The Beyond the Door series has a long and not-very-illustrious past. The first one, which I haven’t seen, was an early 70s Exorcist rip-off that is generally considered to be notable only for being really boring (so, I guess, look for a review from me later this year). The second one, also known as Shock or Possession, came out in the late 70s, and holds the distinction of easily having been the worst film Mario Bava’s name ever appeared in connection with. This final one, from the late 80s, is a similar disaster, throwing witches, runaway trains, and Satan himself at us in such a crushingly boring manner that we want nothing more than to die to escape such tedium.
The film follows a group of stereotypical slasher teens that get to go on a trip to Europe (specifically Serbia – what a fun trip, right?) to meet up with a professor that is secretly a devil worshipper who wishes to sacrifice the virginal girl from the group. Apparently all that’s needed to bring Satan to Earth is that, and there’s tragically not a single of age virgin in all of Serbia that might have been easier to use. So not much happens for a while, and then someone dies, and they all try to flee onto a train. Sadly, the train they flee to (with the exception of the virgin girl, who is too incompetent to jump onto the train, and her man, who jumps off after her) gets possessed or something, and soon they’re all alone on the front end of the train, which disconnects from the passenger sections and slowly starts killing everyone. The key word there, of course, would be “slowly”, which one would off-handedly assume would not be the case in a movie about a runaway demonic train.
Is she going to be able to lose that pesky virginity before she dies and Satan returns to Earth? Will any of her no-personality retarded friends survive the Amok Train? Will anything of real substance happen in this movie before the end credits roll? Let me tell you, the only way for this film to be any worse would be for it to have had a child actor trying and failing to be creepy for 90 minutes like we got in Shock. This entire series of films should be buried under a gravel pit and never be spoken of again in polite company. It just got released on DVD last month as part of a big wave of Italian horror films; I think I can safely say this was the worst in the bunch.
Rating: ½ *
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Amok Train (a.k.a. Beyond the Door 3)
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Death Machine
It’s always a little odd when a film set in the future makes references to earlier films in the genre, or even worse, a then-present day pop culture reference. This film, made in 1995 and set in the Near Future, does both. This film has a pair of irritating Humanist goofballs trying to bring down an evil corporation, and almost halfway through the film one of them decides to do a Schwarzenegger impression and tell everyone “I’ll be back” (yes, he was doing Schwarzenegger’s voice, it’s not something that could have been passed off as a coincidence), and then a few scenes later does a Street Fighter reference, shouting out “Shoryuken!” before going to town on an evil robot. These are small moments, granted, but movies do tend to live or die on a series of small moments.
Fortunately, the rest of the movie is generally pretty entertaining, if generic. We’ve got our futuristic world that’s typically 90s cyberpunkish, we’ve got our evil corporation that’s developing evil weaponry, we’ve got a killer robot that seems to be comprised almost entirely of fangs and claws, and we’ve got a small group of people trapped in the building with it whose chances of survival seem to be pretty easy to determine from the moment each of them opens their mouths. There’s really nothing here that you haven’t seen before, but it’s always pretty fun to watch a bunch of people frantically firing machine guns at a big robot thing that’s trying to eat them all. Especially when it’s standing on a platform above them and they’re shooting the robot and everything around it so that a hail of sparks and shrapnel is descending upon them, but with nobody getting wounded from this at all.
This, like Little Erin Merryweather before it, was another film I had gotten at Fangoria’s recommendation, and I have a feeling I’m not going to find any outright classics from their list of obscure greats. Especially not when they’re as much of a pain to get ahold of as this film was: the original copy I had ordered from Amazon came in a Death machine box, the DVD had a Death Machine logo on it, and when I put it in my DVD player Cyborg 2 loaded up. I guess because one cheesy 90s sci fi movie is as good as another, right?
Rating: **
Monday, April 28, 2008
Beware: Children at Play
Watching a film from Troma is often a bit of an endurance test. These are, after all, films that pride themselves on being total pieces of crap, and this one in particular has the added hurdle of an abundance of child actors to deal with. A fairly universal problem with the evil child subgenre of horror films, is that children tend to be really, really terrible actors, and when a film is so low-budget and poorly made that the adult actors are at the general level of child actors in more normal horror movies, you know you’re in for a pretty bumpy ride.
The film is basically a ripoff of Children of the Corn, as a family ventures into the bible belt of New Jersey (just one more reason to sneer at the Pine Barrens, really) at the request of the local sheriff. Apparently, for the past couple years now, a child has disappeared once every two months, and now adults are starting to vanish as well. It seems that a young boy who watched his father get caught in a bear trap and slowly go mad and starve to death in the woods ten years before has started raising his own cult of cannibalistic children out in the woods that is obsessed with Beowulf. As the sheriff and his friend, an occult investigator, try to figure out what’s going on, the townsfolk start falling under the sway of a fundamentalist that believes they must all do as Abraham did and kill all of the children, for they are clearly now demons.
So if this movie is a complete piece of crap, why did it even merit one star? Well, I’ll tell you. Partly it’s because of how, for a Troma movie, it’s surprisingly straight-faced, rather than their usual mugging-for-the-camera nonsense that generally drives me nuts. Just as a tip for any budding young horror directors out there: generally we would prefer that you actually try to make something good and fail, rather than try to make something lousy and then throw in a bunch of lame self-referential jokes to show how you’re right there with us or whatever. The main reason, however, for the little bit of a rating that it gets, is for the ending. I’m going to go ahead and spoil it here, so if you’re actually planning on seeing this (and why would you?), you should probably stop reading now. Anyway, at the film’s climax our main hero (the friend of the sheriff) finds the camp of the evil children, and beats the hell out of the lead boy so that he can get his daughter back. As he’s taking her away, the whole town shows up with guns and surrounds the camp. After the crazy religious guy babbles for a bit about Abraham, our hero says that if a single child is murdered here, he’ll have them all charged as accessories to murder. The religious nut responds by shooting him right in the damn head and then we get about ten minutes of the townsfolk murdering all the children. Not all from gunshots, either. Quite a few are taken down with axes, knives, pitchforks, whatever happened to be lying around, I guess. It’s a surprisingly awesome way to end a movie that’s about as far from awesome as one gets. If only the rest of the film had shown that amount of grotesqueness, this could have been something really worth watching. As it is, at least you know it’s going to end better than it began, right?
Rating: *
Friday, April 25, 2008
Hellboy: Blood & Iron
I’m one of those odd few people that became a fan of Hellboy the comic after first seeing the live action film. The live film was good, if not particularly great, though when I finally got around to reading the comics I found them to have a depth, visual flair, and wit that was somewhat lacking from the film. As such, I was curious to see if creator Mike Mignola’s darkly comic style would be a better fit with this animated film than it was live.
Of course, it was, and rather extensively so. There are times when this film pretty much feels as though the comic book itself had been thrown onto the screen and somehow animated. The plot is also better than in the live film, as all the major players in the B.P.R.D. (The Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense) head out to investigate a supposedly haunted hotel in Europe at the request of a senator. While there, they discover a plot to resurrect Countess Bathory, a centuries-old vampire who had been killed by the professor decades prior. The evil goddess Hecate gets involved in the plot as well, as does an old werewolf, some harpies, the ghosts of all of the Countess’ young victims, and a seemingly endless army of snakes. Once things start to heat up, obviously, it’s pretty much constant action for the rest of the film, including a massive throwdown with Hecate that closes the film out.
Pretty much everything about the movie works right. The visual tone of the film comes very close to matching that of the comic itself, which is a very good thing if you’ve not read it. The voice acting, with one or two exceptions, is also very good, as producer Guillermo Del Toro managed to get the cast of the live film to voice their characters again. There’s also a good amount of humor to liven the film up, which is nice, considering the general concept of the character. After all, this is a story about a demon from Hell that goes around seeking out dark, Lovecraftian horrors and then punches them to death. If you can’t find some amount of humor in that premise, then you shouldn’t be working on such a project. The film was straight to DVD, so the animation isn’t as fluid as a big budget theatrical film, but that’s really its only flaw. After all, how many movies are out there that will let you see a fish man whipping a harpy with a set of manacles? I watch a lot more movies than is healthy, and I’ve only seen that twice before.
Rating: *** ½
Thursday, April 24, 2008
The Hanging Woman (a.k.a. Return of the Zombies, Orgy of the Dead, etc.)
If there’s one thing you can always depend on from old European horror movies, it’s a great atmosphere and setting. Now, while a distressing number of them don’t actually manage to bring anything beyond that to the table, this one fortunately manages to maintain that atmosphere while throwing a plot at us so thick and convoluted that you start to wonder how they’re finding time for all the shots of graveyards and spooky castles.
The film follows a man named Serge who comes to an unidentified European village following his uncle’s death so as to inherit his uncle’s castle. After being tipped off by some villagers that bad things are about, he stumbles across a woman that’s been hanged by the cemetery, and is soon embroiled in a series of murders, seances, feuds, gunfights, chases, and attacks by zombies. I’d also mention the mad scientist and the women’s love of nudity, but that almost seems like too much at this point.
It’s got all the required goofy moments and crazy camera work that one would expect from a film like this. At one point a woman is murdered, and Serge announces “It was my uncle that did it. And I think I know where to find him!” before taking off at a full gallop across what appears to be two counties, dragging on for so long that it starts to become like that ponderously lengthy scene in Ali where he just goes running until he’s had the chance to run past every single person in Africa. He also gets to show off his badass side later on, when he and his girlfriend discover a secret passageway, and he decides that as her protector he must stab a corpse to make sure it’s dead, open fire on a skeleton hanging on a wall, and then start a massive brush fire by throwing a lamp at some passing zombies (okay, that last bit may have been somewhat justified). It doesn’t quite raise itself up to that higher level like Suspiria or similar Euro horrors, but it’s definitely worth watching.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Dead Heat
What we have here is an ideal result of an unexpected blending of genres: a goofy 80s style buddy cop movie that manages to throw in a plot about zombies for some spice. It’s the kind of movie where you get a hero named Roger Mortis, a sidekick played by Joe Piscopo, and a band of mercenary zombies led by Kolchak and Vincent Price, so by the time you get to the scene in Chinatown you’ve already gotten pretty accepting of whatever they feel like throwing at you next.
The film follows the two aforementioned daring cops as they manage to take down two bold robbers of a jewelry store that don’t seem all too willing to die when shot repeatedly by the regular police. For their heroic efforts, they get chewed out by their captain and have their badges threatened, a scene pretty much required in all such films. When the bodies of the criminals disappear from the morgue, however, they investigate further, and the trail leads them to a pharmaceutical company that’s doing experiments on reanimating the dead. During a surprise battle at the company, Mortis is killed and brought back as a zombie, and now he and his partner have about half a day to find out who murdered him and bring them to justice before he decomposes.
Not too shabby of a plot, right? The film moves along at a pretty steady clip, never pausing long enough for us to contemplate how ridiculous it all is. There’s constantly something new going on, further complications, new scenes for all the actors to ham it up, and new dangers to face, the best of which is of course the scene in Chinatown, which is such a brilliant set piece it should have been in a Re-Animator film. The film hardly qualifies as a masterpiece, but then the zombie comedy genre is a fairly crowded one. It does hold its own, however, and is consistently entertaining the whole way through, and really, how much more can you ask for?
Rating: ***
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Within the Woods
So after hearing about this highly-coveted prequel to the Evil Dead trilogy for years now, I’ve finally gotten my hands on a copy. As a short film, it works fairly well, high on mood and violence but low on plot or characterization. Its main appeal, however, is obviously as an artifact showing how the Evil Dead series evolved as a concept from its initial genesis to when the first film was made.
The film was shot on Super 8 video as a promotional video to try to get some financial backers to give them the money needed for writer-director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell to make their feature film The Book of the Dead (obviously later renamed). The film has Bruce and his girlfriend Ellen, along with another couple, decide to stay at a cabin in the woods. Bruce and Ellen decide to go out on a picnic, Bruce casually mentions that the cabin was built on an old Indian burial ground, and soon he’s been possessed by the Indians and tries to kill everyone.
The low quality of the footage turns into both a major flaw and a hidden blessing. It makes a good chunk of the film pretty much impossible to see, but the darkness of it does manage to make the no-doubt amateurish gore effects a lot more realistic. The various stabbings and mutilations that frequent the last third of this film carry a bit of the feel of the music videos for NIN’s Closer – dark, grainy, and nasty. It’s not enough to make this a truly great film, but it does make it fairly enjoyable once it gets moving along. If you’re a fan of the Evil Dead films (and if not, are you sure you’re on the right blog?), then you’d be well-advised to hunt down a copy.
Rating: ** ½
Monday, April 21, 2008
Three on a Meathook
Over the weekend, I noted a slight difference in print quality in the two films I saw. One was There Will Be Blood, which had a lush, sharp print job, perfectly complementing the rich visual texture of the film. The other was Three on a Meathook, which had a washed out, lifeless print, with colors fading and bleeding into each other, so that night scenes would be off enough that a lot of the shadows had outright reddish tints. It’s a goddamn disgrace of a print, and it is perfectly complementary to this goddamn disgrace of a film.
The movie, allegedly based on the life of serial killer Ed Gein according to the DVD case (though so far removed form it that, like Psycho before it, its killer doesn’t even have the same name), follows a group of four girls who decide to go to a lake for the weekend. On the way back, their car breaks down, and they get a ride from a young farmer to his house where he lives with his dad, with the promise of a ride back in the morning. Of course, his father is against the idea, because the son has had problems with women in the past, and before we’ve even made it half an hour into the film the girls have all been murdered, though the killer’s face is never shown, to be our glaring clue that the killer is actually the father. They don’t get around to revealing this until the very end of the film, of course, so I apologize if you honestly think you were going to be surprised by this, but come on. It’s so obviously him he may as well have been tapdancing in their blood afterward (the DVD case also ruins the surprise, giving us a picture of the father covered in blood). The next day, the son goes out into the city, meets a girl, falls in love, and spends the night with her. He then decides to invite her to spend a night at the farm, along with her friend, and one can guess what happens.
If I had to pick one major flaw with the film, it would be the atrocious pacing. The film blatantly rips off Psycho with its first group of women, introducing us to them, having them travel around, and then killing them in less than half an hour. We then get over half an hour of absolutely nothing happening, as the film stops dead so that we can watch the father and son whine at each other, and the son have a tepid romance with some girl. Then there’s another brief murder, and then we get a repeat of the ending to Psycho, as a cop tries to delve into the psyche of the father after he’s been captured (off-screen, of course). The murders themselves are also nothing memorable at all; two are killed by quick gunshots, and two are just quickly stabbed. There’s one minor treat by one girl being beheaded really goofy (she’s backed against a wall and her body falls to the ground while her mannequin heads stays on the wall), but that’s cut away from pretty immediately, on the presumption that this isn’t what we wanted to see this film for. There’s some nudity, but it’s pretty brief, and the film is so washed out that you can’t really get a good look at the girls anyway, so the point is lost.
My friend Curtis told me this film was worth checking out, presumably because he wishes me ill. I am telling you all, there is nothing redeeming about this film. If it has a good side, it’s that at 77 minutes it’s over fairly quickly, though if all the padding had been excised from it the film would have been closer to 40. It’s just a complete disaster in every way, shape, and form. Do not see this.
Rating: Zero stars
Friday, April 18, 2008
A Night to Dismember
And after our brief hiatus, we’re now back to the horror movies. This was a particularly nice one to be coming back to, as in addition to having a nice amount of violence in it, it has the side benefit of being completely, unapologetically insane. Those types of movies are always a friend to this site, let me tell you.
The film is directed by Doris Wishman, a longtime veteran to exploitation films, though whose work I hadn’t seen until now. What I’ve seen from this, however, rivals the works of Ed Wood in sheer mad audacity and incompetence, and I dearly want to see more. The plot is nothing particularly unique: a woman spent five years in an asylum after murdering two local boys, and now supposedly cured, is released to her family. Soon all but one member of the family is killed. The end. Now, what makes it as amusing as it is is the way in which it was filmed. I can only assume that it was for budgetary reasons, but whatever the cause the movie was filmed without sound and was overdubbed afterward, so that most of the spoken words in the film are from a grizzled narrator that sounds like he’s trying to imitate Joe Friday. When a character in the film does actually speak, it’s generally when they’re off-camera or facing away from the screen, because when they do face the camera while talking the dialogue doesn’t come close to matching their lips. It provides for a fun bit of surrealism in the vein of Beast of Yucca Flats.
Another thing that just completely drives home the Ed Wood comparisons is her inclusion of scene fragments that have nothing to do with anything, and leaving it to the narrator to try to create some tenuous connection to them. Near the beginning of the film, for instance, after the woman has made her way back home and her brother has decided to drive her crazy again so she’d go back, we get a random shot of him chilling on a park bench somewhere reading a newspaper, while the narrator intones “He needed to drive her mad again, but how? Maybe he could get some ideas from the newspaper.” And then we go back to their house, and we never get any closure on the damn paper at all.
There’s also some delightful moments Wishman threw in just to up the sleaze factor of the film, and I love her for it. Right at the start of the film, unconnected to anything, a girl gets naked and gets in the bathtub, and then her older sister comes in and chops her up with an axe, with the narrator then telling us that shortly afterward the killer then fell on an axe herself and was dead. Presumably this was in for no reason other than to start the film off with some nudity and blood, and I for one commend her for her decision. There’s also a nice bit where the formerly crazy girl’s brother and sister first try to drive her mad again, by calling her out of her room by screaming out her name, and then in the dark whispering at her and grabbing at her until she flees back to her room. All well and good, but why is the brother’s hand affixed to her boob the entire time? How exactly did this family survive as long as it did?
I find it to be a great disappointment that the horror genre doesn’t have more films like this. If every movie we got was so cheerfully willing to fling itself off the rails right from the start, the genre as a whole would be a great deal more wonderful than it currently is. We desperately need more filmmakers out there like Doris Wishman, who IMDB helpfully informs me made, at the age of 90, a movie titled Dildo Heaven. That is dedication to the craft right there.
Rating: ***
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Super Mario Bros.: The Movie
I thought it would make a nice change of pace for the site to review the first major film based on a video game (no, The Wizard doesn’t count). Really now, how many hundreds of times can you see someone impaled on a spike before you get a jonesing for something a little different? And different is exactly what one gets with this film. The people working on this film had to overcome two hurdles in making this: for one, they had the task of crafting the first real video game movie, with no previous works to look at to see how one should be going about doing it. For two, they were making a movie based on a game that, narrative wise, was completely off the rails insane. Needless to say, their options weren’t looking all too hopeful here.
It’s a nice surprise, then, that they actually managed to make the film fairly decent. The film follows ace plumber Mario Mario (played with aplomb by Bob Hoskins) and his kid brother Luigi (John Leguizamo) as they try to rescue a woman from two thugs and find themselves dragged into a parallel world where dinosaurs had evolved to look human. The leader of these people, in this thoroughly 90s steampunkish world, is King Koopa (Dennis Hopper), who wants the woman they’re hoping to save, as she’s a princess that has the ability to merge the dinosaur world with the human one, with the presumable aftereffect of all the humans being enslaved or wiped out or something.
What makes the film work, aside from the sheer lunacy of it (seriously, they get helped out by a giant fungus, how can you not like that?), is the hammy charm of the actors involved. Hopper has made a career out of this, of course, but Hoskins does a good job keeping pace with him. It’s certainly not a great film, or even an especially good one, as there are too many sections that tend to drag, and the steampunk dino world is simply not as visually entertaining as one closer to that of the games would be, but it largely does its job. The tone of the film does occasionally get a bit too dark for the material, probably due in part to its visual style, but it largely manages to stay light and quirky, and fun enough for what it’s supposed to be. Don’t watch this expecting anything as good as the games themselves, but if you’re interested in just a strange little side jaunt in Mario’s history, this is worth at least one watch.
Rating: ** ½
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Mulberry St
So at last we come to the end of the After Dark Horrorfest Part 2. Having now seen this film, I can indeed confirm everyone else’s opinion that it’s the best of the set, though Borderland does come close to matching it. It’s always a pleasant (though increasingly uncommon) experience when one of the movies I critique for this site is actually good, rather than just “so-bad-it’s-good”, or the far more common “bad”.
The film’s setting, for those unfamiliar with New York, is on Mulberry Street, in the heart of Little Italy (though sadly, there were no shots of Paisano’s. I was looking). It’s on the southern side of Manhattan, and it’s where a small group of people are trapped after a viral outbreak caused by a plague of rats causes anyone bitten by the rats (or by the subsequently infected people) to transform into rat men with an insatiable thirst for blood! Manhattan is quickly quarantined and placed under martial law to stem the tide of the outbreak, leaving the survivors to barricade themselves inside and wait for rescue.
There’s a few things I really enjoyed about this film. First and foremost was how it seemed fairly real in ways that counted. Obviously the scary zombie-like ratmen were as real as they come, but the characters themselves spoke and acted like real people. None of them seemed like movie stars, and none of them were like the characters we got in all seven of the other movies in the set, where we get twenty-something models trying to pass themselves off as regular people. The location only helps this feeling, as it’s actually a real place, and not just some set or backlot, and they didn’t just place the action in some isolated patch of wilderness or some military compound like the majority of zombie movies do. Indeed, they even work the setting into the characters’ ongoing dilemma, as this is possibly the only zombie movie I’ve ever seen where not a single character can get ahold of a gun. Everyone is just left with using their fists or whatever happens to be nearby that can pass as a club. It ratchets up the tension considerably when nobody can rely on headshotting the enemy from a distance, and pretty much leaves them to just running like hell whenever they can.
I have to say, this year’s set was a noticeable improvement over last year’s, though it still has a lot of problems to it. Both After Dark collections have been incredibly schizophrenic, and while this one’s high points (Mulberry Street and Borderland, and to a lesser extent Tooth & Nail and The Deaths of Ian Stone) were generally higher than those in the first set (The Gravedancers being the only one I’d consider an outright good film), it still managed to have as many weak films as good. Indeed, the two worst films in this mix were just terrible, like something out of the Tomb of Terrors collection. If they continue doing this each year, they need to knuckle down and start practicing some stronger quality control, or else they’re running a serious risk of burning out their core audience.
Ehh, who am I kidding? I’ll still watch ‘em.
Rating: *** ½
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The Deaths of Ian Stone
I had a feeling, after really enjoying Borderland yesterday, that there would be a bit of a backslide in quality today. While it certainly wasn’t as great a decline as I’d feared (this really is no worse than, say, last year’s The Hamiltons), it does mean that (assuming Mulberry Street is good) this whole set as a whole is only marginally better than last year’s, and that is none too promising.
The film itself functions as a horror mixture of Groundhog Day and Dark City. A young man named Ian Stone is repeatedly killed by shadowy monsters, and each time he dies he comes back with a whole new life and no memory of what has come before. While this is quite a nice promising start to the film, he soon starts to figure out that someone is going wrong and begins remembering more and more of how he got this way, what these things after him are, and a whole mess of other things that get heavily overexplained. I know this is not a genre that is generally known for subtlety, but it is not really necessary to explain so much, particularly when the explanation is so lame and poorly-done.
Honestly now, what would you rather see a movie about? A guy losing a hockey game and then being tossed in front of a train for his ineptitude, or a guy going “What? I don’t understand!” over and over again as someone else tells him his whole hidden past? Indeed, I know which of those two I could watch all day long (I didn’t recognize his team jersey, possibly because the film is set in England, but I think we all know that, were he American, he’d have been making game losing shots for the Flyers). Unfortunately, that’s not the direction that director Dario Piana or writer Brendan Hood went with. Still, if you can get past the problem of it being very reminiscent of two much better films (three, if the monsters’ rapid head shake reminded you of Jacob’s Ladder like it did to me), it’s not bad at all. It’s just a good deal less than it could have been.
Also, what’s with these After Dark movies and poor cell phone reception? I mean, there are reality manipulating demons in this film so it's understandable with this film, but it’s the third film out of the seven I’ve seen (the other two being Lake Dead and Borderland) where someone tries to call for help only to not get a signal. Come up with a new problem already!
Rating: **
Monday, April 14, 2008
Borderland
Well this was certainly a nice surprise. The After Dark Horrorfest films have undergone a sudden sharp turnaround in overall quality with Friday’s Tooth & Nail and particularly with this film today. We just need The Deaths of Ian Stone or Mulberry Street to continue the quality streak and we can safely say this batch of films has indeed been an improvement over last year’s (yes, despite Unearthed and Crazy Eights).
The film follows a group of roughly college-age friends as they decide to go on vacation along the U.S./Mexico border, where Life Is Cheap! * thunder crash * Ahem. Well, stereotypes aside, they actually do run afoul of a gang of drug runners/cultists who offer up human sacrifices to their dark lords in exchange for theoretical magic powers to aid them in their drug running. While two of the three guys find romance down there, their nerdy friend, afraid of fifth wheeling around them all day, goes off alone to trip on mushrooms, and is soon kidnapped by the cult. It’s now up to them and a disabled old cop who lost his partner to the cult a year prior to find their friend and bring the cult down.
You know, it all sounds a little pat and easy when put like that, but I did find myself getting more and more engrossed in the film the longer it went on. It’s a little refreshing to find a horror movie that obligingly frontloads all of its retarded moments (such as once again cell phones not having service, or the camerawork turning silly when everyone starts tripping on shrooms) so that the middle and climax can just be nonstop tension and violence. The characters are actually pretty fleshed out and likeable here (except for the captured one, who just annoyed me), with even the asshole friend transforming into an interesting guy over the course of the film. These are people that (retarded kidnapped guy aside) you actually don’t want to see die, which is always a plus and a rarity in these films.
There’s quite a few really good scenes once the action starts heating up. There’s a daring escape attempt by the annoying guy at the cultists’ complex, a chase up to the rooftops, and the entire climax involving an assault on the compound, and a final defense back home. If I had to point to any one moment that perfectly exemplifies how this is better than most of its kind, it’s this: at one point, our hero has caught one of the gang members and blocked off his escape. The gang member, having just seen the hero kill his partners, is lying on the group saying he surrenders and begging for his life. In any other movie, you know what you’d see next: the hero accepting his surrender, the gang member pulling out a gun, and the hero whipping around and shooting him now that the rules of engagement say he’s allowed to. Not here though. Here the guy begs for his life, and our hero just starts hacking away at him with a machete. His mama didn’t raise no fools.
Rating: *** ½
Friday, April 11, 2008
Nightmare Man
Round 2 of the After Dark Horrorfest is finally starting to shape up nicely, as this is the strongest film I’ve yet seen from them. After seeing several movies struggling just to handle one idea, it’s a little nice to see a film that’s willing to throw in a schizophrenic heroine, a mad slasher, erotic truth or dare, and some good old fashioned demon rape for spice.
The film follows a young woman (Blythe Metz, who looks astonishingly similar to Charisma Carpenter) that suffers from constant recurring dreams about being raped by a horned demon, and whose Spanish husband is driving her to an isolated asylum to help cure her when their car (naturally) runs out of gas on a deserted road, and he (naturally) leaves her in the car alone while he goes off to get some gas. Left alone, she is attacked by the figure from her dreams, and manages to fight him off in the woods long enough to escape to an isolated house occupied by two couples that are trying to have a relaxing weekend of sex games. In their efforts to help her out, they all become targeted by the killer too, and have to deal both with it and with her madness. A fun weekend all around, I’d say.
One thing that was nice about the film was that it was a bit lighter in tone than the other films I’ve seen. It was written and directed by Rolfe Kanefsky, who also did the enjoyable There’s Nothing Out There, something I might have had trouble realizing had he not had one character wearing a shirt with that film’s title emblazoned on it, and had another character yell out that sentence at a different point. That was a better movie than Nightmare Man, and even had a character escape the clutches of a monster by swinging from the boom mic to safety, but this certainly ain’t bad by any means. It’s definitely not as light as that one was, what with the screaming hysterics and demonic violations and all, but it does have a guy get shot in the mouth with an arrow, only to exhale a smoke ring around it as he dies.
I won’t spoil the ending, but it does take a rather dark and perverse turn, and while I don’t think it ruins the movie like some do, you should be aware that it rather abruptly gets a good deal nastier and meaner right before the film ends. I was fine with it as, well, I’m pretty desensitized by this point, but you may want to be a tad careful if you choose to view this. Still the best of the five After Dark Horrorfest films I’ve seen. Now I’ve just got Borderland, the Deaths of Ian Stone, and Mulberry Street to go. Easy enough, right?
Rating: ** ½
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Tooth and Nail
Well this was a little promising. While still mired by a silly story and a retarded plot twist, this was still a major step up from the sheer drivel that was Unearthed and Crazy Eights. While I’m now halfway through the new set of After Dark movies and have yet to find one that could at all be termed “good”, after the past couple days I’m perfectly fine with settling for “decent”.
One thing I really liked about the film was in its strict adherence to factual science. Set in the near future, the film follows a group of post-apocalyptic survivors of the collapse of human civilization after we ran out of oil to drill in 2012. Hey, it’s going to happen, and you just know that every single oil well is going to run dry all at once, if you don’t know that then you’re just blindly believing whatever Halliburton tells you, man. The beginning is pretty boring and lifeless, as it establishes the group of people (led by – I kid you not – a professor Darwin) living at a hospital, trying to somehow rebuild their lives without electricity. The film does get interesting fairly early on, though, as they are set upon by a group of cannibals, including Vinnie Jones and Michael Madsen. This may mean that I spoke too soon in declaring Crazy Eights as having the biggest star power among these movies, though in this case the star power works wonders, as both ham things up brilliantly during their all-too-brief appearances.
If there’s a flaw with the cannibals (besides the really lame plot twist that accompanies them), it’s that they are so entertaining that they only serve to further underscore how uninteresting most of the main characters are. Seriously, we even get a shot of one of them using a metal file to whittle his teeth into fangs, as though nerve endings simply do not exist in this futuristic wasteland. There’s some nice violence, and some good bits of humor here and there to boot. By the very low standards of quality this collection brings with it, it may be a borderline masterpiece. Even by regular movie standards, this will at least be something that won’t suck if you happen to catch it on TV sometime. Things are hopefully looking up here.
Rating: **
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Crazy Eights
You know, I fully realize the underlying silliness in watching the new set of After Dark horror movies rather than returning to the Tomb of Terrors collection, given that so far they’ve all been of roughly the same quality, though these with higher production values. This does nothing to alleviate that problem with quality control, making this year’s set (at least so far) look like it might be even worse than last year’s. Keep in mind as I say this that last year’s set had Dark Ride and Wicked Little Things, so that is saying something.
Crazy Eights starts with text letting us know that in the 50s-70s, about six hundred children were volunteered for behavioral experiments at isolated facilities in the deep south, and most were never seen again. We then cut to the present day, where a group of six survivors of one such institution meet up at the funeral of their seventh friend. While there, they see a photo of themselves as children, all dressed up for their baseball team that they named the Crazy Eights, even though they were one player short of the full nine needed for a full baseball team. I want you to take a moment, now, and do the math up to this point, and see if you can figure out where this movie is headed. See, their friend’s will asks them all to return to their old institution and get all of their old childhood things together, and once they’re all there, they all start being murdered one by one by some mysterious figure. And yes, in an 80 minute long film, it takes them until the 60 minute mark before they all realize that they’re being stalked by their eighth childhood friend, who is even in the damn baseball photo with them.
Of course, there’s not much in the way of a plot here. What film there is uncomfortably closely resembles the Expedition, which is a strong contender for the worst movie I have ever seen. They get trapped in the asylum, and are left to just wander around it for the rest of the film, every now and then with one of them wandering off alone for seemingly no reason beyond that they need to be isolated so they can be killed. It’s not even like I was able to get behind any of the characters, either. The film just throws all six characters at us all at once, and then spends pretty much no time at all developing any of them. Each of them is given one minor character trait (the nervous one, the one with facial hair, the one that curses a lot, etc.) to distinguish them, and then stops there with the sense of a job well done.
Of all eight of the new After Dark films, this one had the biggest name cast, with the likes of Traci Lords, Gabrielle Anwar, and Dina Meyer, and it’s managed to be probably the weakest of the three I’ve yet seen. If I hadn’t committed myself to watching all of these films one right after another, I’d give up at this point, since they started poorly and have gotten steadily worse. This does not bode well for when the third set comes around next year. At this rate, it’s just going to become a dumping ground for the worst semi-professional horror movies to come out each year. Here’s hoping that there’ll be at least two good films in this set to match last year, but it’s not looking promising so far.
Rating: ½ *
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Unearthed
What a piece of shit this movie is. I freely admitted yesterday to having stacked the deck with the new After Dark Horrorfest series by watching Lake Dead, generally viewed as the weakest in the set, first, with plans to watch Mulberry Street, generally considered the best, last. I’m now on my second movie in the set, and my plan has already unraveled before my eyes. I’m hoping that now, after this dreck, things will start to pick up and we’ll at least be able to work our way up to the mediocrity the first set was famous for.
The film is a pretty generic monster story set out in the West somewhere, as archaeological digging of old Indian lands unleashes a monster so damn close to the xenomorphs from the Alien series that I’m pretty sure Fox would have an easy time lobbing a lawsuit against the filmmakers. Not only does it look almost exactly like one, it’s also determined to come from outer space, and goes around with an oversized crab-spider thing that looks suspiciously like a face hugger that tries to jump on our heroine’s head and implant some nasty bug things inside of her. Not exactly the most original creation one could have for a movie.
The main characters are all pretty much stock characters, and none of them are at all fleshed out except for the lead, who’s a young alcoholic sheriff about to be voted out of office, and who has a dark past. There’s nothing about her that doesn’t scream “by the numbers”, and trying to create some kind of conflict about her by having other characters lamely argue her merits (“Hey, leave her alone, she’s good people”) or lack thereof does not in itself constitute drama.
So yeah, was not a fan of this movie on pretty much any level. About the only serious enjoyment I got out of this thing was watching the cast wander around a cave that turned out to be filled with uranium, and imagining them all losing their teeth, hair, and skin the next day, much like when Ben Affleck was dramatically talking on his cell phone amidst the fallout in the Sum of All Fears. It’s a minor bit of happiness, but it was my happiness and I’m keeping it. You’re going to have to find your own, should you decide to watch this.
Rating: ½ *
Monday, April 7, 2008
Lake Dead
In my ongoing efforts to delay returning to the Tomb of Terrors collection, I’ve decided to grace you all with a marathon of the new batch of 8 After Dark Horrorfest films. For those unfamiliar with the series, about a year and a half ago, there was a three day marathon of 8 horror movies that were bundled together for added promotion, because they quite frankly were (with one or two exceptions) too mediocre to survive solo. I didn’t see all of the original batch, but out of the five that I did watch, there were only two that I’d ever want to see again. As such, the second round, just released on DVD last month, seemed a worthy addition to this blog. Just to make thing easier on myself, I’ve taken the liberty of viewing Lake Dead first, since most reviews have said this was the weakest one, and I’m saving Mulberry Street for last, since a surprising number of people are saying that one’s actually really good. We’ll see when I get to it next week.
This one’s not so good though. It’s a pretty standard slasher flick, filled with annoying characters going up into some isolated wilderness and being stalked by mad slashers until most of them are dead. There’s some attempt at creating an ironic twist, by having the killers being incestuous relatives of the two main sisters, wanting them to come up so they can continue the family line in purity, but it doesn’t really help the movie much. The acting is pretty poor across the board, and the writing and directing, and sound are all pretty much awful. What’s so bad about it? Well, I’ll start with the first thing that really grated on me. There’s one sister at the beginning whose character trait to distinguish herself from the others is that she uses the word “fuck” in every sentence. She’s thankfully killed early on, but why was she even in the film to begin with? She contributes absolutely nothing beyond being an early victim of the killers, and that could have been managed with a good deal less time devoted to her.
They also manage to throw in, near the beginning of the film, a completely nudity-free sex scene between the main heroine and her boyfriend, for no reason that I can conceive beyond that the film needed some extra padding. There’s also a bit of brilliance where, after she gets to the Lake Hotel and talks to the old woman running the place, she comes back outside to the others and excitedly tells them “she says there’s a lake, too!” Wow, really??? Some would say that this is being nitpicky, since their last name is actually Lake, but since they don’t bother to mention that until the very end of the film, I’d say it counts all the same. There’s also the joy of one character trying to use their cell phone to call for help, only to get the dreaded “No service!” Given the prevalence of this problem in horror movies, I find I must conclude that there is exactly one cell tower in the whole of the United States, and it has been co-opted by the military.
There’s also a problem with the sound. There’s a few scenes where the ridiculously overdramatic music starts to drown out the dialogue, and the sound effects are all pretty incongruent with what we’re being shown on the screen. I’m not sure how to properly describe them; they sound a bit like someone loudly chomping on celery while slurping soup and stamping on grapes. This is every time someone gets killed, and I don’t have the slightest idea why.
That said, you know, one of the characters wears a Rutgers Football shirt, so I guess it’s not really that bad, right? Here’s hoping the other seven films will improve upon this foundation.
Rating: * ½
Friday, April 4, 2008
Day of the Dead (2008)
This movie has been getting hammered with pretty overwhelming scorn by the horror community for months now, to the point where I wanted to see it just to see how bad it was. Of course, I forgot that I was listening to people that obsessively hate any and all film remakes, and it turned out good for me that the film wound actually being pretty good. I guess it turns out bad for you, though, since it’s hard for me to really write that much about movies that are decent, rather than verging to an extreme in either direction. Oh well, sucks to be all of you!
The film, in its function as a remake of the George Romero zombie movie from the 80s, retains three elements from its source material: the title, a military presence, and zombies firing guns. Beyond that, it’s a whole new animal, and given that the original was easily the weak link of Romero’s Dead series (no matter how many people nowadays try to claim otherwise), I can’t say that’s necessarily a bad thing. The film is set in some dive town in Colorado, helpfully surrounded by mountains so there’s only one road leading out of town. The military has quarantined the town under the guise of “military exercises”, but almost everyone in town seems to be coming down with bad colds, so we have some idea of where this is headed. Ving Rhames is the head of the military presence there, though he’s playing a different character than he did in the remake of Dawn of the Dead (this is not, as it was originally billed, a sequel to that film), and pretty soon he and his soldiers and some civilians are neck-deep in a swarm of zombies that are running around ripping into everyone they can find.
The film itself is pretty fast paced, as films with running zombies tend to be, and manages the difficult feat of simultaneously looking like it had a decent-sized budget, and looking cheap as hell. I always enjoy seeing monster carnage taking place in an actual town, where you can see it’s not just a series of sets with a few pans of some generic city thrown in to try to fool everyone, and this film certainly shows it has the budget to manage that. It then also throws that all away by continually using CG for blood, which is one of the cheapest and lamest looking moves there is for a movie. Seriously, that’s what I’d expect from the movies in the Tombs of Terror collection, not a movie with Ving Rhames and Mena Suvari. There’s a small army of older horror flicks that had no budget at all and still managed to have more convincing violence in them than this film did, and that simply should not be the case.
That problem aside, the movie is largely fairly entertaining. It’s not as good as, say, the original Night of the Living Dead, or either Dawn of the Dead, but it’s at least better than the average zombie movie to come out in recent years, so it has that going for it at least. Indeed, it’s at least as good as the original, if you can forgive the brief retardation of the ceiling crawler zombie that is every bit as awful as it sounds. Just go in expecting an okay zombie movie and nothing more, and you should be satisfied. Anything more than that and you’re just getting your hopes up way too much.
Rating: ** ½
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Baby Blood (a.k.a. The Evil Within)
I saw part of this movie many years ago on HBO, under the superior title The Evil Within. As I was in high school then, the film appealed to me largely on the basis of the lead actress, Emmanuelle Escourrou, getting naked quite frequently toward the beginning of the film. Of course, I am now a much more, refined, deeply cultured individual, and so I expect a great deal more from my horror movies than mere exposed breasts, or women being impregnated by snake things. Fortunately (and surprisingly, given what I’ve seen of most French attempts at horror movies), this movie manages to bring the goods elsewhere as well.
The film opens with a voice over explaining the beginning of life on Earth, before revealing that the narrator himself was one of those initial forms of life, only he is still waiting to be born. We then cut to Africa, where a leopard has just been captured for a French circus, just in time to cut to the circus itself, which seems to be run by a vicious animal trainer. His abused girlfriend/wife/whatever is chosen by the primordial creature, who is clearly living inside of the new leopard, to be his vessel to incubate and birth him, so that he may eventually replace humanity. He impregnates her with himself (as mentioned earlier), and most of the rest of the film follows them on the run, with them communicating semi-telepathically, and her needing to continually drink blood to feed her unholy spawn.
As premises go, it’s a fairly unique idea for a movie, and it’s fairly well made too. It’s mostly dubbed, and yet is surprisingly non-terrible (some scenes were cut from the original American release, and so were never dubbed over), a bit of a rarity among any genre, but especially noteworthy given how atrocious the dubbing of the French film High Tension is. The directing is also good, managing to successfully interweave a largely low-key, realistic look with scenes that go overwhelmingly over the top. Of course, there’s also the delightfulness of those over-the-top scenes; I must say, there are few things that can get me hotter than seeing a sexy naked woman take a knife and stab a man to death while screaming her lungs out. There’s also, as there would have to be with a premise like this, pure spun gold when the baby is eventually born, and the film does not have any kind of copout here that one might come to expect from an American horror movie.
Those of you out there looking for a standard horror film will probably want to avoid this. It’s pretty openly weird, and while it does have a nice body count and an ample showering of blood, it’s probably not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. However, if you’re in the market for something a little different, a little off the beaten path, a little less Starbucks and a little more Sardo’s Persian Blend, then you may just want to give this one a gander. If nothing else, I can guarantee it’s better than buying most of the new After Dark Horrorfest movies, and I say this from the authoritative position of someone that’s not seen a one of the new batch.
Rating: *** ½
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Killing Spree
I first heard of this movie by way of a review trashing it on Something Awful years ago, but in the many years since then had forgotten everything about the film had I read beyond that the lead actor’s name was Asbestos Felt. So when the DVD recently came out, I figured I’d give it a whirl, and found myself quite moderately entertained by some fine 80s cheese.
The film stars Asbestos Felt as a newlywed who stumbles across his wife’s diary and reads a lurid account of how she slept with his best friend while he was away at work. Filled with a berserker rage at the news, he does what any man would do in such a situation, and murders his best friend and his friend’s new girlfriend. Sadly, this doesn’t mark the end of his problems, as the next day she has a new diary entry about sleeping with the electrician. So it goes, as he tears through the town murdering every man his wife sleeps with, only to find out a bit late in the game that she was merely writing fictional sex stories to sell as a romance novel and help with their money troubles. Sadly, by the time he’s learned this helpful bit of info, all the people he’s killed have randomly come back to life and are looking for revenge against him and his girl.
So yeah, that’s pretty much the whole movie. It doesn’t sound like all that much, and it isn’t, but buried within its cheap, no-budget exterior there are some true gems hidden. The murder scenes, while obviously done on the cheap, have a real bit of imagination and charm to them, and the squabbling of the zombies over who should be the one that actually gets to kill Felt is quite amusing. Of course, the real joy of the movie is Asbestos Felt himself, who looks so creepy with his out of control facial hair, and whose every moment is as over the top as it can possibly be. At one point his wife comes home to find him scrubbing the carpets in an effort to remove the evidence of a recent homicide. Naturally, he does this wearing nothing but a pair of black bikini briefs with text that I didn’t want to read on his ass and package. When she understandably asks him why he needed to shampoo the carpet and not just vacuum it, he tells her that “it was a real mess…more than you’ll ever know.” He follows this up with an insane giggle. Nothing suspicious about that at all.
This really isn’t that essential of a film, nor is it particularly good. However, it was pretty enjoyable while I was watching it, and I’m certainly not annoyed that I paid money to see it like I was with Little Erin Merryweather. If you like cheesy 80s horror movies, and you know who you are, then you will like this one. Just don’t go into it expecting brilliance, and you should be fine.
Rating: **
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Little Erin Merryweather
I’m not sure that I really get the point of this movie. It seems to fail on every single criteria it sets out to, and yet I have seen so many critical blurbs praising it that I’m half convinced that it’s actually just me, and not that the film itself is just lame. However, I am arrogant enough to instinctively assume that is not the case, and so we shall be plowing on with our unflattering review as per usual.
The film centers around a small university somewhere in New England, where a serial killer appears to have set up shop. All the victims are male students at the college, and so a trio of friends decides that they have figure out who the killer is, since the local police officer is pretty much a clown in a cop’s uniform, and try to enlist the aid of their abnormal psych professor, who helpfully doubles as a former criminal profiler. There’s a few problems with this scenario, and each problem makes the film pretty much unworkable from any point of view. The first is that the murder scenes are largely obscured from view, in the possible thought that the filmmakers were making serious art here, rather than a low-budget horror flick (this despite it having a fairly unwarranted R rating – seriously, this is PG-13 at most). That would leave us with little to go on but the detective work, which the film does spend the bulk of its time on, as the various characters try to piece together who could be the killer, and how do they tie into the story of Little Red Riding Hood. That’s all well and good, except the film lets the audience know who the killer is less than half an hour into the movie (Christ, the movie’s even named after her), so we’re pretty much left watching roughly an hour of the characters trying to catch up to where we already are. It’s an exercise in tedium in any movie where we get that (and be honest, you’ve already thought of at least two other movies you’ve seen where that happens, and you hated it in both of them too), and it’s just made worse here by how very much of the movie is spent focusing on figuring out who she is, even though she pretty openly acts crazy in front of several people.
It’s a shame, because this film does have the exterior trappings of a decent movie. The music is rather pleasant, and the camerawork, if not spectacular, is certainly passable. It’s just that the story itself is fairly worthless, and the various actors, most of which look like they had just stepped off the set of 90210, are pretty uniformly poor. I will single out Frank Havey, who plays the over-the-top blundering police detective, as being the high point of the film, as he manages to take the stereotypical idiotic cop common to these films and go so far with it that he almost becomes brilliant. Outside of that one highlight though, there’s little reason to see this.
Rating: *
