Dir - Oz Perkins
Overall: MEH
Made before the tediously lousy I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House yet given a wider release after it, The Blackcoat's Daughter is Anthony Perkins son Osgood Perkins to-date other film that drops the ball down several flights of stairs. To compare, Blackcoat's is noticeably more successful in some aspects. Perkins deserves a pat on the back for maintaining a consistent mood, one that is crawling along at a deliberately slow and eerie pace. The performances from the three leads, (all female), are also ideal and no one at any time chews the scenery in a B-movie manner. This is certainly a serious movie with a serious feel. Yet Perkins does not quite have all the pieces in place to deliver what he seems to be going for. The film is irritatingly inconclusive which is really only a problem since both the characters and premise are too vaguely formed. Even though they are done more subtly than most horror films allow, there are still a handful of genre cliches and twists that rear their predictable head and unintentionally cheapen the proceedings. Perkins certainly could be on to something just as easily as he could be doomed to make the same mistakes again with future film vehicles, but if anything, he seems well-equipped at creating a consistently menacing tone.
Dir - Can Evrenol
Overall: GOOD
Turkey has produced very, very few horror movies over the last century, making Can Evrenol's full-length debut Baskin, (based off his own 2013 short film of the same name), something to take note of simply on its geographical origin. It was shot in Istanbul exclusively at night with a less than half a million dollar budget and from an optical standpoint, the gore enthusiast horror fan will be most pleased. Influences from the Hellraiser franchise, Silent Hill games, Lucio Fulci's "Gates of Hell" trilogy, and the contemporary New French Extremity movement pile on top of each other as everything flies off the rails, almost cartoonishly so by the end. Evrenol's concocted a gruesome sensory overload to be sure, but he also keeps it on the mysterious side of the fence, keeping the viewer invested even once it became clear that this is just a mishmash of random themes, bizarreness, and freakish visuals. There are more than enough earnestly creepy moments that brew up before the "I would've shit my pants forty times if that was me" ones take center stage and as probably too unnecessarily vile as the torture porn moments get, (aren't they always though?), the film is strange and even silly enough to enhance its balls-out brutality.
Dir - Perry Blackshear
Overall: GREAT
Another very commendable venture of independent, horror filmmaking, They Look Like People was made on what has to be a diminutive budget, (any special effects shots are sparse in quantity and severity), by newcomer Perry Blackshear who handled pretty much every technical aspect of the production solo. It not only lives up to the respect it deserves in its formation, but it surpasses it in its achievement. First off, points are deservedly won for skipping right past oodles of genre tropes that could have cluttered up the place, with insulting jump scares and twitchy, deformed things never showing up. From a story standpoint, it is simple and believably portrayed, and such subject matter is voluntarily distanced from how it would normally appear in other such movies. This is a triumphant aspect for not only Blackshear, but his small cast and their well-mannered and crafted performances that kept things thoroughly unpredictable. An exemplary bit of contemporary horror, it proves what kind of intelligent, effectively different and creepy ways there are to breathe exciting life into this genre.
No comments:
Post a Comment