V/H/S/94 isn’t entirely successful, but it marks an upswing for the anthology franchise from its last entry. The first V/H/S film was a novelty, a throwback to the old-fashioned omnibus anthology features that littered the arthouse scene in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. It wasn’t a…
Martyrs Lane is the latest horror film built around a metaphor for trauma in which boredom and cliche trump any catharsis. There’s a palpable sense of melancholy at the heart of writer/director Ruth Platt’s Martyrs Lane, a ghost story that largely eschews scares in…
Superhost isn’t heavy on style and runs out of steam too early, but Gracie Gillam’s outlandishly unhinged performance keep things from becoming bland rehash. A companion piece of sorts to last year’s Airbnb slasher-riff The Rental, Brandon Christensen’s Superhost tills familiar anxieties about trusting strangers while navigating…
There’s a perverse gothic sex comedy located somewhere in Jakob’s Wife, but it’s buried under reams of flat, deadening horror comedy. The work that made Barbara Crampton an icon is the work she did with Stuart Gordon in outre horror pictures, where she was used as…
Bleed With Me is too generic as a familiar, slow-burn mood exercise, but Moses has plenty of technical acumen to recommend keeping an eye on her work. Amelia Moses’ Bleed With Me plays equally like an accomplished student film and an overly mannered A24-style…
Teddy feels awfully familiar and its bid at upsetting that template doesn’t quite work, but the Boukherma brothers at least present a clear sensibility that could recommend future work. Ludovic & Zoran Boukherma’s new horror/comedy Teddy is only intermittently interesting as a werewolf movie, but it’s…
The Boy Behind the Door doesn’t do much that hasn’t been seen before, but mostly works on the strength of its careful, expert craft. A tough, tense little thriller, David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s The Boy Behind the Door wastes no time in setting up its…
Kandisha doesn’t quite rise to the directors’ past heights, but remains both riveting and probing in its own right. With horror, thriller, and the many mash-ups of the two proliferating under the dreaded confines of pandemic filmgoing (hunkered down, for most, with oneself or…
The Call‘s throwback vibes don’t do much to add to its predictable style and lack of notable scares. Arriving on the heels of the Fear Street films, The Call is another throwback teen horror, but apart from some fun outfits, it takes little inspiration…
Vicious Fun fails as both horror cinema and horror deconstruction. Wes Craven’s Scream has been justly lauded as an epochal moment in horror cinema, a self-reflexive bit of genre deconstruction that has fun tweaking the “rules” of slasher cinema all while still delivering a…
