Skip to main content

The Resort review – inane horror film or a sophisticated meta-joke?

Perhaps the director wanted a holiday in Hawaii or to audition for a gig making episodes of Love Island

Four friends who look like models take a trip to a remote Hawaiian island to check out a shuttered resort where spooky, unnatural things happened years ago. Apparently, the place is haunted by the vengeful ghost of a native girl whose face was mutilated back then. Will anyone survive to write a TripAdvisor review?

This inane horror movie is so ludicrously cliche-ridden one starts to wonder if it’s not some kind of sophisticated meta-joke being played on us. How else can we account for choices such as having the whole thing told as a flashback from a hospital bed, by sole survivor Lex (Bianca Haase)? Is it some kind of nudge in the proverbial ribs that, as we see the quartet strip off to swim near a waterfall, we hear Lex intone solemnly that this was the last time they were happy? (Spoiler: because everyone is going to die.) And was writer-director-producer Taylor Chien hoping to use this as a calling card to get a gig making episodes of Love Island? Or did he and his friends just fancy a holiday in Hawaii?

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3vnD29a

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...