Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
A group of friends and a resort so remote that when you arrive your car is running on fumes. It’s a movie set-up that means you can almost hear the machete being sharpened. And yet, Don’t Blink is not a slasher. No one gets decapitated, and the masked stranger stalking the woods is on holiday. Instead, this group of friends begins to slowly disappear. The second you take your eyes off someone they blink out of existence. Why? No one knows.
This review is the start of a change for Ramblings About… It will see us moving away from keeping up with the newest releases and instead focusing on writing about cool things. While we are not completely ditching the new (I’ll probably still get excited about Star Wars’ films and try and write about the things that don’t get as much attention) it will serve as a template for what I look at going forward. Enjoy!
‘You know how people like zombies?’
‘Yea.’
‘And that whole found footage thing is big too?’
‘Damn right it is.’
‘Well – and this will blow your mind – why don’t we meld the two together?’
‘Give this man some money.’
It would be so easy to believe that was the conversation that led to [REC] and its subsequent sequels. Taking two popular things and melding them together is money making 101. Which is why [REC] is so refreshing, because it’s not that. In fact, it could hardly be further from that.
Daniel Radcliffe’s post-Potter career has been a brilliant example of how to do it. While he obviously has a comfort blanket lined with money to take the pressure off his shoulders, you still have to step back and admire a man who is willing to take the risks he has, which leads us to Swiss Army Man in which he plays a farting corpse.
Calling the zombie movie genre oversaturated was right about five years ago. Today, it’s gone far past that. We’ve had classic zombie movies, we’ve had running zombies, we’ve had zomromcoms, and we’ve had Arnie looking sad zombie movies. You name it; they’ve done it. So unless you have something new to bring to the table, then you are better off staying at home.
Despite the claims of those who are either lacking in imagination or presumably spent the entire time with their eyes focused on a phone, The Blair Witch Project is a scary film. It builds its tension to an unbearable level and reveals nothing but hints as to what is happening to its audience. Because of that, it has a mythology that is ripe for exploring and which seventeen years after the original Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett are returning to.
Stop-motion genuinely baffles me. Whether it’s Wallace & Gromit or Coraline, it almost doesn’t matter how good the film is, I am in awe that it exists at all. Which you could maybe say gives Laika Studios a bit of a free pass. Much like Aardman they are a group dedicated to stop-motion releases but they also happen to be brilliant.
Fede Alvarez’s attempt to tackle an Evil Dead remake/sequel/whatever it was intended to be, didn’t quite take off. It lost that spark which made the original the enduring classic it is today and replaced it with a nastiness. However, nasty doesn’t necessarily mean bad and in that nastiness, there was something that made you want to keep an eye on what would come next.
Another year another Woody Allen film. You have to go back to 2004 to the last time he failed to release one. Cafe Society sees him venturing away from his native home of New York (at least briefly) to take in the glamour of Hollywood.
That shape in the corner of the room. Is it just a shadow? Or something more? We’ve all seen it. In the middle of the night when your half asleep brain plays tricks on you. Yet, when you scramble to the light, there is nothing there. Or is there?
Did you know that Hollywood occasionally remakes films? If you have been close paying attention, you might have heard someone complain about it on the internet or something like that. What you won’t hear them admit is that sometimes a remake makes perfect sense.
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