Rampage | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

MONSTERS! + The Rock + Jeffrey Dean Morgan + ecological awareness = entertainment with a purpose.

The arcade game Rampage stomped onto the scene in the mid-eighties. The player, assuming the identity of one of three gigantic creatures, attempted to pound the crap out of a city. It was dumbed-down, straightforward fun. One could say the same of director Brad Peyton’s latest blockbuster film loosely based on the game.

A Quiet Place | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Silence means survival in ultra-tense film that resounds thunderously within horror canon

Three minutes into A Quiet Place, I was about to grab some popcorn, when my wife seized my hand and shook her head. The theatre was so quiet, its occupants so immersed in the Abbott family’s attempts to keep quiet, that my hand reaching into that bag would have sounded like a jet taking off. That tension and absorption in the characters’ plight dominated the remainder of the film, written and directed by lead actor John Krasinski.

The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley | review by Stephen Theaker

The Beauty (Unsung Stories) is a story told by Nathan. Telling stories has been his job ever since the women and girls first began to fall sick and he stood up at the commune’s campfire and retold the story of a famous boy wizard to keep away the silence of the night. It has now been six years since the last women in the valley died, all of them victims of an aggressive fungal infection. The future is bleak, but he tells the surviving men and teenage boys tales of the past, doing his best to keep the women alive, in their thoughts at least. For sex and love the younger men make do with each other. That brings comfort, but there’s no future in it for the species, and no hope, even for a community that was self-sufficient before the disaster.