Time Crimes could possibly be retitled The Idiot’s Guide to Time Travel – which isn’t a complaint or a put down of the movie. Hector is a hapless schlub who is moving into his new house; when we first meet him he’s coming home from the store without having closed his car’s hatchback, and has … Continue reading
Cloverfield is audacious. That’s a word I certainly didn’t think I would be using in conjunction with a movie that I have been sort of dreading, a movie wrapped in a nonsense blanket of mystery marketing. Here’s the answer to the mystery: Cloverfield is about a big monster who attacks New York City and the … Continue reading
A jittery pastiche of more movies than I care to list, J.J. Abrams’s Cloverfield is thankfully as entertaining as it is shameless. It may be a case study in "stealing from the best", but Abrams and his co-conspirators (director Matt Reeves and screenwriter Drew Goddard) are so brazen with their smash-and-grab aesthetic that you almost … Continue reading
It’s a pleasure to get past viral salesmanship to see the thing itself. J.J. Abrams’ low-fi monster flick Cloverfield began as a secret and became an internet oddity propelled by a marketing approach that engaged everything but the film. Now stripped of external influence we can see the movie for what it is: a meticulously … Continue reading
It’s hard out there for a pimp, especially if that pimp happens to be a monster movie with theatrical aspirations. Monster movies have long been the black sheep of the horror genre and though their fans are among the most loyal and vocal there’s still the stigma of the concept that makes it difficult for … Continue reading
I’ve come to the realization that Uwe Boll’s latest film, In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Seige Tale, is an incredible work by a director who has flown under the radar for too long. Rather than churning out just another video game adaptation, Boll has delivered his most complex work, with the only … Continue reading
I know I’ve seen the original film version of One Missed Call, directed in 2003 by Takashi Miike. But I don’t remember much of it and won’t even try to dig up my DVD copy to compare it to the American remake, directed with corporate video elan by French helmer Eric Valette. Both feature cell … Continue reading
BUY IT FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE!PUBLISHER: St. Martin’s MinotaurMSRP: $23.95PAGES: 336AUTHOR WEBSITE: CLICK HERE Chelsea Cain’s serial killer thriller Heartsick has hit big. It’s everywhere, pimped to the fullest extreme at every major bookstore, ranked high on Amazon and making its best of ’07 List, and it has Youtube videos as part of its promotion. … Continue reading
As craft, Atonement is astonishing. There is no denying that Joe Wright is one of the most visionary and gifted directors working today. His name would certainly be tripping off the tongue of CHUD readers as often as that other, equally talented, Wright if his chosen genre to date wasn’t romance films. And he has … Continue reading
It feels good to like a Tim Burton movie again. I’ve spent most of the last decade on the outside of Burton’s films, unable to get past his empty stylistic tics and his obsession with fathers, growing more and more convinced that the guy had turned into nothing so much as an imitation of himself, … Continue reading