If You're Intrigued By Adam Driver's 65, You Really Need To Watch Haunt
Hold onto your butts: the trailer for "65" has dropped, and it's a dinos-vs-humans battle royale — except this time, man has high-tech weaponry. The latest feature from "A Quiet Place" co-writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods sees double Oscar-nominee Adam Driver as intrepid hero Mills, a pilot stranded on a strange planet with some familiar flora and fauna. Bonus: it has the added support of "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" director Sam Raimi as producer. Check it out here:
The trailer synopsis has the details:
"After a catastrophic crash on an unknown planet, pilot Mills quickly discovers he's stranded on Earth. .. 65 million years ago. Now, with only one chance at rescue, Mills and the only other survivor, Koa, must make their way across an unknown terrain riddled with dangerous prehistoric creatures in an epic fight to survive."
Starring Driver opposite Ariana Greenblatt as young Koa, the movie appears to be a cross between (skipping the obvious "Jurassic Park" comparisons) a William Girdler "Day of the Animals"-type picture and M. Night Shyamalan's "After Earth" — as our doomed protagonists are stuck navigating hostile terrain where everything seems engineered to kill them, and it's going to hurt the whole time they're dying. Its intensity is just what Beck and Woods are known for; their 2018 post-apocalyptic creature feature "A Quiet Place" made a box office smash of over $340 million and inspired a blindfolded hide-and-seek "Quiet Game" among social media users.
Those who dig the new trailer won't necessarily have to wait until the March 2023 release date to see more from Beck & Woods. Just one year after "A Quiet Place," the dynamic duo crafted a slasher movie, set in a good old haunted house attraction, on Halloween night — a horror fan's dream picture. Allow /Film to introduce you to "Haunt."
Something wicked this way comes
Scott Beck and Bryan Woods take on writing and directorial duties for "Haunt," which tells the story of a group of college kids visiting a haunted house featuring catchpenny-masked performers — the kind that jump out from a corner with a fake chainsaw. It starts as normally as any haunt; give up your cell phones, sign this waiver so you can't sue, etc. But the students soon find that the performers are a bit zealous, and the scares are deadly.
Among the hack-n-slash canon fodder is Harper ("American Idol" contestant Katie Stevens), potentially the resilient final girl of the story. Harper is navigating an abusive relationship and a whole lot of childhood trauma when she links up with friends to forget her troubles for a night. What they encounter is a house of horrors filled with Samhain-themed killers — one has a cheap-o witch mask, another a cheap-o devil mask — what follows are buckets of blood and mayhem — the kind guaranteed when "Hostel" director and Splat Pack member Eli Roth is counted among the film's producers. Add in a pulse-pounding score by "The Strangers" composers Tomandandy, and the result is a taut 93-minute fight for survival.
In his streaming recommendation, /Film's Chris Evangelista acknowledges the movie's predictability. If you've seen "Hell House LLC," or "Hellfest," or "The Houses October Built," you have a fair idea of the twists and turns around each corner of this "Haunt." But Evangelista further acknowledges, "Sometimes you just can't beat simplicity," vowing to revisit the movie every Halloween. While you wait 65 million years for the prehistoric thrills of "65," you can keep the Hallow's Eve spirit going and catch "Haunt" on VOD.