Sometimes there are films that for whatever reason, despite having a lot going for them, don’t entirely work. After all, there is a lot to enjoy about John Carpenter’s second widely released feature The Fog: the stylish vibe of peak Carpenter, the effective synthy score (again courtesy of Carpenter), the intriguing locale of a sleepy California sea town, and the mother-daughter pairing of Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh. Though despite all this, The Fog just isn’t that scary conceptually. Which doesn’t by any means make it a failure, since as I said, there’s plenty here that makes it a worthy entry from maybe the best horror director of its era. Continue reading →

No one shoots a kill scene better than Dario Argento. We’ve reviewed six Argento movies on Mildly Pleased now and it never fails to amaze me how much work goes into the demise of an Argento character. Here’s an example in today’s film Inferno. A woman after being attacked takes shelter in a neighbor’s apartment. She tries to relax in a sealed bedroom and puts on an opera record. As the music plays, we cut away to a pair of gloved hands—a classic Argento touch—making children out of paper and then cutting their heads off with scissors, we cut to a pet lizard eating a moth. We cut back to the woman as the power in the apartment goes off and on, the music cutting out with each flicker. She hears a noise and opens her door. Her neighbor friend enters with a knife lodged in his neck. The unseen gloved figure then proceeds to stab the woman repeatedly in the back to the tune of the opera music. That’s how you do it.

Continue reading →

You don’t usually get the chance to ponder why anyone ever remakes a film, seeing as the answer is almost always “because money”. However, this isn’t necessarily the case with Werner Herzog’s remake of the 1922 silent horror classic Nosferatu. After all, Werner Herzog has never seemed like a director who has ever done anything for the money (including his head-scratching turn as the villain in Jack Reacher).

So why remake a genre picture? Especially when it seems so far removed from the kind of subject matter that typically concerns Herzog’s career-long search for “the ecstatic truth”? Well, for one, Herzog described F.W. Murnau’s original as the greatest German film ever made. So it says something that Herzog had the ambition to take on this very influential film, while also managing to make a film nearly as good. Continue reading →

I have never felt this uncomfortable watching a film. Which is quite an accomplishment. Faces of Death sets out to do exactly what it does, disturb the fuck out of you with death. I don’t know what part of me thought I might enjoy this film. I think more than anything, I watched this film for its notoriety. As a horror movie completionist I had to know if Faces of Death had earned its spot in the most notorious echelons of the genre. It has earned that spot.

Continue reading →

“What’s it like having sex with David Cronenberg?” That’s how I was going to start this review. The reason being that so many of Cronenberg’s films are about scary sex. Cronenberg’s first film, Shivers was about sex-crazed zombies, Naked Lunch and Videodrome were full of phallic imagery and things going in and out of various orifices, and don’t get me started about Crash. Not the Matt Dillon film. I’m not that twisted.

When I found out Cronenberg’s second film, Rabid was about a young woman played by a famous porn star with a bloodsucking hole in her armpit, I was sure I was going to see a healthy dose of triple X terror. I was going to dive into what makes Toronto’s number one provocateur tick. Instead, I watched a film that was a typical monster film. It’s a well made and well-acted monster movie, but it’s not perverted, it’s not even that explicit. If you ranked all of Cronenberg’s films I imagine Rabid would be right square in the middle? So what is the middle? More importantly, why did I still open my review talking about sex with David Cronenberg? Let’s find out.

Continue reading →

The Wicker Man is a film that for years I’d only known a few stray things about, despite its status as a horror classic. Namely, the ending, which is a bit unfortunate, since other than it being the reason for the film’s title and being hinted at a few times earlier in the film, it comes as quite a surprise. Meanwhile, the only other frame of reference I had was the (supposedly) terrible Nicholas Cage remake, which apparently features a scene of Cage getting bee-ed, which isn’t even in the original. So it was nice to see that The Wicker Man is my kind of horror/thriller – one that doesn’t seem to have much in the way of onscreen violence, and yet the societal parallels it delves into are surprisingly visceral. Continue reading →