Lords of Chaos

Year:  2018
Director:  Jonas Åkerlund
Screenplay:  Jonas Åkerlund and Dennis Magnusson, based on the book Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind
Starring:  Rory Culkin, Emory Cohen, Jack Kilmer, Sky Ferreira, Valter Skarsgård
Running Time:  118 minutes
Genre:  Horror, thriller, crime, music

Norway, the late 1980s:  Teenager Øystein  Aarseth (Culkin), known as Euronymous, forms groundbreaking band Mayhem and creates a new subgenre:  True Norwegian Black Metal.  The band begin to attract a lot of attention in the Metal scene, with troubled lead singer Pelle Ohlin (Kilmer), who calls himself "Dead".  Euronymous soon finds has his own record store and record label, Deathlike Silence, and signs singer Kristian Vikernes (Cohen), who calls himself Varg.  However, it soon becomes much darker, as some begin to act on the group's evil, Satanic persona leading to suicide, a spate of high-profile arson attacks on churches and murder.

This film is based on the early years of the Norwegian Black Metal music scene from the late 1980s until 1993.  The opening title of the film states that it is "Based on Truth... And Lies... And What Actually Happened", so I don't know how accurate or not it is, and Black metal is not really my taste in music, so i really know nothing about it.  However, I did like this film.  It has a curious mix of tones though, moving from typical music biography material (the band get together, struggle, there are conflicts, the band achieve some success, there are more conflicts, break ups and make ups and so on), almost goofy Spinal Tap style humour, and some deeply disturbing scenes.  There are several long, brutally shocking scenes of violence in the film that even I, hardened horror fan as I am, found hard to watch.  Throughout the film, the characters are very dismissive of "posers", and yet they are kind of posers themselves, they adopt this Satanic, dark evil persona to shock and frighten people, and have their own little exclusive club (called the "Black Circle"), but some take it way too seriously.  The performances are good, even if some of the actors seem a little too old and clean cut for the roles that they are playing.  The film feels too long at times and the pacing feels off at times, but it is still a compelling and genuinely disturbing true-life horror film.

Rory Culkin and Jack Kilmer are lords of Chaos   

Signs

Year: 2002
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin, Cherry Jones, M. Night Shyamalan
Genre: Science-fiction, thriller, drama
Running Time: 107 minutes

Summary: Former preacher Graham Hess (Gibson) lost his faith when his wife died in a car accident, and now works as a farmer a few miles outside Pittsburgh with his younger brother, former minor league baseball player Merrill (Phoenix), and Graham's two young children Morgan (Culkin) and Bo (Breslin).
Waking after a night disturbed by strange noises, the Hess family are shocked to find a large crop circle design in their corn field. Initially putting it down to local pranksters, the family soon discover that there have been reports flooding in from around the world of an unusually high number of crop circles appearing in a brief space of time.
Speculation is rife as to what caused the crop circles, some believing it to be an elaborate publicity stunt, some claiming it is a widespread hoax and others claiming that it marks the end of the world.
Morgan becomes fascinated with a book he buys about UFOs and extra terrestrials. The news reports on the television and radio become increasingly disturbing as strange lights are seen in the sky near the circles and video footage of briefly glimpsed strange creatures surface on the news. It soon becomes apparent that a full-scale alien invasion is under way, and the Hess family are among their targets.

Opinions: M. Night Shyamalan has had an interesting, if very uneaven career. From the highly successful and critically adored The Sixth Sense (1999) to the critically panned The Last Airbender (2010). Shyamalan is at his best when he is dealing with regular people pitted against otherworldly events. This film really has him doing what he does best, and provides an imaginative ground zero view of an alien invasion.
Unlike most films of this type there are no flashy spaceship effects or spectacular battles, or even ray-guns zapping everything in sight. The spaceships are seen briefly in TV news footage and then are basically lights in the sky. The aliens are barely glimpsed throughout the whole movie, and are usually depicted as just noises in the house.
The film features an impressively subdued turn from Mel Gibson as a tormented former preacher who is still stricken with grief and bitterness over the untimely death of his wife. Joaquin Phoenix is also good as the younger brother, who seems to be treated more like an employee than a family member. As the two kids, Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin both provide powerful and affecting performances.
The movie does have it's problems, most notably a ludicrous final revelation about the aliens, although that really comes too late in the day to spoil anything. Also the elements of family drama and alien invasion movie, as well as the film's surprising religious overtones, don't always gel. At times it comes across as a fusion of Ingmar Bergman and Steven Spielberg.
However, this is an intriguing and fascinating film and a cut above most alien invasion movies.

"See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Do you believe that there are no conicidences?"
- Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) philosophises in Signs.



Rory Culkin, Joaquin Phoenix, Mel Gibson and Abigail Breslin watch for Signs

Scream 4

Year: 2011
Director: Wes Craven
Screenplay: Kevin Williamson
Starring: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Anthony Anderson, Alison Brie, Adam Brody, Rory Culkin
Running Time: 111 minutes
Genre: Horror, slasher

Summary: It's been ten years since the notorious "Woodsboro Massacre", and Stab, the film based on the murders, has spawned six successful sequels. The small town of Woodsboro has put the murders behind it, to the point where the massacre have become something of a joke to the town's high school students until, on the tenth anniversry of the killings, two high school students (Aimee Teegarden and Brittany Robertson) are brutally stabbed to death by a killer wearing the same "Ghostface" costume and mask that the original "Woodsboro Massacre" killer wore.
The following day Sidney Prescott (Campbell), who has survived three previous massacres perpetrated by "Ghostface" killers, returns to Woodsboro to promote her book Out of the Darkness but almost immediately becomes caught up in the murders. Especially since her teenage cousin, Jill Roberts (Roberts), and her friends Kirby (Panettiere), Charlie (Culkin) and Olivia (Marielle Jaffe) are among those targeted by taunting telephone calls from the killer.
As Sheriff Dewey Riley (Arquette) leads the investigation, his wife one-time journalist Gale Weathers (Cox) (on whose books the Stab movies were based) determines to solve the killings, and it soon becomes apparent that this horror movie obsessed killer is planning a "remake" of the original massacre: with everything bigger and better than before.

Opinions: The original Scream (1996) was a massive hit with it's blend of scares, mystery, humour and movie references. It assumed that audiences were familiar with horror movies and so it had it's characters being equally familiar with the genre. The sequel, Scream 2 (1997), targeted it's jokes and references at horror movie sequels, while Scream 3 (2000), which was intended to be the final film in the series, referenced trilogies. This film, coming out eleven years after the previous one, deals with endless, and increaingly bad, sequels and the recent popular trend to remake older horror movies.
It opens with kind of a clever sequence in which two teenagers are savagely murdered in what appears to be an over the top self-parody, but is revealed to be the opening sequence to Stab 7 (the latest in the film-within-a-film series based on the events of the first Scream). It pretty much sets the tone for what follows.
Scream 4 (or if you prefer it's on-screen title SCRE4M) is not a bad movie at all. It's funny, it's clever, it has suspense and a few good shocks and pretty much delivers what anyone could expect from a Scream movie. The cast perform well, and Wes Craven directs with his usual sure hand. It benefits enormously from Kevin Williamson, who wrote the first two Scream films, returning for this.
The problem is that Scream was such an influential film in it's time. For about six years afterwards horror was full of jokey self-referential slasher films, none of which managed to get as good a balance between jokes and scares as Scream. Watching Scream 4 it's hard not too feel as if it's been done before, although that tends to always be the way with sequels. At least this makes an effort to stay fresh.
Scream 4 is an entertaining and enjoyable movie, which fans will certainly enjoy, and is in fact an improvement on it's predecessor.



Neve Campbell in Scream 4