A retrospective by Brooks Rich What scares you in a film? Is it a masked killer jumping out of the darkness with a knife? A ghost appearing in the blink of an eye? Someone having their skin peeled off slowly? There are all kinds of scares in horror. Today, I want to focus on one of the most interesting: psychological horror. A subgenre that lives entirely in the mind. The best ones don’t show us much. They make us do the work. And sometimes, that’s far scarier than anything we could actually see. A work crew is hired to clear asbestos out of the run-down Danvers State Hospital. There’s competition for the job, so Gordon, the crew’s leader, underbids with a two-week estimate—something he knows isn’t realistic. But they get the job. Then he cuts it to a week. Now they have no choice but to grind. And then… something might start happening. There may be something in the dark of Danvers State. Or there may not be. This is the brilliance of Session 9 . The film lives and dies on i...
A retrospective by Brooks Rich I know Woody Allen is a complicated figure. He is a creep in a lot of ways and some people find his sexual weirdness to be too much. I get that. But on the blog I sometimes like to separate the art from artist. Not always to be sure. Jeepers Creepers will never be covered here because Victor Salva is a useless piece of human garbage. What he did I can't ignore. Allen I can push aside him being weird to cover him now and then. It's hard to write a film blog and not mention a Woody Allen film now and then. The man has some bangers. And I've always wanted to cover this film. The concept is so interesting and Allen post 2000 is fertile ground for Forgotten Film Friday. So let's look at the film and not Allen himself. Melinda and Melinda is a dual narrative about a woman named Melinda, an underrated and brilliant Radha Mitchell, who shows up unexpectedly at a dinner party in New York. The film questions if life is inherently tragic or comic a...