Movies
BD Reviews: ‘Battle: Los Angeles’ and ‘Red Riding Hood’
Two quasi genre films arrive in theaters today, one that’s big budget popcorn fun, while the other is a self-indulgent drag. Can you guess which is which?
Here’s what I had to say about Columbia Pictures’ Battle: Los Angeles, their alien war flick from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning director Jonathan Liebesman: “While the idea of an alien attack in absolutely terrifying, ‘Battle’ comes off more like a summer action movie with a massive scope and insane visual effects… [It] is like a wicked mix between the “Call of Duty” and “Gears of War” video games; it’s absolutely intense, face-paced and relentless.”
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Also now in theaters is Twilight director Catherine Haedwicke’s Red Riding Hood, which BD’s David Harley scathed: “It’s not even that the film is bad because it deviates from the source material; it’s bad because everything from the script to the direction feels manufactured. Aside from Tom Sanders’ production design and Don Macauley’s art direction, which work together to realize a fairy tale universe just the way I imagined it, there’s nothing particularly interesting or artistic about Red Riding Hood.”
Click the title for the full review and don’t forget to write your own review and tell all of BD what YOU thought. We’ll try and push users to read your thoughts via Facebook and Twitter as well.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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