Dir - Emma Tammi
Overall: WOOF
Eight years in the making, the Five Nights at Freddy's movie finally emerges with a misguided thud and is a tonally askew hodgepodge of the usual pratfalls that doom many a PG-13 horror film. Surprisingly, the video game franchise's creator Scott Cawthon did not just take a gigantic check from Jason Blum and sail off into the sunset, instead co-writing the script with Seth Cuddeback and director Emma Tammi, reworking much of his established lore into something both bafflingly hare-brained and unrecognizable from its source material. Granted, staging a ninety-minute movie as nothing more than a single person trying to not get killed by animatronic Showbiz Pizza stand-ins would be a fool's errand, but the plot line devised here is laughably convoluted and schmaltzy, taking itself way too seriously for a movie that is simultaneously trying to balance kid-friendly scares with child abduction and brutal violence. The results are something that is likely to frustrate many and please none, straying far enough from its roots to piss-off the diehards and causing everyone else to check out due to its monotonous structure, inconsistent character behavior, hackneyed plot contrivances, awkward attempts at humor, and failure to fully commit to all of the plates that is is trying to spin.
Dir - Kenneth Branagh
Overall: GOOD
For his third Agatha Christie adaptation portraying the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, director thespian Kenneth Branagh chose to take on the lesser-known, 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party, here changed to A Haunting in Venice. Boasting a top-notch cast who are all doing splendid work, an emotionally impactful screenplay by Michael Green which explores post-war-torn baggage, and all done in a grandiose style that brings expressive camerawork and digital, pristine detail into an old timey period piece of the whodunit variety, it has plenty going on to keep one invested. Though occasionally punctuated by snappy dialog and unimposing humor, Branagh maintains an aura of supernatural gloom where every house in Italy is presumed haunted by something. The particular setting for this overnight murder mystery is far from an exception; a sprawling palazzo with a disturbed past that is ripe for otherworldly allusions to go along with all of the intricate plot revelations. It may not deliver the chills in the most unique manner as it relies on jump scares and over-used ghostly tropes to give it a mild, horror movie sheen, (even if a horror movie it technically is not by several definitions), but it is a refreshing and elegantly photographed throwback all the same.
Dir - Hideo Nakata
Overall: MEH
Unintentional doofiness runs amuck in Hideo Nakata's latest The Forbidden Play, (Kinjirareta asobi); a bit of J-horror silliness that throws subtlety to the wind in place of loud, CGI-ridden scare tactics. Scripted by Nakata's past collaborator Noriaki Sugihara and first time screenwriter Karma Shimizu, the story reworks the central idea in Stephen King's Pet Sematary, except by throwing in some half-baked ideas about a religious cult and generational supernatural powers that manifest in a barrage of arbitrary ways. This is the type of formulaic horror movie where characters behave irrationally by failing to tell people pivotal information, failing to tell people all of the unexplained things that they continue to witness, and proclaiming that the problem is solved when there is still over twenty minutes left in the running time. The choice was also made to present the first act in a non-linear fashion, which makes it confusing to get one's footing before the plot settles into a conventional timeline for the remainder. Performance wise, it is a mixed bag of actors displaying a combination of wide-eyed bewilderment, unconvincing emoting, accidentally funny face-making, and good ole fashioned scenery-chewing. Nakata delivers it all with rudimentary set pieces that seem as if they were plucked out of a hat, which of course leads to an over-the-top conclusion full of yelling, lighting storms, axe-smashing, and horrendous digital effects.
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