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Midsommar (2019)

Halloween Treats

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The Shining (1980)

Halloween Treats

We pick more than two dozen films that steer clear of the gratuitous and try stay true to the spirit of the holiday instead

by the Cineluxe staff
updated October 13, 2023

Despite the best efforts of the Hallmark Channel to turn Christmas into a year-round holiday, Halloween has—not so strangely—earned that honor instead. As the culture took a decidedly heavy metal turn, it became inevitable that all things dark and nasty—including, of course, horror movies—should find themselves in permanent ascendance. It would be all too easy to churn out a list of callous and desensitizing hardcore horror flicks, but that kind of cultural effluvia has become so pervasive that there would be little point—and they don’t have much to do with Halloween anyway. The films gathered here are instead meant to invoke the feel of the holiday as a fixed point in time, as a tradition, not a consumerist feeding frenzy. And they’re an effort to move beyond the usual suspects. For every Scream, there’s an Ed Wood; for every It, a Carnival of Souls. The films that follow are meant to offer an opportunity to savor, not wallow.

Alien

Alien has never lived up to its potential on the home screen. DVD and LaserDisc versions were overly grainy and noisy, and the previous remastered Blu-ray version couldn’t do the shadow and black-level detail justice. All of that is made right with this 4K HDR version, which looks fantastic. Fortunately, the restoration isn’t heavy-handed, getting rid of the bad bits of noise and deterioration while keeping Scott’s look and stylistic feel solidly intact.    read more

Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice is one of the worthiest UHD HDR remasters I’ve seen to date (almost on par with The Wizard of Oz), and the film itself is such a joyous (and ironic) celebration of life that it stands on its own.    read more

THE BIRDS

Without The Birds, there would be no Jaws—and, arguably, no Spielberg, since he lifted so many of his filmic mannerisms from this brutal and detached end-of-the-world tale. The really ironic thing is, while this is far from Hitchcock’s best film, it’s still better than Jaws. I realize that conclusion is heresy to the popularity = quality crowd but it underlines the vast difference between what an adult with adolescent tendencies and a perpetual adolescent with no interest in growing up can do.    read more

If the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a B movie, then Carnival of Souls is a solid C—a wild fling at moviemaking by a bunch of naive and repressed Midwesterners meant for second, or third, billing at Kansas drive-ins, a kind of Bergman-goes-to-Topeka thing that must have confused the hell out of the 2 a.m. hangers-on expecting to get off on something like Chain-Gang Girls. And yet somehow out of that impossible equation came art.   read more

The series is slow in parts but definitely picks up near the end. There are some nice King-esque jump scares along the way, along with tons of general creepiness as we slowly move towards solving the mystery of who is The Kid and how did he get here, along with the overall question of, “Why is Castle Rock so rotten?”    read more

I’m not sure what fans of the film will make of this presentation. Maybe, having looked past its visual flaws in the earlier incarnations they’ll be willing to forgive them being heavily underscored here. My take is that drawing too much attention to the technical lapses makes you that much more aware of everything else that’s wrong. But you can’t expect a well-intended but inept ‘50s creature-on-the-loose throwaway to look like Citizen Kane.   read more

The myth of Dracula isnt one I think needs retelling. It, and vampires in general, have been done to death over the past couple decades. But whenever Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss write a project together, Im intrigued.    read more

I told myself I was going to make this one a quickie and not belabor my points. So, Point No. 1—this is the only good Tim Burton movie. Point 2—it features Johnny Depp’s best performance, by far. Point 3—it’s astonishing Martin Landau did such a great job of playing Lugosi without getting much help from behind the camera. Point 4—Ed Wood died at the box office, not because it’s not a great film—it is—but because it doesn’t fit within the all too predictable definition of what a Burton film is supposed to be. And because it committed the unforgivable sin of being in black & white.    read more

This is a better movie than the original—better acted, more artfully shot, with a more coherent script and more competent direction, but such praise is relative. This is still a glorified after-school special with a false edge, filled with out-of-touch musical numbers and lazy references to modern culture that will lose what chuckle-worthiness they have before the inevitable Hocus Pocus 3 comes out in a few years.    read more

If there’s an inherent value in a piece of pop cinema being able to both capture the angst of an era and use it as a springboard to perfectly project the trajectory of the culture, then Body Snatchers has that, and in spades. The film was too easily dismissed at the time and subsequently as an expression of Red Scare paranoia. It’s not. It’s a low-budget B-movie depiction of the loss of self, or soul—depending on how you want to parse that—uncannily prescient, and done with a power that lends it a continuing relevance it never would have achieved as an A-list project.   read more

It is a surprisingly good horror movie that thankfully relies more on scares than gross-outs to keep you glued to the screen and huddled under your blanket. Don’t go into it expecting a faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s book (although, given how poorly that one has aged, that’s probably a good thing) but do go in expecting a very satisfying reinterpretation of parts of the novel—one that absolutely works on its own terms, whether you have any intention of watching the sequel or not.    read more  

Last Night in Soho won’t be to everyone’s taste, and even if you love it as much as I do, I think you’ll find some flaws with it. Wright attempts to load the film with a bit more meaning than its narrative framework will support. And in paying homage to the whole of the 1960s—from its fashions to its music to the diversity of its cinema, ranging from Polanski to EON Productions—he’s bitten off a bit more than he can chew. All of which makes Last Night in Soho flawed by any objective measure. But it’s one of the most fascinatingly flawed films I’ve seen in ages, which makes it a shoo-in for Day One purchase the instant it’s available on home video proper.    read more  

Loosely based on the short story by Edgar Allen Poe, The Masque of the Red Death is a heightened and slightly campy tale of a pandemic plague that sweeps medieval Italy. The Raven, on the other hand, has no intention to be authentically scary in any way. Peter Lorre plays the Raven in bird and human form in a highly comedic performance. And it has a fabulous supporting cast: Boris Karloff, a very sexy Hazel Court, and a very young Jack Nicholson—in tights, no less.     read more

The Masque of the Red Death

The Raven

One relatively recent trend that warms my dark heart is the reemergence of horror as a legitimate genre of cinema. This isn’t to say that I don’t get a kick out of schlocky B-movie suspense but for most of my adult life, horror movies have been little more than that, leaving legitimate attempts at making serious films in the genre—like Rosemary’s Baby and Kubrick’s The Shining—in the distant past. So to see Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, and Ari Aster’s Midsommar embraced in recent years as art is, if nothing else, a step in the right direction.    read more

Muppets Haunted Mansion ends up being a pretty good time, mostly due to the antics of Pepe combined with the gorgeousness of the imagery. If you have kids, I’m also pretty sure they’ll love the whole thing. And that is the thing I like best about this special. Fun Halloween specials that can be enjoyed by the whole family are few and far between and it’s nice to see another one added to the mix, even if it’s not quite as good as it could have been.
read more

It ought to be a mess, and yet Nightmare remains one of the most charming and heartfelt holiday films I’ve ever seen. And, yes, it would be more accurate to call Nightmare a “holiday” film than a Christmas film because although it appropriates all the trappings of our modern commercialized, paganized melting-pot celebration of the nativity, the story makes it abundantly clear the trappings of Christmas are hardly the point.    read more

Old

While Old isn’t the best of M. Night Shyamalan’s catalog, it’s not the worst, and it kept me involved enough to see how it was going to wrap. And, I didn’t see the particular “twist” coming but it wasn’t on par with “I see dead people!”  Also, I felt like he tried to over explain and over resolve the ending, and it would have been better had he stopped about five minutes before he did and let it be more open-ended.  read more

Anybody who cares about movies beyond junk-food event flicks needs to make the pilgrimage to Hitchcock at some point in their lives, and there are far worse places to start than Psycho (like, say, Family Plot). Whether it gets under your skin on your first viewing is a matter of blind luck, but it will stick with you. If you haven’t seen it in a while, your best chance beyond the local revival house will be these UHD and HDR releases. And if you’re a rabid fan of the film, you should have already hit the download button by now.    read more

For my money, Pan’s Labyrinth is as near to perfection as any work of cinema made in the past quarter century. And while I can’t say the same for any of its home video releases, this new UHD/HDR release gets closer to the mark than past efforts. Quite frankly, that’s enough to recommend it as a worthy upgrade for those who are already under the film’s spell.   
read more

A Quiet Place 2 is like a classic horror film where suspense and what you dont see provides much of the scares, which is perfect for people who dont like what the modern horror genre has become. The violence is mostly bloodless, and not the focus of the film. Not only does it make for a great night at the movies, I think it actually plays better in a well-designed home theater outfitted with an array of Atmos height and surround speakers for the full experience.   
read more

Nobody needs to convince you to watch Rosemary’s Baby. Its reputation as a horror classic is unassailable and secure. But I would urge you to first scrape away as many of the accreted conventions Polanski’s shocker has spawned and try to see it as if all those other films had never happened, as this is the place where it all began.    read more

The teen-slasher genre had been stagnating in the ‘90s when along came Wes Craven of Freddy Krueger and A Nightmare on Elm Street fame to totally upend and breathe new life into the genre with Scream. It’s hard to believe Scream is celebrating its 25th anniversary but the good news is that Paramount has given it a 4K HDR transfer.    read more

This latest Scream is the first film in the series not directed by franchise creator Wes Craven. But it remains true to the spirit of the franchise and brings back key cast, including Randy Jackson returning to voice Ghostface, with some quick cameos and voiceovers from actors that have been in the earlier films. I did find the violence to be a bit more brutal and gorier, and the language to be a bit saltier, so definitely not suitable for younger viewers.    read more

This release of The Shining will quickly become the jewel of any serious film collection. But it’s not there to be revered but watched. This film’s impact hasn’t diminished a jot since the day of its release. And this 4K HDR version takes us all the way back to that first day without compromise.  
read more

Stranger Things 3 is such a tonal, structural, and narrative departure from what’s come before that it can take hardcore fans of the series a few episodes to get into this year’s batch of eight episodes. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the first couple episodes. In fact, the show’s creators demonstrate time and again their ability to lovingly mash up, remix, riff on, and reassemble 1980s pop culture in new and inventive ways. It’s simply that this time around, they’re being a little cheeky about it.    read more

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Midsommar

Midsommar (2019)

review | Midsommar

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This arthouse horror film eschews jump scares and plot twists for atmosphere and style

by Dennis Burger
October 14, 2020

One relatively recent trend that warms my dark heart is the reemergence of horror as a legitimate genre of cinema. This isn’t to say that I don’t get a kick out of schlocky B-movie suspense but for most of my adult life, horror movies have been little more than that, leaving legitimate attempts at making serious films in the genre—like Rosemary’s Baby and Kubrick’s The Shining—in the distant past. So to see Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, and Ari Aster’s Hereditary embraced in recent years as art is, if nothing else, a step in the right direction.

Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary, 2019’s Midsommar, keeps the horror-as-art train rolling, not simply due to its gorgeous cinematography, deep reliance on symbolism, or its 148-minute run time, but because it actually has something to say. While Peele used horror for the purposes of societal allegory in Get Out and Aster himself used it to explore familial angst in Hereditary, Midsommar broadens its reach to explore both cultural issues and deeply personal struggles. And it’s the constant tug-of-war between the individual on the one hand and the expectations of the herd on the other that give the film so much of its tension. 

That’s simply one element of what makes the film work, though. In telling the tale of a group of anthropology students (and the girlfriend of one of them, herself a psychology student) as they travel to Sweden to study and document the cultural traditions of an isolated Scandinavian commune, Aster uses personal relationships the way Kubrick used architecture in The Shining. In other words, if you’re paying attention, there’s an internal consistency to it all that’s nonetheless contradictory, which results in a foreboding sense of unease. 

That in itself wouldn’t be worthy of praise but it’s the way Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski convey the ties that bind (and the wedges that divide) the characters that makes Midsommar so fascinating. In one early scene, for example, the film uses mirrors brilliantly to convey a sense of othering. The characters viewed directly by the camera? They are the “Us.” Those that can only be seen in reflection? They fall (or move) into “Them” territory. And what’s fascinating here is that the film’s “Us” and “Them” are right opposite of the audience’s “Us” and “Them,” which further builds tension. 

What I appreciate most is that such compositional sleight of hand is almost always employed with such subtlety that it never comes across as a gimmick. Only one scene crosses the line into artsy-for-arty’s-sake territory, and it’s an establishing shot, demarking the transition from one culture into the other, so it’s easily forgiven. 

That scene is far from the only one that could be construed as cinema-for-cinema’s sake. So much of Midsommar is pure audiovisual experience—style as substance, if you will—intended to invoke feeling rather than trigger thought. Perhaps my favorite thing about the film is that it strikes such a perfect balance in alternating between storytelling and tone poetry that it’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime never becomes a slog. 

That’s aided by the fact that it never resorts to jump-scares or twists to keep you hanging on. It telegraphs exactly the direction in which it’s heading and then takes its time getting there, which only adds to the suspense and tension. 

The one big surprise—at least for me—is that Midsommar wasn’t shot on film, but rather captured in a combination of 8K and 4K, and finished in a 4K digital intermediate. Despite this, it boasts a very film-like aesthetic, although the palette is intentionally muted. And Kaleidescape’s 4K HDR presentation is wonderfully true to Midsommar‘s intended look, delivering it with exceptional detail. Far more importantly, the Kaleidescape download doesn’t muck up the background textures the way streaming providers do. Perhaps it’s a result of the resolution at which the movie was shot, but Apple TV’s stream in particular suffers from occasionally messy and noisy textures that serve as a bit of a distraction, whereas the Kaleidescape download maintains its composure from beginning to end, even when the film is at its densest, visually speaking. 

The high dynamic range does little to change the look of the film overall, largely due to that muted palette. When HDR does make itself known, it’s generally in the shadows, especially during those scenes in which a darkened interior is viewed from a sunlit exterior. HDR allows the viewer to see into those shadows without brightening the image as a whole. 

Kaleidescape’s DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack is also true to the film’s theatrical audio mix. You may have seen Midsommar presented in Dolby Atmos on certain streaming platforms, but these Atmos tracks were created using Nugen Audio’s Halo upmixer software, based on the original 5.1. Given my druthers, I’ll take the original mix, thank you very much. It’s unusually aggressive, in a way I normally don’t love, but in this case it absolutely works. 

The soundtrack leans on the surround channels hard, often panning dialogue into them so fully that if your rear speakers aren’t up to the quality of the rest of your system, you’ll likely hear a shift in the quality of the sound. Even if your system is well-designed from front to back, it’s still a disorienting and frankly distracting effect. But that’s the point. The mix rarely goes whole-hog on the surrounds when there’s something crucial happening onscreen. And when it does, it’s because the film wants to you feel disoriented at that moment. 

The only thing missing from Kaleidescape’s download is Aster’s original 171-minute cut, which A24, the film’s distributor, made him trim down for wide theatrical release. Given that the cuts were made simply to cram more butts into seats and not due to content, it’s strange that A24 is so precious with the original edit. In the US, the only ways to see it are via Apple TV (it’s included as an iTunes Extra with the purchase of the film) and by way of an incredibly limited 4K Blu-ray release that’s already fetching six times its original asking price on the secondary market. 

What I wouldn’t give to view that cut of the film in the quality of Kaleidescape’s presentation. Despite its nearly three-hour length, the director’s cut is even better paced and frankly feels like a shorter film. But the improvements over the theatrical cut aren’t so substantial that I would choose Apple TV’s compromised stream over Kaleidescape’s pixel-perfect download.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Kaleidescape’s 4K HDR presentation is wonderfully true to Midsommar‘s intended look, delivering it with exceptional detail

SOUND | The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack is unusually aggressive but true to the film’s theatrical mix, leaning hard on the surrounds

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