It’s not a home run weekend at the box office, but it’s a start thanks to the best horror film of the year.
Let’s bitch it out…
The light at the end of the February tunnel is here as we struggle through one final weekend. With the Oscars falling on Sunday, expect to see boosts for all of the major contenders still in release (looking at you Hidden Figures and La La Land). Meanwhile one of the stars of sketch series Key & Peele debuts a not-so-thinly veiled race allegory horror film that has critics and preview audiences buzzing.
Feb 24, 2017
Get Out (Wide)
- Cast: Daniel Kaluuya (Sicario), Alison Williams (TV’s Peter Pan Live), Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich), Bradley Whitford (The Cabin In The Woods)
- Official Synopsis: Now that Chris (Kaluuya) and his girlfriend, Rose (Williams), have reached the meet-the-parents milestone of dating, she invites him for a weekend getaway upstate with Missy (Keener) and Dean (Whitford). At first, Chris reads the family’s overly accommodating behaviour as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter’s interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that he could have never imagined.
- Good for fans of: Stepford anything, The Cabin in the Woods
- Is it worth your time? Yes. The buzz on the film is out of this world, which is relatively unheard of for horror films. It’s smart and scary, which is always a good combination.
Collide (Wide-ish)
- Cast: Nicholas Hoult (Warm Bodies), Felicity Jones (Inferno), Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal), Ben Kingsley (Sexy Beast)
- Official Synopsis: An American backpacker (Hoult) gets involved with a ring of drug smugglers as their driver, though he winds up on the run from his employers across Munich’s high-speed Autobahn.
- Good for fans of: That awful Fast & Furious knock-off Need for Speed, Transporter sequels
- Is it worth your time? How snarky do you want me to be? No. Obviously. Come on!
Rock Dog (Wide-ish)
- Cast: The voices of Luke Wilson (Legally Blonde), Eddie Izzard (TV’s Hannibal), J.K. Simmons (Spiderman)
- Official Synopsis: When a radio falls from the sky, a young Tibetan Mastiff is inspired to leave his village in the mountains and move into the big city to become a rock musician.
- Good for fans of: Cheap animation and poor storytelling?
- Is it worth your time? This is being billed as “a comedy directed by Academy Award Nominated Writer-Director of Surf’s Up and Co-Director of Toy Story 2, Ash Brannon” but the former is hardly a compliment and the quality of the trailer and the number of screens suggests that the latter was courtesy of the other director. This looks cheap and dreadful and that logline? UGH
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That’s it for the final week of February. Next week Hugh Jackman brings the pain (and the violence) to the neo-noir/Western posing as a superhero film, Logan.