The Rozen is en route to Mumbai when the weapons-toting Somalis overtake the ship and its seven-man crew. Writer/director Tobias Lindholm doesn’t utilize the captain as our viewpoint, but the cook, Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk, TV’s The Borgias), a nice man who makes a mean omelet. The other half of A Hijacking gets inside the head of […]
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Grave secrets
Without the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, Calgon detergent and Fred Rogers’ tonsils, Night of the Living Dead would not exist. And without Night of the Living Dead, there would be no The Walking Dead, no World War Z, no entire cottage industry centered around those “all messed-up” ghouls who crave and dine […]
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Abducted
But crap happens, and while being all cute and cuddly in L.A.’s famed Griffith Park, the happy couple is darted from afar and drugged into a state of unconsciousness. They awake in a dingy cell looking not unlike the basement from the original Saw. Something’s up and yet, something else is up, because whoever their […]
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Day of the Dead
By the time 1985 rolled around, Romero had made one other Dead film: the brilliant Dawn of the Dead. Other countries, especially Italy and Spain, turned zombie movies into virtual cash machines and zombies, for the first time, were everywhere. So there was great anticipation for Day of the Dead, Romero’s third film in what […]
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Resolution
Resembling Wolfman Jack as a hobo, Chris refuses. With the help of a taser and handcuffs that attach to a pipe running along the exposed wall, Michael puts Chris on an involuntary, seven-day detox. As his friend experiences withdrawal, Michael comes across some tweakers and members of a religious fringe group, but these weird people […]
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All Hallows’ Eve / Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear
Like many a great ‘ween tale, the dirt-cheap All Hallows’ Eve opens with a babysitter and her young charges, one of whom got a little something extra dropped into his sack of candy: an unlabeled VHS tape. Because the household still has a VHS player, the sitter (Katie Maguire) is able to view the cassette’s […]
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Pacific Rim
I realize this unpopular stance puts me at odds with fervid fanboys nationwide who all but wet their pants over the film this summer, but that’s OK — it’s hardly the first time. I, too, would have loved this movie at the age of 8 … unfortunately, a few decades have passed. A mere seven […]
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Maniac
That’s not to say this update isn’t gory — oh, boy, is it ever — but it has a style the first film sorely lacked. Admittedly, Lustig had little budget to work with back then, whereas P2 helmer Franck Khalfoun enjoyed a $6 million sandbox, now clumped with blood. Playing aggressively against his nice-guy rep, former […]
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Horror Stories
Like all good anthologies, a wraparound story takes a stab at clumsy cohesion. Here, Arabian Nights-style, an abducted schoolgirl must tell her captor stories to stay alive. The best comes first with “Don’t Answer the Door,” in which a two young siblings awaiting Mom’s arrival home find their apartment infiltrated by … wait and see. […]
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Static
Marrieds Jonathan and Addie Dade (respectively, Kiss of the Damned‘s Milo Ventimiglia and Bullet to the Head‘s Sarah Shahi) know this, yet answer the door anyway. There stands a young woman in distress (Sara Paxton, The Innkeepers) who says her car broke down and now is being pursued by men in gas masks. It’s a whale […]