Part 7 – The Watchable
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
The films in this tier mostly work on one strong structural decision instead of on sustained quality. Saw keeps its answer lying on the bathroom floor in every wide shot, The Pyx runs one timeline forward to a death and one backward from the body, and 30 Days of Night gives its vampires a language the audience can follow and the characters cannot.
The other pattern is professionals who find the supernatural tedious. Jack Crow treats vampire hunting as a trade with equipment and an employer who is slow to pay, and Stake Land makes its vampires weather so the militia can be the antagonist.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the seventh of nine parts.
Saw leaves its answer on the bathroom floor in every wide shot, and The Pyx gives the ending away in the first five minutes. Build the structure in the Plot Handbook.
1. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"Lee refuses to speak and the count is worse for it."
Terence Fisher brought Christopher Lee back eight years after the first Hammer Dracula, and Lee refused to speak a word of the dialogue he was given. He has claimed the lines were unusable and the screenwriter has claimed there were none written, and the argument has never been settled by anybody who was in the room.
The silence turns out to be the film’s strongest asset. Lee hisses, stares and moves, and the count becomes a physical presence with no interiority available to an audience at all. Nothing he does can be reasoned with because nothing he says can be argued against across the entire ninety minutes.
The resurrection sequence is the best thing Hammer staged in the sixties. A servant hangs a body above a stone coffin, cuts a throat, and the blood runs down onto ash while the camera holds steady. It is patient, entirely practical, and considerably nastier than the studio usually permitted itself to be.
Andrew Keir replaces Cushing as Father Sandor and the substitution works better than it should. He is a working monk with a rifle and no ceremony about any of it, and the film treats vampirism as a practical problem requiring practical men with equipment and a clear understanding of running water.
2. The Pyx (1973) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Pyx (1973)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"One timeline runs to the death and one runs back from the body."
Harvey Hart made a Canadian film that runs two timelines at once, one moving forward toward a woman’s death and one moving backward from the discovery of her body. Karen Black plays the woman and wrote and performed the songs on the soundtrack herself. The novel by John Buell had been published in 1959.
The structure is the whole achievement and it was unusual for 1973. The audience knows the outcome from the opening minutes, so the tension comes entirely from working out what happened and why, and both strands converge on a single apartment building in Montreal at the same moment.
Christopher Plummer plays the detective and the performance is unhurried throughout. He is methodical, he is not a genius, and he arrives at the answer by walking around asking people questions in a city that has no interest in helping him do his job properly. Plummer was in his early forties and had not yet become a character actor.
The satanic material is handled with considerably more restraint than the decade usually managed. There is no spectacle, no ceremony filmed at length, and the film’s position is that the people involved are wealthy, bored and entirely ordinary in every other respect about their lives. Nobody in the film is shown enjoying any of it.
It was released into almost no attention and has stayed obscure for fifty years. The Montreal locations, the bilingual dialogue and a genuine sense of a specific city in a specific winter are what separate it from the American films it was competing against at the time.
3. Zombie (1979) / Flesh Eaters [full review]
► Read the full review of Zombie (1979) / Flesh Eaters
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"The splinter sequence holds far longer than is bearable."
Lucio Fulci made an unauthorized sequel to Dawn of the Dead, after its Italian release as Zombi, and his own went out as Zombi 2 with no connection to Romero beyond the title. It was banned in Britain as a video nasty and prosecuted repeatedly.
The underwater sequence is the reason anybody remembers it. A zombie fights a live shark off the coast of Santo Domingo, with a stunt performer in makeup and a sedated animal, and the whole thing was shot without any of the protection such a sequence would require today.
The splinter is the most notorious shot in Italian horror. A woman is pulled slowly toward a broken door and the film holds on the approach for far longer than is bearable, in close-up, with no cut away at any point before or after the moment of contact.
Fulci’s dead are the best-designed in the form. Decayed past anything Romero attempted, with worms and earth still in the sockets, moving slowly and without any sound, and the makeup by Giannetto De Rossi holds up considerably better than most of its decade. Nothing about them moves faster than a walk at any point.
The plot is close to irrelevant and Fulci has never pretended otherwise. A boat in New York harbour, an island, a doctor and an explanation nobody needs, and the film exists entirely to deliver four or five images that have outlasted every picture it was competing with.
4. Friday the 13th (1980) [full review]
► Read the full review of Friday the 13th (1980)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"The killer arrives with twenty minutes left and is somebody’s mother."
Sean Cunningham made it explicitly to copy Halloween, took out a trade advertisement for a title before a script existed, and the film cost around five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It took close to sixty million and produced eleven sequels across four decades. Victor Miller wrote the screenplay in a matter of weeks.
The reveal is the structural idea nobody credits it for. The killer is a middle-aged woman avenging a drowned son, she arrives with twenty minutes left, and the entire first hour is built on an audience assuming a shape they have been trained to assume by the film it was copying.
Tom Savini’s effects are the reason it worked commercially. The arrow through the throat, achieved with a false neck and a pump, and the machete sequence are staged with a precision the rest of the film never reaches anywhere in its running time. Savini was twenty-nine and had already worked on Dawn of the Dead.
Betsy Palmer took the part because she needed a car and has said so repeatedly since. The performance is the best thing in it, entirely committed, and her explanation of what happened at the lake is delivered with a warmth that makes the whole last act work.
Everything the series became arrives later. Jason is not the killer here, the hockey mask is two films away, and the picture that launched a franchise is a small mystery about a woman nobody in the camp has thought about for twenty years. None of the iconography the series traded on for decades exists yet.
Dracula speaks no dialogue at all and Kaufman is a landlord with a waiting list. Two ways to make a threat unarguable, in the Antagonist Handbook.
5. The Fog (1980) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Fog (1980)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"Barbeau never shares a scene with anybody in the entire film."
Carpenter made it directly after Halloween and hated the first cut enough to reshoot roughly a third of the film, adding gore he had deliberately left out and a substantial amount of the fog itself. The revised version is the one everybody has seen. Dean Cundey shot both versions and the seams do not show.
The ghost story is told in the first three minutes by John Houseman around a fire, and the film never improves on it. A leper colony, a deliberate wrecking, gold, and a ship driven onto rocks by a false light by men the town has since built a church to honour.
The fog is the best practical effect of its decade and it is entirely mechanical. Oil foggers, wind machines and a lighting rig behind it, and Carpenter shoots it moving against the wind so anybody paying attention understands what it is before a single ghost has been seen.
Adrienne Barbeau plays the whole film alone in a lighthouse radio station and never meets another cast member. She is the voice everybody else is listening to, she sees the fog first, and the structure gives the town a narrator who cannot do anything except watch and describe.
The centenary is the subject. A town celebrating a founding that was a murder, with the descendants of the men responsible running the ceremony, and the film’s position is that the debt was always going to be collected from somebody who had no part in incurring it.
6. Pet Sematary (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of Pet Sematary (1989)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"The catastrophe starts with a neighbour trying to be kind."
Mary Lambert directed from King’s own screenplay, and King had left the novel in a drawer for years because he thought it was too bleak to publish. Paramount shot it in Maine with King insisting on the location, and he appears in it as a minister. Lambert had come from music video and returned for the sequel.
The premise is grief with a mechanism attached. A burial ground that returns what is put into it, a father who knows what happened to the neighbour’s dog, and a film about a man doing something he has been explicitly warned about by everybody who has tried it before.
Fred Gwynne’s Jud is the best performance in any King adaptation of the period. He is kind, he is lonely, and he is the one who shows Louis the path because he wanted to do something for a neighbour and could not see where the gesture was going to end.
Zelda is the sequence everybody remembers and it has almost nothing to do with the plot. A sister with spinal meningitis kept in a back bedroom, remembered by a wife who was a child at the time, played by a man to get the proportions wrong. Andrew Hubatsek was cast for exactly that reason.
The ending is bleaker than the studio wanted and King held the line on it. Nothing is learned, the pattern repeats, and the last scene is a man sitting at a kitchen table waiting for something he has already been told is not going to be what he wants.
7. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"An hour of one genre, then no transition at all."
Robert Rodriguez directed a Quentin Tarantino screenplay written years earlier for an effects company, and the film is famous for changing genre completely at the midpoint with no warning at all. Nothing in the first hour indicates what the second contains. Rodriguez shot it in roughly forty days.
That first hour is a hostage crime picture played entirely straight. Two brothers move a family across the Mexican border, the tension is about whether Richie will do something nobody can undo, and the performances treat it as the only film anybody is making. Juliette Lewis and Harvey Keitel play the family in the camper.
The turn happens in a bar and the picture commits to it instantly. The Titty Twister becomes a vampire nest, the crime plot is dropped without ceremony and the second half runs on practical creature effects, improvised weapons and a body count nobody survives with any dignity. Tom Savini and Fred Williamson are both in the bar.
George Clooney was making his first film lead and the casting works because Seth Gecko is the only person behaving sensibly. He is competent, he is practical, and Tarantino plays his brother as genuinely disturbing without softening any part of what the character does to people. Salma Hayek performs the table dance in a single take.
The structural trick works once and Rodriguez has always known it. The sequels attempt the same reveal with an audience that already knows it is coming, removing the entire effect and leaving a plain vampire film with nothing underneath it. Two direct-to-video sequels followed and a television series in 2014.
8. The Devil’s Advocate (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Devil’s Advocate (1997)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"He is never offered anything he had not already chosen."
Taylor Hackford made a legal thriller that turns into a theological one, with Al Pacino playing the devil as a Manhattan law firm partner. It cost around fifty-seven million dollars and the Milton monologue at the end is the most quoted thing Pacino did in that decade.
The premise is vanity instead of temptation and the film is clear about the difference. Kevin is never offered anything he has not already chosen, the firm simply supplies more of what he was going to take, and every damning decision he makes is one he would have made anyway.
Charlize Theron gives the performance the film is built on and almost nobody discusses it. Mary Ann is isolated in a city where nobody believes her, her deterioration is shown at length, and the picture treats her as a person being destroyed instead of a device.
The law firm material is better than the supernatural material. Cases nobody should take, a jury selection scene that is genuinely unsettling, and a senior partner who never once asks anybody to do anything they were not already prepared to do for a larger office. Jeffrey Jones and Craig T. Nelson appear in the firm.
Pacino is enormous in the last twenty minutes and Hackford lets him be. The monologue runs several minutes, it is a sustained argument about God as an absentee landlord, and it works because the film has spent two hours establishing that the man is not wrong about very much.
9. Vampires (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Vampires (1998)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"Hunting as a trade, with equipment and an employer who pays late."
Carpenter made a vampire western in New Mexico with dust, wide lenses and a slide guitar score he wrote himself. The whole picture is constructed as a frontier film that happens to contain the undead, and nothing in it is played for atmosphere or mystery. Don Jakoby adapted John Steakley’s novel Vampire$.
James Woods plays Jack Crow as a contractor who finds the work tedious. He is profane, exhausted and entirely unromantic about the subject, and the film treats vampire hunting as a trade with equipment, procedures and an employer who is slow about settling invoices. Daniel Baldwin plays Montoya alongside him.
The extraction method is the best practical idea in the film. A harpoon, a winch and a truck, used to drag a vampire out into daylight, and Carpenter establishes the technique in the first ten minutes and then works variations on it for the rest of the running time.
Thomas Ian Griffith’s Valek is barely characterized and the film has no need for him to be more. He is the oldest one, he wants a specific object, and Carpenter is considerably more interested in the working men than in the thing they have been hired to work against.
The Catholic material is where the film finds a subject. A church that has been funding the hunt for centuries, a cardinal with his own reasons, and a crew who discover the people paying them have known considerably more than they were saying the whole time. Maximilian Schell plays the cardinal financing the operation.
Daybreakers works out blood rationing and day driving mode, and Vampires treats hunting as a trade with unpaid invoices. Follow the premise into the World Builder’s Handbook.
10. The Resident Evil Series (2002-2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Resident Evil Series (2002-2016)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"The games run on scarcity and the films run on abundance."
Six films across fourteen years, all written by Paul W. S. Anderson and all starring Milla Jovovich, an unusual degree of continuity for a sequence of this size. Together they took over one and a half billion dollars and the series never once changed its lead.
The first film in 2002 is the best and the most restrained. An underground facility, a sealed environment, a hostile building intelligence and and a laser corridor sequence that remains the most remembered thing anywhere in the entire sequence of six pictures. Michelle Rodriguez appears in it and returns in Retribution.
The escalation across the series is the problem. Alice acquires telekinesis, loses it, acquires clones of herself, and by Retribution the films operate at a power level where nothing can threaten her unless an equally arbitrary countermeasure is invented in the same scene. Anderson has been open about the escalation problem.
The games are built on resource scarcity and the films are built on abundance, the adaptation failure underneath everything else. Survival horror works because ammunition runs out, and the series hands its protagonist unlimited everything from the second picture onward. Capcom published the first game in 1996.
Anderson shoots action clearly, worth saying because almost nobody working at that budget level in the period did. The geography stays legible, the cuts are slower than the era’s fashion, and the practical stunt work is genuine even when the surrounding film is not. Anderson directed four of the six himself.
11. Saw (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of Saw (2004)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The answer is on the floor in every wide shot for ninety minutes."
James Wan and Leigh Whannell made it for around one million dollars in eighteen days, with Whannell playing one of the two men chained in the bathroom. It took over one hundred million and produced nine sequels that have almost nothing to do with what this film actually is.
The premise is a two-hander in one room and the budget is the reason. Two men, a corpse between them, two saws that will not cut chain and a tape recorder, and the film spends most of its length on conversation between people who cannot reach each other.
Jigsaw does not kill anybody, the distinction the sequels lost immediately. He builds situations with an exit available, the victims are given a choice they refuse to make in time, and his position is that people who waste their lives should be made to value them.
The reveal is the best low-budget twist of its decade. The corpse on the floor stands up, he has been in the room for the entire film, and every wide shot in the picture has shown the audience the answer without ever drawing attention to it.
The reverse bear trap sequence was built practically and is the one piece of design that carried into the sequels intact. Everything else the franchise became, the escalating machines and the elaborate mythology, arrives later and against the grain of this picture. Charlie Clouser scored it and returned for the sequels.
12. Land of the Dead (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Land of the Dead (2005)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"Kaufman is not a tyrant. He is a landlord with a waiting list."
Romero returned to the sequence after twenty years with an actual budget and made the most explicitly political entry in it. A fortified city with a luxury tower, a surrounding slum, and a wealthy class who have arranged the apocalypse to their own considerable satisfaction. Romero had waited twenty years since Day of the Dead.
The dead developing tool use is the film’s real subject. Big Daddy learns, teaches and organizes across the running time, and Romero’s position is that the dead are becoming a society while the living are running a protection racket from a car park. Eugene Clark plays Big Daddy without a word of dialogue.
Dennis Hopper plays Kaufman as a property developer who has simply carried on, and the performance is flat, bored and entirely correct. He is not a tyrant with a plan. He is a landlord with a waiting list, and the film understands that this is the worse thing to be.
The action is better than the series had previously managed. Dead Reckoning is an armoured vehicle with a legible layout, the fireworks distraction is a genuinely good practical idea, and the raids have a procedure an audience can follow from one end to the other. Tom Savini appears briefly in makeup from an earlier film.
Simon Baker, John Leguizamo and Asia Argento lead, and the film was the first Romero made with studio money. Universal gave him around fifteen million dollars, more than the previous three films had between them, and the difference is visible in every crowd scene. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright appear as zombies.
13. 30 Days of Night (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of 30 Days of Night (2007)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"They speak a language you can read and the characters cannot."
David Slade adapted the Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith comic, and the premise is the best high concept the genre produced that decade. Barrow, Alaska loses the sun for a month, and a group of vampires arrive for the only thirty days a year the place is worth visiting.
The vampires are the strongest element and the design is the reason. They do not speak English, they communicate in a constructed language with subtitles, and they move in a way that is fast and wrong without being stylized into something an audience can enjoy watching. Ben Foster plays the human who arrives ahead of them.
Danny Huston’s Marlow is genuinely frightening and gets almost no dialogue in a language anybody understands. He is patient, he is amused, and the sequence where he explains that nobody is coming to help is delivered to a woman who cannot understand a word of it.
The overhead shot of the massacre is the film’s best sequence. A single crane move across a snowbound street while people are killed in doorways and driveways below, held for minutes, with no music and no cut to anybody’s face at any point during it.
The last act loses the discipline the first hour had. The infected protagonist solution is a conventional sacrifice, the sunrise arrives on schedule, and the film resolves a genuinely original premise with an ending several other vampire films had already used. Two sequels followed and neither had Slade involved.
Stake Land makes its vampires weather so a militia can be the antagonist, and Krampus breaks its family before the snow arrives. Layer the pressure in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
14. 28 Weeks Later (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of 28 Weeks Later (2007)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"It opens on the worst thing he ever did."
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo made the sequel to Danny Boyle’s film and the opening fifteen minutes are better than anything in the original. A farmhouse, a survivor group, and a man abandoning his wife to save himself, filmed as one sustained panic across open ground. Boyle directed the second unit on that sequence himself.
Robert Carlyle carries that sequence and the guilt underneath everything that follows. Don lies about what happened, his children arrive from abroad believing the lie, and the film is about a man whose single act of cowardice turns out to be the infection vector for a whole city.
The reconstruction premise is smart and specific. A NATO-administered green zone in the Isle of Dogs, repopulation conducted in phases, snipers on rooftops with rules of engagement that change mid-scene, and the film is precise about how an orderly plan collapses in eleven minutes. Enrique Chediak shot it and Boyle produced.
The second half loses the discipline. Characters make choices the screenplay requires instead of choices their situation suggests, the helicopter rotor sequence is staged for effect alone, and the ending exports the problem to Paris for a sequel that took eighteen years to arrive. Fresnadillo had made Intacto in Spain before it.
Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne play the American military personnel and both are better than the material. The film’s strongest idea is that the occupying force has no plan for failure and defaults immediately to killing everybody, and nobody in the chain of command disputes it. Idris Elba plays the commanding officer.
15. Daybreakers (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of Daybreakers (2009)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Blood rationing in coffee shops and cars with day driving mode."
The Spierig brothers built the best vampire world-building of its decade and attached it to a chase plot that cannot carry it. A decade after the outbreak, vampires are the population, humans are farmed, and the blood supply runs out on a published schedule. Lionsgate released it in January 2010.
The economics are the film’s achievement. Subsidiary vampires who cannot afford blood degenerate into subsiders, coffee comes with a twenty percent blood ration, cars have day driving mode with external cameras, and schools run at night because the children still have to be educated. Ben Nott shot it and the Spierigs wrote it themselves.
Ethan Hawke plays a haematologist working on a substitute and the moral position is unusual. He has never fed on a human, he is trying to solve the shortage instead of ending the arrangement, and the film treats that as a failure of imagination instead of as virtue.
Sam Neill’s Charles Bromley runs the blood company and is the best thing in the picture. He is a businessman managing a supply crisis, he turned his own daughter against her will, and every scene he has is about margin and continuity of operations. Claudia Karvan plays the human resistance leader.
The cure turns out to be transmissible by feeding, a genuinely good idea the film reaches too late to use. The last act becomes a conventional siege and the economic material that made the first hour distinctive disappears from the picture entirely. Willem Dafoe plays the man who was cured first.
16. Zombieland (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of Zombieland (2009)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"A numbered list of rules, and the film honours every one."
Ruben Fleischer made a road comedy with an outbreak in it, and the rules device is the structural idea everything else hangs from. Columbus has a numbered list of survival rules that appear on screen as text and pay off across the entire running time.
The rules work because they are specific and because the film obeys them. Cardio, double tap, beware of bathrooms, check the back seat, and each one arrives before it matters instead of being invented at the moment it becomes convenient to have one. Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick wrote the screenplay.
Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee is the film and the Twinkie search is the joke that carries the whole picture. The reveal about what he actually lost is handled in a single short scene and the film never returns to it or asks the audience to sit with it.
Bill Murray appears as himself, in makeup, living in his own house and pretending to be infected so he can move around freely. The sequence runs about eight minutes and is the best cameo of its decade by a considerable distance. Murray suggested most of what he does in it.
The amusement park finale is the weakest section and the film knows it. The rides make good weapons, the geography is clear, and the emotional resolution arrives on schedule in a picture that had been more interesting when nobody was learning anything. Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin play the sisters.
17. Insidious (2010) [full review]
► Read the full review of Insidious (2010)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"It stands there in daylight until somebody in the audience notices."
James Wan and Leigh Whannell made it for around one and a half million dollars after Saw had become something neither of them recognized. It took over ninety-nine million and the first hour is the most efficient haunted house construction of its decade. Whannell plays one of the two technicians in it.
The premise inverts the form and states the inversion out loud. The house is not haunted, the child is, and moving the family to a second house is the moment the audience understands that the problem has been traveling with them the entire time. Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson play the parents.
The red-faced demon reveal is the best jump in modern horror because nothing signals it. The thing stands behind a character in daylight, during a conversation, with no musical sting, and the film simply lets it stand there until somebody in the audience notices. Joseph Bishara plays it and scored the film.
Lin Shaye’s Elise arrives an hour in and reorganizes the picture. She is calm, professional and frightened, she brings two technicians with mismatched equipment, and the series that followed exists almost entirely because of what she does in this one film. Four further films have followed and Shaye appears in all of them.
The Further is where it loses people and the criticism is fair. The last act moves into a fog-bound astral plane with a Victorian family and a demon sharpening its nails, and the mythology arrives faster than the film has time to make any of it frightening.
Insidious puts its demon in daylight with no musical sting, and Zombie holds the splinter shot past bearing. Two kinds of nerve in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
18. Stake Land (2010) [full review]
► Read the full review of Stake Land (2010)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"The vampires are weather. The militia are the antagonists."
Jim Mickle made a post-collapse road film with vampires for almost no money and it is considerably better than its distribution suggested. A boy and an older man travel north through a ruined America toward somewhere that may or may not still be accepting people.
The vampires are animals instead of characters, the correct decision. They do not speak, plan or negotiate, and Mickle treats them as a condition of the landscape in the same way weather or distance or a lack of fuel is a condition of the landscape.
The actual antagonists are a Christian militia who consider the plague a cleansing. The Brotherhood run towns, they have a theology, and the film’s position is that organized people with a belief system are considerably more dangerous than anything without a language. Michael Cerveris plays the man who runs them.
Nick Damici plays Mister and wrote the screenplay with Mickle. He is taciturn, competent and teaching a boy a trade, and the relationship carries the film without either character delivering a speech about what they mean to each other at any point. Connor Paolo plays the boy across the whole film.
The helicopter sequence is the one everybody remembers. The militia drop vampires into a fortified settlement from the air, a genuinely original idea, and the film stages it without ever explaining how the logistics of such an operation would work. Kelly McGillis appears as a nun they travel with.
19. Crimson Peak (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of Crimson Peak (2015)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"The ghosts are warnings. The living are the problem."
Guillermo del Toro made a gothic romance and Universal marketed it as a horror film, the reason it failed. He has said repeatedly that it is a ghost story instead of a horror picture, and the audience that turned up had been sold something else entirely.
Allerdale Hall is the best set del Toro has built and it was constructed practically. Red clay seeping through floorboards, a hole in the roof through which snow falls into the entrance hall, and a house sinking slowly into the ground it was built to mine.
The ghosts are not the threat and the film says so in the first line. They are warnings, they are trying to help, and the danger in the house is two living people with a financial arrangement and a history nobody in the story has been told about yet.
Jessica Chastain’s Lucille is the best thing in it and the performance escalates carefully. She is controlled for most of the running time, she plays piano, and the last twenty minutes release something the film has been carefully containing since the first act. Tom Hiddleston plays the brother she arrived with.
The costume and color work carry meaning throughout. Edith in gold and white among people dressed in red and black, the palette shifting as she is absorbed into the house, and Kate Hawley designing the sleeves to echo the moths the film keeps returning to. Dan Laustsen shot it and Fernando Velazquez scored it.
20. Krampus (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of Krampus (2015)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"The family had already failed at Christmas before the snow arrived."
Michael Dougherty made a Christmas horror comedy that commits to both halves, something almost nothing in the subgenre manages. A boy tears up his letter to Santa, the weather closes in, and the family are besieged in a suburban house by something considerably older than the holiday.
The design work is the reason it survives. Weta built the creatures practically wherever possible, the gingerbread men, the jack-in-the-box and the angel are all puppets, and Krampus himself is a suit with an animatronic face instead of a rendered figure. Douglas Smith and Emjay Anthony lead the younger cast.
The animated sequence in the middle is the best idea in the picture. Omi explains her own childhood encounter in stop-motion with no dialogue, the style shifts completely for about four minutes, and the film returns to live action without commenting on what it just did.
The family are written as genuinely unpleasant to each other before anything arrives. Political arguments at dinner, a cousin nobody wants, resentments going back decades, and the film establishes that the household had already failed at Christmas before the snow started. Adam Scott and Toni Collette play the parents.
The ending is the part that divides people and the ambiguity is deliberate. Everything is restored, the family are together, and then the last shot shows the snow globe on a shelf with Krampus watching, suggesting the restoration is a condition instead of a rescue. Krista Stadler plays Omi and carries the mythology.
Honorable Mentions: Horror Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
The Burning (1981)
A summer camp slasher with Tom Savini effects and a raft sequence that gets five kills into about forty seconds. Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander and Fisher Stevens all appear in early roles.
My Bloody Valentine (1981)
A Canadian slasher set in a mining town where the killer works in a respirator and the last act happens underground. The censors cut nine minutes and the restored version is considerably nastier.
Terror Train (1980)
Jamie Lee Curtis on a moving train with a killer who takes the costume of each victim. David Copperfield performs magic in it and the confined setting does the work the script does not.
Prom Night (1980)
A revenge structure with a six-year gap and a disco sequence that runs longer than anything violent in the film. Curtis again, in the same year, doing considerably more than the material asks.
Pieces (1982)
A Spanish and American production about a killer assembling a body from students at a Boston college. It is incoherent in ways that have made it durable and the chainsaw lift sequence is genuinely startling.
Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
J. Lee Thompson directed a slasher with a reveal so convoluted that the film has to explain it twice. The shish kebab killing was on the poster and is the reason anybody remembers it.
The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
Rita Mae Brown wrote it as a parody and Amy Holden Jones directed it straight, producing something stranger than either intention. The driller has no mask and no backstory at all.
April Fool’s Day (1986)
A slasher that turns out to be something else entirely, with a reveal that divided audiences completely in 1986. It plays fair and every piece of the solution is visible on a second viewing.
The Funhouse (1981)
Tobe Hooper put four teenagers overnight in a carnival ride and built the film from the machinery around them. The barker and his son are the most disturbing family relationship he filmed after Texas Chain Saw.
Deadly Blessing (1981)
Wes Craven made a film about a religious sect in rural country with Ernest Borgnine and a young Sharon Stone. The bath sequence is a direct rehearsal for something he staged three years later.
Alligator (1980)
John Sayles wrote a creature film about a pet flushed into the sewers and fed on laboratory animals. The satire is sharper than the premise deserves and Robert Forster carries all of it.
Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)
Larry Cohen built a monster film around Michael Moriarty as a small-time criminal who finds the nest and tries to negotiate a fee. The performance is improvised and completely unlike anything in the genre.
Dishonorable Mentions: Horror Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the premise, the cast or the source material and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Saw 3D (2010)
The seventh film, sold as the final one, built around a survivor group and a reveal that reaches back to the first picture. The traps had become the entire point and the moral argument had gone.
Insidious: The Last Key (2018)
A prequel to a prequel, supplying Elise with a childhood, a father and a demon with a key for fingers. Lin Shaye is better than the film and the mythology has become a filing system.
When a Stranger Calls (2006)
A remake that takes the twenty-minute opening of the 1979 film and stretches it across a whole feature, with a glass house and no second act. The famous line is delivered on schedule and means nothing at all.
One Missed Call (2008)
An American remake of Takashi Miike that explains its curse, supplies a hospital fire origin and resolves the mechanism with an exorcism. The Japanese film left all three unstated.
Prom Night (2008)
A remake in name only, rated for a wide audience, with a stalker who has no mask and a plot that removes the revenge structure the 1980 film was built on entirely.
Land of the Dead: Unrated (2005)
The longer cut adds gore and loses the pacing Romero had built, an unusual failure for him. The theatrical version is tighter and the extended one dilutes the political material it adds minutes to.
What Do You Think?
This tier runs on single structural decisions. Saw hides the answer in plain sight, The Pyx gives the ending away first, and 30 Days of Night lets you read a language its characters cannot. Tell me which one you would steal.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures