What a putrid mess. The trailer for Pompeii, Paul W.S. Anderson’s CGI shit-fest from earlier this year, promised viewers an exploding mountain. It never promised to be a faithful retelling of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 that destroyed the city of the title. But that’s all well and good. Paul W.S. Anderson does not do anything but spectacle. In the trailer, Vesuvius blows up and that’s what I paid to see. What I didn’t pay to see was a low-rent Titanic rip-off that made me wait 66 whole minutes for the good stuff. And that wait is a problem. Pompeii only runs about an hour and a half. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for the disaster portion of this disaster movie. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Pompeii”
Some of Those Responsible: Michele Conroy
October Horrorshow: Mama
The last horror flick I saw with Guillermo del Toro serving as executive producer was The Orphanage, from 2007. I reviewed it in last year’s Horrorshow, and while I did like it, I lambasted it for its derivative nature. This time around, the film del Toro chose to attach his name to is Mama, from writer/director Andres Muschietti. It’s also a fairly derivative horror flick, in that there’s not much happening on screen that will be all that unfamiliar to horror fans, but unlike The Orphanage, I couldn’t find any quotes online where the director is being a pretentious ass, so there’s that.
Mama tells the story of two lost little girls and the ghost that loves them. Beginning during the financial crisis in 2008, a businessman played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau goes on a murderous killing spree (thankfully off camera). He kidnaps his two young daughters and flees the city for the countryside. After a car accident, the trio are lucky to survive, and they seek shelter in an abandoned cabin in the woods. There, Nikolaj is about to finish off his bad day by killing his daughters, but a spectral apparition inhabiting the cabin gets to him first, saving the girls’ lives. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Mama”