Posts

Showing posts from November, 2020

The Call: Worth a Watch?

Image
New Korean sci-fi suspense thriller  The Call sees two women communicate across two decades via a mysterious landline phone. Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye), from 2019, warns Young-sook (Jong Seo-jun) of an impending catastrophe in 1999, but when it transpires Young-sook is a card-carrying psychopath, Seo-yeon begins to regret saving her. Recently dropped on Netflix with little to no fanfare, it would be easy to miss The Call. It's far from a perfect movie, yet its high-concept premise is an excellent basis for a twisty cat and mouse conflict between the past and present. It's definitely more of a horror-adjacent thriller than a true horror flick, so will disappoint committed gorehounds, but it's still very much worth a shoutout on here. Read the film's pros and cons below to find out if it's worth a watch . This is a spoiler-free zone. The Call 's hits The movie's time-bending premise is excellently exploited. We see how each woman has an advantage over the othe

Every V/H/S series segment ranked from worst to best

Image
There have been sixteen different short films in the three V/H/S anthology movies so far. With the announcement of a fourth instalment, V/H/S 94, it's time to find out which segment were mini horror classics and which were misfiring duds. The rapid release of V/H/S films from 2012 to 2014 provided a platform for the foremost horror directors of the day to take creative risks within the found footage subgenre . All the short films had a rough-and-ready quality, yet some seemed to capture lightning in a bottle while others failed to impress. Were the segments in V/H/S 2 really superior to those in the original? Can V/H/S Viral actually be as bad as you remember? Wonder no more - here are all sixteen short films from the V/H/S anthology series ranked from worst to best. There are no spoilers for any segments from V/H/S, V/H/S 2 or V/H/S Viral in this article 16/  Gorgerous Vortex Film: V/H/S Viral (2014) Director: Todd Lincoln Known for: The Apparition Plot in a sentence: A woman murd

Relic, His House and a trend for emotional logic in horror films

Image
  Two of 2020's most talked about horror releases - generational dementia tale Relic and Netflix's haunted house refugee drama His House - don't really care about making literal sense. Instead of having metaphor as subtext , it becomes the only logical way of understanding the two movies. Warning: This piece contains spoilers for both Relic and His House Metaphorical layers in horror movies are nothing new, but viewers usually have the option of reading the film at face value. The Entity in It Follows is an otherwordly monster first, a representation of sexual anxieties and an adolescent fear of mortality second. Hereditary may be focused on a family tearing itself apart for the majority of its runtime, but in the third act Paimon and his cult hold centre stage. Not so with Relic and His House, which in their final acts dive head first into dreamlike territory which foregrounds thematic and emotional currents over plot. In Relic, this happens around the time Sam (Bella He