May 17
Produced by the famed Troma Enterainment, Father’s Day is a pretty middling affair. The flick comes written and directed by Winnipeg-based filmmaking collective Astron-6and attempts to slap itself headlong into the grindhouse and late-nite movie genre, using resolute cheese, bad effects, and exaggerated sex and violence to plead its case.
You can check out the rest of this review at Father’s Day (2011) Movie Review: Too Modern and Too Hip for Its Own Good at Cinema Sentries
The Woman in Black is Daniel Radcliffe’s first post-Potter vehicle. Directed by James Watkins and based on the novel of the same name by Susan Hill, this is a moody Edwardian ghost picture that utilizes many of the clichés of the genre. It is a kind of sluggish picture, one that relies more on mood than substance, and it never really seems to get off the ground.
In what seems to be an attempt to mesh at least some of the elements of Shaun of the Dead with a send-up of the Hammer horror films of the 1950s to 1970s, Lesbian Vampire Killers arrives with very little bite and very little titillation. It is unfortunately a half-assed effort in just about every sense of the term, feeling remarkably safe and impossibly bland.
The Paranormal Activity saga continues with the third entry in the series, a prequel that is supposed to explain the events of the first two movies. It is set 18 years prior to the first two flicks apparently, although the incessant presence of the video camera (clunky as it may be), fashion and décor is straight modern times.
Presented in the “found footage” style, André Øvredal’s TrollHunter is an interesting movie. I can’t say that it brings much by way of freshness to the table, although there’s something to be said about sticking fairly closely to troll mythology. Trolls are found in Norse and Scandinavian folklore, apparently living in caves or isolated rocks and representing significant danger to human beings, especially Christians.
