- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 4, 2016

The Purge: Election Year: Do Progressive Politics Make Good Horror?

Dawn Keetley

The Purge: Election Year is the third film in James DeMonaco’s franchise and continues on the trajectory set in motion by its two predecessors: it represents a broader political scope with proportionally less dread. Indeed, if the Purge franchise has had only a marginal grasp on the horror genre, Election Year may represent its letting go (though it is still labeled “horror” in IMDb—albeit secondarily to “action”).

In Election Year, the seeds of the resistance to Purge Night that were growing in The Purge: Anarchy (2014) have come to some sort of blossoming in the form of Senator Charlene (Charlie) Roan, played by Elizabeth Mitchell (also currently starring in Freeform’s new summer horror series, Dead of Summer). Charlie witnessed the slaughter of her entire family on Purge Night eighteen years earlier (indeed, her mother had to choose which of her family members would survive). Charlie is not only, unsurprisingly, deeply opposed to the Purge, but also to violence in any form. She intends to defeat the NFFA (The New Founding Fathers of America) and their Purge platform at the voting booth. Ballots not bullets. Read more

Posted on June 30, 2016

Blake Lively Doesn’t Need a Bigger Boat in The Shallows

Dawn Keetley

Synopsis of The Shallows: After her mother dies of cancer, Nancy Adams (Blake Lively) drops out of med school and heads to a secret beach in Mexico, one her mother used to visit. Surfing alone, she is attacked by a large shark and stranded on a small rock about 200 yards from shore.

One of the handful of big theatrical horror releases of the summer of 2016 (produced by Columbia Pictures), The Shallows is expertly directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who is no stranger to horror. Collet-Serra has helmed House of Wax (2005) and Orphan (2009), as well as directing the first two episodes of ABC’s interesting but finally foundering supernatural found-footage horror series, The River (2012).

The Shallows has inevitably been compared to Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), which both is and is not an accurate comparison. On the one hand nothing like Jaws, The Shallows does, toward the end in particular, make numerous covert references to it—offering an explicit and interesting re-writing. Read more

Posted on June 28, 2016

Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre Gets it SOOO Right

Gwen

Review: “Sharkansas” takes a bite out of my horror comedy lovin’ heart.

TV Movie 2015 | Jim Wynorski | Not Rated | 84 minutes | (USA)

Synopsis: Local fracking shatters the earth’s core, releasing deadly prehistoric sharks with a taste for voluptuous female inmates who recently escaped imprisonment…or did they?

Grade: B+

I am going to break this post in to two parts. The first part being a simple review of the film’s pros and cons…the second part unleashes my love of sharks and includes a rant about something really cool that I noticed about this film.

PART I:

The Nuts and Bolts:

I absolutely loved this movie! The only reason I gave it a B+ instead of an A is because I slightly enjoyed Jersey Shore Shark Attack (2012) more so I had to prioritize. I will be clear; this film is a B horror film that incorporates a lofty flavoring of cheese with its horror. If you are looking for super special effects or a really scary plot, then this movie might not be for you (although I still suggest you give it a shot). Read more

Posted on June 24, 2016

The Price of Bones: “I just want to be thin” (2016)

Dawn Keetley

A horror short featuring an all-female cast, The Price of Bones stars Summerisa Bell Stevens, Jordan Anton, and Lisa Dennett as two young women, Caprice (Stevens) and Heather (Anton), and Caprice’s unsympathetic mother (Dennett). The film is written by Samantha Kolesnik, directed by Brandon Taylor, and produced by Kolesnik, Melissa Sherry, Michael Sherry, and Hollow Tree Films.

The Price of Bones is about the intense pressure on girls and women to be thin, a pressure that, not least, creates severely disordered eating and exercise habits. Taking the perspective of Caprice, the film focuses both visually and narratively on bodies and food, showing us the constricted world of a woman who can’t see and experience anything that doesn’t have to do with the size of her body. She wakes up and looks at her body; she goes into the kitchen and is confronted with food she doesn’t want to eat and a mother who tries to make her eat it; she exercises with her friend, and they talk about eating and about how thin they are and how much thinner they need to be. Read more

Posted on June 19, 2016

CELL: Phoning It In

Dawn Keetley

Cell is a disaster, and I say that as someone who has read (and liked) Stephen King’s novel and was very much looking forward to this adaptation. Moreover, the fact that Cell is directed by Tod Williams, who also directed Paranormal Activity 2 (in my view, the best entry in the franchise), stars John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, and was written in part by Stephen King himself, promised much more than what, unfortunately, has been delivered.

Cell is something of a cross between Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), though not nearly as good as either (yes, not as good as The Happening!). Read more