I suppose it’s only fitting that, after watching one of last year’s best horror movies yesterday, today I watched one of the worst. For those that blinked and so missed this getting released and swiftly removed from theaters back in October, this was writer/director Wes Craven’s proud return to horror after a lengthy hiatus following 2005’s Cursed (though he’d probably rather you focused on 200’s Scream 3). Going by what a muddle this one is, however, I think it would have been fine if he had just waited until Scream 4.
The film opens in the past, as notorious serial killer the Riverton Ripper finally realizes, after a security camera takes some video of him, that one of his personalities (he’s schizophrenic) is the killer. He calls up his psychiatrist for advice, who quickly calls the police, but the personality that’s been killing everyone is pissed that he told anyone, and decides to take action against his family. The police arrive too late for his wife, but gun him down just before he kills his young daughter. And then they have to gun him down again when he revives, grabs a cop’s gun, and shoots the cop and the psychiatrist. And then he comes to again in the ambulance, killing a paramedic and somehow making the ambulance explode. AND THEY NEVER FOUND THE BODY….
We now cut forward sixteen years. At the same instant the ambulance exploded, seven kids were born prematurely at the hospital, one of which came from the murdered mother (not real sure how that worked), and they now celebrate their birthdays each year at midnight by one of them killing the Ripper in effigy. This year’s celebration goes awry, however, when the police show up before Bug (Max Thieriot, the son of the Ripper) can destroy this year’s effigy, and now the students are all afraid that this means the Ripper will return for real. Of course they’re right, as otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie, and the body count starts rising pretty rapidly.
Let’s start with the obvious good parts. First, the movie is pretty ridiculous at times, and I mean that in a good way. Bug and his best friend Alex (John Magaro) do a presentation on the Californian condor, and it’s not enough that Bug made Alex a creepy full-body costume, he also uses the opportunity to get back at the school bully by giving it an alleged condor defense mechanism of projectile vomiting on anyone that tries to touch one of its feathers, and then he gets back even further at said bully by giving it a secondary defense mechanism of having projectile diarrhea in case the vomiting just wasn’t enough. It’s the best scene in the movie, and it’s a shame it arrives so damn soon in the film because nothing that comes later can really live up to it.
Unfortunately, the film simply isn’t ridiculous enough to make up for its other problems. After the over the top nature of the prologue and the presentation, I was kind of hoping for an almost Argento-ish madness to the film, or at least a Drag Me To Hell-ish madness. Instead it soon devolves into fairly standard slasher fare, something made all the worse by the completely outlandish dialogue. The dialogue alone probably warrants its own paragraph, as listening to this movie, one could get the impression that Craven’s sole understanding of how teenagers speak comes from repeatedly watching Juno. He used to have a pretty good ear for this sort of thing, I have no idea what the hell happened to him here. Unlike many of the film’s detractors, I didn’t hate the dialogue so much as was amused and fascinated by it, as one might be fascinated by an alien culture trying to learn English but without understanding any of the basic syntax or grammar, but it’s certainly something pretty damn far from anything one would normally expect or want in a film.
There’s also the issue with the killer. It would be somewhat dishonest for me to accuse the film of cheating with the killer, when roughly half the slasher films ever made have done the same thing (the other half just made the killer some evil mutant/supernatural monster), but here are the basic facts. Our main character spends so much of the movie having sudden nightmares about each new victim being killed before anyone else knows about it, has a history of mental illness and blackouts, and is the son of the previous killer, and they spend so much time all but shouting from the rooftops that he’s the killer that it’s completely obvious that it’s not him. However, they spend absolutely zero time on trying to establish any other possible suspects (one character jokingly suggests the new principal might be the killer, but that thought is never mentioned again aside from the one line), so when the killer is finally revealed, it’s obviously just someone completely random that you can only identify because they’re just about the only other surviving cast member left. If it’s not outright cheating, it’s still pretty damn lame (My favorite, by the way, is probably in the slasher film Cutting Class, where they spend most of the movie trying desperately to convince you that one of the main characters, who used to be in a mental asylum, is the killer, to the point where you have to dismiss him because he’s too obvious, and then he turns out to be the killer after all).
And that’s how this film is: pretty damn lame. It’s appallingly paced (not only is it too long, at 107 minutes, but we’ll go about half an hour without a single kill, and then three characters die almost at once), fairly light on the blood (outside of the prologue, this probably could have gotten a PG-13 for violence), and an opening that promises sheer craziness but stops delivering anything really wild after the first act. It just might be the weakest film I’ve ever seen from Craven, and I say this as someone that’s a much bigger fan than he should be of all his ridiculous 80s horror movies that nobody in their right mind would watch. You should all definitely avoid this one.
Rating: * ½
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
My Soul To Take
Friday, February 4, 2011
Hatchet 2
I may have mentioned here before how the original Hatchet was, in my opinion, one of the best slasher movies to be made since the 1980s. Naturally, I was eager to see the sequel, particularly since it was being released in theaters unrated and uncensored, something fairly unheard of for a horror movie, and a trend that I really hope continues. Sadly, I wound up having to wait for the DVD, as there was so much outrage over the fact that such a gory, unrated movie could ever get a limited release that it was yanked out of theaters after one day. Naturally there was no hope of it living up to the kind of ridiculous build-up that put in my head, but now that I’ve finally seen it, I have to admit that while it’s not as much fun as the original, it’s definitely one of the most gruesome movies in my collection. And people, I own a large chunk of Miike films.
The films starts at the exact moment the first film ended, with our heroine (Danielle Harris of Halloween fame, replacing Tamara Feldman) on a boat getting attacked by the monstrous Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). She fights him off, and after encountering a nearby woodsman to supply the opening kill, she makes her way through the swamp back to New Orleans, talks to voodoo tour guide Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd, who is by far the most fun character in the film), who gives her some added backstory on Crowley and assembles a team of yokels and idiots (including Harris’ uncle, who Zombie demands she bring along) to hunt Crowley down once and for all. Once that whirlwind bit of plot development and hasty character introductions is over with, it’s back to the swamp for everyone to die horribly.
And wow, do they ever die horribly. People get beheaded, shoved into spinning propellers, rubbed down into nothing with a sander, chainsawed in half, take hits to the crotch with an axe, chopped in half, curb stomped, and even skinned alive. What’s more, he spends several minutes on each victim -- not just chasing them down, but outright mutilating each one -- to the point where it eventually stops being fun and gross and starts being a little uncomfortable. I didn’t think I’d ever say this about a gory horror movie, but I think writer-director Adam Green could have dialed it back a tad here, and maybe give us a few more minutes of character development so we could have a reason to care when most of them die. While Crowley has an appropriately tragic back story (and in proper slasher movie fashion, his back story is made both larger, more ridiculous, and more muddled in this sequel), there’s no real reason given for him to be this ridiculously pissed off at everyone that he can’t just kill them, but has to beat them around, chop bits of them off, slap them around a bit, call their mother names, and then kill them. For instance, take one of the early kills. He springs out of the bushes onto the guy, knocking him on his back. Crowley has his hatchet in hand, but rather than using the blade, he instead decides to slam the blunt top of it into his victim’s mouth over and over and over and over and over again, until the poor guy’s face has been completely caved in and just looks like a pile of goo. What the hell, man?!? Calm down!
Really, the two main stars of the film are Hodder (well, I guess the violence is the real star there, but he’s the one dishing it all out) and Todd, in his best role since his star turn in Candyman. Yes, Candyman was a star turn for him, just ask any horror junkie. He completely hams things up as Reverend Zombie, trying to warm up his crowd of hillbillies with guns by waving his shaman staff around and shaking his hands frantically around their heads, and while we’re supposed to view him as a bit of a villain for his secret plans regarding Crowley, I have to say that I was rooting for him all the way to the end. He was a great deal more fun than Harris was. I don’t know what her deal was, but she was perfectly fine in Rob Zombie’s Halloween, so I have to assume she just made a terrible acting decision to appear miserable and lost the whole way through the movie. She’s such a killjoy, it seems almost necessary for Green to have made it so she shared most of her scenes with Todd so that he could keep the fun going.
I don’t mean to put the movie down like this. It is indeed a good, mostly fun modern slasher. If it’s not as good as the original film, well, sequels often aren’t (I’d say almost never are, but that’s not really the case with horror franchises). All I can really advise is that when Hatchet 3 comes around (and yes, I have to assume it will), Adam Green should spend a little less time on the gore effects and a little more time on character development, and perhaps get a more energetic lead. Also, bring Tony Todd back, he was all kinds of awesome. Also, given the quick reference, a Victor Crowley, Leslie Vernon team-up would be all kinds of sweet.
Rating: ***
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Killer Movie
It’s always nice to get some contrast in our daily lives, and so after seeing the quite acceptable and entertaining modern slasher Midnight Movie yesterday, today I got to “enjoy” a much worse example of a modern slasher with a similar title. You can almost read this movie as an inversion of that, as this gets wrong nearly everything that Midnight Movie got right, from the characters to a plot that’s somehow even worse to all the awful reality TV references. It does have more variety in its kills, but that’s about it.
The film follows a group of people out to create a reality show or something up in the lonesome town of White Plains, North Dakota. Now, the first problem is that I’m honestly not sure what they were actually trying to film here, whether it was intended to be a reality show or a documentary, or what the premise was. They told all the townsfolk that it was meant to be a show about the local high school hockey team, but they repeatedly say they made that cover story up just to get the cooperation of the townies so they could ask questions about a mysterious death that had happened in the town loosely connected to the hockey team, and the feuding current and former hockey coaches, and while I’m certain they said this was going to be a reality show (and the stupid confessional scenes, terribly generic rock music, and overall structure of the film back me up on this), I have not the slightest idea how this was going to translate into one. Of course, it doesn’t really matter, as it’s all just an excuse to get a bunch of people in an isolated environment where there is no cell phone reception and apparently no working land lines either (one character even complains that each time she tries to get on the Internet at the local library she gets booted off after ten seconds), so that a killer can get at them. Now, everyone had difficulty with their cell phones in Midnight Movie as well, but it’s harder for me to get annoyed by that when the killer has a lot of supernatural powers that he’s repeatedly using to block the cast off from the outside world; here, apparently we’re just expected to believe that everyone in North Dakota casually accepts being completely cut off from the world.
Anyway, the big gimmick here is that the killer is making his own movie, planting cameras everywhere (particularly one on his shoulder) and filming all of his murders for his terrible -- well, terribly retarded, which almost counts -- purpose, and since he doesn’t want to get found out right away he frames the first few kills so that someone could almost look at them as suicides. And by almost, I of course mean that the very first kill in the movie involves a girl on a quad getting beheaded when she drives down a road at night that has barbed wire strung across at neck level, and the local police rule it a suicide, because clearly what else could it be? The cast of the reality show does make a lot of jokes at the expense of the local police for their overall incompetence, but quite frankly, when the bodies start piling up and nobody actually gets nervous enough to try to leave, who’s the idiot then? Of course, unlike Midnight Movie, this continues the cliché tradition of everyone not finding out there’s a killer until more than half the cast is dead, to help further drive home the point that everyone in the cast is completely retarded and we should not care about a single damn one of them.
The killer is a little bit dicey as well. We do get a much better variety of gore from him than in Midnight Movie, which is certainly important in these kinds of films, but his costume just makes him look like the killer from Urban Legend (that the first kill, with the wire across the road to decapitate someone, is a fairly well known urban legend doesn‘t help matters), and his secret identity isn’t exactly hard to figure out (hint: it’s the only major character that kind of disappears for a good half hour without anyone noticing). Also, the reason he gives for why he’s committed all these murders is simultaneously retarded and cliché, and the nonsense in the epilogue made me want to break the DVD in half. Without spoiling too much, he basically pretended to be dead after getting shot with a rifle a couple times, and then the next morning, after being confirmed dead by some EMTs, he managed to slip out of his body bag, out of his bullet proof vest (which he leaves behind, I suppose, for no reason beyond to clue the audience in on how he survived, since I can’t imagine how it otherwise benefited him), runs across a street and across a long field into the woods without any of over a dozen people running around spotting him. And then he films the heroes staring into the woods trying to spot him, because this means he won, I guess.
The only real bright spot in the movie, aside from the blood, is the reality show’s big name star Blanca Champion, which made me keep thinking that she must have become champion through her devastating combination of Capoeira acrobatics and electricity-based attacks. I don’t know that that’s enough to justify the ending, where one of her fellow cast members asks her “Is it worth it? Being so famous?” to try to drive home a clumsily inserted moral about the perils of celebrity, but I take my fun where I can find it, thank you.
If you ever needed to make a double bill of horror movies to showcase how just a few simple changes can make or break a film, this and Midnight Movie would be perfect. They’re both fairly similar (one has people making a movie getting killed off one by one by a mad slasher, one has people watching a movie getting killed off one by one by a mad slasher), both came out around the same time (both were made in 2008, and the DVDs were released a month apart), and yet one by and large works while the other is pretty damn lousy. Sure, you’d have to watch a bad movie to accomplish this, but if I had to, damn it, so can all of you.
Rating: * ½
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Midnight Movie
Today’s movie was originally going to be Tangled, before my plans to see that fell through (maybe later this week, maybe just when it comes out on DVD. I am not optimistic). I was then planning on doing Atlantis: The Lost Empire as an alternate, despite feeling foolish after spending the entire movie wondering why the film was making me think of Hellboy and B.P.R.D. before realizing at the end of the film that Mike Mignola was responsible for the art style of the film. However, after giving it some thought, I realized that what really gives me proper Christmas cheer are bloody horror movies, and so that’s what I bring to you on this joyous season.
The film opens with some old man rocking back and forth in his cell at an asylum, watching some old horror movie he had filmed that a doctor unwisely though might help his rehabilitation to see. One doctor vehemently opposes allowing him to watch it, but as he needs to be out of town on business, he’s been overruled. Of course, something goes horribly awry, and when he returns there’s blood everywhere and no bodies to be found. We then cut ahead five years to the present day, where a movie theater is hosting a midnight screening of the madman’s film for the first time since the massacre at the hospital, and in addition to the regular tiny midnight crowd, the two aging cops assigned to the case have turned up in the hopes that he will turn up and they can close the case. Unfortunately for them all, five years ago he managed to transport himself into the film, and now that it’s being screened again it is once more time for him to kill…
It’s a fairly generic, overused story, which gives us the benefit of examining how well it stacks up to its immediate competitors. I’ll start with what may be my biggest pet peeve in these kinds of movies, and that is how in almost all movies like this, there’s got to be one major horror buff that’s constantly talking about other horror movies and driving everyone else (and the audience) completely crazy. One could theorize that it’s to make the character intentionally annoying so we get excited when they die, but I’d personally rather have a bunch of likable characters so I actually don’t want them dead and off my screen already. That’s why I’m so happy that there’s nobody like that in this movie. The main group of guys sit there laughing and joking through the early parts of the movie and annoying their dates, and while they’re exactly the kind of people you don’t want to get caught at the movies with, at least they stop their nonsense pretty early on once it becomes clear that Something’s Wrong. The rest of the cast is also rather nice: there’s a biker and his girl that you’d expect to be the stereotypical “villainous non-villains”, but all he is is pissed off at the guys for constantly talking during the movie, as anyone else would have been. He’s actually a pretty decent guy, as is his girlfriend. The cops themselves are pretty fun too, as they make sure to let everyone in on the problem pretty quickly, so we can spend most of the film with them trying to escape the killer rather than staying oblivious for most of the movie and just wandering off one by one. Then after serving that vital purpose, they both get killed off because fuck the police, coming straight from the underground.
So now that we know there’s interesting characters and a bland story, what about the killer? Well, he’s got a pretty decent look, kind of a retarded mutant version of Crossbones from Marvel Comics. He’s huge, has a club foot, and his face is half covered by a skull mask, and in every way looks absolutely nothing at all like the old mental patient at the beginning of the film that we’re supposed to believe he is. The only major downside to him -- well, aside from all the mystical crap that’s more distracting than interesting -- is that he only has one weapon, a hand-held drill thing that he plunges into people. It leaves most of the kills looking fairly generic, to the point where even the killer seems to realize this about two thirds of the way through, when he kills one guy by grabbing him and then plunging the drill into an electrical outlet so he can electrocute him instead. I appreciate the effort, guy, but maybe for the sequel you can grab a couple extra weapons? Just a thought?
Don’t get me wrong, this is hardly a bad film at all. It’s a perfectly enjoyable modern slasher, certainly better than the over-directed mess that was Laid to Rest or the turgid efforts that one frequently finds in the After Dark collections (think Dark Ride or Lake Dead). It’s not one of the best recent efforts for the genre (for those you’d be better off trying Hatchet or Wrong Turn 2), but one could certainly do a lot worse with their slasher choices for the holidays.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Blood Night
Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet is one of several recent attempts at creating a new slasher franchise, as were such films as Hatchet (no relation) and Laid to Rest. Like those two, it presents a fairly interesting killer that seems supernaturally powerful and unkillable, gives the killer a fairly involved backstory, and throws in a lot of gruesome kills and nudity (actually, I don’t recall Laid to Rest having any nudity, but that one’s the exception) to make up for the fairly cookie-cutter stories.
This film accomplishes the goal of being a potential new slasher franchise fairly capably, even if it’s not a wild success. As a young girl, Mary Hatchet went on a lovely little killing spree against her family, and was promptly locked up in an asylum, raped, knocked up, had her kid taken from her, broke free (by way of murder) to find her kid, and was promptly gunned down by the police after throwing a severed head into their windshield. We jump forward a great many years, where Blood Night is now a famous local holiday celebrated by the teen crowd (at one point, we even get to see a computer game where Mary jumps out from behind gravestones to throw knives at you and you have to block them by throwing bloody tampons at her), and we get a group of college kids that decide to have a wild party night to celebrate the 20th anniversary. They quickly get down to drinking, telling sexy stories, having sex, and half-assedly stripping down to their underwear and performing lap dances (girl on guy only -- sorry, ladies), and being brutally murdered whenever any of them wanders off alone. Could the ghost of Mary Hatchet have returned to continue her killing spree, or could it very obviously be someone else entirely, since the killer never wanders into frame during any of the murders?
This film does have quite a few nice things going for it. The kills are nice and bloody (though there is one where a person’s head is cut in half vertically that’s a little too blatantly CG to work), and almost every female character at least gets topless (my favorite being Mary Hatchet herself, played by Samantha Facchi, who at one point walks around completely naked, but covers up her pubic region with a strategically placed severed head), and let’s be honest with ourselves here: in a slasher movie, the violence and the nudity are the two single most important factors as to whether or not the film is entertaining.
Which is good, as it falters in most other regards. The acting quality is pretty varied, as one might expect from a low budget production (IMDB has it pegged at having cost $3 million, which is a good deal more than I would have expected), ranging from acceptable (Bill Moseley and Danielle Harris, though neither gives one of their best performances) to pretty lame (most of the rest of the cast). To be fair, the script doesn’t help them much, with fairly obvious twists and turns, and a group of teens that seems to have been specifically designed to be unpleasant in the hopes that we’ll then enjoy it more when they die. Also, while director and co-writer Frank Sabatella does a solid enough job of just keeping everything important in frame, resisting the urge a lot of young horror directors have to be overly flashy and annoy the shit out of the audience (see Laid to Rest -- actually, don’t), he also doesn’t really do much of anything to stand out from the pack, making a film that is perfectly acceptable entertainment that doesn’t really try to excel at all.
I suppose I should be pleased with good, considering how many of the horror movies I’ve seen this month have been straight up horrible, but with all the buildup I’d heard from people online I was expecting something really special. Still, for all you slasher fans out there, it’s absolutely one of the better ones to come out in the past decade, so just don’t get your hopes up too high and you should easily enjoy it.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Rose of Death
I hate to say it, but not only is this the highlight of disc 8 on the Tomb of Terrors set, but it’s not even noticeably worse than actual “professional” horror movies of its ilk. Yeah, it’s a lousy movie, but I really can’t offhandedly think of a single horror movie where we get a high school prank gone horribly wrong leading to a double homicide (don‘t you hate when that happens?), and now years later all the kids are back for their class reunion and are now shockingly being murdered one by one, that wasn’t complete garbage. I mean, Class Reunion Massacre? Slaughter High? If anyone is remembering these movies with any fondness, they are bad people and you shouldn’t be talking to them.
So yes, now that you know what the general premise of the film is, you know the entire plot from start to finish, excepting a boring subplot about one of the young accessories to murder and her overall guilt and relationship troubles. So how do the important issues with such a film work? Well, the kills are moderately bloody (you’ll have seen much better than this, but you’ll also have seen much worse -- in fact, you can see much worse on this very disc), if not especially inspired, the killer was not who I initially assumed it was, and there are a couple surprises both in the order of those killed, and in who winds up being killed, so it has that going for it. The ages of the people, always an issue in films that jump forward a decade, mostly work out (the only character that still looks like she belongs in high school actually has someone tell her that, which was a nice touch).
The direction (by L. Alan Brooks) is as lazy as one would expect, though, and the acting is almost universally terrible, the lone exception being the hard-ass boss of an auto dealership (Dave Narramore), who does such a convincing job that, combined with the fact that this is the only movie he’s ever appeared in, I am forced to conclude that he actually is a hard-ass boss at an auto dealership. They clearly made the wrong film and should have made a script that revolved more around him.
There’s not that much else to say about this film. It’s such a rehash of the bad films that came before it that it was almost as if I had seen this multiple times before. While it is still the best film on this disc (and what a sliding scale non-achievement that is), it’s also much more cookie-cutter and forgettable than any of the other three, and it’s almost certainly going to be the first one I completely forget ever existed. I only wish I could make that claim about tomorrow’s entry.
Rating: *
Friday, April 30, 2010
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
The Platinum Dunes guide to creating a successful remake is as follows: find a beloved older horror movie (older in this case being anything before the 90s, when the company’s target audience started being born), and strip away any and all intelligence or filmmaking skill. Then they can successfully call it a day. It’s a pattern first devised with their debut offering, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which may well be the single worst horror remake I have ever seen), and has only been refined further ever since.
*SPOILER WARNING*
This is the worst kind of a remake, really, as in addition to being a much dumber film, it also tries to simultaneously change around the storyline while still shoehorning in all of the major hits of the original film, even though the changes to the story often make the highlights stolen from the first film incomprehensible. Now, instead of being a child murderer, Freddy Krueger is a child molester, completely negating any and all reason for him to have his iconic knife-covered hand. Of course, they couldn’t really do a proper remake without the glove, so he has it here too, for no discernable reason whatsoever. Then there’s the fact that the nightmare world is pretty much just the iconic boiler room where, as we all remember, he was burned alive by the parents of his victims…except he’s murdered in some kind of warehouse/factory looking place in the remake, so the nightmare world being a boiler room only makes sense as a lame bone thrown to fans of the older series. And don’t get me started on how the mechanics of the parents covering up their crime is supposed to work with the closing of the nursery school, because as much as I try to wrap my head around it, there’s nothing involved there that makes anything approaching sense.
To be fair, they do have one interesting potential plot twist, in that they briefly flirt with the idea that he may have been falsely accused and murdered, and is now enraged at the children that betrayed him so. That would have made him from a villain into an outright tragic figure (though it would have made a sequel pretty difficult to pull off). Of course, they very quickly find that, no, he really was guilty after all, and here’s some pictures to prove it. And also, there’s the glove that he apparently made for no reason at all. Lame.
Of course, the plots got pretty convoluted in the original series of films anyway, so how are the main issues, the kills and Jackie Earle Haley’s performance as Freddy? Well, the kills are pretty damn lame and uninspired (there is nothing in the film that can match, say, Johnny Depp’s death in the original), with lots of CG blood flying around looking like CG blood, and every last one is done with the glove, so there’s not a single bit of variety to them (though they do steal Tina’s death from the original, with her flying through the air, it’s not done nearly as well). Haley’s performance is harder to judge. I’m not really sure if he actually turned in a bad performance, or if the script never gave him any chance to give a good one. When he’s under the makeup, he’s pretty much relegated to growling in his Rorschach voice, and looking like nothing more than an X-Files alien that’s been badly burned. The flashback scenes that show him when he was still alive aren’t really any help either, as they’re mostly done in voice-over, so we only get brief glimpses of him. It’s not the way to really build a terrifying villain.
Of course, the rest of the acting in the film is pretty poor, with just about anyone that’s not aggressively annoying to watch getting killed off in the first half of the film, something that is a surprisingly common problem with horror movies. The two teens that last the longest, Nancy and Quentin (played by Rooney Mara and Kyle Gallner) are so goddamned obnoxious that the movie almost has no chance at all with them leading the show.
The film has a good deal of other problems as well. For one, we spend too much time in the nightmare world, as the cast passes out every few minutes even at the start of the film, leading me to assume there’s something in Springwood’s water supply that causes mass narcolepsy. Then there’s the climax, when they pull him out of the dream world and into reality, goes into that delightful editing style where we do lots of quick cuts while throwing the camera around the room, so we frequently have no idea what the hell is actually happening. This is called building tension, I suppose. Then there’s the dialogue, where we have frequent exchanges like the following:
GIRL: Dreams aren’t real.
GUY: This dream is real.
GIRL: This dream isn’t real.
GUY: This dream is real!
It took two people to write dialogue that razor sharp.
There’s very little here to recommend itself. There’s quite a few spots where I laughed, though most of them were at the movie’s expense, not because of any intentional humor. It’s Samuel Bayer’s debut film, and while I hope he improves with his next movie, Fiasco Heights, the fact that it’s a) another Platinum Dunes release, and b) got a plot description on IMDB that goes “the story centers on a notorious hitman who teams with a failed private eye in search of a missing woman and an invaluable briefcase,” I’m not exactly holding my breath.
Rating: *
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Granny
So apparently it’s been a little while since I’ve updated this blog. I would apologize for the lengthy gap, but frankly, dipping back into the Tomb of Terrors set should be all the apology you people deserve. This is a bit of a landmark here, too, as I’ve now knocked out the seventh disc in the set, and so am now more than halfway through it. It’s been a long, dark journey, and I for one am proud that’s it’s now four movies closer to being mercifully over.
That’s not to say that all four movies on this disc are bad, but this first one here certainly is. Directed and co-written by Boris Pavlovsky, this is one of those movies where a group of friends gets together for a party and is picked off one by one by a mad killer. It’s a typical entry for the Tomb of Terrors set, both in that instead of a polished, professional film it’s done by a group of friends with a digital camera, and in that it’s not very good.
First, let’s talk about the ways in which is compromised by its effort to avoid any financial costs. This starts off with the time-honored tradition of talking to each other for the first half hour of the film (a classic maneuver, as dialogue doesn’t cost a dime), which becomes a problem when the writers can’t think of anything more interesting for them to discuss than a tedious and lengthy argument (I can’t call this a debate) on who’s better, men or women. I would directly quote some of the lines, but then you’d cry. We also have the title villain, who, no doubt owing to the high costs of roping someone’s grandmother into acting the part, is just one of the writers in a Halloween store mask/wig. There’s also a part where two characters are supposedly trying to drive away to safety, even though the car is visibly not moving. My best guess is that they were having trouble hearing the dialogue over the car engine, but if you’re going to be trying a thing like this, at least have the common sense to film it at an angle that doesn’t show an unmoving tree right next to the car!
The end twist is probably the worst part of a bad movie, however, as it means the film has completely cheated up to this point, while simultaneously trying and failing to rip off a fairly famous early 80s slasher movie in the process. I won’t reveal what it is here, but die hard slasher fans might be able to guess the twist just from that statement alone. It’s not completely without merit, of course -- if nothing else, it’s only an hour long, so it doesn’t linger overmuch, and I freely admit I laughed when one of the characters announces that he found a gun in the house, but they have to be careful with it because it only has one bullet. Thanks for that warning there, pal.
Rating: ½ *
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Evil Dead Trap
Like the Eternal Evil of Asia, this was another of the first Asian horror movies I ever owned. In retrospect, I see that I was completely being spoiled by almost solely purchasing high quality Asian horror, as later years and the spread of what feels like hundreds of cookie-cutter “scary ghost girl terrorizes people for using technology” films would water the product down so heavily that an impulse purchase nowadays is far more likely to give you a mediocre to terrible film than one actually worth having. Fortunately, back in the days before Ringu/Ju-On/Dark Water/Angry Ghost Girl With Long Black Hair 87 flooded the market, here in America we were only given access to the very best Asia had to offer, such as this film.
The film follows a group of women that work for a small late night news show who receive a video detailing a woman being tortured and killed. Also featured on the video is a nice lengthy driving sequence showing the girls how to get to the abandoned warehouse/factory type place where the murder was committed. Now, as anyone with half a brain would do in their situation, they decide not to call the cops, as this might just be their big break as serious reporters, and they decide instead to grab a cameraman and drive out there to investigate. They all start dying soon afterwards.
The film has two main flaws to it, both heavily intertwined. One is in the weak pacing, as almost every death in the film occurs within the first hour. The reason for this is due to its other flaw, in how the first two thirds of the film work really, really well as a particularly nasty slasher film, while the final third suddenly turns into a Cronenberg film. Just completely out of nowhere it devolves into complete weirdness and insanity, and I can’t say I’m a very big fan of all that, at least not when a film was doing such a good job at doing things in a semi-sane manner.
That said, when the film is working it does a really great job. It’s got a really gritty, grindhouse-style look to it that perfectly complements the grisly murders that take place in it. The murders themselves are also a piece of work; it should come as no surprise that Japan was and is able to make video nasties much better and more grotesque than anything America or England was capable of. Just compare this to, say, its namesake Evil Dead, which got an NC-17 in the USA and an X in England prior to being outright banned as a video nasty, for reasons that elude anyone who’s ever actually seen the film. Compared to that film, this should have gotten a XXX rating while being edited down to a 20 minute run time. Moral of the story: don’t even try to compete with Japan when it comes to brutal violence against women, you’ll never come close to matching them.
Rating: ***
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Cherry Falls
One of the worst parts of slasher movies is the unbearable sameness of them all. It’s as though there were a firm blueprint they all must share in or else nobody will take them seriously, which severely weakens any attempts at originality they might try. While this film does not completely break free from the bonds of slasherdom, it makes a surprising enough try that I feel I must commend its efforts.
The film, set in the small town of Cherry Falls, concerns a mad killer that is slicing up all the teenage virgins in the town. Right from that we’re getting an inversion of the normal premise, where now a person is only safe if they have had sex before. The main heroine, Jody (played surprisingly by Brittany Murphy, as part of her ongoing efforts to prove to me that no matter how many times I see her, I still have no idea what she looks like), who has just broken up with her boyfriend, is now being pressured not only to start dating him again, but to immediately sleep with him so that she isn’t murdered. It’s a nice change of pace from the necessary virginal beauty we usually get in movies. This is further compounded by the general student body, getting wind of the killer’s modus operandi, deciding to engage in a big group orgy after school to keep themselves safe. Nice!
This is not to say the movie is perfect, mind you. I managed to successfully identify the killer from the first time they appeared, which does not really help when so much is made of who it could possibly be. There’s also the maddening cleverness of how a movie that’s all about arguing for young people to screw contains exactly zero nudity (sort of like the complete lack of anyone smoking in Thank You For Smoking, only not as fun because we are deprived of tits). The characters also tend to verge on the annoying side, which I guess is to be expected in a slasher film, but speaking just for myself I do always prefer getting a chance to actually give a shit about the characters before they start dying off. Still, despite its faults, it is definitely one of the better slasher movies to have come out since the 80s, and you should at least give it a try.
One more thing: if you watch the trailer below, you’ll notice Murphy spouting off about how your first time is supposed to be perfect and wonderful and magical and all that nonsense. For those younger readers that have as of yet not had sex yet, here’s how your first time is going to be, no matter how well you plan it: awkward, uncomfortable, and probably outright painful for the girl. The magical aspect of things doesn’t show up until you’ve had enough practice to actually be good at it. This is why you should in no way wait until marriage, as all that means is that your wedding night won’t stop being awkward, uncomfortable, and painful until well after the ceremony and reception.
Rating: ***
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Freddy vs. Jason
Back in the early 90s, New Line, which already owned the rights to the Nightmare on Elm Street series, bought the rights to the Jason series (though not the Friday the 13th title, because why would they need that to continue the franchise?) from Paramount. The first major sign fans had that this was a big deal came at the end of 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell, when he was dragged down to Hell by Freddy Krueger’s arm. This was intended to set up this film, which would have come out one or two years later to thunderous box office. Then it languished in development hell for a decade before finally getting made, but at least it still did really good business (probably not as good as it would have in the early 90s, though).
One of the odd things about the Nightmare series is in how it both insists on calling back to previous films, and yet still repeatedly tampers with the rules involving Freddy. In this film we both get kids rescued from Freddy through the use of Hypnocil, the experimental dream suppressant first introduced in Nightmare 3, and then also rewrites history to say that he can’t attack any children in their dreams unless they’re already afraid of him, which makes one wonder how he was able to start in their dreams in the first place. Anyway, he decides that the only way to fix things is to bring Jason back from Hell to attack everyone, thus creating a panic about Freddy’s presumed return that enables him to return for real, an ingenious plan complicated only by Jason’s insistence on remaining after he’s no longer needed.
As Nightmare films go, this one falls somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t reach the heights of the original or New Nightmare, but at least it’s consistently entertaining, and is easily the bloodiest in the series (once we get to the final fight between them, they pretty much open up new arteries with each swipe they take at each other). There’s also one pothead character that completely steals every scene he’s in, though he sadly doesn’t quite make it to the end. You get a couple groaner lines, like when our heroine, completely out of nowhere, suddenly says, “Wait, Freddy died by fire, Jason by water. How can we use that?” but for the most part it’s solid all the way through, and thanks to its crossover with the Jason-verse we get an extra infusion of nudity, something I will never complain about in a movie.
There was a planned sequel to this, titled Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, but unsurprisingly it languished in development hell as well, and now that New Line has recently closed up shop, it looks like that film will never get made. Shame, really.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Wes Craven's New Nightmare
As I said yesterday, I’m glad they got Wes Craven back to close out the series properly. The series had become a complete parody of itself with Freddy’s Dead, and New Nightmare is a very welcome return to the scarier origins of the series. It’s also a premise that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before or after in a horror movie or elsewhere (excepting maybe Adaptation).
Set in the “real” world, we get to meet Heather Langenkamp (Nancy from the first Nightmare) and her family, as she and her son both start having nightmares about a surprisingly dark, more evil-seeming Freddy. We also get to meet up with other actors from the original film, including the delightful John Saxon and makeup-free Robert Englund (though sadly there is no appearance by Johnny Depp), as well as a good deal of crew members, including Wes Craven himself, as he busies himself with writing a new Nightmare screenplay. Eventually we learn that Freddy was actually a kind of primal evil that was shaped and contained within the stories of the first few films, but has been leaking out slowly into the real world as a result of the watering down and eventual dissolution of his stories.
This is a brilliant idea for a horror movie, and provides a superior bit of metatextuality (a word that fits so perfectly that I do not care that MS Word is telling me it isn’t real) to Craven’s later work on the Scream series. Freddy is about the most ideal candidate for a story about a horror villain that finds a way to escape from his fictional origins and menace people in reality, since he’s been sort of doing that very thing in each of his films prior to this. This is the true peak of the series, and should be required viewing for any serious horror fans.
Though man, does that kid get annoying.
Rating: ****
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
So yeah, I know I promised that I’d have the Nightmare on Elm Street 3 review written up sometime over the weekend, but that got unexpectedly delayed by an offer to spend the weekend with my friends Jasmine and Paul, neither of whom I’d seen in months. I also didn’t get to do this one yesterday as I’d planned because I got a bit lazy. In my defense, this isn’t exactly a movie that inspires effort.
Set ten years from now, all of the children of Springwood, Ohio (this is a somewhat abrupt departure from Springwood, California, where the series had taken place up to now) are dead and the adults are undergoing a mass psychosis. Unfortunately, we have to wait to see that, as we then focus on a surprisingly alive last surviving teen who is chased out of town by Freddy and winds up several towns away at a center for troubled teens. The head of the center hears his story and decides that the only proper response is to take everyone on a road trip to Springwood to help him work through all of his mental problems, with somewhat predictable results.
The main problem with this film is in how it’s played entirely for laughs, rather than in maintaining even the barest bones of suspense. It’s to the point where we get wacky cartoony sound effects whenever Freddy tries to kill someone (speaking of, just like in Dream Child, there are only three kills in this film – that’s forgivable when the film is good, it’s not forgivable here). Hell, at one point he outright sucks someone into a video game and then kills him with the Power Glove. Granted, points there for style, but the more serious, nasty Freddy of the first couple films is much preferable.
There’s also the problem with the climax. This film was made partially in 3-D, which meant if you saw it when it was first released in theaters like I did, then during the last twenty minutes a bunch of stuff lunged at you. This stops being entertaining and starts being obnoxious when they remove the 3-D from the DVD and leave you with a bunch of stuff lunging at you while still maintaining the same visual plain as everything else. Despite this supposedly being the “final” nightmare, I’m glad they brought Craven back in to do one final film to give it a proper send-off, because this would have just been an embarrassing way to end it all.
Oh, and the end credits give us a montage of clips from every film in the series, just to remind us of how much better the earlier films were. Very nice.
Rating: * ½
Friday, August 29, 2008
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
And we see a welcome return to form here for the series, which had taken an unfortunate slide with the previous film. Here we are freed from the taint of Renny Harlin, and get to learn a bit more about Freddy’s origin, something the series has largely only seen fit to elaborate on in the odd numbered films.
Once again the survivors of the previous film have returned (you’d think they’d have taken the hint from the two previous times this happened in the series), and are once again menaced by Freddy, though with a rather original twist. Apparently Alice and Dan, fresh off of their defeat of Freddy in Dream Master, have started knocking boots, and now Alice has a bun in the oven whose dreams in the womb have opened up a new way for him to return.
This film is all about the mythology of the series, even bringing back Freddy’s long-deceased mother to explain some of his history that she didn’t get around to in part 3. This is generally a good thing, though it’s focused on to the point that the kills have largely dried up. It’s a pretty uncommon thing for the fifth film in a series of slasher movies to only have a body count of 3, yet here we are. Fortunately, the film at least partially attempts to compensate for this by dragging out the first kill for so long that it may as well have been several, something that is always appreciated.
This is a quality entry in the series, though it’s probably one of the least talked about, presumably because of the low body count and the overall lateness in the series. Frankly, though, more people should be checking this thing out. If nothing else, it’s got a guy that decides to fight Freddy by transforming into a superhero he created (though little tip for any of you that have to fight Freddy at some point in the future: transform into Superman or something, don’t just turn into a masked man with two handguns, all right?), and that’s awesome.
Rating: ***
Thursday, August 28, 2008
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Yes, I’m doing this review before I do the review for part 3, so that I don’t get further behind, if that makes sense. Anyway, Dream Master is (in my opinion) the second weakest film in the entire series, ahead of only Freddy’s Dead due to a combination of an exceptionally weak story, uninteresting characters, poor pacing, and largely pretty weak kills. Actually, now that I think about it, this might be the worst one, I haven’t seen Freddy’s Dead in a few years.
The film was directed by Renny Harlin, which should be enough explanation in itself for film buffs. For those lucky readers not already familiar with him, he is the highly esteemed director that has made such films as Die Hard 2, an action movie notable for its action sequences being the weakest parts of the entire film, Cuttthroat Island, the film which bankrupted Carolco Studios, and Driven, that Stallone racing movie that I didn’t see but I’m sure sucked. This was one of his first films, and he seems to have peaked early.
So onto the story. The film opens with the three surviving teens from the last film, which never bodes well for their continued health, as they accidentally bring Freddy back to life and he kills them all. Before he can completely finish them off, however, the last girl manages to transfer her power to bring other people into her dreams to a new girl (Hrmm, I should probably mention something about that when I write up the review for part 3), who now gets to put all of her friends in danger of Freddy. We then pretty much jump from segment to segment where he kills off another of her friends in an ironic manner (sucking all the air out of an asthmatic, turning a girl terrified of insects into a roach thing, etc.) before our new heroine decides to combat him once and for all. She is…the Dream Master.
The movie’s admittedly not outright terrible (though thanks to doing this blog my concept of how low the bar can be set has greatly expanded), but it comes from a higher pedigree than the average horror film, and so should be held to a somewhat higher standard. It’s perfectly watchable if you’re just trying to see all of them like I am, but it’s hard not to view this as a bit of a speed bump in a series that’s mostly a pretty smooth ride.
You know, so far as series’ where people get gruesomely killed a lot go.
Rating: * ½
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
So here’s finally the long-delayed review of Dream Warriors. This is probably the most famous Nightmare film after the original, and the one primarily responsible for the tragically lame NES game back in the 80s. It also brought series creator Wes Craven back into the fold, however briefly; he was one of roughly three dozen screenwriters credited to the film, as this went through a ridiculous number of rewrites before it was finally released (Frank Darabont, who would later go on to direct the classic films The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, also has a screenwriting credit, though you wouldn’t know it from watching the film). Still, despite the script being a bit of a mess, this is one of the most fun in the series.
This one seems to largely pretend the second film never happened, as we instead move on to a mental hospital filled with teens that are all having nightmares of being stalked by a burned-up man with sharp fingernails. The kids start dying off, and all seems hopeless until the hospital gets a new staffer named Nancy (Heather Langenkamp from the first film), who has some experience in such matters and wants to help them. Apparently due to the nature of the dreamworld, everyone has their own magical power that will help them in the fight against Freddy, such as Kristen’s ability to pull other people into her dreams, or the wheelchair-bound Will’s revelation that, “in my dreams, I can walk. My legs are strong. In my dreams, I’m the wizard master!!!” before donning an incredibly silly black cape and making everyone else in the room extremely uncomfortable.
So yes, this is the film where the series goes from being scary to being somewhat cheesy and silly, but it’s still done well enough to work. The kills in this tend to be among the more imaginative of the series, particularly one involving a young lad’s arteries being yanked out of his arms and legs and him being pulled along by them like a marionette. The dialogue tends toward the laughably poor, as one would expect from such a jumbled mess of a script, but I can’t complain much about a film that brings back Langenkamp and John Saxon, and then throws in Larry Fishburne to boot. It may mark the beginning of the series’ descent into self-parody, but it’s still an entertaining film in its own right.
Rating: ***
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
So here we are with Freddy’s Revenge, the second Nightmare film, and the first horror movie I ever saw. Watching it today, this film does not quite hold up as such an important piece of my personal history, but it’s still pretty decent.
Set several years after the first film, an awkward teen boy moves in with his family to Nancy’s house from the first movie, and soon his dreams are being haunted by a strangely familiar burned up monster with fingerknives. Freddy’s got a new trick in this one, as he’s decided to outright possess the poor lad and force his way back into the waking world.
There is one thing hanging over this movie’s reputation, and that is how this movie, along with the original Sleepaway Camp, reigns supreme so far as the most overtly homoerotic horror movies out there go. Seriously, there is a ton of man on man action in this film even without the S & M bar frequenting gym coach that likes to punish his cuter students by making them run nude laps showing up. Even our main hero, who is supposedly saved by his love for his new girlfriend, looks completely bored when he makes out with her, in sharp contrast to the barely controlled passion he shows when he sneaks into his best bud’s bedroom at night and wakes him up by jumping on him. Hot.
The body count, as can be expected for a sequel, is much higher, as Freddy wipes out half of a teen pool party here, pausing only to utter the immortal line “you are all my children now!” We also get a nice continuation of all of the adults being utter retards, as when Jesse’s father assumes their bird went crazy, attacked them all, and then freaking exploded, because there was a gas leak. Well, of course, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
This is obviously not the high point of the series, but it’s hardly as bad as a good number of people have made it out to be. It’s a nice halfway point between the dark dreamlike effort of the first film and the really goofy third film (which is also by far the most quotable movie in the series, but we’ll get to that tomorrow). This probably shouldn’t be your introduction to the series, but if you’re already a fan this won’t make you change your mind.
Rating: ** ½
Monday, August 25, 2008
A Nightmare on Elm Street
After a chance encounter with Robert Englund over the weekend at Monster Mania (he briefly wandered out onto the main floor and as soon as I noticed he was there he took off like a shot, so there was no time to take any pictures of me chasing him like a fucking creepy stalker), I decided it would be fun to rewatch all of the Nightmare on Elm Street films for the site. They have a lot of history for me – Nightmare 2 was the very first horror movie I ever saw (or at least that I can remember seeing) when I was five or six years old. It’s good that they all still hold up so well (yes, even the bad ones), so this week won’t go by nearly as torturously as, say, another week of Tomb of Terrors movies.
One nice thing that sets this film apart from its sequels is the mystery of just who is committing the crimes. We gets a view of the killer (mostly in shadow), but we don’t learn his name until more than halfway through the film, and we don’t find out how he is for a few more scenes after that. It also provides us with a halfway intelligent cast (at least the teens – the parents, especially Nancy’s mother, are a whole ‘nother story), that in defiance of standard slasher logic, actually makes some small effort to avoid being killed by a deranged killer.
Of course, the teens aren’t the real reason to watch a movie like this, so it’s good that the kills tend to be so impressive. For a film with so few (four, a truly paltry sum compared to its peers), the ones it has are truly memorable. Right near the start, a girl gets sliced to ribbons while being dragged across the ceiling, and film newcomer Johnny Depp’s final scene is an unceasing delight. Freddy is actually surprisingly scary in this one, too, as he hadn’t yet transformed into the joker character of the later films.
While many people view this as the pinnacle of the series, it’s actually only my second favorite, as I think the initial series was closed out perfectly with New Nightmare. Both that and this film were directed by Wes Craven, who clearly knows his shit. If you’ve been living under a rock somewhere and haven’t seen any of these films, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you begin. You won’t regret it.
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
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
