Dread Central’s Best and Worst of 2014
Scott Hallam’s Picks
With the end of the year upon us, I take great pride in being able to share my opinions on the best and worst movies of the year with you. Once again, we had some fantastic horror on television this year, and we were treated to one of the best horror movies to be unleashed upon us in years. Here’s my take on things.
A couple of honorable mentions first. There was an endearing little micro-budget indie that seemed to charm the pants off anyone who was lucky enough to see it this year, and that film was Kurt Larson’s Son of Ghostman. Another honorable mention goes to a short film that recently finished its festival tours and was debuted online right here at Dread Central. Entitled Service, the short was written and directed by Jerry Pyle and is everything you need from a feature length horror movie boiled down into a few frantic minutes. The Houses October Built deserves an honorable mention for going right off the creep meter and “American Horror Story: Freak Show” started hot, then trailed off a bit before recently coming on like a train. It’s back to delivering the quality of show we’re used to getting from the series. And, call me a knucklehead, but I’ve gotta give some love to Sharknado 2: The Second One. I was thoroughly entertained by this campy gorefest loaded with cameos and oftentimes horrendous CGI flying sharks. It was hilarious, and casting Judd Hirsch as the taxi driver was a stroke of brilliance.
Now, The Best and The Worst of 2014, as told by Doctor Gash.
The Babadook
The Babadook is not only the best horror movie of this year, it’s the best horror movie of last year as well. In fact, it’s been quite a long time since a film has come out with the creepiness, brilliant acting and powerful story as we see in The Babadook. And the movie is downright scary. The best thing about The Babadook is that it reminded horror fans that we can actually be scared. So often we pop in a new horror movie, never expecting it to get under our thick, veteran horror-watching skin. Then something like The Babadook comes along and gets its hooks into us, and all of a sudden we find ourselves checking the closets before going to bed. Brilliant.
Snowpiercer
A sci-fi adventure in a horrific setting, Snowpiercer shows us a caste system developed on a self-sustaining train that travels around a barren, dead Earth wiped out by an accidentally man-made ice age. The tension on this train containing the final members of humanity is fantastic and stirred to a boil by Mason (played brilliantly by Tilda Swinton). As one would expect, those in the back of the train, those which have become the lower class, will only take so much from their upper class tormentors at the front. Plenty of great action, violent battles and amazing atmosphere in this dreamlike environment.
Flu
This South Korean movie directed by Sung-su Kim could not have come at a more appropriate time. It’s the story of a lethal epidemic sweeping through Bundang, a suburb of Seoul, which houses a half-million people. We get a close look at the suffering in the streets, as well as a divided government trying to decide how to deal with the disease in Bundang while also keeping it from hitting the large city of Seoul. With what seems like annual epidemics in our news reports (Ebola, H1N1…Hell, it’ll probably be Captain Tripps next year), Flu hits close to home and shows us how devastating a true epidemic can be.
“The Strain”
We waited for it, they teased it. We were drooling over the idea of Guillermo del Toro bringing his feral vampire story to television. But the worry was, with all this hype, could it really live up to the billing? And the answer was a resounding yes! The action was intense. The gore factor was high for a feature film, forget about television! Amazing! And the characters were really appealing. Sure, The Master looked a little hokey when we finally got a good look at him, but any shortcoming were offset by David Bradley’s outstanding portrayal of Abraham Setrakian. More, please!
Cheap Thrills
This is another unique horror offering from the golden mind of Trent Haaga. After having written things like Deadgirl and American Maniacs and directing the devilishly good horror/comedy Chop, Haaga dreamed up Cheap Thrills, a bloody story of greed and double-cross that builds tension masterfully and culminates in an explosive finale. Similar to 13 Sins but with a more personal feel, Cheap Thrills asks the age old question….Honey, what’ll you do for money?
Leprechaun: Origins
We don’t see a leprechaun, not really, at least. And we definitely don’t learn anything of the origin of the leprechaun that we don’t see. Not really. This thing is a nightmare, and not in the fun, jump out of your seats way. More in the “I can’t believe I dedicated an hour and a half of the short time I’ll have here on Planet Earth during my lifetime to watching this fucking drivel” way. Sigh.
The Ganzfeld Haunting
A big WTF to the makers of this one. The Ganzfeld Haunting turned out to be nothing more than a vehicle for Rumer Willis to prance around in a bra and panties and play the bad girl for a good portion of the movie. We would have been fine with Rumer’s peep show, but absolutely nothing else went on in the movie. Ugh.
Evil in the Time of Heroes
The Greeks are fantastic at many things. They have amazing food, wonderful people, incredible history and culture. Unfortunately, they’ve been really bad at making horror movies. The only other notable Greek horror title you might recognize is Island of Death, which was a similar mess as Evil in the Time of Heroes. This thing is all over the place, and everywhere it goes is bad. A disaster from start to finish.
The Upper Footage
They tried. I’ll give them that. But they tried too hard. The makers of The Upper Footage tried so hard to make another underground media buzz akin to the excitement surrounding The Blair Witch Project upon release, but it just didn’t happen. They created a fake website, sent press releases about this mysterious footage that had the overdose death of a girl on it that Quentin Tarantino may or may not be buying and using for a film. They tried, but in the end, the mystery kind of fizzled out and the movie just wasn’t that good. A for effort, F for execution.
Average to poor horror movies crushing it at the box office
A lot of movies that were just okay to downright stinkers took in big hauls in 2014, as they do every year. Annabelle earned $84 million domestically ($252 when combined with worldwide box office) on a $6.5 million budget. The Purge: Anarchy brought in $71 million ($110 worldwide) on a $9 million budget. They were okay movies, but hardly worth over $350 million in revenue. Then some of the stinkers (or movies you couldn’t care less about) made big loot… Ouija was the fourth highest grossing horror movie ($50 million domestic/$74m worldwide, $5m budget), Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones did pretty well ($32m dom./$90m w./$5m budget), Deliver Us From Evil even made $87 million worldwide for crying out loud. For god’s sake, on that scale, if you marketed The Babadook properly, you could haul in half a billion, easy. Going to the theater and paying good money for middling horror doesn’t motivate filmmakers to deliver a quality product. Don’t let our genre be an easy cash grab. Let them know we want quality for our moviegoing dollar. *steps down from soapbox*
