Robtober

Another practical effects showreel barely disguised as a movie featuring the maniacal killer Art the Clown, a try-hard whose yearning to be a horror icon is as plain (and plainly mortifying) as our Commander in Chief’s yearning for a Nobel Prize. Despite the fact that Art, after being introduced gearing up Rambo-style in an unearned montage, indulges in some hacksaw shenanigans nasty enough to arouse the kind of guy who owns more than one Cannibal… See more →

It seems as though Terrifier is the slasher franchise of the moment, with 2024’s third installment reportedly becoming the highest grossing unrated film of all time, so it’s time once again for me to hold my nose and commune with the zeitgeist.

You’d be forgiven for assuming Terrifier’s stabby antihero, Art the Clown, was the product of an 11-year-old Fangoria subscriber’s very first ChatGPT prompt, but Art actually made his debut in a 2008… See more →

Too bad the franchise police put all their fingers in the pie at the end, but this is otherwise a far better crafted film than it has any right to be.

So Paul Schrader made this somewhat elegiac Exorcist prequel, and the studio rejected it and hired Renny Harlin to preside over a rewrite/reshoot, which was released in 2004 as Exorcist: The Beginning. And then that film’s poor critical and commercial performance led them to try to squeeze a few bucks out of a limited release of Schrader’s version less than a year later. And neither of the films is good. And I find the whole… See more →

Was Jerry Goldsmith the only person involved who was told the title of this film? His apocalyptic score is at 11 almost the whole time, but everything else about the film’s execution is relatively sedate, which is pretty weird considering the script includes a huge satanist rally in what looks like a volcanic crater, the systematic murder of hundreds of newborn babies, and the literal second coming of Christ. Sam Neill is probably as good… See more →

I watched The Omen in a double feature with The Exorcist, and in terms of overall sophistication, the juxtaposition does The Omen no favors, but it’s still a pretty fun ride, and it must be said that Satan siring a human child to clandestinely seize the world’s levers of power is a far more potent strategy for spreading evil than commandeering a tween’s body and making her throw up all over everyone.

I think I was in college when I first saw The Exorcist, by which time my resentment of the Catholicism I grew up with had calcified, and that undeniably colored my reception of the film, and still does. It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who lives in fear of a goat-man trying to lure everyone into a flaming cave of eternal suffering, and that mythology only gets sillier when viewed through the vaudevillian… See more →

You’d never know it from the title, but this movie is kiiiiiiind of sleazy.

Not quite as good as What Have You Done to Solange?, and the ending is anticlimactic, but still a great police procedural that never stops moving and gives plenty of screen time to its motorcycle maniac with an oversized meat cleaver. One of the rare occasions I kind of wish I had watched the English-dubbed version, which might have made the copious dialogue easier to follow.

George Lazenby is great, as is all the Venetian location shooting, but the murder mystery is extremely unsatisfying, and there’s not nearly enough indulgent giallo style to compensate (with the exception of Ennio Morricone’s music, but it seems like he really just wrote a couple of themes, which are reused ad nauseam). I didn’t love Don’t Look Now either, so maybe I’m just not a grieving-parents-in-Venice kind of guy.

The more it explains itself, the less interesting it is, but damn if it isn’t otherwise very well executed.

An experiment doesn’t need to have an explicit goal, but I’m still left wondering what writer/director Chris Nash hoped to accomplish with In a Violent Nature. Slasher movies are categorically shallow affairs, and framing one from the killer’s perspective doesn’t add depth, nor do its costs (like the eradication of suspense) outweigh its benefits (of which I’m struggling to name a single one). Its approach is novel, I’ll give it that, but only insofar as… See more →

I’ve decided Stranger (rhymes with hanger) is their family name, and when they show up at a barbecue, everyone is like “Ugh, who invited the Strangers.”

Having Helter Skelter as a primary inspiration doesn’t automatically make you a hack, but if your ultimate takeaway is limited to “Wouldn’t it be scary if a bunch of weirdos randomly attacked you in your home in the middle of the night?,” you’re probably a hack. Putting the attackers in “creepy” masks removes all doubt. (That said, I haven’t seen 2006’s Them since it came out, but I remember it using these same elements to… See more →

Since Terry O’Quinn declined to return for this third, made-for-TV installment, it opens with an overlong plastic surgery sequence to explain why our title character looks completely different. At no time in that sequence do we actually see his face, and once the movie settles into yet another idyllic suburban community, there seem to be some intriguing hints that maybe we can’t be sure which of this town’s painfully average dads is the one with… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me.

This year I seem to be nostalgic for the age of Satanic panic, as I’ll be doing concurrent, chronological deep dives on The Exorcist and The Omen, two… See more →

Terry O’Quinn’s socially regressive Reaganite dad is pitch-perfect, and the opening scene—showing him calmly strolling through the house, past the family he just slaughtered, en route to his new identity—is a doozy. But pretty much everything else in this, including the plot, characters, and color palette, is weirdly bland. Maybe that’s meant to be its own comment on the insipidity of the 1980s’ dominant conservative nostalgia, but a better movie would have just let its… See more →

Completely lazy script, but astonishing execution, which unexpectedly has me wondering if this whole screenlife shtick actually has legs? Next stop: Searching.

Tobin Bell’s lucid stoicism, facile as its moralizing may be, has always been the Saw series’ biggest strength, and after nearly two decades of coolly calculated carnage, Saw X finally puts his Jigsaw front and center with the full antihero treatment. Taking place between the events of Saw and Saw II, this one is uncharacteristically patient and character-driven, and by the time the stage is set for the the latest round of mayhem, Jigsaw’s victims… See more →

A second try at a whodunit, and the most competent script in the series to date, though also the most conventional, which makes it pretty easy to solve (I’m not usually good at murder mysteries, but I cracked this one fast). Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson bring some real personality to the franchise for the first time, though the former doesn’t know quite what to do when he’s not cracking wise. This is Darren… See more →

In the beginning of Saw V, it’s established that Jigsaw is 52 years old, and maybe the fact that he looks considerably older can be chalked up to his chemotherapy and years of disemboweling people. But at a certain point in Jigsaw, the eighth film in the franchise, we see the character a few years before that, presumably when he was in his late 40s, with no attempt made to disguise the fact that the… See more →

Saw 3D begins with a notable first for the series: a scene shot on location (outside Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto) in broad daylight with hundreds of extras, Jigsaw’s first trap in a public place and built for spectators. After countless hours of watching his victims get disassembled in dim, dilapidated industrial environs (I’ve often wondered about the health of Saw City’s commercial real estate market), this scene is literally a breath of fresh air.… See more →

Halfway through this interminable series, I assumed its best days (which were not great!) were behind it, so imagine my surprise that Saw VI may actually be the high water mark! After editing all the previous installments, Kevin Greutert moved to the director’s chair for this one, and he appears not to have micromanaged the new editor (Andrew Coutts), because the obnoxious, spastic editing style of old has been dramatically toned down, as has the… See more →

When Saw co-creator Leigh Whannell handed writing duties for the series over to Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan after Saw III, the duo envisioned a trilogy for the next three films, and Saw IV stormed out of the gate laying the groundwork and expanding the mythology. The expansion continues with Saw V, but first-time director David Hackl slows the pace, alternating focus between this episode’s cannon fodder and the origin story of the latest would-be… See more →

There’s something to be said for a series whose primary draw is brutal violence, but whose creative energy is largely spent on byzantine plotting. Saw IV packs in the backstory, expands Jigsaw’s network of accomplices, and has enough twists and turns to make it almost impossible to follow, even if, like me, you’ve watched the previous three films in the preceding 24 hours. The first Saw made it clear that abandoning any expectation of plausibility… See more →

More than its predecessors, Saw III really leans into the torture porn classification, while at the same time somehow managing to be the first in the series to commit the cardinal sin of being boring. Does anyone really give a shit about drama between Jigsaw and his protégé? I genuinely thought they might start splicing in Real World-style confessionals. Also, I know the dude is on his deathbed, but I really wish Jigsaw would… See more →

Interesting to see what the same production crew from the first film could accomplish with quadruple the budget. It still feels small and stagey, like its two main locations aren’t part of any larger world, and it doubles down on the 1990s David Fincher by way of Spirit Halloween aesthetic, but at least it’s more cohesive. Director Darren Lynn Bousman’s music video experience is in evidence, and I often wondered if the editor was paid… See more →

I’ll give Saw a little more credit this time than I did on my first viewing years ago. The basic premise is the stuff of a decent popcorn thriller, Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell are mostly serviceable in their roles, and the central, grimy bathroom set—the only one purpose-built for the film—is a skin-crawling feat of extremely unsavory production design. But ironically, everything gets pretty crappy whenever we leave that bathroom. The cheap, generic sets… See more →

Equally unnerving as both genre exercise and political allegory.