Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category

Grindhouse

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

PLANET TERROR and DEATH PROOF

PREAMBLE

Here in the US these two movies were designed and released as a double feature with trailers for fictional movies in between. They were released under one unifying name that starts with a ‘G’ that is a word used to describe the shitty theaters that used to churn out sleazy horror, sexploitation, kung fu and blaxploitation movies back in the day.

I am not going to be using the g-word in this review, because I am sick and fucking tired of hearing it. It’s a perfectly legitimate title for this concept, but here is the problem. Mr. Tarantino is a huge fan and expert on these types of movies, he is the human IMDb judging from some of those interviews. So I don’t mind seeing him talk about it in every article about KILL BILL VOLUME 1 and then KILL BILL VOLUME 2 and then when they announced this g-word movie, and then while he was filming it and now to promote its release. Tarantino can use the g-word all he wants, he has earned it. So I don’t mind him and the trailers for his movie trying to explain to the kids what the g-word means.

That’s him, that’s his thing. But it makes me want to jump out a window to read the guy from the local newspaper or the dumbed down weekly entertainment magazine deciding that he too has to explain to you what it is. (more…)

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The Hills Have Eyes II (2007)

Monday, March 26th, 2007

THE HILLS HAVE EYES REMAKE II

First, a review of my review of THE HILLS HAVE YES REMAKE I: not so hot. I had so much I wanted to say about that movie that I couldn’t figure out what was actually worth saying. Just skip to the end where I ask, “Are you asking for a movie about mutant cannibals who steal a baby and then raise it in a safe and loving environment? Because I don’t think I would like that movie as much. (I’d watch it, though.)” Somebody oughta do a remake of that review. Sorry, everybody.

Second, a review of the advertising for THE HILLS HAVE EYES REMAKE II: top-notch. The teaser trailer was one single shot of two weird mutants dragging bodies through the desert, then the title of the movie. Because what more needs to be said? A masterpiece of simplicity. I also enjoyed the TV commercial narrator who said, “Last year, critics said THE HILLS HAVE EYES went too far. Now, get ready to go even further…” I am not a fan of advertising in general, so I gotta give credit when credit is due. You did it, fellas.

Okay, now the sequel. Okay at best. Not painful, but not good, a wasted opportunity for sure. Maybe as an homage to the original part 2 it’s worse than the first one in pretty much every respect. Not as stylish or atmospheric, not as good of characters, less of a story, not as tense, less subtext, nothing all that new to offer.

The opening scene is a grossout shocker though. Right off the bat we realize the trouble with these mutants: not enough women in their tribe. When you live deep in a mine in the middle of a top secret military nuclear testing facility it’s hard to meet people who share your interests. These guys must not be so sweet on Big Mama, the bald lady I believe survived part 1. They prefer kidnapping innocent non-radiated women and using them for reproductive purposes. So you see some poor tied-up lady give birth to a baby mutant. And you gotta figure she’s been there for a long time by the apalling state of her toenails. (more…)

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Leprechaun, Leprechaun 4: In Space, Leprechaun in the Hood, Leprechaun Back 2 Tha Hood

Monday, March 19th, 2007

I don’t know why, but I never saw a LEPRECHAUN picture before. You guys know I got a taste for straight to video trash, as well as little bastard killers. Nobody is as good as Chucky, but I had fun writing about THE GINGERDEAD MAN. Plus, the Leprechaun made it into space 4 years before Jason did, and I loved JASON X. (HELLRAISER won the space race, after false starts from HALLOWEEN, give credit where credit is due. But Leprechaun was there second.)

More importantly, it was St. Patrick’s Day, and I’m not Irish, and I can’t drink, so what the fuck else am I supposed to do on St. Patrick’s Day besides watch some Leprechaun pictures.

The first one is the one that stars Jennifer Aniston playing a Jennifer Aniston type. She’s an L.A. city girl who has to come with her dad to a barn out in the boondocks somewhere. Little does she know that the old Irish immigrant who used to own the place once went back to the motherland, trapped a leprechaun (Warwick Davis, RAY) and stole his gold. The leprechaun came home with him in his luggage and tried to kill him, but the old man used a four leaf clover (like a crucifix to a vampire) to trap him in a box. In Jennifer Aniston’s barn.

Mark Holton (Frances from the PeeWee Herman movie) plays a reta– I mean a lovable manchild who accidentally opens the box. And because he’s a lovable manchild, nobody believes him that he saw a leprechaun. Also they don’t believe him because he said he saw a leprechaun.

The lovable manchild and his actual child friend find the leprechaun’s gold, and the manchild accidentally swallows a piece of it, and then the leprechaun uses evil magic to try to get the gold back. etc. (more…)

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Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

First there was BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA. Then there was MARY SHELLY’S FRANKENSTEIN. Now, finally, we have SNOOP DOGG’S HOOD OF HORROR. In this case though the man in the title is not the author of the work, but the host, a duty he first mastered in that other great film with his name in the title, SNOOP DOGG’S DOGGYSTYLE.

You guys had a test screening review of HOOD OF HORROR a long time ago. Since then I guess it played that “AFTER DARK HORROR FEST” thing which I’m sure most of you also boycotted due to 1. lack of interest 2. not wanting to validate all those web advertisements with the annoying screaming sounds. I read somewhere this one was going to get an actual, legitimate more than 2-days type theatrical release, and I can’t find a release date for the DVD anywhere. So I guess we gotta assume the DVD screener I watched was for Academy Award consideration. Good luck Snoop, I’m rooting for you.

The crudely animated opening tells the story of Devon (played by a sequential series of drawings of Snoop), a gangster who accidentally kills his little sister in a drive-by shooting. To set things straight he makes a deal with a demon and/or devil. In exchange for his sister coming back to life, he will host a horror anthology. Also he does the theme song, not sure if that was part of the deal or just something he did because he believed in the project.

So now Devon is in live action, he gets a pair of gold braids and a throne in Hell which, it turns out, looks like a small warehouse where you would shoot a low budget rap video. His curse is to hang out with the damned and tell them moralistic horror stories until they’re redeemed. Like most anthologies these stories are a mixed bag, but nabbing Snoop as the host and giving him this backstory was a stroke of the ol’ genius. The guy is so charismatic strutting toward the camera flanked by his demonic hoes and his midget sidekick Half Pint, asking us, “Y’all ready for some crazy shit?” And just in the first 5 or 10 minutes of the movie we get a pretty good selection of crazy shit: animated Snoop calling a demon the n-word, Half Pint puking a bunch of blood on the floor, Devon promising his “legless homey Footloose” a shoe endorsement deal. The movie doesn’t live up to this great opening, but it’s able to coast on it for a while, so I had fun. (more…)

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Attack Force

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

ATTACK FORCE is Steven Seagal’s latest, where he takes on a bunch of sexy people given super powers by an experimental military drug. But until recently it was listed on IMDb as HARVESTER, where he takes on a bunch of aliens. After I savaged the last one, SHADOW MAN, I got a nice email from Seagal’s co-writer Joe Halpin, who I found very humble and down to earth. Having his ear for a minute I didn’t want to be rude and bury him in an avalanche of questions, but I couldn’t resist asking if this HARVESTER movie would really end up being about aliens, or if they would chicken out like they did with the “biological mutants” that ended up not being in SUBMERGED.

His answer: “Who knows.” He explained that they had shot it both ways. It could be about aliens, it could be about European mobsters, the studio and Seagal would have to come to an agreement in post-production. This of course brings up alot more questions (the main one being “Shouldn’t you decide on the premise before shooting the movie?”) but it also gives a huge amount of insight into how Seagal’s DTV movies end up the way they do. I mean, if they don’t even know who he’s fighting until after they’re done, no wonder they end up with these weird overdubbed lines, randomly dropped story threads, etc.

To no one’s surprise, they went with European mobsters. But actually I don’t think they hacked up the movie as much as I had figured before hand. These mobsters are treated pretty much as aliens (or actually vampires) – their eyes do a weird CGI effect, they have super strength for throwing people through walls, they use weird high tech weapons. It seems like they mostly left them as is, but changed the explanation for their powers. (And probaly cut out some bad CGI space ship shots here or there.) (more…)

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The Gingerdead Man

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

get it, gingerDEAD instead of gingerBREAD

For hundreds of years, gingerbread has been a delicious and vibrant European treat. It was used to make soft cakes that would be drenched in hot lemon sauce and whipped cream, or for ornate candy-covered houses like the “witch’s house” from the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, or to form the shape of a small man, a reflection of its creator. As man is to God, gingerbread man is to man. And therefore also to God.

No one knows the origin of gingerbread, because how do you pin down something like that? I’m sure they could figure out who invented the McRib Sandwich, but not gingerbread. Some believe it came from the Eastern Mediterranean, and spread across Europe as soldiers came home from the Crusades. At least something good would’ve come out of the Crusades then. Wherever it came from, its ginger packs a powerful punch, so much so that throughout the 17th century you needed a license to bake gingerbread except at Christmas and Easter.

Perhaps the all time greatest gingerbread was found in Nuremberg in the early 1600s, where it was baked exclusively by an elite guild of master bakers known as the Lebkuchler. But even these highly trained artisans could never have foreseen THE GINGERDEAD MAN starring Gary Busey as the voice of the Gingerdead Man. The Lebkuchler knew that in fairy tales, the gingerbread man is a little guy who runs fast, always on the move to prevent being devoured by man or beast. But there is one gingerbread man who refuses to run. This is his story. (more…)

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Turistas

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

This week’s horror movie is called TURISTAS (Portuguese for ‘Hostel’). It’s another story of young good looking backpackers whose vacations go badly due to bodily mutilation, etc. A crowded bus swerves to miss some asshole kids with surfboards and falls off a cliff. Luckily everybody gets out in time. The next bus won’t be for ten hours so some of the English-speakers band together and find a cool beachfront bar where they dance, make new friends, meet women and have such a good time they decide to ditch the bus.

So the vacation has taken a lucky turn, right? WRONG. We know this bar is too good to be true, not just because we’ve seen movies before, but because the movie lets us hear the bartender calling a local doctor and telling him she has some more gringoes for him. And I don’t think she means for him to give them their annual exam. When they wake up in the morning they’ve been drugged and robbed, and their new Swedish friends are gone. They’re in a foreign land where most of them don’t speak the language. They have no way home, no money, no passports, and some little kids are wearing their clothes. It could be worse though, the doctor could’ve planned better and had them all transported to the remote cabin where he plans to take out their kidneys, instead of leaving them on the beach far from the operating table. But don’t worry, he’ll get them there.

I’ll be honest. I don’t like tourists either. Even here in Seattle we get invaded by the fuckers. Whatever city you’re in, you can probaly relate. Here they got this thing called “Ride the Ducks,” an amphibious tour boat/car thing. If you’re walking peacefully downtown and you hear either “YMCA” or “Brick House” blaring and a bunch of assholes blowing on kazoos, you know they’re coming. I don’t know what exactly they’re getting a tour of, it’s a regular city with people walking down sidewalks. I’m not a zebra, I’m just a dude going to the Adidas Store or whatever. And traditional family values prevents you from flipping them off or yelling “go fuck yourself” cause there’s kids on that thing. (more…)

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Phenomena

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

If you know your horror you know about Dario Argento, the crazy Italian fuck responsible for SUSPIRIA, DEEP RED and Asia Argento. Even if you don’t dig his movies or daughter you have to give him credit for putting together Goblin, the band who made the distinctive scores for alot of his movies as well as DAWN OF THE DEAD and that movie where Art Carney refuses to leave before Mount St. Helens erupts. I also really like INFERNO, the movie I brought up the most when trying to convince people that SILENT HILL was a surreal nightmare world and not just a moronic video game adaptation with stiff dialogue that made no sense like they thought it was.

I thought I had seen most of the big ones by Argento and I had kind of avoided this one PHENOMENA that didn’t have as good of a reputation. Maybe part of the problem is that it’s better known in the U.S. as CREEPERS, the version where they cut out about a half an hour. But at least in its uncut form I really dug this strange fucking movie about an American girl (Academy Award winner Jennifer Connelly) sent to a Swiss boarding school during a murder spree.

So far it sounds simple and normal, but let me explain the good parts. One of the people investigating the murders is the famous entomologist John McGregor (Donald Pleasance – Dr. Loomis in HALLOWEEN, the president in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK). When they find, say, a severed head in a river, he is able to tell by the life cycles of maggots how long it has been chopped off. He’s also quadriplegic so he has a chimpanzee for an assistant. And maybe it’s just me, but I think the chimp is a suspect. In the opening murder you never see the killer at all, you just see the point of the scissors he or she uses as a murder weapon. And you see the chains that hold the killer to a basement wall before it breaks loose, and these are some pretty small chains. A monkey might be able to break them. Then the first thing you see in the very next scene is the chimp running outside during a stormy night at the professor’s bug palace. (more…)

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The Slumber Party Massacre

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

This is a slasher movie about girls at a slumber party, and a dude with a portable drill. There is no pillow fights or nothing but otherwise it pretty much plays out how you would imagine.

Almost anywhere you read about this movie they say it’s a feminist slasher movie. I can see a touch here or there that supports that theory, but I am positive that pretty much every one of these people would be saying it was misogynistic if it was directed by a man. In most respects it’s exactly like every other slasher movie of the time, including showing lots of gratuitous female (and not male) nudity. When the girl gets up in the morning you see her take her shirt off to change into a dress. When she goes to school you see lots of nudity in the locker room, including a really funny shot (I’m not sure if it’s intentionally funny or not) that pans down and just focuses on a girl’s ass for a while before panning back up to where it started. Then during the slumber party they all take their clothes off to change into their night clothes and for the most part don’t wear pants for the rest of the movie. The other characters, who don’t get naked, wear those tight running shorts that were popular at the time.

Plus, there’s a scene where the girls are in the school gym playing basketball, and they’re fucking terrible. They can barely dribble, let alone shoot. I thought it was okay, they’re just high school kids in gym class. But then they mention that it’s not gym class, it’s the actual varsity team. You call that feminism? I’ve seen the Seattle Storm before, I know girls can play basketball.

The alleged feminism in the movie is pretty minor. There is a shot (also used for the movie poster) that goes from between the killer’s legs with the drill pointing down to look like a dick, but that’s not all that different from Jason’s machete or Leatherface’s chainsaw (especially in part 2 where in one scene it’s almost more of a prosthetic penis than a phallic symbol). At the end one of the girls hacks the drill bit off with a machete and this makes the killer helpless, so the phallic thing is obviously not a coincidence. (more…)

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

Boys, boys, boys–

These last couple weeks have been tough on my mental facilities. I reviewed that great new “ULTIMATE” edition of the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, I also revisited parts 3 and 4 in that original series, then on Thursday I reviewed the new prequel to the remake. So by that point I’d studied and written about pretty much every angle to the whole Texas Chainsaw deal. You’d think I’d be done with it by now, but there is one final chapter: the one spinoff of the original movie that achieves its own level of True Greatness. I am talking about Tobe Hooper’s 1986 sequel, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2. It’s been available on DVD for a couple years in a bare bones edition (get it, that is a pun because of all the skeletons they have) but Tuesday it comes out in a much deserved special edition with new commentaries, featurettes and deleted scenes.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is my all time best buds forever horror movie, so it’s lucky for me that part 2 happens to be one of my all time favorite sequels. Mostly hated in its time, it has developed a little bit better of a reputation over the years and if it’s not at bona fide classic status by now I think it will be after this DVD gets around and more people give it serious consideration. Like Mr. Romero’s DEAD pictures Mr. Hooper here made a chainsaw movie to represent the time it was made, an excessive, over-the-top ’80s take on TCSM. While it’s about as unrelenting and in-your-face-crazy as slasher movies come, it’s also way more of a comedy than the original, so I can understand why some people didn’t cotton to it right away. But I think most horror fans who gave it half a chance would fall in love with its deranged brilliance.

A warning: it starts out iffy. The first thing you hear after the credits is the dated 1980s drum machine of a Timbuk3 song. And the first scene is about some obnoxious high school yuppie football fans driving down a Texas highway firing guns and calling the K-OKLA request line, announcing themselves as “Buzz” and “Rick the Prick.” Like in many bad horror movies (especially of that era) these are characters that you will probaly want to see get killed. If so you will get your wish when the two assholes get stalked by an American flag-decked pickup truck that they played chicken with earlier. Leatherface makes his entrance hidden behind “Nubbins,” the new name for the hitchhiker’s rotted corpse, which he uses as a puppet while sawing their Mercedes. (more…)

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