The Devil in the Details

  William Freidkin's 1990 horror outing The Guardian was heavily marketed back in its day as Friedkin's return to the horror genre, years after The Exorcist wowed unsuspecting audiences. Somewhat surprisingly for one of the great American directors, it bombed on release, receiving negative reviews across the board and apparently underperforming at the box office, even eventually being disowned by Friedkin himself. What could have gone so wrong? Well, let's dig in and find out. Our two newly-wed leads, Phil and Kate Sterling, find themselves raising a newborn baby boy despite the fact that both of them have demanding careers. Once maternity leave time starts to run a little low, they decide to hire a live-in nanny to look after little Jake while they're gone, despite a shared sense of guilt at having to subcontract out their jobs as parents.  After their first choice of nanny dies in a mysterious biking accident, the couple have no choice but to hire their second: t...

So after Road Games, I've been looking very much forward to Patrick,  the very first collaboration between director Richard Franklin and writer Everett de Roche (Long Weekend.) One look at the synopsis was plenty enough to draw me in: a comatose killer that kills with his mind? Written and directed by people with talent? Sign me up! When newly-independent housewife Kathy Jacquard takes a job opening at the nearby private Roget Clinic, she is quickly introduced to the building's most miserable specimen, the comatose Patrick, who was rendered a vegetable after a mysterious 'accident' three years ago. Some say it was probably the trauma of seeing his mother killed, as she was discovered fried together with her new lover in a bathtub in the home she and her son share, but Kathy's beginning to have her doubts. I mean, is everyone really so sure Patrick isn't responsible? And besides, why do the windows keep opening on their own? Why does the equipment in the hospi...

In parts one and two of my Fatal Frame II analysis, we got  caught  up with the plot all the way up until the third act before diving into the successes and failures of its story, atmosphere, and game design. This time around, we'll be getting into spoiler territory as we talk about the ending and everything we couldn't discuss before. When our twin protagonists reach the escape tunnel they were seeking when last we left off, they find it lies behind a locked gate. Bummer. Luckily, we find evidence that the locked gate is controlled by a mechanism inside the “Old Tree,” so that’s where we’re headed next. Once Mio and Mayu reach the Old Tree, however, Mayu becomes overwhelmed with exhaustion and decides to have a lie down. Observant players will probably understand this to be foreshadowing for our final protracted scavenger hunt.  But for now, Mio doesn’t know where to even begin with the mechanism that works the escape tunnel, so she seeks out Itsuki to ask him if he kn...

Last time in this looong-running analysis of the Fatal Frame franchise, we got through roughly half of Crimson Butterfly's dense narrative and are finally primed to start picking apart what works and what doesn't. Intrigued? Of course you are! If anything seems to have been glossed over here, there's a good chance I covered it in pt. 2 of my original Fatal Frame analysis, which you can read here. As we transition into actual criticism and analysis, let’s just take a moment to give it up for the Fatal Frame wiki and all those who have contributed to it over the years. While the bits of the wiki that just regurgitate questionably true claims by the game’s authors are often more than a little grating, the fact that one can use it to actually make sense of this game’s complex story is a godsend. It’s actually confused things just a bit for this review, because as much as I want to voice my frustrations with how tough the narrative can be to make sense of, at this point I feel...

Oh, hey! Didn’t see you there. Welcome back to my unnecessarily lengthy and verbose analysis of the Fatal Frame series. The last time we were here, we braved all manner of horrors to escape from the haunted Himuro Mansion in the original Fatal Frame, and it was a lot of fun. And pretty fucked up as well, I might add. If you enjoyed that, boy are you in for a treat as today we'll be discussing what is popularly considered to be the best entry in the whole damn series. Well, alright, some people prefer the third game, but some people prefer Silent Hill 3 over 2 as well, and those people are every bit as wrong. I’m going to attempt to only brush over things that were covered in the first review. If you didn’t check that one out, you really oughta. And full disclosure: I actually have a personal history with this game compared to the rest of the series, so I admit to a bit of a bias on my part. The game opens, much like the last one, with voiceover atop an initially black screen. A...

So before I begin, I would like to warn all of my readers out there that my copy of this film may be haunted. When I first took the plastic off of it the other day (it was brand new,) I discovered that a thin, oily substance had saturated the paper insert inside the Blu-ray case, and the back of both discs within. So, I cleaned them and made the best of it, but I find myself more than a little freaked out by this. I tried to return it to the Amazon seller that sold it to me, but wouldn't you know it: they no longer exist. Apparently, according to Google, this is actually a common occurrence: something called outgassing, and entire little communities of weirdo Blu-ray collectors out there spend their every waking moment on forums discussing the best way to combat it and how to keep their archives in the best shape possible so that they'll still be around even when their bones have long since turned to dust, but the more you know, I guess? I'm very inclined to just go with th...

I come to this review of cult classic Mystics in Bali with a lot of baggage. You see, this is a film that has been on my backlog for a hot minute, and having already seen the esteemed RedLetterMedia group cover this film once in a far more entertaining format, I almost felt there was utterly no use in making any attempt to cover it. But I suppose I shouldn't assume everyone on the internet has already seen those videos and heard of this thing; only most of them. Speaking of which, are you at all familiar with the equally infamous mockbuster Lady Terminator? If so, you're in for a real treat, as this comes from the same director. His trademarks include an almost lost-in-translation approach to aping Hollywood films that result in truly baffling work, further strengthened by a reliance on obscure regional folklore, even when the film being copied is allegedly James Cameron's The Terminator. I almost feel like there's no point in summarizing, either. I mean, the very firs...