Dir - Roxanne Benjamin
Overall: MEH
After providing segments in both Southbound and XX, writer/director Roxanne Benjamin's first solo full-length Body at Brighton Rock over-extends itself just a bit too far to work. The premise is interesting and quite fitting for such a small-scale, low-budget endeavor. It opens with some retro 80s nostalgia on the soundtrack and Benjamin is quite unashamed to indulge in good ole fashioned camera zooms throughout. A more comical vibe is also present early on, but things get serious before too long. From that point on, it focuses entirely on creating the most psychologically suspenseful tone possible, though it only achieves this in fleeting doses. The story is arguably too simple, allowing itself to spin its wheels while it is trying to wrack-up the tension and create a terrifying guessing game for the audience. Shots linger long enough to slog everything down and after several moments that turn out to be nothing more than psyche-outs, the intended feeling of dread is ultimately deflated. There are some good ideas and virtually the film's only actress Karina Fontes does solid work with the material at hand, but it is a near-miss in the end.
Dir - Larry Fessenden
Overall: MEH
While Larry Fessenden's modern day re-vamp of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in Depraved is earnest in its serious, mostly humor-free construction, it is loaded with problems. Filmed in New York and clearly made on a paper-thin budget, the characters are staggeringly underwritten, which is unfortunate as it focuses exclusively on them. Because of this, hardly at any point does anyone's dialog or behavior seem either natural or logical. Another issue is the weak performances, particularly a villainous Joshua Leonard who rattles off the bulk of the movie's pretentious dialog. Fessenden seems to be heading somewhere up until a point, but the film's unfocused nature comes to bonafide trainwreck levels in its final act. The confused spiral to the finish line is the cinematic equivalent of falling down the stairs while carrying fragile dinnerware, leaving both head scratches and embarrassed laughs instead of thought-provoking intrigue. Such wretched plot construction and amateur drawbacks are a shame since this could have been an interesting, contemplative, non-genre-pandering take on such over-adapted material.
Dir - Mike Flanagan
Overall: MEH
Logically speaking, Mike Flanagan was probably the perfect filmmaker to adapt Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, a decades-later sequel to both the novel and film The Shining. To his credit, Flanagan keeps many contemporary horror cliches at bay
and like it or not, the fanboy reconstruction of the Overlook Hotel and key moments therein are technically impressive. The director's overt sentimentality and seemingly allergic reaction to even the most minute ambiguity jives perfectly well with the author whose novel he is working with. In this respect, the resulting movie here is a curious work, faithfully calling back King's seminal novel and Stanley Kubrick's equally paramount, yet wildly different film which King legendarily despised. Kubrick's The Shining was all ABOUT ambiguity; leaving an audience with mountains of questions and things to obsessively puzzle over and in effect, stay permanently disturbed by. Well, until now when Flanagan and company wrap everything up quite concretely. Such an endeavor is certainly not for all tastes and the endless call backs, (particularly during the final act), recasting of key characters, excessive running time, and the expanding of a mythos that was very arguably better off left cryptic is all quite aggressively in conflict with at least the cinematic source material this acts as a follow-up to. For those more on King's side of the fence though, it is pretty ideally realized.
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