horror – Page 23 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Ju-On: The Grudge

Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
Written & directed by Takashi Shimizu

One of the common themes I’ve seen in my look at J-horror thus far is an exploration of loneliness and a focus on the victimization of women & children. If you’re making existential horror in Japan, then it makes sense there will be some big ideas to tackle. They apply to almost every nation on Earth, but these movies look at them from the Japanese perspective. This movie is also a weird anomaly in that many viewers assume it’s the first in the Grudge franchise but is actually the third picture, just the first to get a theatrical release. You wouldn’t know it by watching Ju-On as one of its strengths is that it slowly lays out the core haunting and the bits of history behind it. It’s a franchise encompassing 13 films, including the horribly bad 2020 sequel. The less said about that one, the better.

Movie Review – Audition

Audition (1999)
Written by Daisuke Tengan
Directed Takashi Miike

Takashi Miike is a cinematic force of nature I stumbled across one night while sitting in the Belcourt Theater in 2001. I can’t remember the film I was waiting to see, but the trailer for Audition played beforehand. If you’ve seen this trailer, then you understand what I mean when I say it was one of the most jarring things I’d seen at the time. In a matter of a minute and a half, I was wholly intrigued about what this insane, bizarre movie was. A month or so later, I returned with friends and watched Audition. At the time, I didn’t think I fully appreciated it. My vocabulary and understanding of film were much more limited than when I recently revisited the movie.

Movie Review – Pulse (2001)

Pulse (2001)
Written & Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Japanese horror cinema didn’t come into existence in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but it certainly reached a peak in terms of its exposure to the global movie-going market. You likely know of the ones that got American adaptations, The Ring and The Grudge. Pulse also got a less well-received American version, but I have always heard positive things about the Japanese original. With this in mind, I decided to do a short dip into the J-horror of this period, focusing on the “classics” to get a sense of what was popular. These were movies I was aware of, some of which I actually saw, and seemed to have a significant impact at the time in American popular horror.

Movie Review – The Humans

The Humans (2021)
Written & Directed by Stephen Karam

You wouldn’t be in the wrong to walk away from The Humans feeling a bit confused about how you were supposed to feel watching this filmed stage play. The work’s creator, Stephen Karam, has imbued his movie with such a foreboding and menacing tone. This is followed by numerous jumpscares that cut through the monotonous and passive-aggressive dialogue of the characters. The story’s setting even brushes up against the premise in an interesting way: A crumbling New York apartment complex where a family meets to have Thanksgiving dinner. The audience is constantly unsettled by noises coming from neighboring apartments or figures briefly glimpsed through blurry, rain-stained windows. This is a Thanksgiving ghost story for the 21st century.

Movie Review – Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Written by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman
Directed by Jason Reitman

Can the Ghostbusters join the ranks of Star Wars and the MCU as a cinematic franchise to be mined into the ground until everyone hates it? This is the question Sony executives will be asking this weekend as they open the second Ghostbusters reboot/sequel in the last 5 years. Having recently rewatched the first two Ghostbusters movies, I was curious to see how hard they hit the nostalgia button with this one, very likely as the studio wanted to wash the stink of the 2016 film away from theaters. I suspected and was proven right that the script would lean heavy into nostalgia bait territory.

Movie Review – Honeydew

Honeydew (2021)
Written & Directed by Devereux Milburn

Sometimes you come across a movie so bizarre that you can’t quite figure out if you enjoyed it or hated it. Honeydew is such a movie. It probably didn’t help that I watched it after consuming my nightly quarter of an edible, but I find that often acts as a filter, heightening the things I like about a piece of media and spotlighting everything I hate. For Honeydew, my mind was confused while watching it because you had so many elements clashing with each other that made the picture feel like it was causing you to love and hate it moment by moment. Ultimately, I wondered if that wasn’t the intent of the movie.

Movie Review – Come True

Come True (2021)
Written & Directed by Anthony Scott Burns

Certain movies hit my personal aesthetics so perfectly I love them immediately. Beyond the Black Rainbow and It Follows are two films that sit in that dreamlike 80s-ish wheelhouse. They don’t spam cultural references to get across their implied eras; they just exude the vibe. When you watch them, it feels like that movie you saw when you were up way too late, half asleep, not sure if you remember it quite right. They are movies where you don’t need concrete logic; you just need them to feel a certain way. Come True is another picture I can add to that list. Its blend of visuals and music made me immediately love it.

Movie Review – Ghostbusters II

Ghostbusters II (1989)
Written by Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd
Directed by Ivan Reitman

Ghostbusters was always meant to be a standalone movie, but financial success in the 1980s meant you had to make a sequel, which remains true today. But something weird happened where a new chairman of Columbia Pictures took control in 1986. David Putnam liked smaller movies that garnered critical acclaim, even greenlighting a handful of foreign directors’ transitions into American films. So as big as the hype around Ghostbusters even years out from its release, everything seemed to point to the franchise being dead. The main actors were also obstacles as many of them were booked up or simply weren’t keen on revisiting the world of Ghostbusters. Putnam was eventually removed as chair in 1987 after making some incendiary comments about Bill Murray and others. Dawn Steel was put in charge, and after numerous box office failures for the studio, she saw Ghostbusters II as a way to redeem Columbia financially.

Movie Review – Ghostbusters (1984)

Ghostbusters (1984)
Written by Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Rick Moranis
Directed by Ivan Reitman

Ghostbusters is a film that has firmly placed itself in the memory of many an older Millennial. For myself, I can remember my family renting a VCR (that was a thing at one point) and this movie for the weekend when I must have been four years old. I vividly remember sitting in that living room and being scared by the opening library scene. I think that’s one of the things that’s key to why Ghostbusters stuck with so many people. It was as much a comedy as it was a horror movie. That balance of genres helps soften the more frightening moments, but it’s still very much a creepy, scary film. This is something every sequel fails to understand and explains why they’ve done so poorly.

Movie Review – Psycho Goreman

Psycho Goreman (2020)
Written & Directed by Steven Kostanski

1980s/90s nostalgia is running rampant in popular culture. Whether its new streaming series that evoke the mood of the period or new versions of classic action figures released into the wild or reboots of franchises that are beloved, America just cannot get enough of crawling into a cocoon of childhood memories instead of confronting that ever-present horror of this moment in time. Psycho Goreman is a violent beating from the past, refusing to allow things to be so fuzzy and friendly. Instead, we get the bloody horrifying Saturday morning cartoon we all sort of really dreamt about, a hilarious and absurdist take on the Power Rangers, E.T., and many other corporate childhood darlings.