Movieline Online

Despite their theurgical and psychological subject matter, the films of Ingmar Bergman hue very closely to the horror genre.  So it’s no surprise to see  another  filmmaker follow the same route to explore the depths of guilt, shame and religious self-punishment.  In  The Righteous  (2021) writer, director and star Mark O’Brien takes the same stage-friendly approach (essentially three characters), isolated location (Canada stands-in for Sweden) and even shoots in glorious black and white!  But rather than coming off as a blatant rip-off of  Through a Glass Darkly , O’Brien’s film leaves itself open to supernatural interpretation and makes for a refreshing throwback to arthouse fare of the ‘60s.   Having left the priesthood to marry late in life, Frederic Mason believes God’s punishment is the death of his 8-year-old adopted daughter.  But he still seems spiritually unsatisfied, praying for the opportunity to pay the u...

It’s kind of surprising that someone thought  Flatliners  (1990) was good enough to remake in 2017.  After all, the original existed mostly to showcase its post-Brat Pack characters in a pseudo-supernatural format they had yet to explore:  life after death  (although poor William Baldwin’s career died soon after).  Directed by Joel Schumacher (post  Lost Boys  but pre- Batman & Robin ) and starring then-Hollywood-power-couple Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland, the film wants to dissect spiritual philosophies  and  provide visceral thrills.  It winds up doing neither, but it’s a handsome example of ‘90s popcorn thrillers nonetheless. Loyola med-school wunderkind Nelson Wright (Sutherland) convinces a gaggle of his fellow students to help him study life-after-death phenomena by stopping his heart under controlled circumstances.  That’s the simple part; it’s bringing him  back  the proves more d...

The slasher film formula wasn’t exactly complicated but it did have some interesting variations.  One of the most notable was the use of a foggy prologue to hint at the killer’s motivations.   Deep Red ,  Halloween  and  Prom Night  are all perfect examples, but even off-the-wall projects like  Hell High  (1989) weren’t above using the technique.   Here a pretty-in-pink 8-year-old girl tosses mud on a passing motorcycle and causes the occupants to impale themselves on convenient spikes.   Cut to 18 years later and that girl has become Miss Brooke Storm (Maureen Mooney), a high school biology teacher whose students, led by notorious bad boy Dickens (Christopher Stryker), push her to the edge of a nervous breakdown.  Her fragile sanity finally snaps when Dickens and his gang pull a prank using the swamp noxious swamp mud, not realizing the tables will soon turn…and history is destined to be repeated. ...

Boomers get a bad rap.  Sure, they’re self-centered wealth-hoarders who drive gas-guzzling cars they insist on  backing up in to any parking spot, but at least their disposable income drives the physical media sales for titles like  The Brain from Planet Arous  (1957).  Niche sci-fi programmers from the ‘50s certainly aren’t top of mind for Gen Z, so let’s all be thankful that there’s still a market for cut-rate oddities like director Nathan Juran’s alien brain picture that sneaks in more sex appeal than you’d expect!   Steve March (John Agar) is a pipe-smoking nuclear physicist with a smoking-hot girlfriend, Sally Fallon (Joyce Meadows), he plans on marrying in the near future.     But after an exploratory trip to the desert Steve returns “different,” power-hungry and sex-crazed to the point of isolating himself from Sally and his colleagues.     The explanation?     Gor, an alien brain from planet Arous, has inhabit...

There’s a tendency to cut indie filmmakers some slack when they’re working against the grain.  But just because the world they’ve created is obviously a manufactured metaphor, there’s still an obligation to entertain, provoke or enlighten.  Luckily, Spanish director Chema Garcia Ibarra, whose previous shorts exhibited the same anti-narrative tendencies, crafts a more compelling cinematic argument with  The Sacred Spirit  (2021), a humanistic study of characters desperate to make connections – even they happen to be of the  in- human variety. After the disappearance of her daughter Vanessa, Charo reaches out to the media and community in hopes to reuniting the family.  Things are particularly hard for Veronica (Llum Arques), Vanessa’s twin sister, who proves susceptible to conspiracy theories preached by her uncle, Jose Manuel, an avid Ufologist, and grandmother, a retired psychic.  But while aliens and astral planes are under suspic...

The DNA of the modern zombie film has been spliced from so many different sources it requires genuine cinematic research to produce an accurate genome map.  But who’s complaining?  Rediscovering influential off-shoots like 1974’s The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue  (aka  Let Sleeping Corpse Lie ) is like unearthing all the bits and pieces that make up the zombie evolution.  And director Jorge Grau’s take on the living dead is unique among its shuffling competition, mixing environmentalism, religion and a counter-culture rallying cry that’s as contemporary as it is gruesome. Paired up by accident on a journey through the English countryside, George and Edna get mixed up in a murder that makes them the prime suspect of a hippie-hating Inspector.  Determined to track down the real perpetrator, the couple discovers a pest control experiment using ultrasonic waves is resurrecting the dead bodies in the local cemetery.  As they wor...