Above Average Joe Blogs

So the blog posts kinda got a bit quiet in the last 2 months. I think I'd only seen two movies in that time and they weren't particularly interesting, or easily bloggable movies. The first was Thor: Ragnarok, the second The Disaster Artist. For Thor, my thoughts amounted to "eh, its another Marvel movie, too long, too much humour, lacklustre villain." My review would have been, do you like Marvel movies? You'll like this. If not, this won't win you over. The Disaster Artist on the other hand, was a trickier film for me to blog about through its subject matter: a film about the making of the the best worst film ever made, The Room. I'm not a huge comedy movie fan but this film had me in stitches time and time again. Plus, I'm no Francophile (great pun, google it), but he gave a spot on performance of the alien-like Tommy Wiseau. If I had to give any critiques it is that it would not work for anyone who has not seen The Room but really, why haven...

I had a bit of a bumper week for films the past week, knocking off Darren Aronofsky's Mother! (! is part of the title for reasons unknown) and then Matthew Vaughn's sequel to Kingsman, subtitled The Golden Circle. Before diving into these reviews I'd like to talk a bit about the problems with trailers. Both the trailer for Mother! and The Golden Circle raise two different problems with modern trailers which are almost impossible to avoid if you are seeing movies in the cinema and therefore having to watch trailers before the actual film. Mother! and a Misleading Trailer First, Mother!'s (this is never going to be an easy film to properly punctuate) problem relates to the potential for miss-selling the movie in question. The trailers for Mother! suggested that the film was going to be a psychological horror movie that was going to go further than any other movie before in terms of shock value. That isn't me hyperbolising, one trailer for the films come replete w...

Cannily enough, the last time Stephen King's mammoth sized horror epic It got an adaptation it was 1990. Then It was adapted into a tv-movie starring the inimitable, sinister voiced, Tim Curry. Now 27 years later, just like the titular monster's feeding cycle, It is back, and ready to feast on the fears of children. And unfortunately, that's about the only peer group I suspect will find this, whilst wonderfully made bit of 80s retro kids on bikes adventuring throwback, scary. But before we dive deep into that tautologically turgid claim a few side notes. First, I'm not a mega Stephen King fan. That isn't saying I dislike him but I've only read a handful of his books, although considering how vast his body of work is maybe that isn't too bad. The first King book I read was Cell, which I read in high school. That was a twist on the zombie apocalypse genre, where all the mobile phones in the world suddenly let out a phone call which, if answered, turns th...

By the time I'd sprinted to the end of Outlast 2's lean campaign of around 6 hours the opening tension had long since died out to be replaced by utter confusion, bewilderment, and jaded cynicism at the amount of violence, only punctuated with the occasional creepy image. Australia's Funniest Home Videos got dark. That isn't to say Outlast 2 is a bad game, far from it, but in terms of horror it is decidedly average, too eager to the throw gore and obscenities on top of gore and obscenities, when a quiet lull and sinister shadow would have made you tremble from head to toe. I think the intensity of my negativity above stems from the fact that the game has at its core an interesting premise. Much like the original Outlast your character is in the reporter/journalist school of archetypes, which serves as the reasoning for why he insists on filming everything. That's right, for the uninitiated the Outlast series focuses on first person horror with the option of...

About two thirds of the way through the new Australian horror film Hounds of Love, a door is closed, screams are heard and the shot fades to black. In this scene there is no explicit violence, and for the majority of the film the violence is off-screen and implied, yet my heartbeat must've been about to explode out of my chest. When the scene had finished, the blood pumping around my ears gone, only then did I notice that just to my right, a few seats down, a woman in the cinema was weeping, stifling back tears. That's how much of an impact this film had without showing any violence. Hounds of Love is the debut film by Australian director Ben Young, not that you'd know it was his first time with this terrifying little film, about the kidnapping of a young girl by a serial killer couple in the suburbs of Perth. The cinematography and acting are all brilliant, with the central three performances of Ashleigh Cummings, ostensible victim, and Emma Booth and Stephen Curry as th...

A Shared (Collapsing) Universe  One happy family A "shared universe" is the hip new cool thing to have. Everyone's got one, from the Avengers and the Justice League, to Godzilla and King Kong, and now Universal is banking on The Mummy being the tentpole film for their Dark Universe. The Dark Universe is set to comprise of resurrecting the vintage Universal monsters of the black and white period. This means, pending good box office returns (not so much critics, sorry The Mummy) we are set to see Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Invisible Man, and The Creature of the Black Lagoon return to the silver screen.  But doesn't this beg the question: aren't we a bit fatigued by this whole shared universe idea though? Can't a film just stand on its own two feet, propelling its own narrative forward without having to make concessions to another 6 potential movies, some that many years off too? Whilst Marvel's cinematic universe has proven fertile gro...

Joe's Little Blog of Horrors  "We have such sights to show you..." Vital Stats  Name : Joe McCormack (Joe Kerr if I ever wanted a stage name, that's it) Age : Endless (or 26) Nationality : British-Australian - with the accent of your typical British villain Job : Out of work law graduate, looking for work in criminal law (think mildly less sleazy Saul Goodman) and currently employed as casual at Myer packing up all your pervy orders of g-strings, bras, minimisers (and that's just the men! Ho, how funny!) Why blog : Inspired by my current audiobook - A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay - and his framing device of introducing each part of the book through a horror blogger analysing the fictional documentary that makes up the bulk of the book.  I've been obsessed with horror from an early age. My earliest memories of horror were things like A Nightmare Before Christmas, the Tim Burton film (but not directed by him, that honour goe...