Halloween: the one night of the year when the young or old can pretend to be someone (or something) else. But after all that exhausting trick-or-treating and immature partying, it can be nice to relax in front of your favorite Halloween flick. Here at Player Affinity in honor of ol’ Hallows Eve, we (Dinah and Simon) are discussing our favorite fright films in some classic categories to enjoy on October 31. Beware.
Predict which five movies will place in the top five of this weekend’s U.S. domestic box office. It’s that easy. I will make my own predictions here and explain them to you each week to give you some sort of reference point. It’s then your job to enter a comment with your top five.
The highest grossing horror franchise is sadly coming to an end. In 2004, Saw solidified a new form of modern horror that exploits torture as a central stomach-turner. Produced for very little money, Saw turned heads with a hands-off killer in John Kramer who is a mere mortal dying of cancer aiming to teach people the value of life (or so he says). Jigsaw, as he is otherwise known, sets up elaborate games to make his “subjects” adopt a new way of thinking. I’ve been given the glorious task of identifying the most memorable trap of each entry. Let’s start from the beginning (spoilers throughout).
If the adaptation of “Drake’s Fortune” is to succeed under the temperamental direction of David O. Russell (The Fighter, I Heart Huckabees), it must have a stellar lead to play Nathan Drake. Casting such a role is a difficult balance of fitting the bill of the character and branding the project with a name large enough to attract viewers who are not familiar with the series or games in general.
Clint Eastwood’s new film Hereafter opened in theaters on Friday, and gave us a tale of ponder and wonderment at the possibilities that follow our mortal life. It’s not been his best received work, and some critics express worry that Clint Eastwood is going the way of Woody Allen – a once incredible director that now just churns out films nobody cares about. I disagree with this point of view. Actually, Eastwood is among those colleagues of his whose worst works still best 90 percent of the dreck unleashed upon us by Hollywood – the Coen Brothers, Spielberg, Scorsese. He seems to enjoy the darker and more ambiguous places of human existence: racism in Gran Torino, and ideas of afterlife and communication with the dead in Hereafter.
Predict which five movies will place in the top five of this weekend’s U.S. domestic box office. It’s that easy. I will make my own predictions here and explain them to you each week to give you some sort of reference point. It’s then your job to enter a comment with your top five.
What happens after we die? The fear and fascination of this unknown post-mortem void has driven many fictional works, but what better a medium to explore the notion of an afterlife than film? Depictions have ranged from fantasy worlds to mirror image societies where one must come face to face with his or her life decisions.
For all aspiring filmmakers, ultra-low budget films are a way in; the one sliver of light that cuts though the dark of big-budget
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