Hellraiser: Hellworld was made during the second half of the same production block as Hellraiser: Deader, during the final weeks of 2002; the two shoots shared virtually an entirely identical production crew, working in both cases underneath director Rick Bota (the one significant change is that Deader cinematographer Vivi Dragan Vasile was replaced on Hellworld […]
Final Cut (the original French title is Coupez!) puts me in a bit of a sticky situation. The film—which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival—is a remake of the 2017 Japanese film One Cut of the Dead (released in France as Ne coupez pas!), which achieved instant (and deserved) cult classic status. That movie tells […]
If you work in media, you likely know someone like B.J. Novak’s Ben Manalowitz — someone hell-bent on finding a big idea that will propel them to fame and fortune, with or without any actual profundity. Novak has played this semi-punchable character more than once, and in Vengeance, his feature film directorial debut, leans hard […]
When telling a story about truly horrible people, you’ve got two basic choices. Option one: They remain horrible, and either experience a moralistic comeuppance (for several decades, Hollywood’s old Production Code expressly forbade evil to triumph) or, more cynically, thrive as a result. Option two: They eventually achieve some degree of self-awareness, even if that […]
The 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was a massive bestseller, whose 15 million copies sold make it by far one of the biggest literary successes of the 2010s and among the 100-odd bestselling novels of the last hundred years.* It’s also a book I hadn’t heard of prior to the spring […]
The Gray Man may very well be the end of an era. Over the last half a decade, Netflix has attempted to move into the blockbuster space, making hyper-expensive streaming projects to rival Hollywood’s theatrical output, initially staking their claim with the putrid, runny dribble of offal known as 2017’s Bright. They have continued to […]
I would claim, and I would certainly appear to be in a very small minority in doing so, that with Nope, Jordan Peele has officially entered the realm of wildly talented directors whose work is all but guaranteed to be interesting and visually striking on a rare and potent level, but who are also fucking […]
Whatever else is true of it, Hellraiser: Deader has an extremely dumb title. Formally speaking, “deader” is correct English, but it’s not a word that I think anybody uses except in those moments when it is useful to compare things to doornails. And in the context of a horror movie sequel, it’s not just awkward, […]
Recent years have seen an impassioned debate about the merits of what some call elevated horror. By “elevated,” these folks generally mean exhibiting any sort of ambition beyond scaring the bejeezus out of viewers; this can range from being snail-paced and lugubrious (with intermittent grotesque shocks), à la Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, to simply having […]
“[This thing] is like [this other thing]” is tawdry, cheap criticism, and when the things are both from a foreign culture to the critic writing the comparison, it is tawdry, cheap, and risks revealing a profound ignorance and limited frame of reference. Granting that, The Deer King is very much like Princess Mononoke. To pretend […]
A note about the critic. While I am a devoted Austen-ite, her final, posthumously published novel Persuasion is not one of her works that particularly captures my imagination, good as it may be. Thus, I am somewhat inoculated against people fucking with it, which probably explains why I’m not illegally downloading a copy of Netflix’s […]
Proximity serves as both fascination and frustration in Fire of Love, a documentary portrait of the Alsatian French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. Let’s begin with physical proximity, since it was the couple’s penchant for cozying up to active volcanoes that captured the world’s imagination and—this isn’t remotely a spoiler; the movie informs us of […]
