Movie Review: Stonehearst Asylum (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

"Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see." That's a piece of advice offered in Stonehearst Asylum to the film's ostensible hero, Dr. Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess). It's also the most important suggestion made by author Edgar Allan Poe to his reader in the droll short story that the movie is loosely based on, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether." Directed by Brad Anderson (The Call), Stonehearst Asylum is more clever than scary. But there's a lot to be said for a well plotted thriller in a time when too many horror movies hinge more on shocking their audiences instead of getting under their skin.

Movie Review: You're Next

by Tony Dayoub

After a terrifying prologue, You're Next begins with ultra-cute Erin (Sharni Vinson) and her pudgy boyfriend Crispian (AJ Bowen) on their way to a weekend at his parents' secluded vacation home. They're to join a family reunion to celebrate Mom and Dad's anniversary. The conversation in the car is about what you'd expect. Erin asks if Crispian's parents are as "loaded" as she's heard. A visibly nervous Crispian admits this is true. But what's really creating the unspoken tension is Crispian's reticence for Erin to meet his complicated family. Who hasn't been in that situation? "What's wrong with them?" Erin asks. After a moment of silence that lasts for what seems like eons, Crispian says two words.

"You'll see."

Underrated: Rock Hudson in Seconds (1966)

by Tony Dayoub

I admit it's something of a misnomer to call Rock Hudson's performance in Seconds underrated. For years, Hudson has been praised for his turn in the John Frankenheimer thriller and deservedly so. But ask even the most avid film buff if they've seen the movie and you usually get something along the lines of, "I keep meaning to, but I just haven't gotten to it yet." Well, that should change after today with the Criterion Collection's new Blu-ray release.

Movie Review: The Conjuring (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

How long has it been since a so-called horror movie actually scared you? Made you jump? Yes. Turned your stomach? Sure. But actually sent chills up your spine? The Conjuring is the first fright movie in years that accomplishes that. And without the aforementioned cheap tricks either. The Conjuring instead resorts to some of the tried and true techniques of classic horror cinema—the slow burn, viewer investment in its characters, polished camerawork—that have long been absent from the genre.

Movie Review: This Is the End (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

A clever, funny and, most of all, incredibly original comedy, This Is the End is a surprising contender for most hilarious movie I've seen all year. Concocted by Evan Goldberg and actor Seth Rogen as a nihilistic, self-reflexive satire featuring Rogen and his actor friends as themselves, This Is the End successfully overcomes its biggest potential liability, extending its one-joke premise too far, by keeping the movie short and, as this film's version of Jonah Hill would say, tight.

Movie Review: Evil Dead (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

That's what I get for listening to you guys. Yeah, all of you bloggers filing out of the SXSW premiere of the Evil Dead remake declaring, "This time, they got it right," I'm looking at you. I know you weren't necessarily saying this time they got The Evil Dead right since Sam Raimi's 1981 film, though admittedly amateurish in its execution, is still about the most inventive first-time horror film this side of David Lynch's Eraserhead. I get that what you really meant is that 2013's Evil Dead does right by its predecessor in ways that the Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and umpteen other recent horror remakes never have. Raimi himself produced the new Evil Dead along with Bruce Campbell, the cult actor who made his name with the series, so it's certain they'd shepherd their baby through the often callous reboot process. But with each successive film of his, it seems more and more apparent that Raimi is making financial decisions not artistic ones. How else to explain the blatant inferiority of the new Evil Dead?

Crime and Misdirection: Sinister (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

One of the easiest ways horror movies provoke a response from their audience is to put a child in jeopardy. Just think of all the films that immediately come to mind when you contemplate that last statement: The Shining, The Sixth Sense, Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, The Exorcist. Sinister does this too. In truth, Sinister is not just a little derivative in its attempt to invert the expectations associated with this angle. But it's the way it uses our fears to misdirect us that make Sinister an engaging, and surprising, horror film... perhaps even one of the most frightening in years.

NYFF50 Review: Berberian Sound Studio

by Tony Dayoub

You won't find one of the NYFF's most exciting discoveries playing in the cavernous Alice Tully Hall as part of the festival's main slate. Instead, you'll have to brave a trip to the Lincoln Center's relatively tiny Walter Reade theater to catch this gem as one of the NYFF's Midnight Movies, Berberian Sound Studio, a true festival sleeper if there ever was one. The intimacy is appropriate given that some might say Peter Strickland's small, imaginative movie is thin, spare. And they wouldn't be entirely wrong. Berberian Sound Studio is kind of a doodle, a loving tribute to the giallo, an Italian horror genre that often features a "normal" person slowly driven mad by phantasmagoric events around him.

Digging up The Hole

by Tony Dayoub

Though its release has been held up for three years in most parts of the country, Joe Dante's The Hole has garnered a limited theatrical release in 3D before its upcoming DVD/Blu-ray debut. Rated PG-13, The Hole is a creepy, funny film perfect for everyone from mature tweens to parents and the young at heart. On the scare-o-meter, it falls somewhere between the Goosebumps TV show and Poltergeist, two properties it's reminiscent of. Fans of Joe Dante (Matinee) should be particularly pleased to see the director of films like Gremlins and The Howling continue serving up scares while accurately depicting the sensibilities his young leads.

NYFF50 Review: The Bay (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

The most surprising thing about the disturbing The Bay, the first of the New York Film Festival's new Midnight Movie entries, is the fact that Barry Levinson (Diner) directed it. Cobbled together from a wide range of digital video "found footage," The Bay draws on recent reports of parasitic isopods infecting fish just off the Jersey coast. As one recent report says, "There's a horror film waiting to be made about this thing." And so it has been—The Bay is a harrowing, nerve-jangling trifle from a once popular director all but written off in recent years.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at 20

by Tony Dayoub

Months before Twin Peaks' national TV premiere on ABC, its pilot debuted at the Miami Film Festival, where one reviewer correctly predicted its ultimate fate:

...the series may lay an egg on television because of its drawn-out and deliberate pacing, brutality, sex with violence and a hint of something else... something deadly, yet unseen and probably repulsive.

True enough in the long term. But short term, its first 6-episode season—in which FBI Special Agent Dale B. Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) comes to town to investigate the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)—managed to enthrall the nation. The season finale, a cliffhanger in which Cooper is shot in the chest at point blank range by an unseen assailant, was sufficiently newsworthy to prompt Saturday Night Live to invite Maclachlan to host the show's 16th season premiere and propel the show's co-creator, David Lynch, onto the cover of Time magazine in anticipation of Peaks' 2nd season premiere. What are the chances either of those occurrences might ever happen again?

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

If you're going to call your movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, then it damn well better be as surreal as its title suggests. Therein lies the underlying defect of the film. In its attempt to concoct a clever spin on both horror movies and historical dramas, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter forgets that it is, or at least should be, just a goofy exercise. That screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (on whose novel the movie is based) takes the exercise so seriously—even if director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) seems incapable of doing so—actually robs the movie of any measure of credibility.

Prometheus (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

Who would have thought that Prometheus, Ridley Scott's triumphant return to science fiction, is not necessarily designed to evoke the picture it shares the most connective tissue with? 1979's Alien, only Scott's second film, was a horrific variation on the traditional haunted house movie trope in which a small crew of seven miners slowly gets picked off by an indestructible monster in the outer reaches of space. Alien's grungy, shopworn technology, its motley crew of unlikeable and all too human antiheroes, and the emergence of the spaceship Nostromo's whiny, female second officer as the film's lead were among the movie's innovative twists, spicing up a once moribund genre. Eventually, Alien inspired so many copycats it all seemed kind of old hat again. While ostensibly a tangential prequel—explaining a few of the more mysterious elements of Alien—Prometheus takes off on a different course, one especially familiar to those of us around in the '70s.

Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

It's ironic that Tim Burton—whose expressionism-by-way-of-acid-tinged Batman was the forerunner of the modern superhero film—has a new film getting trounced in the box office by The Avengers, the ultimate example of the very kind of genre he helped to usher in at the start of his career. And that this film is Dark Shadows, not only a property with a fervent cult audience but probably the most satisfying effort from Burton in quite a long time. Based on the Gothic soap which ran on ABC from 1966-1971, Dark Shadows is the apotheosis of Burton's artistic concerns, perfectly fusing his love of all things dark and creepy with his off-kilter family dynamics in a way only glimpsed at in previous efforts like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and most precisely (but all too briefly) in his 1984 short, Frankenweenie. In films like Sweeney Todd, Burton gets the sense of dark foreboding right, but misses that infectious feeling of benign wonder which his other movies are bursting with. And most of the rest of his oeuvre, though exuberant in its ability to astonish with imaginative production design and fanciful style, doesn't quite get that Hammer horror feel of movies like Sleepy Hollow. Perhaps Dark Shadows succeeds because, by Burton's own admission, it was a formative influence.

Movie Review: The Grey

by Tony Dayoub

In the American movie landscape, the early part of the year usually means a few things. It's when the rest of the country gets to start catching up on Oscar hopefuls that opened at the end of the previous year in New York and L.A. It's also the season when unworthy films get dumped on an unsuspecting public (Man on a Ledge, anyone?). And finally, it's the designated release window for the semi-annual middle-age-action film by the lumbering Liam Neeson (Taken, Unknown). But this upcoming weekend's entry, Joe Carnahan's survival nightmare The Grey (based on a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers), resembles Neeson's previous simplistic thrillers only from a marketing standpoint. Though the story of a man fighting against nature in a snowy wilderness is unabashedly straightforward, Neeson and Carnahan (who previously collaborated on the dumb A-Team remake) plumb the depths of The Grey's central character, Ottway, and come up with some fascinating stuff.

Blu-ray Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

by Tony Dayoub

Out on DVD and Blu-ray today, one of this year's best horror films, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is an update of the most chilling entry in the 1970s science fiction franchise. 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the penultimate film in the series, postulated a future in which domesticated apes turned on their masters after being organized by a once meek chimpanzee named Caesar (Roddy McDowall). For those familiar with Los Angeles history, images of rioting gorillas in a Century City set aflame still stir up uncomfortable parallels with what were then the recent Watts riots. Rise wisely avoids the racially tinged narrative of its progenitor and instead concentrates on the controversies attendant to animal lab-testing, zoological abuse, and the recent spate of chimp attacks in domestic environments.

Ghost Story

Samurai, sensuality and spirits haunt Criterion’s new Blu-ray, Kuroneko

by Tony Dayoub

Feudal Japan: A tracking shot through the woods carefully follows a pale woman wearing a kimono that glows ghostly white as she seemingly skims almost inches above a muddy path. A lascivious samurai follows on a horse trotting close behind her, accompanying her home to “keep her safe” from road agents while mentally working out the best method of having his way with her. When she comes to a puddle, she hops above it in a manner that approximates… flying? Or so the samurai imagines. He shakes off the hallucination. But then, she’s gone. The camera has lost her, too. As it slowly dollies up the path where she once walked, her voice comes from offscreen. Cut to the woman now standing at the side of the samurai astride on his horse. The silence is deafening when the wind isn’t blowing through the trees...

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Gothic Nightmares

A survey of British horror films on DVD and Blu-ray

By Tony Dayoub

Serena in Hammer's Vampire Circus

As the climate turns chilly, leaves fall away from skeletal trees and nighttime lasts just a bit longer, I’m always tempted to enjoy the run up to Halloween by binging on spooky films. In selecting a sampling of some of those horror films to share with all of you, I decided to focus on a cross-section of British horror films. Though this sample leans toward the more esoteric in theme, many of them feature very familiar monsters and are representative of the eroticism, gothic panache and propensity for colorful gore that characterizes screamers made in the UK...

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NYFF11 Movie Review: Martha Marcy May Marlene

by Tony Dayoub

Tense as it is, I still can't wholeheartedly get behind Martha Marcy May Marlene, writer-director Sean Durkin's first feature. The title refers to all the names used to identify the lead character played by Elizabeth Olsen (younger sister of the famous Olsen Twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley). The movie unfolds utilizing a parallel story structure. One thread follows the protagonist's time as the member of a cult led by the creepily charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes). The other looks at her life after she leaves the cult and returns to live with her older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy's husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy).

Manhunter at 25

Summer of ’86: We Don’t Invent Our Natures…: Manhunter

by Tony Dayoub

[This is my entry in the House Next Door's annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! Manhunter was released in theaters on August 15th, 1986.]

I was never quite as taken as everyone else was when I first saw The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. After just coming off of two post-punk films which married comedy to violence in unpredictable ways (Something Wild and Married to the Mob) Lambs seemed like a dank, watered-down, miscalculated step into typical thriller territory for director Jonathan Demme. Worse, its Oscar wins seemed to tempt derail Demme’s career for a while, as he pursued projects more for their awards-worthiness than for any personal interest in the material. Admittedly, Anthony Hopkins’ performance as serial killer Hannibal Lecter was electrifying. But the fact that this cannibal killer was imprisoned in what looked like a dungeon struck me as both phony and a little too on-the-nose in its attempt to force Jodie Foster’s heroine to descend into Hades every time she needed more help with her case. So deliberately unusual was Hopkins’ glassy-eyed intensity and odd vocal inflection, it was years before I connected his character to Brian Cox’s Hannibal Lecktor (sic) in Manhunter, a film I had caught in theaters just five years earlier...

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