The V/H/S films, as ever true in horror anthologies, are met with timid reception; they are at best uneven compilations of short feature-works by up-and-coming horror filmmakers. It seems a safe presumption that such a franchise can only be the brainchild of genre liberals and bored experimentalists who, by extension,
Category: Streaming & Home Media
Siquijor: Mystic Island
In horror, sincerity stands as the most welcoming and, simultaneously, repelling factor for a genre filmmaker. Terror is forthright; this fundamental directness of the genre both introduces to and restricts itself from countless possibilities. Explaining then how few sincerely understand the business of fear; how few of them succeed. Then what,
San Lazaro
In the occult film San Lazaro, the demons taking over its characters are only internal and untapped; one apparently does not need a soul-consuming entity in order to meet his fallout. Wincy Aquino Ong understands this much, yet as the film director he does not count on terror, than so much
Wolf Creek
The smaller moments in Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek inspire liberation from the conventions of grotesque cinema: a slight, giggly yet sincere wedding of the lips; the occasional jealous-driven tantrums; all the friendly bickering, among countless, all-treasured others. In close to an hour, our three backpackers — displaced in McLean’s at once
Diary ng Panget
The general observation for Andoy Ranay’s Diary ng Panget is that it can be viewed as a substandard Cinderella byproduct — and it is — where the youth revolt for reasons no greater than excess pimples and earlier Mac book generations. Though one particular scene gleams in utter radiance and nags of biting reality: in a student council
Ang Katiwala
Meant — rather explicitly — as a propaganda for the late President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines Manuel L. Quezon, Aloy Adlawan’s Ang Katiwala (The Caretaker), makes for a convoluted debacle of an assortment of ideas that are never entirely developed. The scripting is weak. It finds an illiterate family
Les Revenants
In Les revenants (They Came Back, 2004) the threat posed by a vast river of bodies inexplicably risen from their recent deaths, is far more internal than losing jugulars and seeing outbreaks of mass contagion. The film — directed by Robin Campillos — relies on the primitive terrors of tragedy, pressed
Final Exam
Echoing John Carpenter’s seminal slasher, Jimmy Huston’s almost-forgotten Halloween wannabe Final Exam (then an unconscious subversion of the slasher genre), is an audaciously soiled exercise yet comes to dissatisfying fruition. The film may also be viewed as a gesture to boycott what is to come upon the release of Friday the 13th, the
Snowpiercer
Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho marks his momentous English-debut in Snowpiercer, a subversive, genre-melding and timely contemplation of an all-consuming society, confronted with an earth-wide layer of permafrost that renders humanity to near-extinction. What success The Wachowskis’ have achieved with their multi-dimensional odyssey that is The Matrix, Bong successfully achieves here with only
The Sacrament
Ti West is among the very few contemporary genre filmmakers to receive much-deserved admiration: ‘tis from both the sizable fraction of the following he has cultivated over the years, people who enjoy most of all his abrupt third-act carnage; and the rest of his admiring audience, who perhaps are more
