If you grabbed an IV drip, a steady stream of low-level stimulants, a super-comfy bed, and relaxed whatever grip you have on sanity, you could conceivably watch around 4,380 films a year. Sure, by the end you'd have the physique of Jabba the Hutt and the mind of that kid at the end of Stephen King's "The Jaunt." "Longer than you think," you'd whisper to the attending nurse who doesn't get your 30-year-old
I didn't see 4,000 movies this year. If anything, I fought my better instincts to make it past 15. Even then, I missed a few (
) and ignored more on account of weak reviews. Speaking of this year's glut of scare cinema, three final comments:
One, given those omissions, this list is clearly not intended to be comprehensive.
Two, if you see a title in [brackets], I'm not sure if it's horror or not, but I'd rather be inclusive.
If Thomas Kinkade dropped his living room eyesores for found-footage horror, the results would look something like
. Premise? Four people spend the night in an abandoned hospital. Things don't go well. And that's it. I've lost patience with found-footage over the years because the style removes so many elements of expressive cinema. There's less chance for creative lighting, for thoughtful (or witty (or poetic)) dialogue, for character arcs, for supernatural imagery. So much so that judging found-footage movies on artistic merit so often feels futile. So here's something worth saying.
. None of the thoughtful emotional development of
.
features 70 minutes of four nondescript characters shouting in corridors, and then it's over.
Directed by Abe Rosenberg
Unrated; Mexico
16. Stung
Eight Legged Freaks came out over a decade ago, and while its giant insect yuks (and yucks) never hit Joe Dante velocity, the flick carried enough imagination and humor to pass a lazy Saturday afternoon (remember the dirt bike chase?).
Stung would like to achieve a similar impact, but the flick tastes like flat soda, filling its time with a weirdly sexist romance, a cascade of F-bombs, and one of those interminable subplots where some infected jackass tries to hide his disease from everyone else. Meanwhile, the wasps never demonstrate interesting traits (like the vibration-sensitive
Tremors) or any hint of personality. All is not completely lost, as Clifton Collins Jr. channels Crispin Glover in his role as a Norman Bates-y party host. And kudos to the special and visual effects teams; their puppets and CGI creatures lurch and attack with a feeling of weight and plausibility.
Rating: D+
Written by Adam Aresty
Directed by Benni Diez
Unrated; USA
15. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
Imagine that you've written a movie where a woman can mind-control zombies. A movie where those same zombies can fuel cars like extra tanks of gas. Now imagine that this hypothetical movie climaxes with two men punching each other in an empty field. That provides some idea of how
Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead biffs its promise. This is a movie interested in new ideas only as far as those new ideas allow the filmmakers to play in the overcrowded sandbox of macho nonsense and cult movie veneration. That's why viewers must watch one of those post-Tarantino torture scenes where a mad doctor sways along to uptempo music. And one of those post-Raimi lock-and-load scenes where shots THWOK and SCHUNK as men strap on armor and guns. And one of those post-Miller chase scenes that underlines the unfairness of this film coming out the same year as
Mad Max: Fury Road.
Rating: C-
Written by Kiah Roache-Turner and Tristan Roache-Turner
Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner
Unrated; Australia
Teenager Max (Taissa Farmiga) is still getting over the loss of her mother Amanda (Malin Akerman), who died, why,
exactly three years ago today! Her mom's only successful acting gig was in a Dead Teenager movie called
Camp Bloodbath. So when Max and her friends
Pleasantville their way into the film and see Amanda, alive and chirpy, there's an emotional sincerity that cuts through and almost makes the film work. The roadblock here is that
The Final Girls makes absolutely no effort to establish the rules of its fictitious world. Time makes no sense. Space makes no sense. Amanda's occasional glimmers of recognition (?) make no sense. The sequel-hook ending makes no sense and retroactively torpedoes the suspense of prior scenes. All of which mean that great moments (like knocking the villain into a subtitle on the bottom of the "screen") never exist in service of a larger context. Sidebar: what self-respecting slasher satire is PG-13?
Rating: C
Written by M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller
Directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson
Rated PG-13; USA
13. Insidious: Chapter Three
The opening 20 minutes of
Insidious: Chapter Three are fantastic, superb. Scenes end without obvious scary punches. Instead, they linger on small moments, wide shots that hint at possible danger. The first sighting of a ghost keeps the volume down: a girl on a theater stage looks up at a backstage railing, and a shadowy man in the rafters waves to her. No shrieky effect. No ghostly fades or shimmery visuals. Just a slight bit of... strangeness. The shadowy man appears later on a street, kept at a distance. The lead characters function as archetype leavened by warmth, genuine care for one another, in particular Dermot Mulroney as a weary father. Through the first act, this is the best
Insidious yet. And if you understand why the first 20 minutes are so good, you can guess why the rest are not.
Rating: C
Written and Directed by Leigh Whannell
Rated PG-13; USA
Cooties begs for the return of Peter Jackson to horror.
Dead Alive did more with a zombified child in a five-minute throwaway scene than
Cooties does in all of its runtime. Sure, some jokes hit. In a film highlight, a socially awkward teacher (Leigh Whannell) yanks a gloppy zombie brain out of a kid's head and explains its properties to a group of nauseated teachers. But moments like that exist in service of a film that's, at it core, identical to a thousand other "siege horror" flicks where misfits get stuck in a building, fortify, bicker, lock and load, and get out. This can be a useful paradigm (
Dog Soldiers,
Splinter,
Demon Knight), but after so many of these movies, it takes more than zombie kids to up the ante, and the style here feels too functional. Where's the anarchic camera? The Hieronymous Bosch gore? The Looney Tunes insanity? To the film's credit, "I'm giving you kids an F for 'Fuck you'" is a great line.
Rating: C
Written by Leigh Whannell and Ian Brennan
Directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion
Rated R; USA
A few films proved as impossible to ignore as they were impossible to recommend...
11. Last Shift
Let's take a moment to thank Anthony DiBlasi for spearheading the mid-aughts revival of Clive Barker cinema. Sure,
Book of Blood might've been a snooze, but
Dread honored the simmering cruelty of its original story, and
The Midnight Meat Train slashed through its heroes with painterly gore and a Lovecraftian touch. Okay.
Last Shift. A rookie cop named Jessica (Juliana Harkavy) spends the night patrolling a nearly-decommissioned police station. The same police station where the cult that killed her father committed group suicide,
why, exactly one year ago today! Before you can say Jesus Juice, Jessica falls victim to apparitions that imply either a fractured mind or some ghostly pranksters. The film hits predictable beats and neuters a crucial twist with a weirdly timed flashback, but its first half trusts in the police station setting... and in Harkavy, who gives a grounded, sympathetic performance.
Rating: C+
Written by Anthony DiBlasi and Scott Poiley
Directed by Anthony DiBlasi
Rated R; USA
In found-footage horror
Unfriended, all the action happens during a Skype session on a computer monitor overloaded with Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, and a few messenger apps. Thing is, this premise almost works. Kind of. A nice touch: protagonist Blaire (Grey Griffin) often types her true feelings into a text field, backspaces, and sends a more innocuous message to her "friends." She has reason to be cagey. Her bestie Laura committed suicide,
why, exactly one year ago today! Go figure that, during Blaire's Skype session with her "friends," computer glitches escalate into terror, betrayal, and, I shit you not, death by blender. The term "friends" needs quotes, though, because this film has the least likable horror film cast in a long time. They're all empty faces until a mid-film shriekfest reveals them all as shrill assholes. The kind of people Neil Hamburger would call "sewage people." But given how terrible this could've been, it's a small miracle that
Unfriended works at all. Mostly.
Rating: C+
Written by Nelson Greaves
Directed by Leo Gabriadze
Rated R; USA
9. Knock Knock
With opening shots of suburbia ripped from a 1980s Spielberg production, Eli Roth introduces a family headed by Evan (Keanu Reeves). This family man hides one of Roth's familiar young brats deep inside. Evan's the kind of not-quite-adult who just loves the sound of vinyl, ya know, and isn't above calling an easy woman "free pizza." The first 30 minutes of
Knock Knock find suspense and laughs as Evan moves from one chair to another in his living room, never quite escaping the soaking-wet vixens who invade his personal space. There's also an end-film gag involving Facebook that's maybe the funniest joke of the year. The bummer is that
Knock Knock makes the mistake of placing too much guilt at Evan's feet. His two captors' hypocritical violence never gets the examination it merits, and their "game" is never ordered enough to invite subversions or reversals. An hour of punishment gets boring. Imagine if this film had the psychological brinksmanship of
Misery.
Rating: C+
Written by Eli Roth, Nicolas Lopez, and Guillermo Amoedo
Directed by Eli Roth
Rated R; USA
Now, onto the films that I feel safe endorsing.
While not as satisfying as the free-spirited mean-spirited neo-classic
Trick 'r Treat, Michael Dougherty's
Krampus accomplishes its goal: the creation of a Christmas horror-comedy with both heart and an edge. From the beginning, the film is sharper than expected. The opening credits arrive amid a slow-motion department store stampede. Later, the film's first glimpse of the demonic title monster escalates into a kinetic chase scene. The big guy's chained hooves ka-chunk on roof after roof as he races after a young girl. As
Krampus develops, however, the story focuses too much attention on the adults healing old wounds. This development sidelines Max (Emjay Anthony), a sympathetic pre-teen who instigated the arrival of Krampus but mostly stands around looking guilty during the film's long middle act. Had the film centered more on Max's efforts to fight the anti-Santa,
Krampus might've jumped from fun-enough chiller to Christmas perennial.
Rating: B-
Written by Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty, and Zach Shields
Directed by Michael Dougherty
Rated PG-13; USA
7. The Visit
My audience laughed at countless moments in The Visit. That's no accident. M. Night Shyamalan's Signs stuffed humor into suspense sequences ("I am insane with anger!"), and despite its infamy as a misconceived schlock-terpiece, The Happening is at least halfway aware of its silliness; Mark Wahlberg tries to calm down a plastic plant, for God's sakes. The Visit spends plenty of time gunning for gooseflesh, but it never ignores a chance to get goofy. One frightening chase caps with an old bare ass flapping in the wind, and my favorite bit involves a hypochondriac kid getting his anxiety tested in the worst possible way. What's The Visit about? It's a barebones logline of a film stretched to a still-tidy 90 minutes, fusing fable (a person-sized oven is a threatening prop) and campfire tale (a local asylum factors in). This doesn't offer the globe-shaking twist of The Sixth Sense or the meticulous artistry of Unbreakable, but on its limited terms, The Visit is one hell of an entertainment.
RATING: B
Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Rated PG-13; USA
6. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
And then there's this damn film, confounding what few expectations I could glean from its synopsis.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night uses its pulp elements (vampirism, westerns, drug melodrama, romance) like
Mauvais Sang and
A Field in England use their pulp elements: as a means to string together images and scenes of artful beauty. For example, when the two mains slide toward each other while retro-new-wave band White Lies churns in the background and a disco ball whips a blizzard of light around the room. But then, when director Ana Lily Amirpour wants to, she creates suspense with ease. One scene has a child on a skateboard play a convincing avatar for audience terror.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night lives in a curious world of overlap, a place where the film works as a genre piece when it follows those rules... and as its own kooky thing when it ditches expectations and chases its own uncommon interests.
Rating: B
Written and Directed by Ana Lily Amanpour
Rated R; USA
Horror? Maybe? Maybe not? At the least,
Circle's got one seriously creepy idea: 50 people wake up in a room with a red glowing orb in the center. Every two minutes, that orb shoots out red lightning and kills someone dead. The twist? Those 50 people can secretly vote on who dies next. With that constant two-minute deadline,
Circle moves like a runaway train, and the more people die, the more certain survivors capture interest. A nervous military man advocates for the survival of a young girl and pregnant woman. A flanneled hipster becomes a voice for cold pragmatism. Alliances build and dissolve with brutal speed. Some of the smaller characters don't work and skirt bigotry, notably a tatted, abusive Mexican, a race-card-playing black man, and a short-haired leather-jacketed lesbian. Even with those missteps,
Circle at long last completes the unofficial sci-fi/horror shape trilogy that started with
Cube and
Triangle.
Rating: B
Written and Directed by Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione
Unrated; USA
[4. Bone Tomahawk]
Like
Circle,
Bone Tomahawk may not qualify as a straight-up horror film, but it stands close enough to horror territory to ride by and tip its hat to
Cannibal Holocaust and Jack Ketchum. Here, a quartet of heroes (led by Kurt Russell) chase people stolen by a group of "troglodytes." The heroes visit graveyards, argue the ethics of shooting on sight, and compose poems for their wives. The villains mark sacred ground with cairns, hatchet anybody close by, and... well, let's skip how they treat their wives. This premise could offend, but the troglodytes play like the cavemen of our collective unconscious, the primitive screwheads found in every
Conan the Barbarian story and
The 13th Warrior, too. Set against them, a murderer's row of Hollywood actors perform the heroes as darn decent fellas, revealing
Bone Tomahawk as the work of an optimist who won't let a pulp-friendly disemboweling challenge his faith in the slow climb of human civility.
Rating: B
Written and Directed by S. Craig Zahler
Guillermo del Toro loves Allerdale Hall so much that he accidentally makes the setting of
Crimson Peak more beautiful than it is frightening. Snowflakes drift from holes in the ceiling onto plump little piles on the main floor. Steaming pipes rattle and shriek before spraying out red water. The main room holds the mother of all spiral staircases. I remember the houses of
Wuthering Heights and
The House of the Seven Gables feeling eerier, more imposing. Maybe that's the benefit of creating a space like this in a reader's imagination. On film, Allerdale is a smorgasbord for the starved eyes of genre nuts. Hell, the story here is almost beside the point; Mia Wasiowska riffed on these tropes already in
Stoker, where she also matched wits with a prissy dandy and an ice queen. To their credit, Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain attack their roles with vigor. Chastain in particular tears into her character's arch broadness, embracing the overwhelming nature of Allerdale Hall head-on.
Rating: B
Written by Guillermo Del Toro and Matthew Robbins
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Rated R; USA
And now, the two essentials from 2015.
2. What We Do in the Shadows
What We Do in the Shadows works so well because it builds on the distinctive appetites and traits of its leads. The gags emerge from who these people are. Consider how Vladislav (Jermaine Clement) avoids discussing his run-ins with a villain he calls "the Beast." This first works as a way to build mystique (I don't want to discuss my secret ageless battles!) and then upends in the final act when we see who the Beast really is. And consider how Stu (Stu Rutherford) enters the story as a tagalong who introduces the old-school vampires to computers. Charming enough on its own (they love YouTube clips of sunrises), his tech-savvy subverts a vital moment in the climax, hilariously so. A couple of characters uneasily show the cruelties of vampirism: an unaware victim happily discusses her aspirations, while a female "familiar" cares little for her family. But apart from those tonal curveballs,
What We Do in the Shadows flies with confidence through its horror-comic absurdity.
Rating: B+
Written and Directed by Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Rated R; New Zealand
1. It Follows
When Michael Myers dressed up in his Kirk mask and black jumpsuit, he became an avatar of death, but the creature in
It Follows might just be death undiluted. The boogeyman's core essence, the anti-soul found deep within the chest of every slasher villain (and Cesare and the ghost in
Carnival of Souls). Can we call it coincidence that those villains all stalk the young and sexually awakened? Even ignoring those thematics, as an exercise in suspense,
It Follows pulses with dread. "It" can look like anybody, and "it" slowly walks toward its prey, which turns watching the film into a nearly unbearable game. Scan the screen. Someone's walking in the background. Is the someone "it"? One scene that 360s around a school entrance like it's on a lazy Susan - once, twice, three times - nearly had me shouting at the screen. It's catching up to you, damn it! But of course it is. It always is. That's the point.
Rating: B+
Written and Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Rated R; USA
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