Mr. Brown Versus

I've made a grave mistake. Not doing Halloween Horror Week back in October; no, that's been really fun. I got myself better acquainted with the work of Wes Craven, re-discovered that Tim Burton is a great director when given the right material to work with, realized that I don't really need to go past Saw III to understand that the rest of the series is a seemingly lazy exercise in offering the audience nothing by more torture and grizzly, pointless violence, and that I'd love to see Jessica Chastain in more horror movies. But when it came to the last movie on this list that I chose to watch, I had much better options.  I could have reviewed Halloween: The Revenge of Michael Myers . Sure, it's probably same movie John Carpenter made back in 1978, but hey - an early Paul Rudd would have a few wisecracks thrown in there, right? I could have done Vampire in Brooklyn , but I had already covered New Nightmare , so covering two Craven movies didn't really sou...

Earlier this year, the horror genre lost arguably it's most influential icon: Wes Craven. Nicknamed the "Sultan of Slash", the writer/director's contributions to the genre spills across the cinematic landscape, even to this day. Remember how production company Lions Gate Films went from obscure indie company to a legitimate powerhouse, thanks to the the success of the Saw  film series; even dubbing it, "the house that Jigsaw built?" Craven did the exact same thing for New Line Cinema with the Nightmare on Elm Street series, even bringing actor Johnny Depp to prominence. What about how Jigsaw, Michael Myers and Jason have become twisted main characters that you want to root for? Again, that bears a debt to Mr. Craven, as actor Robert Englund's Freddy Kruger became the main draw to the Elm Street sequels, mostly for his dark sense of humor and creative ways he slaughters his victims. Even the ways Jigsaw makes and plants traps for his victims to be brut...

As I said yesterday, if Tim Burton's Corpse Bride were realized in live-action form, it might look like Guillermero del Toro's Crimson Peak , with the Gothic undertones, the themes of death and the supernatural and the semi Victorian-era setting. That's where the similarities would end, though. Whereas the former is a family-friendly fantasy musical/comedy, the latter is a dark, sinister and haunting picture that's gorgeous to watch in every regard. Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), like Haley Joel Osmet in The Sixth Sense , can see dead people. Kidding, but she did experience some paranormal activity when she was a little girl, as she witnesses her mother's ghost, warning her of a place called Crimson Peak, and yes, that will be the last time I make a lame horror pun in this review. Years later, she's still fascinated with the supernatural, as she's writing a ghost story, in addition to being married to the charming and mysterious Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hidd...

Despite the title, this series is, at its core, just a list of great and not so great movies I feel like talking about. And despite Halloween being a night to hang out with friends and watching slasher flicks, ghost stories, zombies and creatures & things that go bump in the night (at least for me sometimes), not all movies are like that. Sometimes the best movies to watch on Halloween are the ones that you remember as a kid growing up. Films like The Nightmare Before Christmas , Hocus Pocus and the Halloweentown series are probably some of the most fun flicks I remember seeing during this time of year, before I found Ju-On: The Grudge , The Ring and other creepy movies from Japan - both the original and American counterparts. Today's installment has to do with the man who probably loves the twisted side of life - Tim Burton. To me, Mr. Burton really doesn't need much of an introduction: if you're a child of the 80's or the 90's (like yours truly), then y...

Ah, it's good to be back! Yes, I've been gone for weeks, and yes, I've got a ton of movies I need to review, and I hope to get to them in good time, but for the next five or six days, I'm diving head-first into the horror genre to review five or six movies that deal with slashers, the supernatural, and remembering the Maven of the genre himself. To kick things off, I'm reviewing horror's newest icon on the block - Jigsaw. Back in 2004, director James Wan bust onto the scene with his psychological thriller, Saw . Written by his writing partner Leigh Whannell, the film dealt with two men, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and a photographer, Adam (played by Whannell himself) awake to learn they are chained in a dingy room by a sadistic serial killer known as "Jigsaw" (Tobin Bell). His motive is that he wants to play a game of survival with the two men: one must kill the other and escape in the time provided, of they both will be trapped in the room fo...