POMO

Ben Steiner trips on shrooms and has a distorted idea of what viewers want. The fact that all of the characters (with the exception of the insignificant role of the blonde mistress) are unlikable and unreadable wouldn’t matter so much if they fit into the concept of the plot. But all of the gradual revealing of the mystery surrounding the mother and the black secretion is just bizarre and irrelevant, not scary and shocking. Utter bullshit.

She-Joker. Meticulously crafted in psychological terms, Pearl is an interesting and polished profile of an unstable asocial that crosses the same boundaries that the award-winning hit with Joaquin Phoenix did. The setting with a hillbilly family in a house in rural Texas is even more appealing to me. In fact, Ti West suggests here how idyllic the origins of other famous Texas families could have looked... The kitschy fairy-tale-like retro-stylization contrasts with the dark tones of the soundtrack, indicating the presence of a hidden evil and gradually paving the way for the outburst of that evil. The main character delights fans of the genre not only with a pitchfork and axe in hand, but also with a long one-shot confession about her own shattered mental state. Mia Goth is great. And the audiovisual flashes of Kubrick and Hitchcock... Pearl is a formalistic delight for those who are interested.

It’s a fine thing that Disney+ is debunking the myth of family VoD and premiering interesting horror movies. But Barbarian is overhyped. Screenwriter and director Zach Cregger enjoys playing with form and he respectably builds up the suspense associated with the unknown in the first third of the film. But the later uncovering of the mystery reveals the creative weakness of merely borrowing key elements from the groundbreaking works of the genre and slides into unintentional self-parody in the climax, while thinking it’s cool. This should have been made by an inventive butcher, ideally with European roots, who wasn’t afraid to exploit the potential of the terrifying content of the videotapes.

In terms of its technical execution, Old People offers a decent level of craftsmanship. The beginning, which culminates with the scene in which the main character figures out what's going on, is a great horror treat. But the bizarre idea of angry, murderous pensioners on which the whole film is based comes across as silly. The filmmakers failed to elevate the subject to the level of social allegory and remained with the mental optics of a pure zombie horror flick, which made Old People embarrassing to the point of being ridiculous.

Funny Games turned on its head and made more conventionally, without formalistic filmmaking gimmicks. Nocturnal Animals without the artistic multilayering. However, Speak No Evil is still a great psychological escalation of insecurity and the feeling of “something is wrong here”, with its cards held close to the vest and a surprising climax. This is a powerful yet cruel and evil film that I can recommend to only a few people.

Better than the previous, superfluous Halloween Kills. Though Michael Myers is sidelined here, the storyline with the new Corey character interestingly relativizes the causes of the origin of absolute evil (the responsibility of the society around us) and functionally parallels Myers himself. When have we ever seen a mainstream Hollywood movie in which the main character, whom we understand and support, develops in this way? It’s a unique and bold approach. That, however, is not to say that I wouldn’t have preferred to see the conclusion of this cult franchise in different hands and conceived differently...

Forests and meadows shrouded in fog are a great setting for a werewolf horror movie. The historical period with costumes to match give the film the mark of a solid drama. However, the viewer pretty much checks out by the time the horror scenes start to work at least a little. Those scenes are unusually badly directed at first and later evoke emotions only because we already know the characters better and we are experiencing the drama with them. I’m giving this a weak third star for the drama, not for the horror.

Screenwriting futility, directorial blackouts. The sole purpose of this film is to continuously serve us extreme gore that we won’t see anywhere else. And with a straight face. In the first half, the directing kind of attempts to use the social ills of contemporary society to make a point, but the second half is just drawn-out nothingness pulled out of the filmmaker’s ass. But the film’s splatter brutality and punk degeneracy are truly unique. For example, the sexual assault of the eye socket of a woman whose eye has been poked out with an umbrella, in a wheelchair, while she’s hooked up to a drip. And so on…

An overweight girl suffers ridicule at the hands of the people in her small town. The only person in whom she finds support is a rampaging killer, whose identity and whereabouts are known only to her. Piggy has an interesting subject and starts off very promisingly, but the screenplay starts to stray from what’s interesting and becomes annoying due to unnecessary dialogue with the girl's mother and the police trying to figure out why the protagonist is concealing the events that she has witnessed, as if the viewer doesn’t already know. The bloody climax mitigates the viewer’s disappointment, but the impression of wasted potential remains.

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser is a difficult subject for adaptations. It requires more than just traditional “horror talent” to film it so that it makes sense in the motivations of all of the characters and the intertwining of reality with the hellish dimension, to be gripping in terms of the plot and pleasing with more than just fantasy scenes of suffering and gore. David Bruckner and the screenwriters have done a decent job of developing the revelation of the world of the Cenobites, while adding new, almost mythological dimensions to the famous puzzle box. However, they got a bit lost in the climax with respect to the meaningfulness of the twists and the conclusion of the characters’ stories. One of the surviving characters summed it up nicely: “What just happened there?”