Horror | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Butter on the Latch [2014]

2014/11/132014/11/13 Jared Mobarak

“Because she sat on Pinocchio’s head” I’m going to run with this quote from director Josephine Decker: “I think an ending is much more exciting if even I don’t know what it ‘means’.” For all intents and purposes she’s giving permission for me to make of her fiction narrative feature debut Butter on the Latch whatever I want. What’s real? What isn’t? That’s up to my own personal understanding of her lead character Sarah (Sarah Small) and what occurs to her during this nightmarish descent inside herself. Honestly, isn’t that…

REVIEW: Berenice [2014]

2014/10/22 Jared Mobarak

“I wanted it to hurt” One chapter from the horror anthology Creepers, Jeremiah Kipp‘s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe‘s disturbing short story Berenice finds itself hindered by what I can only guess was a shoestring budget. A director who has excelled at creating stunning pitch-black tone with ambiguously delicious mystery in carefully composed thrillers, this twenty-minute horror finds itself delivering more unintentional laughs than frightening scares. The over-the-top and often amateurish acting does no favors and its brightly lit digital presentation of footage with a do-it-yourself sensibility puts the artifice…

REVIEW: Tusk [2014]

2014/09/152014/09/19 Jared Mobarak

“I believe we’re all tea people” I want to dismiss Kevin Smith‘s second foray into horror as total bullshit. I really do. Not only was Tusk created on a lark because one of his and Scott Mosier‘s internet Smodcasts recorded them discussing a crazy Gumtree ad offering a room for rent if the lodger agreed to wear a walrus suit, but because the “ad” in question was itself a fictitious prank by poet Chris Parkinson. Smith’s listeners voted to have a film made out of the restructured, warped version of…

TIFF14 REVIEW: Spring [2015]

2014/09/072017/03/21 Jared Mobarak

“I’m not drunk enough to sleep in your mother’s deathbed” The first words in Colin Geddes’ TIFF description for Vanguard selection Spring are, “Before Sunrise gets a supernatural twist.” You read that as a cinephile and you push everything aside to check out what it could mean. A horror romance co-director Aaron Moorhead described in his and Justin Benson’s (who also wrote the screenplay) introduction as “life, love, and monsters”, its Italy-set journey of an American lost and alone proves equally suspenseful, grotesque, funny, and beautiful. The best part, however,…

REVIEW: Cam2Cam [2014]

2014/08/212014/08/22 Jared Mobarak

“r u alone?” This year’s most tonally out-of-place ending goes to Cam2Cam. A horror/thriller pitting the murderer of a young American in Bangkok against the victim’s sister for either vengeance or a smart getaway somehow finds itself culminating in a weirdly romantic vibe of lost loves sending gifts via post to remember the lovely time they had in Thailand. It’s the biggest left turn since The Truth About Charlie‘s mediocre by the numbers remake shifting to memorable WTF whimsy for its final five minutes. Cabin Fever comes to mind too.…

REVIEW: Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with the Plan [2006]

2014/08/072014/08/08 Jared Mobarak

“This is definitely the wrong way to do this” Had I watched writer/director Mike Flanagan‘s short Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with the Plan when it was released in 2006, I might have found myself reacting much differently. Being eight years later and a world post Sinister and The Conjuring success, however, I can’t help feeling underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very well made for its shoestring two-grand budget and does possess a few nicely orchestrated effects via carefully blocked shots and specific jump cuts through time. I…

FANTASIA14 REVIEW: Preservation [2014]

2014/07/282014/08/06 Jared Mobarak

“The bear went over the mountain” When Christopher Denham‘s Preservation shows recently discharged vet Sean Neary (Pablo Schreiber) telling sister-in-law Wit (Wrenn Schmidt) about how playing war as a kid allowed him to be killed and still find his way home when the game ended, I couldn’t help think of underrated Canadian film I Declare War. In it a group of children battling in the woods is shown killing each other via imaginations projected onscreen. We watch as guns and bows replace the sticks of reality inside the players’ minds—a…

FANTASIA14 REVIEW: Ejecta [2014]

2014/07/252014/08/05 Jared Mobarak

“Something came to me” Many might take my comparing Ejecta to The Fourth Kind as a slight, but I actually enjoy that film a lot. While Chad Archibald and Matt Wiele‘s science fiction horror doesn’t pretend it’s real, the crosscutting between time and styles similarly keeps us off-balance enough to buy into the escalating danger onscreen. We’re shown straight away that a government or privatized military agency has captured William Cassidy/Spider Nevi (Julian Richings) in the woods through night vision goggles and yet this convergence is the mid-point of the…

FANTASIA14 REVIEW: The Harvest [2014]

2014/07/192014/07/23 Jared Mobarak

“God doesn’t think he’s a doctor” I can see why director John McNaughton chose Stephen Lancellotti‘s script The Harvest to be his first feature length film in thirteen years, but I’m not sure it was worth the effort. There are some cool aspects to the horror thriller that may have worked better if its 104-minute runtime didn’t tick along at a snail’s pace—a shortcoming I guess he has no one to blame but himself. A lot of questions are posed, crazy becomes crazy about halfway through with a genuinely startling…

REVIEW: The Purge: Anarchy [2014]

2014/07/152014/07/18 Jared Mobarak

“We’ve lost our souls to attain this peace” I enjoyed last year’s suspense horror The Purge a lot—despite high expectations for the premise actually going where it needed to prove more than another generic home invasion flick. Writer/director James DeMonaco gave us the graphic brutality its conceit promised through its claustrophobically bottled skirmish between malicious debutantes and an (not so) innocent family trying to survive while also lending the social commentary at its back a voice. I use the parentheses because it just so happened that the Sandin’s patriarch was…

NYAFF14 REVIEW: 失魂 [Shi hun] [Soul] [2013]

2014/06/272014/07/08 Jared Mobarak

“I watch the wind and, dreamlike, vanish” Described in equal measure as a slasher horror and psychological meditation on the soul—whether from demonic possession, reincarnation, or both—Taiwan’s entry for the 86th Academy Awards ultimately proves difficult to categorize at all. Mong-Hong Chung‘s 失魂[Shi hun] [Soul] may in fact be better labeled as a drama about familial love and fidelity despite destroying those same two things in the process of their preservation. There’s an unsettling spirituality at play that teeters between supernatural and schizophrenia with a weirdly rigid attitude towards life,…