There are two claims I would like to make about Saw X, and both of them surprise the hell out of me. The weaker claim, which is still a bit on the aggressive side, is that Saw X is the best of the ten Saw films stretching back to 2004, though the series has been […]
A review requested by Mandy Albert, with thanks for supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is perhaps the cult exploitation film of the 2000s. By 2009, when Dutch edgelord auteur […]
With The Reckoning, we arrive at the saddest point in the life-cycle of any once-promising film director: the point where we need to abandon hope. Almost a whole generation ago, Neil Marshall blew his way into the world with an extraordinary one-two punch of Dog Soldiers in 2003 and The Descent in 2005, a pair […]
The torture porn fad of the mid-’00s was one of the dreariest developments in the history of horror cinema: take the imaginative gore effects of the early slasher films, strip away the merry exploitation hucksterism, and replace it with bitterness and a fascination with the human capacity for cruelty. I have seen at least a […]
There is simply no reason at all to have brought the Saw franchise back to life after all these happy, wonderful years, but things happen without reason all the time. And anyway, there was a reason: brand recognition. So here we are, seven Halloweens after the release of the film first released as Saw 3D […]
A review requested by Andy Stout, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. A film like Martyrs has to exist, and I’m glad it does. That is not the same thing as being glad I’ve personally seen it, and it sure as bloody hell isn’t the same thing as […]
The life story of Louis Zamperini is fascinating and wide-ranging, and it shouldn’t even be possible to condense it into a movie as all-around misguided as Unbroken. But that’s what happens when you throw an enormous non-fiction bestseller at talentless check-cashing hacks like Joel & Ethan Coen. Or something. I suspect that the story of […]
The Call is really two movies, and one of them is actually pretty good. It’s the first one, and somewhat the longer (the whole thing comes in at a blissfully contained 94 minutes), and it is about a setting that, to my knowledge, has never been used in a procedural thriller before, which is in […]
I promise, I’m not trying to be the flippant atheist. My intellectual cover is that David Edelstein, in the article where he invented the phrase “torture porn”, named-dropped our Good Friday subject, but truth be told I was already planning this essay before I recalled that fact. It’s not, of course, a horror movie in […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 16 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival It’s a kind of weird achievement that Snowtown, the debut of Australian director Justin Kurzel, starts off by promising to be one kind of incredibly distressing movie and turns into another kind of even more incredibly distressing movie entirely; sort of like […]
The Saw films and I are not buddies, to put it mildly. Though there is hiding within the first one a very good psychological “chamber horror” film, it is not itself a very good film, and the sequels have all in their way proven to be one diminishing return after another. And morally vicious! I […]
Though knee-jerk anti-remakism is not one of the most intellectually sound positions one can hold, it’s still the case that attempting to remake a film is a dangerous thing, and not to be done lightly. The classic argument is that you should only remake a film with a good premise that didn’t work very well […]
