Arrow in the Head: Go to Hell

Year: 2017
Director: Ben Browder
Cast: Sammi Hanratty, Sean Astin, Gina Gershon
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: Seriously, Sean Astin is truly great in this. It’s almost like he thought he was shooting a real movie. I have a weird relationship with the Bad Kids Go to Hell movies, because even though the emphatically suck, they have a manic desperation to be liked that I respond to. And hey, Bad Kids of Crestview Academy is at least a mild improvement, making it the Empire Strikes Back of Breakfast Club slashers.

TL;DR: Bad Kids of Crestview Academy is a crappy B-movie, but its commitment to bad taste is captivating and energetic.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 810
Reviews In This Series
Bad Kids Go to Hell (Spradlin, 2012)
Bad Kids of Crestview Academy (Browder, 2017)

Arrow in the Head: The Wrong Arm Of The Law

Year: 2016

Director: Shawn Crahan

Cast: Kim Coates, Tyler Ross, Meadow Williams 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review of Officer Downe at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: There is one great high-angle shot overlooking a city street from skyscraper height. Yeah, that was nice.

TL;DR: Officer Downe is a spectacularly messy film with a couple redeeming elements that are at least trying.

Rating: 3/10, maybe I fudged a little bit in my Arrow review.

Word Count: 796

Arrow in the Head: The Tension Experience

Year: 2016

Director: Vincent Masciale

Cast: Lucas Neff, Caitlin Stasey, Chris Marquette

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review on Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: Setting aside that utter nonsense about Abigail Breslin, I really did like Fear, Inc. I always expect the worst when a review rolls far enough down the hill to reach me, but I was pleasantly surprised. I’m worried the film will get buried under an avalanche of licensing issues due to its frequent, exact visual quotes from other movies (Joe is wearing a Freddy Krueger sweater literally the entire time), but if it gets out into the world, I don’t think I’d mind seeing it again. This is clearly not a strong recommendation, but I had fun with this one.

TL;DR: Fear, Inc. is an addled low budget horror-comedy, but it's still a basket of Halloween fun.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 829

Arrow in the Head: Ripley's Believe It Or Not

Year: 1979

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt 

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: I can see why they hired James Cameron to do the sequel to this film. Alien is a massive, unprecedented special effects spectacular that tests the limits of the gooey monstrosities you can show onscreen. And aside from an obvious cut replacing a dummy head with Ian Holm’s and a late wide shot that exposes too much of the Xenomorph’s “dude in a suit”-liness, the effects hold their glorious icky power to this day. H. R. Giger’s orifice-tacular design is gross enough on its own, but it’s realized with tremendous skill. 

Like I said, design is what really counts in this movie. Although the basic interiors have lost their charm after years and years of rip-offs and copies, there are subtle elements that still stand out, my favorite being the hatches that swirl shut like a camera lens.

I suppose I should mention the cast, although the human element barely registers in this cold and (literally) alien film. They have solid chemistry and their banter is amusing, although they’re only given a handful of character traits between them. Sigourney Weaver isn’t, like, mind-blowingly good, but she retains her femininity while still presenting a tough, professional attitude, a balance that earns her all the credit she gets for being an iconic strong female character.

I really don’t have that much more to say about Alien, because at its core it’s devilishly simple. I respect what it does and how it works, but as the years pass I’m less and less sure that it’s Ridley Scott’s doing why it works so well. All I can say is, when compared to its proto-predecessor, the likewise Dan O’Bannon scripted Dark Star, Alien is a massive quantum leap forward for 70’s sci-fi.

TL;DR: Alien is a base and dirty grindhouse horror flick with the impeccable design of an A-list sci-fi picture.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1051
Reviews In This Series
Alien (Scott, 1979)
Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
Alien 3 (Fincher, 1992)
Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997)
AvP: Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (Strause & Strause, 2007)
Prometheus (Scott, 2012)

Arrow In The Head: Training Day

Year: 2016

Director: Tate Taylor

Cast: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson 

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: Would you bet a million dollars that the soundtrack and score of The Girl on the Train is packed full of train sound effects? That’s a very safe bet, I can assure you. Just like its soundscape, director Tate Taylor’s first full-blown thriller is a wee bit overwrought. It’s so excited to make choo choo noises that it doesn’t really plumb the obvious metaphor at the center of the story: about women who want to escape their lives and the different things the train represents to them.

A lot of really valuable elements are left by the wayside, which makes the film wind up a little disappointing. And I don’t even want to talk about one scene’s flagrant abuse of the 180 degree line! The cast is solid, even the comedy actors Allison Janney and Lisa Kudrow, who sell their small parts with aplomb. Maybe I should just stop complaining and enjoy it for what it is: a muddled, but enjoyable mystery.

TL:DR: The Girl on the Train is a decent, if befuddled thriller.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1004

Arrow in the Head: Killer? I Hardly Know Her!

Year: 2016

Director: Billy O'Brien

Cast: Christopher Lloyd, Laura Fraser, Max Records 

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: I really thought this would be the one to break my streak. Of all the films I’ve watched and reviewed for Arrow in the Head, only one of them has received over a 5/10. This is what some might call “paying one’s dues,” but I don’t want all the readers to assume I’m some movie-hating Debbie Downer. I was excited, because I Am Not a Serial Killer was getting some decent buzz on the festival circuit. It just goes to show, you really never can trust festivals.

I have literally no idea why this movie has received such positive notices, to the point that I would suspect bribery if the movie had any money to speak of. It’s a devastatingly boring, pretentious piece of work that should have been 90 minutes long, if it had to exist at all. Don’t waste your time on this one. You’re not getting paid to do it.

TL;DR: I Am Not a Serial Killer is a miserably pretentious slog.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count:939

Arrow in the Head: Upstairs Downstairs

Year: 2016

Director: David Farr

Cast: Clémence Poésy, David Morrissey, Stephen Campbell Moore 

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review of The Ones Below at Arrow in the Head.

The Ones Below has the worst opening credits I’ve ever seen on a movie that’s claiming to be professional. My student film had better opening credits. Hell, the Animorphs fan film I made in third grade on Windows Movie Maker has better opening credits (for the record, they were scored by Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”). Now, the rest of the film manages the microscopic feat of looking more professional than its credits, but the fact that it doesn’t go above and beyond that initial level of apathy is damning.

This film is cheap. So cheap that it couldn’t afford a fake computer operating system that looks more modern than, say, WarGames. For god’s sake, there are actual f**king green polygons up in this beast. It’s stunning how little they attempted to stretch their budget to any degree. As I stated, this works for its haphazard tonal approach, but it’s genuinely embarrassing.

There are some subtleties in the story that I appreciate, allowing the viewer to actively make connections and attempt to guess what’s going on, but a blatantly derivative third act makes the whole affair retroactively even duller. Any and all of the movie’s sputtering buildup is squandered by this bleating, overlong, too obvious finale. It’s a mark of a bad film that my guesses as to what was happening were always more entertaining than what it eventually turned out to be. 

There’s enough good in The Ones Below to make it bearable, but who the hell needs to watch a bearable film? Watch Rosemary’s Baby. Watch Inside. Hell, watch Annabelle for a better time with a pregnant horror protagonist. If you feel the need to check out The Ones Below for yourself, just don’t blame me.

TL;DR: The Ones Below has a solid ensemble, but is too cheap and generic to be worthwhile.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 937

Arrow in the Head: Bringing Home the Bacon

Year: 2016

Director: Greg McLean

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, David Mazouz

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Read my full review of The Darkness over at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: Bronny?! What in the f**king hell kind of name is Bronny?! And the kinda racist Native American demons are called Jenny? Who the fish cock is Jenny?!

If you had transcribed my entire post-Darkness rant to Sergio on our car ride home, it might just have been the greatest review ever written. The Darkness is a soul-suckingly crappy movie. It’s one of those bad movies that are so po-faced, they even suck all the joy out of mocking them under your breath.

I don’t know what happened behind the scenes on this one, but it sure wasn’t pretty. The chewing hum holding this rickety film together is patently visible. First there’s the fact that their family friends are yanked out of the film with a cane and replaced by Kevin Bacon’s boss and his wife, who are jammed into a plot function that’s physically impossible for them to serve. Then there’s the scene where Lucy Fry’s after-school special bulimia is cured by one visit to the doctor. Also I’m pretty sure they switched around the five animals the demons represent mid-film, hoping we wouldn’t notice.

It’s an outright disaster, boosted only by the ineffable campiness of the third act and the production design (the mom has a giant bonsai tree on her nightstand… in the bathroom). Also the balloons. Never forget the balloons.

TL:DR: The Darkness is a shamelessly derivative, tedious movie that makes me fear for the future of Blumhouse.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1037

Arrow in the Head: Mos Deaf

Year: 2016

Director: Mike Falnagan

Cast: John Gallagher Jr., Kate Siegel, Michael Trucco

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review of Hush at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: OK, phew. We’re safe from prying eyes. Here are some closing thoughts on Hush, which is by far the best film I’ve ever been asked to watch for Arrow in the Head. It almost feels like I’ve been promoted. I stand by my review (I mean, obviously – I wrote it), but I’d like to expand on a couple things I didn’t have space for.

First, the killings are few and far between, but they tend to have a brutality that certainly lingers in the mind. There’s not a ton in the way of gore, and much of it is comfortably kept in shadow, but the actual act of killing (no, not the dreary documentary) is generally well-captured, tense stuff that feels like it could belong in any number of quality original movies.

Second, the film actually has a subdued but prominent sense of humor in its dialogue scenes that works wonders at sneaking its characters into your heart. And when it’s Kate Siegel’s moment to transform into a femme fatale badass, she’s pretty freaking awesome.

Hush is probably the best possible version of itself that it can be, though I kind of wish for its sake that it were something different, because then it might be a real work of art. Mike Flanagan is two for two on movies with great concepts that I really want to like but can’t muster up an overwhelming enthusiasm for.

TL;DR: Hush is a generic but totally decent survival thriller.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 920

Arrow In The Head: Do Not Disturb

My third Arrow in the Head review has surfaced, and it's for a movie that was actually released to theaters! It's like I'm famous or something.

Year: 2016
Director: Johannes Roberts
Cast: Sarah Wayne Callies, Jeremy Sisto, Javier Botet
Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Check out my full review here!

Additional Notes: When my editor assigned this film to me, he apologized in advance if it ended up sucking. I told him that with reviews of The Sand and Dementia already under my belt, this movie was practically Citizen Kane. I was right, at least in the sense that it ended up being crazy boring. I thought an Indian-set supernatural flick might have something unique to offer, but I was dreadfully wrong. At least it’s kind of fascinating in the sense that it unwittingly acknowledges Hinduism as the One True Religion while obscuring its tenets into oblivion beneath a generic, Catholic-lite possession story.

The Other Side of the Door is chock full of clichéd nonsense: lots of shadowy figures pointing at spooky things and seemingly innocuous children with their faces turned away from the camera that the movie pretend you can’t predict are gonna be revealed to be creepy. We even black out our paranormal bingo cards with a ghost-sensing dog and a mystical ethnic servant. It’s an embarrassment of riches!

In my review, I mentioned the film’s ear-bleeding ADR, but let me get into devilish detail. Dog growling is superimposed over a happily wagging tail, and that’s just the beginning. Creepy observers keep making a strange chant that constantly fails to match their lips (it’s more than a little like an Ariana Grande music video), but these people are so strictly non-supernatural that the sound only emphasizes how haphazardly conceived the film is. It’s a dull slog that devolves into a sloppy and confusing third act. One to avoid.

TL;DR: The Other Side of the Door is a bland, milquetoast venture that's hardly worth anyone's time.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1169

Arrow in the Head: One Flew Over The Dodo's Nest

The time has come! My second official Arrow in the Head review has been posted! I had to throw in a Kate Beckinsale reference to appease my straight audience, but otherwise it’s my bona fide opinion on the 2015 indie release Dementia.

Year: 2015

Director: Mike Testin

Cast: Gene Jones, Kristina Klebe, Hassie Harrison

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my review here.

Additional Notes: This really wasn’t my cup of tea. It’s just another one of those films with a plot like a clear day. You can see every twist coming miles in advance, and they’re usually not that satisfying to begin with. As I mentioned before, I hate the movie Session 9 with every fiber of my being despite the fact that it’s pretty widely acclaimed. Dementia kind of reminds me of that film with its rudimentary psychological thriller machinations, so I’m sure somebody will love it. It sure as hell ain’t me though.

There’s basic flaws in its construction of reality (have you ever tried to subtly FaceTime someone? That noise could wake the dead), its continuity, and even its sound mix. The dad character looks and acts more like the daughter’s boyfriend, at least in the opening scene, and the veteran character abruptly shifts his entire personality with no motivation.

Dementia is constantly shifting, but not out of an attempt to create an atmosphere. It literally has no idea what’s going on in its own story and it’s immensely frustrating. But at least it’s better than The Sand.

TL;DR: Dementia is an unfocused, boring attempt at a psychological thriller.

Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 942

Arrow in the Head: I Can't Sand It

Year: 2015

Director: Isaac Gabaeff

Cast: Brooke Butler, Meagan Holder, Jamie Kennedy

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I have a very special announcement to share with you. After three and a half months of writing horror news for Arrow in the Head, I have been asked to write my first official review for their hallowed pages. There’s no telling if or when I’ll write another one, but I’m happy to share with you my very first, a review of the Jamie Kennedy sand monster movie The Sand.

…We all gotta start somewhere.

Check out the full review here!

Additional Notes: Phew, now that we’re back on safe ground, I’m free to be as free form and bluntly honest as I like. The gloves are off, baby! The worst thing about The Sand is that it’s not even bad enough to hate. It’s just plain dull. It wants to be bad-good so much (or at least I assume, considering that it opens with a topless sunbather kicking the bucket), but it’s hardly even bad-bad. It’s just bleh-bleh.

The opening is promising, alternating between the traditionally shot empty beach vistas and found footage debauchery from the night before, but it goes on for what feels like ten minutes. Or a decade. It’s just plain grueling, and the ending is even worse, holding on two characters emoting poorly for a ludicrously sustained period. I’d rather have watched my roommate wash the dishes. And he’d probably rather I washed the dishes myself. But I’m too busy with important work commitments. Like eviscerating The Sand.

The Sand is not the worst film I’ve ever seen, bt the acting is mostly juvenile (Cynthia Murell’s every line is delivered in a nasal whine, and Cleo Berry literally drools as he’s speaking), the gender politics are hideously reductive yet think they’re redeeming, and major plot points or character beats are shelved and forgotten for half hours at a time. An entire death occurs that filmmakers apparently forgot to include in the finished cut. It’s sloppy, it’s inane, it’s bland, and it includes the line “he’s stuck in a goddamned trash can without any hope,” delivered with the earnestness of a Borgnine. But I’m glad I was given the chance to tackle it, and I hope I did y’all dedicated readers proud.

Peace and love, guys.

TL;DR: The Sand is a poorly acted, boring, film laced with terrible CGI.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1141