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.

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How many versions of “Romeo and Juliet” have there been? With “Let The Right One In” and this, count two more. “Let Me In” is an American remake of Tomas Alfredson’s tender “Let The Right One In,” based on an engaging vampire novel by Alfredson’s fellow Swede, John Ajvide Lindqvist. Those who admired the 2008 import will recognize many of the same scenes, yet writer-director Matt Reeves’ (“Cloverfield”; writer, “The Yards,” seventy-three episodes of “Felicity”) transposition of the story to 1983 Los Alamos, New Mexico, feels wrenchingly personal in its own right. Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee, “The Road”) lives with his mother in a rundown enclave called Enchanted Hills, missing his estranged father, picked on by older boys. New neighbors move in: a weary older man (Richard Jenkins) and a girl, Abby (the ineffable Chloë Moretz, “Hit Girl”), who seems to be his own age. Reeves would have been 17 at the time, to his characters’ 12 or so; 1983 is also the year after the first release of another study of a Boy and his Other, “E.T.” Where Alfredson’s version is steeped in a prehensile sexuality both more suggestive and more intriguing than the chastity myths of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, Reeves finds an American corollary to the essential loneliness of both vampire and child. (A contemporary version would likely turn out more mawkish, self-pitying, a kind of “Eat Prey Bleed.”) Read the rest of this entry »

Marybeth (Danielle Harris) wants to fetch the corpses of next of kin decomposing in a Louisiana swamp. And get revenge against Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder) who put them there and almost got her too. This legendary ghost wants revenge too. Born a biracial deformed bastard cursed by a woman with terminal stomach cancer, this hulking outcast in overalls wants to dismember the teens who once taunted him one Halloween night and triggered a fire. Trying to break into the burning shack where teenaged Victor was trapped, his father swung a hatchet at the door and accidentally hit him in the face on the other side. “I’m going to bury that hatchet deep into his fucking face,” vows Marybeth, who jams a thumb into one of Victor’s eye sockets in the opening scene. This follow-up to the first “Hatchet” (2007) is less funny. Returning writer-director Adam Green measurably prolongs his carnage if you’re counting the number of slashes and thrusts it takes Victor to decapitate and do other blunt, ragged hackings-in-half of his victims. A face-bashing sequence with the dull end of an axehead contains about ten more blows than Gaspar Noé furnished in his similar scene with a fire extinguisher in “Irreversible.” Read the rest of this entry »

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How low can a budget go before there’s no film there? Compact zombie entry “Colin” got its first notoriety in the UK as being the “$75 Zombie movie,” its reported budget. Writer-director-editor-sound designer-producer Marc Price called in more than a favor or three, to be sure; the claimed outlay was only for “a crowbar, red food coloring, a couple of tapes and some tea and coffee to keep the zombies happy,” while his Facebook-cast roster of extras ran to a hundred and his head makeup artist had just come off the set of “X-Men 3.” Treading on Romero territory, including “Martin,” Price still manages to make his camcorder enterprise into a horror movie that manages to be touching in a few of its less shabby moments. After a bite, teen Colin wakes to find himself turned and we witness suburbapocalypse through his jaded eyes. Handheld and grainy, and rude and crude, to be sure, but “Colin” is a decent calling card, for say, Price’s $7,500 movie to come. 97m. (Ray Pride)

“Colin” opens Friday at Facets.

While awaiting a conversation with Todd Solondz outside a boutique hotel room, a recording of urgent, furious songbirds echoes down the corridor. Another chorus awaits inside.

The 50-year-old writer-director’s latest movie is marbled through with his bleak, black humor, but there’s a shell-shocked character to the figures in his story. Living lives they can’t manage in a society they can’t reckon with, they all seek some manner of forgiveness. The words “forgive me” echo like the word “fuck” in a Judd Apatow movie. On one level, this newest film is a variation on his 1998 “Happiness,” where those figures are played now by other actors (such as Paul Reubens for Jon Lovitz). That carapace is readily shed even a few scenes in. Despite his penchant for shock, Solondz seems to have crafted an empathetic, if dark fable for “Life During Wartime.” The pedophile from “Happiness” is released from prison just as his youngest son, Timmy, anticipates his bar mitzvah. To be a man is to understand what happened to his father, what terrorists are, what 9/11 means. The shroud of the past decade cloaks all his characters like the Holocaust did an earlier generation (a linkage which the script does not shirk). Read the rest of this entry »

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By Ray Pride

The prescriptive yet apocalyptic anti-nuclear proliferation documentary “Countdown to Zero” has you reaching for the comforting simplicity or even banality of song lyrics; not necessarily Radiohead’s “Reckoner,” which plays at extended length, or The Cure’s “M,” (“ready for the next attack”) but something like Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??,” as in “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”

Yes, the topic today is thermonuclear Armageddon, which would offer perhaps only half an hour of anticipation followed by a second of detonation, illumination and incineration. “Countdown to Zero” does not shy from the toxic poetry of the prospect of annihilation. Hair-raising, bloodcurdling and wholly despairing, this cry-of-the-mind from the producers of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Lawrence Bender (“Pulp Fiction,” “Inglourious Basterds”) and Participant Media, is chock-full of fascinating material and articulate interviewees from former spies to statesmen, as assembled by talented writer-director-for-hire Lucy Walker (“Blindsight,” “Devil’s Playground”). For instance: What’s the best way to hide fissile material being smuggled across the sea? Put it inside a cargo container filled with kitty litter; kitty litter triggers radiation detectors. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Laughing with or laughing at?” is a question arising with more and more movies, from the trainwreck exhibitionism of a movie like “The Room” or the more tender “Winnebago Man,” in which a young filmmaker searches for a curmudgeonly figure of YouTube fun who may or may not be alive. (Oh, he’s alive; Jack Rebney is so fucking alive, but that’s another review when that movie finally opens in Chicago.) What’s most alive about writer-director Michael Paul Stephenson’s “Best Worst Movie,” a documentary revisiting the Utah town where “Troll 2″ was shot in 1989, is how genial everyone is about their experience working on an almost unfathomably incompetent movie that was made with great sincerity. You might be “smiling with and tearing up at,” which was my reaction to much reaction to this oddly charming film. Here’s the setup: At the age of 10, Stephenson was the star of “Troll 2.” The man who played his father is now a beloved Alabama dentist who embraces the idea that there are audiences who love the film. Then there’s the Italian director: Claudio Fragasso, whose accent is a great Fragasso sea of mumble and harrumph. There are repetitions and a few questionable moments (such as scenes with the now-reclusive woman who played the child-actor’s mother), but at its best, “Best Worst Movie ” is a love letter to unlikely fame, a big bucket of serendipity and nonsense. Let the fans bay. 93m. (Ray Pride)

“Best Worst Movie” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio’s very smart, genuinely troubling “Cropsey” revisits a tale that had been told when they were children on Staten Island, a much-embellished urban legend about an escapee from a nearby mental institution. Cropsey was the local bogeyman, the all-purpose chiller of children, handy to keep the tykes in line. But Cropsey was a real man, one Andre Rand, who was tried for the disappearances of disabled local children, and Zeman and Brancaccio’s horror documentary is a real jaw-dropper. Comparisons have been drawn to the fear-filled “Blair Witch Project” and David Fincher’s close, clammy “Zodiac,” as well as Stephen King stories and “Capturing the Friedmans,” yet the parallels are mere flattery, considering the film’s own unique savor, an alternately genial and sinister tone: I’d go more for saying this deeply paranoid chiller plays like Errol Morris in a good mood, sharing his favorite shaggy-dog story about true-life murder. And about true-life suspicion, real-world ambiguity: as in “Zodiac,” you’re hardly certain if Rand is criminal or scapegoat. “Cropsey” is small, but small like an earwig, cozying up in your memory once you’ve seen it. The local, the most personal things, will, at the best instants, always suggest the universal, and “Cropsey” does. Children must have their bogeymen, fear is cultivated like a perennial crop. I don’t want to describe Geraldo Rivera’s role in the story’s unfolding, but he’s a compelling key. (The Ghost Robot production company presentation logo that opens the film is a swift delight.) 84m. (Ray Pride)

“Cropsey” opens Monday at the Music Box; it continues after its Thursday closing on VOD on cable systems until August 12.