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...

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...

In honor of Halloween, I'm doing a special edition of The Netflix Files , in which I finally review one of the more shocking and controversial horror movies out there,  The Human Centipede , in 2004, director James Wan released Saw, a horror flick about a sadistic murderer known as Jigsaw, who kidnaps two people and forces them to to escape the bathroom they're trapped in, or else they both die. The film, which was made for just over $1 million, gained a cult following among horror buffs and grossed $100 million worldwide. Some critics praised the film for it's inventiveness and having it's killer using extreme methods to teach people a lesson (much like in the 1995 thriller   Seven , a  film which Wan said he and the screenwriter was a huge inspiration for making Saw ), while others said it was too gimmicky for it's own good. Wan's debut horror movie also paved the way for a new breed of horror film: the torture porn subgenre. From Eli Roth's Hostel in 2...

Allow me to be as frank as possible about the remake based on the 1981 cult classic, The Evil Dead : I hated Evil Dead . Fucking hated  it. Hated every last thing about this "film": hated how it borrowed damn-near every horror cliche in the book, from the dire warnings to stop what the individual was doing, turn around and leave while their lives depended on it, to the manufactured jump scares that were as predictable as they were un-frightening. Hated how just about every character in the story made one implausible and idiotic decision after another, and most decisions would get them killed. Hated how the director Fede Alvarez and screenwriters Rodo Sayagues and Alvarez put an interesting spin on a cliche like the old, creepy cabin deep in the isolated woods - four friend reunite to help one of their own, a drug addicted youth (Jane Levy) go cold turkey.- and ended up with formulaic drivel that we've seen countless times from the horror genre....