Mainlining Christmas

Snow Falls is a horror movie about five teenagers who are either being killed off by supernatural snow or just hallucinating due to hypothermia and hunger. The ambiguity surrounding what's causing their deterioration is intentional; the movie being bad is presumably less so. Okay, that was a little harsh. Snow Falls has some decent moments in it, and I need to hedge any criticism with the caveat I'm unclear how much this thing cost to put together (aside from "not very much", which is obvious). I do think it's important to consider budget when discussing movies like these, as well as what the movie was supposed to accomplish for the filmmakers. If they hoped to create something capable of attracting a following like that of  The Lodge , they were way off the mark. On the other hand, if this was produced for very  little money with the goal of displaying a competency with genre... I mean, it's still not a homerun, but there are a handful of good shots scattered...

I try not to be overly dismissive of movies in genres I'm not entirely familiar with, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to find anything in "Last Stop on the Night Train" (or whatever they're calling it these days) that justifies it being made. I should note I haven't seen either "The Last House on the Left" or "The Virgin Spring," the movies this is apparently emulating ("Second House on The Left" is one of many titles this was released under in English). I take some solace in the fact that the consensus among genre fans seems to lean towards this being a cheap knock-off, rather than existing in conversation with its predecessors in any kind of interesting way I'm missing. That's not to say "Last Stop on the Night Train" isn't saying anything - it has themes and was competently filmed. But an extended series of sexual assaults overtakes the film in a way that feels grossly exploitative and leaves you with ...

It's not hard to see why this thriller was forgotten despite starring Kim Basinger as a suburban housewife being hunted by murderers in the woods on a rainy Christmas Eve in what could have been sold as an R-rated, feminist response to Home Alone, had the movie been good enough to capitalize on any of that. The last few minutes, for what it's worth, are actually pretty good and provide something of an demonstration of what the movie as a whole was going for. This wants to be a sort of modern parable, meant to be experienced viscerally, rather than considered rationally. If it were being made today, the last decade of horror would offer a template for managing this effect. Unfortunately, it was made in 2008, and as such mostly leverages the cinematic language of suspense from that era. The story here is bare bones. Della is a housewife with two kids she loves, an abusive husband she does not, and an immense amount of anxiety and regret. After a harrowing encounter with said husb...

Based on the handful of reviews available, I'm pretty sure I liked this more than most who saw it, and I didn't like it. The Open House draws inspiration from various horror subgenres, including haunted house, home invasion, and slashers. Until the end, the movie leaves you in the dark as to which direction (or directions) it's going to break. The conclusion feels like they just picked one out of a hat and went with it, ultimately delivering a film about the existential terror of [checks notes] okay, it's actually just about open houses. Like, having strangers come to your house. That's it.  Perhaps I'm being a bit uncharitable, but for all the setup surrounding being haunted by trauma, fear of rural communities, and family strife, the movie just sort of reveals its big idea was just the obvious one in the title. Some random stranger we never see clearly was in the house all along. Somehow. We never really get much of an explanation on the logistics, just the id...

Not to be confused with any of the scores of non-Ukrainian-horror movies with the same title, this centers around a woman trapped on a desolate mountainside in Georgia (the country, not the state) being hunted by someone on a snowmobile. The movie has a couple merits - we'll get to those - but on the whole this is style over substance where the style gets old quickly. Director and co-writer Stanislav Kapralov is trying to create a modern Christmas ghost story, but he's stretching material appropriate for a short into a full length movie. By the time we get to the end, we've figured out the two or three twists the movie could take, and when we get to the final reveal, there's no way it can't be anticlimactic. The movie, which features five significant characters and maybe twice as many bit parts, probably didn't cost an awful lot to make, but it had the resources for some realistic (and at times disturbing) make-up effects. Visually, it compares to US movies with...

Four years ago I revisited a number of movies in the "slasher-Santa" subgenre and was surprised to realize a surprising number were good . Even many of those I dislike deserve credit for being smarter, better shot, or at least based on more a more interesting foundation than the straw man I'd concocted. Let that be a lesson to you about making assumptions. I bring all this up mainly because the most interesting thing about the 1980 horror film, To All A Goodnight, might be how perfectly it encapsulated my original ignorant assumptions about what the subgenre would be like. This is pretty much exactly what I'd imagined the subgenre to be like: cheap, lazy, dumb, and misogynistic with few redeeming qualities. The movie plays like a knockoff of Black Christmas , minus the complex themes, genuine terror, eerie fear, iconic performances, effective direction... basically anything and everything that makes Black Christmas endure. In its place... gah. There's just not muc...

"Beware, My Lovely" is a sold noir bordering on horror with proto-slasher elements. It does a fantastic job building suspense and empathy for its heroine, played by Ida Lupino, who also produced the film (through her company, The Filmakers) and took over directing when  Harry Horner had to step away due to his wife's illness and passing. All of which should be interest to anyone curious about the history and evolution of horror, women directors, and this era of Hollywood. I'll touch on some of that later in this review, but first... Uh... Holy shit, this is a Christmas home invasion proto-slasher from 1952. That's more than twenty years before Black Christmas  and significantly older than any other holiday film I've found employing similar tropes to tell the extended story of a woman trying to survive an encounter with a dangerously unstable man in a claustrophobic setting. Hell, it's two years older than the Vault of Horror story, "And All Through th...