Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022) - Movie Review

With how badly his last attempt at darker storytelling turned out with the woefully mishandled cop thriller The Little Things, the prospect of writer/director John Lee Hancock taking on a Stephen King adaptation is a worrying one. Films based on King’s books can be very hit or miss, and this year has already featured a particularly big miss with the Firestarter remake. But hey, it’s starring Jaeden Martell, who was a key part of one of my favourite King films with It: Chapter One; maybe this will actually work out. Well… it kinda does?

The Lodge (2020) - Movie Review

The phrase ‘style over substance’ tends to get a bit overused in critical circles. Usually, it’s applied to films that are far more interested (or at least are perceived to be more interested) in showcasing cinematic style and craftsmanship over deeper textual or subtextual meaning. On its own, there’s really nothing wrong with it as a label or even as an artistic practice; hell, my favourite film of all time is very much style over substance, and that’s one of the reasons I like it so damn much. But then there are the occasional films that embody the phrase in a different manner. Films where both the style and the substance have equal work being put into them, but where one ends up succeeding the other for one reason or another. Unfortunately, this film fits into that category.

Knives Out (2019) - Movie Review

Films like this… intimidate me. As someone who writes about every new movie I watch, I certainly don’t make it a habit of hiding my true feelings in regards to pretty much anything I’ve written about here, whether I love it, hate it, or walked away unfathomably bored. But my come-up as part of the wider YouTube angry critic scene has definitely influenced how I approach all of those features. If something is bad, I hold no qualms in outlying every single way it has failed… but what about the opposite? What about those films that are just so engaging, so well-crafted, so endearingly good?

Surely, a film that is entirely positive is an impossible thing; no film is perfect, and even with films I love, I usually bring up even the most minor of issues to keep things balanced. Then there comes a film like Knives Out where, no matter how hard I strain my grey matter, I struggle to find fault in what it presents. I don’t know if this film is indeed perfect, but holy shit, it's so damn close that there's nary a difference.

The Book Of Henry (2017) - Movie Review

The plot: Suburban kid Henry (Jaeden Lieberher) is a child genius, often making contraptions with his brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay) and balancing out his mother (Naomi Watts)’s budget. However, when he discovers that his next-door neighbour Christina (Maddie Ziegler) is being abused by her step-father (Dean Norris), he decides that something must be done. Something that the adults seem unable to do because of the step-father’s standing in the community. He decides that there’s only one choice: The step-father has to die.

It (2017) - Movie Review

As we continue our look into the Stephen King adaptations for the year, we’ve come to a certain story that holds a very special place in my heart for a number of reasons. Growing up with a rather morbid and horror-loving mother, I had a lot of exposure to King’s work growing up. One such examples was the 1990 miniseries based on King’s novel It. Despite its rather glaring issues, much like most other Stephen King-based miniseries, it has a very secure place in my personal nostalgia. That connection would eventually lead to the Nostalgia Critic incident, which I have discussed on here before, where my love for the miniseries lead me to my first-ever instance of fanboy rage. I’ve had many more cases of that since then, but that was what first lit fire under me to rage out about what someone else dares to think about something I love; you’ll notice that I don’t tend to do this that much anymore.

 

And now, after a fair amount of time in production limbo, we have the first of two theatrical films based on that same story. Knowing my own love for Tim Curry’s homicidal kookiness as Pennywise, I was definitely sceptical about how it would measure up. What I was in no way prepared for was just how good this would turn out.