Tag: Carlos Areces

FANTASIA15 REVIEW: Pos eso [Possessed] [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“What he did left his teacher speechless” I didn’t know I wanted a horror parody in the style of “Celebrity Deathmatch” until about halfway through Samuel Ortí Martí‘s [Sam] pitch black skewering of the genre Pos eso [Possessed]. His and Rubén Ontiveros‘ script is littered with homage to The Day the Earth Stood Still in dialogue, The Omen in characters, The Exorcist in plot, Raiders of the Lost Ark in its cold open, and countless others—Alien, A Trip to the Moon, etc.—in visual flourishes. A fun pastiche of anything and…

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Posterized Propaganda June 2013: The Apocalypse is Nigh With ‘Man of Steel,’ ‘World War Z,’ ‘This is the End’ & More

Jared Mobarak

“Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” is a proverb whose simple existence proves the fact impressionable souls will do so without fail. This monthly column focuses on the film industry’s willingness to capitalize on this truth, releasing one-sheets to serve as not representations of what audiences are to expect, but as propaganda to fill seats. Oftentimes they fail miserably. Summer continues chugging along with the America and/or Earth threatened by destruction at every turn. Whether comic book adaptations, zombie wars, terrorist assaults or a giant pit opening up to…

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INTERVIEW: Nacho Vigalondo, writer/director of Extraterrestrial

Jared Mobarak

After finding great international success with his debut feature film Timecrimes in 2007, writer/director Nacho Vigalondo performed a bit of a 180 for his sophomore effort. Coming to the Toronto International Film Festival last year with a romantic comedy set to the backdrop of an alien invasion, his Extraterrestrial showed he would not be pigeonholed to dark thrillers with twists a la M. Night Shyamalan. It’s a move that showed his versatility and creative story-telling approach—two things that must have appealed to Hollywood with him now attached to direct an…

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REVIEW: Extraterrestre [Extraterrestrial] [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Maybe the spacemen will give us diplomas” You wake in a strange place without memory of arriving. You see light’s curved shadows on the wall through clouded eyes while a chorus of clanging is heard in the next room. Disoriented, mildly frightened, and without a clue to what is going on, you’re lost trying to recall the erased minutes of an alcohol-infused evening eerily similar to a crackpot’s account of alien abduction. But rather than a greyed creature with probe in hand, the figure moving in the kitchen is an…

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