Review: "Room 237"

On my DVD shelf sit two movies that I consider among the best I’ve ever seen: Pi and JFK. Both movies deal with lead characters obsessed with their current problems and slowly (but surely) becoming paranoid, seeing conspiracy in everything. Both are less about “the truth” or “the answer” and more about how one can lose oneself in the pursuit of their obsessions. Growing up with OCD, I certainly understand.

Room 237 joins in on the action, except it switches dramatized people and fictional characters for real ones - making what is shown more interesting and (believe it or not) more frustrating to watch. Not really a documentary and not really a “movie”, Room 237 is more like an essay in a style similar to F for Fake. Made up of a series of interviews from film buffs and scholars, we get a frame by frame deconstruction of the messages and meanings behind Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Review: "Evil Dead"

It doesn’t take much to impress me, but it does take a lot to scare me - when it comes to movies, I mean. At my most recent outing, a colleague teased me a bit about my lack of interest in watching horror flicks. Then, just prior to the movie starting, a security woman yells at us all, “If we catch you with an electronic device, you WILL be escorted out by the police!” For me, real instances like this are much scarier than anything that flickers on a screen.

After being bombarded for years by trailers and DVD’s for movies that offer nothing but jump scares and familiar killers, I’m kinda lukewarm towards this genre. Reviewers like The Cine-Masochist make me feel a bit picky and unfair, but it’s just how I feel.

That being said, I should re-state that it doesn’t take much to impress me. All I need is something fairly clever, easy to follow and very fun to watch; if the cast and crew are having a blast, so am I (Troma is great at this).

And watching a demon vomit vibrant, non CGI blood on a woman, only to be chainsawed in half later on, is indeed “a blast” and “fun to watch”.