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: *
Friday, April 30, 2010
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Thursday, April 29, 2010
So Mort It Be
And here we have it: at the end of the seventh disc in the Tomb of Terrors set (of twelve discs total), and we have made it to what is likely to remain the best film in the entire collection. Again, like every other film in this set, it’s a zero budget film just made by a group of friends, so it’s not going to be for everyone, but within that context, writer/director/star Fabian Rush completely nails it.
First, let’s get the most notable aspect about the film out of the way: the special effects and green screening involved in the film are so over the top terrible that they turn right back around and become brilliant. You can get a brief glimpse of this in the trailer, where you’ll also get to enjoy a glimpse of the two main villains: a bloodthirsty coven of witches, and an army of giant mutated rats that look and act suspiciously like furry sock puppets. Furry sock puppets that kill.
This is all a part of the film’s main strength, which is that it’s pretty damn funny. We have such jokes as a main character that’s trying to score with a goth chick, so to try to win her over he wears a T-shirt with a pentagram on the front and “Christ sucks cock” on the back, and another character that enjoys Anti Christo Magazine because nuns are hot.
Another thing I like is that, mid-90s PC graphics aside, it showed me something I have never seen in any other film before. Now, it’s hardly the first movie I’ve seen where someone gets attacked with a dildo (oh, the revelations on this blog), but I’m pretty sure it is the first time I’ve seen someone get attacked by a flying CG dildo, and I’m definitely certain this is the first time I’ve ever seen a flying CG dildo attack get blocked by the defendant wielding a painting of Jesus.
Again, this is clearly not a professional film. It was something made by people with a digital video camera and some special effects program they likely bought at Best Buy. Also, it takes more than a little of its plot from the Deadly Spawn. That said, though, there must be some form of market for such delightfully goofy independent films like this (beyond just myself, that is), and I would highly recommend checking this one out to anyone interested in the same. In seven discs of zero budget horror films, this is the single best one yet. I’ll be back next week with the next disc, assuming it’s not so awful it makes me start openly weeping.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
None Left Standing
And now we finally start getting back to movies that justify my having gotten this set. None Left Standing is far from a perfect film -- it runs far too long to sustain itself, and completely falls apart once its plot kicks into high gear -- but it has some really neat ideas, some quality dialogue, and seems like everyone had enough fun making it that it almost (though not quite) managed to wash the taste of the last two films out of my mouth.
The film follows three college students as they try to come up with an idea for a short film for their final exam. The teacher in this class is probably my favorite character in the film. She gives a lecture about audience attention spans and why you should always make your film 90 minutes long, and give your first major twist at the 45 minute mark, and so on, that sounds like such terrible, creativity-destroying advice, that I can only assume that it had actually been told to writer-director Samuel Benavides at some point.
The dialogue is really probably the best part of the film, as we get some lines more brilliant than most professional films I’ve seen. For instance, after unintentionally filming a murder, one of the characters debates the morality of making their student film around it by saying “Robbing liquor stores. That’s illegal and people do that every day.” It’s really hard to argue against that brand of logic.
Unfortunately, as I said, this one does fall apart halfway through, when they decide to kick the conflict into high gear and we start getting endless scenes of the villainous friend (I didn’t think to write down any of their names, sorry) making grand statements about how all the world is a film and morality only exists so far as making the best movies goes. Perhaps this was just what their teacher was warning about, but they did lose me here. Still, for something that was quite obviously just a group of friends with no money deciding they needed to make a film together, it’s a lot better than the bulk of its peers. According to IMDB Benavides has made two horror shorts since this, one of which (Mansfield Path) has a trailer on Youtube that looks more expensive than the entirety of this film. I’m curious to see if the shortened length improves them at all.
Rating: **
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Kill the Scream Queen
This is the second and mercifully final film by Bill Zebub in the Tomb of Terrors set, the other being the delightful Rape is a Circle. By delightful, I of course mean that it was one of the worst movies in a pack filled with bad movies. This is just as bad, as he continues his proud streak of making some of the most inept, annoying, and tedious zero budget exploitation films of the past decade.
The film is an exercise in repetitiveness, as our main character (played by Zebub himself with the same care and effort that is typified by the rest of his filmmaking) lures young would-be actresses into some empty rock club under the guise of filming a horror movie, ties them up, and then sexually abuses and kills them while droning on in a dull monotone a whole ton of pretentious blather. The film is only 70 minutes long, and yet it’s so dull that it easily feels longer than Seven Samurai.
Further, considering both the subject matter, and how much Zebub seems to want to be viewed as shocking, it manages to be an incredibly tame film. Just about all the violence is off-camera, the only two exceptions being the opening woman whom he lightly whips for a brief time, and at the end where we once more get a little bit of blood, yet no visible wound. And just like in Rape is a Circle, the nudity is also really tame. All the girls get topless, and that’s as far as it goes. Now, far be it from me to constantly whine when my movies refuse to go full frontal, but when we straight up have a character monologue about how he’s now ripping off her panties and forcing himself inside of her, you probably shouldn’t pan the camera back far enough that we can see her panties are still on while he’s supposedly raping her. And you definitely shouldn’t be showing her corpse in the woods later, both with her panties still on, and without a single wound on her.
And just in case it wasn’t bad enough, it serves as a call-back to the terrible Jennifer Lopez film Enough (yes, I did indeed see it) by introducing each new girl with a title card like “Humiliation” or “Molestation”. Yes, the film is that bad.
Rating: ½ *
P.S. For those wondering, the half star is solely because two of the girls in it were pretty attractive. There is no other reason for this film to exist.
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 *
Friday, June 5, 2009
Fortress
This is one of the greatest movies hardly anyone has seen. It’s well-paced (much more so than Faust was), has a good deal of action, and even veers full-bore into some Lord of the Flies-type territory toward the end. Also, it’s Australian, so everyone has just adorable accents in it.
Our heroine is a young schoolteacher in rural Australia, who is teaching her class when they are interrupted by a gang wearing Santa masks, who kidnap everyone at gunpoint. The class is locked up in a cave, but manages to escape, leading inexorably to a surprisingly tense and bloody confrontation with their kidnappers.
The main thing that works with this film is how clever the characters are. While the fact that the class is of wildly varying age (something I hear can happen in rural communities, though I normally associate such phenomena with schoolmarms in westerns) does lead to a moment where a stupid little girl completely botches an escape attempt, for the most part the characters are able to think of ways to escape and defend themselves from their attackers. This is a major step up from most horror movies, where characters mostly have a tendency to actively seek out their deaths by the most stupid means possible.
There’s also some great tension to the film, as the villains are also pretty damn smart. They’re somewhat able to anticipate what the class is going to try to do, and even when they can’t, they’re still the ones with the guns, so how about that? And yes, as mentioned before, it ends with a fairly shocking amount of violence for a movie that’s comparatively restrained up until the climax, and for a TV movie to boot. It provides us with a nicely shocking, and wonderful, ending to a classic film.
Rating: ****
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Faust
I feel I should take a moment and defend the integrity of the 100 Rare and Obscure Horror Films You Should See Before You Die, as, in the world of silent movies, F.W. Murnau is admittedly not all that obscure. That being said, however, there really isn’t a great surplus of people my age (or in general) that have seen any silent films at all, except perhaps in a film class. Even then, any silent film is likely to be Nosferatu, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or a non-horror movie. I feel confident, therefore, that few if any of you have seen this silent classic, about a renowned doctor who makes a deal with the devil to help his people, and surprisingly finds that it doesn’t turn out quite how he imagined it would.
The film, based on Goethe’s play that I’ve yet to read (I have read Marlowe’s version, if that makes up for it at all), opens humbly with the four horsemen of the apocalypse flying through the land. This turns out to be an opening gambit by the Devil, who, when confronted by God, argues that the human race is thoroughly corrupted and belongs to him now. God obviously disagrees, and so they make a wager: if the Devil can completely corrupt and ruin a pure soul – the aforementioned doctor – then the world is his.
The film, presumably like the play, is structured rather oddly. It’s bookended with some startling imagery that partially floats away from a conventional narrative, as when they show the Devil infecting Faust’s city with plague via him spreading his wings out to surround the land. However, during a good chunk of the middle portion, the film seems to turn away from the dark and fantastical, and towards romantic comedy territory, as Faust is given his youth, and spends his time chasing after a girl. I can only assume this section is meant to show us that even someone renowned for his wisdom and intelligence can turn into a damned fool when youth and beauty come along. It tends to go on a bit overlong (as the comedy sequences in Marlowe’s play did, come to think of it), but at least it wraps up appropriately miserably, as a story of a man making a deal with the devil should.
While the pacing is off (as was often the case with silent films), the movie is filled with such great imagery and tells such a classic, dark story, that you owe it to yourself to check it out. Also, if you find you just can’t bring yourself to watch a silent film, or if you’d just prefer a film that goes completely surrealist and weird, you can also check out Jan Svankmajer’s Faust from the mid-90s, which is also totally awesome. Sadly, though, it’s not available in full on Youtube, as Murnau’s is.
Also, keep in mind you can never go wrong with 1920s tits.
Rating: *** ½
*Further proof: on Amazon, Faust’s new 2 disc special edition DVD is currently ranked at 15,786 in DVD sales, while Basket Case, a cult horror movie about a man whose murderous mutant twin brother is kept hidden in a basket, is ranked at 8,934. This is scientific proof that Faust is only half as popular as semi-obscure cult movies from 1982.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Eyes Without a Face (a.k.a. Les Yeux sans Visage)
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but no matter how much I may enjoy gorefests and the over-the-top bloodiness of the best slasher movies, I will happily take a horror movie that emphasizes creepiness over blood any day of the week. That’s not to say that Eyes Without a Face has no gory moments (indeed, a couple shots are pretty extreme for a movie from 1959), but it does mostly focus on being one of the most unsettling and weird horror movies of its day.
The film is about a famous surgeon in the French countryside whose daughter’s face has been hopelessly ruined in a car crash, and so he becomes obsessed with kidnapping other young women and trying to surgically graft their faces onto his daughter. Clearly a man ahead of his time, as just recently have we had the world’s first successful face transplant. While he uses his first victim as a means of faking his daughter’s death, the police do eventually start noticing the disappearances of several young women in the area, all of whom seem to have recently been at the doctor’s clinic (way to keep attention away from yourself there, buddy). Additionally, he also finds he has to contend with his daughter, who is increasingly horrified at what is being done to all the young women, as well as to herself.
It’s always interesting to me how the French countryside can look so beautiful in so many movies, and yet look so grim and ghoulish whenever a horror movie is set there (Calvaire is another one where all of France seems to be a grim post-apocalyptic wasteland). Add to that the unsettling carnival music, and the constant sound of the doctor’s pack of dogs barking, and you’ve got a place that seems a wee bit less pleasant to live than, say, Manon des Sources.
I also enjoyed how plausible most of the film was – not only is there nothing at all supernatural about the plot, but it bears mentioning that quite a few of our major medical breakthroughs have indeed come from using people as complete guinea pigs. Sure, most of the time there wasn’t any outright kidnapping going on, but there hasn’t been any shortage of tests done on minorities or prisoners of war (or, in the case of the Japanese Imperial Army, all of China) – in short, any time someone was able to pretend someone else wasn’t a real person. This was a pretty dark subject matter for the 50s – or even today – and even if it doesn’t fully deal with the questions it raises, it still makes it one of the best horror movies out there, and one that it’s a shame almost nobody my age has seen.
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: ***
Friday, May 8, 2009
The Eternal Evil of Asia
This was one of the first Asian horror movies I ever bought, dating back to the fabled year 2000 when a co-worker brought in a copy of Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind and gave me the bug for more. Being a budding young Amazon enthusiast, I went on there and checked their Asian Horror category, which at the time consisted of three movies: Encounters, Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, and this film. It has remained a cherished part of my collection ever since.
While the film works on pretty much every level, if there is a weakness it would be with the plot. It’s the fairly standard “group of friends somehow wronged someone earlier in life, and now he’s back for revenge” type deal, though this one admittedly has a few nice twists. For one, it’s pretty much 100% the guy’s fault that they wronged him – the villain is a wizard, see, who tried to use a love potion on the main character to get him to fall in love with the wizard’s sister, only the main character’s friends accidentally got the potion instead. After a nice softly-lit orgy, she awakens, sees she’s attracted the wrong people, flips out and tries to kill them, and is accidentally killed in the process. Totally not our protagonists’ fault in any way, though this should be considered a strong cautionary tale of why one should never vacation in Thailand, for any viewers out there not already warned off by all the trannies.
So, with the plot more or less brushed aside, what does this film have to really offer? Well, it has a lot of great humor to it, such as when the evil wizard punishes our hero by using a voodoo doll to make him impotent right when he’s getting it on with his fiancee. That’s just cold. There’s also a good deal of fun with the unconcernedly terrible subtitles, which not only mutilate the English language (and presumably also whatever Asian language is sitting on top of them, though I haven’t sat any Asian friends down with the movie and had them verify this), but also sometimes says the exact opposite of what the character is actually saying.
Finally, there’s the unavoidable topic of the women in the film, who are tremendously attractive, especially our main character’s fiancee, played by Lily Chung, who IMDB helpfully tells me was Hong Kong’s representative for Miss Universe 1987. I hope she won, because she totally deserves it. Hell, the film’s climax alone, which plays out pretty much exactly how The Invisible Maniac SHOULD have played out, should have won her the title. If, you know, this hadn’t been made almost a decade later, which I feel is an unfair sticking point.
Rating: *** ½
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Eaten Alive
While a great many people have seen and loved Tobe Hooper’s first film, a little ditty known as the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (well, not counting some weird hippie movie he made in the 60s that all of five people have seen), surprisingly few have seen or even know about his second film, Eaten Alive. One could argue that this is because it’s not as good, but that kind of argument would then require us to watch only the single greatest film by each director and ignore all of their other films. I don’t think I want to live in a world where I’d be missing out on films like Creepshow (Romero), Last House on the Left (Craven), or Chopping Mall (Wynorski) just because they weren’t the top films of their filmmakers.
The film centers around Judd (Neville Brand), the owner of a small Texas hotel that, much like the Bates Motel, has its own swamp in the back. Even better than the Bates Motel, though, this swamp has its own crocodile, to which he feeds his more troublesome guests. It’s a nice way for him to expand from Texas Chain Saw, keeping things somewhat similar while taking them in a completely new direction. This would be pretty much the only time Hooper would ever do this, as almost every other film he’s ever made has been wildly different stylistically from all his others, leaving it very difficult to fit him into any kind of auteur theory. But I digress.
Even if it’s not on the level of Chain Saw (and honestly, that is kind of a tough act to follow), there’s still quite a lot to like about the movie. First is the quality acting of the film, headlined both by Brand and by a very young Robert Englund, who before becoming Freddy Krueger and Willie plays here a charmingly violent yokel that always enjoys plugging girls from behind. Also, while not an actual sequel, this does still follow the formula somewhat of ratcheting up the sex and violence to compensate for not being able to be the first film all over again. Not only does the croc kill people, but Brand takes a pitchfork and a scythe to his enemies, and a dog gets eaten too, something I always appreciate in a film. Also, following the simple understanding that everything is scarier (or at least creepier) at night, every single scene in the entire film is at night. Watching this, one would have no idea such a thing as the sun exists. It’s that kind of genius thinking that leads a man to make a movie about a house cursed from being built on an Indian burial ground, and then deciding to use actual corpses as props in the movie.
This is a true grindhouse film – nasty, vicious, and ugly. It’s also quite a lot of fun. If you want to see the kind of film that people reminisce fondly about when they complain about the dullness of present day movies, give this one a viewing.
Rating: ***
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Dog Soldiers
When The Descent wound up being a surprise hit among horror fans, I had had some hopes that this would lead to fans then seeking out director Neil Marshall’s previous film Dog Soldiers, which I hold up as being possibly the best werewolf movie ever made. Sadly (and perhaps obviously), this did not happen, and it still languishes in semi-obscurity.
The film follows a group of Scotch soldiers on what seems to be a routine training mission out in the wilderness, when they find that the team they are fighting against has been almost completely wiped out by a pack of werewolves. Taking the lone, badly wounded survivor, they pretty much run screaming away from the vicious pack and hole up in a local’s home, where they have to make a NotLD-style defense against them all.
One of the things that makes this work so well is the rather frantic pacing of it all. I mentioned how it plays out somewhat like Night of the Living Dead, but only if you remove those wussy slow-moving zombies with the ones from the Dawn of the Dead remake. And make them smart, so they can figure out all the extra-sneaky ways to break in and kill people. Also, I don’t know if Britain just takes extra care in training its actors, but unlike many (read: all) of the United States’ low budget horror movies, there’s not a single bad actor to be found here.
This is not to say that the movie is perfect. I did, after all, not rate it quite four stars, pretty much entirely due to the ending, which takes all the momentum the film had built up and lets it drop with an ugly thud on the floor. It’s admittedly not the worst ending I’ve ever seen (I think that honor may permanently belong to Atonement), and also admittedly it’s not like there’s not a small army of horror movies out there that completely fumble the ball at the end, but for a movie that’s been so great up to this point, it’s all the more glaring. Still, if you watch it, the option is always there to turn it off ten minutes before it ends and imagine a different, much better ending. You can’t get that with most movies these days, you know.
Rating: *** ½
