Dir - David Pastor/Àlex Pastor
Overall: GOOD
Writer/director brothers David and Àlex Pastor's follow-up to their 2009 debut Carriers once again explores a post-apocalyptic landscape, this time removing the zombies in place of a bizarre virus that causes fatal agoraphobia for the populous. Switching back to their native Spain, The Last Days, (Los últimos días), was shot in Barcelona with a significant enough budget to accurately portray the type of urban decay that quickly sets in when everyone is forced to make due with rain water, dead pigeons, and depleting supplies while perpetually stuck indoors. The unlikely pairing of a corporate peon and a ringer boss brought in to enforce company cutbacks provides an adequate amount of tension as they learn to trust each other in a Mad Max, survival of the fittest world where any forms of law and order seem to have been obliterated. There is plenty of momentum to the plotting where both Quim Gutiérrez and José Coronado have no other driving force than to be reunited with their loved ones and the finale manages to be both heartbreaking and uplifting. The Pastor brothers may be proving to have a narrative obsession of sorts, but this is a superior work to their first film and one whose emotional turmoil is well-earned.
Dir - James Wan
Overall: MEH
Interchangeable with The Haunting of Connecticut, The Amityville Horror, and Insidious, (plus hundreds of others), the latter's director James Wan continues his insistence in delivering dumb supernatural schlock with The Conjuring; not the first movie to be based on the fraudulent exploits of ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren, but the first to feature them as actual characters. Patrick Wilson returns from the aforementioned Insidious, this time as half of the husband/wife Warren duo, with Vera Farmiga playing the sensitive psychic medium because ya just gotta have one of those. You also have to have a down-on-their-luck family moving into an old house, whispering spirits who perform arbitrary paranormal activity, a kid with an imaginary friend, the Annabelle doll, equipment set up to capture the spookies, a big loud stupid exorcism, ghosts with racoon mascara, and plenty of jump scares to keep the easily startled teenagers happy. In other words, same crap different horror movie and Wan makes sure not to variate from the formula at any instance. On the "plus" side, it is unintentionally hilarious to watch everyone taking all of the malevolent tomfoolery seriously, (that of course the Warrens have immediate answers to at virtually all times considering that Lorraine herself was credited as a consultant on the movie), giving the film some much needed camp appeal to offshoot its laughable attempts at creepiness.
Dir - Blair Erickson
Overall: MEH
Writer/director Blair Erickson's debut Banshee Chapter tries as hard as humanly possible to ruin itself with jump scares, forcing the horror genre's most obnoxiously hackneyed trope into an otherwise clever melding of H.P. Lovecraft's From Beyond and the United States government's documented MKUltra experiments with DMT-19. On top of that though, the film has a disorienting structure where it nonchalantly zig-zags between a found footage mockumentary and a bog-standard, low-budget movie with handheld camera work. We never see a cameraman, yet Katia Winter's protagonist narrates various sections, on screen text shows up, and real life senate hearings and interviews from the 1970s and 90s are intermingled with faux-retro surveillance footage and the present day narrative. It is a bona fide mess in this regard, which begs the question of why Erickson bothered to go such a route instead of just investing his efforts fully in a single format. Winter turns in a solid performance as a journalist exploring the spooky disappearance of her close friend, but Ted Levine also shows up to once again unintelligibly marble-mouth his dialog as a Hunter S. Thompson stand-in that would have been a hoot if we could understand at least half of what he was saying. The CGI monster faces and Erickson's insistence to punctuate every single "scary" scene with a deafening noise after some silence is unforgivable nonsense, which just makes the whole thing a frustrating ordeal that deserves a far better treatment.
Overall: MEH
Writer/director Blair Erickson's debut Banshee Chapter tries as hard as humanly possible to ruin itself with jump scares, forcing the horror genre's most obnoxiously hackneyed trope into an otherwise clever melding of H.P. Lovecraft's From Beyond and the United States government's documented MKUltra experiments with DMT-19. On top of that though, the film has a disorienting structure where it nonchalantly zig-zags between a found footage mockumentary and a bog-standard, low-budget movie with handheld camera work. We never see a cameraman, yet Katia Winter's protagonist narrates various sections, on screen text shows up, and real life senate hearings and interviews from the 1970s and 90s are intermingled with faux-retro surveillance footage and the present day narrative. It is a bona fide mess in this regard, which begs the question of why Erickson bothered to go such a route instead of just investing his efforts fully in a single format. Winter turns in a solid performance as a journalist exploring the spooky disappearance of her close friend, but Ted Levine also shows up to once again unintelligibly marble-mouth his dialog as a Hunter S. Thompson stand-in that would have been a hoot if we could understand at least half of what he was saying. The CGI monster faces and Erickson's insistence to punctuate every single "scary" scene with a deafening noise after some silence is unforgivable nonsense, which just makes the whole thing a frustrating ordeal that deserves a far better treatment.
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