Dir - John McNaughton
Overall: WOOF
Emerging after a significantly long break from full-length movie making and an even longer one since his last to fall into the horror camp, (sans his 2006 Masters of Horror segment "Haeckel's Tale"), John McNaughton's The Harvest is a gargantuan disappointment and not just for a comeback. The problem lies entirely with Stephen Lancellotti's script which is preposterously idiotic, hinging on a completely nonredeemable couple whose behavior is both horrendous and illogical. In fact all four grown-ups in this movie exhibit either the type of poor judgement that becomes insulting to the viewer the more that it contradicts previous actions or in the case of Samantha Morton's over-the-top, psychotic mother, just becomes insulting to the viewer because it clashes with an otherwise serious tone. This is the type of film where people act annoyingly cruel, oddly aloof, or just plain stupid and the answers eventually given as to why are more unsatisfying than could have possibly been imagined. McNaughton fades out of scenes in a peculiar fashion that makes it seem like a Lifetime television movie, but there is probably nothing he or any other director could do with the material to sufficiently distract from how awful it is. On the plus side, at least Michael Shannon and fourteen year-old Natasha Calis deliver solid performances that the story hardly deserves.
Dir - Chris LaMartina
Overall: MEH
Boasting a massive budget and Hollywood's biggest A-lister in Brad Pitt, the adaptation of Max Brooks' World War Z still cannot overcome its formulaic shortcomings as one of countless zombie apocalypse movies to emerge at the turn of the century. The PG-13 rating may be an immediate detriment for gore hounds considering that blood and guts have been a staple in the sub-genre from the get go, but the problems have more to do with the fact that this hardly offers up a differentiating enough take on such incredibly played-out material. It is a series of set pieces that are thrilling on paper, but also ones that go through all of the expected motions, with high stakes established where only minor characters do not make it out OK. Pitt's production company Plan B Entertainment locks horns with several others to inflate the scale in order to utilize oodles of CGI, conveying a pandemic sense of global, rabid, animated corpse mayhem the likes of which Danny Boyle's meager in comparison 28 Days Later could only dream of pulling off. Director Chris LaMartina tackles the material in the safest way possible, allowing for plenty of heartfelt scenes between Pitt and his family while rapidly editing a barrage of footage together to cause either headaches or excitement depending on the viewer's tolerance for such things. In other words, it is exactly what a two-hundred-plus million dollar Hollywood zombie movie is supposed to be.
Dir - Hideo Nakata
Overall: MEH
Up until the grandiose finale, The Complex, (Kuroyuri danchi), is Hideo Nakata's version of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie; an emotional character piece, deliberately paced with hardly any incidental music on the soundtrack. The theatrical film was quickly proceeded by a television series titled Kuroyuri danchi: Joshô which served as a prequel to the events here and also had Nakata's involvement, writing and directing four of the twelve episodes. As one of the forerunners of contemporary J-horror, Nakata had already carved out a successful niche for himself in the genre, this being his return to purely supernatural terrain since Kaidan, his 2007's version of the often told ghost story. The highly tranquil atmosphere is immediately striking here as the movie has a standard, slow-boil approach that makes it a top priority to build up a mysterious, spooky mood. While these early moments are enticing, all of the story's would-be twists are made quite obvious, either intentionally or not. So by the time that things start to rev up and the CGI becomes more prominent and the noise level intensifies, sadly the movie dissolves into a bloated cliche-fest with a creepy ghost kid, spiritual experts performing chanty exorcisms, tinted-color pallets, and mental turmoil.
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