The Mummy’s Ghost would be the second of three sequels to Universal’sThe Mummy, following The Mummy’s Tomb and would also see Lon Chaney Jr step into the shuffling bandaged corpse of Kharis.
Unfortunately The Mummy’s Ghost is by far the weakest of the franchise so far, which for me comes down to lazy writing. It feels as though the creative department were happy to rest on their laurels and aim for more of the same in the franchise.
In doing so, it fails to stimulate and to say that it runs through the numbers in the process would be a misjudgement, as there are a lot of numbers that Universal are happy to skip past to deliver the basics in horror for the time of its initial release.
Once again we are greeted with a high priest handing down the duties to a younger member of the fold, Yousef Bey played by a suitably hammy John Carradine (House of Dracula). Kharis is still transfixed by the lure of tana leaves and tramps around for his latest fix while Bey tries to stick to his mission in finding the body of Ananka and return her to her resting place in Egypt.
Ananka however has transformed her soul into the body of another, Amina (Ramsay Ames), which puts a spanner in the works.
Time has not been kind in the passing years, and this feature feels stale as a result and if it weren’t part of a franchise would have been served better entombed in the past.
It’s one saving grace that allows it to stand out happens to be shrouded in its bitter end, with Kharis carrying an unconscious Amina into the swamp, where they can be reunited in the afterlife. This is delightfully offbeat considering its age, and I can only wonder how this came across to the audience of the time. It may have had a more profound impact if more care and dedication were taken into building up a more imaginative narrative to steer away from the now tired formula.
Directed by Vincent Parranaud, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Alexandre Perrier, Hunted stars Lucie DeBay and is currently available on Shudder.
The film may speak on a very average sense, but there are some elements that I did enjoy.
While it does tap into that thriller element that we see all too often, with a woman being hunted, or the victim, or being chased down by either serial killers or someone planning to do ill.
Hunted taps into these themes in a big way.
Lucie DeBay plays the central character, Eve, where we get two guys who accost her when they trick her into getting into their car and end up in the woods.
From here all manner of stuff arises as the film becomes a story of survival.
What I kind of like about the film is that it’s basically The Little Red Riding Hood story inverted with a lot of the story elements coming to the fore.
The character Eve wears red throughout most of the movie.
The woods obviously ties in really nicely which includes a twist on the woodcutter component that comes into that fairy tale.
Obviously the biggest image at play is the wolf, which at first comes across as the men, but there is this dog-like energy that comes across the movie and propels the narrative to a bitter and frenzied conclusion.
The Prognosis:
I like these elements that Parranaud plays with which slightly elevates it above the average movie.
Probably one of the most surprising hits for me so far in 2021 comes Shadow In The Cloud, directed by Roseanne Liang, and starring Chloe Grace Moretz (Let Me In, Carrie).
The reason I was surprised is because on face value it comes across as quite cheesy, particularly if you’re judging from the trailer. What I liked however, (Maybe the surprise factor doesn’t come in when you know that writing duties alongside Liang for this film was Max Landis. Obviously he’s the son of famous director John Landis – An American Werewolf In London.) there’s a lot of great humour in this film.
The premise of this film which is set in World War 2, sees Moretz play an Air Force Woman, Maude Garrett, who’s on a strange mission, which we’re not too privy about from the beginning. Garrett is supposedly carrying secret documents and ends up on flight from Auckland to Samoa.
The problem arises with suspicion centred around Garrett’s character, and who she really is, highlighted by the improper manner in which she gets onto the plane.
Not only that, things become more sour when it is discovered that there is a gremlin that has some stowed on board. This gremlin for good or ill, serves as a great metaphor for harbouring secrets, disillusionment and distrust among the crew.
The more this is heightened and comes to the surface, the more the gremlin pulls apart the machinery and causes great drama.
Primarily though, this is a story of female empowerment; imprisoned against her will, her skills and abilities constantly questioned, and treated like a sex object, until the shit hits the fan, and Garrett could potentially be the one person to save them.
The Prognosis:
It’s a great little piece. I love the humour of it. Moretz for me, never fails when she performs on screen. I think she’s a solid, solid actress. The energy and the feel of this film makes this for me a real surprise hit and i highly commend Liang’s directorial style.
When it was announced that there would be a remake/reboot of the early 2000s horror feature, Wrong Turn was set for a release, I have to admit that I was a little skeptical, more that I presumed we would be presented with yet another bunch of teens lost in the woods, fighting for survival against a group of mutant hillbillies in the backcountry of the States.
It was also a little surprising that this is actually the 7th installment of the franchise.
Don’t get me wrong. I kind of dug the original feature despite its numerous faults, which were all the more obvious upon re-watching ahead of the 2021 version.
I mean, that may have a lot to do with the casting of Eliza Dusku. And yes, I was always a Faith fan more than Buffy. Sorry folks. Also Desmond Harrington was doing the whole smouldering, moody thing, way before he was eventually cast in Dexter and made it even more his thing.
All this aside, I was pleasantly surprised by the way the 2021 version was presented that ticked the box of a successful sequel.
It managed to stay true to the premise of the original feature and the folklore set around it, whilst providing a whole new slice of survival pie that marked a successful entry into the franchise.
Director Mike P Nelson delivers a solid feature film, learning from his predecessor, The Domestics and centring on the core theme of a battle of survival at all costs.
The manner in which the narrative is presented also goes against the grain of the usual tropes, (which is a good thing in this instance) as we’re introduced to Scott (Matthew Modine – Stranger Things) arriving at a small country town on the outskirts of the Appalachian Trail in search of his daughter, Jen (Charlotte Vega – The Lodgers), who has been missing some two weeks hence.
This method of storytelling allows the audience to not only engage with Scott as a character, but also outlines the guarded nature of the local people, prejudicing us against them and their ‘backward’ ways from the get-go.
Nelson then bravely pushes our preconceptions and forces us to confront them and question not only our morals but our position on communities as a whole.
So quickly we jump to conclusions or presume something of a particular person or group of people before understanding their position, and in doing so, leads to an amount of trouble, aggression, and in this case, bloody revenge on all sides.
Nelson soon casts us among the group of youths, including Jen and straight away challenges our current in build misconceptions around gender and equality, before eventually thrusting us down the rabbit hole of misgivings.
We see these youths as outcasts among the local community, but are equally highlighted as the outcasts among the group with the greater society. There’s the Black American, Darius, whose skin colour has led him and his generations to have been ostricised over hundreds of years, and then the gay couple, Luis and Gary, who have also been oppressed. The trouble is that despite a decent amount of attention laid down on the bones of the plot, it’s a shame that not enough was paid to the depth of the characters. The closest we get for a multi-dimensional evolution comes in Adam (Dylan McTee – The Wind) who at first is your typical red-blooded alpha male, but at one stage shows a human side, before unfortunately resorting back to type. These misconceptions drive the group deep into the heart of America’s wilderness and foundations, where they come face to face with a group of America’s descendents of their founding settlers who carved a new walk of life away from the world to form their own community. When these two worlds collide, both belief systems are challenged leading to a bloody and brutal path that leads to an unknown horizon.
The Prognosis:
Mike P Nelson directs the unimaginable; a decent and well crafted movie that strengthens and supports the original movie, while still delivering a strong independent movie of its own.
It breaks the rules and conventions of your standard horror tropes and for that it must be commended.
Plus, it projects some delightfully confronting images for horror enthusiasts that leave you wincing, and serves this with some sharp, thoughtful insights into human conditioning and the impact that communities have on the psyche.
The wrong turns are not necessarily the wrong ones, but they will force you into action.
It’s biggest stumbling block comes in the lack of depth in the characters though, who deserved greater attention for the subject matter to truly have a lasting impact.
It’s been 40 years since David Cronenberg’s visionary tale of telepathy, telekinesis and by now a recurring theme in the Canadian director’s work, espionage surrounded by political and government conspiracies embedded in a deeply psychoanalytical point of view.
It’s hard to believe that this is Cronenberg’s seventh outing in the director’s chair, having already produced body horror films such as Shivers and Rabid, the latter of which had been reimagined by The Soska Sisters and is well worth your time. Scanners still has that low budget, earth feel to it that is often expected in the first few films in one’s career, and only two years later he would serve up a double hitter in the classics Videodrome and The Dead Zone.
Another theme that is prevalent throughout Cronenberg’s work is that of an uprising, often from an oppressed group or individual, but also that of misguided intentions that lead to their true calling.
In the case of Scanners, we are first introduced to Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), who is ostracized from society by appearance at first, being a homeless figure trying to survive on the streets, but we quickly learn that he harbours the ability to read people’s minds and inflict pain on those who torment or ridicule him through telekinesis. This ability comes attached to a group in society known as scanners and when he is detected in a shopping mall, he is soon hunted down and subjected to close scrutiny and rehabilitation by Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan).
Once he conforms to the will of Ruth and with it the Government agency that takes advantage of Ruth’s knowledge, Vale is then charged with hunting down a group of vigilantes led by Revok (Another fine turn from Michael Ironside). Can Revok be controlled? Or is there more to Revok’s revolution than meets the eye?
Scanners can be bookmarked as the film that changed Cronenberg’s career, moving away from the body horror image that had shaped his career at this point, and moving him into the mainstream playing field. It still has some moments that reflect the style and substance that made Croeneberg’s name on screen, most notably this head explosion scene…
The prognosis:
Scanners does suffer a little in exposition and the lead performance from Stephen Lack, is somewhat stilted which detracts from engaging with the narrative. Whether this is down to the performance of the actor in question or the director’s choice in portrayal is hard to pin down, but it certainly curbs the film from being Cronenberg’s finest moment. It is still an enjoyable ride though and well worth your time to explore a master visionist honing his craft.
In some circles, there will be some grumblings about the current state of affairs when it comes to female empowerment on the screen and that perhaps that this film serves as a marker for this wave of change. To those people, I simply say, fuck you.
The pendulum is long overdue a swing towards a bevy of muliebral energy and with Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve) at the helm in both writing and directing duties, we’re presented with a sharp, witty and intelligent film that heralds a prime position for tales led with the feminine gaze.
What struck me above the dialogue from this essentially dark comedy piece, was the casting of some of America’s wittiest comedians, ranging from Alison Brie, Jennifer Coolidge, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Molly Shannon. The inclusion of stellar support actors in Clancy Brown, Laverne Cox, Connie Britton, and Alfred Molina further supports the strength of the script, showcasing just how strong Fennel’s writing is to lure in talent, but more importantly the talent that can deliver the narrative in a manner that it deserves. None more so than Carey Mulligan who leads as 30 year old Cassie, a lady who still lives with her parents, ‘a promising young woman’ who drops out of medical school following the rape of her best friend Nina. It is alluded that the trauma of this incident led to Nina taking her own life and charges Cassie with a lifelong mission to seek vengeance on those who wronged her.
When we first meet Cassie, we quickly learn that she is both smart and calculating when she poses as drunk in order to lure men into taking them back home, proving that they generally only have one thing on their mind and to steer them into correcting their behaviour, changing their ways.
This journey takes a more dark and twisted tale when Cassie further learns that Al Monroe (Chris Lowell) the man responsible for the rape of Nina, is due to marry, and propels Cassie down the rabbit hole of revenge that spirals into a climax that appears out of her control.
It is the final reveal however that truly displays the lengths and breadths that Cassie is willing to go to in order to ensure that justice is established. Not only is this a deeply dark view of her purpose, but also a harrowing reminder that despite the gender pendulum is swinging back, there’s still a long way to come when the course of action taking by Cassie seems to be the only one open for certain individuals to sit up and take notice of just how serious things have gone and how far we still need to go.
The Prognosis:
Fennell is more than accomplished in her first outing in the director’s chair. I can’t wait to see what she produces next.
The script is incredibly on point and projects a fine balance of humour, drama and tension with some powerful performances that bring the melody to the fore. The message is clear and with it, Promising Young Woman delivers a promising start to 2021 genre based movies.
Initially when I heard about this movie, I couldn’t help but think of a sketch from popular British comedy series, The I.T. Crowd.
It did also smack of clutching at straws to try and get a horror vehicle out there that taps into the latest technology and social media trends and invokes the same sense of fear and dread that J Horror films such as The Ring or Kairo subjected into the mainstream.
With previous attempts such as Unfriended missing the mark, I went in with my expectations low. What I found was a film that was able to elevate those expectations, while admittedly it didn’t blow my mind, director Justin Dec manages to wrangle enough out of the plotline to make it both enjoyable and watchable.
We get the inevitable precursor explanation of the virus mobile app called Countdown, which correctly predicts the users time of death. A group of teenagers discuss this at a party where they provoke each other into downloading the app and participating in it as a sort of dare moment. The outcome. One of said teenagers is told she only has hours to live and tries to change her fate only for the app to prove true with its prediction.
The story then revolves further around Nurse Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail – Dead of Summer) who has just finished up her internship at the hospital and been appointed to a full time position. Quinn learns about the app from a patient who was the boyfriend of our first victim. The app tells her that she only has 3 days left to live and with it opens up the labyrinth for Quinn to fall down in order to try and outlast and outwit this curse.
Joining her on her voyage is Matt Monroe (Jordan Calloway – Riverdale) who is predicted to die a few hours before Quinn, and her sister, Jordan (Talitha Bateman – Annabelle: Creation) who also downloads the app. (Insert facepalm emoji).
There’s a fairly decent supporting cast in Matt Letscher (Flash) as the single Dad, Peter Facinelli (The Twilight saga), but the stand out has to go to P.J. Byrne (The Gift) as Father John going against the religious, disciplined stereotype, busting out more as a fanboy of the occult if anything else, which felt refreshing.
The Prognosis:
So despite my predisposition that this film reached higher than my expectations, it still failed to deliver on the horror front and go beyond the realms of previous genre movies in the scare department. Nor did it offer anything too original. It did entertain though, and I can’t help but feel this was down to its cast more than the plotline or directorial choices.
Unfortunately for the sixth and final instalment of the Inner Sanctum Mystery feature films produced by Universal Pictures starring Lon Chaney Jr. I found that the delivery was incredibly formulaic and as such all I wanted to do was reach for the snooze button. Upon reflection, my opinion may have been marred from watching each instalment within close succession and it may have warranted a little bit of space between each viewing to allow each film to strike up its own identity. Without wanting to give too much of the plot away, the one strength that Pillow of Death has over its predecessors is the twist finale, going against the grain of our expectations.
This time around Chaney Jr. stars as an attorney, Wayne Fletcher, whose heart belongs to his secretary Donna Kincaid (Brenda Joyce – Strange Confession), who also happens to be from a fairly wealthy family.. Bound by wedlock, Fletcher is in the midst of filing for a divorce so that he can be with Donna when his wife is found murdered, suffocated by the titular weapon of choice. This makes Fletcher prime suspect number one and must now fight to prove his innocence.
The one person standing in Fletcher’s way is a fraudulent medium, Julian Julian (J. Edward Bromberg) a man who despite his charlatan ways is intent on pointing the finger at Fletcher for his wife’s murder. What makes the task for both parties is the rise in the body count whilst staying at the family mansion one evening.
The film takes on a slightly lighter tone in comparison to the other Inner Sanctum Mysteries, much like other Universal outings such as The Mystery of Marie Roget. One can almost sense the doors opening for Abbott and Costello to march into the mansion and infuse it with satire at any given moment. That direction was not long off for Universal and the tide is certainly changing away from that darker edge that they had been synonymous for over the past decade and a half. It’s a shame as I feel that if they were willing to push the boundaries of dread, their films would have marked an altogether different experience and been much more rewarding, but they were hindered by their times and one must remember that world was going through its own dark times, carrying the burden of a Global war on its back. The stark reality is that people were needing an escape from the world and a need for humour to step in and poke fun at the grim and dire circumstances that humanity had to endure. For Universal, Abbott and Costello would provide that alternate formula… but that’s for another retrospective.
By the time Universal were producing their fifth instalment of the Inner Sanctum Mysteries starring Lon Chaney Jr., the fizzle had run out in this writers’ mind.
Strange Confession sees Chaney Jr. as chemist Jeff Carter, who has been running tests to find a cure for influenza.
One could argue that this film could be viewed with the lens of all the horrors that Capitalism can arise. Carter works for an egocentric tycoon, Roger Graham (J. Carroll Naish) who is always eager to gain a profit by any means even if that means cutting corners. When Carter grows wise to Graham’s ways he initially resigns, and works at a local store. Once married to Mary (Brenda Joyce) and raising a son, their fiances take a strain and Carter finds that he has no choice but to work once more for Graham. It is here that he potentially finds the influenza cure and is encouraged by Graham to go to South America to perfect his findings. Unbeknownst to Carter however, Graham has eyes on rolling out the formula despite not having a 100 percent success rate, and also to prize Mary away from Carter while he is away.
Tragedy inevitably strikes when Carter’s son is fatally struck down by the killer virus. Once Carter learns of this, he only has vengeance on his mind.
It takes the final reel before this film hits home and true, but the lead up to its conclusion is slow and cumbersome. Stand out performance goes to Lloyd Bridges as the bright and cheery friend to Carter, Dave Curtis, and potentially the only real spark in the film.
When I came to casting a retrospective of the Universal Inner Sanctum Mystery movies, I decided to watch them all fairly close together. As such, due to the similarity in style and substance, combined with the fact that Lon Chaney Jr. starred in all sic of the, a blurring of the narratives came about.
In the case of The Frozen Ghost, I found that I struggled to bring to mind what actually occurred without looking it back up again. This is surely an indicator that the movie had little or no impact on me, which says a lot about my connection to the movie.
When I did research back into it again, the visuals soon sprang to mind and I was left pondering about why it didn’t resonate so well.
My resolution comes down to that the film was just a bit messy in its delivery.
The tale presents Chaney Jr as mentalist Alex Gregor, who is provoked by an intoxicated non-believer in his audience that he is a fake, so out of anger, hypnotizes the individual spurring a heart attack that leads to the man’s untimely death.
Gregor is now consumed with grief and then turns within himself, ending his relationship with assistant Maura (Evelyn Ankers in a subdued performance, albeit still a strong one) and runs away to work as a lecturer for an old friend, Mme Valerie Monet (Tala Birell).
Trouble creeps up once more however when Valerie also turns up dead and Gregor becomes prime suspect number one.
The continuing theme involved with the Inner Sanctum Mysteries centres around mystery, intrigue and in the case of the movies, a wronged man troubled with murder most foul.
The Frozen Ghost has to shift and change on numerous occasions to accommodate the plight of its lead protagonist, who tries to figure out if he truly is responsible for the death of these individuals through the use of paranormal abilities.
The road isn’t a straight one to the conclusion and the perpetrators are all too obvious, so the attempt at clever deception is lost much to the detriment of the film.
The performances are still strong regardless, but unfortunately the executions is just too weak.
Surgeons of Horror 