The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

In this day and age, it's nearly impossible not to anticipate an iconic horror property from the 20th century to be given the remake treatment. The fundamental reason is fairly obvious: if audiences are familiar with a certain story and the characters who inhabit it -- especially the villain -- it's a sure thing they will flock to the theater to witness a modernized interpretation that will reintroduce them to the material using the advantage of updated technology. The best of the remakes will refuse to coast solely on the power of nostalgia and offer a unique take that distinguishes themselves from their source material and therefore justify their existence; the worst will offer a reheated carbon copy whose raison d'etre is to suck your wallet dry and laugh themselves all the way to the box office.  There is a distinct difference, however, between remaking genre entries along the lines of  Halloween , Friday the 13th , A Nightmare on Elm Street , Psycho , The Texas Chainsa...

Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) lives a life tragically similar to that of Carrie White. A teenage social misfit enduring his senior year of high school, Andrew is abused physically and emotionally at home by a mentally unbalanced father (Michael Kelly) and bullied at school by a group of young men led by the sadistic Wayne (Rudi Malcolm). Like the Stephen King-created outcast before him, Andrew has distressingly few friends to turn to for comfort or guidance owing to a timid personality and lack of self-esteem. However, his entire life is about to change once he inexplicably develops the supernatural ability to move objects with the sheer force of his mind, known as telekinesis. At first, this ability imbues the socially isolated and inept Andrew with a newfound sense of confidence. For the first time in his miserable life, he has finally gained control. But as a web-swinging superhero famously said, "with great power comes great responsibility," a memo Andrew doesn't seem t...

Sam Raimi makes his return to the horror genre for the first time in 15 years with Send Help , a survival horror that's been described as a cross between Rob Reiner's Misery and Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away , with an unacknowledged but unmissable sprinkling of William Golding's Lord of the Flies  and Coralie Fargeat's Oscar-winning sci-fi/body horror/Hollywood satire, The Substance .  Horror is the genre that catapulted Raimi's career as a filmmaker. Before he set aside the bloody thrills and haunted-house chills in favor of more lighthearted, spider web-swinging, superhero silliness in his Spider-Man series, Raimi made his bones with his 1981 directorial debut, The Evil Dead , which combined a classic teens-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods scenario (popularized a year earlier by Sean Cunningham and Victor Miller's Friday the 13th ) with demonic possession and slapstick splatter. The result was a shrill, irritating attempt at a horror comedy that proved neither scary n...