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Review: ‘Hostile’ Does a Delicate Dance Between Love Story and Horror
In Hostile, a worldwide epidemic has killed most of the planet’s population. The few survivors struggle to find food and shelter. But they are not alone.
On her way back from a scavenging mission, Juliette (Brittany Ashworth) has a terrible accident. Stuck in her car, with a broken leg, in the middle of an unforgiving desert, she must survive the perils of the post-apocalypse while a strange creature prowls around.
On paper, it sounds like a fairly typical post-apocalyptic action-horror blend. But writer/director Mathieu Turi enriches the parched wasteland with a sincere backstory that explores the role of fate in the film. It builds a slow burn that reaches a rough yet beautifully emotional climax.
The story is told in two interjecting parts (with stunning cinematography by Vincent Veillard-Baron). The sun-scorched present follows Juliette (Brittany Ashworth, The Crucifixion) as she travels alone through the desolate expanse.
Flashes of the past explore Juliette’s personal journey in rich, vivid color tones that thematically compliment the development of her relationship with gallery owner Jack (Grégory Fitoussi, G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra).
I must admit it took me a few turns to get used to the sudden change of scenery, but once I realized that the “flashbacks” were alternating chapters in the story, it immediately made sense. Structurally, it’s kind of like a post-apocalyptic Gone Girl if the characters actually liked each other. It’s a literary trait you don’t often see in film, but Turi skillfully weaves the story together.
Juliette’s present chapters put Ashworth in the spotlight and she rises to the challenge. When we first meet her, we immediately see that she’s confident, competent, and completely independent.
Her first on-screen encounter with one of the Reapers visually reveals absolutely nothing (the camera rotates around the RV that serves as their fighting ring), but this simple action communicates a lot to the audience. Sometimes action is best left up to imagination. With the RV’s movements and the sounds we hear from inside, we learn that killing the Reapers is not easy, and we retain the image of Juliette as a deeply human character.
We can hear her struggle as she attacks, and we hear the Reaper as a fierce opponent. But we don’t see a stylized, overly choreographed fight. Juliette is not an archetypal super-soldier heroine, she’s just adjusted to the “new normal”.
The Reapers featured in the film are played by the wonderful Javier Botet, whose work you have definitely seen before (though you might not know it). His job is to be completely unrecognizable and regularly terrifying, and he’s very good at it. You know him as The Crooked Man in The Conjuring 2, the Hobo in Andy Muschietti’s IT, Mama in Mama, Niña Medeiros in [REC], and KeyFace in Insidious: The Last Key.
Botet brings an otherworldly quality to the Reapers that’s both fascinating and unnerving. You can’t look away.
Hostile is a combination of a love story and horror, not one over the other. Of course, there are a large number of horror films that include elements of a budding romance. But it’s how Hostile balances the two elements that makes it stand out.
Like Juliette’s relationship with Jack, there’s a delicate dance between the two. A push and pull. Admittedly, they do step on their partner’s toes from time to time with a clunky misstep. But ultimately (and to continue the dance analogy), it feels completely different from the choreography we’re used to in the horror genre.
Hostile Arrives On VOD And Digital HD On Leading Digital Platforms And On DVD On September 4, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C9oDky87Xs&feature=youtu.be
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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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