18 Best Movies To Watch After Saw (2004)
Dolls
Ethan Coen goes solo for a raunchy, silly comedy-thriller. When the Coen brothers announced back in 2021 that they were taking a temporary break from working together, the anguished wails of film nerds could be heard around the world. It wasn’t anything personal – indeed, they've reportedly reunited to work on a horror movie – but rather just a desire to do their own thing separately for a little while. Their time apart resulted in two very different projects: Joel’s critically acclaimed The Tragedy of Macbeth, and now, Ethan’s Drive-Away Dolls, a good-naturedly raunchy crime caper that occasionally flounders under the weight of stale, fetishy stereotypes. The film opens with a gruesome death and a briefcase that needs to make its way from Philadelphia to Tallahassee. Also about to hit the road south are a pair of friends, brash, free-spirited Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and buttoned-up, bookish Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). Marian wants to pay her aunt a visit, while Jamie, kicked out of her apartment by her fed-up girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein), has nothing better to do and goes along for the ride, hoping to loosen up Marian along the way.. Continue Reading →
Blood Rage
Serve up this bizarre, oddly funny 80s slasher as part of your holiday entertainment feast this year. Though Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s retro horror double feature Grindhouse met with audience indifference, the collection of fake movie trailers during its “intermission” became amusing pop culture ephemera. Of the four featured, Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” is probably the most fun to revisit, mostly because of its loving dedication to capturing the unique seediness of an 80s slasher film. There’s something so familiar about the murky film quality, the low budget special effects, the incoherent plot (it appears to be a trailer for two different, unfinished movies stuck together, as was the case for many 80s horror movies), the glimpses of T&A, and of course, that hilarious voiceover and excellent tagline, that it seems unbelievable that it hadn’t actually already been made. Though it took over 15 years, Thanksgiving is finally a full-length feature, released to largely positive reviews just last weekend. It is not, however, as has been claimed elsewhere, the first Thanksgiving slasher film. Before that, there was 1987’s Blood Rage, a movie that leans into all the best and worst tropes of its genre, while also being deeply strange and often undeniably funny. Continue Reading →
Killer Joe
Upon the news of the passing of William Friedkin, every headline reporting on the news focused on two films. It’s not surprising that the media spent so much time talking about The French Connection and The Exorcist, two bona fide masterpieces that paved the way for a new era of American filmmaking. What was disappointing was this seeming willingness to reduce a cinematic legend’s legacy to a burst of time in the early 1970s, thus dismissing the five decades that followed as either negligible or outright unworthy of interest. Continue Reading →
Sayen: La cazadora
At the risk of making a "getting a lot of Sorcerer vibes from this" guy out of myself, The Hunted—William Friedkin's 2003 old-master-hunts-rogue-student thriller really does make for a fascinating counterpart to his earlier men-on-a-desperate-mission masterwork. Both delve into the lives of damaged, forlorn, isolated men on perilous quests for deliverance. And both of those quests lead deep into madness. Both pointedly contrast man-made, flame-choked hellscapes (Sorcerer's exploding oil well, The Hunted's secret mission amidst the Kosovo War) with the vast, amoral green of the deep forest (Columbia and Oregon, respectively). Both turn on setpieces that thrill while maintaining a grounded (if not necessarily "realistic") feel and weave surreality in with care. Continue Reading →
A Haunting in Venice
The first two entries in director/actor Kenneth Branagh’s foray into Agatha Christie adaptation lost the magic of the English writer’s mysteries. With his third attempt, A Haunting in Venice, Branagh decides to make considerable changes to the story. Using the bones of Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, writer Michael Green changes the setting from a small town in the English countryside to a palazzo in Venice. Branagh emphasizes the gothic elements of Christie’s story, leaning on the horror of the location, the manic nature of the children’s Halloween party, and the gruesome moments before and after an unexpected death. Continue Reading →
Stoker
There's more than one transition going on in Park Chan-wook's 2013 thriller Stoker. Yes, the film tells the story of how the seemingly carefree India (Mia Wasikowska) goes from worshipping her father to worshipping her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode). But the Hitchcockian thriller -- and it is one, beyond the shadow of a doubt -- was also Director Park’s first English-language title. Continue Reading →
The Blackening
The Blackening is a horror-satire based on a popular 2018 short film of the same name. It mercilessly skewered the genre conceit that the Black character is always the first to die—a notion so familiar that this year saw the publication of an examination of Black-related horror films entitled The Black Guy Dies First. To do so, it presented a scenario in which all the potential victims are Black. They argue about who among them is truly the Blackest while downplaying their own ethnicity to survive. (“I qualified for the Winter Olympics.”) Continue Reading →
Pengabdi Setan 2: Communion
If Satan’s Slaves: Communion wants to be a local PSA for better management of high-rises instead of a second wringer for the Suwono family to go through, it can. There’s an elevator in the film’s setting that is home to a horrific banquet of images and sounds. There are happenings inside, outside of, and even underneath it that will get the one in your building more regular inspections and stricter compliance with the “maximum capacity” notice. Per the film, poorly maintained and overloaded lifts won’t just be an eventual Final Destination moment, it’s also how hell gets to be on Earth. Continue Reading →
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
The modern age of sequels, spin-offs, and all other franchise extensions has amplified complaints about how derivative follow-ups can be. As a result, sequels have garnered a bad reputation, and it’s not unearned. Continue Reading →
Halloween Ends
Where do we even begin? Continue Reading →
Barbarian
It can be hard to write about films sometimes. No mere words, no matter how witty, insightful, or elegant, can truly capture the experience of watching the most surprising ones. Except for movies like Zach Cregger's (The Whitest Kids U'Know) new horror/thriller, Barbarian, which I can encapsulate perfectly with a few phrases: Continue Reading →
Death on the Nile
Even if you’re not familiar with Agatha Christie’s vast body of works—she wrote sixty-six detective novels alone—you’ve probably heard of Hercule Poirot. He’s the world’s most famous literary detective, next to Sherlock Holmes. Death on the Nile marks Kenneth Branagh’s second outing directing one of Christie’s Poirot stories and starring as the mustachioed detective himself, following 2017’s tepidly received Murder on the Orient Express. Dogged by COVID-19 delays and scandals surrounding star Armie Hammer, Death on the Nile sometimes feels like it’s scrambling to justify its own existence, and only half-succeeds. Continue Reading →
Halloween Kills
With the release of The Rise of Skywalker and the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the term “fan service” has come to mean going to extremes in order to please fickle audiences of a TV series or film franchise. Though framed as an acknowledgment and appreciation of fan support, it feels forced and phony, an Easter egg hunt where a plot should be. While David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s 2018 reboot of Halloween was far from a perfect film, they were determined to make it their own, rather than continuing the same interminable, by then thoroughly ridiculous storyline. Its sequel, Halloween Kills, however, feels like whatever Green and McBride were originally trying to do was shoved aside in favor of winks and nods at the “true” fans of the series. The body count is much, much bigger, and almost laughably gory, but if you’re looking for any kind of coherent plot and characters not doing anything but the stupidest things imaginable, look elsewhere. Continue Reading →
Hydra
Takashi (Masanori Mimoto, Yakuza Apocalypse and one of Hydra's action coordinators) is a quiet, reserved man. He's the chef at Hydra, a Tokyo bar well-loved by its regulars. To those regulars, he's a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but damn can he cook. To Rina (Miu, Netflix's Followers)—Hydra's bartender and Kenta (Tasuku Nagase, Kamen Rider Wizard)—its waiter, he and his stillness are a regular part of their lives. Rina considers him an adoptive big brother/uncle since he knew her vanished father. Kenta both admires his cool and resents his (relative) closeness to Rina. Takashi is Hydra's constant. He knows just what to cook for a regular in the middle of a bad break-up who orders "anything." He stops potential fights before they can start. And he keeps a leary eye on a sleazeball he suspects of being a sexual predator—making sure that the women the creep might be targeting get home safely. When the schmuck does indeed out himself as a date rapist, Takashi puts the fear of death into him. How is he able to do all this? He's observant. Why is he observant? Because he's a retired assassin. Continue Reading →
Dracula
So there’s this fabulous sequence about three quarters of the way through Bram Stoker’s Dracula where nearly all the characters left alive are speeding to Transylvania and Dracula’s castle for the film's climax. On one side of the race are Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) , barrister Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), his fiancée Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), and three adventurers/friends. Continue Reading →
Scream 4
For the horror genre, April 15, 2011, marked a handful of notable dates. On one hand, it was the 15th anniversary of when Scream started filming, starting with the 11-minute sequence in which an onscreen Drew Barrymore, thought by the masses to be the star, was eviscerated in the name of her killers' pop culture fetish. The movie not only reintroduced the slasher film back into the mainstream, but it also brought back one of its maestros. Of course, that'd be Wes Craven. Continue Reading →
Ghostland
Nicolas Cage & Sion Sono team up for an incoherent Samurai-Western-Mad Max homage-something or other. It’s impossible to review a Nicolas Cage movie. They’re the very definition of “critic-proof,” in that they always have a dedicated audience who will declare them “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” and forgive them for lacking in plot or competence. You don’t like it? You just don’t know how to relax and have a good time. Sion Sono’s first English language feature, Prisoners of the Ghostland fits right in: loud, garish, bereft of anything resembling a plot. Is it fun? It certainly thinks it is. Trying to explain what Prisoners of the Ghostland is about is a fool’s errand, but let’s give it a go anyway. Nicolas Cage is Hero, a notorious bank robber whose last gig got a little boy killed (but he feels bad about it, so that absolves him). He’s summoned from jail by the Governor (Bill Moseley), who runs Samurai Town, a combination of Dodge City and Neo-Tokyo, with a dash of Terry Gilliam thrown in. Hero is ordered to rescue the Governor’s missing “granddaughter” Bernice (Sofia Boutella), and is fitted into an unremovable leather jumpsuit with explosive charges at his neck, elbows and crotch. Continue Reading →
The Pale Door
You don’t watch a movie like Aaron B. Koontz's The Pale Door, you rewrite it in your head. Old West outlaws facing off against a coven of witches, that’s a good start for the story, it’s simply a question of restructuring everything else, like getting rid of the pointless backstory, or letting one of the already few non-white characters make it to the end alive, or maybe cutting down the number of hypermacho mustachioed men to two rather than five, or giving the witches any other motivation for their behavior than needing virgin blood to survive. Any one of those changes would have at least slightly improved The Pale Door. Sadly, it’s an inert, dreadfully dull mess that tries for some From Dusk Till Dawn-style “you thought it was this kind of movie, but it’s really this kind of movie” shenanigans, and falls flat. Continue Reading →