by ·Comments Off on Alien: Romulus (2024, Fede Alvarez)

Fede specializes in remaking beloved horror movies by aping the style of the originals and repeating their most famous line of dialogue in a slightly different context. He doesn’t fare as well creatively with Alien as he did with Evil Dead. He also made The Girl in the Spider’s Web so this is technically his second bad sequel to a not-great* David Fincher movie. Meanwhile this week everyone’s watching the new Alien prequel TV series from the guy who made se/pre/quel series of Fargo and X-Men.

A new group of British-accented attractive young people is stuck on a sunless planet in debt to the Evil Company, until they have the good idea to board a doomed low-orbit space station and loot it of cryo-pods to escape their fates. But it has been abandoned by everyone except Fake Ian Holm due to alien infestation. The first of the bozo thieves gets chestburst only four short minutes after getting facehugged, then the aliens multiply extremely quickly, while lead girl Cailee fights for her friends, her life, escape, and her defective robot friend who sometimes gets possessed by pro-company programming.

Featuring the stars of Priscilla, The Long Walk, Feline, and Madame Web, it’s all expensive-looking at least, though Fake Ian Holm looks like shit. I love how analogue all the space tech is: lights flickering, vidscreen color separation, audio recordings slowing down. The final boss is a skinny new alien-human hybrid, as if part 4 never existed, which I’m sure a lotta people would prefer.

*For the record:
Good: 1, 2, Resurrection, Prometheus
Bad: 3, AvP, Covenant, Romulus

by ·Comments Off on Don’t Breathe (2016, Fede Alvarez)

Another movie about criminals doing One Last Job before they retire on their earnings, but this time it’s young, disorganized burglars trying to leave Detroit. Rocky is Jane Levy, star of Evil Dead Remake, casing a house with her partners, tough Daniel Zovatto (It Follows) and meek Dylan Minnette (Let Me In). Unfortunately, the house is occupied by dangerous blind army vet Stephen Lang (VFW) who keeps a kidnapped impregnated girl in his basement, a killer dog in his yard, and a few million bucks in his safe.

Fortunately there’s not much dialogue – the two guys sparring over the girl was unconvincing, and I think there were three appearances of “Let’s Do This.” Better is the camera, which finchers around, between walls and under furniture. It’s a good looking movie, especially considering it’s mostly set within a decrepit house. The girl escapes with the money and sees a news story saying the old man lived, which explains the existence of Don’t Breathe 2.

mini-Cujo at the end:

by ·Comments Off on Evil Dead (2013, Fede Alvarez)

Okay, we’re at a crisis point with the movie blog. I fell about two months behind, only taking basic plot and character notes on the last 25 movies, so I need to admit the next few posts are going to be very bad and just rush through them. Jumping back and forth between some recent SHOCKtober films and the Aug/Sept backlog for a while…

I’m not a huge fan of remakes of beloved classics, so ignored this when it came out, then I heard it was actually good, so took a chance. It’s actually good! An intense little horror film, splitting the difference between adding new details (prologue with a demonic-possessed girl being burned to death by her father), following the same old story with fan-service references (“does that sound… fine?”), and trying to top the original (*two* people cut their own arms off).

After the prologue we meet the doomed new gang. Eric (Lou Pucci of Spring and Southland Tales) is the glasses nerd who will discover the Book of the Dead and read the cursed passages. Olivia (Jessica Lucas of Cloverfield and Gotham) is a dark-haired nurse who is probably the first to die, though it’s hard to tell when anyone in this movie actually dies. City Boy David (Shiloh Fernandez of We Are Your Friends) is our lead cool dude who we assume will be the new Ash, but won’t be. His blonde girlfriend Natalie (Liz Blackmore of TV’s Vampire Diaries) gets bitten on the hand, tries to take care of the problem with the electric carving knife but still goes full demon.

And that leaves Mia (Jane Levy of Don’t Breathe and Castle Rock), City Boy David’s sister who was lured to the cabin as an intervention to help her get off drugs. She’s the first victim of demonic possession (of all the details from the original, they kept the tree-rape scene), then vomits demon blood onto Nurse Olivia, is locked in the basement, but I guess Mia recovers, cuts off her own hand, and chainsaws a Demon Mia to death in the apocalyptic blood rain as the cabin burns down. Some fun with camera and focus, as in the original.