Dir - Tim Burton
Overall: GOOD
Arguably the most direct love letter to Tim Burton's childish love of horror movies that the director ever made, Frankenweenie serves as his somewhat inevitable full-length adaptation of his own 1984 short of the same name. The hallmarks of Burton's work are as ever present as always here, hallmarks that themselves have always deeply been inspired by the genre films that permanently warped his quirky, harmlessly macabre aesthetics. Misunderstood, outcast characters, nods to everything from Universal monsters, to Godzilla, to Rankin/Bass stop-motion specials, Danny Elfman's incessant and whimsical score, black and white photography with every shamelessly Gothic cliche in the book, etc. It even has returning Burton alumni Catherine O'Hara, Martin Landau, and Winona Ryder on board, though oddly Johnny Depp for once took this project off. For any fans of the filmmaker's work or kid-friendly, Disney fare in general, it is pretty impossible to find much fault with Frankenweenie, a film quite pleasing in its safe, predictable structure and auteur vision.
Dir - Dario Argento
Overall: WOOF
The opening title sequence in Dario Argento's Dracula 3D sets the stage quite accurately; an incredibly cheap-looking digital intro with cornball music that would fit in something like a retro, dancing vampire toy for Halloween. The schlock only intensifies from there and boy does it ever. To be fair, Rutger Hauer is surprisingly understated as Van Helsing, the set and costume design is solid, the screenplay takes a significant amount of liberties with the stripped-bare source material to warrant itself unique enough, and being an Argento film, it has a few splendidly giddy gore sequences. Every other aspect is pure, unintentionally embarrassing absurdity. The post-dubbed dialog sounds like it was "written" by people with only the most rudimentary grasp on the English language or how human interactions work, the visual effects are almost inconceivably poor, most performances are sink-in-your-chair awkward, the pacing is oddly stagnant, and German actor Thomas Kretschmann's title character is probably the least memorable Dracula since ever. Watching a movie like this from an always eccentric though once ingenious filmmaker whose cinematic output has only grown more hilariously clueless in recent times, it is necessary to try and appreciate it as the trainwreck oddity that it can only be. That is if your want to laugh at it every step of the way which is truly the best one can hope for.
Dir - Scott Derrickson
Overall: MEH
Though it relies far too heavily on predictable and over-used horror tropes, Scott Derrickson's Sinister at least to a point boasts some decent ideas and production values. Christopher Young's unorthodox soundtrack is a highlight, mixing strange electronics and ambient noises in quite different ways from scene to scene. The cast and dialog are also stronger and more convincing than usual, particularly the dynamic between Ethan Hawke and Juliet Rylance as a struggling yet supportive couple. The most promising aspect of Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill's script is the world building which creates an intriguing amount of detail surrounding an entirely fabricated Pagan deity which acts as a stand-in for the Bogeyman and Pied Piper. Though the name Bughuul and Slipknot-member-look of said deity is rather silly, there are a handful of genuinely creepy scenes early on concerning him. Things get more derivative as the story progresses when it turns into a "here comes the jump scare" game and ghoulish kids holding up the "ssshhhhh" sign and tilting their heads which are far more hackneyed than frightening. Despite one or two clever tweaks to the formula, its primary objective is unfortunately that of a cliche work-out.
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