Following the death of her mother, an independent-minded waitress named Annie (Caity Lotz, TV’s Death Valley) returns with dogged reluctance to her childhood home — and that’s before her sister (Agnes Bruckner, Kill Theory) and friend (Kathleen Rose Perkins, TV’s Episodes) have vanished there. As made perfectly clear by the cover art, a malevolent force […]
scary
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Back from Hell
Presented as four days of a taped holiday — because apparently, that’s what young people do — the movie follows a handful of pals who vacay together, screw around with a Ouija board and eat shish kabob outdoors. In other words, not a Hell of a lot happens beyond the occasional person screaming from outside. […]
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The Barrens
The Barrens harkens back to the cryptozoological craze of that decade, rife with mostly rotten pics about Bigfoot and Boggy Creek and the like. This one’s better, following family man Stephen Moyer (TV’s True Blood), his second wife (Mia Kirshner, The Black Dahlia) and their two children on a fun-filled vacation (well, for him, at […]
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Apartment 143 [Emergo]
The hauntings occur in the apartment occupied by Alan White (Kai Lennox, Beginners), a widower whose wife recently died in a car crash, leaving him with their curious young boy (newcomer Damian Roman) and resentful teenage girl (22-year-old Gia Mantegna, daughter of Joe). Tired of the unexplained occurrences, Mr. White has hired a two-man/one-woman team […]
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Lovely Molly
The film opens with a deeply distraught Molly (newcomer Gretchen Lodge, in a fearless, go-for-broke debut) recording herself on Oct. 16, 2011, saying, “Whatever has happened, it wasn’t me.” Immediately, we jump back to “whatever.” Married just 13 months earlier, mall janitor Molly and her level-headed truck-driver hubby, Tim (Johnny Lewis, TV’s Sons of Anarchy), […]
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ParaNorman
But while Coraline sustained a masterful level of Grimm-like creepiness, ParaNorman is only fitfully brilliant. The premise is promising. Eleven-year-old Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee, Let Me In) has a familiar problem: He sees dead people. Lots of ’em, actually, which makes him something of a pariah in the hamlet of Blithe Hollow, Mass. […]
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Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Now that said original has been reissued, coattail-ridin’ style, by Warner Archive, I’d alter that response to, “I liked it OK, but I definitely still prefer the original.” With much fewer resources, the 1973 version is far more effective. The person being menaced by the trolls in the walls has always been Sally, but here, […]