Scott Weinberg - MODERN HORRORS: An A to Z of Horror Movie Reviews

MODERN HORRORS

by Scott Weinberg

@scottEweinberg

Edited by

David Hughes

@DavidHughesTwit

Andrew Jones

@ethanrunt

cover design by

David Hughes

Steve Ramsden

@SynchronicityN4

published worldwide by

The Horror Show Ltd.

@TheHorrorShowTV

correspondence to

info@thehorrorshow.tv

This eBook edition first published in 2015

All rights reserved

Scott Weinberg, 2015

Cover design by

David Hughes

Steve Ramsden

@SynchronicityN4. Copyright applicable.

Reviews 2015 Scott E. Weinberg

Introduction 2015 James Wan

All rights reserved

by Scott Weinberg

The first film review I ever published online was in 1999. It was Lake Placid . Yeah, the goofy killer croc flick. The site was eFilmCritic, the movie was so-so, and I was not a very astute writer.

I suppose I always wanted to be a film critic. Growing up, movies were pretty much all I talked about. (Fine. Video games too.) High school taught me that I had no natural skills, although according to other people, I did show a glimmer of promise in the writing department. My ultimate goal was to write about film for a newspaper, a magazine, or perhaps even television so once I finally got on to "the internet" and found a forum for my early writing, I just kept plowing forward.

Even 15 years ago it was plainly obvious that there were tons of smart people writing about film online. I started getting nervous. I had no idea how to make a name for myself in the field, so I just kept my head down, wrote as much as I could, and tried to improve. After about five years of writing for no money, I finally landed a few paying jobs and then I went back to A) writing as much as I could, and B) trying to improve with each new piece I wrote.

The weird irony is this: the Internet gave me the opportunity to pursue my "dream job," but at the same time the internet was making the "traditional" film critic sort of obsolete. (Much better film writers than me get laid off every month.) So I've had to jump around a lot and while I cover films of all shapes, sizes, and genres, my favorite type of movie (by far) is the independent horror film. I've written for dozens of websites over the years, and I'm grateful for every one of those opportunities. But since websites come and websites go, I thought it might be cool to collate all of my horror film reviews into one handy resource.

Some of these reviews are still available online somewhere, but most of them are not. Several of them were almost lost forever, and that would have made me very miserable indeed. My thanks to David Hughes for getting this book rolling, to every editor who ever tweaked, proofed, and improved my stuff, and to everyone who has read, shared, and supported my work for the past 15+ years.

I truly hope that horror film fans enjoy this collection.

@scottEweinberg

by James Wan

Scott Weinberg has had a profound impact on the psyche of my career more than any other film critics out there.

To understand this, lets rewind back over a decade to the world premiere of Saw at the Sundance Film Festival. I was about 26 years old, and had just screened my first independent feature to a real audience at the Egyptian Theater. I was a nervous wreck. I didnt feel I had made a good enough movie, and that I had let my buddy, who had written a terrific script, down. Quite frankly, I was very green, and inexperienced enough to know that I couldnt direct the ambitious movie I had in my head for $700K and in 18 days. It was rough, it was raw, it was naively uncouth but yet here we were, showing it to the rest of the world.

That night, I stayed up. I couldnt sleep. I was waiting. Waiting for reaction. And sure enough, in the early hours of the next morning, the reviews poured in. I was sick to my stomach. At worse, they were horrible; at best, they were indifferent. Needless to say, it was debilitating. This was supposed to be my breakout film. All I wanted was to make a movie that people would enjoy. Then I saw a write-up by a Scott Weinberg in a website called efilmcritic.com, and it made me remove the razor from my wrist. It wasnt so much that it was a glowing positive review though that helped tremendously but it was more the fact that it gave me a glimmer of hope. Hope that others may feel the same way. In the coming months, Scott championed it with the kind of zealot passion with which Leigh and I had made the film.

Thats what I love about Scott: he champions the little guys. Hes a staunch supporter of independent genre films, but does it in his writing with a working class, blue-collar attitude. He fights for the underdog that is worth fighting for, and his passion for critiquing movies stems from his even bigger passion for watching movies all kinds of movies. His writing is filled with honesty, wit and biting sarcasm, but its never mean-spirited. When he finds a movie worth advocating, he writes with the kind of childish abandonment of someone who just cant wait to share his excitement with the rest of the world.

To this very day, I still highly value Scotts opinion whether its of my own work, or of an exciting new indie horror movie coming out.

Oh, and plus, his reviews are a damn fun read.

James Wan is the director of Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring.

Contents

F (2011)

(2003)

(2009)

(2009)

+1, aka Plus One (2013)

Have you ever seen a movie about a group of high school (or perhaps college age) kids who go to a party, only to come up against something outrageously violent or dangerous or horrific? Of course you have. You're older than ten years old and you're reading a book of horror film reviews. It's only pertinent because the new sci-fi/horror/feature-length- Twilight Zone -ish movie called Plus One (or simply +1 ) is well aware of all those movies, and it knows you are too.

With that in mind, it's cool to note that Plus One is not about stalkers or monsters or alien invaders. As the title plainly indicates, it's a thriller about plus ones. In other words, everyone at this rowdy house party seems to have spawned a double! Or a clone! Or something like that. Most of the partiers are way too distracted to notice the bizarre new arrivals, but we do have a quartet of colorful heroes in Nice Guy, Angry Girlfriend, Comic Relief, and Unexpectedly Intelligent Hottie. (Those aren't the character's actual names, but it sums them up fairly well, and it's not a knock on the performances, which are all quite good.)

Director Dennis Iliadis (last seenhelming the surprisingly solid remake of The Last House on the Left ) wants to keep a lot of plates spinning here. At certain points Plus One feels like a John Hughes homage, an affectionate send-up of 1950s sci-fi thrillers, and a pointed piece of satire about the dangers of conformity, especially among people who are young, naive, and very, very drunk. If Plus One doesn't keep all those plates aloft for a full 90-some minutes there are some clunky moments of exposition and a few sequences that simply run way too long we can give the filmmakers credit for trying a new approach. We can only take so many slasher attacks, after all, and it's not like they lend themselves well to any sort of amusing social commentary.

Aside from a rocky start and a handful of moments that feel simply redundant (perhaps by design), Plus One has just enough multi-genre appeal to keep viewers interested. Each of the four semi-heroes find their own way to deal with this unexpected attack of the clones, so if the romance between Nice Guy (Rhys Wakefield) and Angry Girlfriend (Ashley Hinshaw) doesn't work for you, you can choose to focus on the Comic Relief (Logan Miller) or the Unexpectedly Intelligent Hottie (Natalie Hall). Also rather good are twin actresses Suzanne and Colleen Dengelas, as the shy but very sharp Lonely Girl. Even when the pacing of Plus One winds down a bit (like in Act II), the leads are quite appealing and their material (by screenwriter Bill Gullo) is a touch more intelligent than one normally sees in indie-style multi-genre concoctions.