Something buried in last week’s LA Weekly profile of producer Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, Ouija) that I wrote about previously caught me attention: comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (aka Key & Peele) are making a horror movie for Blum called Get Out. “Like comedy, horror has an ability to provoke t...
I finally caught up with The Final Girls on VOD last night and was very pleasantly surprised. I’d heard it described as “all very meta,” and that didn’t fill me with confidence. But after a shaky start that had me rolling my eyes at the on-the-noseness of it all, it quickly settled into an enjoyable
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, which is a terrible title that sounds like a Mission: Impossible rip-off, made $26 million worldwide in theatres this past weekend. It’s the sixth film in the franchise and by all accounts the least successful, even though it only just opened and has a reported budget of only $...
When I was a teenager, I had a best friend named Manny. He was the first metalhead I ever knew. A bit of an outsider, like so many of us feel like we are when we’re young, no matter what our taste in music, Manny was a sweet, gentle, crazy kid with long dyed-black hair,
I have a few teacher friends and this just looks like a typical day at school. The kid playing Danny Torrence is the best. He really nails the voice. They should’ve had one of the kids playing with a Chucky doll, though.
If I were to suggest seeing a movie called The Hexecutioners, you’d probably expect some occult-themed horror-comedy about hitmen who kill with curses. Or something like that. At least that’s what I imagined. That, however, is not what I got. Written by Tony Burgess (Pontypool) and directed by Jesse Thomas Cook (Septic...
In Crimson Peak, Mia Wasikowska plays Edith Cushing. Given director Guillermo del Toro‘s professed love of Hammer Films and Sherlock Holmes, it’s obvious she’s named for Peter Cushing, who starred in such Hammer classics as The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles, although Cushing is ...
When it comes to short films, I tend to favour comedy over other genres. It’s the perfect medium to tell a joke and deliver a punchline—short of stand-up comedy—and it often doesn’t require complicated or expensive special effects. Take Movies In Space, for example, which is my favourite in this year’s Toronto After Da...
I love a good Christmas holiday horror movie. I’m even drinking a cup of eggnog as I’m writing this (yes, it’s already in grocery stores). My favourite is A Christmas Carol, the superior 1951 version with Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. It’s essential holiday viewing; I watch it every Christmas Eve without fail (alon...
