Halloween Viewer's Guide - A Horror Movie Round-Up for the Harrowing Holiday

Horror Movie Round-Up And Halloween Viewer’s Guide

It is Halloween week so I thought I’d put together a quick movie guide to help you set the tone for the spooky times ahead.

I love Halloween, always have, and have spent the last few weeks gearing up for the festivities by catching up on some of the horror films released this year, and the last few years, that I’ve missed.

Here are the films I watched for the first time in recent weeks (all rated on the “1 to 5 horror movie scale” not the “1 to 5 regular movie scale”).

MaXXXine (2024) - Available on Max: This is the third movie in Ti West’s trilogy – which began with X (2022), then Pearl (2022), and now MaXXine. MaXXXine is hands down the worst of the three films. X was terrific and Pearl was pretty good too, but MaXXXine is just an incoherent mess that never finds its footing or a distinct flavor. It’s a mish mash of 1980s nostalgia stuffed into a dour and dull narrative that doesn’t really know what it wants to be.

Yes, Mia Goth is an intriguing screen presence, but even she can’t overcome the flaccid and foolish script for this seriously sub-par film. Very disappointing and definitely not worth watching. 2 stars out of 5

Late Night with the Devil (2024) - Available on Hulu: An extremely clever and well-executed movie that deftly uses the medium of 1970’s late nite tv to plumb the depths of devilry and the demonic depravity of the ruling elite who sell their souls to the dark lord at Bohemian Grove.

David Dastmalchian gives a fantastic performance as a desperate late night talk show host trying to catch Carson in the ratings. A very effective and captivating film…especially if you lived through the 70s. 4 stars out of 5.

The First Omen (2024) - Available on Hulu: Speaking of the 70s!! The First Omen is a surprisingly well-made and executed prequel to the iconic 1976 film The Omen. The First Omen won’t change your life but it will keep you mildly entertained and reasonably spooked for its two-hour run time. 3 out of 5 stars.

Immaculate (2024) - Available on Hulu: This is a not great movie but serves as a decent enough vehicle for Sydney Sweeney to keep building the foundation to her movie stardom. A rather forgettable film with a tenuous premise but the luminous Sweeney, who still manages to be insanely sexy even in a nun’s habit, makes the most of it…especially in the final scene. 2.5 out of 5 stars

Doctor Sleep – Director’s Cut (2019) - Available on Amazon Prime: A shockingly well-made and completely compelling sequel to The Shining which, like Late Night with the Devil, casts a severely jaundiced eye toward the ruling elite and their demonic ways, which include feeding off of the pain and suffering of regular people, most notably children. It’s impossible to watch this movie and not think about the infamous pedophile rings involving people of power, including the Jeffrey Epstein ring, the P Diddy accusations and the horrific Franklin Affair…not to mention the wholesale sickening and senseless slaughter of children in Gaza by the Israelis.

Doctor Sleep features two great performances, the first by Ewan McGregor, who gives a subtle, layered and impressive performance as the adult Danny trying to navigate life after the horrors he endured in The Shining. The other by the absolutely luminous Rebecca Ferguson. Ferguson is so good, so charismatic, so gorgeous and so sexy in Doctor Sleep it is astonishing.

I completely skipped Doctor Sleep when it came out in 2019 because I thought “a sequel to The Shining? No thanks!”. To me The Shining is one of the greatest horror movies of all time…and to be clear Doctor Sleep is nowhere close to being an equal of The Shining in terms of the filmmaking or storytelling. But…it really is a fantastic horror movie.  In some ways I’m glad I missed it in the theatre though because my first watch of it was of the three-hour Director’s Cut which is available on Amazon Prime. I highly recommend you watch the director’s cut and not the theatrical release.

Know this going in though, Doctor Sleep – The Director’s Cut, has one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve seen in a film in a long time. It deeply disturbed and unnerved me – which may say more about me and my life’s circumstances, but still…this scene was tough to watch, but necessary to see. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Smile (2022) - Available on Hulu: Smile came out in 2022 and has a sequel out this month…but I never saw the original so I watched it last week. Smile is a decent enough piece of trauma porn horror movie making. It’s got some clever story lines and keeps you engaged through out. I thought Sosie Bacon did a solid job as the lead, and she had some very heavy lifting to do. In some ways Smile is a typical middle of the road horror movie, but to its credit, it works. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

As for the rest of a Halloween Movie Guide…

My usual go-to horror films are previously mentioned The Shining (1980), The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). They are, to me, the best horror films around and they never fail to scare the living shit out of me.

I also love the Universal Classic Monster movies like Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Wolf Man (1941) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Another old movie classic is F.W. Murnau’s masterful Nosferatu (1922), which is creepy as hell and well worth watching.  

Other less ancient notables would be most anything by David Cronenberg, his remake of The Fly (1986) is particularly fantastic and his films The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Videodrome (1983) and The Dead Zone (1983) are solid choices as well.  

You also can’t go wrong John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982), which are all time horror classics that never fail to frighten no matter how many times you’ve seen them.

More current horror films that are most worthy of a watch are Robert Eggers’ extremely eerie The Witch (2015), and Ari Aster’s formidably frightening and fearsome Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).

And finally, one movie which is not technically categorized as a horror film but which is as creepy, frightening, disturbing and unnerving as any movie out there, is David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). Zodiac is a great film that pulsates with a darkness of such depth that haunts you for days and weeks after after watching.

And thus ends the Halloween viewer’s guide!! I hope everybody has a Happy Halloween and gets a bevy of tricks AND treats!!

©2024

The Northman: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

 My Recommendation: SEE IT. This weird, arthouse action movie is flawed but also unique, interesting and gorgeously photographed, so best to see it in the theatre.

The Northman, directed and co-written by arthouse darling Robert Eggers, may be the most brazenly bizarre big budget action movie in cinema history.

The best way I can describe the film is to say that it’s like if Conan the Barbarian and Hamlet had a baby and Norse mythology was its wet nurse.

Writer/Director Eggers is one of the more intriguing talents to come along in recent years, and he made a name for himself with his distinctly stylized, visually impeccable, first two films, The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019). Those movies were arthouse ventures through and through, and while I liked The Witch much more than The Lighthouse, I respected what Eggers was up to in both films.

With The Northman, Eggers is stepping out of his comfort zone and stepping up in budget to an estimated $90 million, in an attempt to expand his audience with a more action-oriented movie. With more money comes, well, less responsibility, as Eggers lost the power of final cut of his movie, leaving him no doubt unhappy to have his film be left at the mercy of soulless suits from the studio.

The plot of The Northman is as old-school as it gets, as it’s a revenge story, one which has no doubt been told and retold since the dawn of history.

The film follows the trials and tribulations of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard), a Viking prince who sets out on a journey to avenge the murder of his father and capture of his mother.  

Amleth’s odyssey is epic in concept but Eggers makes it feel intimate in execution, whether that is a plus or minus is entirely a matter of taste, with arthouse aficionados probably liking it and action fans being disappointed by it.  

What makes The Northman so fascinating as an action movie, and it is an action movie as there are some gorgeously shot battle sequences that are as good as it gets in the genre, is that scattered among the usual revenge story twists and turns are scenes that explore the esoteric spirituality of the Vikings. To put it mildly, these scenes are weird, and viewers who signed up to just watch the spectacle of a Viking kicking some ass will no doubt be irritated and annoyed by such artsy distractions.

I found these forays into the Norse netherworlds to be fascinating, but I am admittedly a strange person and that sort of stuff is right up my alley, so take that for what it is worth.

The biggest problem for me about The Northman was not the winding story or the esoteric detours, but rather something much more basic…namely that the film’s star, Alexander Skarsgard, isn’t up to the job.

To be clear, Skarsgard isn’t a bad actor and he doesn’t embarrass himself as Amleth, the Berserker on a mission. No, the trouble with Skarsgard is that he simply lacks that “it” factor which all movie stars need. Yes, he’s is impossibly handsome and he is in incredible shape for the role of a Viking – for example, his traps are absurd, but Skarsgard just doesn’t have the requisite supply of charisma, magnetism and blind ambition to make a compelling enough screen presence.

Skarsgard is in nearly every frame of this film and yet he never jumps off the screen. Unlike his co-star Anya Taylor Joy, who obviously loves the camera and the camera loves her back, Skarsgard often times seems to be trying to hide from the camera and by default, audiences. In contrast, Taylor Joy’s ambition oozes out of her every pore, and you see her seek out the camera at every opportunity, but Skarsgard feels like a reluctant leading man.

That said he does pull off the action scenes with aplomb, but it’s when things slow down, that Skarsgard recedes into his shell.

As for Anya Taylor Joy, who plays Olga – a Slavic Sorceress, she makes the most of her supporting role. Taylor Joy was fantastic in Eggers’ first film The Witch, and her career is in steep ascendance, and you can see why in The Northman. She steals nearly every scene in which she appears, and her magnetism and dynamism are absolutely undeniable. She is a star who is in the early stages of going supernova.

Other actors in supporting roles, like Ethan Hawke as Amleth’s father-king, and Willem Dafoe as a court jester, do solid work in smaller roles.

Nicole Kidman plays Amleth’s mother Queen Gudrun, and while I admire the attempt, she seems to be out of sync with the acting style of the rest of the film.

Unfortunately, Claes Bang, who plays Amleth’s nemesis Fjolnir, is not up to his task and makes for an underwhelming villain.

The real star of The Northman is director Robert Eggers and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke. There are sequences in this movie, most notably the climactic battle scene and an earlier scene of a raid on a village by Vikings, that are stunning to behold. Gloriously and gorgeously photographed, The Northman is elevated from a run of the mill blood, beards and brutality Viking tale into a piece of semi-populist cinematic art.

The screening of The Northman I attended was the first screening on the Sunday of opening weekend, and it was sold out. I saw the film in a mall in a rural part of upstate New York, and the audience reactions were very muted. No doubt audience expectations of a blood and guts action movie were thwarted by Eggers’ unique arthouse style and narrative decisions.

Due to my experience of seeing the film in “rural America”, I can’t help but feel that The Northman will under-perform at the box office because it’s arthouse weirdness will alienate regular viewers and negative word of mouth will be the kiss of death.

That would be a shame, as The Northman isn’t a great movie, but it is a good and interesting one. Despite its weak leading man, The Northman is a captivating cinematic experience that is worth the effort to see in theatres…but you should hurry as I don’t think it’ll be in theatres long, and its stunning cinematography will seem less so on a smaller screen.

In conclusion, if all action movies boasted the masterful artistry and depth of understanding of The Northman, then cinema would be a much more interesting and relevant artform than it is now. We need more movies like The Northman, not less. I pray to Odin that he makes it so.

©2022

The Lighthouse: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Not worth seeing in the theatre…you can wait til it hits Netflix or cable to check it out.

The Lighthouse, written and directed by Robert Eggers, is the story of two lighthouse keepers, Thomas Wake and Ephraim Howard, who struggle with the isolation and solitude of their job. The film stars Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake and Robert Pattinson as Ephraim.

Director Robert Eggers burst upon the scene in 2015 with his ingenious horror film, The Witch, which was set on a remote farm in 1630’s New England. The Witch was a piece of devilishly terrific film making that used craft and artistry to breath life into an ancient tale. The Witch was not perfect, but it was well-crafted and highlighted the great potential of Eggers as auteur.

The Lighthouse has been much anticipated, by me and other cinephiles, because of the great promise shown in The Witch and because of the intriguing casting of Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, two committed actors. I was very excited to see The Lighthouse, so much so that I went on opening day to see it as soon as I could.

Sadly, my excitement for The Lighthouse diminished with every passing flash of its monotonous warning beam of light. The Lighthouse tries to be so many things and yet ends up being nothing at all. The film is a very ambitious project, but the bottom line is that it simply fails as a cinematic endeavor.

The biggest issue with The Lighthouse is that it is neither entertaining nor artistically enlightening. The film certainly boasts all the atmospherics that would enable it to be a quality film…great setting, terrific acting and solid black and white cinematography…but the narrative is so thin, rushed and indulgently incoherent that when it is all over the film simply wisps away like dust blown off an old photograph, never to be thought of again.

I’ve heard The Lighthouse described as a horror comedy, which strikes me as painfully inaccurate and woefully inadequate. People describing the film as a comedy are only doing so because they are so befuddled by it they think it must be a joke. The Lighthouse is not a comedy as there is nothing funny about it, and if it is meant to be a comedy it is even worse than I think it is.

I would describe the film as a mythological horror thriller, which in theory should be right up my alley, but even with that awkwardly specific yet expansive moniker the film fails to deliver the goods. It certainly touches upon some things, particularly the mythology aspect, that could be very interesting, but it doesn’t do so in any sort of interesting way and ultimately falls decidedly flat.

Eggers’ direction on The Witch was stellar, but with The Lighthouse he flounders trying to set narrative focus. The film meanders and never gains any dramatic or horror momentum and then hits an unearned hyper-drive that leaves coherence lost out at sea. The unwieldy ambition of the film ends up sinking the movie and leaving it a rotting hull on the ocean floor, which you’d think would be an indication of a fascinating story to tell, but here we are stuck with a pretty mundane sea shanty that gets sunk by its own inadequate telling.

Dafoe and Pattinson actually do some pretty solid work on The Lighthouse, but the narrative is so diluted their efforts are all for naught. Pattinson, in particular, has really grown into a quality actor, as evidenced by his work in this year’s High Life, and he gives his all as the junior lighthouse keeper. It will be interesting to see what he is able to do with the much trod ground of Batman when Matt Reeves takes the helm for the next installment of that cash cow franchise.

Dafoe is always a committed actor, and he does his most Dafoe-eqsue work in The Lighthouse as the ornery, pseudo-Ahab, Thomas Wake. In last year’s At Eternity’s Gate, Dafoe literally gobbled up dirt as Vincent van Gogh, and in the Lighthouse he once again indulges in the same mineral rich diet, devouring soil like he does the scenery.

Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke shoots a nice black and white in a claustrophobic aspect ratio, and the film does look gorgeous, but his framing fails to accentuate the narrative or psychological sub-text, and the visuals end up feeling muddled and muted. In this way Blaschke’s beautiful black and white is equally as empty as the story and film it is wrapped around.

In conclusion, I really wanted to love The Lighthouse…but I didn’t. For all it has going for it the film simply doesn’t work. If you are really interested in seeing it, my recommendation is to save your money and wait for it to hit a streaming service or cable. If you really want to have a hauntingly good movie-watching Halloween, skip The Lighthouse altogether and watch the super-creepy and effective, The Witch.

©2019