items tagged with Scary Movie

ZERO DARK THIRTY

As an orchestrator of cinematic suspense, Kathryn Bigelow might currently be without peer in American movies. The sequences of Jeremy Renner dismantling explosives in the director’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker were miniature masterpieces of sustained excitement; despite our knowing, through much of the film, that it was too early for Renner’s Sergeant William James to be killed off, each masterfully shot and edited act of bomb disposal vibrated with legitimate threat. In Zero Dark Thirty – Bigelow’s and screenwriter Mark Boal’s fictionalized docu-drama about the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden – nearly every scene feels like a ticking time bomb. There is, of course, never any doubt about the narrative’s outcome, yet Bigelow’s gifts for composition and pacing ensure that you still watch the picture with rapt attention and dread. And blessedly, she’s also a spectacular entertainer. The movie is tough-minded and sometimes tough to watch, but even when Bigelow is fraying your nerves, she’s tickling your senses.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

It's not often that you witness an image in a horror movie (or in any movie, really) that you instinctively recognize as iconic. The last one I can think of in the scare-flick genre would probably be Heather Donahue in The Blair Witch Project, with her wool cap, her nose running, and her mouth out of camera range as she videotapes a final, tearful apology. (Seeing that shot for the first time in 1999, you knew it was one that would endure - and be parodied ad nauseam.) But we now have a new addition to the Iconic Image Hall of Fame thanks to Paranormal Activity, which, like Blair Witch, was filmed on a shoestring budget, and which features a shot, like that of Donahue, that will no doubt be instantly identifiable for generations of horror-movie fans.

DEATH RACE

Inspired by the 1975 thriller Death Race 2000, writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson's Death Race isn't much of a movie. But you don't go to it expecting a movie; you go expecting a bone-crunching, brain-splattering, ass-kicking cinematic video game, and that's exactly what you get.

In order of recommendation:

LITTLE MAN and YOU, ME, & DUPREE

Much as I try to prepare for every new cinematic experience with an open mind, sometimes it simply can't be done, as when the advertisements for a new release proudly proclaim: "From the creators of White Chicks!" So it was this past weekend, when Little Man, directed and co-written by White Chicks auteur Keenen Ivory Wayans, debuted. I'm not sure I can adequately express just how much I was not looking forward to this comedic opus; not only did I not laugh once at the grotesque White Chicks (nor, for that matter, at Wayans' Scary Movie and its first sequel), but as I recall, through the entire course of its running length, I actively frowned.
Read More About Stunted Adolescents: "Little Man" And "You, Me & Dupree"...