‘Antebellum’ is a punishingly self-congratulatory, crystalline thriller with an egregious exploitation of the nation’s dehumanization of Nubian citizens to the point of non-minority prejudice (Jena Malone is defiantly overacting as Elizabeth, a Caucasian succubus who obviates eye contact with “inferior” ethnicities).
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‘Possessor Uncut’ is a clinical, nonplussed grotesquery about the fungible nature of identity in an Orwellian surveillance society and Canadian auteur Brandon Cronenberg more than adjudicates how plainly rancorous monolithic corporations are and will be in the adjacent future.
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‘You Should Have Left’ is a byzantine, paranormal thriller which is also a scalpel-sharp Tinseltown satire (e.g. The rhetoric of a “closed set” is verboten to non- industry outsiders like Susanna’s (Amanda Seyfried) scandal-embroiled husband Theo Conroy (Kevin Bacon) but not the latte delivery boy).
‘Hubie Halloween’ is Adam Sandler’s bovine, stratospherically unfunny vendetta against the Academy Awards committee who omitted his nomination for his tour-de-force performance in last year’s ‘Uncut Gems’.
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Slide-show photography of Montreal’s Starliner Towers is immediately unnerving despite being pictures of the swanky tennis court and delicatessen. It could be the wryly monotone instructional video announcer and how it culminates with the medical examiner on the premises. David Cronenberg germinates the groundwork for the epidemic thunderclap ahead with those images and how the doorman’s gun is “just an advertising gimmick.”
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‘Train to Busan: Peninsula’ is a faineant sequel to the exquisitely overrated South Korean zombie flick from 2016 and it doesn’t filibuster about pandemic theories (a pundit television appearance is the viewers’ only hypothesis and the acting is quite amateurish) when a breakneck pace is stipulated.
Let’s all marvel at the fact that this blaxploitation horror flick is rated PG which was much more lenient during this era. While the boom mics are either hovering in the frame or muzzled with echoes around Count Dracula’s (Charles Macaulay) opulent manor in Transylvania, the frugal sound design is the only AIP aspect of this surprisingly baroque, sophisticated production.
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Onward with the pervasive trends of the 80’s, ‘DeepStar Six’ is Carolco’s twiddling, extremely slow-burn installment in the abyss-spelunking subgenre. The dry-for-wet technique for marine-biology authenticity that was so palpable in ‘Leviathan’ is a facsimile of matte composites and miniatures here. The sea floor collapse beneath a trawler is aesthetically apocryphal.
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‘ The Devil All the Time’ is a chronologically jagged, hyperliterate mood piece with a homespun narrator device for a William Peter Blatty-esque yarn about Pentecostal extremism. The clergical image of a gunnery sergeant Miller Jones crucified in the Solomon Islands is graphically evocative but many of the backwoods horror are effigies for smarmy shock value.
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I suppose the reason that left-wing filmmakers regurgitated the analogous storyline of a resurrected death-row killer was because it was their soapbox against capital punishment. As such, ‘Nightmare Beach’s is a tactless notch on the flashpoint topic which nullifies any plea for a venial, Innocent man bring executed since Edward Diablo (Tony Bolano) is truly a flaying biker sadist.
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