4) Insidious
I’m extremely outspoken about my love for James Wan’s Insidious for multiple reasons, but good horror is the most prevalent one. I mean, in a time of studio remakes and awful reboots, Wan was able to bounce back from the horrid debacle that was Dead Silence and deliver one of the most creative, visually enticing, well-written horror films in years, boasting originality over re-hashing. I mean, what other movie can exploit gangly and freakish oldies singer Tiny Tim for the true monster he was through the music he created, as Insidious conjured a hair-raising scene involving Tiny Tim’s Tiptoe Through The Tulips, a scene that stresses tense atmospheric horror over cheap thrills and kills. This film re-instated my faith in director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell instantaneously, making me explode with joy at the news of Insidious Chapter 2 being greenlit.
-Nato
3) Kill List
This was one of those horror movies you hear about buzzing from the corners of the room. Take the best Guy Ritchie crime movie you have seen in a long time, and mash that movie up with (the original) The Wicker Man, and you have an idea of what Kill List has in store for you. It’s about a man, a fellow soldier, who gets asked to do some random killing jobs for some people he doesn’t know, and things get twisted, pretty quickly. We can see our lead may not be well in the head, and those who hired him may have hired him for just that reason.
When I watched Kill List, I watched the movie knowing nothing at all about it, so by the middle of the film I was transfixed, and by the ending of the film (which is incredibly disturbing) I was sitting there, slack-jawed, in awe at what I just saw. The violence in the film is brutal (the hammer to the face scene, anyone?) and the story is a complex and creepy one, involving secret societies and our own primal urges. Kill List is NOT the movie you expect it to be, and the way it skews those normal movie tropes is what makes it so unforgettable to watch. And please understand, you will NOT shake that ending.
-Remy
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