Karyn Kusama
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Connections, in both directions
And although much rides on Jennifer's relationship with her BFF (Amanda Seyfried), the movie doesn't establish much of a bond there, so it's hard to feel like there's much at stake (pardon the pun) when it deteriorates, leading to their ultimate, "Carrie"-ish confrontation.
Think Mean Girls meets Carrie.
Best is probably the shower-room scene that extends Kusama’s running Brian De Palma homage with a fairly explicit reference to Carrie, complete with steamy nude girls.
Oscar-winning "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody does her slanguage-laden best to make "Jennifer's Body" -- about a high school hottie ( Megan Fox ) turned boy-chomping demon -- into a femme-tastic anti-"Carrie," but her glib teen-hip dialogue mostly feels like self-conscious splatter over a sorely lackluster scare flick.
Cody's screenplay comes off frequently as an affectionate homage to DePalma's Carrie (down to its third-act prom scene), while possessing the knowing, caustic wit of Williamson's Scream scripts.
As for the film, it tries to be equal parts snark and snarl — think "Mean Girls" meets "Carrie."
"Body" aims for the knowing, tongue-in-cheek horror of the "Scream" series, and also for the pitch-black teen comedy of "Heathers."
Her sense of wordplay owes a clear debt to Heathers, but without that film’s satirical feel for the absurd.
Jennifer’s Body reminds me of the 1988 Heathers, taking high school conventions and flipping them on their wild, murderous side, all while the cool kids talk the talk.
At this point, Cody and director Karyn Kusama go all proto-feminist Heathers by way of a horror film on the material.
Stripped of these underlying psychological inferences and judged on its own cinematic merits, the film is more uneven, not quite as sharply satirical or groundbreaking as its past brethren, 1989's "Heathers" and 2004's " Mean Girls ."
A new Heathers proves elusive.
Kusama moves her star, and her camera, through these silky L.A. nightscapes in a style reminiscent of Michael Mann; between the visual aesthetics and the dazzling bank robberies and shoot-outs, Kusama basically remade Heat, but with Kidman in both roles.
The spectre and greatness of Michael Mann’s Heat hangs heavily over Karyn Kusama’s grandiose L.A. crime drama Destroyer.
There’s something familiar about Karyn Kusama‘s Destroyer, the sense that this film is unashamed of its genetic connection to classic cops-and-crooks films like Heat and The French Connection.
Think the Diane Venora/Natalie Portman portions of Heat, only without Michael Mann's acute attention to emotional shorthand.
If the worst case scenario is a female driven Heat, that would still be worth doing.
Unfortunately, this crime film plays like a mixture of Heat and Kill Bill that doesn’t earn its extended running time.
‘Apartment 1BR’ bears a strong resemblance to ‘The Invitation’, another film about a cult, both are subtle and restrained, creating an uneasy sense of dread.
David Marmor’s 1BR renovates horror’s “residential mistrust” subgenre by lifting inspiration from Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation and other proprietorial cult-based horrors.
Surely, 1BR has a bit more in common with cult-centric films like Ari Aster’s Midsommar or Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation than apartment horror like Polanski’s The Tenant or the underseen Spanish thriller Sleep Tight.
…you’ll find a slick and sometimes scary film which feels like the unruly younger and less experienced sibling of Karyn Kusama’s outstanding chiller The Invitation.
Not since “The Invitation,” has a final sequence reshaped the entire scale and scope of what came before, making “1BR” not only a decent exercise in thrills, but a room that’s worth checking into.
Playing with a sense of community and flipping it on it’s head, we dance around ideologies seen in films like The Invitation and The Endless , and to its detriment, those movies do it much better.
The Rental recalls Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation in tone, but its denouement isn’t quite as satisfyingly strange.
Like Karyn Kusama’s brilliant The Invitation , Franco isn’t afraid to let us question what is truly going on for a beat too long.
Or compare The Rental to Karyn Kusama's The Invitation, another horror-thriller set all in one house and in which things quickly escalate near the very end.
Screenwriter Diablo Cody ("Juno") and director Karyn Kusama ("Girlfight") have nth-wave feminism on their minds, but their abundant ideas never jell.
They have used some unconvincing arguments about subversiveness, but director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody's ( Juno ) willingness to resort to flogging the movie off the back of Fox's cleavage and highly-sexual public profile spoils what could have been an interesting and original addition to the slasher horror genre.
That is not to say that Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody's latest is not original—she has so many random ideas floating around in this story of two BFFs whose relationship is ruptured when one of them becomes a man-eating demon that it does have a style of its own.
'Jennifer’s Body' doesn’t have any of the zinging witticisms that were the hallmarks of Diabolo Cody’s debut effort, Juno.
Megan Fox supplies the titillation, Diablo Cody (Juno) the lingo, and every teen-oriented horror flick ever made the blueprint for this enjoyable, if skin-deep, lark.
Or is it, like Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Celebration,” a matter of everything that goes wrong is very right and simply hasn’t been spoken aloud even though it demands to be spoken aloud?
While the high bar for reunions gone wrong is “The Celebration,” Kusama’s abstract approach suggests Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” by way of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” (with a touch of Ti West’s Jonestown-inspired “The Sacrament”).
It’s akin to Nicole Kidman in Destroyer or Johnny Depp in Black Mass, actors dressed like Halloween ghouls surrounded by regular people.
The Invitation (2015; Kanopy, Peacock, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Sling TV, Tubi, rentable): "Hospitality can be hell" is also the premise of this tense psychological thriller directed by Karyn Kusama (not to be confused with the 2022 film of the same name), in which a dinner party takes an unsettling turn for a man visiting his ex-wife.
His veneer of affability and its occasional cracks make the first half of the film some of the tensest sitting-around-and-talking-about-stuff since 2015’s The Invitation.
It's poorly paced and never scary, but there are a handful or three scenes that approach the eeriness of, well, if not The Shining, then maybe the pretty eerie Johnathan Glazer directed video for "Karmacoma" by Massive Attack that was inspired by The Shining.
That patience is rewarded, and then capped by one of the nicest final shots since Hitchcock's "The Birds."
When an overly enthusiastic second cousin (Hugh Skinner) invites Evie to join him for a posh family wedding at a decadent English estate—and she arrives and realizes uneasily she’s the only person of color besides the maids—there’s hope that “The Invitation” might have something more relevant and substantial on its mind along the lines of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
Nul doute que pour The Invitation (au Québec, portant le titre français de L’invitation ; en France, Le bal du diable , plus approprié au récit), la jeune cinéaste s’est inspiré avec un extraordinaire sens de la dramaturgie de l’incontournable The Brides of Dracula ( Les maîtresses de Dracula ), du non moindre Terence Fisher, parmi les grands gourous de la célèbre Hammer de l’âge d’or.
Imagine a version of Mean Girls produced in Hell, and you will have some sense of the film�s tone.
Take Mean Girls or any other teen movie involving girls' jealousy and competition and blend it with the South Park episode in which no one will believe the boys when they insist that Chef's fiancée is a succubus and the result is Jennifer’s Body.
Think Mean Girls meets Carrie.
Stripped of these underlying psychological inferences and judged on its own cinematic merits, the film is more uneven, not quite as sharply satirical or groundbreaking as its past brethren, 1989's "Heathers" and 2004's " Mean Girls ."
As for the film, it tries to be equal parts snark and snarl — think "Mean Girls" meets "Carrie."
The movie has the darkness of Heathers, the edginess of Mean Girls and the absurd gore of Little Shop of Horrors.
From Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation , the dinner table as a space for transgressive social and/or familial communion has long proven rich terrain for the horror genre to mine.
Subdued and formalistic for the first two-thirds of the film before, very literally, taking the camera off the tripod for a particularly gory finale, The Feast may test one’s patience but, for those willing to embrace these Welsh-film’s eccentricities, Jones has crafted one of the more horrifying dinner parties this side of The Invitation .
For my money and the 2000 indie Girlfight surpasses this awards pandering melodrama.
True to the unspoken desperation and disillusionment that toughens or chews up career-undercard boxers, tinged with post-feminist complexity and rich with classical metaphor, "Million Dollar Baby" has only one competitor for the title of best boxing movie since "Raging Bull" -- Karyn Kusama's fervent, genre-transcending "Girlfight," also about a female fighter.
Cinematographer M. David Mullen ("Jennifer's Body") uses every trick in the book (along with some he's written), bringing rich jewel tones of red, pink, purple, blue, yellow and green to his 35mm film, employing in camera effects for some psychedelic vibes.
Almost the only job she doesn’t take is cinematography, but M. David Mullen (Jennifer’s Body), shooting on 35mm film, fully enters into her mindset: the primary colours pop so that odd props (an apple-red cigarette carton) take on sinister meaning.
Porque es precisamente el dolor enquistado, el mismo que llevaba al matrimonio de Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz, 2008) a desintegrarse en la jungla, el que activa los mecanismos del horror y el que amenaza a sus personajes con transformar una locura individual en una locura colectiva.
It's been done a thousand times, including such famous performers as Wallace Beery in "The Champ," Kirk Douglas in "Champion," Sylvester Stallone in "Rocky," Michelle Rodriguez in "Girlfight," Hilary Swank in "Million Dollar Baby" and Mark Wahlberg in "The Fighter."
It fits neatly into a recent trend of low-budget thrillers that use the civility of a house party as the starting point for a descent into carefully controlled chaos: See also 2013’s Cheap Thrills and Coherence.
De esta idea maléfica nacieron recientes joyas del terror psicológico como The One I Love o Coherence, en las que el miedo no se acababa al llegar a casa sino que empezaba al entrar por la puerta, al encontrarnos con nuestros colegas, o peor, con nuestra pareja.
The most captivating parts are when the touchy relationship between Jennifer and Needy takes center stage; the death scenes and more typical fright moments of walking through dark houses alone or being startled when something pops up are moodily shot by cinematographer M. David Mullen (2006's " The Quiet "), but pretty standard just the same.