7 Best Movies To Watch After Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
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 →
Dream Scenario
At this point, you can roughly divide the output of Nicolas Cage into one of two categories. First, there are films so tailored to his reigning wild man of cinema persona that it seems unimaginable they could exist if he passed. In the other camp are the quieter efforts like The Weather Man, Joe, and Pig that remind of what a powerful actor he still can be. His latest project, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, combines both approaches into a single offering. The result is a strange and wildly audacious work anchored by a surprisingly deft and low-key turn from Cage that stands in marked contrast to the weirdness surrounding him. Continue Reading →
Totally Killer
The low-budget confines of Blumhouse movies mean that any idea can become a movie, including bold original visions like Whiplash or Get Out. Unfortunately, it also means a lot of subpar stuff can easily get the green light. The latest example is the new Amazon/Blumhouse collaboration, Totally Killer. Hailing from director Nahnatchka Khan, Totally Killer dares to ask a question no reasonable soul was pondering. “What if Happy Death Day and Hot Tub Time Machine had a tedious baby?” Buckle up, horror devotees. Here comes yet another dose of 1980s nostalgia and some frighteningly lousy editing. 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 →
Sightseers
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →