Review: John Carpenter’s The Ward

There is only so much you can say about a used-to-be-great director before you finally give up. John Carpenter was one of those guys for me. I’d say to my friends, “Who cares if he made The Village of the Damned or Ghosts of Mars… this dude made The Thing (1982), Halloween, and Big Trouble in Little China!” But that didn’t matter after a while. There is only so much you could say about a director who hasn’t made a decent film in quite some time (1995‘s In the Mouth of Madness might be his last worthy effort).

Review: Troll Hunter

Leave it to those crazy Norwegians to finally get that whole “found footage” genre a satisfying entry. You see, this whole genre has been plagued with problems since it first started. For every good one (Man Bites Dog or [Rec]), comes 57 bad ones (Cloverfield, Apollo 18, The Last Exorcism). The problems with those films are all the same too. The story takes too long to get off the ground (remember that painfully bad party sequence at the beginning of Cloverfield?), the characters are nothing shy of awful and/or disconnected (again, see Cloverfield), the premise never fully realizes itself until it’s too late (I’ll point you to The Last Exorcism for that), and most of the time they take themselves way too seriously.

Review: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

I am going to start off this entry with a bold statement that will sure to attract the attention of cinema snobs all over – horror films simply don’t exist anymore. You can argue the finer points of some lesser-known foreign masterpiece all you want. But deep down in your heart, you know you weren’t actually scared when you watched [Rec] or Martyrs. Not like you were when you saw Jaws for the first time. No matter how much we love to watch teenagers (or anyone really) get destroyed on screen, there hasn’t been a film in a while that really connects us with the characters to have us even care in the first place.