Horror Movie A Day

Welcome!

2012-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

Before reading any of the "reviews", you should read the intro, the FAQ, the MOVIES I HAVE ALREADY SEEN list, and if you want, the glossary of genre terms and "What is Horror?", which explains some of the "that's not horror!" entries. There is also a handy recommendation thread that you can use to post suggestions for movies. And to keep things clean, all off topic posts are re-dated to be in JANUARY 2007 (which was before I began doing this little project) once they have 'expired' (i.e. are 10 days old).

Due to many people commenting "I have to see this movie!" after a review, I have decided to add Amazon links within the reviews (they are located at the bottom), as well as a few links to the Horror Movie A Day Store around the page, hopefully non-obstructively. Amazon will also automatically link things they find relevant, so there might be a few random links in a review as well. If they become annoying, I'll remove the functionality. Right now I'm just kind of amused what they come up with (for example, they highlighted 'a horror movie' in the middle of one review and it links to, of all things, the 50 Chilling Movies Budget Pack!!!).

Last but not least, some reviews contain spoilers (NOTE - With a few exceptions, anything written on the back of the DVD or that occurs less than halfway through the movie I do NOT consider a spoiler). I will be adding 'spoiler alerts' for these reviews as I go through and re-do the older reviews (longtime readers may notice that there is now a 'show more' which cleaned up the main page, as well as listing the source of the movie I watched, i.e. Theaters, DVD, TV) to reflect the new format. This is time consuming, so bear with me.

Thanks for coming by and be sure to leave comments, play nice, and as always, watch Cathy's Curse.

Aw, Sorry Hitler!

2012-02-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, in addition to being the absolute worst person of all time, Hitler is also a big horror fan. Sadly, he just found out that HMAD is ending next year. Here is his response:

Thanks to Mike Breiburg for putting this together! It made me laugh heartily! Excellent five year birthday present!!!

Circle (2010)

2012-02-09T16:14:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER, SLASHER
SOURCE: CABLE (TMC ON DEMAND)

If one ever wanted to show a movie to a film school class on how to botch potentially exciting/interesting ideas, Circle would make a fine candidate. I could list the bullet points about the movie and your first thought would be “that sounds pretty great!” But if you actually watch the movie, you’d know that there is nothing “great” about it, as it spends its runtime seemingly going out of its way to bungle the job.

For example, our main group of young pretty folks are part of a psychology class who are assigned to go to the childhood home of a killer and see what made him tick (except without Busta Rhymes and Dangertainment to guide them), and the teacher adds that they will not be working with their usual group, because out in the field you’ll be working with strangers and need to learn to adapt. So I’m thinking, this is great – for once there will be a reason that these people are together when they won’t be getting along, and perhaps the lack of a prior friendship will allow for some actual character development for a change. But no, the TA who is “randomly” assigning the kids to a particular house (I guess there are a lot of serial killers in the area?) picks his girlfriend, her best friend, and another guy they seem to be friendly with, so there goes the whole idea of being with people you’re not familiar with. The only wild card is some stoner dude whose presence in the class makes zero sense (advanced psychology is hardly a throwaway class), who brings along his crazy Latina girlfriend in order to even things out to 3 guys and 3 girls, I guess.

The killer is also heavily influenced by Numerology, which is an under-mined area for movie serial killers, many of which often just go by the Bible or Satanic ritual or whatever. Finally, a different kind of killer! Well, all it boils down to is the fact that he leaves FOUR cars arranged in a particular way or kills SIX people in a semi-circle for reasons that have already escaped my mind. I think it’d be better (or just enjoyably silly) if he sought victims that had 21 letters in their name or whatever, but instead we just get scene after scene of a couple of cops trying to decipher his clues, which would be fine if A. we didn’t know who the killer was and B. we didn’t know where he was going. Alas, our killer is shown in the first scene, and it’s not too difficult to figure out that he’s going to his damn house where all of our slasher victims in training are waiting.

Unfortunately, and for reasons that baffle me to no end, the movie is heavily skewed toward the cop scenes instead of the kids, as if writer/producer Brad Tiemann assumed watching some folks trying to figure out what we already know is somehow more exciting than watching our victims do their thing, where at least we’re not sure in which order they will be killed off, or if they will find out something interesting about the killer during their “research” sessions (mostly just wandering around the house going through his stuff). I’d say for every minute of kids we get two minutes of cops, when it should be more like 10 minutes of kids for every 1 minute of cops. I mean, it’s fine that they add a police presence, and it’s good to check in on their progress every now and then, but why dedicate 2-3 minutes of screen-time to them wondering where he is, or 5 minutes on a “clue” that he left for them, when the audience already knows these things?

Worse, it takes forever for him to kill any of them, and when he does, it’s almost all off-screen. Adding insult to injury, all kills occur in a 15 minute chunk at the top of the 3rd act, so everyone’s dead except for the final girl, the killer, and (SPOILER!) the TA, who turns out to be his brother/fellow numerologist. Oh and the cop, who has finally figured out that the killer is in his own house, and arrives on the scene just in time to scramble around in the dark for a while before doing anything. This results in a criminally awful “climax” in which not one but BOTH killers get away by outrunning a trained police officer (a chief, in fact!). Come on, even Chain Letter’s ending was better than this halfassery.

Oh, and the Linda Vista is used as a shooting location, as if to say “Look, we refuse to put any effort into this whatsoever.” I swear, the day that place burns to the ground because some film crew knocked over a light and started a fire will be the happiest day of my life (assuming no one is hurt in the process). I assume it’s just super cheap to use, because otherwise I can’t imagine for the life of me why any filmmaker would want to shoot there when it’s been used so many times. Don’t they want to stick out? Find cool places that haven’t been overused (or used at all) in dozens of other movies? Even if they have to shoot inside, can’t they at least steal an establishing shot from any other building in the state?

Incredulously, this thing got a theatrical release in 2010, playing two theaters, which is one more than necessary (every movie should play in a theater once). Were you one of the ones to go see it? If so, why?

What say you?

Nightmares (1980)

2012-02-07T17:20:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 6, 2012

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

It’s always fun to hear about a movie for the first time and find yourself watching it a few minutes later, especially when it belongs to an era/sub-genre that you greatly admire. So for me, finding a previously unknown slasher film from the early 80s heyday is sort of like finding a hundred bucks in an old pair of pants. Unfortunately, when said movie is as bad as Nightmares (aka Stage Fright), it’s just a major drag – I would have rather have kept on living my life totally ignorant of this movie’s existence.

Barely escaping the “Crap” heap due to its short length (79 minutes) and admirable excess of sleaze (including a closeup on a woman’s vagina being fondled! Isn’t that technically porn?), the film offers nothing to the genre, which is even sadder when you consider it came out before many of the other slasher films folks can name off the top of their head. In fact it’s almost more like a Giallo at times, due to the loose plotting, excess of sex and assholes, and crazy flashback motifs, but it lacks style. If nothing else, a Giallo should deliver some nice setpieces, but one of this film’s biggest issues is how shoddily constructed it is. There AREN’T any set-pieces, scenes just sort of come and go at random throughout the film, leaving the viewer without any clear indication of how much time has gone by since the last one (that they all fade in/out to black doesn’t help). The only thing that ties it all together is the Brian May (not that one) score, which is either ripping off Psycho or trying to do a better job of it than Harry Manfredini, I couldn't tell.

Another major problem is that the killer’s identity doesn’t seem to be hidden in terms of the plot – any time someone’s about to die we see flashbacks that only our main character could have been present for, so we know it’s her right off the bat. However, the kills are all presented in POV, which is only acceptable for a movie in which we DON’T know the identity of our murderer. Even a total cheat like Friday the 13th would have been preferable to this, as it denies us both some fun slasher scenes, but also a mystery of any sort. Worse, we don’t really get to know anyone else, resulting in thoroughly boring kill scenes. There’s a bit near the end where one of the actresses from the play is being chased around for a while, and it more or less functions as the film’s final big chase (complete with a “find the dead friends” scene), yet I couldn’t even remember the “heroine’s” name, because she was just one of the anonymous “other folks” in the film. She didn’t earn the title of “Final Girl”, it’d be like the random girl who got driven home from the party in Halloween II (the one who refused to ask Eddie Lee for a ride) showing up at the end and taking on Myers.

The kills also lack any sort of inventiveness. The thing that set her off as a kid involved broken glass, and so every present day kill requires a nearby mirror or window to work, which gets tiresome. After 3-4 of them I just started wondering if there was any glass left for her to break inside the theater. On that note, I should mention that nearly the entire movie takes place in the theater, which they also botch. The single location slasher is fine if it all takes place in one night or so, but this is spread over a couple of weeks (again, there’s no way to tell how much time has gone by, but it starts with the audition and ends on opening night, so it had to have been a while), so it doesn’t quite work, either – it basically adds to the movie’s disjointed feel.

And we barely even see any of the play! I mean, on one hand I’m glad that the production doesn’t miraculously tie into the events of the story, but why even bother when it’s such a non-point in the story? It creates a ton of logic holes in terms of how many folks involved can be offed before anyone notices, and has no real bearing on anything. The closest it gets to being relevant is the addition of an asshole critic (hey!) who is just looking for an excuse to pan the production, which I guess is supposed to add tension to the movie as a whole. “Oh no, they can’t afford to even mistime a cue, let alone GET KILLED! Drama!!!” But he dies before the damn thing even goes live (if I am following the plot correctly – like most things in the movie, it’s sort of vague), so it doesn’t matter.

Actually none of this movie matters. Just don’t watch it.

What say you?

P.S. Remarkably, Severin – who usually has better taste – put this out on DVD with a commentary that is apparently kind of crazy. Anyone hear it? I shudder at the thought of sitting through this thing again but I do like a candid commentary…

Happy Birthday, HMAD!

2012-02-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

If you've been counting, or just saw it on Twitter, then you already know that today, February 7th 2012, is the five year anniversary of the "birth" of Horror Movie A Day! The site came along a few weeks later, but on that fateful day I put in a "new to me" horror movie, and have done the same every day* since! I didn't really do anything special, but if you'd like you can head over to Badass Digest to check out an article I wrote about the best movies I've reviewed over the past 5 years that still haven't been given an official release in the US. You can also share your HMAD memories in the comments section, assuming you have any (I certainly don't). Whatever you do, just don't go back and read the earliest reviews, because they're awful.

As always whenever I hit a milestone here, THANK YOU! You guys are all great and I still get giddy seeing "New Comment" emails. Wouldn't do it if not for the continued support of the few hundred or so of you who come back every day. You = HEROES.

Now to find a movie for today!!!

*I missed one day. Screw you, February 16th, 2007!

Metal Shifters (2011)

2012-02-07T13:26:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 5, 2012

GENRE: ALIEN, MONSTER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

One of my favorite things about Tremors is that it actually has a LOW body count. While some horror fans equate success by the number of kills per hour, I’d much rather folks were continually in danger, darting from location to location while trying to figure out how to stop their enemy. So with that in mind, I must say I enjoyed Metal Shifters, despite the cheapness (and an awful title), because unlike most Syfy movies less than half of the cast got killed, but I never stopped believing many of them COULD be killed.

Intentional or not, it was pretty smart of writer/director Paul Ziller (also behind the above average Sea Beast) to kill off a certain character early on, because the way that the movie was designed up until that point, you would think it would be about these two particular characters, not unlike Tremors’ Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward (or to use a Syfy example, the “frenemies” in Ice Road Terror), making his death not only somewhat shocking, but also removing the idea that just about anyone else was “safe” at any given time. Yeah, the two top billed folks would be fine, but everyone else was fair game, at any time.

And Ziller was wise enough to keep everyone broken into smaller groups in the 2nd half. The bartender holds the door closed as the monster tries to get in – he could die! The town drunk and the guy who inadvertently built the monster attempt to figure out a scientific way of stopping the monster – they could die! The kid from Dear Mr Gacy who keeps risking his neck to protect the heroine’s daughter – he could die! You get the idea. And our heroes are proactive; sometimes you get into a situation where the heroes sort of sit in safety while the fodder goes off to die and thus they only spring into action when no one else is left, but top billed heroes Kavan Smith and Nicole De Boer are constantly on the move once the action kicks into high gear.

The monster’s also a little more interesting than their usual blend of Swamp Sharks and such. An alien rock crashes through a satellite and morphs together (I guess?), producing a virus that spreads through metal. And it just so happens to end up at the junkyard of a guy who has just build an 18 foot statue from scrap metal, which he keeps calling a Golem even though it’s not made of clay. Anyway, the thing ends up inside the statue, which comes to life and starts lumbering around like a reject Transformer (or maybe a scarier looking Bionicle), seeking human victims as he lives on the iron in their blood. At first he’s just going after random folks, but after a while our core group of eight or so residents hole up in/around a bar as the monster disassembles and uses his smaller parts to get at them.

If I had any complaint about this stuff (other than the baffling idea that this guy would make such a weird, scary statue as a gift for the town ceremony), it’s that when the monster regroups its random parts, he becomes the same thing he already was. It seems like he just took the original form out of convenience, but once separated he should have taken on a new form when it came time to regroup, perhaps something more beast-like or maybe 3-4 beings of a few feet each. Obviously the CGI isn’t going to win any awards (though it’s better than most Syfy movies, to be fair), so perhaps if they went with something more manageable they could have just built a robot puppet or two to use (as it stands I think his arm is the only practical effect). It also would have given the finale a little more variety, which would make up for the unique but cinematically dull method that they use to stop him/it.

I also would have gladly taken 25-30% less monster action in exchange for a better shooting location. While the attempt to make Canada look like Idaho is decent enough (a closeup on a speedometer with KMH listed over MPH was a dead giveaway though), the main three locations are a bar, an inn, and a police station – all of which look like brand new condos. The inn is being renovated, so its new look is acceptable enough, but the bar exterior looks completely ridiculous. Who the hell would want to get drunk somewhere that looked like it should have a welcome mat and a key hidden under the fake rock next to the flamingo? And the police station is just as silly, hell I’d love to spend a night somewhere that cozy looking! The fact that all three buildings looked alike also made me wonder about something else – where is everyone else in this town? We never see another soul; you’d think they’d have some shot of some randoms running away from the thing, but every single person we see in the movie (save for maybe a couple extras in a pre-monster town scene in the first 10 minutes) has a name and purpose.

But, you know, who cares. These movies are like episodes of a TV show; you deal with their shortcuts and questionable plotting the same as you accept that there isn’t a single night of the week that Norm, Cliff, and Frasier have nothing better to do than go to a bar with a staff that never gets a night off, or that no one else ever sits in the comfortable couch/chairs in the middle of Central Perk. All that matters is if they deliver on their promise to entertain you for 90 minutes (or two hours with commercials) on a Saturday night, and in that regard Metal Shifters delivers. The action moves nicely, there are some decent thrills, and best of all, I liked the characters. The kid from Gacy was a bit of an idiot at times, but otherwise I was glad to see so many of them survive. Any modern day monster movie that has two guys in their 50s/60s turn into action heroes during the finale is fine by me (one old guy is Doc Cottle from BSG; in fact pretty much everyone in the movie is best known for some genre TV show from Canada).

Anchor Bay’s disc comes with only one real extra besides trailers for it and other company releases (including Corman’s World, yay!), which is a making of that runs about 12 minutes. It’s pretty much fluff, and overly clip-heavy, but it’s fun to see the attack in the police car as it’s seen in the film next to footage of it being shot, which amounts to a couple of guys waving a giant metal stick around over the actors’ heads. I also enjoyed the fact that instead of the usual tennis ball, the FX guy waved a little toy robot around in front of the actors to give them an eyeline for what would eventually be the CGI creation. We also learn that the original name was Iron Invader, because that’s what everyone calls it (and probably what it originally aired as), though no one explains why it was changed to something far less enticing (“Metal Shifters” sounds like a Discovery Channel show). Not essential, but not the worst way to kill 12 minutes either, in other words. The transfer is also as spot on as always with their discs, no surprise there. It’s not a particularly great looking film to begin with, but I highly doubt it could ever look any better than it does on this blu-ray.

I’ve often wondered why they bother with single film releases for these things, as again they’re basically episodes in a TV show called “Syfy Original Movie”. Seems like they might actually move more units by grouping a few of them together by theme (not unlike how Shout Factory releases the MST3k TV series). The market for people specifically wanting to buy Metal Shifters is probably pretty small, but I’m sure there are lots of folks that would drop 30-35 bucks on a set of 4-5 giant alien robot movies. Something to consider!

What say you?

The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971)

2012-02-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 4, 2012

GENRE: GIALLO
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

On an interview dated 2001 on this very DVD, Dario Argento says that The Cat O'Nine Tails is his least favorite of his films. I wonder if he first offered this sentiment before he more or less lost his mind and made 1998's Phantom Of The Opera, but I guess since said mind was lost it would kind of fit that he'd single out a movie that wasn't bad at all. A little slow, perhaps, but I'd rather sit through it on an endless loop for the rest of my life than endure Phantom again.

I'll give him this much: it's too conventional. While it dips into weird territory every now and then (like when hero Karl Malden inexplicably acts like the villain for 30 seconds), it's pretty easy to follow, and Argento never seems to let his stylistic flourishes get in the way of the story. If not for the closeups on eyeballs and a few memorable kill scenes (particularly the girl in her apartment, drooling as the murderer chokes her), one might not even realize it's one of his films. The other entries in the "Animal trilogy" had a lot of his themes and trademarks already on display, but this one is fairly bland in that regards. Hell, the hero isn't even considered a suspect at any point!

What makes it work is the fun chemistry between Malden (who plays a blind ex-reporter who now seemingly designs puzzles) and Chuck Heston look-alike James Franciscus as Giordano, the main reporter who would seemingly get nowhere in the case if not for Malden's hunches and ability to "see" stuff no one else can, such as the loud clicking noise he hears while talking to a suspect might be important in some way. At first he's just dropping by to give Franciscus a lead, but by the 3rd act they're enjoying home-cooked meals together. It's cute, but it's also the rare Argento film with two male leads who are both decent guys - usually one turns out to be the killer or is just a total asshole.

And again, it's pretty easy to follow, and the killer's motive doesn't really come out of nowhere. The character is a bit underutilized throughout the film (it took me a second to recognize him/her), but their explanation for each murder more or less makes sense. It's also funny how it's revealed - Malden just wants to know where his niece is, and doesn't really care about the motive, but the killer just keeps explaining himself anyway. Thanks, pal. Rather hear it from him than some cop a few seconds later.

It's also got some great comedic moments, some unintentional. I know we're supposed to be horrified by a guy getting nailed by a subway train early on, but the ridiculous over-the-top approach just makes it a riot, with a closeup of the dummy head being slammed by the front grill followed by a shot of the body flopping around on the curb. Then they top it, all the folks watching instantly forget about it when a movie star steps off the train - one guy even goes something like "Oh yeah, the starlet!", no longer concerned with the dead guy inches away. There's also a cop who seemingly serves no purpose except to offer culinary tips to his fellow officers; there's half of a pretty great sounding ravioli recipe in this movie.

As for the deaths, there aren't a lot of them, and it seems half of them are in the first act. The train murder is probably the most eye-catching, but there's a fun one inside a darkroom that's aided considerably by Ennio Morricone's score. It's not one of his most memorable scores really, but they do this great thing where the music cuts out at key moments, as if to suggest something's about to happen, only to then start over when nothing does. It's like an inverse fake scare! So fun.

Anchor Bay's disc has some nice extras, nothing substantial but worth a look. Argento and Morricone provide a new interview, the music section is obviously more in depth than the rest (and a bit over my head) but it's always fun to listen to the candid Argento, who explains a bit why he thinks so little of it (something about it being too similar to Crystal Plumage). Then there are radio interviews with Franciscus and Malden, which run about 8 minutes each. Malden talks about training to play blind and how many movies he's done; Franciscus talks working in Italy and with Malden. He doesn't have much to say about the beautiful Catherine Spaak, however, merely saying she's a "nice girl" or something like that*, which is a far cry from his amazing pickup line in the movie, in which he gets her in bed by more or less pointing out that there are a bunch of other people doing it at this moment so they might as well join them. Smooth. Some trailers (including one that spoils the ending), still galleries, and bios round things out. I should note this disc was re-released by Blue Underground a few years ago, but I couldn't detect any difference with regards to the bonus material or the transfer (uncut, anamorphic) - someone correct me if I'm wrong.

So it might lean closer to the "for completists" only side of things, but compared to anything in the past decade or so, it's a winner. If it's passed you by all this time, might as well give it a look to see how much better a "bad" Argento movie used to be.

What say you?

*I later looked at her IMDb and saw that she got divorced after this movie, so my guess is that they totally boned. No disrespect.

The Woman In Black (2012)

2012-02-03T22:29:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 3, 2012

GENRE: GHOST, HAMMER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Now THIS is how to do a book adaptation, Hammer! While not a bad film, I will forever be disappointed that Let Me In (the first movie out of the gate for this Hammer revival) was not an adaptation of the source novel, but a remake of the Swedish film, copying scenes/shots almost line for line at times while continuing to leave out elements from the novel that hadn’t made it into the first movie (and also retaining some of that movie’s deviations). But The Woman In Black carries only the basic plot over from the 1989 version – and it’s a better movie to boot.

Right off the bat it goes into new directions. While the other movie has the main character’s wife still alive, our hero here is a widower (in the original book – which I should note I haven’t read – he doesn’t get married until after the main events of the story), which doesn’t really make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but at least it’s showing that they’re making an effort to do their own thing separate from the other productions. They also spend more time in the town than the other film, and condense the events to a few days, whereas the other movie seemed to take place over a couple weeks. At no point did I get the sense that this team was looking at the old movie for any sort of guidance or inspiration - which is exactly how ALL "remakes" should be (I don't like to use the term for adaptations, but Let Me In is a remake of Let The Right One In, plain and simple).

But ignoring all that, it simply WORKS as an old-school ghost/haunted house type story. I never realized it until pointed out the other day, but Hammer never actually tackled a ghost film in their heyday – the closest of the ones I've seen would be Night Creatures, but that doesn’t count because (spoiler) the “ghosts” were guys in costumes (though they were clearly shot as actual ghosts in the first hour or so of the movie – they floated!). However it fits right in with the films of old; not only is it a period piece (few Hammer films took place at the time they were produced) but it’s got the Gothic mansion at its center, and the fog machines constantly cranked to 11, and even a town populated with suspicious folk. It’s a damn shame when they resort to a pretty obvious CGI effect for one scare around the one hour mark – otherwise the film could have been a well preserved relic in terms of its technical aspects.

(That said, I truly hope you can find a theater showing it on 35mm – the digital transfer I saw was pretty lousy and was a giant mismatch with the film’s old-school approach.)

Otherwise, my only real complaint would be an over-abundance (not reliance) on jump scares punctuated with a BANG! on the soundtrack. I was hoping that the success of Insidious – which doesn’t have a single fake scare in the entire film – would kick-start the death of such silliness, but alas – a faucet, a bird, a wind-up toy… all these things provide an attempt at a scare, and while they’re not all unsuccessful (the faucet one actually works well), it starts to put the movie closer to bad teen horror remake territory (When A Stranger Calls and Prom Night being the worst offenders), when it’s otherwise a more “adult” horror film.

Speaking of adults, I guess I can’t not talk about Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe, in his first feature lead outside of the magic world. He’s pretty good, actually, especially considering he spends most of the movie by himself and not talking – there’s a segment that runs at least 15 minutes in which he only utters a single line. It’s not easy to command the audience’s attention without saying much or interacting with anything besides old papers and candles, but he pulls it off well. He might be a bit young for the role – the character has a four year old son and he shot the film when he was 20 – but he’s clearly got what it takes to move beyond Potter and continue a successful career if he chooses.

He’s aided considerably by the great Ciarán Hinds (who was in the last Potter himself; and I’ll also mention here that the guy who starred in the 1989 version was the actor who played James Potter!), who plays the only guy in town that doesn’t give him the evil eye. Some of their stuff is similar to the other movie, but Hinds creates a wonderfully conflicted, interesting character as opposed to that one’s rather dull exposition machine. There’s a terrific, underplayed bit where he drives Radcliffe to the mansion after dismissing the townsfolk’s crazy superstitions, yet he still stops his car short of the front gate and makes him walk the rest of the way. Little tidbits like that (as well as a well-placed sight gag involving his wife’s “twins”) give the character much life – it’s almost a bummer he’s not around more often. Note - if you enjoy his performance here, please check out the underrated/underseen The Eclipse, in which he stars as a widower himself.

As for the horror stuff, it’s pretty good. The jump scares are thankfully balanced with some wonderfully subtle bits, including one of those great “you don’t realize a ghost is in the shot until it moves” shots, which is thankfully NOT given a musical sting to alert us to it. Director James Watkins (Eden Lake – a movie I really need to watch again; Fassbender! The insanely gorgeous Mary Reilly!) also has fun with reflections, particularly a very cool bit in which the reflection of a candle makes it look like the glass eyes of various dolls are moving to watch Radcliffe as he walks past.

And the production designer should be given some sort of award on the spot; not only is the house a TERRIFIC find (way better than the rather bland one in the other film), but the various children’s toys are all remarkably “odd” in some way – even when they’re not being wound up or used for jump scares, there’s something unsettling about them (the rabbit in the trunk? Gah!). It’s a wonderful looking film too; the scope imagery is a great fit for this sort of thing, where your eyes will constantly be darting around the frame looking for ghosts. The casting director also did a fine job with the “locals”, many of them seemingly stepped out of one of the old Dracula or Frankenstein films. Radcliffe and Hinds are the only recognizable folks in the film (to my eyes), and since they play most of their scenes alone or together with no one else it actually sort of fits their antagonistic relationship with the town: they stick out in more ways than one.

Also, I won’t spoil it, but kudos on the ending scene, which is different than the book and other movie, but still quite satisfying. A buddy of mine pointed out what he thought was a plot hole in the film, but this “hole” combined with the ending fits into something I feel we don’t see enough of in horror films (swipe at your own risk): a hero who is actually wrong about how to save the day. Might not be the most conventional choice, but horror movies are cheap enough to produce that they shouldn’t care about such things. Yeah, you can’t kill off Megan Fox at the end of Transformers 2 when 300 million is on the line, but when you’re dealing with movies that cost less than what most Hollywood movies pull in on their opening weekend, there should be more freedom to do the unconventional thing – even if it’s a PG-13.

Speaking of which, the PG-13 rating is a fairly harsh one – I could definitely see the MPAA giving this one an R, same as they did with the similarly “old-school” Dead Silence, which was designed for that rating only to be screwed over by Universal who wanted to capitalize on the filmmakers’ ties to the Saw series. The two films would make a lovely double feature in fact; this is more successful overall, but Dead Silence has the originality going for it (and a better score). At any rate, it’s no game-changer, but it’s the most fully satisfying film yet from the new Hammer, and should satisfy the teens who just want to be scared as well as the adults who want an interesting story to go along with it.

What say you?

Julia's Eyes (2010)

2012-02-03T22:17:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 2, 2012

GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

It might be an issue for some viewers, but one of Julia’s Eyes' (Los Ojos De Julia) greatest strengths is its refusal to stick with one genre for very long, keeping you from ever getting too comfortable or feeling like you know where the story is going. It starts off as a mystery, dips into Giallo territory for a while (!), and finally enters the realm of cat and mouse thriller. And it’s all wrapped up in a fairly touching drama about a woman dealing with the loss of both her husband and her sight.

That it’s produced by Guillermo Del Toro is not too surprising. Not only is it similar in tone to The Orphanage, it also has the same lead actress: the utterly wonderful Belén Rueda, whom I can only assume has no interest in transferring to Hollywood – if they haven’t been after her for high profile roles in studio movies, they’re even more insane than I thought. She plays twins here, but since the movie is more or less about a woman trying to find out why her sister killed herself you can rightfully assume that her second role is fairly brief. I figured they might have flashbacks or something to give her more fun with the dual role, but once she’s gone (a few minutes into the movie) we barely see her again. No matter, Rueda is in nearly every frame of the film, and if I were in the mood for bad jokes I’d say something like “we see the entire movie through her eyes even as she loses them”.

But Del Toro also brings his trademark genre blending; a bit horror, a bit romance, a bit mystery… not to mention that, as usual, his villains have a bit of humanity to them. Our guy here IS a killer, but there’s a sympathetic slant to his actions that makes him a lot more interesting than most of his type. Especially when it’s fair to compare the movie to a Giallo – most Giallo villains barely even have a coherent motive, let alone strong characterization. At first I was surprised that his identity was revealed so long before the movie’s end, but again, the film never settles into a real routine, so it’s not really an issue (not that there are many possibilities for the killer’s identity anyway).

I was also surprised how well the mystery tied into the slight romance plot. Our heroine’s husband doesn’t want her looking into it, so she has to hide it from him. Thus when she suggests a weekend trip, he thinks she’s trying to go along with his wishes, but in reality the hotel she suggests is one where her sister was seen a few days before she died. The pieces of the puzzle are revealed at a pretty good rate, and the story gets more intriguing with each one, which is sadly rare in these kind of stories. More often than not, the more you find out the less interesting it all is, so it’s fun to be drawn in along with the characters for a change. There is one aspect to the back-story that is a bit unnecessary (and, unless I missed a line or two, possibly just made up), but it still held my interest.

And writer/director Guillem Morales always pays off each bit with a fun scare, most of which are somewhat unexpected. For example, Rueda learns that her sister frequented a physical therapy place nearby, and when she arrives she overhears the other guests talking not too flatteringly of her sister. And since they’re all blind, she is able to eavesdrop without them noticing, until one catches her scent. So you think the scene will carry out with her trying to get out before they discover her, except they DO find her after a few moments… only for one of them to realize someone else is there too. This is where the Giallo elements start to come into play – our guy has the tendency to show up pretty much everywhere, and he even has black gloves for good measure. One could question the logic of it, but if you think about him/his goals as a whole (once they’re revealed), it’s pretty solid.

Less successful is part of what alerts Rueda that there must be more to her sister’s death than the police have told her, because a particular song was on her stereo and “she HATED that song!” As we learn as the story goes on, the two weren’t really close anymore, so how she’d be so aware of her sister’s listening habits is a bit silly. I mean, folks often know what their loved ones LIKE – my sister texts me every time she sees Meat Loaf on TV – but what they don’t? I have no idea what songs anyone I know/love hates. That said, if I am found dead and “Pumped Up Kicks” is on my iPod or whatever, alert the authorities. No way in hell I’d be listening to that fucking waste of aural space.

And again, it’s kind of sad. I don’t know why I’m such a sucker for horror movies that tug my heartstrings a little, but like Premonition or The Eclipse, it’s one of those movies that’ll make you wanna give your spouse an extra hard hug or kiss when you get home. Again, there’s a bit to the back-story that has a negative impact on the drama, but based on the film’s final scene, one can safely assume that this tidbit was either made up or forgiven. But if love’s not your thing, don’t worry – there’s a nice throat slitting, an electrocution, even an old lady whacking someone over the head. The body count is pretty impressive by the film’s end, even a character you KNOW will be safe gets it (possibly worse than anyone in the movie, in fact). Something for everyone!

The disc has a few bonus features, all pretty worthless. The “making of” is merely B-roll footage from the EPK, which just means a bunch of quick/random shots of Rueda running through a take or people pointing at lights or whatever. Then there are interviews with Rueda, Del Toro, Morales, and co-star Lluís Homar, which are too brief to be of much use, and also seem to come from the EPK as everything is pure fluff. Homar’s interview is LITERALLY just him saying how much he loved working with Rueda – it’s not even worth the effort of scrolling through the menu to select it. The trailer is also included, and it’s not bad but if you look quick it spoils the killer’s identity (again, not really a big deal; more of a “well now I know it’s NOT this or that character”).

Now, twice this week I’ve bitched about movies being too long, but this was also just under two hours and yet I was fully engaged throughout. Sure, I’d love to watch nothing but 90 or under movies every day, because that just means more time for Skyrim or catching up on ABC’s Revenge (best new show by far!), but in the end I don’t care if it’s 65 minutes or three hours long – if you have a strong lead and a real story, the length won’t be an issue. One of my favorite movies of all time is Dawn of the Dead, and that’s still one of the longest mainstream horror movies ever made (and if we go outside of horror you’ll find a ton of 2+ hr films on my list – hell I love Kevin Costner and that dude’s only made 2-3 movies that are UNDER two hours). I might not have the time for it, but if every horror movie I ever saw again for the rest of my life was this “long” but also this satisfying, I’d have nothing to complain about.

What say you?

Exit 33 (2011)

2012-02-02T14:56:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

GENRE: SLASHER, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: DVD (SCREENER)

There are precisely two interesting things about Exit 33, which to be fair is two more than most indie DTV slasher movies. However, that isn’t exactly an endorsement, and since it bungles pretty much everything that counts, I can’t say I’d recommend seeking it out (seems to be relatively hard to find) over others that you’ve probably missed. If you find yourself watching this before something like Forget Me Not, your slasher card should be revoked!

Anyway, interesting thing #1 is that it stars Kane Hodder as the killer, but he’s not in any makeup whatsoever. Apart from a couple of real life serial killers (BTK, Ed Gein), I believe this is the first time he’s played the main killer in a movie without being drowned in latex and foam. Also, as with Hatchet or whatever, he actually gets to act a bit – his character in the present day is a standard giant killer type for the most part, but he’s got a little son that he talks to every now and then, and in flashbacks we see him all happy with his wife and such. The scenes don’t really gel with the present day stuff in any meaningful way – they eventually tell a tragic story and explain a certain character’s whereabouts in the present day, but how that translated into him becoming a ruthless killer is a bit fuzzy. It’s not like his wife and/or kid were killed by local teens and now he’s sworn to kill them all or whatever; there’s absolutely no relation between these two aspects of his character. But at any rate, he delivers the only memorable performance in the movie, and the twist, while obvious to seasoned vets*, might surprise a couple folks.

The other interesting thing is that director Tommy Brunswick is actually a woman, despite her 99.9999% commonly masculine name. She’s actually helmed a number of films over the years, all of which I have managed to miss (though one, The Remake, sounds awesome – queued!). I guess it’s good to know that women are just as capable of making mindless torture trash as their male counterparts; there’s no feminist angle on display here, as women get beaten with tire irons, have their eyes spooned out, etc. One is even knocked out cold with her boyfriend’s decapitated head (I laughed at this bit). Actually it almost seems a bit MISOGYNIST at times, if anything, as Kane tends to kill the men quickly and even let a few of them go free, while the women spend most of their time screaming and chained up. It’s not a particularly well shot film (it’s incredibly dark, for one thing), but gorehounds will probably dig it, and I hope they take the time to realize that it was a female behind all this carnage.

Otherwise, it’s just too repetitive and bland to really register. The movie is little more than an endless cycle of people stopping at Kane’s gas station and asking for gas. If he decides he wants to kill them, he tells them to use pump 9, which is apparently filled with water or something because everyone who uses it breaks down 5 minutes down the road. If he wants to let them go free, he has them use pump 3, and as luck would have it, everyone manages to pull up to the exact pump he wants them to! A better script would build a little moment around someone using one when he wants them to use the other, or have him try to figure out a reason for them to move their car back/forward to the appropriate pump to see him sweat a bit, but nah. There’s also a subplot about his jerky that never really pays off – is he serving flesh? Is the movie more of a Texas Chainsaw ripoff than previously established?

It’s also one of those movies where you can tell that it was written around actor availability. It’s ostensibly about a group of friends who are going off to a cabin somewhere (Kane’s gas station being along the way), but the friends never interact. Apart from Kane, no one in the movie has more than 10-15 minutes’ worth of screentime, including the “final girl”. You’d think they’d at least have a scene at the beginning of them all hanging out together before taking off in separate cars, but a few phone calls is all we get. Not that it matters much – you won’t care when any of them die, but it’s still kind of awkward that the movie essentially recycles its cast every 15 minutes or so.

The few attempts at humor are kind of painful too. Kane’s character deadpans the truth when people ask him about the strange noises they hear or whatever (“I have a girl chained up in my barn,” he’ll say, and the other guy will think he’s kidding), which is about the closest they get to a successful laugh. Other examples include not one but TWO lengthy shots of a guy sitting on the toilet reading porn while defecating (we get appropriate sound effects for this too), before realizing that there’s no TP so he has to wipe with a page from the magazine. Ugh, movie. They also can’t resist having Kane thumb through a “Fangoria” with Jason X on the cover before tossing it aside and snorting “Yeah, REAL scary.” I dunno, I’m sure some folks will laugh their ass off at that, but that sort of humor just hasn’t appealed to me in years (it’s not even the first time Kane’s done that sort of thing; he played an out of makeup character in Jason Goes To Hell that refers to Jason as a “pussy”). To me, the best laugh in the film came from the woefully bad greenscreen effect during a driving scene, which managed to look less realistic than the one in Airplane where it was SUPPOSED to be a joke! Hahaha, I love that scene. “Ass-HOLE!”

Oh well. Again, there are certainly worse movies out there, but it just reeked of cynicism. They clearly spent all of their money on hiring Kane, and his presence is the only thing that will get the movie noticed. Replace him with some no-name (or even one of the other Jason actors) and the movie has absolutely nothing to offer that we haven’t seen before. The script is credited to the executive producer, which is all you need to know about how this movie came together: Norman Koza had a buck that he wanted to turn into two, and that’s the extent of this movie’s merit. He didn’t have a real story to tell or even an interesting location –it was written by a guy who wanted to spend as little money as possible to maximize profits. Well, I wish him well. I hope the car he bought for himself was worth clogging up the shelves with yet another pointless horror flick no one will remember in five years.

What say you?

P.S. Over the years I’ve developed an interesting ability to instantly spot a character who is obviously being played by someone related to the producer. Sure enough, when two guys walked into the store and bought cigarettes (and didn’t get killed), I instantly thought: “Producer, producer’s nephew.” The actual tie is unknown, but one is listed as a co-producer and the other shares Koza’s name. Nailed it!

*OK, this is just for the folks who saw this already - at the end, were they trying to suggest that the ENTIRE MOVIE was his imagination and he was just killing deer all that time? Or am I giving them too much credit?

Closed For The Season (2010)

2012-02-02T10:56:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 31, 2012

GENRE: GHOST, PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

Like the killer clown slasher movie, horror movies set in amusement parks tend to suck more often than not, and sadly Closed For The Season does little to reverse the trend. It’s certainly better than Dark Ride or whatever, but the inconceivable length (a few minutes under two hours), purposely convoluted plot, and two leads who aren’t engaging enough to warrant looking past the other blemishes ultimately kills whatever goodwill a “Better than Dark Ride” claim can provide.

At 90 minutes I could be more forgiving, because at its core IS a fairly unique story, which is something that should be lauded (especially nowadays). Our heroes are trapped in an abandoned amusement park, forced by the movie’s strange villain (a carny played by the great Joe Unger – someone needs to cast this guy as John Hawkes’ dad in one of his 195 yearly awards bait type flicks) to relive the memories – most of them painful/scary – of the folks who had passed through the park over the years. Why he would do this, I have no idea, but it’s better than the usual slasher or whatever in terms of inventiveness. Also, director Jay Woelfel lucked out with a terrific location, an actual abandoned amusement park that has been left to rot for the past 30 years.

And he must know how good of a location it is, because I am sure at some point that someone told him that another horror movie called Deadwood Park was shot there as well. Amazingly, my biggest problem with THAT movie (which also blended nostalgia with ghosts) was that it was too damn long, so this is one of those things that only doing Horror Movie A Day can make happen: I’ve now seen two bloated horror movies shot in Chippewa Park, which is at least one more than any normal person should endure. Sadly, even though Deadwood was actually a few minutes longer (!) it’s actually the better of the two, so make that your one experience with this overrun fun park.

As with that film, the production value afforded by the one of a kind locale adds immensely to the proceedings; there’s something incredibly eerie about seeing coasters and tilt-a-whirl type rides with trees and brush growing between the rails and tracks – it’s the sort of thing that even the best set designers in the world couldn’t accurately recreate and get that creepy, almost kind of sad look that these things provide “as is”. Or, “as was”; since this movie’s production I understand the park has finally been demolished properly in order to make way for new developments. It’s the movie’s best asset for sure.

Thus, the fact that it’s gone is kind of infuriating – no one will ever be able to put it to truly good use for a movie. Instead, its last hurrah was used up in this convoluted nonsense. Few horror movies can be accused of being full of themselves, but that’s exactly the problem here. It seems Woelfel was incapable of reigning in his ideas and instead just put them all into one movie, which would be a problem even on a big budget movie (see: Transformers sequels), but is even more problematic when you’re dealing with an action-lite affair with only three characters. Poor Unger has to wear more costumes in this film than the Dean on Community wears in an entire season, and worse, occasionally has to provide important exposition while dressed as a sea monster or one of his many clowns.

It also drags out every plot point to an insane degree. When Unger demands they beat him at a carnival game, not only does it take forever (it’s one of those “break the plate” deals), but it just keeps going! After our male hero beats him the game, the female then has to have her own “test”, a dunk tank scene that is equally overlong and dull. Add in the constant dream sequences and hallucinations, and you have a movie that probably could have been 75 minutes long if Woelfel could have focused while writing and/or wasn’t such a baby in editing. Doesn’t matter how much time and effort you put into shooting something – if your story is becoming muddled or drawn out, it HAS to go. It’s why it’s never a good idea for a director to be his own editor (as he is here); in fact I was amazed to discover some deleted scenes among the film’s many extra features. This movie could have been LONGER? Christ.

Also, call me crazy, but a movie about two characters experiencing things that happened to other people just isn’t that interesting after a while. Yeah, it’s sad that someone got killed on a ride and someone else was sexually assaulted in the park, and numerous other things, but if you step back and look at it as a whole, the movie is about two people doing and experiencing absolutely nothing for real. It reminded me of that awful movie The Babysitter with Alicia Silverstone, where the entire thing is just people briefly fantasizing about getting closer to her when in reality they’re just standing there staring. That’s basically what happens here – most of the movie is a dull illusion.

I will give it props about one thing – the ending wasn’t what I expected. I was positive we were building toward a “they’ve been dead the whole time” finale, but that wasn’t quite it. It wasn’t much BETTER, but at least I was sort of fooled, which is always a plus regardless of the other circumstances. And even though the CGI roller coaster scenes look awful, it kind of “fit” to me – they weren’t really happening, so the crude “un-reality” look was appropriate (sort of like the bit in Speed Racer where the background is made up of his childish drawings). In other words, this movie doesn’t fail because it doesn’t have any good ideas – it fails because it doesn’t know what to do with them.

If you dug the movie though, this DVD will delight you to no end. It will take you nearly four hours to go through everything, starting with a full length commentary on the 2 hour movie. Woelfel is by himself here, and he admits some of the movie doesn’t quite work as well as he wanted to and even mocks its endlessness on occasion, but he’s also kind of boring. His obsession with scenes that were shot in two locations will drive anyone up a wall after a half hour or so – no one cares that an insert shot was shot in LA! I swear, at least 10% of the track is him going “OK so this was Ohio, this was California, California… now back to Ohio for that shot, and then cutaway was back in California!” And his soft voice over two hours of mostly dull film is almost like a challenge to the viewer: I dare you not to doze off as he drones on about CGI shadows and where they found the “Octoberfest” sign seen in the background of one scene.

The rest of the stuff is a little more enticing; 45 minutes’ worth of making of footage (broken up into “Webisodes”) will provide some insight into the real location and techie stuff like sound design, and then there are 20 minutes of deleted scenes that you can watch with or without commentary. None of them really felt much different than anything that was seen in the endless movie, so if you loved every minute of it – there’s more! Interestingly, he doesn’t say much about why he cut them, opting to just ramble on about the location and nitpicking about the color timing, same as he did on the feature. The only one of real interest is the last one, which would have been near the end of the film and explained how she really ended up in the park in the first place, but only someone who truly cared about the movie doing anything but finally ending by that point would have been annoyed by this dangling plot thread. Then there’s a pair of trailers (1st is better, not sure if the order is swapped or they just made their film look more amateurish on their 2nd wave of marketing) as well as two separate video tours of the abandoned park grounds, which will mostly just make you wish someone had thought to make a found footage movie in this eerie, unique location. Oh well.

Again, I like seeing original horror stories, especially in the indie world where most seem to just be trying to cash in on the current trends in an attempt to get noticed. But you gotta do that original idea justice with a tight script and strong characters, neither of which are offered here. Nice try, but I can’t recommend this one unless you’re a big fan of Unger, since he’s the best thing about it.

What say you?

Faces In The Crowd (2011)

2012-02-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 30, 2012

GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL, SERIAL KILLER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (STORE RENTAL)

I had passed by Faces In The Crowd a few times, assuming it was just some DTV thriller. But I had an extra rental tonight and picked it up, seeing if was something that I could watch over the weekend when I had a little more free time. There are certainly worse ways to spend a couple hours than looking at Milla Jovovich, and I spied Sarah Wayne Callies’ name on there as well! Bonus “Hot nurse from Prison Break”! And then I saw it labeled as a “horror/thriller” on the DVD, and saw that it was about a serial killer, so hurrah!

Not too surprisingly, it’s a BIT of a stretch to call it horror. It’s about a serial killer, but he drops his MO in favor of trying to drive Milla crazy after she witnesses one of his killings, which puts it more into generic thriller territory – especially when she starts falling for the cop that is assigned to protect her. The hook is that her encounter with the killer leaves her with Prosopagnosia, a rare disorder that prevents her from being able to remember faces. Not just HIS face, all faces – her best friends, her boyfriend, even her dad look like strangers to her, and they even change from minute to minute. Sort of like those masks in A Scanner Darkly, basically – but she can “fight” it by focusing on something particular on their face. Hero cop Julian McMahon, for example, sports a goatee and thus she is able to keep track of what he looks like.

Thus, the most interesting thing about the movie is seeing how director Julien Magnat depicts this to the audience. Every character (besides Milla) is played by several people – her boyfriend is played by over a dozen credited actors, for example. As a result, the other actors – such as Callies – barely appear, as we only see her once before the accident but then after, apart from a couple of shots, she is always being played by other women (with her awful haircut being the only thing to ground us). In fact I kind of wish Magnat had opted for a similar approach to Memoirs Of An Invisible Man, where they set up a gag with him being invisible, but then show Chevy normally so we could follow along/see our name actor as much as possible. But either Magnat doesn’t trust us or was using this motif as a clever way to keep the budget down by hiring recognizable folks for what couldn’t have been more than 2 days of work, because even when the scene isn’t necessarily playing on Milla’s problem with identifying them, they still don’t return to the original actor or actress, which makes it a bit harder to get worked up when they get killed off. The face changing keeps us from being attached to them, and in fact one corpse is even yet another new face (the credits list “Dead _____” or something like that).

However, it DOES get the point across. The casting folks did a great job of finding people that looked close enough alike to momentarily disorient us as well as Milla, which helps sell this very tricky and personal problem to the viewing audience. I was a bit baffled that she’d continue to lash out and hit someone because she didn’t recognize their face even after a few weeks of dealing with this – you’d think she’d be used to it by now – but otherwise it’s one of the better on-screen depictions of a strange neurological issue. Memento is the undisputed champ of such things, but in this area anyway, Crowd measures up.

Sadly, it’s nowhere nearly as successful in telling its mystery story. Even with the face changing gimmick, it’s pretty obvious who the killer is, and the movie’s feeble attempts at red herrings (i.e. her boyfriend) are wholly unsuccessful. And it’s not even a case of “you’ve seen too many movies” – the movie doesn’t bother to offer any potential suspects besides her boyfriend and the actual killer! And the boyfriend is cleared at around the 70 minute mark, so until the final chase we’re just kind of waiting for the movie to get around to telling us what we already know. The killer uses her disorder to his advantage, which leads to some fun scenes, but if she was just plain ol’ blind there would be almost no point to the movie at all. To compare to Memento again, the gimmick was a major selling point, but it was still a compelling mystery/thriller on a basic level. This lacks that intrigue, and the fact that he drops his usual type of killing and focuses on cleaning up this particular mess doesn’t help either. If she was an INTENDED victim who he discovered had this problem and decided to have a little fun with her first, then it might be unique/interesting, but a generic “no witnesses!” approach does the movie no favors.

It’s also kind of awkward on all levels. Almost none of the characters have much of a chemistry (with the exception of Callies and Jovovich, who sadly only have like 4 minutes of screentime together); McMahon in particular seems uncomfortable playing the tough but romantic hero cop. The editing is also wonky; perhaps it’s intentional to give it more of that uneasy feeling, but I don’t think so. Like there’s a bit at a bar where McMahon walks over to Milla, pulls out a stool, and sits next to her – we see this in three shots from angles that aren’t much different from one another, and McMahon appears to be in a different position in relation to her with each cut. There are also subplots that have no payoff, such as the fact that her shrink is deaf and thus needs to read lips. And Milla’s dad comes to visit and then leaves again just as quickly, despite the fact that keeping him around might actually be a fun potential red herring.

Nothing is as weird as the back of the DVD though, which lists “Bonus Material” under “Special Features”, as if the two meant completely different things. As it turns out, the “Bonus Material” is merely a trio of brief featurettes covering the film’s cast, FX, and story. Why they were split into three segments is unknown, especially since it’s CLEARLY meant to be one piece as only the third one has credits for the director/editor/producers. They’re not too bad as these things go, though I had to laugh when they showcased the film’s amateurish green-screen compositing during car scenes. “They added in the background later!” a producer tells us, over a shot with a background that might as well have been drawn in with MS Paint.

If you’re in the mood for a Lifetime-ish take on a serial killer movie with an unusual hook, this should scratch the itch – but you gotta admit: that’s a very specific mood. With a better mystery at its core and some better casting decisions this could have been really cool. Instead it’s just decent; something Milla junkies can watch while they wait for the next Resident Evil movie.

What say you?

Twice Told Tales (1963)

2012-02-01T13:40:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 29, 2012

GENRE: ANTHOLOGY
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

Not even a two hour runtime could keep me from being excited about Twice Told Tales, another anthology in which Vincent Price stars in every segment, but with stories based on Nathaniel Hawthorne instead of Poe. Since the Poe stuff tended to get a bit similar as time went on, I figured this would be a refreshing change of pace. And it’s pretty good, but a couple of things weigh it down, so that length ultimately DID start to get to me a bit, especially since the third segment was the weakest.

In fact it goes in order; the first story was my favorite, the 2nd was pretty good, and then the 3rd was kind of dull. Interestingly, the first was the least horrific of them all, depicting a sort of standard “Fountain of Youth” story in which things don’t turn out that well for everyone. There are only three people in the segment, and thus Price rarely leaves the frame (another reason it was my favorite). I was impressed with the old age makeup given to him and Sebastian Cabot (though his colored beard was a bit silly looking); in fact since I didn’t look at the date I was actually a bit surprised how aged he was – I knew they had done SOMETHING but not to what extent (and they did a pretty good job of guessing what he’d look like in 20 years). It’s also the only tale that benefits from the film’s rather bland style; director Sidney Salkow was from TV, and it shows – even for an early 60s film it’s rather static and “small”, a far cry from the lush colors and lavish sets of the Corman/Poe pictures. It’s also at the 1.66:1 ratio, unlike those films which were all 2.35 scope if memory serves. As it was clearly trying to emulate those other films (Tales Of Terror most obviously), the difference sticks out – you’ll never forget that this isn’t Corman. I sort of love the irony there – “It looks cheap compared to Roger Corman movies!” – but at least in this first story, where only three characters spend the entire time in one of two tiny rooms, it fits.

The second story is almost as good, and possibly would be the best if it was fleshed out a bit more. Price plays a scientist who has treated his daughter with a rare toxin that prevents her from touching anyone (they will die if she does), because his wife left him for another man and this is how he chose to deal with it. Of course, she falls in love with someone, and the young man gets too close and discovers the secret. Needless to say, things don’t work out too well for anyone, including a poor little lizard that gets offed when she is asked to prove that she has the deadly touch. Here’s where the film’s limited visual flair starts to hurt – the garden that houses the deadly plant is colorful, but fake looking, and too small to boot. For a plant that can kill anyone who touches it, it’s just sitting there in the middle of a yard – it seems like it would be difficult NOT to touch it if you wanted to get across. However, I did enjoy the rather tragic approach; and Price is pretty great at toeing the line between a mad scientist villain and a rather sad man who seemingly did really love his daughter but had a messed up way of showing it (fans of Repo might enjoy this one; it mirrors Nathan and Shilo’s relationship in some ways).

But then the third sort of drags the whole thing down. It’s based on Hawthorne’s novel “The House Of Seven Gables” (the other two were based on short stories from a collection of the same name), and even though it’s the longest of the three it still feels a bit rushed and underdeveloped. The whole thing is about a curse imposed by the house’s original owner, but he/his story barely appear in the proceedings, severely limiting the mystery angle. Too much of it is given over to our heroine (Beverly Garland) wandering around the house or hearing noises, and Price only really gets to cut loose in the film’ final 5 minutes or so. The story – an old house, inheritance, curses – also feels the most like one of his Poe films, which doesn’t help the feeling that this could have been done better. Oddly, Price actually starred in the first full length film based on the novel (as a different character); I’m curious if that one is more successful.

The FX are pretty fun. The first story has the always enjoyable “fade in/out to show aging or decomposing” effect, and it’s above average in its depiction, and the second has some fun “acid touch” moments. And the third makes up for its sluggish pace with the finale – bleeding walls, a scythe to the head (!), and a wacky skeleton arm that chokes Price. I assume it’s the same arm that we see in what passes for the movie’s wraparound segments, which is just a skeleton arm turning pages in a book as Price (as a narrator, not one of his characters) reads some text and basically plays us out. As wrap-arounds go, it’s pretty much one of the lamest, but the movie is long enough – anything more in depth would just be torture. Even Creepshow wasn’t this long and that had five segments AND a real wraparound story!

MGM’s DVD is nothing to write blog paragraphs about; the image is often over-compressed, and it’s non-anamorphic to boot. It’s annoying enough on any movie, but for 1.66 films it’s twice as obnoxious because most HDTVs can’t zoom in properly – you either have to watch it “windowboxed” (black bars on all four sides) or zoom in and crop the top and bottom. The trailer is the only supplement, and it’s a lousy one since it spoils the end of “Gables” along with most of the other “action” highlights. I’d say “it’s a good thing that they don’t do this anymore” but a very high profile, much loved movie that’s in theaters now had a trailer more or less built around the film’s closing moments (I won’t spoil it by saying the film’s title, but if you know what I’m talking about – I hope you stayed through the credits for a little bit of a bonus “epilogue”). Curious if anyone ever actually cares about such things though (oddly enough, before said film the same actor was in a trailer for another movie and that spot actually spoiled his death!), perhaps without the context it doesn’t register as a major spoiler? Eh, who cares.

Anyway, back to this movie: Starts off good but declines; I'd recommend watching in chunks.

What say you?

Kuroneko (1968)

2012-01-30T15:40:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 28, 2012

GENRE: ASIAN, GHOST
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (ONLINE RENTAL)

The most common misconception about Criterion releases is that they are supposed to be the "best" movies of all time, which people continue to claim despite the fact that neither Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Gone With The Wind, The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, or Dr. Giggles have been given the treatment. No, Criterion releases films that are significant in their genre or the whole of filmmaking, which is why Armageddon is part of the collection: name a better example of "dumb, big, and loud" summer blockbuster movie-making. So I was excited for Kuroneko (translated to The Black Cat), because I don't see too many Asian horror films from before the 90s, and with Criterion behind it I figured it would be quite memorable and exciting.

Well, I can only guess that at the time it was pretty amazing. It's not a bad movie by any means, but it's not particularly involving, either. There are potentially exciting plot points in the film, but everything is drawn out and under-developed, as if it was a campfire tale of sorts that got stretched out to feature length without much further development of the story.

The basic plot is this: a woman and her daughter-in-law are raped and killed by a traveling group of Samurai in the opening sequence, and then some time later their ghosts are seen killing any Samurai that crosses their path. So it's sort of like a rape-revenge tale but without specific victims. I couldn't even tell if the guys they kill were part of the original group, but since they have vowed to take down ALL Samurai, it doesn't really matter to the movie's plot. I (the viewer), however, DO have a problem with this - it instantly turns the victims into villains. At least if they were seeking revenge on their specific attackers it would work, even at the eventual point where the line between victim and attacker becomes a bit blurred (a staple in these sort of things). Here that line is crossed pretty much in the 2nd scene - for all we know these Samurai were perfectly decent men. At least Paul Kersey was still taking on thugs and lowlifes if not necessarily the ones who killed his wife, you know?

Plus it drove me nuts that the movie hinges on our hero (who isn't even introduced until the movie's nearly half over) not recognizing his own mother or wife. He sees the resemblance, but it's not until he's banging the wife that it finally sinks in. And he fails to recognize his mother not once but TWICE during the movie's narrative. Once he understands that it's them, certain plot points result in his mother turning against him, and near the end of the film she shows up saying that she's a witch of some sort. Her face isn't that much different, but he again doesn't realize that it's his mom until a particular defect on her person is revealed. Come on, man! Or at least, come on, makeup man! Make her look different enough to fool the audience as well.

That said, I do dig the basic idea of a guy being ordered to investigate/kill the "monster" that's been killing his brethren only to discover it's the ghosts of his mother and his wife. Because of their code of honor and all that, it's not a simple "I can't do it, I know them" type situation - he is sworn to kill them. Additionally, they themselves are sworn to kill HIM, as he is a Samurai and they have vowed to take them all down. LAYERS, man. But again, this stuff is so drawn out, and partially based on our acceptance that a guy can't recognize his own family (even when their cat shows up he's like "Ah, I had a cat that looked like that with my wife who looked exactly like you. Weird!"), that it never felt as compelling as it should. The passage of time was also an issue; years go by in between their murder and the appearance of their ghosts, but we only discover that later.

Beautiful looking film, however. The scope widescreen image mixed with true black & white photography just looks gorgeous, and director Kaneto Shindô finds a lot of wonderfully striking shots: snow fall on the forest setting, the long opening shot of our band of evil Samurai making their way through the woods (and their matter of fact exit later), and others all made me glad I was watching this on Blu-ray. The bits of violence were also surprisingly graphic for their day, with the ghosts tearing at the victims' jugulars. The story may have been a bit too loose for my liking, but I never felt the need to take my eyes off the screen, either.

As this was a rental I cannot judge the merit of the booklet that comes along with the retail version, which has essays and the like that would probably help me understand its significance a little bit better. On the disc we get an interview with Tadao Sato, a Japanese critic that DID help clarify some things for me, such as the fact that Shindo was pretty much the only one at that time who would dare paint the noble Samurai in a negative light. I also liked that ghost movies were a staple of the Japanese summer movie season, particularly after this last summer in which not a single horror film was released wide from May to July (unless you count Priest, which was more of an action movie). He also provides some info on the actors and Shindo himself, and seems like a pretty jovial, well-versed guy (he also discusses cat psychology, which was fitting as my beloved Butters was sitting on the couch with me, purring happily). There's also an hour long interview with Shindo himself; I tried watching it but as it was about his whole career including story details I gave up; this is the first of his films that I've seen and didn't feel like having the others spoiled. Plus I just got other stuff to do; I had mixed feelings about the movie, no use sitting around for an hour trying to learn more about it.

I'd love to hear some takes on this one though, perhaps with someone more familiar with 1960s Japanese horror films - is this one of the better ones, in your opinion? Is there a title you think would make a better "entry point" for a n00b like me? And do they all involve cats?

What say you?

The Wicker Tree (2010)

2012-01-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 27, 2012

GENRE: CULT, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Of all the movies to get a surprise theatrical release, The Wicker Tree has to be in the top 5. Maybe in the UK it'd be a draw, but a pseudo-sequel to a nearly 40 year old British cult film that is probably best known here for inspiring a crazy Nic Cage movie is hardly the sort of movie that can be expected to bring in a crowd at a time when even first class, A-grade entertainment like The Grey can't even sell out a prime showing on opening night. Even if the movie was good!

Because, sadly, it's not. It's pretty damn bad, in fact. But really, how can anything related to Wicker Man just be "OK" at this point? The original is a terrific low-key movie, combining an intriguing mystery with a "guy gets caught up in an insane cult" plot, and adding songs and other assorted weirdness. It's not something I pull off the shelf too often, but it's the sort of movie I encourage folks to check out when they seek something a little different. And the remake is infamous; obviously everyone has seen the clips of Nic Cage running around in a bear suit and what not, but it's actually kind of nutty from start to finish, and (IMO) a lot better than anyone gives it credit for.

So when the original film's writer/director Robin Hardy said he was making a spiritual successor to Wicker Man, I got excited. However, a lot of false starts got me worried that maybe this "franchise" should be left alone - and I was right. The elements are there for an intriguing movie - a pair of young lovers, one of whom is a Carrie Underwood-ish country sensation prone to spreading the word of God and promoting chastity with her boyfriend, travel to a strange Scottish countryside town in order to "remind" the citizens about the importance of Jesus and angels and all that. Of course, the town has their own religion and plan to use these two for their own purposes. So it's similar to Man, but different enough to be its own thing and theoretically have some fun with the concept. After all, who's to say that one religion is better than the others? And maybe not now, but certainly many people have been killed in the name of Christianity, so you can't even say the Scots are "wrong" because they're into sacrifice - they just haven't caught up with everyone else.

Unfortunately THAT movie doesn't exist. Instead, we just get an endless series of loosely connected scenes in which our heroes do their thing while the townsfolk either humors them or makes shifty eyes in the background. There's no mystery of any sort, and nothing to even build suspense. Hell, there's no indication that we're even in a genre film until the final reel, so you can't even really call this a slow burn. It's just THERE, and when the cult elements finally kick in they're just as indifferently presented as everything else (and the film's most vicious act occurs off-screen to boot). And if you've seen either version of The Wicker Man you should know that happy endings aren't their style, something Hardy doesn't bother to use to his advantage - a more clever filmmaker would have used our expectations against us and done something different. Instead, he SEEMS to be mixing things up, only to randomly turn it back around and do the exact same thing. Yeah, good one.

It almost seems like Hardy had the wrong idea of what people liked about the original film. If the songs, irreverent humor, and nudity were the only things about the original you enjoyed, then you're the ideal audience for Wicker Tree - the film is overloaded with all. There's a subplot about a woman trying to convince her lover to do it 7 times in one night (one scene even has subtitles for some reason - the movie is in English), which never quite has any real bearing on anything (based on the Wikipedia synopsis I suspect this subplot made more sense in the source novel) but offers plenty of actress Honeysuckle Weeks in the nude. There are at least a dozen songs, often coming right after the other, none memorable in any way. And the film is overloaded with attempts at all types of humor; black (an argument breaks out over a missing bowl of human eyes), absurdist (the aforementioned sex scenes, plus a guy who only speaks in lines from "The Raven"), and even pop culture - head villain Graham McTavish actually makes a Simpsons reference at one point.

Hardy also assumes Christopher Lee is essential to the proceedings. While his name certainly adds some interest, his 30 seconds of screentime in the film may eventually be used in the dictionary to provide an example of "extraneous". Out of nowhere, McTavish has a flashback to when he was a kid and was painting a picture of a bridge, which catches Lee's attention. They have a brief conversation and then it cuts back to present day, without any further insight to the character or plot really gained from the excursion. He has a portrait of Lee on the wall - that should have been the extent of his "cameo", instead of this insultingly pointless bit of fan-wankery.

And again, most troubling - it's simply not interesting. Our heroes are bland, boring people played by not very good actors, and the villains barely try to hide the fact that they plan on doing SOMETHING bad to them, so it's basically just a long wait until the night of their sacrifice so we can see if they'll succeed. Worse, the heroes never seem to suspect anything is amiss, which just makes them look like idiots and also keeps the movie from having anything one could consider suspenseful or interesting. One character randomly seems to be trying to help them near the end, but there's no build up to it nor is there any follow-through on the subplot - she just kind of looks worried in a few shots but doesn't really do anything to help. Riveting!

Oh and the digital photography was a mess at times, but why complain about that anymore? No one's listening. 35mm is on its way out because of laziness, and in 20 years everyone will be wondering why "old" movies look so shitty when stored/projected on technology that didn't exist at the time they were made. Good job, everyone. Ironically though, Anchor Bay (or someone) struck prints of this movie, which is awesome. It's a lousy film and only worthy of theatrical release in the sense that ALL "real" movies deserve the treatment, but I like that the "little guy" is actually trying to keep 35mm alive in its own way. I'd rather the damn thing was SHOT that way in the first place, but I'll take what I can get.

Mr. Hardy once said about the 2006 remake: "It was a complete failure. There was nothing enchanting. No fun. They just didn't get it." Interesting, because I could levy this exact same argument about his own "re-imagining". I wouldn't exactly fight someone who claimed that the Cage movie was terrible, but I'd be very curious to hear how they could possibly say this was any better. The one thing you couldn't say about either version was that it was "boring" - this one can barely be described as anything but.

What say you?

The House On Skull Mountain (1974)

2012-01-28T17:04:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 26, 2012

GENRE: CULT, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

Thanks to my endless supply of “being nice”, my IMDb page boasts like 10 credits, almost all of which are in different areas. “Producing” an EPK, editing a documentary, doing some titles, even a few acting gigs. With one exception, I wasn’t paid for any of them, which is part of why you don’t see more than 2 credits in any area: I get sick of doing something for free, but will offer my services in a different area just for the experience. Anyway, Ron Honthaner, director of The House On Skull Mountain, has a similar page - couple acting credits, some sound editing, regular editing, production manager/producer on Gunsmoke (which seems to be his claim to fame), etc. So it’s no surprise that this is his sole directing credit – dude seemingly couldn’t pick an area to excel and just kept bouncing around the industry doing whatever the hell he could, I guess. His final credit was an editor on some action flick from the late 80s – not sure if he died or just finally gave up.

But based on Skull Mountain, I don’t think there was any tremendous loss to the horror genre that he never directed another film (though he fared better than screenwriter Mildred Pares, who has not one other credit to her name in any field). The film is dull, and padded with nonsense like two characters who just met going off into the city to look at antique clocks (set to a weepy ballad no less) – but I could forgive that if any of it was the least bit suspenseful. It’s basically one of those 30s/40s horror style movies where a bunch of distant relatives join up at a big ol’ house to hear about their inheritance, and then they start getting knocked off (or just out) one by one by someone who clearly is after a bigger share. Unfortunately, Pares and Honthaner didn’t really bother to take into consideration that those movies were of a different era and many were made under the Hayes Code, which is why they are mostly so damn boring. Thus, their 1974 version is just as weak, but nowhere near as forgivable.

To be fair they do add some new elements; mainly, the fact that this is a lite Blaxploitation effort, and also has heavy voodoo elements. And while that does add some novelty (as does the Georgia setting, though the opening driving scene was clearly Los Angeles), it doesn’t really matter much in the end. Our lone white character is also the hero, vastly reducing its merit in the sub-genre when compared to say, Sugar Hill (another voodoo movie of infinitely more entertainment value), and the voodoo element is comprised mainly of scenes of our villain chanting in odd closeup angles while stabbing voodoo dolls or lighting sticks on fire.

At least, until the final 20 minutes. Our hero suddenly discovers a hidden passageway that leads to a full cult of worshipers, dancing around and sacrificing a woman tied to a pole and all that good stuff. Then we get a blandly choreographed machete fight, which leads to more voodoo (including a minor zombie scene) before our villain gets pushed out of a window. That’s it. There are only two other kills in the movie, neither of them particularly interesting, though one was a minor surprise since the character (The Jeffersons’ Mike Evans) seemed to be set up as more of a hero or at least someone who’d stick around for a while (sort of the Luke/Russ Tamblyn character in the quartet). The other just gets bit by a snake, which is, as you may have guessed, not nearly exciting or even scary enough to justify the lack of anything happening in the rest of the movie. The damn antiquing scene gets more screen time than the horror stuff!

It’s also depressingly simple. We know who our villain is after about 20 minutes, so there’s no element of surprise like in those other movies. At first I figured maybe the guy doing the voodoo was actually trying to PROTECT our heroes from an unseen/unidentified third party, which would have made for a fun little twist, but no, it’s made abundantly clear that he’s the one behind it all. So it’s one of those movies where you spend the entire movie waiting for the other characters to catch up to you, on top of its other faults.

Honthaner also apparently thinks we’re stupid. There’s a cool little bit where he tries to make a skull face out of a mirror, some bottles, and the person’s head (and her angled reflection), which might have been a fun little Easter Egg for those who noticed it – it’s not like it has any bearing on anything, and had he framed it slightly better or just let the shot linger on for a few seconds more I’m sure folks would have seen the illusion. But pretty much as soon as the elements are lined up (it springs from a zoom out shot), he super-imposes an actual skull face over it, before even the most analytical mind could have possibly noticed the gag.

I was talking to my buddy Sam Zimmerman from "Fangoria" right after I watched, because he was interested in seeing it (I think I talked him out of it). He himself had just watched Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, a better movie to be sure but also one where the concept sounded a lot more interesting than the movie itself ended up being. We then discussed how THESE are the films that should be getting remade, not the movies that were perfectly good the first time around. Both have great titles (even if Skull’s is a bit "Three Investigators"-ish), and that seems to be the only thing any of these modern remake goons seem to care about (which is why the Prom Night remake has zero to do with the original’s story/characters in even a passing sense). And they could be fixed cheaply; they didn’t fail because of terrible special FX or fake looking sets or whatever – they just needed better scripts. Plenty of hungry writers around town – let’s do this!

Or just try to come up with new ideas. Either or.

What say you?

Hands Of The Ripper (1971)

2012-01-26T17:13:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 25, 2012

GENRE: POSSESSION, SERIAL KILLER
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

Regardless of how I feel about each title, one thing I can say about all of the Hammer films that I’ve seen is that they’re not particularly sad in any way. I mean, sure, every now and then someone you like dies, but they never build toward what I’d call a tragic ending the way that Hands Of The Ripper does. I won’t spoil it, but I was surprised to get genuinely bummed out by its events, and thus it elevated the film from good to borderline great.

The cool thing about the movie is that it’s a Jack The Ripper story without Jack. Our heroine is actually the daughter of the killer, and the movie takes place about 15-20 years after his reign of terror. Due to a childhood incident with him that we see in the opening sequence, as well as a séance scene (I think?), the now grown daughter becomes possessed anytime someone flashes a reflected light in her eyes, taking on Jack’s MO and killing the “flasher”. The séance part I wasn’t sure about; it seemed like the lady running it was a phony, but something must have happened to set all this off, right? Otherwise we’d have to believe that no one ever flashed a light at her until now, and then it happens pretty much every day – otherwise she’d have killed more folks than her dad by now, right? I should note that there’s another thing that sets her off, but it’s presented as a sort of surprise – however, it’s equally if not more common an act she might encounter.

See, my problem with most Jack movies is that they get bogged down in trying to make their theory work, which is silly because (uh, spoiler) in real life he was never caught, so no matter what they come up with, it’s still just a movie – one that lacked an element of surprise because of the other problem with most Jack films. That would be the fact that many focus on possible suspects and cops, and never the victims. Every now and then some hooker we’ve never seen or heard of before is killed, with scenes built around typical cat and mouse ideas that are worthless – we know their fate already! But here, dealing entirely with fiction, they are free to create characters we care about a bit – the protagonist’s maid, the girl’s adopted mother, etc. So it becomes a bit of a mix between character study and something closer to slasher than typical serial killer tale. And as a bonus, by drawing on a famous tale (there’s even a hooker victim!), we’re sort of grounded in this world without the need for too much setup – it’s almost like a sequel in some respects. The kills start pretty early and we get 5-6 of them in the 85 minute movie: not too shabby at all.

It’s also well-acted across the board. Eric Porter (who reminds me a bit of pre-douche Kevin Spacey) is terrific as the conflicted Dr. Pritchard, who seeks to learn what causes someone to kill, which is why he takes an interest and then protects Anna once he sees that she is behind one of the recent murders (and understands that it’s not her fault). But he’s also a widower who dresses her up in his wife’s old clothes and lets her stay in his wife’s old room, so it’s got a bit of a sad, pseudo-psycho thing going on too – is he trying to help this girl, or replace his wife? I also enjoyed Keith Bell’s turn as Pritchard’s son, who is about to be married to a blind girl (something Pritchard seems to be opposed to), mainly because his makeup and hairstyle made him look like Edgar Allan Poe.

Angharad Rees is also quite good (and equally fetching) as Anna, who pulls off the tough act of being the film’s killer but also its sympathetic center. It’s a shame she didn’t make more features; most of her work seemed to be in TV and her last credit was in 1998 when she was still in her 40s! Retired too young if you ask me, unless she just wasn’t into acting, in which case I hope she’s well. She also gets to have the most fun in the movie – the kills are surprisingly graphic. Needles in the eye, a woman gets impaled and hung on a door… and the makeup is pretty decent as well. There’s also a terrific bit where a character uses a doorknob to “hook” the handle of a sword in order to pull it out after they’ve been stabbed – awesome!

Plus it delivers the usual Hammer style: colorful cinematography, excellent period recreation, lots of terrific mustaches… in some ways it’s one of the more unique Hammer films (female “villain”, the aforementioned tragic tone, etc), but it feels very much in line with their more famous titles, i.e. the Draculas and Frankensteins. In fact, a subplot about Pritchard blackmailing a guy to help him with his experiment is right out of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, and the director is Peter Sasdy, who also helmed a couple of the Dracula sequels. And that’s probably why I dug it so much – it was a perfect blend of what I’d expect from a Hammer title, and what I DON’T.

Also: no Heather Graham. Important to any movie, really, but particularly beneficial to the ones about Jack The Ripper.

What say you?

The Eternal Evil Of Asia (1995)

2012-01-26T11:07:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 24, 2012

GENRE: ASIAN, REVENGE, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

According to Grindhouse programmer Brian Quinn, The Eternal Evil Of Asia (Hong Kong: Nan yang shi da xie shu) was programmed second so I could make it to the New Beverly in time (after work) to count it for my HMAD. I don’t like to think I influence anyone’s decisions in any meaningful way about anything, but even if just a ruse to get me to come it was nice to hear. And it worked! I coffeed up and put off satisfying my Skyrim fix until after the movie (which resulted in me staying up until 4 am). Everybody wins.

Luckily the movie was worth the efforts; like most of the Hong Kong horror films he programs every other month or so, it’s a wonderfully batshit multi-genre effort that shifts gears and tone so often you might suspect that a few scenes were missing that would explain how it went from almost charmingly sweet to totally sleazy in between scenes. Eternal Evil is actually a rape-revenge film of sorts, but with an unabashedly silly approach that prompted my buddy Dan to remark that the film was the first to have a “slapstick rape” scene. Spoilers ahead!!!

Now, obviously this might strike many as insanely offensive, and I do not argue. While we usually laugh at the rampant misogyny, casual murders, and other “taboo” things that these films usually feature, the rape stuff is a bit out of place. Luckily they do as much as they can to “soften” the act – for starters, the rapist and his victim aren’t even in the same room. Our villain is a wizard who has suddenly taken a liking to the girlfriend of one of his intended victims, and the climax of the film is just him standing in a small room, completely naked and thrusting away, using his magic powers to “ghost rape” the girl who is miles away, hanging on a chandelier. Every now and then they use a CGI outline to show the ghost (it kind of looks like “Not Me” or “Ida Know” from "The Family Circus"), but most of the time the act is completely mimed (somewhat impressively so, to give the actors a weird compliment). Also, the girl is kind of allowing it, because the secret to stopping him lies in the moment of his orgasm, so once he lets it fly (again, he’s just thrusting at nothing!) she is able to overpower him. So that’s good. Still – weird way to end your otherwise “fun” horror comedy (there’s also a shorter, more “traditional” rape scene that is thankfully brief and mostly incoherent). I should note that this was part of a group of "Category III" films, which is their version of X-Rated, so they had to have SOMETHING to justify the restricted rating, but the goofy tone of the film was more like a PG-13 thing, which is what made it so awkward.

Another criticism I could direct at it is probably a waste of time, because it assumes that they care about theme or full circle storytelling or anything, but whatever. As we learn in a lengthy flashback, the reason this wizard is killing our protagonists one by one is because they “killed” his sister. However this is not really the case – what happened was, he prepared a love potion to make one of the guys fall in love with her, because that’s the sort of thing that wizards do for their little sisters. Unfortunately the spell is received not by her would-be lover but by his three pals. So they all fall in love with her at the same time, and (per the spell’s “rules”) she falls for them equally, and thus they engage in a fairly routine fourway where she doesn’t seem to be too upset about the whole thing. It’s only when the spell wears off that she gets freaked out, and when they try to explain, she accidentally falls and dies. Thus, it’s really HIS fault that all this shit happened (and hers, for requesting it in the first place), but this never really dawns on him. A better script would find a way to play with his misguided, unnecessary “revenge”. But instead we just get, well, “slapstick rape”.

Otherwise it’s pretty cool. I just spoiled the hell out of it but I like that they kept the back-story to themselves for a while, making it a bit of a mystery for a while. And the kills are wonderfully gonzo – the movie starts with one guy thinking everyone he sees is a zombie and ends up slaughtering his family/neighbors before falling to his death. I know that doesn’t SOUND particularly funny, but it’s shot in a very early Raimi/Jackson-esque way (weirdly angled close-ups, zooms, etc), with lots of splatter and a charmingly sarcastic little kid tossed into the mix. The scene also keeps trashing Cup O’Noodles for some reason, which is just amusing. Then there’s a great “cannibal” bit and other assorted silliness.

The best, however, has to be the scene somewhere in the middle of the movie where a guy makes a particularly common insult and is then cursed by taking on the shape of this particular insult. I won’t spoil it, but it’s nothing short of amazing, and it even builds – a sight gag on top of the sight gag. It’s actually one of several instances in the movie where you will be subjected to the writer’s fascination with the private areas of males and females – we’re given a lengthy discussion on the best way to fondle a scrotum, a girl questions if a vampire would use her used tampons to make tea (WTF?), and not all of the ghost sex is non-consensual – our hero gets ghost head during one scene set to an awesome/cheesy sax riff.

Plus it has the always fun translation errors, including one that literally changed the point of what was being said when they changed a “can’t” to a “can” (I forget the exact context). However the best was during the aforementioned guy who fell to his death. Our hero calls his girlfriend and breaks the news to her, and after a few somewhat amusingly confused lines, he busts out this classic: “His body was stabbed to death by 7 fluorescent lamps.” The movie also begins with a mostly useless prologue where they explain ghosts/enchanting (which gets explained over and over during the movie), featuring a little ghost kid watching a movie while the narrator tells us “Don’t offend him or take him to toilet”. And if reading subtitles aren’t your thing, you can always enjoy the awesome, geek-friendly mid-90s movie posters on display in the heroine’s beauty salon – Die Hard 3, Pulp Fiction, and… er, A Walk In The Clouds.

Mostly what I was impressed with was that it went on very few tangents. If you think of the movie as being about the rise and fall of a well-meaning wizard (like Anakin in the prequel trilogy!), everything is more or less related to that. Even the sillier bits like the heroine being teased by her friend about not knowing how to give a good hand job sort of fits in, given how she has to use her body to defeat the guy at the end. Most of these Hong Kong movies discard plot threads and start new ones throughout the entire runtime, so that they’re not even recognizable as the same film by the time they finish, so I have to give this one props for at least telling an easily summarized story. Had they reigned in the rapey-ness of the third act it would probably be my favorite of the bunch.

Luckily, for once you can judge for yourself; while most of these movies are so obscure that they don’t even have basics like “cast” listed on their IMDb page, this one is actually available on Netflix Instant! And it’s got the same subtitles that we had, so you can enjoy all of the same crazy errors, with the added bonus of rewinding to make sure you actually read it right. Of course, watching in this manner won’t be nearly as enjoyable as seeing it with a good crowd, but at least you’ll know for sure I’m not making the movie up (something I could probably get away with at this point).

What say you?

A Darker Reality (2008)

2012-01-25T16:43:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 23, 2012

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

Whatever the complete opposite of surprised is, that’s what I was when I discovered that A Darker Reality had been sitting on the shelf for a while. An ugly, dull, poorly constructed film that more than once reminded me of gems like Chain Letter and Curse Of The Zodiac, I only wonder why they ever bothered releasing it at all, now? Even at the time it was produced (in 2008) the torture genre was bottoming out, and none of the actors involved have made it big since – who at Phase 4 thought the time was finally right for this junk?

If there was anything remotely worth appreciating about this thing (besides a few decent practical FX), it’s that they split the time evenly between the killer (Daniel Baldwin), his would-be victims (a bunch of annoying girls, many of whom are possibly not actually actresses!), and the cops tasked with finding him. This of course makes the movie more of a mess, but since everyone is either an idiot or hateful, that means the viewer is never stuck with one of them for too long at a time. Suffer through a few minutes of the victims shrieking and telling each other to shut up, and you’re rewarded with the most laughably inept police investigation subplot in movie history!

Let’s talk about them. Despite a victim toll nearing 100, it seems only two cops are assigned to this case: a Michael Biehn-ish detective and a mega-hot forensic psychologist who almost exclusively wears workout clothes. Her character also only works from home, a silly character trait that I suspect was added to allow them to film all of her scenes quickly (the only other place we see her is at the hospital). Their investigation amounts to little more than going through files and talking to either an escaped victim of “The Ghost” and a guy that’s in jail for killing some children, and yet they’re able to determine his location (“Pico and Olympic” – a non-existent intersection, for the record) fairly quickly. You’d think a guy who killed even a tenth as many people would have been caught by now if this was all it took.

The movie also swipes from Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Saw… all movies you’d rather be watching, of course. Baldwin’s voice is sadly almost indistinguishable from his brother Alec, so his attempts at sounding scary (read: swearing a lot) just remind me of when ol’ Al left voicemails for his daughter calling her a selfish little pig. And when one of your sadistic serial killer’s first big scenes is of him getting off via auto-erotic asphyxiation, it’s a bit hard to take him seriously, let alone be scared of him. I just kept wondering if the ghost of Keith Carradine would appear and warn him to stop. So when the movie isn’t ripping off better movies it’s merely reminding me of a variety of TMZ articles, basically.

Honestly I’d go on but the movie has already passed out of my memory bank. The only thing I distinctly remember is the awful ending, which is either setting up a sequel or is just the result of this production not having the money to finish it (it’s also ripping off a scene from Eye See You, for the record). Anyway, it’s not worth the effort trying to recall anything else.

The DVD offers a few deleted/extended scenes, mostly character bits with our hero cops. It’s nothing that could have helped the film – knowing more about their characters' back-stories wouldn’t have helped the fact that their investigation seemed less authentic than a few kids playing cops and robbers in their backyard. But that’s it for extras, and thus there is no mention of the fact that this is a pseudo remake of an experimental film from 2006 that is simply called Dark Reality (this was originally called Dark Reality 2). From what I can understand even its own filmmakers hate that one; curious what they have to say here. I PRAY that this is an actual improvement, but I can guarantee I will never bother to find out for sure.

What say you?

HMAD's 5th Annual End Of Year Awards!!

2012-01-24T15:54:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 24, 2012

GENRE: AWARDS!
SOURCE: ME!

I know, I’m super late with these. I’ve had some real life annoyances to deal with, plus some side jobs (I even got paid for one!), so it’s the sort of “extra” thing that kept getting pushed off and almost forgotten. So I apologize, but believe me – it’ll be worth the wait!

You’ve had enough ado, so I won’t further it: let’s celebrate the Best and Worst of 2011!!

(note – as always, these movies reflect the 365+ films watched/ reviewed for HMAD in the calendar year, NOT when they came out. If you want a more traditional list, head over to Bloody Disgusting.)

BEST MOVIE ABOUT THE PLAGUE: BLACK DEATH
One of the year’s best films, Christopher Smith’s (Severance, Triangle) men on a mission tale about a group of badasses (led by Sean Bean) seeking out a supposed “plague-free” zone was unfortunately given one of Magnolia’s weird “let’s put it On Demand before dumping it in 6 theaters” releases – it’s a gorgeous film that deserved to be seen on the big screen. But on the other hand, I’m happy someone picked it up at all; there’s not much overt horror, and anything that plays on religious fears can cause some trouble. It also has one of the darkest endings to a film in recent memory. Smith continues to impress – let’s get him a mid-level studio feature!

WORST MOVIE ABOUT THE PLAGUE: SEASON OF THE WITCH
There’s a lot of reasons to dislike Season of the Witch – it’s not particularly good, it confines all of its supernatural elements to the final half hour, and Cage is playing it straight for once, instead of “Caging out” and turning this into Medieval Wicker Man. But the worse was that it came out a few weeks before the infinitely more enjoyable Drive Angry, killing what little interest anyone had in Cage at that point. So this thing made nearly 30 million (still not impressive), while Drive Angry didn’t even hit 10. His next film actually more or less went straight to video, for the record. Let’s hope Ghost Rider 2 rejuvenates the public’s interest in one of our most entertainingly ridiculous actors.

BEST USE OF DANIELLE HARRIS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE: STAKE LAND
Despite being the biggest genre name in the cast, Ms. Harris doesn’t show up until around the halfway point of Stake Land, and then barely speaks for another 20 minutes. But she’s quite good in the film, well outside of her comfort zone in that she plays an expectant mother AND sings on-screen (something she is terrified of). Also, her genre history pays off in the film’s third act, which goes against what you might expect from the character AND the actress.

WORST USE OF HARRIS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE: CHROMESKULL
Can anyone explain what exactly Harris’ character is doing in the middle of a Laid To Rest sequel? She pops up as some sort of higher-up at Chromeskull’s company (you heard me), and is seemingly using ol’ Jesse to jockey for a promotion. Yes, because when you watch a Chromeskull movie, you want to see corporate intrigue. I assume they have more plans for her in future installments, but her scenes here just add to the sequel’s biggest problem – it’s called CHROMESKULL and yet the guy is kept on the sidelines for far too much of the runtime.

MOST IMPROVED SEQUEL: WRONG TURN 4: BLOODY BEGINNINGS
I LOATHED the 3rd Wrong Turn film, and so when I heard the same director (Declan O’Brien) was not only returning to direct but also write it himself, AND that it would be a prequel set in the snow, I figured this was the actual recipe for the worst horror movie of all time. But I guess all those negatives equaled a positive; while still far from the heights of Wrong Turn 2, this one delivered a lot of great (and mostly practical!) kills, a fast pace, and the most wonderfully silly climax in recent memory. Not a good movie by any means, but it hits the sweet spot for this sort of thing.

LEAST IMPROVED SEQUEL: SOMEBODY HELP ME 2
The original Somebody Help Me was the first movie I was given specifically for review on Horror Movie A Day, but I didn’t think too much of it, which is probably why they didn’t send me the sequel. But they made the right call; this is infinitely worse than its predecessor, with repetitious, kill-free plotting, obnoxious direction, and a killer who wears a mask in some scenes even though we know who it is (same guy as the original). Please don’t let there be a third, as threatened.

BEST MOVIE ABOUT JEFFREY DAHMER: DAHMER
Go-to franchise rejuvenator Jeremy Renner got an early break in this independent serial killer biopic (from the same company that gave us Gacy and all those others), and he’s pretty damn great in it. The movie doesn’t provide much context – it’s best viewed by those who are already familiar with the case – but the above average attention to detail and Renner’s performance make up for its low points.

WORST MOVIE ABOUT JEFFREY DAHMER: THE SECRET LIFE
Shot only a year after Dahmer’s arrest, this is like the complete opposite of Renner’s film – they provide a Cliff’s Notes account of the case sans any sort of insight, and tell the story via the lousiest collection of actors ever assembled for one of these things. Add in the constant, obnoxious voiceover and complete lack of detail (so many palm trees in Milwaukee!) and you have a movie that manages to be even crasser than the subject matter demanded.

BEST ASYLUM MOCKBUSTER: WHEN A KILLER CALLS
Not only is this infinitely better than the 2006 remake of When A Stranger Calls, I think it’s actually a bit better than the 1979 original as well (based on memory - haven't seen it since I was like 14, but I didn't like it). Like the remake, it keeps everything based around the first 20 minutes of the original, except here the body count is higher (nothing happened in the remake) and it’s surprisingly grim – not one but two kids are offed by our killer. And it even has a theme song, so I’m automatically in its corner.

WORST ASYLUM MOCKBUSTER: HILLSIDE CANNIBALS
I’m not as crazy about the 2006 Hills Have Eyes remake as many of my peers (it’s good, but the things they changed were for the worse, so just stick w/the original IMO), but it’s the friggin Exorcist compared to this thing, which doesn’t even come close to the very low standards of “OK for Asylum”. A straight up ripoff of the other movie would have been better than this, which kills everyone off in the first 10 minutes and then proceeds to tread water for the next 70. Ugly and boring, it’s the sort of movie everyone probably thinks ALL Asylum movies are like, when in reality it’s only like, half of them.

BEST MOVIE WITH A BAD TITLE: MANSQUITO
The title Mansquito sounds like something that would be made up for a comedic film making fun of 50s horror movies, but it’s a real movie from 2004 – and a pretty fun one at that! Taking cues from The Fly, we follow a slowly turning female victim, giving us the human drama that a good horror movie needs and often ignores. But, there’s also a fully formed Mansquito that goes around killing folks, so we still get a lot of monster action – it’s the best of both worlds! And then of course they fight at the end, which is always awesome. A shame more Syfy movies don’t follow this one’s lead.

WORST MOVIE WITH A GOOD TITLE: SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS
Now, this isn’t a BAD movie, but that title is so damn creepy and weird; at the time I referred to it as “The Giallo-est title ever”. But they use it on a rather slow-paced, barely horror movie about a guy investigating his girlfriend’s disappearance. There isn’t even a killer per se, a couple of folks die but by different hands, and until the 3rd act it’s just pretty damn boring, honestly. And the title has almost nothing to do with the plot, making its misuse even more annoying.

BEST BATSHIT MOTIVE: CONTAMINATION .7
We’ve heard of nature strikes back movies like Long Weekend or Frogs, but this one goes the extra mile, with killer trees specifically going after loggers and such, seeking revenge against them for harming their habitat. By the time a cut down Christmas tree goes after someone in their own home, you can be assured that you are watching a truly inspired film.

WORST BATSHIT MOTIVE: BEAR
Since they used a real bear and no CGI, Bear could have been a decent survival thriller about folks fending off an angry bear if not for its jaw-droppingly awful script, topped off with a “twist” at the end in which we discover that the bear actually wants these people to atone for their sins (embezzling, infidelity, etc). And it’s played straight, as if anyone in the audience might go “Ohhhh… yeah, I GET it, man.” It’s almost worth watching just to see how straight they play this inanity, but the hateful, idiotic characters and repetitive, poorly edited action make that a hard sell.

BEST MOVIE ABOUT A RAPIST LANDLORD: SLEEP TIGHT
I couldn’t make any of the screenings of Sleep Tight (Spanish: Mientras Duermes) at Fantastic Fest, and had to opt for a screener viewing on my computer instead of one of the greatest movie theaters in the world, but in a way that helps clarify just how well this creepy thriller works. An ugly transfer on a relatively tiny screen couldn’t diminish the impact of Jaume Balagueró’s best solo effort yet, and I can’t wait to see it again – hopefully with a crowd, so I can amuse myself by watching them squirm as the plot unfolds.

WORST MOVIE ABOUT A RAPIST LANDLORD: THE RESIDENT
Even in the glory years of Hammer they produced some clunkers, but nothing was ever as bad as The Resident, a woefully stupid account of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s disturbed landlord going to extreme measures to bang Hilary Swank, even though she seems into him. Featuring cinema’s all time most idiotic “let’s show you stuff from earlier in the movie now that it has a different context” montage, nonsensical character actions, and the total waste of Christopher Lee (he was treated better in the theatrical cut of Return of the King), this is NOT the sort of thing Hammer should be putting their name on as they try to get back into the horror game after a lengthy absence.

MOST TERRIFYING USE OF SPORTING EQUIPMENT: FINAL DESTINATION 5
Even detractors of the series often admit that the kills in the Final Destination movies are creative and enjoyably insane, and given that this is the FIFTH in the series, it’s sort of impressive that they can still come up with new ones. Even more impressive that it would have one of the series’ best – a typically Rube Goldberg-ian sequence centered around a gymnasts’ balancing beam that produces the most mangled corpse ever. There should be a Sniglet for my resulting mix of a laugh and a horrified groan.

LEAST TERRIFIYING USE OF SPORTING EQUIPMENT: STORMHOUSE
The climax of this already obnoxiously bad movie came down to a haunted fucking basketball bouncing around HARD in an attempt to make it scarier. Note – this was not played for laughs.

BEST NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD MOVIE: NOTLD 1990
Back in February I inexplicably decided to watch nothing but Night of the Living Dead related movies for the week (except for Rubber, which was a press screening that they refused to change for my sake), and most of them weren’t worth the effort. But Tom Savini’s remake (which I had seen as a kid) holds up fairly well – it’s not as tense or scary as the original, but it gets more right than wrong. And crucify me all you want – I prefer his ending to Romero’s (which is also his - George wrote the remake’s script, not Savini). And any movie that features an immolated Bill Butler can’t be too bad.

WORST NOTLD MOVIE: NOTLD 30th ANNIVERSARY
I bought this thing back when it came out in 1998, only to hear how bad it was before I ever got a chance to watch it. Thus, I vowed to hang onto it and thus keep anyone else from being exposed to it (the DVD is a limited release). However when I got this “Week of NOTLD” idea I realized the time had come to see for myself if it was really as bad as I heard. So I was surprised to see they were wrong – it was FAR WORSE than anyone had ever led me to believe. I’d comfortably call it one of the five worst movies ever made, in fact; the insanely misguided decisions that John Russo and the others (not Romero) made go beyond awful, where it’s not even funny to watch in the “Plan 9” way. When Russo croaks I hope they bury every copy of this piece of shit with him.

BEST ATTEMPT AT MAKING A JOHN CARPENTER MOVIE: ATTACK THE BLOCK
Joe Cornish’s debut succeeds in pretty much every area one could want from a film: it’s funny, it’s scary, it’s got terrific, crowd-pleasing action, and it moves like gangbusters – if there’s a dull moment in the film no one can remember it. And it’s knowingly inspired by no less a great than John Carpenter; the opening shot of the alien ship is a direct homage to The Thing, and the confined setting is right out of several of JC’s flicks. Plus, the protagonists are enemies on opposite sides of the law who are forced to team up to defeat their common enemy; which is straight up Assault On Precinct 13 (or, fine, Ghosts of Mars). One of my favorite movie-going experiences of the year – and the only film I paid to see a 2nd time.

WORST ATTEMPT AT MAKING A CARPENTER MOVIE: THE THING
For years fans have been scoffing – yet mildly intrigued – by the idea of a Thing prequel, showing what happened to the Norwegians even though we know that they’re all dead. However, constant attempts to make their film fit into Carpenter’s story (“SEE how the axe got into the door! LEARN the name of the guy who slit his wrist and froze!”) just make all of their missteps all the more obvious. The bad CGI is the most offensive, but I was more troubled by the lack of a single interesting or fun character. I’d pay handsomely for a Childs or Blair action figure; I couldn’t even tell you the names of any of the characters here. They should have just abandoned the prequel idea and made it a remake (which they sort of did, actually) – at least then we wouldn’t have to accept this Thing as part of the canon.

BEST INCOHERENT MOVIE FROM 1989: THINGS
Every even numbered minute of this movie will make you laugh or smile, every odd numbered one will make you shout “WHAT?”. Spider sandwiches, bizarre dubbing, a newscaster who seems to be reporting on plot developments that haven’t occurred yet… it’s just pure, insane bliss.

WORST INCOHERENT MOVIE FROM 1989: THE BLACK CAT
Most Italian horror movies don’t make a lot of sense, but even by their standards The Black Cat is a total mess. “Luckily” if you can’t follow a particular plot thread, it will probably get dropped and never mentioned again, since that’s what happens to most of them – it starts off as one of those “movies about movies” but ends with some sort of wizard battle involving planets. And I know that sounds kind of awesome, but it’s actually crushingly dull and shockingly low on gore/kills, which is probably why it remains relatively obscure despite some weird attempts to fit it into Argento’s Three Mothers series. P.S. not to be confused with Fulci’s 1981 Black Cat!

BEST MOVIE ABOUT SOLDIERS GOING NUTS: DEATHWATCH
I’ve heard about Deathwatch here and there over the years, and it’s been recommended by more than one reader – not sure what took me so long to get around to it. But it was worth the wait, upsetting and scary, with terrific performances by a mostly unknown (for 2002) cast, it’s the sort of movie that keeps me doing HMAD. Without the need to watch something every day, gems like this would continue to pass me by.

WORST MOVIE ABOUT SOLDIERS GOING NUTS: THE SQUAD
Hearing so many great things about Fantastic Fest over the years, I was under the assumption that no bad/generic movies squeaked through, but The Squad was obnoxiously starved for creativity, not to mention even basic scares or suspense. The only time I actually dozed off the entire time I was at the festival (regular readers should understand how much that means under normal circumstances – I was barely sleeping there!), and it wasn’t worth fighting to stay awake for the rest.

BEST HORROR MOVIE A DAY NEWS: MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS
For a while it looked like the Horror Movie A Day screening series at the New Beverly would come to an end due to some personnel issues at the theater, but as of April they have been resumed and even more frequent! And we’ve shown lots of great stuff, including Psycho II (with Dean Cundey in the house for Q&A!), From Dusk Till Dawn, Drag Me To Hell, and a sparsely attended but still glorious showing of The Descent, which is my favorite horror film of the decade. To everyone that has come to one or all of them – you are forever in my cool book. See you in 2012!

WORST HORROR MOVIE A DAY NEWS: NO MORE “EXTRAS”
Due to some staff cutbacks at my real job, I had to take on more work responsibilities. As a result, a lot of the extra stuff I liked to do – commentaries, “October Extras”, non-canon reviews, etc – had to be greatly reduced or eliminated entirely. I also wrote fewer full reviews for festivals I attended - there just wasn’t time for them anymore alongside everything else, because the time I used to spend doing extra stuff at work was now spent doing work (assholes!). It’s a bummer; I enjoyed giving you guys a little more than just the daily review (within reason; I never want to post “news” or interviews here), but alas, I just can’t do it anymore. I mean, look how long it took to get this up!

Of course, next month marks the amazing FIVE YEAR anniversary of Horror Movie A Day, and thus along with it the five year anniversary of daily horror watching (February 16th, 2007 remains the only missed day), so that’s pretty awesome. We’ll also hit some milestones within the genres (200th monster movie! 100th Italian horror movie!) and hopefully provide the same amount (if not more) of festival coverage – as always, money dictates those things so be sure to do all of your Amazon shopping HERE, or just hand me 100 dollars cash if you see me out and about! I also accept baked goods.

And of course, thanks for reading! Without you I’d be talking to myself even more than usual!

What say you?

The Tenant (2010)

2012-01-23T17:19:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 22, 2012

GENRE: MAD SCIENTIST, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

As previously mentioned, I hate repeating myself under any circumstances, but it drives me even more nuts when I have to repeat something that is IN WRITING. However, I do understand that I tweet a lot, and some folks like to follow over a thousand people for whatever reason to boot, so when I tweet something about the movie I said I was watching 2 posts ago and someone goes “What movie are you talking about?” I have to accept that maybe it’s too much of a hassle for them to investigate. So it’s kind of ironic that I actually DID put the name of The Tenant into my brief reaction, because then of course someone assumed I was talking about the Polanski one. Thus, had I not bothered trying to clarify, maybe I wouldn’t have had to clarify.

But the weird thing is, my post was pretty specific to this movie – it’s not like I said “The Tenant was kind of lame, but I’ve seen worse” or something; I specifically addressed the movie’s odd structure (Polanski’s film is fairly straight-forward) and admirably crass handling of its deaf characters, something I cannot recall in the other Tenant. So maybe folks can’t even read the whole tweet, I don’t know.

Anyway, the mad scientist and slasher hybrid is pretty rare, so it’s worth noting that the two never really blend into one movie. The first half of the movie is essentially an overlong prologue depicting how the hulking brute slasher in the 2nd half came into existence. There’s very little “horror” in this setup (which is probably why a present day, pre-credits kill scene of no bearing on anything was added); we just watch a well-meaning but obsessed doctor (who looks like Rip Torn) conduct questionable tests on his pregnant wife (as well as Michael Berryman, second-billed for a single scene role). But she’s having twins, so one baby comes out fine while the other is a hideous freak. There’s a lot of stuff about their failing marriage and money issues, plus the Berryman scene goes on forever – it’s basically the most fleshed out, overlong version of the five or ten minute intro that would accompany something like The Burning or whatever: “Once upon a time THIS happened – now let’s get to our slasher story.”

Thus, by the time the slasher plot kicks in around the 45 minute mark or so, there isn’t much time for characterization or suspense-building. All of a sudden we meet a vanful of deaf teens (young ones, like around 14), two older (college-age) counselors, their boss who looks a LOT like the mother in the first half (hmm…) and J LaRose as the hilariously crass van driver, an ex-con who repeatedly refers to the kids as “dummies” and has negative things to say about pretty much anything. Where they were going in the middle of the night in a huge rainstorm is none of our business, but the movie wastes no further time getting them into the now abandoned asylum where the now adult mutant boy is prowling around.

In a way it’s kind of remarkable how many clichés they run through in order to get to the point quickly: their tire blows out AND they’re out of gas, which is why they don’t just sit in the van to wait (it’s cold). Then they run through the “no signal” scene with their cell phones, with the exception of one that has a signal long enough to call a phone that was dropped in the rain, and then it promptly dies from a low battery. The only thing they forgot was getting lost, but I guess that would make the rather silly coincidence of the connection our heroine has to the asylum that they broke down in front of even stupider. On the contrary, she actually knows quite a bit about it, yet doesn’t piece together the connection until she finds some photos and files.

But, you know, whatever. I don’t ask for tight, surprising plotting from these things, and I was already kind of amused by the fact that they spent so much time explaining the killer’s origin. Once LaRose showed up and started spewing venomous insults at kids who couldn’t even hear him it entered See No Evil/Silent Night, Deadly Night territory, so you know I’m on board with that. Plus, the kids get killed! I figured MAYBE one of them would be offed to raise the stakes, but they’re only there for about five minutes before our killer pulls two of them through a wall and kills the shit out of them. In fact, to give it an actual (not backhanded) compliment, they do a fine job of killing the folks you figured would be OK and vice versa (with the exception of the heroine, obviously). Of course, part of that is due to the fact that we barely learn any of their names (the whole “deaf” angle has no real point other than I guess to explain why most of them don’t have phones), but there are still some surprises with regards to the more “fleshed out” characters, i.e. the ones we can tell apart.

I’m less forgiving of the terribly directed/edited action scenes, however. That scene I mentioned where he pulls the girls through the wall? The heroes just look at the hole and then briskly walk into another room saying things like “We have to find them!”, as if there WASN’T a man sized hole in the wall that clearly led to where the girls might be, assuming they were still alive after they just wasted time walking in the wrong direction. There are a number of scenes where people seem to have no reaction to what is going on around them, as if the actors weren’t aware they were in the frame, and one character is CLEARLY dead at one point only to be alive and kicking a few minutes later.

But that just adds to my theory that the film was produced at two different times, as none of the actors in the mad scientist scenes ever interact with the ones in the slasher segment. Whether they didn’t have enough for one segment and decided to add the other, or they just simply didn’t know what they were doing, I don’t know – but the movie definitely suffers from a disconnect, both in the two-part structure and within those segments. The mad scientist parts are kind of sloppy too; the other patients in the asylum look to be more important at one point, only to be forgotten a few moments later. There’s a deleted scene on the DVD that I cannot for the life of me understand how it would have ever fit into the movie, and it’s interesting that all of them are from the movie’s first half. Was the slasher stuff a total “oh shit the movie’s too short let’s come up with something else!” affair?

Nothing on the making of suggests as much, as the director talks about the actors for a bit before they spend an inordinate time on sound editing, including the “reveal” that all of the dialogue in the “van in the rain” scene was looped, something I had written in my notes (“ADR?”) as I watched the movie. Nice try though. There’s also a blooper reel, but as is common with these low-budget horror movies, most of the bloopers aren’t distinguishable in any way – no obvious flubbed lines or even a boom mic dropping into the frame. But if The Tenant is your favorite movie ever you’ll probably enjoy spending a few more minutes with these beloved characters.

With some polish and a slightly less awkward structure, this could have been a minor gem. I appreciate the humanizing of the monster (to a degree), and utilizing practical FX will always earn my respect, but it never quite comes together in a satisfying way, and the tone/point of the first half doesn’t quite fit with that of the second. Nice, weird try.

What say you?

P.S. Enough with “Moonlight Sonata”! Thing’s getting more play than “Mockingbird” in horror movies as of late. Give Beethoven a break, huh? Try some Ives.

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

2012-01-21T18:26:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 21, 2012

GENRE: KILLER KID, THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Much like The Skin I Live In, I got interested in We Need To Talk About Kevin when I started seeing it near the top of several "Best of 2011" lists. The thing was, these were horror-centric lists, and until that point I knew nothing about the movie except for its cast. Forgive my ignorance, but if I hear about a critically adored movie with Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, I'm going to assume it's awards bait and thus nothing I'd ever be interested in seeing (life's too short to watch a movie that exists primarily to win awards). So I looked into it, and discovered it was actually a killer kid movie! Sold!

Now, this is not a killer kid movie in the traditional sense. There's nothing exploitative or "fun" about it, like Orphan or Good Son; in fact unless I'm mistaken (inverse spoiler) there isn't a single moment of actual on-screen violence - even an attack on a dozen innocent eggs is left to our imagination. The closest thing I would compare it to in the genre would be Joshua, which interestingly enough was the current subject of a documentary that I was editing (about under-seen horror movies) prior to leaving for the theater*. Like that film, we stay with a parent more often than not, with the kid's evil behavior kept ambiguous, even though there is no doubt that he's got some severe issues.

But while Joshua stuck with the dad more often than not, Kevin is all about mom (Swinton), who appears in all but one (brief) scene in the film. And she is terrific, nailing the nearly impossible task of playing a mother who is torn between her unconditional love for her child and the fact that he has torn her entire life asunder. The story unfolds via flashbacks, jumping back and forth between the present day, where Swinton is working as a receptionist at a travel agency and living in a tiny house by the railroad, and the past, where we see Kevin at different stages in his life, building toward a truly devastating tragedy where Kevin's disturbing behavior can no longer be chalked up to her suspicions.

As with most killer kid films, one parent is oblivious, so it's a stroke of genius to cast John C. Reilly, who excels at playing guys that are innocently ignorant of their surroundings (his turn in The Good Girl was similar - he's not an idiot, he's just a bit under-equipped for these particular situations). Practically from birth, Kevin has had a unique ability to be a perfect angel around his dad, while he just has it in for his mother and never cooperates with even the simplest things. There's only a single moment in the entire film where he shows her any affection, which cleverly hides a bit of foreshadowing in the process, because it's such a warm and yet shocking surprise.

One thing that I really appreciated about the film was how much the outside world was kept out of it, particularly in the flashback scenes. In the present day, we see Swinton being harassed by neighbors and locals, and we don't yet know why, but otherwise she keeps to herself - there's a heartbreaking moment where she lies to her mother (over the phone) about having people over for Christmas dinner, before sitting alone with a sandwich instead. But in the past, we barely ever leave the house that they live in, and there aren't any outside characters of note. No shrinks, no friends (of anyone). The minimal scenes dealing with their jobs are handled via phone calls, and apart from a brief scene with a doctor (Kevin breaks his arm at home) it's not until the third act that we ever see Kevin sharing the screen with other human beings besides his family. Whether this was intentional or not, I am unsure - but I have to assume so. This was based on a book, and in that there was a best friend character as well as some other students at school that he had particular interactions with, but that has all been excised entirely here.

And yes, it's scary. Not in the jumpy sense (though there IS one of those, oddly enough), but in the unnerving, getting under your skin kind of way, it's one of the most terrifying movies in years. Right off the bat director Lynne Ramsay makes the audience feel uncomfortable, with off-kilter closeups, heightened audio editing (you'll hear every crunch as Kevin mashes some Fruity Pebbles into dust), and just an overall sense that something awful has happened - just in the first five minutes! The non-chronological structure also allows for some terrific "when is it going to happen?" plot threads - I don't want to spoil things, but one character sports a horrific injury in the first few minutes, but it's about 90 minutes into the movie by the time we know how it occurred. So every object that COULD cause such an injury gets a bit of a murmur whenever it shows up on-screen, which is even more fun when it turns out to be a misdirection. "Ohhhh, that's how - oh wait, nope..." It's like the serious, upsetting version of the running gag from Hot Tub Time Machine regarding Crispin Glover's missing arm.

There's actually a lot of misdirection in the film, though one bit doesn't quite come across as successful as the others. At one point in the flashback scenes Swinton and Reilly discuss a certain family matter (I'm trying to be as spoiler-free as possible since it's still in VERY limited release) that would seemingly explain her situation in the present day scenes, however it doesn't really work as there's a fairly useless scene a few minutes later that resolves the issue. I think without this bit, a devastating scene later on would have even MORE of an impact; I almost wonder if the "useless" scene was inserted so the audience wouldn't go into hysterics at the other one - the useless one kind of prepares us for it! I know this makes almost no sense but when you see the movie you'll hopefully get what I mean, even if you don't necessarily agree.

There's a certain real life tragedy (actually a few, though one is the "go-to" version to name-check) that is echoed in the film, one that other films have used as the basis for something far less effective - I think this is the first that has put the parent as the focus in this particular way. While Swinton's character may have her faults as a mother, anyone can plainly see that what Kevin does is in no way the result of bad parenting or a "broken home" (she's not a stripper, is what I'm saying), yet she has to live with everyone assuming that she is (the book apparently had more of this element - I think the movie made the right call to strip it down to the bare minimum and keep it more personal). It's devastating on many levels, and the fact that it's wrapped in a psychological thriller of sorts makes it a must-see film whether you're just into horror or not. Easily one of the best films of 2011; I will forever kick myself for choosing to watch the (mostly bad) short films at Fantastic Fest while this terrific film was playing in the next room. Don't make my mistake - see it (LEGALLY!) when the opportunity arises.

What say you?

*In that doc someone compared Joshua's score to the one in There Will Be Blood, which was by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead... who also composed this film. WEIRD.

Underworld: Awakening (2012)

2012-01-20T19:33:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 20, 2012

GENRE: VAMPIRE, WEREWOLF
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

It’s ironic, I went back and read my review of the 2nd film before heading out to see Underworld: Awakening, which was written as an open letter to director Len Wiseman*. In it, I pointed out that I think he’s a pretty good director (on a visual level), but shouldn’t be allowed to write the scripts. And yet, on this film he is given screenwriting credit (amongst others, including J. Michael Straczynski) while others direct, and yet it’s the best of the “Selene Trilogy” - which completely negates my theory. I’m not sure if I liked it more than Lycans; I’d have to sit down and watch them all to re-assess, but it delivered what I wanted from the first two films. And in 3D!

Actually, the 3D was the only real letdown. It was a native 3D film, not a post-convert (if it was I wouldn’t have bothered; there was a 2D option as well), but at times it almost seemed like it WAS something that was created later. Not only was it rarely impressive with regards to the depth in a shot (“Comin at ya!” shots – which I largely hate – were used sparingly), but it had a number of elements that seemed exaggerated, which is a frequent problem with the converted 3D films I’ve seen. Characters often seem too far apart, elements blend together as if they weren’t separated, etc. They even turn the images on some security monitors into 3D, which doesn’t even make sense.

Otherwise, I was surprised at how enjoyable it was. It largely ditches the convoluted “mythology” of the first two films (and the romantic trappings of all of them) and sticks to a straight up “mission” movie, with Selene and a few other vampires (and one human) connecting with and then having to rescue a young girl who turns out is Selene and Michael’s daughter. The Lycans (werewolves) have her because she shares Michael’s prized DNA as well as Selene’s, making her perfect fodder to experiment with as the Lycans work to eradicate their silver weakness, which will allow them to take over the world. And that’s pretty much it – the movie is only 88 minutes long with credits, and almost never slows down. There’s a bit around the halfway point (maybe further) where Selene actually has a quiet dialogue exchange with someone and I realized that it had been a while since the movie had been quiet enough to hear people talking behind me.

The action is pretty good too, albeit a bit repetitive. The werewolf based fights are a ton of fun (particularly the crazy car chase early on), and the FX continue to impress, but more often than not it’s just Kate (who seems kind of bored this time, admittedly) shooting and diving around anonymous corrupt cops/henchman types, which gets a bit monotonous after a while (and I swear, if you drink every time she drops into frame from above, you’ll be dead before the movie is over). And these guys never stand a chance (unlike the giant werewolves), so it’s like a Jackie Chan movie where the guys keep getting their asses handed to them but still stand around and fight him one at a time, except without his movies’ sense of humor. There are a couple of moments that made me laugh (mostly involving Eve, the vampy daughter), but as usual the creative team seems pretty serious about their vampire vs. werewolf movies. Or, people vs. werewolf movies - Kate also doesn’t get to show her vamp side nearly enough, though when it DOES appear it’s pretty dang awesome. Quality over quantity!

One thing in its favor was the way that the story branched out. With Viktor, Lucian, etc, all dead, it’s time for new villains, and they stick to series tradition by hiring actors who you don’t expect to find in FX heavy horror movies: Stephen Rea and Charles Dance, specifically. Dance only appears in two scenes (guessing he’ll be more prominent in the 5th film if one comes to pass), but Rea is in it quite a bit as the head scientist of the evil werewolf-run lab. His transformation is kept until the climax, but it’s worth the wait – his design is a bit different than the others; much scarier in fact. The Michael storyline is kept to a minimum; Scott Speedman wasn’t asked to return but they got some guy that looks almost sort of nothing like him at all (but with the same hair!) to appear in the few scenes that he was needed. In other words, if you haven’t seen the others, you won’t be lost – if anything you might even be in a better position to enjoy it as the recasting might be too annoying for the die-hard fans. Then again, a newcomer won’t appreciate the little nods to the others; there’s a terrific bit where Selene reprises her famous “shoot in a circle and fall through the floor” bit from the first film, albeit in an inverse way – I cheered and I don’t even like that one!

I also liked that they flashed forward 12 years, and presented the Lycan race as dying – the first few we see are kind of sickly and weak compared to the ones near the end. In fact I could have used more of this stuff; her 12 year coma doesn’t seem to bother her much, and the movie’s pace is too fast to bother much with what might be different about the world now (most of it is addressed in the first reel and then never mentioned again). Then again, at 88 minutes I have to assume the pace was tightened from something a bit more meaty (the first film is just under two hours, for comparison’s sake), so perhaps this stuff was excised since it didn’t have much to do with the main plot – i.e. Kate running around and killing folks/wolves in her attempt to free her daughter from Rea and his cohorts. Still, the little that’s there gives the overall storyline a bit more of a scope – it’s cool to see how their little war has affected the rest of the world.

So it’s hard to tell how fans will react to it. On one hand, Kate is back after sitting the last movie out, and you’d have to be insane not to be interested in watching her do her thing in 3D (one ad even flat out says “Kate Beckinsale In 3D!”). It continues the story of Evolution without demanding that you can remember the details (or even seen it at all – there’s a bit of a “Previously, on Underworld” thing at the top of the movie either way), and opts to stick more with action and FX than scenes of British thespians standing around arguing with each other using silly words. On the other, it unceremoniously drops the 2nd lead from the first two films, and limits Dance’s screentime to almost nothing, which won’t help anyone forget about the great Bill Nighy. And there’s not a lot of vampire action; more often than not it just resembles one of the Resident Evil flicks, in fact (think Alice vs. random Umberella goons), and thus the “dumbed down” approach of this one might be insulting to those who can actually follow the storyline of the first two. So it might appeal more toward those who WEREN’T huge fans of the others instead of those who were. Your call – but unless you’re a total junkie for the format I think I can definitively say that it’s not worth the extra 3 bucks to see it in 3D. That being said, it’s also in IMAX – and I would never dream to suggest it’s not worth a couple extra bucks to gaze upon a 60 foot screen covered with Ms. Beckinsale’s face during her many closeups.

What say you?

*In that same letter to Wiseman I mocked his overuse of blue filters and offered to show him what the color red looked like. So I had to laugh when the logo for the Red camera (which this was shot on) came up… in blue.

Fading Of The Cries (2011)

2012-01-19T21:03:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 19, 2012

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

One of my favorite underrated flicks in the past few years is Night Watch, which combined vampires with a more action/fantasy type story (the sequel, Day Watch, wasn’t as good, and I’m still bummed that they didn’t continue the series since there are four source novels and the two movies only covered the first). So I was kind of interested in Fading Of The Cries, because it sounded like a similar scenario albeit with zombies instead of vampires. Add in Brad Dourif (and the fact that it actually got a small theatrical release) and it should be a fun time-killer at worst, right?

Wrong. By telling a convoluted and yet uninteresting story via a constant stream of terrible VFX shots, almost nothing about the movie qualifies as “fun”. Any sane person would grow tired of seeing digital blood (and skies, and people, and pretty much everything else) before the first act was through, and the action isn’t even all that exciting – most of it is simply our hero (Jordan Matthews) running around and swinging a sword in the general direction of zombie/demon things, most of which appear to have been shot separately. Writer/director Brian Metcalf is seemingly under the impression that everything will look cooler if there’s a lot of it, so Matthews is constantly fighting off dozen of zombies at once while literally hundreds of them run around in the background. Unfortunately for him, he’s completely wrong – any discerning audience member would rather an actual fight with a handful of the things, WITHOUT the distracting, poorly composited extras in the background.

I mean, obviously this was not a big budgeted film – why stretch your production value even thinner by constantly adding in VFX that aren’t necessary? Nearly every shot of the sky in this movie seems to be added in via a demo copy of After Effects, which is just a distracting eyesore that adds nothing. Other elements are needlessly “enhanced” – at one point our heroes are at Disney’s Ranch a bit north of LA, an area I am familiar with because they shot part of Hatchet II there. I instantly recognized the bridge that housed a lot of the equipment during filming (the bridge itself doesn’t appear in the film – it’s next to the swamp where Ed Ackerman’s character got his face sliced off), and then laughed as I saw that they were trying to make it look 10x as long using cheap visual effects, and having the actors run over the same patch of it over and over again to make it seem longer than it actually is (which is about 100 feet). But why? If they’re trapped, what difference does it make how long it is? If anything the shorter length would actually be SCARIER – because there would be less room for them to maneuver.

However even if I was just sitting here reading the script I’d have problems, because the movie is all over the place. I knew we were in trouble early on, when we see Thomas Ian Nicholas drive up to a house, get out of his car, and walk inside. Some voiceover tells us that his wife and child had died and that he’s living there to try to get over it and also write his next book. Then we watch the opening credits, which are followed by a “14 years later” card. 14 years after a widower walked into a house? Who the hell cares? And like every other scene in the movie, it’s filled with ugly CGI skies and such, so lopping it off entirely could have not only strengthened the movie’s pace a bit, instead of starting it off so awkwardly, but also would have given these overworked FX guys either a break or more time to improve the other shots in scenes that DID serve a purpose.

Anyway, Nicholas dies in his “14 years ago” timeline, and thus for obvious reasons he never really interacts with our other heroes. The back and forth between the two storylines never has any motivation behind it, and since we know he’s dead from our first “present day” scene, they carry little interest once you know where they are going. He also narrates them for some reason, as if his story was supposed to be being learned via his journal or something, instead of just being edited into the narrative at random intervals. Most of his scenes involve him slowly walking around his house (“I heard a noise and decided to check it out”, voiceover Nicholas tells us, as his character hears a noise and decides to check it out) or breaking glasses of every sort – water glasses! Mirrors! Tumblers! Why his character’s magic powers seem to revolve entirely around glass is never explained, but I assume it’s just easier on the FX guys than having him break, I dunno, wood or something.

The villains don’t make a lot of sense, either. I never quite understood what evil wizard Dourif was trying to accomplish, but let’s just assume “Destroy the world!” for the sake of our sanity. But why does this require turning seemingly everyone in the town (except for our protagonists and their immediate friends) into zombies? What purpose did they serve in the grand scheme of things? And what’s with the girl with a white sock on her head? Also, he only appears in spurts, talking cryptically to our heroes and then disappearing again. A movie like this needs a villain that matches up to our heroes. Think The Matrix – Mr. Smith was just as interesting as Neo after a while. Dourif never gets that much to do – even Wormtongue had more of an arc and he wasn’t even the main villain!

Like many a fantasy film, at the center of the battle is an amulet, which is fine. The problem is, the amulet’s owner (Hailee Hirsh, cute but playing an obnoxious character) is phased out of the movie in favor of her younger sister, who is basically a glorified extra until the third act. Suddenly, Dourif kidnaps her and our hero goes off to save her while Hirsh – who we’ve been with for most of the movie – just stays home and (spoiler) dies along with her mom, a story point that might be grim or shocking if the story gave us any real reason to care about them beyond the fact that they were on-screen the longest. This results in what I would call the year’s weirdest closing shot if not for the fact that I’m one of the 14 people who have seen Beneath The Darkness.

I was also continually confused who the movie was made for. The R rating is for “bloody horror violence”, and while it’s certainly more graphic than Twilight, the fantasy feel and the fact that everyone is an anonymous zombie probably could have gotten them a PG-13 if they asked nicely. However there are also a couple of F-bombs, so they clearly weren’t TRYING for a PG-13, despite the teen-friendly story (it reminded me a bit of the Dungeons & Dragons movie on more than one occasion, in fact).

It did have a few moments of merit, however. Dourif is always a delight, even when I had no idea what the hell he was talking about (and despite the fact that his near-top billing suggested a lot more than his 10 minutes or so of screen time). There’s a cool “trapped in a barn” scene that uses an aggressive surround mix instead of the usual bad FX to sell the idea, something that the movie should have relied on more often. And there’s a weird little demon that looked kind of creepy (you can see it in the trailer, the one in the cornfield). Also, the movie sort of resembled a live-action anime at times, something that COULD be done well; I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone from trying. Just make sure it’s better than this.

The disc contains the trailer for it as well as other Lionsgate properties, including Highlander 2. Word of advice – no one wants to be reminded of the existence of Highlander 2, ever, so putting it at the top of a disc is somewhat foreboding, as if you’re telling us to be prepared for massive disappointment. The only other extra is a making of, where everyone just talks about how great everyone/everything is, with Dourif praising his character’s dialogue (?) and Matthews hilariously revealing that he read “The Art Of War” to prepare for his one-note, shockingly uninteresting character. Well, beats reading the script I guess.

I hate knocking on ambitious movies – there’s a severe lack of them in the genre nowadays, and again, I think the blend of horror and fantasy is something that could be really cool when done right. But giving a pass to something merely for ATTEMPTING something unique doesn’t do anyone any good – if nothing else, you have to give your ambitious idea some real characters to bring it to life, or something that’s truly exciting on a visual level. This might work as a 6-8 issue comic miniseries, but a 90 minute film isn’t nearly enough to handle this many subplots and ideas, especially when half of it is devoted to mindless zombie “attack” scenes that pale in comparison to even a Syfy level movie.

What say you?

Stage Fright (2005)

2012-01-19T20:54:00.000-08:00

JANUARY 18, 2012

GENRE: SLASHER, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

In honor to succeed, a slasher film must deliver on one of two levels: the story has to be interesting (Scream) or it has to be stylish and scary (Halloween). I can also accept “a whole bunch of cool kills” (Hatchet), but that sort of falls under style. Unfortunately for anyone who makes the mistake of watching Stage Fright, it delivers absolutely none of those things – it’s actually MORE plot-less than Halloween but has zero style, without a single good kill or interesting killer to make up for its other faults.

Director/producer Rick Jordan (who also co-stars) also can’t even bother to pick a tone. It starts off like a farcical comedy of sorts, with a bunch of actors sitting around doing little shtick-y things as a cartoonish producer yells at someone over the phone – no suggestion that it’s even a horror/comedy mix, just a flat out (unfunny) comedy. Finally after seven minutes the rest of the credits show up (out of nowhere; I had actually already forgotten that they weren’t complete. The Fugitive would be proud) and the characters go from the original theater to a different one, where a weird janitor and some creepy music informs us that we are indeed watching a genre film.

To its credit, it doesn’t waste much time getting to the kills, and it seemingly unfolds almost in real time from the moment where all of the characters are aware that they are trapped with a killer. But that’s also one of its problems – we haven’t had any time to differentiate between the complete strangers who make up our cast (I had trouble telling two of the males apart in particular), or know their names when they are mentioned. “Where’s Rob?” someone will ask, and I’m just thinking “WHO is Rob?”. In other words, caring about any of them is impossible, but unlike even an MPAA-mangled Friday the 13th entry, the kills aren’t anything to look forward to. Even New Blood (the most eviscerated entry) had the sleeping bag kill.

So that just leaves story, which is a mess. There’s a couple of killers, with different motives – something that would be fine if used in any meaningful way, but it just seems like a way to pad out the runtime; our main killer is taken out (via a sword fight! Points for novelty, I guess), and then another character we had forgotten about comes back and helps add another 15 minutes to the thing. Thanks, asshole. Supernatural elements also come into play, and like everything else, are too vague to be particularly interesting. There’s an inkling of a decent idea here about people disrespecting theatrical works (Shakespeare in particular), but there’s absolutely nothing compelling about the way it is presented here.

To sum it up (there’s no sense going on and on, this movie is remarkably obscure for a fairly recent American horror movie – I couldn’t even find another review! Clearly no one cares, nor should they), the movie is just THERE. It’s aimless and tone-deaf, features not one memorable moment or performance, and simply doesn’t work on any level. It’s the type of bad that doesn’t even get me angry at the time/money wasted on putting it together; I might as well get angry at wind or upset at the sky. It’s just another movie that makes the Netflix streaming library look more impressive than it actually is, and nothing more.

What say you?