Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)
Rating: ★★
Feb 14, 2010Greek Myth in the Present Day
Chris Columbus seeks to emulate the success of the Harry Potter films with this adaptation of a Young Adult series about the children of Greek gods. The film falls apart due to Columbus's typical banal cues and effects overkill

Vile (2011)

Vile (2011)
Rating:
Sep 19, 2013Sadism and Torture
I'm tempted to make a comment about this being a film that offers its own critical summary in its title but this Saw wannabe is so tame it fails even that. Hard to believe a film with a premise about a group of people forced to torture one another could emerge so dramatically uninteresting

Starry Eyes (2014)

Starry Eyes (2014)
Rating: ★★★
Oct 29, 2014Twisted Deals for Hollywood Stardom/Deadly Infection
Bizarre horror about an actress trying to get her big break in Hollywood that takes all manner of strange turns as she becomes infected and starts physically decaying. More explanation about what is going on would have helped no end but the film still arrives in memorably perverse territory

Southbound (2015)

Southbound (2015)
Rating: ★★★
Apr 2, 2016Horror Anthology
Another in the spate of multi-director anthologies that have become popular in recent years – The ABCs of Death, V/H/S et al. This is set around the common locale of a desert highway where all five tales hover in an eerie twilight zone where the everyday world has stepped over into the uncanny

The Remains (2016)

The Remains (2016)
Rating: ★★
Jan 2, 2019Haunted House
The haunted house genre is one that has become thoroughly exhausted by overuse in recent years. This puts the elements together with a professional assemblage but is essentially no different to the 347 other haunted house films that this site has seen in the last twelve months

I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu (2019)

I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu (2019)
Rating:
Nov 17, 2019Rape and Revenge
I don't enjoy watching these rape and revenge films. I said commendable things about the first two in the series and defended them against being exploitation. On the other hand, when people keep making sequels showing women being raped because the first films made money, a line has definitely been crossed. After 41 years, director Meir Zarchi and star Camille Keaton re-team to make a sequel to the original harrowing rape and revenge film