It has now been five years since the events of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and young Jesse Walsh's family have moved into Nancy Thompson's old place. Jesse has quite the busy life for a teenage boy; he dates the sorta-pretty rich girl in school, he really likes to wrestle with dudes on freshly cut grass, and he is regularly haunted by Freddy Krueger. With all this going on you would hope his dad would cut him some slack about tidying his room. But you would be wrong.
No genre plays the franchise game with more dogged determination than horror. From the classic to the competent, if more than five people saw your movie, it was just cause to churn out sequel after sequel. Few horror movies can epitomise the franchise experience better than the Nightmare on Elm Street series; soaring so high and crashing so hard.
The Echo follows Bobby (Jesse Bradford), newly released from prison and returning to the apartment in which his mother resided and tragically died whilst he was away. Once he's moved in, he begins to hear ghostly noises through the walls and becomes wrapped up in the domestic violence of his next-door neighbours. All is not what it seems however and Bobby starts to think that he may be losing his mind like his mother before him.
The Evil Dead was a nasty experience; giving the supernatural horror an mean-spirited exploitation twist. It's a movie filled with mutilation, terror and a particularly harrowing example of sexual assault. It was not a crowd-pleaser. It was, however, a masterpiece. A great example of boundary-breaking cinema and a calling card for one of the visually thrilling directors of his generation.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Jessica Chastain are the latest acclaimed actors to join Guillermo del Toro's return to the horror genre, the ominously titled Crimson Peak.
The second of Christian Duguay's Scanners sequels concerns brother and sister Alex (Steve Parrish) and Helena (Liliana Komorowska), two scanner orphans who have been adopted by the head honcho of a pharmaceutical company. After accidentally hurling his best friend over a penthouse balcony, Alex goes to a monastery in Thailand to learn to master his powers using the “long breath method”. Helena, meanwhile, is tortured by crippling headaches, and, desperate for relief, helps herself to a prototype skin patch, EPH-3, devised by her father. It works, but induces a radical personality change in the hitherto mild-mannered girl.
1991 saw the release of two belated direct-to-video sequels to David Cronenberg's Scanners, both helmed by the little-known Canadian director Christian Duguay. The first of these, Scanners II: The New Order, takes place some twenty years after the events of the first film. Country boy David (David Hewlett) moves to the city to attend veterinary college, only for the noisy and vibrant surroundings to trigger a disturbing upwelling of power within him. He, it transpires, is that rare thing, a functioning scanner – rare because most of his kind are either crazy (driven mad by their condition) or “dying drug addicts”, hooked on a narcotic called EPH-2.
Scanners (1981) is the penultimate movie of Cronenberg's glorious first period, which saw him working from his own highly original scripts and delivering a chilly, futuristic vision which owed more to the novels of J.G. Ballard than to any other filmmaker. Its protagonist is Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a half-crazed down and out who is recruited by Dr Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) after mind-zapping a woman in a shopping mall. Ruth, a “psycho-pharmacist,” reveals that Vale is a “scanner”, a person with telekinetic abilities. There are others like him – indeed, Ruth has been running a research project into that very topic. Unfortunately, his test subjects are being systematically murdered by Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), the leader of the “scanner underground.” Ruth (after first treating his new protégé with Ephemerol, a drug that “controls the flow of telepathy”, and getting him to hone his psychic skills against a yoga master) wants Vale to infiltrate the underground and stop Revok's “insane crusade.”
Do you like Phil Collins?
Firstly, the answer should be YES! Secondly, it's the wrong part of the film so let's ignore it. If you're a fan of American Psycho (hint - you should be), then you'll know of Patrick Bateman's album critiques. One such critique centres on the album Fore! by Huey Lewis and the News.
Well, Weird Al Yankovic is starring in a parody of the scene, taking the part of the victim. But who is playing Bateman? None other than Huey Lewis!
First off, I have something to say. So far I have not been at all impressed with the film adaptation of World War Z. Owning the book, I could see very few similarities. Since Quantum of Solace, I've not been overly impressed with Marc Forster either.
