Monday, September 9, 2019

Nightmare Cinema


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In case you haven’t seen the intro from my entry dated 1/26/19 (it’s in my archives whenever you want to read it), I’m no longer going to review every single movie I see.  I’m going to review one, with the occasional bonus, and just give ratings for the rest from now on (unless I decide to pick it up again in the future).  You can always ask me why I gave the ratings for the films without reviews though (via comments or the e-mail addresses under the ‘About Me’ section).
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Nightmare Cinema                                                      G
Pretty good horror anthology film consisting of five tales presented as movies in a theater, all helmed by directors behind genre titles:  Alejandro Brugués (Juan of the Dead), Joe Dante (Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins, The ‘Burbs), Ryũhei Kitamura (Versus, The Midnight Meat Train), David Slade (Hard Candy, 30 Days of Night), and Mick Garris (Sleepwalkers, The Stand, Riding the Bullet).  As I’ve said before, anthology films can either have more hits than misses, more misses than hits, mostly hits, mostly misses, all hits, or all misses.  This one definitely had more hits; I liked 4 of the 5 and I didn’t hate the one, I just thought it was the weakest.  It begins with a bang in Alejandro’s “The Thing in the Woods” and I almost want to recommend the film on this entry alone.  It starts like a typical slasher film in the woods before becoming something else entirely after a clever twist is revealed.  The aforementioned weakest entry follows and is Mr. Dante’s “Mirare,” involving plastic surgery gone haywire.  It wasn’t a terrible segment; there was just no satisfying payoff.  Mr. Kitamura’s “Mashit” is a pretty good tale involving religion and the titular demon and contains a fairly gory finale.  David Slade’s “This Way to Egress” is a largely original Twilight Zone-ish story but slightly darker and actually might benefit from being longer (it was ironically shot in black & white like that Rod Serling anthology show too).  The final tale directed by Mick Garris (“Dead”) is slightly akin to The Sixth Sense, but that doesn’t mean it still didn’t possess an eerie quality to it, nor make it any less compelling (and I’m absolutely not dissing that M. Night Shyamalan film either, but the whole “I see dead people” trope has been done to death---pun intended).  All in all, this isn’t a superb anthology film (the first segment was great, the second not great, and the last three were decent), but it’s definitely worth checking out and not a waste of time (the DVD was a little under $10 at Walmart and On Demand has it for $5.99).  I could see this becoming a franchise…well, any anthology movie has the potential to become a franchise since it’s generally short films with no relation to each other, but The Projectionist (played by Mickey Rourke) whom stores these “movies” in his collection could potentially become iconic.  9/8/2019


Bonus review:


Slice                                                                             OK/G
This film is a mystery with elements of horror, crime, and comedy tossed in (the comedy came through quite a bit though, often satirically).  It takes place in a town where the living and dead are segregated.  Yes, there is a literal “ghost town,” but the ghosts look more like zombies (they’re both technically undead though).  There are also witches and a werewolf.  There’s quite a bit to enjoy here, especially for well-versed film fans (horror in particular), but even amongst all the genre intermingling and everything else going on, I still felt a part of the story was missing, but that could just be me.  9/8/2019



Other movies I've seen and their ratings (see above):

Clownado  >>>B

Gags the Clown  >>>OK/G

Giant Little Ones  >>>G

Satanic Panic (2019)  >>>EH/OK

The Utah Cabin Murders  >>>EH/OK


---Sean O.
9/9/2019

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