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Fantastic Fest 2018: ‘Apostle’ Is Filled With Evil, Corruption and Razor-Sharp Folk Horror

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Apostle

Lovecraftian sensibilities converge in the hellish ride that is Director, Gareth Evans latest offering, Apostle.

This film checks each and everyone of Fantastic Fest’s boxes in terms of genre greatness. Apostle offers up a healthy helping of dread, packed into a period piece that echoes of the best of 70s horror. Particularly the kind of 70s horror that dealt with evil cults and otherworldly worship.

Apostle finds Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens) sent on a mission to find and save his sister from the clutches of a enigmatic cult. The cult prides themselves on equality among all of its members by sharing everything and by allowing repentant criminals seeking redemption into its ranks. But, with corruption at an arms reach, and evil forces in the woods, the amiable face of the mysterious cult may not be the paradise its followers signed up for.

Director, Gareth Evans helmed martial arts badass fests The Raid 1 & 2, and switches to an entirely new genre in the field of supernatural, mystic horror with Apostle. The result proves that this dude, can just about do anything and make it look and feel great.

What Evans does particularly-well is bring over his experience with big action sequences and contains them into tiny pockets of intensely gory set pieces. These sequences are peppered in over the films runtime and are each more viscerally-potent and bone rattling than the last. In other words, when shit goes down, shit really goes down.

Apostle, is a period piece and uses the tongue and fortitude of the time, to tell the perplexing mystery that comes undone in layers throughout. Paranoia and evil run rampant as Richardson tries to conceal his identity and intentions among the cult and its forefathers. The result is a strange, thickly layered tension that methodically eats away at the audience.

The film does a great job of exploring corruption within bodies of power and ultimately religion. The deconstruction of higher powers who use their will as a tool that leads to ultimate corruption is at play throughout. The whole thing makes it a hoot to look at our current state of the political and the religious where possible good intent can and will sour.

The score by Fajar Yuskemal and Aria Pryogi is just as rattling as Evans intensely well-capture big gore moments. Strings cut through the tension while also creating a melting pot of east, west and everything in between to showcase the variety of folks who have come to call this cult home.

Evans and his team sure as hell know how to kill folks in creative ways and follows the cine-testament of “the worst the person is the harder they have to die.” Apostle constantly doubles-down on its next explosive gore scene by coming up with devilish ways to lay waste to anyone who stands in the way.

Stevens who we genre fans know from The Guest and Legion is in it to win it here. His straight-laced and laudanum-addicted character has room to play, in his near madness. Stevens takes full advantage of this by steering hard into the period piece with a large performance that matches the carnage going on around him.

There is a lot more I want to go into about the more supernatural of the elements at work here, and how that extends deeply into certain brilliant takes on mythology. But its really something that is best experienced rather than discussed here.

Apostle is a ferocious, Lovecraftian experience that pushes the envelope in perilous directions. It’s cast and crew went to work in a scattered evil, gothic folk tale that will leave you with your jaw on the floor in all the genre film loving, best possible ways.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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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.

Evil Dead Rise

“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:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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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.

Happy Sad Confused

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

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

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.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

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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