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Posts Tagged ‘Franck Khalfoun’

Night of the Hunted (2023)

Friday, October 20th, 2023

NIGHT OF THE HUNTED is a really tense, unsettling single-location thriller just released to Shudder. It’s directed by Franck Khalfoun (who did the Elijah-Wood-starring remake of MANIAC), and he co-wrote it with Glen Freyer, remade from the 2015 Spanish film LA NOCHE DEL RATON (NIGHT OF THE RAT). The premise is about as simple as they come: a woman on her way home late at night gets trapped in a gas station mini-mart by a sniper.

As usual in these sorts of set ups, the protagonist is already going through some drama. Alice (Camille Rowe, KNUCKLEDUST) was attending a convention for work with her co-worker John (Jeremy Scippio, UNDERBELLY BLUES). They’re driving in the middle of the night to get her home in time to see a fertility doctor with her husband Erik (Aleksander Popovic, KNOCK KNOCK 2). But we can see by the nonchalant way John gets into the shower in front of her that they’re having an affair. And we can see from Erik’s texts that they’re aware of problems in the marriage they’re trying to work out. She’s clearly wrestling with what to do with her life, and annoyed with John too, and then she goes in to get coffee, finds no one on duty to buy it from, and gets shot in the arm. (read the rest of this shit…)

Maniac (2013 remake)

Tuesday, July 9th, 2013

tn_maniac2013It’s been a while since I’ve seen William Lustig’s MANIAC, but its memory lingers as a favorite movie somewhere in the scummy part of my brain. It’s not a slasher movie by my definition because it follows the killer the whole time, but that makes it more upsetting. Played by GODFATHER I-II supporting player Joe Spinell (who also co-wrote the movie), this maniac is a sweaty, disgusting mess living in the shadows of the flea-bitten New York City of 1980, the era of peep shows and grindhouses. He was the weirdo women had to worry about following them on the subway. He was literally the guy you didn’t want to run into in a dark alley, partly because he might be dumping a body in the garbage, and you don’t want any part of that.

To me the most memorably fucked up scene is the one where he’s handcuffed himself to a mannequin that has a real woman’s scalp attached, and he’s crying and he says, “I’m so happy.” And then later there’s one of my all time favorite turnarounds where this sicko leaves the private world of his dingy apartment, he goes into the city in the daylight, and it turns out he knows people. He’s wearing sunglasses and he’s hanging out at a photo shoot. They think he’s cool! Great movie.
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Wrong Turn at Tahoe

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Back when I saw the insane Lee Daniels mother-fucking assassin movie SHADOWBOXER I admitted that Cuba Gooding Jr. was good in it, but made fun of the generic covers of some of his other straight to video movies. Back then one or more people stood up for WRONG TURN AT TAHOE. I don’t think I believed them.

Since then I liked Gooding in HIT LIST, and started to realize that I was unfair to dismiss him as a DTV star. Just ’cause he did all that mugging on all those trailers for comedies I never saw doesn’t mean he can’t do other shit. I even kind of liked him in RED TAILS – not a popular stance, but an honest one. And I can’t continue to hold that ugly purple shirt from BOYZ N THE HOOD against him. It was the ’90s, it was a different time. At least he wasn’t wearing Zubaz.

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P2

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

tn_p2It’s weird how the secret to a good movie idea sometimes is just to think of a really limited location and then figure out everything that could happen inside there. Like there’s that movie coming out where Ryan Reynolds is buried alive, and there was the one where Colin Farrell couldn’t leave the phone booth. There’s the building in DIE HARD, the bus in SPEED, the mall in DAWN OF THE DEAD, the hockey stadium in SUDDEN DEATH, and there should be one that takes place entirely in one of those Japanese compartment hotels. Or a nerd gets stuffed in his locker and then terrorists take over the school and he has to fight them from inside. Or a cartoon about a cat stuck in a tree and there’s a bird’s nest there and they’re forced to get along and learn from each other, like Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune in HELL IN THE PACIFIC.
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