Demonic suggests a few novel, fascinating twists to the horror template, and then runs away from them as fast as it can. In the six years since Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie, a film probably more famous for a Twitter meme than anything actually in it, the…
Settlers offers neither genre thrills nor any real interrogation of the material’s potentially rich subtext. Part sci-fi thriller, part western, part survivalist drama, Wyatt Rockefeller’s Settlers has a lot of familiar genre antecedents, but not much of a clue of what to do with them.…
The Djinn offers plenty of playful throwback chills, but boasts eye-roll messaging and doesn’t quite know who its audience is. Anyone expecting the gore and camp of 1997’s malevolent genie pic Wishmaster will undoubtedly be disappointed by The Djinn, David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s latest take…
Come True is an empty-headed, poorly-conceived horror flick that mistakes endless stylistic detail for substance. Anyone who has ever experienced night terrors can attest to the indescribable, otherworldly horror that only the human mind is capable of conjuring; to even attempt to replicate such a…
The Night hints at building nuance into its familiar template, but ultimately jumbles familiar genre tropes to no discernible end. It’s never a good look to be too dismissive of modern commodities, but at this point, the avalanche of slow-burn, largely symbolic horror shlock is…
Hunter Hunter begins as a simple look at a family living off-the-grid, but quickly develops into a gory thriller that isn’t for the faint of heart. It wouldn’t be entirely correct to call the new survival-thriller film Hunter Hunter a bait-and-switch; there’s no twist, exactly,…
Kindred doesn’t achieve much more than powering through a laundry list of tired indie horror film clichés. A studio releasing its seasonal horror offering one week after Halloween is the equivalent of waving a white flag. It’s an admission that not even the spookiest of…
Rent-a-Pal, the debut feature from writer-director-editor Jon Stevenson, is unrelentingly bleak, a 108-minute cringe-fest masquerading as a character study. Not that there is much to glean from the protagonist as presented here, a bespectacled sad sack named David (Brian Landis Folkins) desperate for human…
Centigrade doesn’t do much as a character-driven chamber piece, but it’s served well by an attention to detail and the ability to build genuine tension. In 2012, a man named Peter Skyllberg made headlines for surviving in his car for two months with no food…
Sputnik is competently made but lacks the necessary suspense and horror to elevate it past mere adequacy. Here’s another sci-fi flick that plays like an extended X-Files episode. There will always be room for riffs on familiar scenarios — last year gifted us the superior…
