April Showers: Carrie

In April Showers, Team TFE looks at our favorite waterlogged moments in the movies. Here's Kieran Scarlett on Carrie (1976).

Brian de Palma’s horror classic Carrie has scenes at both the beginning and the end in which our heroine, Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) gets clean. Because of what happens between those scenes, they take on very different meanings. When we first see Carrie White, she is diffident and beleaguered—whether at home with her mother Margaret’s (Piper Laurie) stentorian declarations of fanatical Christian values or at school with the focused torment of her peers. It’s very clear that Carrie has internalized the harsh words of Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen):

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The Only Thing You Have To Fear Is

Team Experience from the Tribeca Film Festival - here's Jason on "Rebirth" and "Fear Inc."

It's weird that I brought up the 2006 film Severance last week when reviewing director Christopher Smiths' latest, because as soon as I sat down to watch Rebirth, writer-director Karl Mueller's new film about a suburban office drone sucked into a nightmare spiritual retreat, Severance was on my mind once again. Rebirth is never half as nasty as that film but the dots are there to be connected. This, too, is a satire most black about the search for that something greater than the proverbial pushing of pencils.

Kyle (Fran Kranz, Whedonite staple) starts the movie with a life that's tossed off in one of those meaningfully repetitive montages straight out of Fight Club. You know the type: coffee, car, cubicle, coffee, car, cubicle, and on and on to a not-early-enough grave...

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We Wish You A Merry Everything

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Holidays.

In the immortal words of Bela Lugosi what music the children of the night make, turning the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival into my favorite playground at the fest. Happy times with horror friends! So it was with some consternation when I saw this year the fest has given us a smaller swing-set upon which to swing - there are only six films showing under the "Midnight" banner (and it's a stretchto label at least two of them as Horror).

But wait! This year's opening film of the Midnight program is Holidays, an anthology consisting of eight short films (each one about a different celebratory day of the calendar) by eight different directing and writing teams, so I suppose that doubles their numbers, in a way. We'll take what we can get.

And with Holidays what we get, as is the usual case with anthology films, is a mixed bag - some treats, some tricks, a couple of candied apples with razor wire wrapped around them, a detached finger or ten. Beginning with "Valentine's Day" (directed by the duo that brought us last year's terrific Starry Eyes) and spanning all the way to "New Year's Eve" (which was written by the Starry Eyes team as well, making them the only repeat offenders of the bunch) the film makes microcosmic the fetishization of rituals and rites so annually played out in scary storytelling; think Halloween, Friday the 13th, Silent Night Deadly Night, or Eli Roth's short film "Thanksgiving"  -- for every day a bloodbath!

Truth be told there's only one true stinker in the bunch...

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Review: The Invitation

A dinner party reunion of estranged friends sets the stage for director Karyn Kusama's unnerving and twisted micro-horror The Invitation. The film's marketing has wisely eschewed going much further than that vague synopsis, for this one is most rewarding when experienced fresh. But don't just expect surprises with what unfolds, but from what's underneath the plentiful chills.

Shot almost entirely within one swanky Los Angeles home, the modest production is deceptive for how easily it gets under your skin and rattles. Its slim budget is hidden by a glossy presentation and a production design that finds the right alchemy of alluring and demonic (paging Daniel Walber!). Kusama treats this house as she does the many characters, all hidden corners of darkness packaged within a polished facade. If you watch The Invitation on VOD, prepare to have home jealousy, for this is pure house porn. And you'll definitely want a glass of wine.

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TV @ The Movies: "Bob's Burgers" and The Birds (1963)

Please tell me that you watch and love Bob's Burgers. (It's safe to assume that if you do the former you also do the latter.) The most recent episode "House of a 1000 Bounces" was a brilliant children's birthday party heist largely focused on the animated sitcom's superbly written kids: Tina, Louise, and Gene. The characterizations on this show never disappoint. Each Belcher family member and nearly every supporting character are so defined they're hi-res. And yet it's more than just broad strokes with flat colors. It's not one of those (many) sitcoms that rests on five variations of 1 joke for per character. Six seasons in the show is still strong with variety and invention.

In the B plot of this episode a pigeon inadvertently gets trapped inside the titular restaurant and Linda (Bob's wife) and Teddy (his self described best friend) are surprised to realize that Bob is terrified of pigeons. When they ask him to explain he flashes back to a childhood memory that looks and sounds all too familiar.

Let's alternate between Bob's false memories and the real fiction as it were. 

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