Richard and CP24 anchor Cortney Heels have a look at the weekend’s new movies including “The Call of the Wild,” the alpha dog of dog movies, the homecoming dramedy “Standing Up, Falling Down,” the family drama “Ordinary Love” and the psychological drama “The Lodge.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to theatres including the canine-coming-of-age story “The Call of the Wild,” the you-can-never-go-home-again dramedy “Standing Up, Falling Down” and the heartfelt cancer drama “Ordinary Love.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
A weekly feature from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest and most interesting movies! This week Richard looks at “The Call of the Wild,” the alpha dog of dog movies, the homecoming dramedy “Standing Up, Falling Down” and the psychological drama “The Lodge.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
In the movie Hitchcock, the master of suspense, played by Anthony Hopkins, says, “Audiences want to be shocked — they want something different.” He’s referring to the lurid horrors of his ground breaking 1960 film Psycho but he could have been talking about any number of frights available on screens this month.
Trends come and go but one thing is for sure, audiences will always line up to get scared at the movies. Whether it is the time loop terrors of Happy Death Day or the return of Jigsaw, the evil mastermind from the Saw series, there is no shortage of things that go bump in the night at the movies this Halloween.
But why do we pay to be scared? Isn’t that counterintuitive?
Scientists tell us that we like the rush of adrenalin that comes from watching Leatherface chase victims, chainsaw roaring.
That jolt of fear makes the heart race and releases a hormone called dopamine that’s also associated with pleasure. Science journalist Jeff Wise called the experience of extreme movie fear “the biological equivalent of opening the throttle.”
A Saturday matinee screening of Paranormal Activity was the first and only time I ever heard anyone actually scream in a theatre.
I don’t mean a quiet whimper followed by an embarrassed laugh or a frightened little squeal. No, I mean a full-on, open throated howl of terror. But the woman didn’t run from the theatre. She stayed and enjoyed the rest of the film, so she must have liked the cathartic release of tension the scream gave her.
Legendary filmmaker and showman William Castle took full advantage of the audience’s love of shocks.
The advertising campaign for Macabre, his 1958 schlockfest about a doctor’s daughter who’s been buried alive, boasted that every ticket purchaser would receive a $1,000 insurance policy against “death by fright” issued by Lloyds of London.
Those brave enough to make it through to the end credits were rewarded with a badge that read, “I’m no chicken. I saw Macabre.” The gimmicks worked, drawing thrill-seeking crowds who spent an astronomical $5 million (roughly $42,505,633.80 in today’s dollars) at the box office to see a movie that cost Castle a paltry $90,000 to produce.
Alfred Hitchcock knew how to scare the wits out of people. The shower scene in Psycho, for example, is a benchmark in cinematic fear. If he had any doubts about the effectiveness of that sequence they must have been put to bed when he received an angry letter from a father whose daughter stopped bathing after seeing the bathtub murder scene in Les Diaboliques and then, more distressingly, refused to shower after seeing Psycho.
Hitch’s response to the concerned dad? “Send her to the dry cleaners.”
The director was always quick with a line, but when it got down to the business of terrifying audiences he summed up the appeal of the scary movie in one brief sentence: “People like to be scared when they feel safe.”
But what scares the people who scare us?
Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan’s Labyrinth and the upcoming The Shape of Water, says, “I love monsters the way people worship holy images,” but it isn’t Frankenstein or Dracula that gives him the willies. “Politicians,” he said recently, “they’re the scariest thing there is right now.”
Trying to prove that someone was possessed by the devil when they did a bad thing is the kind of thing that generally only people in the movies do, and often not very convincingly. But a new film, Oculus, makes a creepy case for demonic interference even though the evidence is slight.
The story begins in present day with Tim (Brenton Thwaites) being released from a twelve-year stretch in a mental institution. The twenty-one-year-old was locked away at age nine after he gunned down his father (Rory Cochrane) who had just murdered his mother (Katee “Starbuck” Sackhoff).
His sister Kaylie (Karen “Dr. Who” Gillan), now a successful antiques dealer, lets him in on a family secret—she claims dear old dad was possessed by a demonic spirit that lives in a mirror. She has the ornate old looking glass and needs Tim’s help to destroy it.
Working in a tried and true supernatural genre—devil possession movies are a dime a dozen—director Mike Flanagan manages to find a new way to inject some life into the story of a haunted piece of furniture. Weaving together Tim and Kaylie’s past and present into one seamless whole, he flip flops through time, telling the story from the perspectives of the characters at different ages. It adds intensity to a tale that isn’t too far off from the terrible Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (the story of a ghostly lamp).
The horror elements work because this is a character driven story and while there are blood and guts aplenty it is the intensity of the story and the performances that will stay with you.
