J*A*S*M

The home invasion sub-genre has seen an unprecedented boom in recent years, with a pretty decent number of quality movies centred around villains breaking into the homes of the heroes. Torment is one such film and certainly doesn’t exceed the bar set by its peers. At times, it has a pretty decent atmosphere and a dirty feel, neither the setting (and old house) nor the villains (shabby hillbillies in dirty clothes, with the heads of plush animals as masks) look squeaky clean, precisely. So far, so good. The problems start with the not very likeable characters, whose family crisis has absolutely no chance to receive even a bit of the viewer’s interest, and who, as it’s typical, don’t hesitate to make bad decisions, which is a little annoying to watch. At a certain point, the film even wants to convince us we are watching some sort of metaphysical revenge of the child against the parents (framed by a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche), which is really too much. As a short, undemanding genre snack, it’s OK, but the expectations set by the effective and depressive trailer were unfortunately not met. The edges aren’t sharp enough for that.

LOL, that was silly! Silly, but fierce, fun and original. Lucky McKee has gone mad, and so will the viewers who get into this relentless game. I resisted at the beginning, I didn’t give a toss about the characters, but the film gradually won me over and I let myself be entertained. Actually, those cheerleaders reminded me of Joseph Kahn’s Detention, which also was a crazy mess of everything under the sun that never had the intention of making any sense, but still managed to constantly surprise the viewer with unexpected twists and ideas, and an ubiquitous awareness of itself and its pop-culture environment. These cheerleaders are not something I would watch again alone, they don’t fit at all into my horror tastes, but I think they are perfect to watch with friends over a few beers. 7/10

A good conversational thriller with an unravelling that you won’t see coming. Though, I think it has too many twists for my taste. And they come so fast one after the other that you don’t have time to figure out which of the many valid interpretations of the events make sense or not, let alone try to come up with your own.

Imagine this: you spot a new film with decent ratings in IMDB, you don’t know, nor you want to find out anything about it; you want a surprise… and what you get is a story about two abducted Mormon missionaries where basically nothing important happens (Chomsky would appreciate the Eastern European dissidents, lol!), plus a plethora of bollocks about Jesus. It’s irritating.

Well, fuck me. Forty minutes of nothing. A minute of a sock on a tree. Then twenty minutes (!) of a static (!!) scene in a tent that only in its last part (!!!) gets interesting a little (!!!!). That’s followed by ten minutes of going around in circles in the woods, something that hasn’t been cool since The Blair Witch Project in the nineties. Then the shrubs shake. Five minutes of the terrified faces of the protagonists hiding in another shrub at night. And all ends with a minute of the camera being dragged on the ground. The critics on Rotten Tomatoes (currently at 96%) had to be paid, otherwise I don’t understand.

Very well executed concept known from Groundhog Day, Source Code and probably every sci-fi series ever made. At the beginning, the hero is introduced without any heroic attributes and the pandemonium of war that follows during the landing in Normandy sets the bar very high. And it holds there damn long. Edge of Tomorrow only stumbles a little by the end, where the thus far relatively reaistic battles (to the extent than a battle between people in exoskeletons and giant tentacled aliens can be described as “realistic”) abandon the realism and now they are falling from huge heights without any injuries and the entire final fight goes too smoothly, especially considering how important it is and how it goes straight down to business. That said, it’s an excellent action sci-fi blockbuster of the kind that has been missing in cinemas for a long time. The action is spectacular, Cruise and Blunt have good chemistry and the script also has a couple of nice moments.

I admit that there are some shortcomings when it comes to the profiling of the characters and their interactions, where the reasons someone is doing what they are doing are not always convincingly explained. However, the film manages to be sufficiently entertaining, tense and riveting that I didn’t start thinking about those issues until I left the theatre. In the cinema it was excellent, uninterrupted fun. In short, a very pleasant time spent with old (and new) friends. I liked Evan Peters as Quicksilver, there could have been more of him, his scenes are interesting and fun. Overall, I had more fun than with the (IMHO) overrated First Class.

A group of eyeballs crawling on a road are run over by a car. That’s not the beginning of some absurd anecdote, but the first scene of this (well, absurd) Japanese horror movie, which makes clear to everyone that this won’t be a very normal experience. It’s a strange mix of extremely effective and extremely weird scenes (for instance, the one with the fake hand in the rubbish, I have absolutely no idea what that one was supposed to be about), but together they create a remarkably disturbing and astonishing whole that I didn’t quite understand, but I still had a lo of fun. It truly chilled me a couple of times and some of the sequences, like “blackout” after the 40th minute, scared the living shit out of me. Even though I’m not a big fan of this bizarre stuff from Asia, this one deserves thumbs up.

A revelation. In a time when most viewers rate the quality of a horror film on the basis of the number and the effectiveness of the jump-scares, this weirdly told, character-centred spooky story won’t have it easy, but I couldn’t be more satisfied. It’s a about a mirror hiding an evil that gets into the heads of its owners and drives them insane, but in two timelines that Flanagan tells simultaneously and that also overlap in different ways. If I had to choose one word that would best describe Oculus, it would be “oppressive”. The characters are likeable, you really wish them a happy ending, but the evil within in the mirror is the best part. The viewer simply cannot escape the anxiety and despair. Rather than Insidious, The Conjuring and other modern horror flicks, Oculus is closer to Kubrick’s The Shining in its slow but thorough build up of a bleak atmosphere. The performances are superb without exception and the technical aspect is perfect. If you prefer unsettling slow-burns over scary attractions, don’t hesitate it for a minute. Absentia wasn’t a fluke, I’m looking forward to what’s coming next. Oculus is a successfully realised opportunity to get into the horror major leagues.

It’s a pity they screwed up the third act. Up until Neeson’s speech to the nervous passengers, this is a solidly tense thriller and I would have forgiven it anything, but after that scene the decent fun falls apart in such way that it becomes annoying. By the end everything is bad.