And Yet Still Another Ten Good Horror Movies (#41-50)

I noticed something weird when re-reading last year’s blog post on this subject. I was ranking the 31st  40th-best horror movies when I realized that some of my rankings were way off. “Get Out,” which I ranked as #32, went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay – a first for the genre. Surely it deserved a higher slot than #32. The film before it on this list, “It Follows,” though just three years old, remains wholly re-watchable, and its stylistic and tonal similarities to 1978’s “Halloween” make it, like “Get Out,” a high-water mark in horror cinema during the genre’s recent quality resurgence.

In hindsight, surely both of these movies should rank higher on this first-part list than, say, “The Cabin in the Woods,” a meta-horror comedy from 2012 that, while equally original, likely won’t age as well. I will posit that they should even rank higher than “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which I enjoyed in the 1980’s but which rarely comes up anymore in discussions about great horror movies. And yet I ranked “Cabin” at #10 and “Nightmare” at #18. Of course, I hadn’t seen “It Follows” when I compiled the first two posts on the subject; and “Get Out” hadn’t even been made at that point.

What can I say? Like every other post on my site, I leave the written content as is (grammatical corrections notwithstanding). The content is what it is, and I’m certainly not the only critic – amateur or otherwise – to rethink a movie’s rank or rating after voicing his or her initial opinion about the film. With that being said, below is my latest list – the fifth in a series – of great horror movies:

Continue reading “And Yet Still Another Ten Good Horror Movies (#41-50)”

The “It” Movie Event of the Season Falls Short of Greatness

This past Friday I did something that I haven’t done in far too long: I saw a movie in the theater on opening day. The movie: “It: Chapter One.”

When the first YouTube trailer was released, download records were broken and a buzz formed around the movie, a buzz that has never really died down. This fact, coupled with my being a fan of the 1990 ABC-TV miniseries and the 1986 novel, which I’ve read three times, had me go in to Andy Muschietti’s (“Mama”) film with high hopes (and an 18-inch gourmet pretzel to snack on).

My full review follows, but in a word: meh. Continue reading “The “It” Movie Event of the Season Falls Short of Greatness”