// Category Archive for: Movie Reviews

Toronto After Dark 2012: Citadel Review

By Less Lee Moore

Like The Brood, Ciarán Foy’s Citadel was inspired by real life events. David Cronenberg’s iconic 1979 horror film showed the physical manifestation of anger through mutant, murderous children and channeled the rage the director felt following an ugly divorce. Citadel features a gang of similarly mutated murderers and reflects the director’s struggle to deal with the physical and emotional toll he endured after being attacked by a gang of kids.

Both films deal with the fantastic, but while Cronenberg tends to sublimate his angst through far more outlandishly indirect tropes, Citadel unflinchingly examines what it’s like to live, sleep, and breathe fear.

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Toronto After Dark 2012: After Review

By Less Lee Moore

It’s rare that a trailer conveys the tone of a movie successfully without giving major spoilers. If you liked the trailer for Ryan Smith’s debut feature After, however, you should certainly like the movie. It’s a strong start to what will hopefully be a successful writing and directing career.

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Toronto After Dark 2012: American Mary Review

By Less Lee Moore

If you remember Jen and Sylvia Soska from their feature debut, Dead Hooker In A Trunk, their new film American Mary will provide plenty of pleasant surprises. It’s a remarkably solid effort for this pair of up and coming young horror filmmakers and one that bodes well for their future.

Mary Mason is a cash-strapped medical student who gets sucked into the world of strip clubs and underground body modification surgeries after a traumatic experience. Katherine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps) portrays Mary with an immense amount of subtlety and charm. She’s studying to be a surgeon and right away, her deadpan voice, sarcastic sense of humor, and fashion sense (including interior decorating skills) prove that she is serious and mature. Wisely, the Soska sisters (who also penned the script) have chosen to make Mary a convincing character, not a bimbo with a tacked-on med school plot device.

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Movie Review: Wrath

By Less Lee Moore

Wrath is a film with much potential. Shot in New South Wales, Australia, it takes full advantage of the area’s beautiful open spaces. The cinematography is lush and the special effects are well done and believable in a grisly way. All the actors are more than capable in their roles, conveying fear, frustration, duplicity, rage, and suffering. The score, alternating between low, sinister synths and haunting harmonica, conveys the struggle between the rural residents and the outsiders. Unfortunately, what Wrath lacks is the narrative cohesion to make these elements affecting.

There’s a story in Wrath, for sure, but we never find out exactly what it is. There are many movies which suffer from too much expository dialogue and leave no questions unanswered, but Wrath‘s dialogue, while enticingly ambiguous, is too much of a good (or bad) thing. Characters often speak in evocative prose that conveys their emotions without conveying much sense. There is a voice over in the beginning that is heavy on repetitive symbolism and tries unsuccessfully to set the tone.

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DVD Review: Beyond The Black Rainbow

By Less Lee Moore

How do you describe a movie like Beyond The Black Rainbow, much less review it with a critical eye? It’s bizarre, hypnotic, compelling, disturbing, and stunning. My only complaint is that I was unable to witness the spectacle on the big screen, but even on DVD the movie is powerful and incredible.

Beyond The Black Rainbow presents a basic story, one we’ve heard before: a controlling doctor, a mysterious clinic, a tormented patient. There are other, less clear-cut or easily understood elements that contribute to the unsettling, overwhelming experience of watching Beyond The Black Rainbow. To attempt an explanation would be to rob the viewer of witnessing and interpreting these things for him or herself.

There are influences, to be sure—Altered States, The Grudge, Suspiria, The Brood—but nothing feels stolen. Beyond The Black Rainbow is a universe unto itself. It’s beautiful and horrible at the same time.

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Blu-Ray Review: Chained

By Less Lee Moore

Chained is a gripping, grueling experience. I had originally seen Jennifer Lynch’s latest film in August in one of the Screaming Rooms at Rue Morgue’s Festival of Fear, part of FanExpo Canada. This feeling was only exacerbated upon a second viewing of the film, this time on the newly released Blu-Ray from Anchor Bay.

Chained, despite the title and subject matter (a serial killer keeps a young boy prisoner), is not a straight up horror movie, but is far more horrific than the mainstream, high-budget horror movies that have glutted theaters over the last few years.

Vincent D’Onofrio plays Bob, a taxi driver who kidnaps women, brings them home, rapes and murders them, and forces his captive, Tim, to help him clean up the mess. It’s sordid, but to avoid the movie based on the synopsis would be a mistake.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Tall Man

By Less Lee Moore

If you’ve discussed horror films with me for more than five minutes, you likely know my feelings about French director Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs. It’s a film that infuriated me when I saw it, but not for the reasons that you might think. Yet the potential of Martyrs to be a truly great horror movie is what made me curious about Laugier’s most recent feature, The Tall Man, out on DVD and Blu-Ray September 25.

Those who loved Martyrs for its uncompromising violence may despise The Tall Man, feeling incredibly disappointed. Martyrs 2 it is not. If you are willing to put aside expectations and embrace a beautifully crafted, wonderfully acted, suspenseful, and thought-provoking film that is heavy on subtext and light on gore, than I urge you to check out The Tall Man.

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Movie Review: Cold Blooded

By Less Lee Moore

Jason Lapeyre‘s Cold Blooded is only his second feature film, but it’s already obvious that he’s a director to watch. The film has a terrific trailer that gives hints at the goodness within; it doesn’t spoil anything but it does leave you wanting more. Cold Blooded is definitely more than your average indie thriller.

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Basquiat Goes To The Cinema

By Chelsea Spear

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, 2010

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life seems all but made for the silver screen. The art world star lived fast. During his 27 years on the planet, he created a complex, engaging body of work. In addition to his solo paintings, he collaborated with Andy Warhol and formed the No Wave band Gray. He died young as the result of self-destructive habits. And he left a good-looking corpse. The half-life of flickering 16mm and unforgiving video reveals a young man with the sulky charisma of a 1950s screen idol.

About a decade after Basquiat’s death, he began surfacing in the movies. His life has the potential for either a brilliant big-screen epic in the style of Lust for Life or a misdirected attempt at catching lightning in a bottle. How have the different films about Jean-Paul Basquiat stacked up?

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Searching For Sugar Man

By Chelsea Spear

Who is, or was, Sixto Diaz Rodriguez? A lifelong resident of Detroit, and the son of Mexican immigrants who moved to the Midwest to work for Ford. A “prophet, “a wise man”, and a “wandering spirit” in the eyes of his coworkers on construction crews. A social activist who ran for office in his hometown, and who brought his five daughters to protests. A man of modest means who lives an ascetic life.

For a brief period in the 1970s, Rodriguez was a solo artist who released two remarkable albums—Cold Fact and Coming From Reality—that reached an audience so small, the cliché “cult hero” would overestimate it. While the albums sold an estimated six copies in America and quickly lapsed out of print, Cold Fact made it to South Africa not long after it came out here. Rodriguez’s anti-establishment lyrics, combined with his driving melodies and funky arrangements, made him a folk hero to South Africans bristling under apartheid. That Rodriguez was rumored to have committed a grisly suicide before a live audience only deepened his legend.

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