2014 Horror Part Three

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
Dir - Ana Lily Amipour
Overall: GREAT 

American/Iranian first time filmmaker Ana Lily Amipour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, (Dokhtari dar šab tanhâ be xâne miravad), is not the stuff of amateurs.  Based off Amipour's own graphic novel of the same name with a deliberately underscored and quirky presentation to say the least, it is easily one of the most stylish and uniquely mesmerizing art horror films perhaps ever made.  Forgoing cliches almost exclusively and existing in a surreal, out of time and out of country universe, (though it probably says more about Iran than America), nearly all the moments are memorable.  On top of this, the story is dreamlike and compelling, with gay and feminist themes lurking in the shadows and never once becoming overbearing.  The words "noir" and "western" have been attributed here and you can just as easily throw the word "hipster" into the mix as well, but the results are so individual that it truly does not fall into any defined boxes.  A few cinematic odes can be picked up on, but the sum of all the parts is very much its own beast.

[REC] 4: APOCALYPSE
Dir - Jaume Balagueró
Overall:  MEH 

It is as much a cliche to agree with the sentiment that horror sequels ultimately take away more than they enhance the initial film in such a franchise, as much as it is a cliche that horror films seem incapable of escaping the franchise treatment in general.  The writer/director duo of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, (who made the first two [REC] movies as a team), decided not to quit while they were ahead.  Instead, they split up with Paco going solo on [REC] 3: Genesis and now Balagueró dropping [REC] 4: Apocalypse.  While Genesis was universally panned, Apocalypse is a direct sequel to the surprisingly excellent [REC] 2.  Essentially an action film set on a boat, this is easily the least "horror" in tone out of the series.  Even with the same rabid, red-eyed crazies running amok as we have come to expect and Manuela Velasco returning as the news reporter turned badass action starlet Ángela Vidal, it is so wildly different that it becomes rather unfair to even compare it to the previous installments.  In a way, this makes sense as the first two entries ambitiously went in different narrative routes from each, but Balagueró kind of pushes his luck this time.  It is somewhat entertaining for what it is, but also more mediocre visually and conceptually than one would hope for.

IT FOLLOWS
Dir - David Robert Mitchell
Overall: WOOF

There have been a slew of movies coming out particularly over the last few years that critics have put on a pedestal and often this is due to them seeming like a breath of fresh air compared to torture porn, reboots, and sequels.  David Robert Mitchell's It Follows is just such a movie.  An interesting question to ask is has the horror film gotten so bad, so predictable, so tastelessly rehashed from movie to movie that anything that does not resemble the boo-scare, ultra gory, by the books traits that are shoved down our throats deserve to get hailed as a masterpiece?  There can be no other explanation where this film is concerned, a film that has one of the laziest, most awful scripts imaginable.  Mitchell has defended it as adhering to some sort of vague dream logic, but unless you are David Lynch, (and none of us are), that can often be an excuse to pretty much allow your movie to establish and then ignore any rules it wants to.  The other and perhaps bigger issue here is that the entire presentation is remarkably dull.  Most of the characters lay around, sleep a lot, and stare at things.  There is a lot of driving here, driving there and then sitting around and laying around even more.  While it seems to be deliberately presenting a world where sexually active adolescents are left with no supervision or guidance, it does so in a more jarring than clever manner.  With such ill-defined terms, it fails to captivate and insufferably bores under its pretentiousness in the process.