CineNiche

  Welcome back to Retro Flashback. Today we have a special critique, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2. There are countless sites devoted to the Evil Dead series and rather than rehashing old material, I thought we could try to find ways to view this classic in a new way. We all know Ash to be a hero, but what is he fighting for? Is it possible that he is merely battling for his own sanity? We will also rate Dead By Dawn to see where it falls in your horror education. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.” Charles Dickens – David Copperfield     "Groovy!” Ashley “Ash” Williams In the beginning... Sam Raimi was born in 1959 in Fra...

CineNiche Graphic Design Purchase poster at Zazzle Brian De Palma's Carrie represents a first in menstruation horror.  This packed phrasing simply means Carrie shows the fears of adolescence through the eyes of a sheltered girl on the verge of womanhood.  The opening sequence features Carrie's first period and through extreme repression at home Carrie has no idea what is happening to her.  All the other girls laugh and throw tampons and pads at her.  In her state of frenzy Carrie has smeared her blood everywhere.  Miss Collins, her gym teacher, comforts her while secretly wanting to laugh as well.  In the principle's office she describes the situation to him and when he sees the blood on Miss Collins he recoils.  Carrie's anger and frustration manifests itself through telekinesis. One could argue that her ability develops out of repression. Without a healthy outlet for her feelings or knowledge of her body, everything bottle...

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...

"I'm so scared my asshole is puckering... Spooky, Spooky." Cornered! is a study in low budget horror production.  We have a total of eight despicable characters with three locations to choose from.  Among the eight is the killer who gives us a medium amount of gore, decent jump scares, and creative murders.  Even though the production budget was tight Daniel Maze did a great job on his first feature.  He wrote and directed a story that may have cliches but overall the atmosphere he created with his characters and the location he tapped into something different. Mona is a phone sex operator addicted to ice cream, Jess is the chain smoking whore who's just trying to survive, Steven is the alcoholic owner of a run down liquor store, Donny is an obese employee with an addiction to doughnuts, and Jimmy (James Duval from The Doom Generation ) is Steven's nephew who has just quit heroin cold turkey.  Put these five together in an inescapable li...

This may be the shortest review of any film on CineNiche, and it's out of spite.  Maybe not spite, but definitely to teach Jon Knautz a lesson.  We wanted to love Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer .  It had been sitting on the unwatched shelf for nine months, just waiting for that right moment to indulge in an Evil Dead type of horror comedy.  Finally, the day came - it was the right time - you know cosmos aligned and all that.  Final summation: This is the longest 85 minute film you will ever see.  It's not bad, far from it.  The main problem with Jack Brooks is they didn't have content to fill the running time so a lot of details that are not needed are included.  Here's a main example: Professor Gordon Crowly (Robert England) is possessed and ends up walking out his second story window and we cut to the next day.  Crowly wakes up with no clue how he got there and sees his hands are covered in dirt.  He turn...

Watch Michael Cain as Paul Kersey in Death Wish VI: Pensioner’s Revenge.  The similarities between Harry Brown and Paul Kersey are endless: both have war time backgrounds and through the loss of someone close to them and no help from the police, decided to take the law into their own hands and become vigilantes for blood justice.  The biggest difference between Harry and all of the Death Wish films is that we care about him.  Charles Bronson couldn’t emote even if you slowly ripped every appendage from his body.  He made a career of being a masculine stoic.  If my wife was murdered, then a few years later my catatonic daughter and house keeper were raped beaten and murdered, and even later my best friend during the war was killed by a gang of thugs – I might shed a tear or two. Harry is older than Paul was and suffers from emphysema.  He has lost his wife child and friend and he mourns – we watch this man break down.  He is all alone in a w...

When Wes Craven first pitched this screenplay he was turned down by every major studio, they said it was absurd - unfilmable - and uninteresting. That was 26 years ago, and over the course of those years we've been given 9 Freddy related films and an unnecessary 44 episode TV show . So, keeping in mind that Freddy is a modern icon or modern urban legend/myth and there isn't a single person that doesn't at least know of Freddy Krueger - "he has knives for fingers." It is a lot of pressure for a first time feature length filmmaker to create or recreate something so iconic. Now, the general consensus is: why remakes? And no matter how good a remake is you'll always - I repeat always for emphasis - have to say I liked the original better. This leads to the second part of the why remakes question, why remake something that will never live up to or be as good as its original? The simple Hollywood answer: Money! We are in economic crisis and even though y...