CineNiche

Brad Anderson the brilliant director behind The Machinist , Session 9 , and Transsiberian has created a new realm of fantasy terror with The Vanishing On 7th Street , the only problem is how unevenly all the elements come together. We've been avid fans of Anderson's work since his psychological breakthrough Session 9.  In his first film he revamps the twist ending by throwing a curve ball no one sees coming and makes it work because the film has an atmosphere and mood that aids in the development of the twist.  The same can be said with The Machinist.  Again he creates a wonderfully told story of a man's guilt that haunts him to the point of his own death.  With Christian Bale becoming a pure method actor and loosing too much weight, they created a world of madness that gave them the buzz they both deserved.  Then we come to Transsiberian, which was another fantastic acting spectacle.  These three films put forth the idea that Anderson is...

Dear Mr. Gacey Svetozar Ristovski's adaptation of Jason Moss' superb book The Last Victim plays out like a made-for-TV movie.  Jason Moss was a young eager student who developed a theory to gain unfettered access to the mind of a serial killer by portraying himself as their perfect victim.  He wrote to Charles Manson , Jeffrey Dahmer , Henry Lee Lucas , Richard Ramirez , and of course John Wayne Gacy .  The correspondences between himself and these monsters led Moss to his darkest place.  His desire to become an FBI profiler was eventually met with open arms and his research provided a deeper understanding of the psyche of these killers.  Unfortunately this film really doesn't dive into the complete story of Jason Moss, instead it keeps to a simple plot of being driven mad by his encounters with Gacey.  William Foresyth plays Gacey extremely well and the film delivers most of Gacey's brilliance in manipulation: which did cause the real Moss ...

Instead of a lengthy comparison between Let The Right One In and Matt Reeves remake , we'll just stick with the basics.  Yes, this is an inferior remake of a foreign film.  Yes, Reeves takes out the subtlety and ambiguity that made the original such a powerful and beautiful work of art, and instead replaces these elements with bouts of action and decent make-up effects.  We would like to say that there is no merit to Let Me In , but that may be too harsh so lets look at the facts.  The in-medias-res beginning we thought would take this film into the realm of the book, but instead it is needlessly placed to spruce up the twenty minute test (for non-screenwriters out there this is the captivating twenty pages/minutes that will ultimately capture your viewer and if this fails then the rest will as well).  Our new Hakan is now played by the brilliant Richard Jenkins and is miscredited on IMDB as "The Father," this may shed some light on how exactly Reeves ruins...

Tony Williams describes the undercurrent in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist by writing, “In an era of recession, oil embargoes, the debilitating effects of Vietnam, and crisis of confidence in presidential leadership, cinema provides an ideological answer by invoking a traditional enemy - Satan (107).” Everything terrible that occurs in our lives, by Christian standards is the work of the devil. It is never the work of humankind, we could never be that horrible, it must be the devil working through us. Human’s represent a duality between good and evil, if we can recognize something to be good or an action that we have to be right than we must have known wrong or evil within our lives. We are light and dark, we are the shadow and the ego, we are the id and the superego, we are heaven and hell, yet we cannot admit to this. The Exorcist can be interpreted as a lashing out on the family structure. Ragan played by Linda Blair has no father and an actress mother who is sleeping w...

“Exploitation films are no different from any other kind of movie.  All appeal to some desire or fear that the audience may have.  Only because they do it more directly, with perhaps a bit less finesse, than a Hollywood product, they are branded as exploitation.” Mike Quarles, Down and Dirty: exploitation filmmakers and their movies   (xiii) Around the same year that The Last House on the Left was released another young documentary filmmaker was contemplating his own horror film.  He got the idea for his film while he was Christmas shopping.  He was in the middle of a large crowd of consumers all rushing to get their last minute gifts.  He couldn’t make his way down the main isles, so he went down a side isle and found himself in the power tools section.  He stared at a display of tools and thought about how easy it would be to clear the people out of his way if he only had a chainsaw.  Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ...

Launched by filmmaker R. J. Chmiel, this site boasts new reviews of films just hitting the theater - given his independent spirit when it comes to his own films - his reviews are great write ups swaying from his own personal philosophy to the social context the film displays.  If you're questioning what to see in the current cesspool of cinema hop on over to Keen Cinema You can also see trailers for the directors work over at:  Suzy Dirge Productions Check out "Song For Lindy" one of the most impressive debuts to come out of Chicago recently.  We hope to interview the director in a later post.

When the original Night Of The Demons premiered in 1988 it was considered the best of B-Horror and created a franchise that lasted two sequels. It is still the only Kevin Tenney film that highlights his ongoing terrible reel – with possible exception to Witchboard made before Demons. The ’88 version gives us gore, bad acting, ridiculous scripting, and a non-sequitur ending. These were elements every 80’s slasher film wanted the perfect combination of. To remake a great trash film does not give you license to try to make it modern cinema. Adam Gierasch, the director of the updated version, does not provide his audience with anything more than a revamping over-sexualized depiction of a once innovative concept. Cineniche does not blame Gierasch, we believe he did the best with what the studio gave him. He is just another young filmmaker that wishes to create horror again – but unfortunately the American horror film is dying. Here is where we’ve decided to rant on remakes ...