monsterflick

I was really impressed with this tech-inspired reboot of classic horror anthologies like the "Tales From the Crypt" and "Creepy" comic books, older British films like "Dead of Night" and "Asylum," Stephen King's "Creepshow" homage, and the sadly cancelled "Masters of Horror" and "Fear Itself" TV shows.

Produced on a modest budget for Canadian television, the "Darknet" series is definitely in the same modern-tech vein as the "V/H/S" movies, but with more precise direction, striking photography, razor-sharp editing, and a deliciously macabre sense of humor. (And don't worry, you "found footage" haters -- the low-tech filming is limited to select glimpses of security cams, web sites, lap tops, and smartphones.) Like the wonderful "Trick 'r Treat" (and "Pulp Fiction") these fiendishly gruesome tales jump around in time and criss-cross over each other (some more successfully than others) -- and the end result is a must-see series for horror fans. It's extremely clever, surprisingly suspenseful, full of mind-bending twists, and often dementedly funny.

Watch it with the lights out!

Michael Haneke's wildly overrated and misunderstood "Amour" may be his cruelest joke to date, right down to the film's sarcastic title. I am a huge Haneke fan. His icy, emotionless, almost sadistic approach to filmmaking is perfectly suited to black- hearted thrillers like "Cache", "Funny Games", "Benny's Video" and "The White Ribbon". But when he applies his surgeon's knife to such human subjects as aging, illness, and death, it comes off so sour, so mean-spirited, and so surprisingly * boring *, that it's difficult to sit through. Having recently experienced the illness and death of my own parents (my mother was half-paralyzed after a stroke much like "Amour"'s heroine) I was afraid this film would be too unbearably painful for me to watch. I shouldn't have worried. I felt nothing (but boredom). The characterizations are so thin and shallow, the Old Man and Old Woman such ciphers, that they barely seem human. They're symbols, or archetypes. Having the woman's mind gone felt like a cop-out too, a way to avoid emotional truth, as did the clinical portrayals of caretaking. Everything feels so distant and calculated that I can't help feeling the title ("Love") is the director's idea of a joke.

Many critics and viewers, however, seem to find "Amour" to be deeply emotional, compassionate, and devastating. But I think they may be filling in the blanks of Haneke's bone-dry script with their own experiences and issues – which may be Haneke's real intention here. I believe he is, once again, playing the scientist and we the audience are his test subjects. (He shows an audience at the beginning of the film; it's us.) So while I must congratulate Haneke for pulling off another interesting experiment, I have to scold him this time for being even more heartless and manipulative than usual.