GET GONE * USA 2019 Dir: Michael Thomas Daniel. 91 mins Writer-director Michael Thomas Daniel’s film builds a joyless (and mostly bloodless) backwoods slasher scenario around possibly the least appealing protagonists imaginable…unless someone decides to make a Wrong Turn sequel set at a “Britain First” meeting. The obnoxious oxygen thieves who make up “Hoax Busters” – dedicated to exposing dumb online myths and the like – take a weekend “team-building” break in Whiskey Flats, Oregon where the familiar slasher-victim campfire talk involves discussing internet “Albino People” videos. Periodically they run into the deluded, dangerous members of the Maxwell family, led…
Author: Steven West
REDWOOD MASSACRE: ANNIHILATION * USA 2020 Dir: David Ryan Keith. 104 mins Shot in Scotland, this is British filmmaker David Ryan Keith’s American-styled sequel to his 2014 slasher flick THE REDWOOD MASSACRE. Ten years after the original events, author Jon Campling, whose absurd manbun is the most entertaining thing about the film, travels with his badass daughter (Danielle Harris) to the woodland location of the earlier unsolved murders. Max (the grating Damien Puckler), a Redwood fanboy with mommy and daddy issues, follows suit, obsessed with finding the killer himself. The audience knows his fixation with the murders extends to nailing…
LAKE MUNGO ***** Australia 2008 Dir: Joel Anderson. 87 mins “I feel like something bad is going to happen to me. I feel like something bad has happened – it just hasn’t reached me yet”. The tragic teenage girl – seen only via stills and home video footage of her before and after death – at the heart of LAKE MUNGO is Alice. As superbly told with authentic performances and remarkable editing, via director Joel Anderson’s “mockumentary” format, Alice is 16 years old and missing, presumed drowned, following a family visit to a dam in the Victorian city of Ararat.…
THE DEVILS (Devil’s Advocates) by Darren Arnold Opening with engaging personal flashbacks of author Darren Arnold’s mission to seek out Ken Russell’s hugely contentious THE DEVILS (1971) within censorial 1980s Britain, this analysis of one of the most notorious major studio films of all time covers a lot of territory in its 120 page framework. Arnold offers historical context – pondering if the picture would ever have been made in either Heath’s or Thatcher’s Britain – while making the distinction between Russell’s still-controversial film and others from the same period (STRAW DOGS, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE etc) that have long been…
SCARE ME *** USA 2020 Dir: Josh Ruben. 104 mins Here’s a cabin-confined, pandemic-released, novel take on the horror anthology format, performed with gusto. Mostly a two-hander, it has writer-actor-director Josh Ruben as writer-actor-director Fred, an ad agency worker in his late thirties holed up in a remote cabin in the snowy middle of nowhere. The film’s tone is set early on via a scene in which, beset by creepy sounds, he takes a glance down the stairs of the cabin basement, mutters “Nope” and closes the door. While alone, he jokily highlights potential parallels to Jack Torrance in THE…