Ghostwatch seems like an appropriate film for April Fool’s Day. Seven years before The Blair Witch Project marketed itself as an actual piece of found footage, a documentary, the BBC scarred viewers young and old with their television production of Ghostwatch. Staged like so many other BBC investigative programmes, and despite a brief intro proclaiming…
Tag: panic
The Exorcist: Believer (2023) – David Gordon Green
For the first few minutes of The Exorcist: Believer I thought that maybe the reviews were wrong, that they had been too harsh, or maybe didn’t understand what the film was trying to do. It’s opening felt, to me, very much in line with the original film, until the earthquake hit, and from that moment…
Family Ties (1983) – Suzanne Takes You Down, The Fifth Wheel, and Stage Fright
We get an Elyse (Meredith Baxter) story with Suzanne Takes You Down. Written by Ruth Bennett it debuted on 16 March, 1983. One of Elyse’s friends, Suzanne (Brooke Alderson) who we’ve seen before with her husband, Ron (Jay Tarses), is having a bit of a tough time. She is suffering from empty nest syndrome and…
Mission: Impossible (1970) – Phantoms, and Terror
The IMF are working to stop a brutal dictator by haunting him, and making his staff think it’s time for him to retire this week in Phantoms. Written by Laurence Heath, this episode first debuted on 8 February, 1970. Leo Vorka (Luther Adler) is getting older, but his hold on his country remains iron tight….
Panic (2014) – Lauren Oliver
Lauren Oliver’s Panic is a page-turner on a monumental scale. I can’t remember the last time I was so swept up in the narrative of a story. I had to find out what happened next. As much as I have been enjoying my foray into the tales of Ian Fleming’s 007, and the writings of…
The X-Files (1996) – War of the Coprophages, and Syzygy
Darin Morgan delivers another fun episode for Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) with War of the Coprophages, which first aired on 5 January, 1996. Mulder, investigating UFO sightings in a place called Miller’s Grove (a play on the Orson Welles’ broadcast of War of the Worlds which took place in Grover’s Mill, when…
Paranormal Activity (2007) – Oren Peli
The Blair Witch Project may have made found footage horror movies mainstream, but it was Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity that brought it into our bedrooms. And this haunted house/possession story is the next stop in the ghost chapter of DK Canada’s Monsters in the Movies. There’s a lot of divisiveness about this movie, people either…
Das Boot (1981) – Wolfgang Petersen
The next big title in DK Canada’s highly enjoyable The Movie Book is the Oscar winning German film Das Boot from prolific director Wolfgang Petersen. This has always been a great film, and I love that I got to settle in and watch this film play out on my screen (again). Set during World War…
The Happening (2008) – M. Night Shyamalan
The Sci-Fi Chronicles continues its foray into the works of M. Night Shyamalan, and if Unbreakable didn’t disappoint you (and honestly I still like that one after all these years), this one was bound to. I think, this one would have worked so much better as a novel, expand out the characters, add a…
The Mind Reels 