In addition to the usual reviews and comments you would find on a horror movie blog, this is also a document of the wonderfully vast horror movie section of the video store I worked at in my youth.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Netflix Pix 8.0

It has been some time since I've posted about what's available on Netflix Canada, so now seems as good a time as any. The solid content has not stopped coming in - mad props to them for adding both seasons of Hannibal so quickly, I guess that it shoots here probably helped - and here is just a taste of some recent dark delicacies.


Mexican import Here Comes The Devil is now available on Big Red. This is a solid genre piece that is refreshingly straightforward and built on atmosphere punctuated with moments of extreme gore. Director Adrián García Bogliano's has sound filmmaking skills, even if he does love the shock zoom a little too much. Much like Jorge Michel Grau's 2010 flick We Are What We Are, this film features a fractured family dynamic, so fans of such will find much to chew on here.


Banshee Chapter was a nice surprise at last year's Toronto After Dark Film Festival. Using the bizarre and unexplained phenomenon of number stations and meshing it with Lovecraftian lore, director Blair Erickson makes a ton of great choices here. It is largely a found footage flick, but he cleverly abandons the format when it doesn't suit the story. There are a ton of well executed set pieces - like double what you get in paint-by-numbers Hollywood fare - so if you're in the mood for some creeps, check this one out.


Last year's documentary love letter to George A. Romero's debut masterpiece Night of the Living Dead is now on Netflix. I enjoyed this quite a bit and had a nice mix between academia and fan service, with fantastic artistic visualizations by Ghoulish Gary Pullin, and includes the likes of Jason Zinoman (author of the great book Shock Value), genre industry pillars like Gale Ann Hurd & Larry Fessenden as well as Romero himself. For fans of zombies and genre film history, this is a must watch.


Moving on to television, I was very glad to this on here. Gillian Anderson is fantastic in this as an icy inspector on the trail of a serial killer. The parallel storytelling mode following cop and killer simultaneously is very compelling and Jamie Dornan is also great as the calculating killer Paul Spector. Only five episodes long, I wager you'll devour this in an evening.

Well, there you go, that should keep you busy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to finish watching the second season of Hannibal.

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