Review: Ready Or Not

by Chris Feil

There’s something almost luxurious in store for horror fans in Ready or Not, this week’s late summer horror film du jour that is nevertheless indispensable for genre fans. Like an oasis for those seeking something along the lines of Kevin Williamson’s wit and Tobe Hooper’s sense of straightforward menace, the film feels like both a throwback and the freshest, crispest antidote to the more brooding mainstream horror trends of late. It gives us the genre’s benchposts and in mighty form: laughter and jolts in equal measure, a distinct iconography, and a brand new scream queen.

The film succeeds largely on its clarity of vision, a simple concept that becomes a playground for its psychological interests. Here director duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (billed together as Radio Silence) look to skewer the dogma of rich people, delivering a delightful horror farce that’s a little bit like a roided Agatha Christie in the best way...

Click to read more ...

The New Classics: Inglourious Basterds

Michael Cusumano here to take a break from batting around Once Upon a Time In... Hollywood to look back a decade.

Scene - Chapter 2: Inglourious Basterds 
The Inglourious Basterds marketing team knew what aspects of the film to emphasize ten years ago. 

“A basterd's work is never done” boasted the tag line next to the image of a triumphant Brad Pitt brandishing a machine gun atop a pile of dead Nazis. “An inglourious, uproarious thrill-ride of vengeance!” promised another line. The centerpiece of the trailer was Pitt’s Aldo the Apache jutting his chin into a tight close to declare “I want my scalps!”. The promise was clear. The director of Kill Bill is trading samurai swords for hand grenades.

Rewatching it now, ten years later, I can still feel the chasm between the film that was sold and the film that was delivered. Basterds is a sprawling, oddly-shaped, thesis paper of a movie. And while there is no shortage of violence, it takes a back seat to dialogue, mostly arriving in quick bursts to punctuate long scenes of conversation. At times, Basterds could be mistaken for an adaptation of a stage play, and a foreign language one to boot. 

“Uproarious” though. The tag was telling the truth about that...

Click to read more ...

Box Office: "Good Boys" makes good - did you see it?

With 16 features in wide release -- which is a lot given that there's usually only 10-12 with today's tendency to pack movies on 4,000+ screens -- let's cover the whole field, shall we?  Plus the specialty titles in limited release because we think they're just as, if not more, important on the regular. After the jump the full chart...

Weekend Box Office August 16th-18th (Actuals) 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
W I D E	PLATFORM / LIMITED
1 🔺 Good Boys $21.4 *new* REVIEW  ★	1 🔺 Mission Mangal $1.3 on 263 screens *new*

2 Hobbs & Shaw $14.1 (cum. $133.7)  REVIEW  ★	2 🔺 The Peanut Butter Falcon $287k (cum. $583k) on 49 screens REVIEW ★

Click to read more ...

Horror Actressing: Joan Allen in "Manhunter"

by Jason Adams

When I first introduced this "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series a few weeks back I mentioned that my own definition of what makes a "horror" film is fairly loose -- so is Michael Mann's 1986 serial killer flick Manhunter a Horror Film? I think that book author Thomas Harris wrote all of his Hannibal Lecter tomes with enough Guignol to them to say that yes, his intention was to unsettle our fundamental trust in the form of the world -- to violate the borders of what's sane and insane with the explicit intention of horrifying. 

But Michael Mann as a director, he does bring Manhunter back down to earth a bit -- just look at how Bryan Fuller adapted the material of Red Dragon straight into outer space with his gloriously baroque show Hannibal to see how much Mann grounded his movie in contrast. All that genre back and forth aside though, I think it's impossible to argue that the character of Reba McClane -- played by Joan Allen, who's celebrating her birthday tomorrow, in the film -- isn't meant to play explicitly with a standard horror trope...

Click to read more ...

Mindhunter (S2) Pt 1: Panic Attacks and the Son of Sam

by Nathaniel R

So, two years ago --  TWO YEARS! -- we were all in the midst of bingeing the first season of David Fincher's Mindhunter. Sadly we never finished writing about it at TFE. This was not intentional so much as that the series was happening in October when the fall film prestige season was colliding with our blogging calendar.  So much time has passed between the first and second season that the only thing we could remember about the finale was that it left Agent Holden Ford (Emmy worthy and snubbed Jonathan Groff) writhing about on a hospital floor suffering the most frighteningly believable panic attack we'd seen onscreen. We were worried about what our terrible memory might mean for the launch of season 2 but thankfully the series picks up just where it left off. We were quickly back into its gruesome groove. That's surely do its claustophrophic focus. Much of each episode is composed of just two to four characters talking in a basement and/or two to four characters in various indoor spaces like offices, prisons, kitchens, hotel rooms, restaurants, bars, and crime scenes.

When we left off, the small team of "Behaviorial Science" was under internal investigation with an uncertain future. So let's jump back in with the first two episodes...

Click to read more ...