Picturenose

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’.

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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 Snaps (2000) a promising director, but there is little here that rises above straight-to-DVD shocks.

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Poor revision
It’s always the way with horror, isn’t it? How quickly do you reveal your monster? How do you keep the scares coming once the audience knows what it’s dealing with?

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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 carnival when she was a young girl and, not long after she arrives, shock-horror flashbacks begin to plague her.

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Not to be missed

As someone who has read Stephen King since I was around 11 years old, who has grown up loving (and loving being scared by) the man’s work, from Carrie, through The Shining via his Dark Tower cycle (and around 40 more novels and short-story collections, all told) to his most recent, Lisey’s Story, my reaction to the prospect of another King big-screen adaptation has, over the years, largely moved from child-like excitement to confused disappointment to weary boredom and, often, outright anger.

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Still on the Rock…

Paul Stump returns with a trenchant analysis of Peter Weir’s elegaic, haunting classic.

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