Three Films Make A Post: When it's red you're dead.

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No (2015): Yeah, well, I kinda could have lived without this one. It’s not just that the sharknado jokes have grown kinda stale this time around (though I have to give the film points for actually going for sharknado Earth worldbuilding), it’s the addition of endless celebrity and politician cameos that drag this thing down, as well as the scenes that make a dubious advert for Universal’s stupid amusement park down in Florida. There’s also just only so many ways you can show Ian Ziering chainsaw a flying shark, alas.

Knock Knock (2015): I don’t think I’m ever going to get into the films of Eli Roth, and at this point, I don’t believe it’s my fault anymore. It is, in any case, a bit of a shame, for I don’t doubt there’s the talent in Roth to actually make great, or at least good movies. Visually, the man’s films are always slick, often inventive, and the man clearly has the basic’s of horror film and thriller structures down flat. The problem is he’s putting all these powers in service of films that are generally obnoxious, waste opportunities for depth by the dozen, and too often have the basic vibe of a visit to the world view and mind of a total asshat. So, as usual, this one consists of nasty things happening to characters the film never gives me a reason to care about, avoids all opportunities to say something interesting (or coherent) about class and gender wars while making pretentious gestures suggesting otherwise, and just isn’t compelling enough as a pure horror film to make it possible to ignore its vacuity.


Altergeist (2014): I actually found it a lot easier to squeeze a bit of enjoyment out of Tedi Sarafian’s (of those Sarafians) directorial debut. Not just because it’s easier to overlook the flaws in a first film but because this film – while not containing any more depth than Roth’s – does not pretend it’s any more than it is: a slick looking film about young, pretty internet ghost hunters getting very much out of their depth in a haunted winery and dying. That is, until the film’s final thirty minutes or so pull a different fortean rabbit out of the hat, and the ghosts become a mere sideshow to the true monsters. It’s all very silly, of course, but here, at least, I found myself having fun instead of becoming increasingly annoyed.