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SXSW Review: Madre
Voodoo was something that bothered me as a kiddo. The idea that someone could be hurting you physically and mentally from the shadows is some pretty creepy stuff. I blame Serpent and the Rainbow and The Believers. Both told terrifying stories about otherworldly influencers that could break you down from the inside out, or the outside in.
In Madre, writer and director Aaron Burns, deals with the subject of witchcraft and the effects it has in a maternal setting. In his story, expecting mother, Diana (Daniela Ramirez) balances her pregnancy, her constantly out of town husband and her autistic son, Martin with growing difficulty.
Diana ends up bringing in, Luz (Aida), to help take care of her increasingly erratic son, Martin. Luz seems to have an uncanny ability to control Martin’s outbreaks and is overjoyed at first, but after things start getting seriously weird and Luz starts teaching Martin how to speak in her native tongue, Diana begins to question Luz’s motives.
Madre, has the same slow burn as a film like Rosemary’s Baby, it begins with well intent that ends up going off the rails and causes everyone to question Diana’s sanity. The more paranoid she becomes the more people stop believing her. The film, is carefully paced to make it so that at times makes even the audience doubt Diana’s sanity. Burns does a great job of dancing between those two possibilities and manages to create tension out of thin air because of it.
The film has a very polished digital look that embodies certain characteristics of a dark tele-novella. It brings about culture clashes as well. The actors and their language are primarily Chilean but Luz brining in a Filipino cultural connection. We have all seen, films about voodoo and have seen a pregnant woman begin to lose her mind, at the center of an evil agenda, but we haven’t seen it told through multiple cultural backgrounds and through a distorted tele-novella format. It makes for an interesting watch and something that is deeply insidious on its own terms.
Madre, also (with no spoilers) goes into interesting and unexpected places. If you think you know the genre and believe you know where they end, you are wrong. By combining all the elements mentioned above, Madre is able to pull of something raw, dark and nail-biting.
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Movies
‘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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