One scary night in Rhode Island back in the horse-and-carriage day, a wildlife painter on par with John James Audubon takes hammer-and-chisel to the teeth of his maid. If he supplicates the diabolical fairies dwelling in the ash pit under the basement, they may unhand his eight-year-old son. (He already made a sacrifice of his own teeth to no avail. )The manic, furry, screechy little supernatural monsters drag the painter into their abyss beneath Blackwood Manor. This prelude to “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” sports a mastery of horror tropes. The opening credits are great, too. But the rest, set in the present and shot in Melbourne, is not up to par with earlier work by co-writer, co-producer and creature-voicer Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”). Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »