also paints an intensely intimate portrait of these few people at this very specific place and time, essentially just by hanging out with them and living in their world.
- Jason Goes to Hell is definitely one way to have taken the Friday the 13th series. It’s just very difficult to imagine the bizarre sequence of miscalculations that would have been necessary to think it was a good way, or that the finished movie was anything close to comprehensible. It’s more interesting than a lot of its predecessors in the series, but that doesn’t make it any good. A miss is still a miss, no matter how big the swing, no matter how lousy the other batters in the lineup. What this feels like is a very different kind of horror movie poorly grafted onto the Friday the 13th template, then chopped up in the editing bay, either because it ran too long or because somebody had the good sense to realize the performances and story made not a lick of sense. At least Jason X, for all its faults, had some fun with its bizarro take on the series.
- Is Head even a movie? It’s something, all right. Whatever that is, it’s more than a little arty-pretentious, very much of its time, and it all kind of just washes over you more than anything else.
- Prevenge is darkly funny, sometimes surprisingly tender, and good fun.
- It’s hard to tell if Hell House LLC gets some parts of the found-footage horror format exceptionally right, or if there are are just some parts of the format that are exceptionally hard to get wrong. The movie has its share of creepy moments and jump-scares, and marrying the format to the haunted house attraction is a neat idea. But it feels very padded, doesn’t do anything genuinely interesting with that idea, and really flubs the ending.
- Ox-Head Village is an oddly haunting, occasionally violently gory, meditation on loss and betrayal and kinship.
I also re-watched both Sorcerer and UHF, which I’ll be the first to admit make for a strange double feature. Sorcerer is an incredibly tense film, a great ’70s update to The Wages of Fear, and UHF is just silly, goofy fun, even if a few of its gags maybe go on a little longer than you remember.
