If some of the kids look familiar, that is because the slut is Anna Hutchison , the jock is Chris Hemsworth ( Expendables 2 ) and the stoner is Fran Kranz ( Dollhouse ).
The trailers give away the fact that this is not as straightforward as it seems. From the get-go, the film lets us know things are being manipulated by an office full of workers. Bradley Whitford ( The Handmaid's Tale ) is there, backed up by Joss Whedon's familiar faces like Amy Acker and Tom Lenk ( Buffy: Season 6 ).
The climax, however, includes a final twist that shows this to be more than just a standard meta-thriller. Even knowing there are two stories that eventually overlap, there are still surprises to be had. All in all, an amazing piece of work. Knowing that the creators are responsible for Cloverfield and Buffy: Season 4 may allow you to see additional references ...
There are lots of twists - perhaps too many. It tries too hard - but without a big budget (no stars = no publicity) it only had a very complex script to reel in the viewers.
Christina has love interest Joshua Jackson ( Fringe ), rival Judy Greer and boss Michael Rosenbaum ( Smallville ) to worry about.
Jesse wants to date Kristina Anapau , but has to deal with School bully Milo Ventriglia ( Heroes ).
This was directed by Wes Craven , and needed lots of re-shoots. Unfortunately the result of the re-editing is a disjointed effort.
Katniss also befriends the boy next door - sole survivor of the murdered family. Of course, in this kind of film there is a nasty secret. It is all a bit predictable, but no worse than similar shockers Silent House or The Pact . In fact, this is more mainstream version - for some reason it was given a 15 certificate in the UK, but it is a pretty tame, PG-13 film.
This was based on a Stephen King short story. It is a suspenseful effort, despite being a made-for-TV movie.
A year later, someone starts bumping off the witnesses. Like in I Know What You Did Last Summer , but with more babes and fewer guys ... think Black Christmas (2005) done without the sense of irony.
Despite its cliched nature, it actually gets better in the third act. This is because Carrie Fisher has some great scenes in it - perhaps she rewrote her own dialogue (as she did in Time Guardian
Stitches is a second-rate clown played by English stand-up comedian Ross Noble. He performs at an 8-year-old's birthday party, but the group of kids play cruel tricks on him and he dies in a horrific accident as a result.
The film jumps forward six years, until the characters are all supposedly 14 years old. The fact that they are played by unknowns helps it work, but the actors are all bound to be ten years older than their characters.
The birthday boy, now a Harry Potter lookalike, is terrified of clowns and birthdays. But eventually his friends talk him into holding a party so he can invite the girl of his dreams. Naturally, the party grows, and then gets gate-crashed by a killer clown back from the dead!
This is John Carpenter 's comeback, eight years after Ghosts of Mars - but it is boring and predictable. The cast of B-List starlets (up-and-comers, like the sidekick from the 2010 Nikita TV show) are nice to look at ... But the Killer is just bland. Carpenter is the king of the slasher film, he gave us Halloween , arguably the first and best example of the genre. Then he moved away from the teenagers in danger trope and gave us grown men in danger in The Thing . He seems to have forgotten everything he taught us. This just adds to the disappointment.
Someone with a crossbow and pack of hunting dogs starts to bump them off. There is no chainsaw or hockey mask - this killer wears a ghillie suit, which makes him the most convincing threat in the genre!
What separates this from a revenge thriller is the apparent lack of justice. The victim's pain is inversely proportional to the amount they deserve it.
This was filmed in the Republic of Ireland.
Yancy Butler pops up as the protagonists's sister. Yes, she is the biggest name in the cast but she only has a supporting role.
Ann's hobby is pinning butterflies. She also befriends and tutors a young schoolgirl. However, this friendship with the girl seems to be mutually abusive and exploitative. It leads to a dangerous obsession.
Ann befriends her neighbour, Claudia ( Erica Leerhsen ), and looks after Claudia's daughter when Claudia is away. However, Ann's estranged daughter Dorothy ( Heather Langenkamp ) threatens to reveal the truth about her mother.
Since this is a female-based horror movie, with few male characters, this passes the Bechdel test. There are lots of cameos by late 1970s scream queens - Olga ( Camille Keaton ), Rachel ( Adrienne King ) and Lauren ( P.J. Soles ) all stand out. Director Joe Dante even has a cameo as the Taxi Driver.
It turns out that while Shelly has an incredibly shy and placid demeanor, she also has a secret that seems reminiscent of the J-Horror movie Audition . She also has a very particular set of skills, which allow her to create a home-made latex mask of someone's face that is almost as good as the professionally made ones in Mission Impossible .
We get flashbacks of Shelly's abusive childhood, which explain that there is correlation between her damaged face and psyche but that does not mean there is causation. She is mentally ill because she was abused, which also led to her disfiguration. Now she has a fixation on the immorality of adultery, among other things.
The male characters, few and far between, are creepy idiots. However, there are several important female roles in this film. That certainly puts it above the normal stalk-and-slash effort. Perhaps the reason is that although the Director was male, his co-writer and co-producer was also the female lead of the movie.
There is a tense scene when the heroine's flatmate ( Maika Monroe ) is stalked by someone posting pictures real-time via cell-phone.
The protagonist's father (Colm Feore - Chronicles of Riddick ) hires a private detective (Stephen Rea - Interview With A Vampire ).
Luckily the next-door neighbour is a trained nurse. If anything, she is too good to be true.
Made for television, this is about a trio of female characters who argue over female-centric things. Clearly this was intended for a female audience. However, the filmmakers did not get too cheap or lazy.
It turns out that Grace has another stalker, who is far more dangerous than the ex-husband. The audience gets clued in on this long before the main character is.
Knox hires Griff (Eddie Goines - ) and his construction crew to repair the house. Due to a bureaucratic misunderstanding, they have to do it illegally off the books. This makes them naturally reluctant to involve the cops.
The cops know Bree, so they give her a lot of leeway. So does Joan Carr ( Krista Allen ), who owns the local off-licence. When bodies start turning up, the cops suspect Knox.
The protagonist (Clint Eastwood - ) is a radio DJ who has a one-night stand with a fan who picks him up in his favourite bar. Unfortunately she gets a bit clingy, and will not respect his boundaries. This builds up to her becoming the prototype bunny-boiler for Fatal Attraction .
There is a saying that Most of Directing is Casting, and that certainly seems to be the case in this film. The female antagonist really steals the movie, and it is a shame the actress never got to move on to bigger films.
A police detective gets involved in the case. Yes, a certain modern trope - best known from The Shining - is shown here in what may be its first outing.
The next year, a single mother ( Nicky Whelan ) takes her tweenage kids to the town. They stay in an Air B'N'B rental hose, and their landlady is ... the sole survivor lady. She recognises their car as the one that killed her family, so she starts stalking them - like in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle .
Eventually, someone starts bumping off the tweens who caused the crash. The killer is kept out of shot - there is no stylish killer identity, with a memorable mask or disguise. After all, this is not a serial killer/slasher movie but a TV domestic drama aimed at a female audience.
This was directed by the same man who directed the shocking Korean film, Oldboy . He has added some incredible visual touches. It is basically a vampire film without the trappings of vampirism. The blood-lust is human, not supernatural, and the result is a stylish display of psychopathic violence.
This has a few similarities with Single White Female , but it is a made-for-television movie-of-the-week effort. It smacks of the old based on a true story films that proliferated on daytime television a few years ago, although it seems too generic to be about a specific true-crime event.
Like most made-for-TV entertainment, this is aimed at a female audience. As a result the main characters are female, with the stepfather and the cops almost thrown in as afterthoughts. While relatively few Hollywood movies pass the Bechdel test, this is not the same for TV movies.
This fails as a whodunnit or a slasher film. We know who the killer is, and that killer is not a serious threat the way others
The protagonist survives a potentially fatal attack. Her resulting injuries come and go as the plot requires. First she is as good as dead, then she makes a getaway. Then she has a broken ankle and a dislocation ... but she still fights back really well - until the point when she gets paralysed with fear. At least the pace of the story is so fast that the audience is constantly distracted by new developments.
The killer is much better organised. She even has what looks like a modern remake of a FG42 rifle, a lightweight semi-auto rifle equipped for hunting. Unfortunately this amazing rifle only appears in a few scenes, and mysteriously disappears before it gets used properly.
The title character, Pearl ( Mia Goth ) is a lonely young woman living on a farm in North America. Her husband has gone off to fight in the First World War, so she has moved in with her aging parents. Although her father is immobile due to disability, her domineering mother is active enough for both of them.
Trapped in her lonely home-life, Pearl dreams of getting out of the dreary small town. She flirts with the projectionist in the local movie theatre, and auditions for the local theatre group. Of course, she has issues with rejection. This boils over into shocking violence.
Mia Goth may be surrounded by a good cast, but she is in every single scene and she carries the entire movie. Her performance is uninhibited, especially considering the director's love of minutes-long shots. Not just in amazing monologues and stalk-and-slash scenes, but even in the end credits sequence itself. Goth is phenomenal, and to say this film is worth watching for her performance alone is misleading because it imples there is something in the film outside of her performance.
Halfway through, someone starts killing the crew off. The audience are too enthralled in the story, which features the camera assistant ( Jenna Ortega ) volunteering to shoot a porno scene, and do not care what happens to the other characters.
The protagonist has flashbacks to his time conscripted into guard duty during his homeland's war. This gives him something of a dark backstory, and the movie turns full circle in the end.
This was written and directed by Romola Garai , best known as an actress a few decades ago. She delivers one of the new wave of horror movies, something that has an anti-male edge but with the supernatural element of the mainstream genre.
The house turns out to be in an abandoned Detroit neighbourhood, just like the one in Don't Breathe (2016) . This sets the mood, almost as much as the fact that the co-star is a rent-a-villain best known as a creepy killer clown. Worse, there is a mysterious tunnel in the basement.
The house's absentee landlord is AJ (Justin Long - Jeepers Creepers ), an actor in Hollywood. He is victim of a #MeToo allegation, so he visits the house in the hope of selling it. As the story's most interesting character, he swings between a redeemable victim and a selfish narcisist.
The protagonist, Evan Cole (Seann William Scott - Evolution ), is a High School guidance counsellor by day. However, the stress of looking after his pregnant wife Lauren Cole ( Mariela Garriga ) has driven him to pick up a hobby. He becomes a serial killer, targeting the deadbeat dads of his school's pupils.
When the wife gives birth, the protagonist's mother ( Dale Dickey ) comes to stay.
The police start to investigate. A detective (Kevin Carroll - The Leftovers ) visits to ask questions. This makes the wife suspicious of what her husband is really up to.
The result is a film that works on a number of levels. Like many American horror films in the post-MeToo era, it has an anti-male bias and features mainly or entirely male fatalities. However, this is a British film so it is also self-knowing, and points out the silliness of the feminist agenda.
The main girl has moved because her mother ( Michelle Monaghan ) has found a new lover (David Duchovny - X-Files ). naturally, this stepfather figure is a bit creepy. He names his three sons after OId Testament characters, so he might be a witchhunter. It turns out that he writes books about masculinity, so he is clearly toxic. Finally, he says that he likes snakes because the Pagan people thought they were powerful. So he might be a Warlock instead of a witchhunter. Almost as if the writers did not have a clear idea of what they wanted to do with the character, so they just threw in a bunch of generic ideas.
One of the teenage boys at school is a bully, so the witches magically roofie and chemically castrate him. The result is a super-woke, brainwashed loser that they treat as their gay best friend. Eventually something bad happens, and the witches have to take responsibility for their actions. One of them even admits that what they did to him was not exactly consentual.
Unfortunately, this movie has a Third Act climax tacked on. Instead of having to take responsibility, they simply use their girl-power to defeat a strawman avatar for Da Patriarchy. Yes, like all two-dimensional female protagonists these days they overcome adversity without a struggle and without learning anything.
The final scene links this movie in with the original, although it creates more questions than it answers.
The story starts at a Fraternity party in a US College. While the Sorority girls' have a pre-party safety briefing, the all-white Frat Bros have a cliched sexist misogynist speech. This leads up to a suspicious incident involving a sorority girl and the younger brother of the Final Girl. What makes it worse is that the brother was victim of similar allegations the previous year.
As befits the contemporary era it is set in, the characters communicate a lot by texts on their smart-phones. This is portrayed on-screen in a flashier version of the system used in Cherrybomb. However, the usual tropes of No Signal and Battery Low are used to signify an increase in suspense.
A masked killer starts murdering the Fraternity boys. The lead detective ( Yancy Butler ) suspects it is an inside job. The Dean of the University, Dr Butler (Lochlyn Munro - Freddy Vs Jason ), is more worried about alarming the rich college Alumni because his budget depends on their donations.
This film skewers the free love atmosphere associated with US college life, which the Feminist movement refers to as Rape Culture. However, it also avoids the complaint of violence-against-womyn by ensuring the killer prefers to target males rather than females. That said, the death scenes are shocking and suspenseful - unlike those in Charlie's Angels (2019) , where the male characters were all treated as expendable bags of meat.
Eloise's psychic powers go into overdrive. She dreams about a girl named Sandy ( Anya Taylor-Joy ), who lived in the swinging 1960s and wanted to become a star. She was seduced by Jack (Matt Smith - Dr Who ), who promised to make her dreams come true.
Eloise is stalked by a dozen creepy faceless ghosts. Worse, the mysterious silver-haired gentleman (Terence Stamp - Star Wars: The Phantom Menace ) lurks around. He even claims to have known Sandy. But what happened to her?
This is not the first movie to have addressed the supposed dark side of the 1960s - Sudden Impact (1983) did it, and even Austin Powers (1997) pointed out that the Free Love ethos was no longer compatible with the feminist era.
Twenty-three years later, one of the kids somehow survived and has now become a bicycle messenger. She gets hit by a car, and then develops mental problems. Missing time, strange things happening that she cannot remember ...
The doctor's diagnosis is that the girl has a parasitic twin, in the form of a clump of cells in her brain. This becomes a bit more than a psychiatric situation, as the twin slowly takes over her body and mind.
The story has a bit of a man-bashing in it, as most of the victims are men who want to spend time with the girl. However, the climax has a fight with a Final Girl ... and we get to see the SPFX that most of the movie's budget must have been spent on.
The rented house is a big mansion in a small village. All the locals look alike, played by the actor Rory Kinnear ( Our Flag Means Death ). This is a good cost-saving measure, and no doubt helped with the Covid safety measures. However, it can also be taken as a misandrist move to illustrate how all men are basically interchangeable.
The protagonist is being stalked by a creepy naked man. She also has flashbacks to the death of her husband (Paapa Essiedu - Lazarus Project ), and visions of the pagan god known as the Green Man. The result is a surreal confusion as to whether the woman is mentally ill or she is being acted upon by supernatural forces. Of course, both could simultaneously be true.
Typical of the lower end of the Horror market, this was written and directed by one person. Strangely for the anti-male subgenre, this was a man - the highly experienced Alex Garland .
The young woman meets a man (Noah Taylor - Powers ) who claims to have been a US Army interrogator in Iraq. The man appears to have many of the stereotypical attributes of a serial killer. However, at the mid-point of the story it takes an incredible twist, when we discover that one of the characters is a mass-murderer.
The final act of the story is a murderous revenge spree. By this stage there is not really anyone left to root for.
The female protagonist is established as an over-stretched single mother. She transgresses in a minor way, by excessively beeping her horn, and this road-rage incident spirals into something far worse.
Normally a slasher movie has a series of female victims. This effort tries to be different by moving away from traditional fem-jep. The killer targets the female lead by attacking the males in her life - her lawyer (Jimmi Simpson - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ), her brother and her pre-teen son.
The Sheriff ( Liv Tyler ) finds the girl. Rather than put the girl in a group facility, the Sheriff takes her home. Despite the age gap, the Sheriff has a brother who is the same age as the girl. They settle into a domestic drama situation.
Despite the apparent domesticity and lack of external conflict, the movie has a sinister undercurrent reminiscent of Stoker . It is implied that the girl has superhuman senses. She certainly likes running barefoot through the forest. Luckily a crazy old man dressed in animal skins is living in the woods, and can provide exposition.
The film takes a sharp swerve in the third act, veering from drama into a straight-up thriller. While the Sheriff and her brother are originally from the big city, the local community are keen big game hunters. This reduces them to nothing more than fodder for the wildling to wipe out.
The film's dramatic storyline has a rape-and-revenge subplot. Mary is sexually assaulted, and takes a horrific revenge on her attacker. While the distributors focus on this subplot so they can safely categorise the film as horror, it is a character drama rather than a slasher film or a torture porn flick.
This was written and directed by the Soska Sisters , and is a prime example of their reinvention of the horror genre.
The happy couple run into some murderous rednecks who are involved in moonshining and whatever else. Despite the setup of the male cop as the hero figure, it turns out that the real protagonist is his love interest. She spends the rest of the movie hunting down and killing the redneck gang.
Unlike some other films of this genre, this one actually has a great star in the lead role. Holloman was Saxa the Warrior Woman in Spartacus: War of the Damned , and now we get to see what she can do on her own. There are some great fight scenes, and hopefully we will get to see more of her in the future.
The man repeatedly suggests that she take him to a hospital. After her own ordeal, a trip to a doctor would probably be a good idea. Also, the police would be far better suited to getting the truth out of him and rescuing the other girls than she would. However, we must suspend our disbelief and embrace the unlikely premise of this story.
The story is intercut with flashbacks, found footage of the girl on a day out at the beach with her boyfriend and sister. This adds a sense of unreality to the movie, because it leaves us unsure of how much the Untruthful Narrator trope will be invoked.
Cassie takes the lead in the Garda's hunt for a serial killer. Jamie Douglas ( Shelley Hennig ) has taken Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to the next level, which makes her more like Dexter. Her victims are local rich people who she claims sex-trafficked her, which basically puts them in the same category as the villains in Taken . Of course, Cassie has a traumatic backstory of her own - in the #MeToo era, this is standard - so she empathises with the killer.
The victims are a pretty bland lot. After all, they only exist as strawmen to be killed off. To further soften the impact of the killer's crimes, most of the extreme violence only takes place off-screen. Until the final act, that is, when Jamie Dornan's mother from The Tourist (Season 2) is allowed some screen time.
A group of pirates, led by Ray Liotta ( Cocaine Bear ), are in search of new victims for human trafficking. They are a bunch of hardened killers. However, the protagonist went paintballing once so she is more than a match for the lot of them.
Somehow there was a family of feral women, which defies the solitary beginnings of real-life feral people. One of them, a young-looking tweenage girl, ends up in a hospital and is handed over to the Catholic church. In reality her situation would be like in The Magdalene Sisters, but instead she is put in a nice boarding school where she successfully learns to integrate with other girls.
Pollyanna decides to track down her sister, even if she has to murder every single person she meets. Luckily the hospital orderly is Jerry, Pollyanna's co-star from The Walking Dead , so he is friendly and helpful. Strangely nobody seems to tell him about her murder spree at his workplace. In fact, the police do not turn up to investigate at all.
In a major twist, it turns out that the Catholic Bishop may not be as nice as he pretends. Not exactly original.
The prison gets a new psychologist - Dr Rebecca ( Anne Hathaway ). Eileen is drawn to Rebecca, and becomes obsessed with her. However, Rebecca is obsessed with her work.
The story boils over into eventual violence. At least it passes the Bechdel test.
This is shot entirely in the French language, with subtitles in English. The cast and crew were all French, with a couple of exceptions. So why is it not listed among the Giallo genre efforts? The director, Paul Verhoeven , is Dutch - but in the 1980s and 1990s he made a string of big-budget Hollywood hits, so he is an International film-maker rather than a European one. This movie was originally intended as an English-language effort, but Verhoeven was unable to find a middle-aged American actress who had the big-name recognition necessary for the project.
Adrian is a doctor himself, and Dr Hindle was his mentor at medical school. As a result, they often collaborate behind Lucy's back. When the treatment works and she becomes pregnant, it feels reminiscent of Rosemary's Baby . She is troubled by strange dreams, and begins to prefer having a traditional midwife over a patriarchal doctor. Yes, this has a strangely misandrist undertone to it that becomes more and more explicit as the story continues.
Lucy's boss Greg (Josh Hamilton - Walking Dead (S11) ) is supportive. Likewise, her gal-pal Corgan ( Sophia Bush ) tries to help. However, they both seem tainted with the sin of patriarchy.
Psychologist Wes Bentley ( Hunger Games ) takes an orphaned young girl under his wing. He trains her like Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass , and she grows up to be Abigail Breslin . Then he sets her loose as live bait to entrap Alexander Ludwig ( Vikings ) and his gang of Frat-boy types who play The Most Dangerous Game with young blonde women in the woods.
Breslin has been menaced by serial killers before, in Scream Queens . And in all fairness, even though that show was played entirely for laughs it is a lot more realistic than this effort. The lead actress is petite, slender and entirely unconvincing in her fight scenes.
The first story this movie tells is about a tweenage girl ( Taissa Farmiga ) and her single mother ( Malin Akerman ) who used to be a Scream Queen actress in teen slasher movies. The girl gets orphaned, and spends the rest of the story trying to get over her loss.
The orphan and her friend ( Nina Dobrev ) get roped into attending a public showing of the slasher movie that made her mother infamous. Things go wrong, and the tweenagers find themselves magically transported to inside the movie. This is basically a parody of the Friday the 13th series.
When the slaughter really begins, this film reveals its third genre. The scares and gore are on a par with the original films that this seeks to parody. In fact, the originals are tongue-in-cheek and have nothing to compare with the slo-mo running-while-on-fire scene.
This is a good film that works on several levels. It is even set up for a sequel, which has yet to appear. However, the mix of genres makes it an uneven ride.
Our heroine gets stood up, but luckily she meets another girl who offers to cheer her up. The girl takes her to a bar, and they end up hanging out with some very rapey dudes. One thing leads to another, and we end up in a rape-and-revenge thriller.
The storyline is predictable, but the high point is actually some Tarantino-esque dialogue between the girls.
The standout performance is by Raylee Hill , who only has one scene but is incredible. Hill plays the mother of one of the protagonist's former patients - from the days when she specialised in treating abused children.
When the shrink is visited by her former patient, she begins to question if she has gone too far. This is a perfect opportunity for the character to have a story arc, and actually undergo some development. Of course, this is a micro-budget ozsploitation movie written and directed by one man so there is always the chance it will choose spectacle over plotting ...
It turns out that one of the victims is a former victim of child abuse, and as a result she has superhumanly high levels of adrenaline. Yes, this seems to be an excuse to make this a new version of You're Next . In that movie, the protagonist's backstory lampshaded her ability to do whatever the scene needed to defeat the villains. In this new low-budget version, it is just an excuse for all kinds of craziness. Somehow, she is an expert in martial arts - well, the actress can do a few high kicks. She also has amazing weapon skills, although every time she picks up a gun she empties it into the nearest opponent, then throws it away so she can take on the next enemy empty-handed. It even gives her the superhuman strength necessary to physically punch her fist through a man's chest.
The third act of the story has the cultists take things to a new level. Instead of just harvesting the victims' adrenaline, they set them loose to play The Most Dangerous Game .
A privileged middle-class woman ( Sarah Butler ) goes to an isolated cabin in the woods, just like in all the best slasher films. She is menaced by some working-class men, who subject her to an attack not entirely un-reminiscent of Deliverance.
Does she do what Jodie Foster did in The Accused, or what victims do every week in Law & Order: SVU? No, she goes on a rampage that owes as much to torture-porn like the Saw Series as it does to the original film this is based on. Think Turistas AKA Paradise Lost - but the bikini babe is the murderer while the yokels (white, not Brazilian, so it is not racist) are the victims.
The violent aspects of the film are exaggerated beyond all realism. One victim is cornered in the most filthy bathroom ever - seriously, this place has never been flushed never mind cleaned! And the girl somehow overpowers a man twice her weight and carries him around.
This film follows some of the rules of the traditional horror movie. For example, the protagonist is a Final Girl ( Amanda Seyfried ) and the antagonist is a demonic monster that kills teenagers. However, the monster does not chase gorgeous cheerleaders like Jennifer ( Megan Fox ) - she IS the monster!
Jennifer is abducted by a music band, who sacrifice her as part of a Satanic pact. Unfortunately she is not a virgin, so she comes back as a demonic monster. This is a typical setup for a rape-and-revenge story. What makes it a more typical horror movie is the fact that instead of seeking revenge on her abusers, she attacks innocent victims like Kyle Gallner ( Beautiful Creatures ).
The Final Girl is Jennifer's nerdy friend, Needy. Their friendship, and its degeneration as the story progresses, is the core of the film. In other words, this is really an inferior version of Ginger Snaps .
The real problem with the film is that it seems uncertain of what genre it is. It is set up as a thriller, but the Second Act lacks conflict between the leads so it is really a drama. The title character's backstory is intended as sympathetic, but she is clearly the antagonist. This at least allows the reactive protagonist to shine.
Moses (Sam Worthington - Clash of the Titans ) and his fellow Union soldiers are in the area, looking to free the slaves. For some reason, this film casts them as the bad guys.
Years later, the survivor is still suffering from PTSD. She works in a drycleaners, and befriends a male cow-orker. Unfortunately someone starts to stalk her, dressed as the original killer.
Has the original killer come back for revenge? Is she being gaslighted by a copycat? Or is this a case of the untruthful narrator, when it turns out that the protagonist and antagonist are the same person?
Things hot up in the final act, when we find out who the killer is. The climax is a kill-crazy massacre, which makes up for the lacklustre suspense of the previous hour.
The rape may not happen, but the revenge is certainly a thing. In fact, it is pre-emptive so it is not really revenge.
This is all a setup for a Kill Bill style revenge movie. But the Mexican religious setting makes it more reminiscent of Machete . Unfortunately, while Machete is a well-aimed satire this is just low-budget and low-brow.
Power corrupts, and the girls are no exception. They use their superhuman strength to go on a killing spree. Specifically they target men they met in the bar on that night. Partly because those men are suspects in their killings, but mostly just out of mean-spiritedness.
Instead of a creepy old man, the Surgeon is a younger man. Sort of like Herbert West in Reanimator , but not such a tight-ass.
Is this appraisal too blunt? What if Clancy Brown (The Kurgan in Highlander (1986) ) played the lead role instead of her father, and had a gender-neutral selection of victims? Perhaps the closest thing to this is Jennifer's Body , another empowering female-led horror movie which, had it not been sunk by a terrible marketing campaign, might have received the same acclaim as this film.
Margot Robbie produced this movie, but turned down the lead role because it would bring too much comparison with Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey . A better comparison might be between PYW and Joker (2019) , which similarly explores mental illness and revenge. It also compares well with Dead Man's Shoes . In contrast, BOP is simply an attempt at creating a female Deadpool .
In the second act, the main character starts to get over her mental issues. She chooses to be in a relationship with a boy she knew in college. The movie changes tone, and becomes a parody of rom-com films.
This leads into the final act, where expectations are subverted several times. It is all cleverly done, but it is not as clever as some people seem to think.
Is this a long-awaited critique of raunch culture of the first decade of this century? Well, Veronica Mars did it first, and did it better. Secondly, that raunch culture was the freedom-loving Girl Power of the Nineties which was destroyed by Nipplegate and the Religious Right in the USA.
Margaret reveals her backstory to the office girl, in a breathtaking scene. She was once in a relationship with David (Tim Roth - She Hulk ), a sociopathic narcisist capable of unbelievable violence. Now, after decades, he is stalking her. She tries to turn the tables on him, but he is always a step ahead of her in their game of cat-and-mouse. Finally she confronts him on his own terms.
This is a drama rather than a thriller, since it concentrates on the protagonist rather than her external conflict. The two leads entirely dominate it, with mesmerising performances.
This was released about the same time as Gone Girl , and because this has Pike play a low-level version of the same character this movie remained in the shadow of the other one.
Evoking the Magic Negro cliché, the token Native American character is a medicine man. He tries to keep the girl’s soul in her body. Unfortunately she ends up soul-possessed by a vengeance spirit - like in The Crow , but with the spirit of Apache chieftain Mangas Coloradas instead of a demon.
Given the played-out nature of the genre and the low budget of the film, this is actually quite a watchable film.
The town is so small that the only person of colour is Brandon Jay McLaren ( Tucker & Dale Versus Evil ), the Canadian actor who always fills the role in this kind of thing. Teenagers got abducted and murdered. Joan and her friend were the final girls, tortured but not sexually assaulted. Just torture porn, not pornographic torture.
In the modern day, someone starts to kill off the townsfolk. Joan sees someone dressed as the original serial killer. Is she halucinating? Is he returned from the dead? Or is it just a copycat?
Angela is kept in the militia's sex dungeon. She befriends one of the sex slaves, Vanya ( Dominique Provost ). Unfortunately this is not a happy-happy movie.
The result is more like I Spit On Your Grave than Die Hard, although the Final Girl does spend a lot of time climbing about in the hollow walls of the house like in the remake of Black Christmas .
Rather than just turn him in to the authorities, the woman abducts him and tries to torture him into confessing. Her use of a hammer is reminiscent of the actress's most famous role - as Lizbo Salamander in the Swedish TV adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series.
This has been done before, and better. The basic premise is the stage-play, Death and the Maiden . It was even adapted as an episode of the TV show Evil (2019) .
The story takes off with a male protagonist, an old CIS-gendered white-looking straight-acting man. He is a police detective, although at his age he must be a few days away from retirement. Yes, the tropes are there for him to be a supporting character - but for some reason he is the viewpoint character for the first proper scene. Anyway, his job involves surveillance on some street-level thugs who are involved in some kind of Red Room . Well, this movie could be a typical Death Game Horror effort, but the crooks' money-making scheme is kept in the background.
The main story concerns the monster, Lacey. She looks like a homeless black woman, but she has superhuman strength and healing factor. To survive she must eat human flesh and bone, so she kills men she deems to be criminals and then eats their fingers. As well as superhuman abilities, she also weighs fifty kilos more than she ought to. Lastly, she has scars on her back similar to those of Lucifer , as if she is a fallen angel of some kind. Anyway, the old detective hires her to kill crooks for him.
This is a soft reboot of a male version called He Never Died (2014) . They have the same producer, but this Distaff version has a female director - Audrey Cummings . There are a couple of token good men in this story, but every one of the good people is female. Also, they are all Caucasian - hence why the black female lead does not qualify this as Blaxploitation Horror . Finally, the main antagonist is female. Unfortunately she does not get much of a set-up as a fighter - unlike something like, say, The Hunt . As a result, the final confrontation is something of a let-down.
This was set up for a sequel. Hopefully Lacey will get to fight some supernatural monsters, since the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are mentioned, and the human villains in this are weak and un-threatening.
This is not just a straightforward rape-and-revenge. Part of it is the character development of Danny Dyer's character. At the start he is a harmless fellow who cannot put a dying animal out of its misery. However, by the end of the story he has evolved into a bloodthirsty killer.
Harry Callaghan (Clint Eastwood - ) is in charge of solving the murders. Unfortunately he causes more homicides than he solves. The prosecutor, D'Ambrosia (Carmen Argenziano - Stargate SG-1 ), has a case thrown out of court because Callaghan conducted an illegal search. The judge who throws the case is a woman - yes, just a few years after Callaghan had his first female partner, he now has women in positions of authority over him.
Callaghan gets sent to the small town where Spenser's murder spree is centred. The local Sheriff, Chief Jannings (Pat Hingle - Batman (1989) ), naturally takes a dislike to the interloper. At least Harry's partner, Horace King (Albert Popwell - ), can keep him informed in events back in the big city.
Callaghan has not softened with age. However, he updates his .44 magnum revolver to a .44 Automag self-loading pistol. Also, he adopts a new catch-phrase: Go ahead, make my day!. This was quickly adopted by Ronald Reagan, the right-winger who was then-President. The movie certainly hits a lot of right-wing talking points, with hippies and minorities as villains. However, at the start of the movie Callaghan gives away that the real problem the cops are facing is that citizens resort to crime by using violence to solve their problems. The irony is that it was the right-wingers who created a low-trust society with an everyone-for-themselves mentality.
While this is part of the Dirty Harry series, and thus Callaghan/Eastwood is nominally the protagonist, most of his screen time is spent on sub-plots. After all, several different groups of thugs want to murder him for a variety of reasons. The main storyline belongs to Spenser/Locke. At the end, the big question is ... Will Callaghan treat her as a serial killer (like Scorpio) or as a vigilante like Magnum Force?
Her effeminate boy-buddy Tobey (Hale Appleman - The Magicians ) and her creepy step-brother Brad (John Hensley - Witchblade ) are on her hit list.
This is some kind of self-empowerment story for young women who wonder what it would be like if they could deter rapists by using vagina dentata. Of course, in real life women already have teeth so this is all a moot point.
Things take a turn for the darker when it is revealed that one of the girls has a criminal history of violence. The other one wants her to help murder an abuser. They try to hire a junkie (Anton Yelchin - Odd Thomas ) to help them, but it does not go according to plan.
It is sad to think that this is Yelchin's final film. He delivers an impressive performance in a role that is very different from anything else he had done prior to this. Unfortunately all that does is leave us with a sense of loss, since he passed at such a young age before he had the chance to fulfill his potential.
Sadie ( Olivia Wilde ) is a sadist, who gets a thrill from torturing and robbing people. What makes this socially acceptable, so the audience can get a thrill out of it without any pangs of guilt, is her choice of victims. She targets men who she is told are abusive to their wives, although one time she alters her modus operandi and targets a neglectful mother whose child is in a bad way.
The protagonist's backstory leads into the climactic third act. It turns out that her husband (Morgan Spector - ) was an abuser who taught her home-made first aid and gave her a high tolerance for pain. She also learned survivalist camping skills from him, and taught herself krav maga from a manual he owned. These skills come in useful as she tries to track him down for a final violent confrontation.
A young Tom Hardy ( The Dark Knight Rises ) and his mixed-race gang of street thugs once terrorised Selma Blair . Now it seems that she has come back for revenge, in a sadistic manner reminiscent of Saw .
This is set in New York City - perhaps the seediest and most unpleasant version of the city presented since Lucio Fulci's 1970s gore-fest The New York Ripper . One should note, then, that it was in actual fact mostly shot in Belfast.
The gang chase her into a construction site, and then the woods. She is lugging her most valued item with her - a big heavy metal toolbox! Luckily the items inside it, including a tyre iron and a screwdriver, allow her to make a couple of enthusiatic kills.