Serenity (2019)

Interstellar, another movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a father separated by vast stretches of time and space from his child, was released five years earlier than Serenity, which is surprising because Serenity feels like the retro, 8-bit, pixelated version, playing with similar themes but in a story that awkwardly melds '40s film noir with family drama and a tuna-fishing adventure, all steeped in odd moments of reality-bending fantasy that may signal McConaughey's character's post-war trauma playing havoc with his head - or else something else delivered in not very stellar fashion.

★★☆☆☆ 

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Longlegs (2023)

The thing Longlegs most reminded me of were the cutscenes of the original Silent Hill computer game on PS1 (they also strung together to make a monotonous, logic-free jumble of satanic goings-on set to a jangly soundtrack of ringing noises and clanks and clangs), but Longlegs includes in its garble Nicolas Cage doing a Jennifer Coolidge impersonation and a this-is-a-bit-right? Silence of the Lambs routine that insults most only after the "we don't even care anymore" abrupt final cut-to-credits when, woken by the return of cinema lights, audience members realise they've been tricked into seeing, I wouldn't be surprised, another prequel-series of the Annabel franchise.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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A Ghost Story (2017)

All we see of their relationship is that he shares a pair of headphones with her once and, in bed, adopts a sleeping position that suggests love - not facing away from each other on opposite sides of the bed - so it hardly seems warranted that when he dies in a car crash he returns as a bedsheeted ghost and experiences, in a dreamy, dialogue-free extended indie videoclip, a mawkish Tree of Life history of the land upon which his and his partner's house stands; he watches tenants and buildings come and go over time until it starts to seem like we are watching his love affair with real estate, not with the woman played by Rooney Mara, whose relationship with Casey Affleck's ghost ends up feeling like a mere blip.

★★☆☆☆

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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

The irreverence of some of the universes in an infinite multiverse makes sense, but that doesn't mean literal sausage fingers, raccoon chefs, goggly-eyed rocks, and swirling black-hole bagels are any less irritating in this sci-fi adventure about a woman who learns a simple life lesson in the most repetitive, long-winded way imaginable - not from the first iteration of her multiverse, where the message was already crystal clear, but only after ad nauseam repetition of several of the silliest iterations - yes, literal sausage fingers again and again and again - over 139 minutes that feel longer than a zillion lifetimes strung together.

★★☆☆☆

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Last Night in Soho (2021)

The life of 60s performer Sandie - think nightclubs, cocktails, Cilla Black-types, Dusty Springfield-lookalikes, and lots of leering, lecherous men - and that of fashion student Eloise in the present day - think peer pressure at college, bar-hopping, part-time beer-pulling and rental applications - supernaturally collide with the help of reflective surfaces, an impressive series of effects that is this psychological horror's pièce de résistance, but if there is anything to learn from Eloise's bunny hop into so elaborate a Swingin' 60s fandango, it seems just to be the idea that no matter how much women are used and abused over decades by lecherous men, in the end they'll always trump men with their own villainry.

★★★☆☆

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Old (2021)

No, director M. Night Shyamalan doesn't have an excuse for yet another lame ending because although this time his movie, a beach-based Picnic At Hanging Rock (a group of people lug picnic baskets to a beach only to discover they are trapped and inexplicably ageing there) is based on Sandcastle, a graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, Shyamalan actually changes the ending of the kooky Lost-like events, so the lame ending is his again, but up to that late point when the story turns rusty, he delivers a captivating fantasy horror thriller full of great acting, weird and wonderful ideas, a beautiful confined location like the stage of a theatre production, and of course his trademark cameo and camerawork, sweeping and overhead and long-take.

★★★☆☆

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Black Christmas (2019)

I like what they've done here in this clever remake of the 1974 horror, taking the original movie with its classic story of women beseiged from inside, not outside, a safehaven (a sorority house) and injecting into the story a metoo generation commentary, a context that was discernable in the original movie but not wholly intricated into the plot like it is here; but while I think the remake makes a strong and important and relevant point and makes it well about the privilege boys hold, handed to them in pretty much supernatural fashion from their white male forebears, the glossiness and smarts and the beautiful teens as well as the unrestrained finale that elicits a momentary yee-haw but then doubt and dismay at the derailment of such strong feminist commentary, render the movie a mere glossy teen slasher with good intentions, not a horror classic.

★★★☆☆

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Prince of Darkness (1987)

The John Carpenter aesthetic, kicking in immediately with the black and white opening credits set against the director's own pulsing electronic music composition - not to mention Donald Pleasence turning up as a troubled priest - rises this horror above similar others which generally don't get away with such laughable plotting: a team of physicists (a feast of Carpenter regulars (and Susan, the radiologist...in blue? With glasses?)) are gathered together in a church to investigate a glass chamber full of swirling green that seems to be alive, sentient, communicative, ancient, able to possess the bodies of others, and somehow author to strange Coptic, Latin, and English texts that contain differential equations...and if that weren't enough to overload a 102-minute horror romp, each of the gathered scientists receives tachyon messages in their dreams from the future!

★★★★☆

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Things Seen And Heard (2021)

One eye is sufficient for this long and tedious supernatural thriller set in "Headless Horseman" country where husband George, an academic, and wife Catherine Clare, an art restorer, move into a haunted fixer-upper, but the presence of ghosts, the ghosts' supernatural connection to these living counterparts, and local legends about the house's murderous past do not seem to impact very importantly on the things happening in the real world between George and Catherine and in fact just seem to obfuscate, like so many other horror movies do, the reprehensible behaviour of men.

★★☆☆☆

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Stir of Echoes (1999)

Released in the same year as The Sixth Sense, this paranormal thriller also has a cute-ish kid seeing dead people, but the focus of the plot is on Dad, following a more Amityville Horror-type of same-old trajectory in which the 'he' (Kevin Bacon) becomes increasingly erratic, subject to paranormality that renders him unable to maintain happy relationships with his wife and child - it's all very predictable but some effective sfx chills helps to overcome the stock-standardness.

★★★☆☆

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The Grudge (2004)

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on horror series, until now wholly Japanese productions, continues with this third movie, high on spooky atmosphere but low on sense, that casts Americans Sarah Michelle Gellar and Bill Paxton in the lead roles of a story - something about a curse that makes children blue and wide-eyed, that makes dead bodies appear and/or disappear, and sees the dead spiritually tethered to the places of their death but then also free to visit people at work or at home - don't ask too many questions.

★★☆☆☆

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Curse of Chucky (2013)

Satisfying elements of mystery keep you watching this umpteenth episode of the serial killer doll franchise which, taking place in a gothic mansion where a wheelchair-bound woman mourns her mother's death, recalls the classic "lunatic on the loose outside a disabled woman's stronghold" movies of the The Cat And The Canary and The Spiral Staircase variety, at least until the is-this-really-happening, laughable Tommy Wisseau "The Room" reveal-all in flashback.

★★★☆☆

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Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

The sequel to Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist of 1982 is the 1986 release, Brian Gibson's Poltergeist II, a movie variously and bewilderingly about car-whispering, teenage smile correction, cult worship, family togetherness, curses, burial chambers, possessed toys, parasitic infection, domestic abuse, alcohol abuse, ghosts, trauma, paranormal investigation, shamanism, Native American steam bath rituals, and evil, and it doesn't make even one word of sense but has some neat effects a la the original.

★★☆☆☆

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The Forest (2018)

While Japan tries to desensationalise the number of suicides that take place in the Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji so that less people feel encouraged to go there for this purpose and more want to go there as tourists to enjoy its expanses of still, quiet volcanic forest, the likes of Youtuber Logan Paul and the makers of this bad taste 2016 movie (just another relegated to the Netflix dross heap for undiscerning couch potatoes to watch and justify their subscriptions) insensitively turn Japan's grim problem, one attributed not to ghost-fed paranoia but to the country's social austerity, isolation and unemployment, into clickbait.

★☆☆☆☆

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What Lies Beneath (2000)

In director Robert Zemeckis' supernatural mystery, a wife comes to believe her renovated lakehouse is haunted by the ghost of a blonde, green-eyed female, probably a former locksmith given the incredible number of times we see doors swing open by paranormal force, and it is all dopey fun that doesn't warrant too much thought except when all is said and done and the protracted denouement is over (having made very elaborate use of only momentarily spotted paralysed laboratory mice and a bridge in a mobile reception blackspot), viewers who do stop to think twice about what has occurred will recognise the irrelevance of the first hour of the movie, the sheer number of unnecessary characters, and an ennui that pervades the performances, probably a result of the actors being involved in so much redundant nonsense.

★★★☆☆

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House of the Disappeared (시간위의 집) (Siganwiui Jib) (2017)

I can't vouch for the source material, a Venezuelan horror that took the world by storm in 2013, but this 2017 South Korean remake about a woman who returns after 25 years of incarceration to the house where her husband was one night stabbed to death and her son inexplicably disappeared through a blocked basement doorway is appealing because it stars Kim Yun-jin from Lost (she was the deeply likeable Sun) and because, in the end, after a really very silly story plays out (in a distinctly low budget way with made-for-tv quality make-up and zero special effects), this supernatural mystery thriller manages to be surprisingly, ridiculously touching.

★★☆☆☆

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Case 39 (2009)

A bit like The Bad Seed crossed with The Omen only incredibly stupid, Case 39 stars Renee Zellweger as a child welfare worker who comes very quickly to the conclusion that the child murderers and abusers she encounters over the course of her job have good reason for wanting to stuff their devil's spawn into their gas ovens, and so she starts wanting to do the same.

★☆☆☆☆

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Winchester (2018)

The many nods to Hammer Film Productions - the lead named 'Dr Price' who looks like Vincent Price, the florrid red titlecard hanging over a gothic house - feel less like a homage to 70s horror than a pre-emptive plea for viewers not to take the daft Winchester Mystery House caper too seriously, which is wise, because the film is riddled with illogic: sealed rooms with secret entrances, thirteen nailed doors and thirteen hooked passages that fail as ghost repellents anyway; an anti-gun theme that ends up resolved with gunfire; and finally, the baffling suggestion the whole may result from an earthquake?!

★★★☆☆

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Poltergeist (1982)

The Conjuring franchise and all its spin-offs owe everything to this Steven Spielberg-written and -produced supernatural horror of the 80s which starts quirkily with a family enjoying the supernatural oddities it experiences at home but then has family members growing more and more screamy as whatever it is that is haunting them grows malevolent and sucks the daughter into a Mike TV limbo world - putting up with the shrillness of everyone yelling is worth it for the Spielberg set piece serving as the horror-lite movie's climax.

★★★☆☆

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Constantine (2005)

Keanu Reeves need only don a black suit and tie and a movie starts earning rating stars, but unless you're a DC/Vertigo Hellblazer fanboy, this mix of dour Catholic exorcism horror, toony villains, and Matrix-style rock'n'roll action doesn't warrant any more.

★★☆☆☆

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