By Ray Pride

Fireworks come screaming across the sky. Near the hulking fortress of a London housing estate, five teenagers are mid-mugging. It’s Guy Fawkes Day; a larger flare falls to earth. Monsters. Alien monsters. Who can save the “block”? Five unlikely heroes and their once-victim, now reluctant co-human, are on the run, through the streets, through the vast estate’s corridors as more monsters land and hunt. There’s only one enemy now. (“Inner city vs. outer space” is one of the filmmakers’ coinages for the elemental conflict.) Running under ninety minutes, even with end credits, Joe Cornish’s debut feature is triumphantly rude and violent and headlong thrilling and even funny, honoring worlds of influence that came before. The richest gift of Cornish’s work is how it’s permeated with influence, but he listens to film history the way he listened to the kids near his home and the actors in his film to create its fast, funny lingo: transformatively. Read the rest of this entry »

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Well, that’s inconvenient. Slouching contentedly through the end credits during the press screening, I abruptly realized that the four wittiest lines in “Scream 4″ are all spoilers. (No jokes for you!) That’s a good thing, but it’s good in the same way as any attempt at a plot synopsis. Even without the encouragement of Dimension Films to keep it to a minimum, it seems like a courtesy to let surprises surprise. Let’s shoot for a vague one: reversals and meta-reversals romp through the night streets of Woodsboro, with knowingness atop mega-meta-knowingness a decade past the killings in “Scream 3″ when Sidney (Neve Campbell) returns to town on the last stop of her book tour for her self-help book-cum-memoir about the earliest killings and the “Stab” movies-within-movies from the earlier installments. Among the cite-of-hand bits that pop from Kevin Williamson’s screenplay, one of the most apt is “We all live in public.” The implications in Ondi Timoner’s documentary, “We Live In Public,” about a prescient 1990s experiment in surveillance, where residents gave up any right of privacy for public, online display of their lives, resound similarly through the larger shape of Williamson’s script. Craven and Co. address all the damage technology has done to suspense and horror movies, which reaches its apex in a classroom where each teenager’s cell phone bursts into full, mad song, announcing texted gossip of a fresh murder. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

The first “Saw” movie was more clever, cruel clockwork than the kind of hostile horror that later entries in the series became.

After its unexpected success, its creators, the Australian director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, then in their late twenties, were directly connected to only one of the sequels. In the years since their original 2003 short and the 2004 feature, Wan has directed only two other films. Their latest, “Insidious,” is a blood-free variation on classic haunted-house stories, with the duo hoping to avoid “false” scares of sudden sounds and leaping cats if at all possible. A young couple (Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne) moves into a new home, and soon their youngest child falls into a coma and scary happenings fill their nights with fear. They also address another bugbear of the genre: why don’t characters move out of houses possessed by supernatural and otherworldly agents? (There’s a bizarre detour involving a psychic and a pair of sub-”Ghostbusters” investigators that turn “Insidious” into two, two movies in one.)

“We wanted to have the family move!” Wan says with the youthful exuberance he displayed when we first met seven years ago. “That’s the number-one gripe with haunted-house movies. If your house is so haunted, why don’t you move? Even though it is a haunted-house movie, we want to take the subgenre and in a lot of ways break these clichés, or subvert it. One of the things people always complain about is, why don’t they move out of the creepy house they’re living in?” Read the rest of this entry »

Grimmmmmm: “Red Riding Hood” is little. The latest teen-girl chastity/purity myth trading on sublimated sexuality from director Catherine Hardwicke (“thirteen,” “Twilight”) may be one of the few werewolf movies without blood in its veins. (Worse, spatters and streaks of blood flow black to insure a clean PG-13 rating.) After a choppily edited opening reel or two, where characters seldom speak important dialogue while on screen, but instead with their backs to camera, “Red Riding Hood” settles into its groove, becoming a Zucker brothers movie with the jokes plucked out. Hardwicke, with “Twilight,” is the highest-grossing female director in history, and it’s a blow for equality that she can move from that marker and attempt to become the distaff Rob Cohen. The visual style lacks only for pockets packed with glitter, the simple story stumbling through mist and muzz and smoke. Set-and-CGI bound, in soft focus as if shot in a talc plant, “Red Riding Hood” demonstrates that when anything is possible, everything winds up looking like a Thomas Kinkade flipbook. Read the rest of this entry »

Once again the devil is revealed as real. Beau Flynn, one of the producers of “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” is among the producers of a lesser screenplay by Michael Petroni, one of the screenwriters of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” Directed by Mikael Håfström (“1408,” “Evil”), “The Rite” is unapologetic propaganda for Evil incarnate and his punning foul-mouthed demons. Here they possess an incested third trimester teenager and a crusty Welsh exorcist, as well as rallying frogs, cockroaches and a red-eyed horse as allies. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Paranormal Activity 2″ replays the premise of the original: a young couple in a two-story suburban house shoot home videos, then install surveillance cameras with night vision after a suspicious event. Everything on the screen is either recorded by the characters or captured by those fixed cameras. Supernatural bad stuff escalates. Oren Peli wrote, cast, shot and edited “Paranormal Activity.” Now he’s producer and co-writer, with Michael R. Perry and Christopher Landon, of a leaner version directed by Tod Williams (“The Door In The Floor”). The psychic and the de-demonizer who made house calls in the first film are now replaced by a Mexican nanny who soon gets herself fired for all her crucifix-waving and smokey counter-spells. The exposition on ghosts versus demons is reduced to two or three sentences taken from the internet, without even a shot of the helpful site on the laptop, let alone a trip to an underlit library to thumb through a leatherbound tome with medieval etchings. The minimal style also means no scary music and no ectoplasmic spook effects. If there’s a demonic force at home, it’s only visible in its documented effects: TV channels change, doors slam, people move around not by their own will. This entry cynically increases the suspense by adding a baby who makes it to toddler stage, and a family dog that will need a vet. Both can detect presences that do not register on video. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite its title, this remake of a 1978 horror film much-maligned by Gene Siskel among other reviewers, is not a first-person spitter or a first-person slasher affair, although the film’s site splatters blood when your cursor pokes at any of its links. Nor is there any grave. Steven R. Monroe directs a script credited to Stuart Morse, whose bio is omitted in press notes, which manage to make room for bios of the cinematographer, make-up effects artist and visual effects supervisor. This befits a plot that nullifies a female novelist. Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) rents a cabin on Mockingbird Trail to write her second book. Five local fellers rape her. It’s a class thing and a country thing, you big city c— who thinks yer better ‘n us. She is, of course, the film concurs. After falling off a bridge, never to be found in the bayou, Ms. Hills is back a month or so later. Proving far more imaginative than her tormentors, this writer exacts what’s called poetic justice. One by one, them five fellers get real painful payback. It’s custom-fit to the ways each one befouled her earlier. This is well-crafted eye-for-eye gore for the reptilean brain. There’s not an iota of implication, though, that the rapist who wielded a camcorder throughout the attacks is there for audience identification or mortification. Our heroine jabs fishhooks through his eyelids to keep his peepers peeled, kind of like in the ultraviolence deconditioning scene in “A Clockwork Orange” with its involuntary exposure to porn films. Crows come-a-peckin’ at the easy ocular pickings in “I Spit on Your Grave.” Watch at your peril. With Jeff Branson, Daniel Franzese, Rodney Eastman, Chad Lindberg, Tracey Walter, Andrew Howard. 106m. (Bill Stamets)

“I Spit On Your Grave” is unrated and opens Friday at 600 N. Michigan.