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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Drag Me to Hell, Adoration, and more.
- What We're Watching: Trick r' Treat, The Gate, Hardware.
- Explore: Zulawski & Raimi: The Hell They Dragged Us Into.
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Sam Raimi returns to his horror roots with this gleefully scary funhouse ride about a young woman trying to escape a gypsy curse. "Unlike so much contemporary horror, it's devoid of sadism and mean-spiritedness," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "The looseness Raimi allows himself here results in an especially joyous kind of filmmaking." Writes Scott Tobias, Raimi "wants viewers to jump out of their chairs, to laugh and scream and cheer, and to nudge each other over the transcendent ridiculousness of what they’re witnessing. This is junk filmmaking at its finest." It is "manna from hell," adds David Edelstein. |
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"A profound and provocative exploration of cultural inheritance, communications technology and the roots and morality of terrorism, the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan nimbly wades into an ideological minefield without detonating an explosion," writes Stephen Holden in the NY Times. Adds Roger Ebert: "Some viewers may find the film confusing; I found it absorbing." "Egoyan's most affecting film since The Sweet Hereafter," writes Carrie Rickey. See more here in our interview with Egoyan. |
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Trick r' Treat goes the comic book route, complete with animated credits, primary color palette and terrific, juicy cinematography (by Glen MacPherson) – with performances to match. You may remember, more than a year ago, theatrical previews for Trick ‘r Treat appearing on various DVDs and, I believe, in theatres, too. Yet the film was never released. Rather than being the bomb some might have expected from that, the movie is quite entertaining, as it links separate stories of townspeople in a small hamlet that, yearly, celebrates Halloween... read review >>
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Don't you hate it when your parents go away for the weekend and you accidentally open up a portal to hell in the backyard? But it's always good when your best friend has a special heavy metal album (imported from Europe, of course), complete with liner notes filled with helpful information and spells. And when all else fails, it's good to have a model rocket to launch at the bad guys. If only The Gate knew how silly it... read review >> |
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Aaron Hillis' pick for DVD of the Week: Falsely but understandably advertised as " The Terminator for the nineties" and loosely based on the 2000 A.D. comics (making it a precursor to Judge Dredd), South African-born auteur Richard Stanley's cult-beloved feature debut had only a fraction of the resources James Cameron did for his Ahnuld-pocalypse. But even in its meager limitations, Hardware is both more cynical and conscious of human indignities as a horrific cyberpunk.. read review >> |
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