The Dark Secret of Harvest Home

IMDb
A young couple moves to a quiet New England village, only to soon find themselves mixed up in mysterious rituals.



NYTimes

Review Summary

This television miniseries is based on Thomas Tryon's complex and suspenseful occult thriller {-Harvest Home}, delving into the forbidden rituals of the small New England township Cornwall Combe, whose residents offer annual human sacrifices to pagan gods in return for a bountiful corn harvest. The production is notable mainly for the participation of Bette Davis, who plays the powerful Widow Fortune, the town's leading practitioner of the black arts. A very young Rosanna Arquette co-stars as one of the new kids in town. Beware the severely cut home video version, which omits almost 200 minutes of footage and thus loses a great deal of clarity. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

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THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

IMDb
A man, upon entering his fiancées's family mansion, discovers a savage family curse and fears that his future brother-in-law has entombed his bride-to-be prematurely

Writers:

 Edgar Allan Poe (based on "The Fall of The House of Usher"), Richard Matheson (screenplay)




Rotten Tomatoes

MOVIE INFO

Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) mourns the death of his sister and prepares for her funeral. He is visited by ghosts and tormented with the idea his sister has been buried alive. The story is taken from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Fall Of The House Of Usher.'

For Vincent Price and Edgar Allen Poe Masters of Thrills

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ShatterBrain

IMDb

• Charles Dexter Ward's wife enlists the help of a private detective to find out what her husband is up to in a remote cabin owned by his family for centuries. The husband is a chemical engineer, and the smells from his experiments (and the delivery of what appear to be human remains at all hours) are beginning to arouse the attention of neighbors and local law enforcement officials. When the detective and wife find a diary of the husband's ancestor from 1771, and reports of gruesome murders in the area begin to surface, they begin to suspect that some very unnatural experiments are being conducted in the old house. Based on an H.P. Lovecraft story.
  - Written by Ed Sutton

Xmovie8

Storyline: Charles Dexter Ward's wife enlists the help of a private detective to find out what her husband is up to in a remote cabin owned by his family for centuries. The husband is a chemical engineer, and the smells from his experiments (and the delivery of what appear to be human remains at all hours) are beginning to arouse the attention of neighbors and local law enforcement officials. When the detective and wife find a diary of the husband's ancestor from 1771, and reports of gruesome murders in the area begin to surface, they begin to suspect that some very unnatural experiments are being conducted in the old house. Based on an H.P. Lovecraft story

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Audrey Rose

IMDb
A stranger attempts to convince a happily married couple that their daughter is actually his daughter reincarnated.



Rotten Tomatoes

MOVIE INFO

In this horror film, Janice and Bill Templeton are the happily-married parents of well-adjusted preteen Ivy. Strange things begin happening with the arrival of mysterious stranger, Elliott Hoover. It is Hoover's contention that their daughter is the reincarnation of his own child, who died in a horrible accident.

TMC

AUDREY ROSE

Director Robert Wise is best known for his involvement in two of film's most successful musicals, West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music(1965). For movie buffs, however, his greatest achievements were in the horror genre for flicks such as The Curse of the Cat People (1944), The Body Snatcher (1945), and The Haunting (1963). In 1977 Wise carried on this tradition with Audrey Rose, an unsettling tale about the doomed reincarnated soul of a little girl. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Marsha Mason, and newcomer Susan Swift, the film is based on the novel of the same name by Frank De Felitta, who also penned the script. He attributed the idea for the story to an otherworldly experience of his own child. At six years old, De Felitta's son began playing ragtime tunes on the piano one day, an instrument he had never learned. Convinced his son's ability was the result of an "incarnation leak", De Felitta began exploring the concept of reincarnation in his writing.

Audrey Rose takes a much darker turn than De Felitta's strange experience with his six-year-old son; it is the story of an eleven-year old girl named Ivy Templeton who begins to have horrific visions of a violent death. Her parents, played by Marsha Mason and John Beck, are at a loss as to the origins of her behavior, until a mysterious stranger - Hopkins--turns up. The stranger explains that his daughter, named Audrey Rose, died in a tragic accident moments before Ivy's birth. Hopkins' contention is that Ivy is the reincarnated soul of his dead child.

"I don't think we're going to prove reincarnation in this picture, but I'm very open to the whole possibility of the supernatural, the paranormal, the possibility of dimensions out there," Wise commented during filming in 1976. Anticipating a heady task in persuading his audience of these concepts, Wise took an unprecedented approach to production; he built in one week of rehearsal prior to shooting for the four leads. "It's always a big help when you have a chance to do that, the director stated in Robert Wise on His Films. "Not just read through the script, but actually rehearse the scenes to see how they play. The reason you don't get to do that in movies is because it costs money.....That's very hard for studios to accept. In this particular instance, it just meant paying those four [Hopkins, Beck, Mason & Swift] for an additional week. Audrey Rose is the only film in which I had a full week of rehearsal before shooting."

Susan Swift, who played the role of Ivy Templeton/Audrey Rose, was an inexperienced actor making her film debut in a very challenging part so Wise hired a specialized acting coach to work with her. Hopkins and Mason, both seasoned stage actors, were open to the experimentalist environment of the film - Wise recalls them as "very much into other-world thinking." Hopkins recalled in his biography by Quentin Falk that Mason was "a much more fervent seeker of truth than I am or was. I accept anything now and don't search as much as I used to. Then I was caught up with all that stuff, such as the manifestation and spiritualization of individual particles of God."

Both Los Angeles and New York City were used for locations in Audrey Rose. The scene where Hopkins informs Beck and Mason about his dead daughter took place at Valentino's on Pico, a popular restaurant in L.A. The car crash sequence was filmed on an unopened stretch of highway in New Jersey and a scene at the zoo and the exterior of Ivy's school were shot in New York.

Wise took great pains to achieve a certain balance in Audrey Rose explaining, "Mine is a prepared approach with ample room for improvising as we go along." The director described one example of this improvisation inRobert Wise on His Films: "We had a sequence in the bedroom between Marsha Mason and John Beck in which they get to a very high, angry pitch, and it wasn't right somehow as written in the script. I suggested that at the end of the day's shooting we get John and Marsha into the bedroom and just let them improvise the scene to see what they could come up with. They got into a really tough argument, much better than the one we had. Frank De Felitta had a tape recorder and he taped everything. Later, he went back to his office and rewrote the entire scene, taking elements that the actors had come up with in the improvisation. That's one of the few times I've ever done that kind of thing and it worked."

Audrey Rose was evenly panned and praised following its release; even almost twenty-five years later, critics have a hard time deciding if Audrey Rose was a triumph or failure for Wise. Certainly the film had some overt competition at the time of its release: Audrey Rose was a markedly different child character than those found in The Exorcist (1973) or The Omen (1976). And Wise was not seeking to shock his audience; instead, he was inviting them to explore a darker side of the unknown. Incidentally, the picture of Audrey Rose on the paperback version of De Felitta's novel is a photograph of a young Brooke Shields. Shields, however, obviously had no part in the film. 

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The Dark Sleep

IMDb

• Following her recent divorce, a writer moves into a new home to begin penning her next book. Little does she know this house has some dark secrets. A giant rat visits her in the middle of the night and in her basement lies a pathway to another dimension. Haunting dreams soon begin in this loosely based retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale, "The Dreams in the Witch House."
  - Written by PhantomStranger

CultureCrypt

Review:

Having directed “Re-Animator,” “From Beyond,” “Dagon” (based on “Shadow Over Innsmouth”), and “Castle Freak” (based on “The Outsider”), Stuart Gordon is the most noted and most prolific filmmaker when it comes to adapting the works of author H.P. Lovecraft.  Gordon also brought Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” to television as an episode of “Masters of Horror,” which was the second time the story had been filmed.  In his final screen appearance, Boris Karloff previously starred with Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele in “Curse of the Crimson Altar,” also based on that same short story.

Writer/director Brett Piper seeks to compete on the level of these aforementioned horror heavyweights with a third stab at “Dreams in the Witch House” in his film, “H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dark Sleep.”  Starting behind the eight ball when two superior versions already exist, Piper combines an unknown cast with the change in his pockets and crafts a cheap looking, poorly written, and completely ineffectual waste of 80 minutes.

Nancy Peterson is an irritable writer with an irritating ex-husband who works as a realtor.  Pete Peterson dumps a free house on his former spouse as a way to escape alimony payments.  Ridiculously, a condition of ownership specified in the deed is that an eerie portrait of strange symbols on the basement wall can never be painted over.  Because what, the city zoning commission will check at regular intervals to ensure some mural still exists in this random home’s cellar?

It does not take long for strange occurrences to begin regularly terrorizing Nancy, while visual effects that would not have been acceptable in the 1920’s begin regularly terrorizing the audience.  On the first night in her odd new home, Nancy’s slumber is disturbed by the sudden appearance of a ridiculous stop motion creature that looks like an animated gif superimposed in the frame.  To visualize what the stop motion effects look like, imagine children playing with action figures and then eliminate the hands moving the toys.  That is the level of caveman-like crudeness that applies to the visuals.

Rankin-Bass would have rejected an animated snowflake sequence from “The Dark Sleep” as being unfit for their “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” children’s production, much less an adult feature film.  Indeed, the best special effect in “The Dark Sleep” is seen on Nancy’s television when she watches a black-and-white late night monster movie from the 1950’s.

“The Dark Sleep” may qualify as “animated” altogether because the characters are also cartoons.  In an incredibly lame attempt at comic relief, two goofball exterminators arrive at the house to kill the whatever-it-is-supposed-be that Nancy mistook for a rat.  Presumably, they are meant to induce laughs because of their hilarious nerd lisps and googly eyes framed by Coke bottle goggles.  Sure enough, even the “comedy” in this film is on the cutting edge of entertainment.

The Sound department adds its hat to the competition ring for most amateur effort.  However, the soundtrack and the sound effects will have to duke it out in Thunderdome for the title of worst aural offender.  Though the conspicuously out of place Hispanic salsa theme that plays during an otherwise quiet pancake breakfast is arguably less obtrusive than the constantly chirping birds and crows that accompany every daytime scene, even if it is indoors.  A Cray supercomputer would be needed to count how many times those same three bird sounds are plugged into the movie.

Although “Dreams in the Witch House” is greeted more unfavorably by critics than most other Lovecraft works, there are still elements from the story that make for compelling speculative fiction.  Long after the film’s halfway point, “The Dark Sleep” shows the glimmer of a possible turnaround with a thread about reality altering dreamscapes that can will people in and out of existence while bridging dimensions to worlds inhabited by Nyarlathotep and the Brotherhood of the Beast.  If those few shreds of real story ideas had not been flushed away with nonsensical scenes of actresses running in place against a green screen and battling skeleton creatures made out of Play-Doh, “The Dark Sleep” might have been closer to becoming something almost watchable.

The scariest thing about “The Dark Sleep” is that it somehow secured home video distribution.  This is solid proof that a professionally boxed and manufactured DVD does not mean the movie is professional quality.  Even without knowing the details behind this production, assuming it was made for pennies by a group of friends out of their filmmaking depth would not be a guess.  It would be a certainty.  H.P. Lovecraft is not merely rolling over in his grave.  He is actively seeking a way to haunt Brett Piper and company to make sure they never again molest the author’s name.

Review Score:  10

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Hardcore

IMDb
A conservative Midwest businessman ventures into the sordid underworld of pornography in California to look for his runaway teenage daughter who is making porno films in California's porno pits.



RogerEbert

The man is played by George C. Scott, the girl by Season Hubley. They have moments in the movie when they talk, really talk, about what's important to them and we're reminded of how much movie dialogue just repeats itself, movie after movie, year after year. There's a scene in "Hardcore" where the man (who is a strict Calvinist) and the prostitute (who began selling herself in her early teens) talk about sex, religion, and morality, and we're almost startled by the belief and simple poetry in their words.

This relationship, between two people with nothing in common, who meet at an intersection in a society where many have nothing in common, is at the heart of the movie, and makes it important. It is preceded and followed by another of those story ideas that Paul Schrader seems to generate so easily. His movies are about people with values, in conflict with society. He wrote "Taxi Driver" and "Rolling Thunder" and wrote and directed "Blue Collar." All three are about people prepared to defend (with violence, if necessary) their steadfast beliefs.

The Scott character is a fundamentalist from Grand Rapids, Michigan Schrader's own hometown. The opening scenes establish the family setting, at Christmas, with a fairly thick theological debate going on around the dinner table. (The small boy listening so solemnly, Schrader has said, can be taken for himself.) A few days later, Scott's daughter leaves home for a church rally in California. She never returns. Scott hires a private detective (Peter Boyle) to try to find her, and Boyle does find her in an 8-millimeter porno movie. Can it be traced? Boyle says not: "Nobody made it. Nobody sold it. Nobody sees it. It doesn't exist."

But Scott vows to follow his daughter into the sexual underworld and bring her back. His efforts to trace her, through San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego, make "Hardcore" into a sneakily fascinating guided tour through massage parlors, whorehouses, and the world of porno movies. Schrader sometimes seems to be having it both ways, here: Scott is repelled by the sex scenes he explores, but is the movie?

That doesn't matter so much after he meets Niki (Season Hubley), who might know some people who might know where his daughter is. She is in many ways like all the other lost young girls who drift to California and disappear. But she has intelligence and a certain insight into why she does what she does, and so their talks together become occasions for mutual analysis.

She has a deep psychological need for a father figure, a need she thinks Scott can meet. She also has insights into Scott's own character, insights his life hasn't previously made clear to him. There's a scene near the waterfront in San Diego that perfectly illuminates both of their personalities, and we realize how rare it is for the movies to show us people who are speaking in real words about real things.

The movie's ending is a mess, a combination of cheap thrills, a chase, and a shoot-out, as if Schrader wasn't quite sure how to escape from the depths he found. The film's last ten minutes, in fact, are mostly action, the automatic resolution of the plot; the relationship between Scott and Hubley ends without being resolved, and in bringing his story to a "satisfactory" conclusion, Schrader doesn't speak to the deeper and more human themes he's introduced. Too bad. But "Hardcore", flawed and uneven, contains moments of pure revelation.

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Eat

IMDb
Novella McClure is like most struggling actresses in Los Angeles: she's in her early 30s, her fake name sounded cooler ten years ago, and she hasn't landed a role in three years. To top it all off, she's developed a disturbing habit of eating her own flesh. Novella desperately tries to hide her strange condition from her motherly landlord, Eesha, and somewhat psychopathic best friend, Candice, but her body and mind continue to deteriorate in the depressing world of failed auditions and sketchy night clubs. Can a romantic relationship with her psychiatrist prevent her from self destruction? Or will her fatal habit continue to eat away at her?



HorrorNews

SYNOPSIS:

Novella McClure is like most struggling actresses in Los Angeles: she’s in her early 30s, her fake name sounded cooler ten years ago, and she hasn’t landed a role in three years. To top it all off, she’s developed a disturbing habit of eating her own flesh. Novella desperately tries to hide her strange condition from her motherly landlord, Eesha, and somewhat psychopathic best friend, Candice, but her body and mind continue to deteriorate in the depressing world of failed auditions and sketchy night clubs. Can a romantic relationship with her psychiatrist prevent her from self destruction? Or will her fatal habit continue to eat away at her?

REVIEW:

I can handle most things in horror, from lobbed limbs to showers of bodily fluids. It’s all make believe at the end of the day, isn’t it? Escapism, if you will. However, give me a scene where someone starts stripping away at flesh or popping off a toe nail and I’ll cringe. I’m talking about full lip puckering cringing. I think it’s the emphatic nature in me. I know how it feels to stub my toe, so by transference someone pulling off the whole thing must be black-out horrific.

Eat, the debut feature from Jimmy Weber (Incubator), took me to the next level. Without hyperbole or Buzzfeed clickbait exaggeration, I can confidently say to you dear reader, that Eat made me nearly lose my lunch. And I’ve seen Thanatomorphose.

In some ways, Eat can be seen as a companion piece to last year’s Starry Eyes, though perhaps not as subtle. Meggie Maddock (Flock) plays the wonderfully named Novella McClure, a struggling actress living in LA. Her daily routine consists of auditions, fighting with her fellow actresses and appealing to her landlord’s better nature in order to get out of paying the rent. Novella is shouting, but Hollywood isn’t listening. Her only solace is her regular nights out with self-absorbed best friend Candice (Ali Francis), with whom she dupes men into giving them free drinks.

It’s apparent that Novella’s cycle of stress, aggression and heavy drinking is doing her no favors. Things come to a head when Novella is tricked into auditioning for a P*rno and, upon returning home humiliated, finds an eviction notice pinned to her door. Her stress and anger at the world explodes from whatever hidey-hole it was buried within and Novella starts to self-harm. And by self-harm, I mean chowing down on her wrists like they were Kentucky Fried Chicken. And so begins Novella’s only way of staying in control in a world where she feels she has none.

Whilst things do soon start going her way when she meets a dreamy psychiatrist, Novella struggles to overcome her desire to consume her own flesh leading to amongst other things a particularly gruesome scene that will put people with foot fetishes off for a week. Like any eating disorder, her illness/desire begins to consume her as she tries to hide her nefarious appetite from her new beau and Candice.

Eat’s special effects are horrifically grim, which is kind of what you want in a film like this. The oozing and bloody flesh is accentuated by the sounds of lip-smacking and slurping, and the sight of claret splash upon Maddock’s porcelain skin. In addition, Weber manages to eke out as much tension as he can from the scenes of self-cannibalism. The problems come from some leaps of logic Eat asks us to make outside of Novella’s predicament.

A night out with Candice sees two men brutally assaulted, but despite the horrific outcome for them both, it never makes it to the news. In fact, even when Novella shares the facts with her boyfriend he seems utterly indifferent. If it wasn’t for Weber’s need to tie those events into the film’s twist ending, I would argue it’s a superfluous scene built only for shock value in contrast to Novella’s main narrative. In a film that plays it straight(ish), it felt that Eat was tumbling into a different kind of genre and not knowing what to do about it.

That said, Eat is disturbingly beautiful film and Weber should be applauded for making it look so good. The performances vary in quality which is sometimes expected in low-budget deals like this, but they cross the line into full blown pantomime. It’s hard to recommend the film as something to enjoy as you would any other horror. Gore hounds will inevitably love it, but Eat is about more than watching a woman go Ouroboros on herself. There’s a deeper, dare I say darker, social commentary at play that highlights the BS the average starlet has to put themselves through in order to be recognized. Eat is most certainly a bloodthirsty curiosity worth checking out.

HaddonfieldHorror

Writer/director Jimmy Weber has taken on quite the task with his film EAT. Focusing on Novella McClure (Meggie Maddock), a struggling actress in L.A., she has to contend with all of the many negatives that come with being a female in an image obsessed society. The expectation that a woman should always behave friendly and flirty, but not too flirty, put out when it's deemed necessary, hold down a career, friends and try to lead a happy life all while hitting just the right level of sexy impeccability is exhausting just to think about. Imagine trying to live it. You may end up finding a career in body modification or you may end up consuming your own flesh, but more on that similarity later.

The movie begins with a fun music montage of Novella getting ready for her day. As a song about how incredibly looks-driven the world has become, she gussies herself up from head to toe. With her stereotypical blondorexic hair color, heavily applied makeup, red nails, tight dress and super-high high heels, Novella goes to multiple unsuccessful auditions only to come home to an empty refrigerator in her apartment that she hasn't paid rent on for three months.

Discussions about generic modeling agencies actually being porn companies, women who have no problem getting on their knees to score a role and, generally, being treated like a thing to be owned or paraded around are all just normal, daily occurrences for Novella and it is taking it's toll. Her disorder starts out innocently enough with some aggressive nail biting and then slowly escalates into some truly cringe worthy binge eating moments. The effects on the filmconsuming herself.

Novella's best friend Candice is played with spot on self absorbed apathy by Ali Francis. At one moment, Candice is a great friend who watches out for Novella while they're at a club and the next, she is completely unconcerned about her alleged suicide attempt, eviction notice, hospital bill and lack of job. Candice applauds Novella's will to keep struggling and fighting to become an actress while she sludges through work at a hair salon. Her pessimistic view of life is like a bad disease that she tries to shake off onto Novella, but is also a kind of disorder of her own. The things Candice says and does, but does not find nearly as alarming as she should, are definitely on a special level of crazy and this unravels in it's own kind of unhealthy emotional attachment.
Despite the fact that these two are intelligent and independent women, they waste their evenings conversing with men at nightclubs in order to get free drinks. As expected, two of the men do not take kindly to this and decide that they should be reciprocated for their generosity with alcoholic beverages. The manner in which Candice deals with these men and their disgusting, stereotypical behavior is simultaneously shocking and hilarious.

Novella is a woman trying to get ahead in life without having to use her looks as her only valid form of currency. With the exception of her sweet landlady, everyone that she holds close is only there for her when it's convenient for them and this only leads Novella deeper into her disorder. At this point you have to wonder how much of this responsibility is on Novella. All of the jerkface guys that expect her to perform sexually for them and her "best friend" have one thing in common: Novella. She consistently shrugs off help from the people who are genuinely concerned about her and, instead, chooses to surround herself with ugly people who create such anxiety in her that she starts eating her flesh. The idea that Novella is a poor innocent who was forced into this by everyone but herself is too hard to swallow and that's really my biggest complaint. I just wish that she had taken on some of the responsibility herself.

As I alluded to earlier, it's hard to watch EAT and not compare it to the Soska sisters' tour de force commentary on society's perceived expectations of women, American Mary. Obviously, these are two separate movies, but it's hard to not draw a line between the two and the fact that Novella never really owns her responsibility in the misery she has created for herself is what didn't sit well with me. For brief moments, she will take the onus, but then it always ends up being the fault of someone else; usually a man. Every time you begin to feel genuinely sorry for the girl, she starts screaming at that shrill level about how this is everyone else's fault. Also, the decision that her and her best friend ultimately come to didn't really make any sense at all. Or perhaps it was just over my head; at this point in the movie you have already been asked to accept so much.

EAT is a lower budget film and while I don't find this to be a negative, some of the dialogue is stilted and awkward and some of the financial restrictions show through. Maddock, specifically, seems to be at her best when the truly disturbing and heavy scenes come up. Her monologue at an audition is great and it's too bad that we didn't see more of that Novella throughout the film.

With a mix of humor, seriousness, social commentary and some awesome gore, EAT delivers the goods and looks beautiful doing it. Novella is every woman and though some of the movie takes itself a little too seriously, overall, it's a wonderful commentary on men, women, looks and expectations; the last ten minutes are fantastic with the film ending on a strangely sublime, yet creepy tone. Be sure to stay until the end of the credits for a bonus bit of insanity; especially if you're a pet owner. are, mostly, fantastic and Maddock goes all out when it comes to literally 

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Into the Wild

IMDb
After graduating from Emory University, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandons his possessions, gives his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life.



Rotten Tomatoes

MOVIE INFO

Freshly graduated from college with a promising future ahead, 22 year-old Christopher McCandless instead walked out of his privileged life and into the wild in search of adventure. What happened to him on the way transformed this young wanderer into an enduring symbol for countless people. Was Christopher McCandless a heroic adventurer or a naïve idealist, a rebellious 1990s Thoreau or another lost American son, a fearless risk-taker or a tragic figure who wrestled with the precarious balance between man and nature? McCandless' quest took him from the wheat fields of South Dakota to a renegade trip down the Colorado River to the non-conformists' refuge of Slab City, California, and beyond. Along the way, he encountered a series of colorful characters at the very edges of American society who shaped his understanding of life and whose lives he, in turn, changed. In the end, he tested himself by heading alone into the wilds of the great North, where everything he had seen and learned and felt came to a head in ways he never could have expected.

RogerEbert

For those who have read Thoreau's Walden, there comes a time, maybe only lasting a few hours or a day, when the notion of living alone in a tiny cabin beside a pond and planting some beans seems strangely seductive. Certain young men, of which I was one, lecture patient girl friends about how such a life of purity and denial makes perfect sense. Christopher McCandless did not outgrow this phase.

Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which I read with a fascinated dread, tells the story of a 20-year-old college graduate who cashes in his law school fund and, in the words of Mark Twain, lights out for the territory. He drives west until he can drive no farther, and then north into the Alaskan wilderness. He has a handful of books about survival and edible wild plants, and his model seems to be Jack London, although he should have devoted more attention to that author's "To Build a Fire."

Sean Penn's spellbinding film adaptation of this book stays close to the source. We meet Christopher (Emile Hirsch) as an idealistic dreamer, in reaction against his proud parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) and his bewildered sister (Jena Malone).

He had good grades at Emory; his future in law school was right there in his grasp. Why did he disappear from their lives, why was his car found abandoned, where was he, and why, why, why?

He keeps journals in which he sees himself in the third person as a heroic loner, renouncing civilization, returning to the embrace of nature. In centuries past such men might have been saints, retreating to a cave or hidden hermitage, denying themselves all pleasures except subsistence. He sees himself not as homeless, but as a man freed from homes.

In the book, Krakauer traces his movements through the memories of people he encounters on his journey. It was an impressive reporting achievement to track them down, and Penn's film affectionately embodies them in strong performances. These are people who take in the odd youth, feed him, shelter him, give him clothes, share their lives, mentor him and worry as he leaves to continue his quest, which seems to them, correctly, as doomed.

By now McCandless has renamed himself Alexander Supertramp. He is validated by his lifestyle choice. He meets such people as Rainey and Jan (Brian Dieker and Catherine Keener), leftover hippies still happily rejecting society, and Wayne (Vince Vaughn), a hard-drinking, friendly farmer. The most touching contact he makes is with Ron (Hal Holbrook), an older man who sees him clearly and with apprehension, and begins to think of him as a wayward grandson. Christopher lectures this man, who has seen it all, on what he is missing and asks him to follow him up a steep hillside to see the next horizon. Ron tries, before he admits he is no longer in condition.

And then McCandless disappears from the maps of memory, into unforgiving Alaska. Yes, it looks beautiful. It is all he dreamed of. He finds an abandoned bus where no bus should be and makes it his home. He tries hunting, not very successfully. He lives off the land, but the land is a zero-tolerance system. From his journals and other evidence, Penn reconstructs his final weeks. Emile Hirsch plays him in a hypnotic performance, turning skeletal, his eyes sinking into his skull while they still burn with zeal. It is great acting, and more than acting.

This is a reflective, regretful, serious film about a young man swept away by his uncompromising choices. Two of the more truthful statements in recent culture are that we need a little help from our friends, and that sometimes we must depend on the kindness of strangers. If you don't know those two things and accept them, you will end up eventually in a bus of one kind or another. Sean Penn himself fiercely idealistic, uncompromising, a little less angry now, must have read the book and reflected that there, but for the grace of God, went he. The movie is so good partly because it means so much, I think, to its writer-director. It is a testament like the words that Christopher carved into planks in the wilderness.

I grew up in Urbana three houses down from the Sanderson family -- Milton and Virginia and their boys Steve and Joe. My close friend was Joe. His bedroom was filled with aquariums, terrariums, snakes, hamsters, spiders, and butterfly and beetle collections. I envied him like crazy. After college he hit the road. He never made a break from his parents, but they rarely knew where he was. Sometimes he came home and his mother would have to sew $100 bills into the seams of his blue jeans. He disappeared in Nicaragua. His body was later identified as a dead Sandinista freedom fighter. From a nice little house surrounded by evergreens at the other end of Washington Street, he left to look for something he needed to find. I believe in Sean Penn's Christopher McCandless. I grew up with him.

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Judas Ghost

IMDb
A team of professional ghost finders are trapped in an old village hall. The haunting they set out to investigate turns out to be far worse than they anticipated. Who will survive and what will be left of their souls?


Official site
The Carnacki Institute exists to Do Something about ghosts.

When reports of the supernatural from an old village hall point to an apparently standard haunting, an elite team of Ghost Finders is dispatched to assess the situation. The team of four includes a cameraman and former Ghost Finder from the Carnacki Institute, who is there to document events as a training tool for new recruits.

But things go from bad to worse when it becomes clear that they are facing something far more sinister than they first anticipated. The hall harbours a dark secret, and the team must use every trick they know to try and get out of there alive.

Three men and one woman who think they’ve seen it all. That is, until they encounter the chilling Judas Ghost...

Who will survive and what will be left of their souls?



HaddonFieldHorror

“A haunting we will go, a haunting we will go…”

A team of professional ghost finders are trapped in an old village hall. The haunting they set out to investigate turns out to be far worse than they anticipated. Who will survive and what will be left of their souls?

Judas Ghost is one of those horror movies that you can never be quite sure about. Like it’s great uncle, Paranormal Activity, it features a group of people wandering around with cameras looking for some ghosts to help out. However, unlike the Paranormal Activity movies the people featured in the film are meant to be professionals, even if they don’t always act like it. This band of misfits it headed by Jerry (Martin Delaney) a cock know it all paro psychologist (imagine Dr Kieran O’Keefe from Most Haunted but without the cockerel hairdo) who along with psychic Anna Gilmour (played by slight Karen Gillan lookalike Lucy Cudden) alongside cameraman Mark Vega and tech chap Ian Calder.

For a good part of the movie we get a lot of standing around in a room. Unlike Paranormal Activity which spent most of its time wobbling around like a drunk car salesman attempting to sell a moving vehicle to someone who is already in it, Judas Ghost spends a lot of time still. This is partly down to some great camera work but also partly because our gang spend a good part of the film locked in one area meaning we have to sort of just watch them being frightened and standing around. It can at times seem a bit grating but it could have worked if more action had occurred during the film.

The acting is good with Martin Delaney seeming to be pretty genuine as the cocky paranormal investigator. However, the rest of the cast are less strong with Cudden seeming a bit wide eyed and dreamy throughout and the other two mains not really making an impression. Maybe with a bit tighter direction the actors could have come more out into their own but otherwise they seem a bit limp even though you can see that they are trying.

Judas Ghost is the type of film that teenagers will watch when they are sitting down with their friends on a Friday night laughing and joking. It has some decent jump scares and what it lacks in substance it makes up for in leaving an impression on the viewer. 

Will Barber-Taylor

Full Movie on Xmovie8

A river Runs through it

IMDb
Two fly-fishing sons of a Presbyterian minister--one reserved, one rebellious--grow up in rural Montana.


Rotten Tomatoes

MOVIE INFO

This film, based on an autobiographical book by Norman MacLean, centers on brothers Paul and Norman, the sons of a Presbyterian minister living in Montana. Norman is the responsible son; hard-living Paul is the rebel. What unites the MacLean men is their mutual love of fly fishing.

Full Movie on FFilms