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Showing posts from November, 2020

Spell (2020) was a valiant effort from Mark Tonderai that ultimately fell flat

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  It was a valiant effort from Mark Tonderai, but ultimately fell short (Image courtesy of impawards.com) Mark Tonderai's one of those directors that flies under the radar with lukewarm shows and colder movies (aside from Twelve Monkeys). Generally emerging once every few years with a studio-backed movie, Tonderai manages to just barely keep his head above the water with many of his projects. Add Spell to his wiki list of movies that fail to deliver and you've got a spiderweb-lined cupboard full of disappointment.  Spell is about Marquis, a prominent lawyer in the big city that flies his family to Kansas for the wake of his late father. While traveling there, their plane is caught in a thunderstorm and crashes. When he wakes up, he's in the home of a family of black hillbillies that practice hoodoo (voodoo is the religion, hoodoo is the magic). Unbeknownst to him, they're keeping him there for nefarious reasons to benefit themselves.  Spell is just a jumble of confusion...

The New Mutants (2020) would make for a compelling television series instead of a movie

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  Too short for a riveting movie, too fast-paced for a television series. So where does that leave it? (Image courtesy of imdb.com) As fans of comics and horror, when Marvel announced that its latest movie, "The New Mutants", would be a horror genre, we couldn't quite believe it. A live-action Marvel comic adaptation AND a horror movie to boot? It sounded too good to be true... and so it was.  Waiting for The New Mutants to be released was like completing a five thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that was missing a few pieces. It was disappointing, aggravating, annoying and honestly, tiring.  We were excited at first, but as the jigsaw puzzle slowly proved to be too tedious to complete, paired with the missing pieces, we just lost all interest in it altogether. Finally, when the manufacturers mailed the missing pieces and we were finally able to complete it, the full image it produced didn't exactly fit the picture on the box, resulting in buckets of disappointment.  For u...

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) is a B-grade movie with a Gucci belt

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  The Wolf of Snow Hollow merely donned the mantle of a horror movie, but in actuality, strayed disappointingly far from it. (Image courtesy of irishfilmcritic.com) We've been waiting a very long time for an honest-to-god werewolf flick. Long have we been served with plates upon plates of gourmet deception from various television shows like Bitten, Hemlock Grove, The Order and The Originals where their version of werewolves were either in the form of trained dogs or real life wolves with disappointing transformation sequences to boot. When The Wolf of Snow Hollow was announced and marketing released stills of their version of the monster, we were honestly excited. That is, until we sat through the entire movie.  The Wolf of Snow Hollow is directed by Jim Cummings, who also stars as the lead actor in this movie. Labeled a comedy horror, The Wolf of Snow Hollow tells the story of Officer John Marshall, a sheriff's deputy in the small town of Snow Hollow, Utah, who is a recoverin...

Come Play (2020) fails to deliver its cautionary tale for screen addiction

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  (Image courtesy of heavenofhorror.com) In the current age of technology, there have been a lot of horror movies in recent years that bank on the premise of tech addiction like Unfriended and Truth or Dare. Come Play is one of them. However, where others have succeeded, Come Play falls slightly short of a cautionary tale and more of a comedic footnote in the fight to educate us on the dangers of screen addiction. Come Play is directed by Jacob Chase and stars Gillian Jacobs (Community), John Gallagher Jr. (The Newsroom) and Azhy Robertson (Marriage Story) and tells the story of an autistic child played by Robertson who is targeted by a demonic presence through the screens of digital devices.  The demon introduces itself to Robertson's character, Oliver, via a storybook app on his phone. Calling itself "Larry", the demon persuades Oliver that it wants to befriend the child, in an attempt to open a portal to its world and pull Oliver through it.  (Image courtesy of indiewi...

Paranormal (TV series) strikes a bumpy balance between Islamic beliefs and Egyptian culture

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  (Image courtesy of heavenofhorror.com) Asian Does Horror has always been intrigued and mystified by Middle Eastern horror content. Our most recent foray into such was via the tv series Jinn, a story about a group of private school students in Amman who join a school trip to Petra and wind up unwittingly summoning a demon. It was modern, evenly paced, cleverly written and it made us hungry for more supernatural content from the region.   Enter Paranormal, a television series that muddies the waters between religious belief and regional culture. It's based off of Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's " Ma Waraa Al Tabiaa"  series of books .  Paranormal tells the story of Refaat (Ahmad Amin), an Egyptian doctor that quit his career in medicine to teach medical students at the local university in Cairo. Refaat is a pessimistic man that has given up on life and on top of that, he's a strong sceptic. However, despite being a sceptic, Refaat is constantly haunted by visions of a you...

The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw (2020) maintains a beautiful consistency

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  Up-and-coming director Thomas Robert Lee sets high expectations for future projects (image courtesy of youtube.com) The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw, or its original title, The Ballad of Audrey Earnshaw, is Thomas Robert Lee's second movie. The Canadian both wrote and directed this artistic pleasure and has fundamentally set the bar high for his career moving forward in the film industry. His first proper foray into movie-making comes in the form of Empyrean, an independently financed, black and white, science fiction drama about a man waking up from a near-death experience who experiences strange happenings resulting from that awakening.  Asian Does Horror rarely gives an extended profile of a movie's director, but we were impressed by the storyline, production quality and art direction for The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw.  (Image courtesy of nerdist.com) The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw opens up with a short introduction of the events following the movie. " In 1873, a group of f...

Takut ke Tak? (2020) is an hour and 20 minutes of our lives we'll never get back.

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  Takut ke Tak fails to command our attention even before the half hour mark (Image courtesy of Finas) Watching Takut ke Tak is like a slow and painful spiral into boredom. It's a winding descent into mind-numbing disinterest, bordering on thoughts of a quick and painless death. Takut ke Tak fails to entertain, humor or even capture our attention long enough to be even considered a movie, much less a good movie. Takut ke Tak was to us, a mindless, droning educational documentary on what not to do when making a film, writing a script, editing scenes or even setting foot onto a set. Our mind was so bored with the pace, plot, scenes, acting and music that it sought to entertain itself by providing a running commentary throughout the hour and twenty minutes.  Before the end of the movie, we prayed for death. A quick, easy, no-frills death, just so we could pry our eyes away from the monstrosity that was greenlit and funded and made into a movie.  We begged to be released from...

His House (2020) blurs the line between supernatural and psychological horror.

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  "Who's house?" "Run's house!" (Image courtesy of Netflix.com) Asian Does Horror has been eagerly waiting for His House to drop on Netflix and we can honestly say that it's not a disappointment and we completely enjoyed watching this.  His House revolves around Bol and Rial Majur, a Dinka husband and wife refugee couple fleeing war-torn South Sudan seeking asylum in Britain. Detained in London, they were fortunate enough to be given asylum status by the government along with 74 British pounds a week and accommodations. As Bol and Rial start settling into their government provided home, the couple starts to experience supernatural phenomena within the house itself.  The flow of the movie is extremely satisfying. It's slow when necessary and fast paced when needed, but the director, producer and post-production did a terrific job controlling the pace of the movie.  The movie doesn't waste time perpetuating the existence of the supernatural in the ...