Mikael Håfström
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The Exorcist (1973)
Directed by William Friedkin
influenced The Rite (2011), 1408 (2007)
Plot Themes
And the public is no stranger to horror films in general, enjoying a haute horror heyday in the '60s and early '70s with "Psycho," "Rosemary's Baby," and "The Exorcist"; moving on to the teen slashers of the late '70s and '80s; the nod-wink "Scream" parodies of the '90s; and most recently, after the success of "Saw" in 2004, torture porn.
If you you’ve seen The Exorcist (1973), you’ll know what to expect.
"The Exorcist" came out in 1972 and it's sad to say that it still stands as the best film on possession that Hollywood has turned out.
Michael Petroni and Matt Baglio's scenario falls about 500 miles short of The Exorcist, right in the crack between a sincere, bland religious drama and a monster fest.
I was a wee girl in Catholic school when The Exorcist was released, and the nuns stood before us with a stern admonishment: The Vatican — or just someone in a dress and a pointy hat — had decreed that watching this movie might actually cause viewers to become possessed by the devil.
And once again, we are reminded by a self-conscious film just how high William Friedkin 's " The Exorcist " set the bar for cinematic tales of Satan, his demons, and the human hosts who are victimized by them.
Training Day (2001)
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
influenced Outside the Wire (2021)
Themes Characters Plot Dialogue
As Harp begins to understand that there is an extra-jurisdictional way that Leo is able to operate, one is reminded of the back-and-forth between Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington in Training Day – though this film goes in much wilder directions.
Everything about him is a secret, and as the men head off on a vaccine-delivery mission that is really cover for a meeting with a spy, Leo's impatience with his hesitant underling may recall the dynamic between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke in Training Day .
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: RoboCop , Terminator 2 , Bright , Extraction , Training Day , Real Steel , the Mission: Impossible movie(s) with scenes in Eastern Europe and/or characters running on rooftops, and Chappie , can’t forget Chappie .
What this amounts to, really, is a few longwinded and artlessly-written conversations in the car between firefights – those are reminiscent of Training Day , even if the subject is plucked straight from Eye in the Sky .
He gets along well with Idris, in a similar way as Denzel Washington did Ethan Hawke in Training Day.
Have you ever watched “Training Day” and wondered how cool it would be if, 15 minutes into the movie, Denzel Washington took off his shirt to reveal that he was actually a semi-translucent android super-soldier with the strength of a Terminator and the emotional range of a B-team Avenger?
…his aim was to put his own spin on the classic "haunted hotel" trope like "The Shining," "1408," and "The Innkeepers" before it.
Hokum‘s setting and acerbic author call Stephen King to mind, 1408 and The Shining specifically, in that the supernatural causes its protagonist to confront their issues in a baptism by unholy fire.
…it is a psychological chiller that sits comfortably alongside other troubled-writer tales such as 1408 or Secret Window — both coincidentally Stephen King adaptations — films that understand the most frightening place is often inside the protagonist’s own head.
McCarthy has clearly been influenced by “The Shining,” “The Innocents” and an underseen 2007 gem called “1408” with John Cusack as another writer with bad luck at picking hotels.
It’s a watered-down 1408 instead. That film, a Stephen King book adaptation, is also about a writer trapped in a haunted hotel room which uses the sins of his past against him.
Derailed is one more example of actors coming to the rescue, here Clive Owen as a married businessman whose sole straying from the path (not even consumed) spirals into Fatal Attraction grounds.
For paradigms of the latter, see Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity" and Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction."
Based on a book by James Siegel, “Derailed” starts off a bit like Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” but then moves forward to borrow from more modern thrillers like “Fatal Attraction” and “Cape Fear.”
Written for the screen by Stuart Beattie ("Collateral") from a book by James Siegel, "Derailed" most closely resembles moralistic American films of the 1980s and 1990s, most notably "Fatal Attraction," that chastised characters for their cushy Yuppie lifestyles as much as for their sexual indiscretions.
But before you can say ”Fatal Attraction,” their tryst in a flophouse hotel goes horribly awry when a violent thief and sadist of French derivation (Vincent Cassel) - naturellement - beats Charles mercilessly and attacks Lucinda.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Rite” goes wrong with a guilty 4 – and don’t blame it on the winter doldrums because Hopkins’ Oscar-winning “The Silence of the Lambs” was a February release.
Their face-off might remind you of the moment when FBI agent Clarice Starling first stepped to the glass prison cell containing Hannibal Lecter in "The Silence of the Lambs."
As this transition takes hold, it’s impossible not to liken Hopkins’ performance to everyone’s favorite psychopath from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Anthony Hopkins peaked with "The Silence of the Lambs" and since then his career has involved many a sidelong reference to it in lesser films, i.e. "Titus."
The main reason to watch The Rite would be to see Anthony Hopkins ( The Silence of the Lambs ) back in full Hannibal Lecter-style swing, chewing on his lines and salivating over his verbs, using his blocky body, beady eyes and naughty troll's smile to suggest terrifying menace.
Judging by The Rite’s promotional campaign, its backers are clearly pinning their box-office hopes on the idea that folks still want to see Hopkins get scary as hell, as he did to Oscar-winning effect in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs .
Based on a book by James Siegel, “Derailed” starts off a bit like Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” but then moves forward to borrow from more modern thrillers like “Fatal Attraction” and “Cape Fear.”
In concept, Outside the Wire borrows a great deal from its influences: it’s a modern military thriller of the Black Hawk Down mold, which screenwriters Rowan Athale and Rob Yescombe augment with iconography from Children of Men , District 9 , and Ex Machina .
But as video game-y as its cutscene-like lore dumps might feel, Outside the Wire is more often a low-energy hodgepodge of prior movies from the genre, particularly Terminator 2 – from which at least three separate scenes are blatantly borrowed – District 9, and Chappie.
Cheaply shot, poorly acted, and with a plot that strip-mines everything from RoboCop to District 9 to Eye in the Sky to even the beyond-dumb jet-fighter-goes-rogue movie Stealth, Hafstrom’s feature might be fine background noise to fold your laundry to.
You’ve got Terminator and the fear of technology run wild, District 9 and a robot class separate from that of humans, and even a little bit of Good Kill, and the problem of collateral damage caused by drone fighter pilots who’ve never seen real combat.
In concept, Outside the Wire borrows a great deal from its influences: it’s a modern military thriller of the Black Hawk Down mold, which screenwriters Rowan Athale and Rob Yescombe augment with iconography from Children of Men , District 9 , and Ex Machina .
Additionally, its peabrained and mundane rummaging around in the AI conceptual attic — CAN SMART ROBOTS, LIKE, YOU KNOW, COMPREHEND THE IDEA OF GOOD AND EVIL? — is like Ex Machina if it was a Happy Madison production.
It’s an interesting issue that provides some spice to the otherwise relentless action, but this is no deep-dish movie about artificial intelligence like “Ex Machina.”
Finally, Kovak develops a pseudo-romantic relationship with a lovely, undercover journalist (Alice Braga, niece of Brazilian actress Sonia Braga of Kiss of the Spider Woman fame) out to expose "the truth" about exorcisms.
The final straw, though, is a climactic exorcism sequence so daffy and open to unintended audience mockery that it most closely resembles 1990's Leslie Nielsen/Linda Blair spoof "Repossessed."
In this (and pretty much only this), it is similar to Michael Tolkin's The Rapture, that greatest of all films about Christianity.
Just before completing his priesthood he is sent to the Vatican where he meets Hopkins’ Lucas, whose house seems to have been designed and modelled on the doctor’s one in Universal’s Frankenstein (1931).
He also has Kaylie read aloud the long, sordid history of the mirror—a dread-building strategy lifted from both The Shining and “1408.”
And if you ever want to see a classic example of a movie that tried to do something similar but didn't quite succeed, take a look at "Smart Money," the 1931 Warner Bros. film that tried to marry the worlds of the two great gangster actors of the day, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney.
Widowed dad Istvan Kovak (Rutger Hauer, "The Hitcher") is uncomfortably pushy about the dead with the young boy, including the corpse of his own mother.
Prison escape films are often fun because we understand the layout and can follow along as the heroes attempt their breakout (the 1963 WWII classic The Great Escape remains the undisputed king of the genre).
Where the most enjoyable films in the genre succeed -- movies like "The Great Escape" and "Escape From Alcatraz" -- it's in the way the filmmaker nurses the suspense of the story along, repeatedly surprising the audience and always keeping the emphasis on the grand escape we know is coming.
In "1408," Mike not only has to weather the scariest room since Janet Leigh stopped by the Bates Motel in "Psycho"; with imaginative CGI surprises lying in chilly wait, he has to enter the darker vortex of his own failings and the tortured past he's trying to forget.
So it goes that Michael, looking a little like Anthony Perkins in "Psycho," heads off to priest college in Rome.
Inspired a true story, screenwriter Michael Petroni is quick to point out on a title card - to which I might reply, "As was Psycho " - The Rite opens big, with a young man we'll come to know as Michael Kovak (Colin O'Donoghue) preps a dead body for funerary services.
The granddaddy of the possession genre is, and will probably always be, "The Exorcist," but more recent examples, like 2000's underrated " Lost Souls ," 2005's astounding " The Exorcism of Emily Rose " and 2010's documentary-style " The Last Exorcism ," have also ably pulled their own weight.
In concept, Outside the Wire borrows a great deal from its influences: it’s a modern military thriller of the Black Hawk Down mold, which screenwriters Rowan Athale and Rob Yescombe augment with iconography from Children of Men , District 9 , and Ex Machina .
On top of all this, we get another variation of an old standby, the Prophet of Doom Who Warns the Hero Away - a character who has been around, in modern form, at least since Melville’s Moby Dick.