Do you want to watch a bunch of obnoxious stereotypes get murdered over 85 fairly quick minutes? If so, The Babysitter is the film for you. If you’re expecting much more out of it? Well, there still might be something worthwhile for you. What if you discovered your babysitter was actually the leader of a bizarre cult performing human sacrifices? You’d go all Home Alone, as one of the cult members points out, on them, right? That’s the fairly simple premise, and it’s liberally peppered with humor and slow-motion bikini shots worthy to keep your attention. Unfortunately, all of that…
Author: Justin
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I don’t think it’s any stretch to call 2014’s What We Do in the Shadows director Taika Waititi’s breakout film. While he had been successful directing mostly television for years, he hadn’t reached mainstream American audiences until this and 2016’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. I had seen some of his previous work headed in, but still found this surprisingly delightful the first time—and it holds up now four years later. A mockumentary about a film crew following around four vampire flat mates in New Zealand, what’s most surprising is how well it holds together. While classics of the mockumentary genre…
Jack Clayton’s The Innocents may be the best horror film ever made. I don’t say that lightly, as I’m a huge horror film fan in general. Still, I find myself returning year after year to Clayton’s masterpiece and always discovering new little details that make me fall in love (or is it fear) with it all over again. Based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and adapted by Truman Capote, the film stars Deborah Kerr as a governess hired to oversee two children at a remote estate in England. Once there, she notes that not only are…
The “found footage” subgenre of film is interesting because outside of the original The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and Chronicle, it hasn’t really been used well in films. And even in those three, it can be argued it was only necessitated by Blair Witch. Regardless, here we are with As Above, So Below trotting out the same trope of people running for their lives while holding onto their cameras throughout (one happy moment came when someone dropped the camera, but alas they came back to pick it up). Scarlett (think Lara Croft, Tomb Raider) is the kind of hero that…
As an avid video game player, I’m a sucker for a good horror tale involving video games. The problem is that most of them feel just so inauthentic. Take the virtual-reality-gone-bad film The Lawnmower Man. It might have been scary to explore the idea of people getting lost within virtual reality but making a mentally disabled man super smart using VR just came off as goofy. So, I was hesitant going into this Black Mirror episode knowing that it involved video games and, more specifically, something to do with VR or augmented reality. It’s the story of Cooper, an American…
I’m not much of a Dr. Who fan. I used to watch some of the Tom Baker episodes on PBS as a kid, but other than an odd episode here or there it’s never something I’ve gotten into. So, while working on a project about horror, I found myself watching what many Whovians (Whoville residents?) proclaim as the show’s best— “Blink.” If you don’t know the general premise, Dr. Who is a time travelling being. In this episode, he finds himself battling (well, vicariously at least) stone statues that come to life whenever you turn your back. It’s kind of…
Halfway through the first season of BoJack Horseman the show makes a concentrated effort to shed our expectations of what a modern American animated show can be. Through four seasons it has continued to undermine audience expectations with a show that was, at times, more Mad Men than The Simpsons. It’s tackled issues from addiction, depression, miscarriages, and more. In its fifth season it subverts itself by laying bare the enabling of the modern damaged male antihero archetype first popularized in the “Prime TV Era” by shows such as The Sopranos. The show makes no mistakes about it—BoJack is a…
Manifest is the kind of high concept TV show that networks have been trying ever since Lost’s breakout success. Unlike that show that kept its premise fresh for at least three seasons, many of these shows can’t even make it a full season without the basic concept breaking down. Manifest couldn’t even make it a full episode. Suffering from the This Is Us-ification of broadcast shows, every other scene is someone crying or embracing. That’s fine in the early moments, but by the end it was feeling ham-fisted to make an emotional connection. Worse, that clever premise of people disappearing…
Always remember. Never forget. But what exactly are we trying to keep in mind? Seventeen years on from 9/11, everyone still feels inclined to post to their social media messages of remembrance. However, I rarely see what it is we’re supposed to remember. Is it the people who did this? Is it the people who died? Is it, as Alan Jackson asks, “Where were you when the world stopped turning, on that September day?” That might seem myopic to some, but just as with Memorial Day and Veterans Day we should inquire what exactly we’re honoring. I suspect, in the…
When you teach a course in video games and run an event like Playing for Pets, you get a lot of questions about, “Played anything good lately?” Why, yes, I have. It’s been a truly remarkable year for games. One might even compare it to a year like 1998, which gave us classics such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid. Wherever it ends up being ranked, it’s clear it was a great year with titles that will prove transformative for the industry. The Switch marked both the return of Nintendo as a force in…