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[REVIEW] ‘Haunt’ Is All Bloody, Well & Good

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A group of college kids find themselves stalked inside an extreme haunted house attraction in Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ (A Quiet Place) violent new feature film Haunt (2019). Things go slice in the night as the group is pursued by a gang of bloodthirsty psychos who seem preoccupied with altering their faces and the body parts of hapless guests.

It also happens to be Halloween night and our beautiful heroine Harper (Katie Stevens) has just reluctantly ended it with her abusive boyfriend only to immediately rebound with the even hunkier Nathan (Will Brittain) at a party. Although nothing happens between them, they orchestrate a perfect meet-cute and decide to gather up four other friends to celebrate the holiday at a haunt attraction.

En route, Harper feels they are being followed and demands they pull over on a desolate Chicago dirt road when out of nowhere a trailer marquee lights up near the car reading “Haunted House” with the “Haunt” part glowing brighter than the rest.

Intrigued, the group throw caution to the wind and follow the road leading to the attraction where they willingly give up their cellphones to a creepy clown attendant before signing a waiver and venturing inside. What they endure is a bloody Grand Guignol production where the actors attack the audience with an assortment of weapons and booby traps.

It all gets pretty bloody as each of them starts realizing the kills aren’t performances and try to escape.

Haunt is a slasher plain and simple. There is a backstory about Harper’s abusive father and her ongoing bout with PTSD. But in the end, various sharp implements and traps are used in the funhouse to dispose of the visitors in various ways; usually through extreme trauma to the head.

Carotid arteries don’t pump this much blood.

Beck and Woods know how to gather an ensemble and flesh them out to be more than just psycho fodder and in this film they again work with an excellent cast who elevate themselves above shopworn tropes.

Katie Stevens is better known for her television roles, but broadens her emotional range here as an abused young woman taking risks to break the cycle only to be thrust into a more extreme version. Stevens gives her character a victim’s heart but doesn’t let her hide behind it. She knows the character is at the verge of an epiphany which she allows her to claim even through the horrors of the night.

Mention should also go to a wonderful performance by Andrew Caldwell who plays Evan, the comic relief of the group. Caldwell has some strong scenes and even though he plays the class clown he doesn’t reduce Evan to a sight gag. It’s a great performance that might get lost in the buckets of blood.

The villains are also remarkable, each dressed in stylized versions of classic Halloween characters, from a witch to a clown to a ghost. They are scary enough in disguise, but more grotesque once their freakish faces are unmasked.

Haunt is the perfect Halloween movie. It’s got blood, realistic kills, and nicely edited suspense. We get a final girl and even a pre-credits stinger which I’m still not sure works.

Where it fails is in its mechanics of percieved free will. I felt that some of the setups required the characters to be in the right spot at the right time which makes it feel as though the killers could foresee the choices long before the victims made them naturally. The “serendipitous” placement of the marquee for instance.

It’s those things that pull you out of the film, like seeing the strings in a carnival dark ride but getting a kick out of it anyway.

Haunt is a slaughterhouse stocked with great gore effects tempered with above-par acting and genuinely creepy monsters. Its heart remains visible through the many other brutalized organs.

“Haunt” is in Theaters, On Demand/Digital: September 13, 2019.

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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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Trailer for ‘The Exorcism’ Has Russell Crowe Possessed

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The latest exorcism movie is about to drop this summer. It’s aptly titled The Exorcism and it stars Academy Award winner turned B-movie savant Russell Crowe. The trailer dropped today and by the looks of it, we are getting a possession movie that takes place on a movie set.

Just like this year’s recent demon-in-media-space film Late Night With the Devil, The Exorcism happens during a production. Although the former takes place on a live network talk show, the latter is on an active sound stage. Hopefully, it won’t be entirely serious and we’ll get some meta chuckles out of it.

The film will open in theaters on June 7, but since Shudder also acquired it, it probably won’t be long after that until it finds a home on the streaming service.

Crowe plays, “Anthony Miller, a troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a supernatural horror film. His estranged daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins), wonders if he’s slipping back into his past addictions or if there’s something more sinister at play. The film also stars Sam Worthington, Chloe Bailey, Adam Goldberg and David Hyde Pierce.”

Crowe did see some success in last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist mostly because his character was so over-the-top and infused with such comical hubris it bordered on parody. We will see if that is the route actor-turned-director Joshua John Miller takes with The Exorcism.

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