Sharni Vinson as Erin A.J. Bowen as Crispian Davison
Release Date
2013
Language(s)
English
Running Time
94 minutes
I swear after I first saw this movie, I was certain a sequel would drop eventually, but unfortunately it seems like that’s not the case. It’s a shame because You’re Next has all the ingredients necessary for a classic slasher movie: stylish kills, great villain design, a dry perverse black humor, and a wonderfully bad ass main character in Erin. The premise- a rich family is targeted by unknown assailants and have to fight for their lives- is simple enough, but its execution shows a real understanding of the craft.
What immediately set this movie apart from others for me is how thought out the story feels. Character motivations are present even for the bad guys so everything has a human element to it. Erin is immediately likable and is a great protagonist to latch onto. Sharni is a bad ass and from the way she carries herself up to the way her character takes charge, it’s apparent that she’s not going to be a pushover. The killers each have different face masks corresponding to a different animals which represent their personality traits. It’s subtle character work that goes a long way in making the group of villains feel distinct aesthetically. The members of the rich family feel nice and distinct in the few moments they get to interact with each other. I wasn’t expecting so many characters to feel so unique.
The reason the characters feel so memorable is because of how odd they all are. The family might be rich, but that doesn’t mean they’re any more functional than a middle or lower class family. The earlier scenes where they play off each other are great, even if the delivery of some of the lines feels wonky. Someone’s always got something strange enough to say to add a “unique” sense of humor to scenes. I personally thought the movie was hilarious (intentionally). I appreciate dry in-your-face humor that’s predicated on the absurdity of what occurs. I think it’s a more acquired taste so if you don’t think it’s funny watching it, I wouldn’t be surprised. But I think watching it from the point of view of a comedy makes the viewing experience more memorable and might be something you consider trying out.
Despite nailing most of important stuff, the movie suffers from a lack of impact. What I mean is that we barely get a chance to gauge the characters relations among each other, so when people start dropping it doesn’t feel like anything.It’s a shame because the few moments they talk to each other had me laughing, but all of that is pushed to the wayside for immediate action.That might be good if you just want a constant source of action, but that’s not my cup of tea. The movie also struggles to balance its tone at times. It wants to be funny but then acts too seriously at other moments to let the humor breathe. It makes it hard to process, especially when the third act starts.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
If you like weird humor that’s dark and kind of perverse and also enjoy gory slashers, then You’re Next is made for you. There’s a sensible story, aesthetically interesting villains, and a great protagonist waiting to be discovered. Just be wary of strange tonal shifts and bare-bones characterization.
Rating
8.2/10
Grade
B
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Jessica Rothe as Tree Israel Broussard as Carter Phi Vu as Ryan
Release Date
2019
Language(s)
English
Running Time
100 minutes
I was so happy when I saw that Happy Death Day was getting a sequel. I actually went to this movie on opening week and remember leaving the theater feeling immensely satisfied. After watching it again recently, I’ve come to understand why. It’s like every problem I had with the first movie has been resolved in this one. The movie makes the brave decision to ACTUALLY expand on the ideas (if only all sequels could do this) which help it carve out an interesting little niche.
The movie picks up immediately after the first one and it’s revealed that the cause of all the time loops is Ryan’s science invention. After a series of mishaps, Tree ends up sent to a parallel dimension and is forced to find a way to escape the baby faced killer again. The sci-fi addition to the franchise gives it some much needed personality and makes the gimmick something more interesting. The way the characters end up reacting to the new knowledge gives us a ton of fun creative scenes that really push the black comedy aspect.
Characters from the past movie get more to do in this one. Because it’s a new universe, everyone shows a different side of themselves which gives Tree a lot of room to navigate and form new opinions. It makes people from the first movie feel more layered and is a fun play on the butterfly effect. It also gives the movie a more poignant emotional core that really made me feel for Tree. Speaking of Tree, Jessica Rothe kills it again in her performance. She’s given more room to have fun in this one and she takes a lot of pleasure in it.
Unfortunately, the one area the movie didn’t really improve on is the horror element of everything. The killer and their motivation in the first movie was pretty whack so I was curious to see how it would play it out in this one, and while it’s believable to an extent, it also feels kind of out there.
The pacing of the movie also feels off- there’s one moment in the third act where it feels like the movie has a natural ending, but then it keeps on going. It’s not that the extension feels bad. In fact, what happens makes a lot of sense- but it feels like it’s missing the polish the rest of the movie had. Maybe a subplot should have been removed and some events should have happened in a different order. I don’t know. It’s just a weird anomaly. The end credit scene does give me hope that the third movie (Please come out) does some crazy stuff, so here’s to that.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Happy Death Day 2U takes everything that was good from the first movie and amps it up. There’s a more interesting story, better character building, and even more fun levels of absurdity. The movie is more science fiction that it is horror, so if you’re expecting focused slasher you may want to look elsewhere.
Rating
8.4/10
Grade
B
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
A blinding white flash …… is revealed to be coming from a street light…The street light illuminates……a textiles factory. The film opens with a burst of bright light that sets the tone.
The film opens on a burst of white light. As the camera pulls back, the source of this light, a post outside a textile building, is revealed.
A shadowy figure stares at Esther. Esther (Lotta Losten) can’t see the figure in the light. The figure gets closer to Esther as the lights go out again. Esther notices a figure that gets closer to her as the lights flicker between on and off.
A worker in the building, Esther (Lotta Losten), goes to finish off the last of her duties and notices a woman’s silhouette standing in the doorway. She turns on the light to get a better look and the figure disappears. Esther tests the phenomenon by flicking the lights on and off, but immediately stops and runs off when the silhouette moves closer to her during an intermission between the light switches.
She promptly goes to warn her boss, Paul (Billy Burke), who pays little heed to her warning as his focus is preoccupied on a conversation with his step-son, Martin (Gabriel Bateman); Paul tries to assuage Martin’s concerns about some personal affairs and then gets ready to leave the office.
Paul (Billy Burke) sees the shadow figure. The figure leaves Paul’s (Billy Burke) corpse in the spotlight. The title card flickers on. Paul sees the same shadowy figure but isn’t as lucky as Esther at getting away from it. It eviscerates him and leaves him on the floor. The camera fades out to a darkness – the light is gone. Then, the title card flickers on.
But the silhouetted figure makes her appearance once again and stops him. Suddenly, he finds himself being chased through the warehouse; the creature manages to injure him when in shadow but can’t seem to touch him while he’s under a light source. Unfortunately, the shadow demon seems capable of turning out the lights and manages to kill him under the guise of the dark. She throws his corpse and the scene fades to black – a counterpoint to the intense light that opened the scene. This is a clash between light and dark with deadly stakes. The title card flickers onto the screen, breaking through the darkness and the battle continues.
A domesticated vision of horror. Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and Bret (Alexander DiPersia) talk about their relationship. Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) stares into a mirror…Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) tries to steady herself. From a poster of a domesticated horror figure, the camera moves to a young couple, Rebecca and Bret, navigating their relationship with one another. Rebecca is more hesitant to commit and is clearly dealing with something; she stares in the mirror as if to center herself from the echoes of something else.
The camera pulls out from a poster of a vampiric entity, a domesticated rendition of the shadow entity from before. It moves from the poster to a young couple, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and Bret (Alexander DiPersia), getting up from bed. Bret attempts to establish a more explicit relationship with Rebecca but she rejects his attempts. She’s dealing with her own set of issues and as she gazes into the mirror, it’s clear she’s trying to affirm herself. She reassures Bret of her feelings but explains she can’t be as forthright as he is.
A photograph of Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and Martin (Gabriel Bateman) in Rebecca’s room. A photograph of Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and Martin (Gabriel Bateman) in Martin’s room. Photo’s of Paul (Billy Burke) with Martin (Gabriel Bateman)Martin (Gabriel Batemen) is terrified in bed. A neat matching transition from Rebecca’s room to Martin’s room reveals their sibling relationship and makes apparent the depressing cascade of events that seems to be surrounding Martin – a series of events which looks to become even more unfortunate.
As he leaves for the night, the camera pans to Rebecca’s shelving unit and pushes into a photograph of Rebecca and Martin, the boy from opening talking to Paul; the two of them are siblings. The camera pulls back from the photograph, pulling us to a new room – Martin’s. From the photograph of the siblings, we track from additional photographs of Martin with Paul and his mother, Sophie (Maria Bello) to an obituary photo of Paul to Martin sitting on his bed with an expression of fear: a trail of familial darkness coalescing in one scared boy.
He gets up out of his bed to check on his mom and notices her talking to a “Diana” (Alicia Vela-Bailey) hidden in the shadows. He tries to get a better look at her but experiences terror as he feels something inhuman gazing back at him. He hides in his bed, utterly petrified of the situation and unable to close his eyes.
The next day, Martin, suffering from sleep deprivation, is brought to the nurse and calls Rebecca to come pick him up. From there, she learns that Martin has been sleeping in school for days on end, seemingly unable to get any rest at home. Rebecca, with Bret in tow as chauffeur, drives to Sophie’s house to get a handle on the situation. On the way, Martin mentions to Rebecca that Sophie has been speaking to someone named Diana, and a chilling realization sweeps through Rebecca’s eyes. She tells Martin that “Diana” came to their mother a lot during Rebecca’s youth as well – a harbinger of the debilitating depressive phases Sophie commonly went through and is currently going through.
With the context of Diana, Rebecca goes in to confront Sophie and comes to the realization that her mother has fallen into a depraved state, neglecting therapy and medication in favor of communing with Diana in a perpetually dark house with the lights out. The loss of Paul has sent Sophie reeling into an abyss that threatens to take her family along with it. Thus, Rebecca and company are tasked with figuring out a way of to deal with the darkness and the despair that comes along with it.
From this angle, Lights Out is an allegory about depression much in the vein of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, utilizing the trappings of a supernatural horror to explore the way dark thoughts lay roost and come to consume not only oneself but ones entire family as well. As Sophie suffers the people closer to her – Rebecca, Martin, Paul – are forced to deal with and suffer the consequences of depression imagined as supernatural infiltration. By mapping depression to darkness and healing to light, director David F. Sandberg sets the film up for frantic battles where characters have to desperately scramble to find the light in the darkest of situations to keep themselves afloat, nailing the metaphor on its head.
Yet, this reading of the film is rendered formally suspect by the opening sequence at the textile factory. Having Esther deal with Diana makes the latter less a representation of familial grief and more a general demonic entity, and the film leans into this idea repeatedly, having Diana engage in creepy maneuverings typical of something more akin to The Conjuringfilms. Instead of being tied to Sophie’s thoughts and inner circles, Diana is allowed to be a loose cannon only tangentially tied to depression and is able do whatever the plot needs her to do. This conflict in identity contributes to a disconnect in the narrative and its emotional arcs as the story refuses to commit to either being an horror motivated by intimate family drama or horror motivated by the machinations of an evil creature.
Instead of this combined approach, the story should have committed to one haunted vision over another: either go for a more traditional supernatural demon story with an explicit threat or go for an allegory about grief. As is, the narrative feels like it wants to be the latter story but is forced to deal with intrusions from the former story.
Consequently, even though many of the more shocking sequences are technically competent and incorporate creative uses of lighting to keep the tension palpable, they are transformed from being evocative representations of the characters’ inner turmoil to run-of-the-mill jump-scare sequences. There’s still fun to be had, but it’s a far cry from what the ideas and sense of sequence design should have allowed for.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Lights Out is a technically proficient horror that knows how to set up a scary sequence but its story is torn between wanting to be a character-driven supernatural allegory and a ghost story about a spectral menace. This lack of direction pervades the narrative and makes it the well-executed scare sequences nothing more than temporary frights with no staying power after watching.
Rating
7.7/10
Grade
B
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3to view this review’s progress report .
Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso Diego Luna as Cassian Andor Donnie Yen as Chirrut Mads Mikkelsen as Galen Erso Alan Tudyk as K-2SO Riz Ahmed as Bodhi Jiang Wen as Baze
Release Date
2016
Language(s)
English
Running Time
133 minutes
If I’m being completely honest here, after watching the trailer for this movie and hearing the raving reviews from some of my friends, I expected to be blown away by this film. I couldn’t wait to get an insight into the group that retrieved the Death Star’s plans, and I put in my Blu-Ray all amped up to learn more about the backstory of the Rebels. While Gareth Edward’s addition to the Star Wars franchise, Rogue One, certainly looks and sounds amazing it feels woefully inadequate in the character development department.
If you’ve seen A New Hope, you know that a group of rebels sacrificed themselves to retrieve the Death Star schematics. But that casualty never feels like it has any kind of weight to it. A nameless group of rebels and their struggles is hard to relate to. This film was an attempt at making the efforts of those rebels more discernible by chronicling their journey to find the plans. There are names and faces and I appreciated the struggle the rebels had to get to their eventual goal. The movie also answers some serious questions I’ve had since I watched the first movie and makes certain moments from the original trilogy feel more earned.
The film is also genuinely gorgeous when it comes to action. The CGI is jaw dropping and the space battles feel colossal and exciting. There’s a real sense of scale and scope with each explosion and battle that I haven’t felt as strongly before in the franchise. I could actually believe this was an intergalactic struggle because of the sheer explosiveness happening on the screen. AT-AT’s felt comical to me before, but I could feel the terror from them in this film because we get a beautiful shot demonstrating just how massive they are in comparison to ground forces. Explosions are finally given some real justice and I could feel their heat and size through the screen. There were also two amazing action sequences that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of. I won’t spoil them or who’s involved in them- but I do wish we got more of these scenes.
However, in spite of all the great action moments and beautiful set pieces, the movie feels incredibly hollow. This is because none of the characters are fleshed out and as a result there’s no real investment in any of them. I loved Felicity Jones in Like Crazy and The Theory of Everything, so when I learned she was playing the lead, Jyn Erso, I felt a lot more excited. I wanted to get into her story and learn how she eventually came to be the hero we’re told she is. Unfortunately, she never really has a chance because the script never gives any of the characters moments to really interact and flesh themselves out. We get a nice flashback at the beginning of the movie regarding Jyn’s backstory- but instead of developing her response to it and subsequent life , we flash forward 13 years later. There’s no attempt at showing what happened during that time- instead we’re just told of certain events that transpired in between. This problem is emblematic of the films approach to characters. We’re told a lot about them but not shown a lot to develop or verify those statements. It makes growth harder to evaluate and also makes everyone feel bland and out of place. Yes, there are some character building scenes. In particular, Diego Luna gives an impassioned speech as Cassian – but that’s the extent of his character. We never get a chance to delve deeper into the man underneath which means there’s no reason to care about his struggle. All the other characters feel like they get even less time to be explored- which is a shame because some of the characters really cool.
For example, I loved Donnie Yen as Chirrut and Alan Tudyk as K-2SO. The latter is hilarious without ever ruining the serious tone, while the former helps expand and make the Force feel more mystical and realistic at the same time. While their scenes were great, I couldn’t help but wonder how much better the film could have been if they were developed properly. There could have been some real emotional weight to the movie if it just focused on building up the characters and cementing their natures to the audience. This is the biggest problem with the movie and is the reason it felt empty to me by the end. We already know the ultimate fate of the rebels because of Episode IV. As such, death/suffering doesn’t really have an impact- it’s something we know will happen. Given this, the only way to add tension to the movie is to have us care about the characters who will eventually suffer. Because I didn’t, the movie didn’t move me or or make me feel anything about it. I just didn’t care.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Rogue One is beautiful to watch and had some amazing action scenes. If you can get past the lack of character development, you’re in for a visual treat.I probably won’t watch this movie again in its entirety but definitely know I’ll be watching some of the action sequences on loop. The movie did make me want to pop in A New Hope afterwards, so I have to give it credit for feeling like it belongs in the actual story-line.
Rating
8.3/10
Grade
B
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Ryan Jennifer as Sara Danny Bellini as Alex Gore Abrams as Paul Jared Hacker as Tony Adam Schneider as Andrew “Mac” McNamara Alice Bahlke as Diane
Release Date
2015
Language(s)
English
Running Time
83 minutes
When I decided I had to do a bonus movie to meet my 31 “horrors” in 31 days, I thought might as well kill two birds with one stone and review this. Stephen Cognetti’s found footage flick, Hell House LLC, is a well acted, tense, and genuinely eerie story that manages to provoke and scare in spite of its low budget. While it doesn’t change up the game, it’s more than competent in all the places that matter and should entertain any horror fan looking for a quick, easy, and effective scare.
The film , which is shot and edited like a documentary, chronicles the creation and subsequent tragedy of Hell House, a haunted house attraction. Clips are taken from found footage the staff that renovated the dilapidated hotel into Hell House took while they were working, faux YouTube videos about the subsequent tragedy at the location which ended up killing fifteen people, and interviews referencing the same. Earlier portions of the movie which contain news clips and YouTube videos of the tragedy grounds the mystery and makes it feel like something that might have actually happened. There’s a gravity to the carnage that elevates the movie about the standard camp you would expect. Cuts (especially from certain interviews) foreshadows events in a way that creates tension without explicitly telling the audience how things will play out. It’s a unique use of the documentary style to set up scares that gives the movie an elevated feeling compared to other found footage contemporaries.
Every member of the main cast feels real and well grounded. Their decisions make sense and their skepticism to the supernatural is justified given the way key events play out. You can feel the tension between the group members grow as things in the hotel get more intense. Schisms and party lines break naturally and feel like power dynamics many of us encounter in our own social groups. In particular Gore Abrams performance as Paul creates moments of levity which simultaneously makes the descent and fracturing of the group more pronounced.
I enjoyed that the film presents a lot of subtle clues about certain character motivations and the nature of the supernatural elements of the movie. These looser “rules” and general associations with satanism are more than enough to engender a creepy aesthetic I loved that there were not many , if at all, stupid jump scares. We see scary things from the corner of our eyes and that in end of itself is the scare. Character reactions to the unseen spooks do more than enough at provoking audience imagination to think about the severity of the events that are transpiring.
Unfortunately, the end of the movie leaves some critical questions unanswered which stands out more than normal because of the sense of realism in editing and decision making had made a lot of sense before. Some of these decisions create cool scares, but I think they ruin some narrative integrity and make the movie feel less intelligent than it had been up till that point. The movie also makes constant usage of a “glitch” (random glitchy bars show up in random places on the screen to indicate that something is messing with the cameras waves) effect which felt like unnecessary visual flair that distracted from what was actually going on.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Hell House LLC is a deceptively fun found footage horror film, that stays believable and creepy for the majority of it’s run time. The characters are relatable and the scares feel natural and well-earned. Despite the bumpy ending, I was left satisfied at the end of the movie.
Rating
8.2/10
Grade
B
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
