
THE BLOB (1988) d: Chuck Russell. c: Shawnee Smith, Kevin Dillon, Donovan Leitch, Joe Seneca, Candy Clark, Jeffrey DeMunn, Del Close. A near-perfect remake of the 1950s monster flick that not only improves upon the original’s special FX but expands the story with rich characters and spectacular set pieces. The residents of a small town become food for a gelatinous organism that grows bigger every time it eats humans, that is until a mysterious containment team is sent to handle the situation, making matters worse. Gory, exciting, and often surprising, this is what remakes should always aspire to be. Co-written by Frank Darabont, this gets major points for switching gender roles and making the spunky cheerleader (Smith) the gun-toting hero. Criminally overlooked during its initial release, this is a fantastic, inventive piece of genre filmmaking that deserves a place on the same mantel as Carpenter’s The Thing. A–

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012) d: Drew Goddard. c: Kristin Connolly, Fran Kranz, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford. Vibrant horror-comedy-fantasy co-written by Joss Whedon about a group of college friends spending the weekend at a remote, woodsy cabin who are terrorized by a family of backwoods zombie-rednecks. Or so they think. Deliciously sending up the “teens in the woods” subgenre created by ’80s classic Evil Dead, Cabin works because the screenplay doesn’t only spoof its subject matter but highly respects and, clearly, enjoys it. The cast is likable and energetic (including Jenkins and Whitford as egocentric employees of a secret underground agency), and the pacing is terrific, building to a full-scare monster movie mash-up of epic proportions. B+

RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACCOON CITY (2021) d: Johannes Roberts. c: Kaya Scodelario, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Hannah John-Kamen, Avan Jogia, Donel Logue. Lively reboot of the groundbreaking video game series, this is set in 1998 with a young woman (Scodelario) going back to her hometown of Raccoon City, a small town built by the evil Umbrella Corp. When the locals start turning into blood-craving zombies, she and her cop brother (Amell), along with several others, must try to escape the doomed city, but not before bumping into a variety of mutated monsters. Following in the footsteps of the six-movie Resident Evil series, this offers nothing new, but is a more faithful adaptation of the original ’90s games, with iconic locations and certain sequences replicated and inserted into the action, which takes precedence over story. This is, however, very entertaining and moves at such a fast pace you won’t notice. B