His House (2020) - Movie Review

For the longest time, haunted house movies have been plagued by a single question: Why the fuck haven’t you left yet? Easily one of the most mockable cliches in horror (and it’s not as if there’s nothing else to make fun of within the trope-ier corners of the genre), it has likewise fallen into the realm of cliché to even point it out. The presence of something beyond this world makes itself known to the family living in a new house, and because the plot demands it, they never question that they haven't taken that as a sign that maybe it's time to move.

Not that all movies hand-wave this away, though. During the 2010s, James Wan and Mike Flanagan treated the question with a lot of postmodern clarity, and even further back, Beetlejuice remains one of my favourite examples of the sub-genre purely because it answers that question in a delightfully kooky fashion. Today’s film, however, is far less kitschy. In fact, it makes for one of the more sobering features I’ve ever seen from the haunted house clique.

Escape Room (2019) - Movie Review

Well, it’s February and you know what that means: Horror movies. No, I didn’t just suffer a stroke; it’s just that the start of the year is usually when studios dump off the movies that weren’t good enough for release the previous year, and horror movies are nothing if not plentiful regardless of the time of year. Knowing that off-season horror fare usually isn’t worth writing home about (we’ll ignore the irony that I do that for literally every new film I see), I can’t say I was expecting much from this. Hell, between director Adam Robitel, whose last film was pretty plain in the visual department, and writers whose best-known work between them is an early-2010’s Nicolas Cage flick, there’s not much reason to expect more than mediocrity here. Well, thankfully, this film does have quite a bit going for it. And it even manages to achieve some of it.

The Ritual (2018) - Movie Review

 

Stop me if this sounds familiar: A group of friends get together for a nature hike. They find themselves in a forest, possibly seeking shelter from the elements. However, it soon becomes apparent that someone, or something, is picking them off one-by-one and the resulting stress could be driving the hikers insane.

Yeah, all sounding more than a little Blair Witch at this stage, innit? Of course, around these parts, familiar premises aren’t something to instantly turn our noses up at (or at least that’s not the intention); execution is the key factor and director David Bruckner certainly delivers on that front. As a pagan-horror offering, this does well at channelling man vs. nature thrills, giving the eerily serene woods a terrifically tense atmosphere.

A Quiet Place (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Humanity is on the brink of extinction. An alien species has landed that will attack at the slightest sound, forcing the survivors like Lee (John Krasinski), his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and their children Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Beau (Cade Woodward) to be live a literal quiet existence or else they will be killed. As they try to lead as normal a life as one can have in this situation and prepare for the arrival of their next child, the creatures lay in wait for them to make even the smallest of mistakes... and snatch their prey.