Sara Watches Stuff

When a movie is fairly universally regarded as terrifying, I become fixated on it. My fascination with horror as a genre has really hardened me to the notion of "scary", but Hereditary  was getting rave reviews and being called scary by all the people whose opinions result in critically acclaimed horror. I had to put on my cynical boots - a lot of these people also loved The VVitch , which I found very hit and miss, and the movie comes from the same producers. Still, my yearning to get to the bottom of what people consider to be a properly scary movie in the current day found an acceptable target.  With Hereditary , it's easy to see why people were so enraptured. It's a thrilling experience. For a relatively new filmmaker on the mainstream scene, Ari Aster has created a very tightly directed and composed movie. It follows a family after the death of Toni Collette's character's mother, through varying places of grief and understanding of the complexities...

I wrote fairly recently about my favourite horror movies and my twisted love affair with the Saw  franchise. When the movies were still getting released, I never got the chance to share in the Halloween tradition of horror releases, because no one else I knew cared at all. And so at 9:30pm on Halloween this year, I donned a bunch of fake blood and some hastily drawn jigsaw pieces and watched a new goddamn   Saw movie. Upfront and honest: Jigsaw  is not a good movie. It does not stand alone, and you will not enjoy it if you do not enjoy the movies as a whole. There was an obvious attempt made at creating an independent piece that stood apart from the seven films prior but still tied into the mythos, and while the game plan is clear, I wouldn't call it successful because it doesn't really make sense when viewed as a part of the series as a whole. As a reboot, it's just average; as a sequel (an octquel?) it's sub-par.  Jigsaw  is obsessed with creating a ...

I never wrote a review for Friend Request when it released in Europe in 2016, mostly because it was one of the most thoroughly underwhelming, by-the-numbers, ill-produced pieces of horror garbage I'd watched in a while. It wasn't the kind of bad that was fun to write about: it was just an indistinct blob of horror on a screen.  Pre-Halloween seems to be the prime time for those indistinct blobs of horror that the film industry has been saving away. Got a movie saved up that wrapped filming in 2014 and released in Europe in 2016 but hasn't technically had its money-making potential squeezed out of it? Go for it. The US release reminded me that I should probably get some thoughts written down, however brief and aggravated. I can't tell you much about the plot of Friend Request because I remember watching it and having all of the details dissolve from my mind almost immediately. It's a fitting review to follow the conceptually bloated and allegorically confused...