FOUND. [2012]

Director Scott Schirmer goes to some dark places in the twisted and disturbing low-budget horror film Found.
It begins as a sort of dark coming-of-age story about a bullied young boy, who lives a seemingly normal American life but is quick to morph into a deeply unsettling horror film when he discovers his older brother has been murdering people and keeping their heads in his closet.
It dives into some very graphic scenes of violence but it finds it's most troubling moments in scenes where we get into the boy's head through a haunted voice-over.  There's plenty of unpleasant subject matter but most of it seems necessary to get the message across, with the exception of a small handful of overly brutal scenes that are so forced they only serve to shock.  As disturbing as it all is, it's a change in this sort of film to actually be making a statement that deserves to be further discussed.

3½ oil stains in the driveway out of 5

REAR WINDOW [1954]

Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly find themselves in a bit of a nosy pickle in director Alfred Hitchcock's classic voyeuristic thriller Rear Window.
Stewart plays a man confined to a wheelchair in his New York apartment, where he gleefully spies over the neighborhood through his window, leading him to believe he's seen a man murder his wife.
Hitchcock allows the camera to only move throughout the apartment, thereby limiting the audience to what only Stewart's immobilized character can hear and see.  Shot and told with complex simplicity, lovingly detailed ambience, light-hearted thrills and plenty of snappy dialogues, Rear Window is the type of film that needs the sharp precision of The Fat Man in order for it not to fall apart.  Perhaps it's just an entertaining way for Hitchcock to tell us to just get out and talk to folks or he'll break both your legs.

4½ types of relationships out of 5

ONE HOUR PHOTO [2002]

Writer/director Mark Romanek's quiet psychological thriller One Hour Photo allows funnyman Robin Williams to really channel his inner creepiness.
Williams portrays a painfully lonely man, who works in a department store photo lab, where he becomes disturbingly obsessed with a family who regularly gets their pictures developed with him.
Romanek creates a colorless world violently lit by fluorescent lights allowing Williams' character to disappear within the walls with a wardrobe that camouflages itself against the backdrop.  While the premise is a little unique, the plotline itself isn't particularly uncommon therefore making Williams the main focus of the film and, boy, does he shine.  His subtly threatening performance elevates the generic thriller into something far more than better than it would have been without him.  

3½ snap-shots out of 5

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

Galactic bully John Saxon arrives at planet Akir and lays down his terms. The planet's defenceless farmers are boned if they don't take action; i.e. hire mercenaries to defend them. So John-Boy Walton hops in a ship that looks like the ass-end of the Enterprise made out of slug and uterus and flies boldly into a Seven Samurai (1954) situation in space. The addition of Robert Vaughn as one of the hired-guns directly references The Magnificent Seven (1960), too.
It's a charming B-Movie that's as bizarre as it is fun. Add George Peppard with the best utility belt ever, Sybil Danning as a Valkyrie warrior, and a ship's computer that acts like a sarcastic but protective aunt and you have a film that might not qualify as 'one for the ages,' but is memorable in its own way.

3 hotblood forms out of 5

THE IMPOSTER [2012]

Bart Layton's psychologically twisted The Imposter is the type of documentary that will force your jaw to drop with each new shocking reveal.
It tells of the infamous French serial imposter, Frédéric Bourdin, a grown man with dark hair and eyes, who successfully assumed the identity of a missing 16-year old Texan child, with blond hair and blue eyes, that had gone missing nearly four years before.
It's a stranger than fiction story that fully engrosses you with each twist and turn.  It could easily be a mockumentary meant to thrill and chill with an intimate creepiness that's hard to brush off.  Told with interviews from the real people involved, including Bourdin himself and a series of dramatically moody re-enactments, The Imposter is gripping, unsettling, heart-wrenching and leaves a long lasting impression.

4 intense plane rides home out of 5

THE WINDMILL MASSACRE [2016]

Director Nick Jongerius' international slasher flick The Windmill Massacre promises something uniquely inspired with it's set of characters different from the genre's norm.
Following a small group of tourists from all over the world, all of whom seem to be haunted by their pasts, the tale takes us into the back roads of Holland where they seek refuge in a old windmill that harbors secrets with a taste for intestines and sinful souls.
The first act is a nice little character's intro that spends just the right amount of time setting each of them up, which is a rarity in these types of films.  Sadly, it's quick to fall into cliché after cliché with minimal surprising twists which is such a disappointment considering what it might have been.

2 bloody clogs out of 5

THE ONES BELOW [2015]

Hanna & The Night Manager screenwriter David Farr makes his directorial debut with his 90's inspired thriller The Ones Below.
Two pregnant couples move into an English flat, one couple sickeningly happy in life and the other weird, weird and more weird...so naturally things get intense ala The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Pacific Heights, The Crush, The Temp...well, you get it.
It's a light piece of fluff that misses all it's marks to be anything remotely suspenseful, thrilling or unpredictable.  There's far too many far-fetched plot-points and character bits to make it the least bit believable.  However Harry Potter vet Clémence Poésy gives in a pretty wonderful performance that will make it a fine film to catch in the middle of the afternoon on The Woman's Network.

2 darned cats out of 5

CHERRY FALLS [2000]

Director Geoffrey Wright hops on board the teen slasher flick craze of it's time with the morbidly weird Cherry Falls.
It starts out a lot like Scream (scene set-ups, music and all), with a sleepy town high school going into a frenzy when a young couple is slaughtered but then things get strange when it's discovered the killer is only going after virgins.
The witty script gets lost under a film that appears Wright thought was a darker story than everybody else involved seemed to think.  The majority of the cast are pretty useless with the exception of Brittany Murphy and Jay Mohr who give it their all even when the film has no idea what it's trying to be.  It's sprinkled with all sorts of great potential throughout but unfortunately it never fully realizes it and seems like the studio heads wanted more of a paint-by-numbers slasher flick.

2½ teen orgies out of 5

MOVIE 43 [2013]

Producer Charlie Wessler gathers together a band of embarrassed directors, including Peter Farrelly, James Gunn, Griffin Dunne, Brett Ratner and many more for his sketch comedy anthology Movie 43.  Depending on what country you're in will depend on what plot you'll get threading all the sketches together...for once, the U.S. cut is the best one.
It's basically a gaggle of juvenile humored sketches that constantly try to outdo each other in jokes about bodily fluids, sex, periods, incest and various forms of racism and sexism.  It's amazingly disgusting, vile and void of any sort of class.  With that being said, it's quite often just as funny as it is ridiculously stupid.  It's notoriously known as one of the worst films of all time but I wouldn't go that far.  I figure more was expected of it considering the huge cast of well-known actors involved, many of whom tried to unsuccessfully back out.

2 shitty car accidents out of 5

NERVE [2016]

Directors Ariel Schulman & Henry Joost's second film of 2016 is the techno teen-thriller Nerve, based upon Jeanne Ryan's novel of the same name.
Emma Roberts plays a shy high-schooler who decides to outdo her more outgoing friend and joins an online game social media game of truth or dare that gets progressively more dangerous the better she gets at it.
With it's warning of social media pressure and fear of technology, it pretty much plays out like a rich teeny-bopper version of a Black Mirror episode only with a happy Hollywood ending with no lasting consequences.  These kids are spoiled and pretty flat, so the stakes feel low and you never really feel the potential danger it could have dived into.  Fortunately the pacing is brisk enough to never really give you time to figure out all the pointless plot-points it introduces for whatever reason.  An admirable effort but in the end it isn't the sharp-witted film it could have been.  

2½ lighthouses out of 5

CROPSEY [2009]

Cropsey is a feckin' creepy-ass documentary from directors Joshua Zeman & Barbara Brancaccio.
It tells of a boogeyman urban legend turned real life serial child-killer found within an abandoned mental institute on Staten Island.
Revealed mostly through lo-fi camera-work, old news footage and talking heads, the film gets increasingly more frightening and upsetting with each new discovery the film-makers stumble upon.  It goes into all sorts of mass hysteria conjured up by the community making it one of the most difficult and controversial cases to go to court, reminding me of The West Memphis Three.  A thoroughly fascinating watch but nothing I really ever want to think of or see again.

3 strands of drool out of 5

THE FUNHOUSE MASSACRE [2015]

Director Andy Palmer churns out yet another horror/comedy with The Funhouse Massacre.
Six homicidal mental patients escape from the local asylum on Halloween night and hide within a horror funhouse that's inspired by all their bloody handiwork.
Unlike most horror-comedies, Funhouse gets all the humorous moments timed right, so that the horrific moments aren't watered down and vice versa.  Thankfully it is funny and packs in some great kill scenes making for a steadily-paced great time that never outstays it's welcome.  The plotting is a bit of a misdirected mess and the characters are all pretty flat but with a title like The Funhouse Massacre one isn't expecting anything of superb quality.

3 sexy Hilary Clintons out of 5

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN [2016]

The Magnificent Seven is given the very unnecessary remake treatment by director Antoine Fuqua.
We all know the story by now but if not refer to ¡Three Amigos!, then add four and you get the general idea.
What Fuqua has made is a pretty solid shoot 'em up Western that is a rarity in this day and age, so I'll take what I can get.  However what he hasn't made is something that will stand the test of time like it's source material and other classic films in it's genre.  It's clear that the cast is having a great ol' time and in doing so it makes for a pretty entertaining ride for the viewer as well.  There's plenty of cheese and cringe-worthy moments but it's so briskly paced none of it is ever overly offensive to anyone afraid of losing brain cells.

3 card tricks out of 5

Debug (2014)

It starts out similar to Cube (1997). Both films exist within a confined and limited space. Cube had even less to work with but achieved more.

The biggest problem with Debug is lack of atmosphere. The sets are lit like a shop floor; they aren't even subliminally threatening. The primary threat is equally devoid of menace. The attempts to channel Kubrick and pair it with the unease of Ringu (1998), the horror of Event Horizon (1997), the sophistication of Sunshine (2007) and the plotting of The Matrix (1999) are much too transparent, meaning the comparison does more harm than good to the production.
The EVA scene was more successful than much of the rest, which is odd because I'd consider that part to be the most difficult logistically.

1½ convenient HUDs out of 5

Seven Samurai (1954)

Set in 16th Century Japan, Kurosawa's much imitated feature is the story of seven rōnin who are hired to protect a village of poor farmers from a gang of merciless bandits. Outnumbered by approx 6:1 and paid only in rice the swordsmen, led by the altruistic Kambei (Takashi Shimura), must work together tirelessly despite their reasons for accepting the job being different.
It's a long film, over three hours, but the three distinct phases (the hiring of the seven, the preparation for battle, and the battle itself) each lead seamlessly into the next, preventing it from feeling too stretched out.
Toshirô Mifune, Kurosawa's regular collaborator, isn't the leader, but he plays a key role and even provides a few laughs that lighten the mood.

4½ bamboo spears out of 5