Review – The Silence

It's pointless at this point to become the thousandth reviewer to observe that this comes across as a knock-off of A Quiet Place, both because this one came out later and because the other one was better. Though this one has its moments, for the most part it does everything wrong that the other one did right. For example, the monsters make their screen appearance too early and spend too much time in the clear light of day. It also spends a big chunk of time pitting the protagonist family against other people, which struck me as a mistake. If you've got good monsters, why bother with a stereotypical religious cult? See if desperate

Review – A Quiet Place

Someone more clever than I pointed out that the same people who did the Bird Box challenge should be encouraged to do something similar with this production, seeing how long they can go without making a sound. The premise – society has been destroyed by alien monsters that hunt entirely by sound – is at least original, and in places it manages some clever moments. The movie also does a good job of slowly revealing the monsters themselves. It was nice to see filmmakers put some thought into their work for a change. Worth seeing

Review – Saturn 3

Return now to the ancient days of 1980, when a brief glimpse of Farah Fawcett's boobs was enough to draw audiences to a thoroughly insipid movie. Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel take turns chewing the scenery in an outer space rework of the Frankenstein story. The monster here is a eight foot tall robot with a super teeny head, depriving it of a considerable amount of scare power. See if desperate

Review – Apostle

Imagine The Wicker Man only way, way dumber. Our hero arrives on a small, isolated British isle trying to solve a mystery, only to find himself thwarted by the strange, cultish islanders. Current horror movie tropes – particularly excessive gore – replace what little charm this production might otherwise have mustered. And gut-wrenching violence makes a poor substitute for more subtle terrors. At least it packs a happy ending, if you feel like horror movies need that sort of thing. See if desperate

Review – The Autopsy of Jane Doe

It's just so hard to make a horror movie set in a single location without making it look like it began life as a stage play. And the theatrical nature of this production does nothing to counter the stiff feeling of the story (pardon the pun). Like many other unexplained horrors, the strange nature of the anonymous woman's corpse loses a lot of its power to scare once it's explained. As a result, Brian Cox's scenery chewing becomes the most frightening element of the show. Olwen Kelly's ability to hold perfectly still and hold her breath for lengthy shots is impressive, but the overall rating is nonetheless dragged down by the violent death of a house cat. Wish I'd skipped it

Review – Interior

A guy is trapped alone in a haunted house, a place far too suburban to pack much of an inherent aura of dread. Mind you, I don't necessarily require a dilapidated mansion next door to a cemetery, but it might have helped to shoot in a spot that looked a little less like it might be the producer's mom's house. The bland setting does help a couple of subtle, spooky shots to work pretty well. But an occasional creepy bit isn't anywhere near enough to sustain a story so dull that it seems to drag well beyond its relatively short running time. See if desperate

Review – Terrifier

The killer clown from All Hallows Eve gets his own movie for some reason. The production relies almost entirely on extreme gore, including a designed-to-stir-controversy scene in which a naked woman is suspended upside down with her legs apart and then split in half. Back in the 1970 and 80s (when I first developed a taste for scary movies and we used to watch clowns for breakfast), that would have been shocking stuff. Now that pre-existing misogyny has been wed to a near-constant sense of over-stimulation, extreme violence that at one time might have shocked now tends only to bemuse. Wish I'd skipped it