From an early age, the slasher genre has held a special place in my heart and has been a major component in my love for film. Some of my fondest memories as a kid were being cuddled up with my mom or grandmother and getting to witness films like Friday The 13th and Candyman for the first time. As a kid you just feel rebellious and cool getting to watch these movies, but you don’t truly understand yet what you like about them.
Category Archive: Reviews
Last night, Prime Video and Blumhouse held an online premiere for two seperate films at the same time, and The UnderSCENE was invited to last night’s premiere. Andres attended Black Box, and Alex attended The Lie. Doors opened at 9pm (or 6pm PST), and there was rotating slides of frames from the film, like there would be during an early screening or premiere. After 30 minutes, the film began. And then there was an online interactive escape room that included tarot card readings with celebrities (Ruby Rose, Malcolm-Jamal Warner made appearances). It was such a fun experience, and would have been great if it was possible to attend IRL, but from the comfort of our living rooms, with guests from many cities, it made for a lot of fun.
Here are our two reviews.
The first season of Mike Flanagan’s Haunting of anthology series, The Haunting of Hill House showed us that ghosts are real but they are linked to the living in unexpected ways, namely family guilt and trauma. The Haunting of Bly Manor explores the supernatural and its relationship with another very natural human emotion; love. Once again we are brought into a tense and mysterious story with surprisingly relatable and flawed characters, for the horror genre, and that just makes the horror itself so much more heightened. Bly Manor is not as scary as its first season but it does make up for it in genuine mystery and strong character work.
Moving to Toronto from a small town at the age of nineteen was the first time I was entirely introduced to the queer scene. More specifically an open and proud community that I would have never really been exposed to three years ago; it’s not that it didn’t exist where I lived either, it just had to be sought out. I remember going to my first gay bar and seeing my first drag show, I was in complete awe. Such an important part of LGBTQIA2S+ history and its community is the drag scene, and the queens who started the revolution at a time where it could have easily resulted in death. So when I sat down to watch Philip J. Connell’s Jump, Darling I already had an instilled excitement knowing that a drag queen character was leading this film. It’s due time for these types of queer stories to be told as a sort of coming of age and I have to say, this one is an incredible installment.
Directed by Thomas Robert Lee, The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw explores the increasingly strained relationship between Agatha (Catherine Walker) and her daughter Audrey (Jessica Reynolds), who has been kept a secret her entire life. Suspected to be conducting witchcraft, hysteria mounts as farms in the town have been fruitless, while Agatha’s continues to flourish.
So, global warming is kind of a big deal, right? In 2067, directed by Seth Larney, we’re shown a future where humans have essentially rendered themselves extinct; a future that doesn’t seem too far off, considering the way the world is currently going. Although we’re not completely hopeless quite yet, 2067 asks the question: are we worth a second chance? It’s a good question, but ultimately gets lost in the mix due to poor execution.
Scare Me is directed by Josh Ruben (best known for his work on CollegeHumor). He also plays Fred, an aspiring novelist who goes to a cabin to focus on writing his book. He meets Fanny (Aya Cash), a bestselling horror author also working on her next novel. When the power goes out, Fanny makes her way over to Fred’s cabin and they enter a competition to tell the best scary story.
I grew up with the Saw series. As much as I prefer and love the first, I still returned and watched every other iteration that Darren Lynn Bousman brought us. And I was genuinely sad to know that Spiral was delayed because I was excited to see him return to the franchise. I might have lost some of that excitement during Death of Me because uh, this movie ain’t it bud.
Possessor premiered at Sundance earlier this year, and I’ve been waiting for what feels like forever (and also, no time at all, thanks Covid) to see it. Seeing nothing but praise for the film, and so I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting. This week I got to see it, and holy shit. Holy actual shit. They did that.
I will be honest, writing this review might have been one of the hardest things I have to write to this day. Not because I hated the film but because of how much I found myself enjoying it and how much I ended up loving it. Putting words to why and what makes this film special was so hard that for days I found myself staring at a blank page. Kajillionaire is already out in theatres, I watched it a full month before its release date and I have no idea when this will be out. But I know I will try my damn best to say why I found Kajillionaire to be one of the most entertaining films of 2020.
The UnderSCENE 