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Sinister (2012)

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After watching the 2002 supernatural horror film, The Ring , writer C. Robert Cargill experienced a nightmare in which he stumbled across a film in his attic depicting the hanging of an entire family. Such a simple, bizarre, personally harmless, and most likely ephemeral vision would serve as the jumping-off point for the setup of the simply titled Sinister , an intimate, self-contained, tensely atmospheric haunted house story that suffers from a stagnant and repetitive narrative, a screenplay dependent on cliches, and muddy lighting, but compensates with a terrifyingly designed antagonist, a slew of nightmarish and grisly visuals, and a deceptively compelling lead performance from Ethan Hawke, whose sheer role commitment grounds the unremarkable supernaturalism around him. Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) is a true crime author whose bestselling debut from 10 years earlier helped put away the perpetrator of a previously unsolved murder following the failure of the police to do so, bestowi...
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Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

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Early on in the sixth installment of John Carpenter and Debra Hill's holiday slasher   franchise, on Halloween morning, a group of kids pull a prank on the new owner of the infamous Myers home, defacing a "Sold" sign in the front yard with a cardboard cut-out of Michael Myers. As the enraged homeowner chops it down with an axe, he growls, "Enough... of this Michael Myers... bullshit!" After sitting through an hour and a half of this joyless and unreasonably dark tripe, you'll be hard-pressed to disagree with such a seemingly self-reflexive sentiment.  Illogical, suspense-deficient, choppily edited, and led by a wooden debut performance from a pre-comedic Paul Stephen Rudd, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers marries a self-serious tone to an embarrassingly nonsensical storyline, demystifying one of horror's most intentionally (and chillingly) enigmatic villains in the process. Jumping ahead six years after the ending of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Mi...
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Misery (1990)

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The last time that the late, great Rob Reiner directed an adaptation of a novel written by Stephen King, it was of one of his rare ventures outside of the horror genre, his typical domain, the 1982 coming-of-age adventure drama, The Body , adapted for the screen and renamed as Stand by Me . With that adaptation, which, at the time of its release, King himself referred to as the greatest adaptation of any of his writings to date, wiping tears of admiration from his eyes and enveloping Reiner in an appreciative embrace, Reiner proved himself as a filmmaker who understood the essence of King's stories, taking a simple narrative about a quartet of preteen male best friends venturing into the woods to locate the corpse of a recently killed 12-year-old boy and enriching it with loads of heavy, real-world subtext, fully dimensional characterizations, uninhibited performances, and subtly shifting tonality. To put it simply, King had discovered the ideal cinematic storyteller to bring his m...
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Elephant (2003)

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When writer-director Gus Van Sant initially set out to produce the psychological drama, Elephant , its title a reference to director Alan Clarke's 1989 BBC short film of the same name, it began its journey as a documentary about the Columbine High School massacre, one of the most infamous massacres ever committed in the United States that remains the deadliest mass shooting in Colorado. On April 20, 1999, two 12th-grade students named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold arrived at their high school in Columbine, Colorado and murdered 13 of their fellow students and one teacher in a shooting and attempted bombing, concluding once both gunmen took their own lives before they could face criminal punishment. Their gunshots injured 20 more people, and three others were injured while trying to escape.   For whatever reason, Van Sant elected to abandon his idea of a factual account in favor of a largely fictionalized cinematic dramatization. The core concept of his movie would remain faithful t...
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