The title pretty much tells you everything you need to know going into the movie. It takes place in the late 80s and is about best friends Abby and Gretchen. It’s filmed basically the same as an 80s horror movie and I think it succeeds in all the important departments.
You have your cliched group of teens, a fun night that goes wrong, and a developing evil presence that pushes the heroine to her limits. This is a really tight script come to life off the page. The entire cast is great, it’s got plenty of creepy moments with great tension build-up and a couple of gross moments for the wow department.
Elise Fisher who plays Abby carries the entire film. Great casting choice because if that character doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t. The friends have believable relationships and there’s a great mixture of good and bad moments between them. Even before the evil shows up, there are problems between them and Abby is the glue that works to keep them together through thick and thin. I laughed quite a few times and when the horror kicks in, those scenes are all really well done.
I think this is a good starter movie to get someone into horror. It’s tame in terms of violence and gore with enough intensity to get your blood pumping. The characters are great hooks to draw you in and keep you engaged long enough to want to see how it ends. I checked this out on a whim and I’m glad I did.
Everything about this movie is fine. Just fine. And that’s the problem. There’s nothing in this movie that stands out. When the credits rolled, I started to forget what I just watched.
FireStarter is an adaptation of the Stephen King novel. A couple of things were changed to make it different from the book and the 1984 film adaptation to modernize it a bit and to give the actors more room to do their own thing.
As college students, Alex and Vicky enroll in a study involving a hallucinogenic drug. It ends up giving them telekinesis powers. They get married and have a girl named Charlene (Charlie) who inherits these powers and develops her own, pyrokinesis. The couple hides from the organization that did the studies, knowing that they are going to want to take and study Charlie. When Charlie loses control of her powers at school, it notifies the bad guys and the family has to run.
While the book is 40 or so years old there’s nothing in here that feels new or interesting. Everything is rather predictable and if it isn’t predictable, it’s boring. Zac Efron is the big name in this movie and as Alex, he does an admirable job as husband/protector. The whole cast is good in fact, even if their character is rather cliched.
The big plot point of the movie is the effort to keep Charlie secret. They have to stay off the grid so they have no digital devices which make Charlie stand out from her peers. This adds to her stress which more or less leads to her getting discovered. Alex and Vicky are at odds on how much they should tell Charlie, with Vicky wanting to teach her daughter how to control her powers while Alex wants her to suppress and hide them. The odd thing is that it looks like there’s nothing to really teach Charlie. While the origins of her pyrokinesis eventually come out, she figures out how to use them pretty much on her own. She can suddenly change the type of attack (explosion, fireball, direct spontaneous combustion) and target pretty easily. They did teach her some basic things as we see her try to hold back at the start but there’s nothing to her becoming what is essentially an X-Men.
The VFX look good, the direction is fine and the movie moves at a good clip. There’s just nothing engaging about it. It’s like a polite insult. There’s an attempt at getting emotion and points across but in the end, it doesn’t matter and is easy to ignore.
I wouldn’t call this a horror movie, but it does have a lot of gigantic monsters in it. So, a monster movie. I’d label it as a fun adventure movie with a lot of charm and character.
Seven years after mankind blasted an asteroid to keep it from hitting Earth and the resulting toxins rained down and mutated all the insects, we find Joel in his underground community. The insects are so dangerous that the few people who survived were forced to go underground and survive in small groups. Joel is the odd man out in his bunker with no significant other. His contributions are fixing HAM radios and cooking what meager food they can scavenge and grow. He freezes up when he gets scared so he’s always told to stay behind when a threat comes for them. After a gigantic bug breaks into the bunker, Joel reassesses his life and decides that making the 85 mile trek to his ex-girlfriend’s community is his only chance at finding a meaningful life. Just surviving isn’t enough. He and Aimee were separated on the day of the end of the world, but he was fortunate enough to find her using the radio he had fixed.
No one thinks he’ll make it.
Joel’s journey is one of discovery, where he finds out more about himself than he ever thought possible. He goes through a lot, threatened by bugs and people. He also meets good people and one awesome dog who teach him what it takes to survive on the surface.
While the concept is far from original, it’s a really well-made movie with a lot of great characters and story beats. The conflicts he gets into are exciting and Joel is a funny character which makes following him around interesting. His story arc is believable and complete, helped by some fantastic VFX that makes this Bug Earth come to life. A surprise movie experience for me.