Dir - Colin Minihan
Overall: MEH
Loud, stupid, obnoxious, and predictable, the self-explanatory horror comedy Coyotes is the latest from director Colin Minihan. Written by the team of Nick Simon and Daniel Meersand, (along with Tad Daggerhart), this is bog standard nature horror/home invasion stuff with constant psyche-outs and computer generated canines that come out of the woodwork all aggressive like after a massive LA storm and power outage. Things write themselves from there, with some stylistic touches like comic book freeze frames to introduce every character's name and flashy camera moves livening up a plot that is as hackneyed as they come. Like most contemporary horror comedies, it also mangles its tone, with humans and pets getting brutally murdered, and characters uncontrollably sobbing over the harrowing ordeal that they are facing, all while quirky mannerisms are played for nyucks nyucks and people get annoyed with each other. The comedy falls flat in almost every instance, plus the internal plight that real life couple Justin Long and Kate Bosworth face with their stereotypically smart-assed and moody daughter Mila Harris is never convincing, such dramatic moments feeling unearned. On the plus side, Long is thankfully not playing his usual snarky douchebag, reminding people that he can do emotional, (if narratively forced), lifting when called for.
Dir - Guillermo del Toro
Overall: MEH
It is a shame that Guillermo del Toro did not get to make his life-long passion project until this far into his career, as the resulting Frankenstein comes off like it cost a zillion dollars and is the work of a man who has earned the status to make such a spectacle on such a grand scale. Similar to Robert Egger's Nosferatu redux from the previous year, it is inherently boisterous and schlocky. The Mexican filmmaker extraordinaire has long championed genre fiction and has optimized the type of romantic artist that sympathizes with "the monster", going on record as staring that James Whale's seminal 1931 Frankenstein is his favorite film due to his inert attraction to its central creature and the tragic elements of Mary Shelley's source material. Yet through decades of rightfully lauded movie-making, del Toro has also positioned himself as someone who seemingly has no interest in doing anything tender, anything subdued, anything nuanced. Instead and like Victor Frankenstein's creation itself, every frame of this film looks artificial. The tone is so bombastic that it makes Kenneth Braughah's over-the-top version from thirty years ago seem like Stranger Than Paradise, but accepting such a rambunctious and sweeping aesthetic is necessary or else the viewer will set themself up for unrelenting annoyance throughout a whopping run time that nearly reaches three hours. Does the script tweak enough and justify its existence after over a century of other sporadic Frankenstein adaptations? Is del Toro skilled enough at his craft to make such abundance compelling? Do we really need a Creature that growls like a werewolf and can push a massive sailing vessel that is trapped in Arctic ice? Guillermo del Toro seems to be enjoying himself asking those questions while spending gallons of money in the process, so maybe that is enough.
Dir - Jay Drakulic/Mallory Drumm/Alex Lee Williams
Overall: WOOF
An exceptionally bad Canadian found footage movie from the filmmaking team of Jay Drakulic, Mallory Drumm, and Alex Lee Williams, (the latter two appearing as the leads), Dream Eater makes a consistent amount of mistakes, almost every one that it possible can as if it is doing so on purpose. The problems are of a "Where to begin?" nature. A laughable excuse for our characters to film everything, unnatural dialog, an unlikable protagonist couple who have no chemistry with each other, scary music and artificial sound cues everywhere, scenic establishing shots, (?!?), an insultingly hackneyed plot, logical gaps galore, a monotonous structure that makes the movie feel ten times longer than it is, one stylistic or narrative horror cliche after the other, (too many to mention), Drakulic providing abysmal narration during an Unsolved Mystery segment that seems as if he is trying to parody said program, and quasi-terrible performances from everyone on screen. In other words, it spectacularly fails at what it sets out to achieve. The fact that what it sets out to achieve is just being another low budget piece of lazy found footage nonsense to toss into the heaping pile of such films begs the question of why anyone should care, let alone grant it a viewing in the first place. It is one of countless examples of people exploring a sub genre without any clue as to what, (rarely in this case), makes that genre work. Instead, Drakulic, Drumm, and Williams just throw everything that they have seen done in other horror movies, (found footage or otherwise), and see if they can make something stick. Sadly and annoyingly, nothing does.
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