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Haunting It’s now ten years since The Blair Witch Project (1999) brought the power of cinema and the (then fledgling) internet together, with its faux-true story/documentary approach to what was actually nothing more (but certainly nothing less) than a well-told (and very creepy) spook story. Derivative dross TV director Peter Cornwell’s latest effort to revisit the ‘Based On A True Story (Honest)’ craze that was begun by Stuart Rosenberg’s really rather average The Amityville Horror way back in 1979, with screenwriters Adam Simon (Brain Dead (1990)) and Tim Metcalfe (Kalifornia (1993)) along for the ride, suffers very much from all the [...] [photopress:Knowing.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Fighting the future Having insider knowledge of the future and being powerless to do anything about it? It’s a curse as old as Cassandra, and an idea that has been relatively well treated by Hollywood, with Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies (2002) the most recent example of the form before Knowing (2009). Now, Alex Proyas (I, [...] [photopress:Dominion.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Exorcising his demons In 2005, Paul Schrader introduced an unexpected world premiere at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film (BIFFF) – his director’s cut of the prequel to The Exorcist (1973), Dominion (2005). The film was notoriously abandoned by its studio on delivery and virtually re-shot by a new director. But, as Schrader explained to [...] [photopress:iburytheliving.jpg,thumb,alignleft]A grave business… The late Albert Band was, along with William Castle, a master producer (and, later, director) of pulpy horror during the 1950s, 60s and onwards – the father of similarly prolific B-movie director Charles Band, some of his more recent classics included Dracula’s Dog (1978) (‘Man’s best friend is now man’s worst fiend’, ahem), [...] [photopress:Mothman.jpg,thumb,alignleft] It only comes out at night… We’re into the realms of ‘based on a true story’ again here but, in all fairness to director Mark Pellington (Arlington Road (1999)), whether or not you believe the ‘Mothman’ yarns is irrelevant – the film still emerges as rather more than merely exploitative ’spookiness’. Washington Post reporter John Klein [...] [photopress:the_dark_2004_reference.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Not much to see here And so, the legacy of Ringu (1998) lives on…will horror directors never tire, do you think, of creepy little dead girls with long dark hair? Not if John Fawcett’s The Dark (2005) is anything to go by. Sure, it has a good cast and, judging by Fawcett’s previous horror effort, Ginger [...] [photopress:MIR_01666.jpg,thumb,alignleft] Poor revision It’s a problem, unfortunately, that undermines Mirrors, the remake by young French director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes (2006)) of Geoul sokeuro (2003), [...] [photopress:trailersj.jpg,thumb,alignleft] Return to sender… Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy, for the uninitiated) is Joanna Mills, a successful trucking company rep who takes a business drive from her home in St. Louis to the rural area of Texas where she grew up. A perilously-close-to-scary prologue has already set the scene – something creepy happened to her at a [...] |
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