Tag: 2010s

I’ve been a sucker for killer kid movies ever since The Bad Seed, so the prospect of a film featuring a homicidal little black girl -- in my dream scenario, with afro puffs instead of Bad Seed Rhoda’s trademark pigtails -- piqued my interest. Alas, as the cover art...

In the days leading up to the release of Us, writer-director Jordan Peele took to Twitter to declare -- presumably in response to critics who are all too eager to label his film a “social thriller” or some such nonsense -- that it is indeed a horror movie. Unlike...

What Inhumanity lacks in budget, it makes up for in reckless ambition. With a sprawling slasher-thriller-action-sci fi-mystery-suspense story that incorporates serial killers, police corruption, medical experimentation, an international crime ring, a murder whodunit, a love triangle and a myriad of crosses, double-crosses and plot twists, it admirably aims for...

Africa in horror movies is like Cleveland in real life: nothing good comes from going there. Its sole purpose, it seems, is to serve as home to ravenous animals and menacing supernatural entities, along with the hapless natives who fall prey to them so the white protagonists don’t have...

Boo 2! A Madea Halloween for me is kind of like a visit to the dentist you’ve been putting off for years. I’ve been meaning to get to it because I know I SHOULD (with Boo 2, for the sake of cultural literacy; with my teeth, for the sake...

If the U.S. were ever to fully devolve into a totalitarian dictatorship with full governmental media control, one unforeseen benefit could be that we may never again have to see a movie like Bill Huckstabelle: Serial Rapist. I’d like to say that, in this scenario, it would be censored...

*POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD if you’re one of the few people who hasn’t seen Bird Box* Amidst the ubiquitous memes, late-night show parodies and herd-thinning viral "challenges" inspired by the Netflix sensation Bird Box, the significance of it being a major mainstream motion picture featuring a black male romantic lead (Trevante...

One of the most unjustly overlooked movies of 2018, Brazil’s Good Manners (As Boas Maneiras) is a bewitching blend of horror, fantasy and musical that veers from humorous to heartbreaking, romantic to tragic, all while maintaining the sort of childlike sense of wonder and storybook lore that could draw...

If you’ve seen Nacho Vigalondo films like Colossal, Extraterrestrial, Timecrimes and Open Windows, you know he’s not one for conventional genre storytelling. His movies tend toward the unpredictable, either in content or structure -- or both -- and his latest, Pooka!, is no exception. That said, perhaps the most surprising...

The British film Writers Retreat feels like a throwback -- somewhere between a more violent Agatha Christie murder mystery and a less stylized giallo -- but one progressive element it has going for it is the fact that the main protagonist is black. And gay. So, you know, two...