Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button" is just the jumping off point for Richard Kelly's The Box, a convoluted moral thriller that gets off to a terrifically eerie start but collapses beneath the weight of its Big Ideas.

December 1976, Richmond, Virginia. The Lewises appear to be living the American dream: They're young and attractive; they have a lovely home and a bright, inquisitive teenaged son named Walter (Sam Oz Stone). Arthur (James Marsden) works at NASA's Langley Research Center, where he helped design the cameras used in the Viking Mars missions, Norma (Cameron Diaz), teaches literature at the exclusive Libby Hill Academy. They're liked and admired by their family, neighbors and colleagues.

Continue reading "The Box Review - The Creepiest Things Come in Small Packages" »

Ti West's slow-burn House of the Devil pays homage to low-budget horror of the 1970s and early '80s, and it's not a spoof or a tongue-in-cheek pastiche. It's the real deal, a low tech chiller that gradually ratchets up the suspense to knuckle-whitening proportions.

Quiet, serious college student Samantha Hughes (Jocelin Donahue) is desperate to escape the dorm room she shares with slovenly, hard-partying Heather. When she finds an off-campus apartment she can (barely) afford, Samantha's determined not to let it get away. If only she weren't flat broke. A peculiar, last-minute babysitting gig comes up, so of course, Samantha takes it. And make no mistake, the gig is a symphony of bad vibes.

Continue reading "The House of the Devil Review - Blame It on Mom, the Babysitter's Dead" »

The franchise continues its descent into an insanely complicated backstory with Saw VI, again written by the team of Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, who took up screenwriting duties with Saw IV. Here principled serial killer Jigsaw -- aka John Kramer (Tobin Bell) -- targets a selection of especially timely victims: Predatory loan officers and avaricious insurance-company executives doing their damnedest to deny coverage and lobby against health-care reform. This timeliness is especially impressive in light of the fact that Jigsaw has been dead since Saw III, and picked his subjects long before the current economic meltdown. In any event, let the games begin...

Continue reading "Saw VI - When Torture Porn Feels Like Homework" »

U.K. novelist Darren Shan's hugely popular, twelve-book series about an ordinary adolescent who discovers his extraordinary destiny at a macabre traveling show makes its first (and probably last) screen appearance in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a colossal bore of a teen fantasy movie.

Polite, blandly attractive Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia) is that kid everyone knew in high school: Smart but not too smart, nice without being a wimp, pleasant company in the cafeteria and totally forgettable. He's the kid whose yearbook photo scarcely registers a year after graduation. His best friend, Steve (Josh Hutcherson), is a whole different story: Petty troublemaker par excellence, "future underachiever of America" is just about tattooed on his forehead. Darren's straight-arrow parents naturally think Steve's a bad influence and ground Darren after he and Steve get caught in an act of minor vandalism. But when the Cirque du Freak comes to town for a one-night-only engagement, Darren has to choose: Stay in his room, or sneak out and join Steve for a night of forbidden delights.

Continue reading "Cirque du Freak Review - Is a Bearded Salma Hayek Scary? Well, That Depends..." »

Veteran TV director Nelson McCormick's The Stepfather is a serviceable remake of the 1987 thriller about a would-be family man whose dreams are repeatedly crushed by willful women and wayward children who just won't act right.

Carefully scrubbed of all but the most sanitized violence in the name of securing a PG-13 rating, the movie begins as Grady Edwards (Dylan Walsh, of TV's Nip/Tuck) meticulously alters his appearance before gathering his luggage and leaving the suburban Salt Lake City home where a woman and three children lie dead among the festive Christmas decorations and never-to-be unwrapped packages.

Continue reading "The Stepfather Review - A Cleaner, Creepier Killer Surrogate Dad" »

In an age when CGI ghosts, stuttering jump cuts and endless remakes dominate the fright flick field, first-time writer-director Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity embraces spooky simplicity.

Made for less than the cost of a new car, Paranormal Activity reiterates what The Blair Witch Project proved a decade ago: The bump-in-the-night things we can't see are still the most frightening. Though not as deeply disturbing as its predecessor in hand-held horror, Paranormal Activity is terrifying enough to keep hardened horror fans awake at night. Here's the setup this time around...

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Horror comedies are a dime a dozen. Good horror comedies -- which is to say movies that are both genuinely funny and genuinely scary -- are another matter, and good zombie comedies... well, let's just say that if you're looking for a horror niche where the competition isn't too stiff (tee-hee), you've found it. So the fact that Zombieland isn't a patch on the sly Shaun of the Dead shouldn't overshadow the fact that it's frequently pretty funny and occasionally sort of scary, especially if zombies creep the bejesus out of you.

In the not-too-distant future, nobody worries about catastrophic climate change, the war on terrorism, third-world nukes, global economic collapse or swine flu, because some super-mad cow disease has turned most of the human race into sprinting, slavering, gut-munching zombies. So why is pale, trembling, virgin geek Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) still alive?

Continue reading "Zombieland Review - Zom-Com Kills and Roller Coaster Thrills" »

A Franken-fright flick cobbled together from chunks of Battlestar Galactica, The Descent, Serenity, Cube, Resident Evil, Event Horizon and, of course, Alien, German director Christian Alvart's Pandorum is an efficient scare machine as long as you can ignore the naked contrivances required to keep the cogs turning.

The year: 2174. Having overpopulated the Earth, mankind builds a massive ark called Elysium and points it toward a distant planet called Tanis that appears miraculously fit for human habitation. Its precious cargo: 60,000 soldiers, scientists and regular folks, most of whom will dream away the flight in hypersleep tubes while rotating skeleton crews keep the Elysium on course and running.

Fast-forwarding now, Corp. Bower (Ben Foster) and Lt. Payton (Dennis Quaid) wake up with their skin peeling off in ghastly white strips, their memories riddled with holes and their heads full of questions. Where are they? How long have they been asleep? Why is it so damned dark? How come the door to their hypersleep chamber is locked tight and scarred with scratches? Why do the ship's systems keep coming on with a nerve-jangling jolt, then shutting down again? And where's Cooper, the missing third member of their team, who's neither in his sleep tube nor anywhere in the sealed room? For that matter, where is everybody.

Continue reading "Pandorum Review - When Head Game Meets Video Game" »

What are those strange drops of blood on Jennifer's body? OK, the Giallo geek in me couldn't resist, and to be honest, they're less like drops than pools of blood. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

"Hell is a teenage girl," observes Anita "Needy" Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried) in Karen Kusama's Jennifer's Body. Needy has more than earned her nickname through years of playing Betty to Jennifer Check's (Megan Fox) bitchy, vixenish Veronica. It's always been the two of them against the small-town world, bantering in their own slang (a variation on writer Diablo Cody's Juno-speak) and thrilling to the fact that their friendship (toxic though it may be) baffles the cliquish sheep who can't see beyond labels like "cheerleader" and "science geek." Without bossy Jennifer taking the lead, Needy's life would be a whole lot duller. Jennifer is well on her way to being too hot for their tiny hometown (pop. 7083) to handle, even if it is named Devil's Kettle. But as long as Jennifer sticks around, Needy is happy to tag along, even it means going to a backroad dump because Jennifer is crushing on the lead singer of Low Shoulder, some cooler-than-thou indie band she saw on MySpace.

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Welcome to Skank Ho sorority, the pride of No-Name University, in the middle of Anywheresville, USA! In keeping with the proud tradition of the Greek system, you and your sisters will make connections, form lasting friendships and help one another learn skills that will stand you in good stead throughout your lives, including how to make a drunken spectacle of yourself at parties, shower in full makeup, screw your shrink for prescription meds, bare your boobs at every opportunity, humiliate lesser girls and cover up mistakes that might tarnish your bright future. Like, say, the grotesque death of a dear friend during a mean-spirited prank.

Continue reading "Sorority Row Review - Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die" »