Seven Movie Review

Although I saw this when I was already 17, it scared the shit out of me. When I saw it for the first time in the cinema I literally fell out of my chair at the moment when the 'sloth' victim turns out not to be dead. This was one of the most terrifying cinematic experiences I've ever had.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

Seven is the one film as I reached toward adulthood that really got under my skin in a way that terrified me. This police procedural thriller about a sadistic serial killer was created through the use of set design and cinematography that are just unnerving. I can’t recall another film of its kind that left me so shaken. It’s unrelenting not only in its sick and ghastly murders, of which we only ever see the aftermath, but also in its dark and depressing tone, designed specifically to destroy the audience’s will to go on, the way the rain continually pours down on the movie’s unnamed city and casts a gloom outside every window. Even the ending, which ties everything together and offers some explanation for the apparent irrationality of the killer, is almost entirely without hope or a denouement.

The Wolfman Movie Review

This review is based on the extended cut version.

Can anyone remember the last time Anthony Hopkins made a film that didn’t look like a complete sellout? In the last decade or so he’s probably made one film that’s worth watching – The World’s Fastest Indian. You should seriously give it a look because The Wolfman is anything but worthy of two of hours of your time.

The Wolfman is director Joe Johnston’s attempt at bringing back that old Hollywood monster movie feeling. He’s trying to invoke nostalgia from the appearance of the Universal logo, which is a retooling of the one used in 1941, when Lon Chaney, Jr. donned the wolf makeup and chased Claude Rains around the backlot. It has an opening scene that suggests we might be in for a wonderfully campy ride, with a bombastic and ridiculous musical score, fast cuts of wolf’s claws, growling and snarling on the soundtrack and just enough dripping blood from the victim to be scary without tipping the balance toward gruesome.