Suitable Flesh
SimilarCrash (1996),
Watch afterAvatar: The Way of Water (2022) Evil Dead Rise (2023), Five Nights at Freddy's (2023), Leave the World Behind (2023), Saw X (2023), The Creator (2023), Top Gun: Maverick (2022),
There have been numerous film adaptations of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, featuring everyone from Sandra Dee (The Dunwich Horror) to Nicolas Cage (Color Out of Space). However, it was the late filmmaker Stuart Gordon who best managed to capture the peculiar and often perverse charms of Lovecraft’s work. With their combination of weirdo humor, bizarre imagery, kinky sex, grisly bloodshed and better-than-expected performances, his Re-Animator and From Beyond became instant cult classics and unquestioned high points of the entire horror genre in the 1980s. Continue Reading →
We Need to Do Something
SimilarAnatomy of a Murder (1959), Blood and Chocolate (2007), Caché (2005),
Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Kiss the Girls (1997), Mystic River (2003),
Primal Fear (1996) The 39 Steps (1935), The Bone Collector (1999),
Sean King O'Grady directs a claustrophobic horror film that has a lot of potential, but just misses the mark.
We Need to Do Something, the debut feature from Sean King O’Grady, is a horror film that can easily be read on two different levels, though your mileage with it will vary depending on which one you choose to follow. As a straightforward horror yarn, albeit with moments of grotesque black humor thrown in from time to time, it contains a few interesting elements but never finds a way to pull them together into a completely satisfying whole. On the other hand, if one regards the whole enterprise on a more overtly symbolic level, it gains a little more in terms of power and effectiveness.
Yet, even then it also tends to lose its way especially once the fairly potent central metaphor gives way to less interesting instances of bloodshed. In either case, it ends on such a clunky and ineffective note that viewers may get the sense that O’Grady and screenwriter Max Booth III have just been screwing with them, a feeling enhanced by the all-too-apt choice for a key musical cue towards the end. Continue Reading →