![]() But when the final act begins and all heck breaks loose it’s a nonstop barrage of shrieks coming from the theater’s speakers and shrieks coming from the guy next to you (and shrieks coming from your own mouth!). They’re all there, but unless you’re Ellen Ripley this movie is going to scare you and odds are you’re going to do one of those three things a time or two during the film. You have your chatterboxes (who try to keep their own anxiety in check by cracking wise every ten seconds), the pointers (who see something in every shadow), the armchair quarterbacks (who shout helpful advice to the hapless characters in the film). Seeing it in a full theater is a delight. It all builds to a crescendo of scares in the final twenty minutes. It’s a lot like The Ring in that respect, and the monster’s secrets are revealed concurrently with a steady increase in tension and horror. Not only because those times are rare, but also because there’s a well-developed backstory to help explain the origins of the monster. ![]() ![]() Because of that, on the rare times that the movie actually stops to let you catch your breath and let the characters talk out what is going on, you don’t complain. Unlike other horror movies, which have plots so thin and worthless they make the slow moments a chore and the exposition a laugher, the story here is actually very good. ![]() The movie doesn’t cheat it sticks to the concept and finds every possible way to milk it for the duration of the picture, often to terrifying (and sometimes very inventive) results. But even the short cheated at the end of it, when you see the baddie in all its glory in the bright bedroom. All the short does is introduce the basic concept (a boogeyman that can’t go into the light). If you’ve seen the short ( it’s only a couple minutes long) don’t think that you know how the movie is going to go: The villain is almost entirely different. There’s not much down time, very little stopping for exposition and almost no moment where you feel completely at ease. Probably because it was a short-film adaptation the movie only runs an hour and twenty minutes. In this case, director David Sandberg and writer Eric Heisserer did a great job expanding the concept and making it work for feature-length. The short film maximizes the premise perfectly but sometimes what works in a short doesn’t translate to a full-length film (the animated movie 9 is one, the horror film Mama is another). But if the lights suddenly go off…it’s game on. Turn the light on and the monster disappears. That sounds like most movie monsters, but in this case it’s by design. The premise is simple enough: There’s a monster that is only active in darkness. This one is based off a short movie from 2013 (directed by the same man who helmed the full-length version, so good for him!). Take a dash of The Ring, add in a little of Del Toro’s Mama and give it a James Wan production, and you have the recipe for a great horror film. It’s been a good year to go to the cinemas and wet your pants. ( great movie) and The Purge: Election Year (pass) which had terrifying moments throughout. And then there movies like 10 Cloverfield LN. Bye Bye Man and Strangers 2 will finish out the year with December releases. I skipped the first Ouija movie but the sequel, due out in October, looks to be a much better film. A pair of scary films are in September: The Woods (which has potential to be as scary for this generation as The Blair Witch Project was to mine) and Before I Wake (which was released months ago in Europe and is finally getting a US release in mid-September). August 26th (my birthday!) will see the release of Don’t Breathe, with it’s very clever premise and terrifying trailer. Conjuring 2 released last month to glowing reviews ( including right here on CoW). Palmer and Maria are also effective in their respective roles.2016 has been and promises to continue being a great year for scary movies. Perhaps he'll excel in the upcoming Annabelle sequel which has a premise with lots of potential. Sandberg tries his best to keep the concept going however and his direction shows promise. The short story succeeds precisely because the initial scare is clever and the concept holds steam within the few minutes the story takes to finish - however, this feature length Lights Out loses steam, purely because whilst the initial scares are cleverly put together, the audience becomes so familiar with the concept that the would-be scares no longer terrify, but in some instances become comical. This presence can only be seen - yep you guessed it - when the lights are out. It tells the story of a mother (Maria Bello) and daughter (Teresa Palmer) and their estranged relationship, brought about in part by the mother's mental illness and also a ghostly presence that has latched itself on to the mother.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |