Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category
Tuesday, December 15th, 2020
BLOOD BEAT (1983) is another Christmas-set (as opposed to Christmas-themed) horror movie that I watched on Shudder. This one I had heard of as a notably crazy movie, and I knew it had been released on blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome. It’s about a family being stalked by the spirit of a samurai. I believe.
It’s a low budget movie shot in Wisconsin – on film, though. Don’t worry. It has a little bit of the awkwardness and amateurishness that can make regional horror charming, which serves to make it more impressive when some of it seems pretty legit. The lead couple give fairly natural performances, the most inconsistent actor turns out to be an endearing character anyway, things that wouldn’t be impressive in a bigger production – like a guy jumping through a window and hitting the ground, or getting a nice shot of the fog or a frozen lake – seem triumphant. And it’s very weird. Sometimes in a goofy way, usually in a pretty cool way. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: ghosts, regional horror, samurai, Wisconsin
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2020
I’ve got this problem that I always want some good Christmas horror movies I haven’t seen before, but also I assume any of them coming out this century are gonna be boring, cheap garbage. Yes, KRAMPUS (2015) is semi-recent and has become an annual tradition for me already, but does that mean I should give a shot to the unrelated KRAMPUS: THE CHRISTMAS DEVIL (2014), KRAMPUS: THE RECKONING (2015), KRAMPUS: THE DEVIL RETURNS (2016), KRAMPUS UNLEASHED (2016) or KRAMPUS: ORIGINS (2018)? So far I have assumed no. In this same spirit, I was curious, but didn’t make it a priority, to watch the 2010 Dutch killer Santa type movie SAINT NICK (also released here as SAINT, originally SINT).
And then this year happened! Not the bad stuff, but the stuff where I finally caught on to the Dutch writer/director/composer Dick Maas. I enjoyed his killer elevator movie DE LIFT/THE LIFT (1983), his scuba-action-slasher AMSTERDAMNED (1988), his killer elevator English-language remake DOWN (2001) and his killer lion loose in Amsterdam movie PROOIL/UNCAGED (2016). So, okay buddy, I trust you to make a Christmas horror movie now. I’m ready. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bert Luppes, Christmas, Christmas horror, Dick Maas, Huub Stapel
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2020
I remember the sci-fi/horror movie PANDORUM coming out – I thought it was more recent than 2009, but that’s how it goes – and I don’t think I heard anything good about it. It was not something that was on my list to see until I found out Cung Le was in it, and then it still took me years to get to it. But now I can report that, though certainly not perfect, this is a very interesting space movie with lots of cool ideas. It’s in English with a decent budget and stars Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid, but director Christian Alvart is the German guy who did the serial killer movie ANTIBODIES. So it’s gonna be a little more off-kilter than most movies produced by Paul W.S.Anderson.
It has some overlap with what I call the Space Loneliness movies, because it’s about some people waking up from hypersleep during a 123 year interstellar trip. It’s different, though, because they’re not just the small crew of one ship like DARK STAR, ALIEN, BLOOD MACHINES, etc. The Elysium is built to carry much of the earth’s population to a new home on the planet Tanis, so it’s enormous, and when they run into other people they’ve never met them before. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antje Traue, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet, Christian Alvart, Cung Le, Dennis Quaid, Eddie Rouse, Paul W.S. Anderson, Travis Milloy
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, November 25th, 2020
Neither MIMIC or MIMIC 2 seemed to go over all that well, but that didn’t stop Dimension Films from releasing MIMIC 3: SENTINEL in 2003. This is probly my favorite of the three, and at the very least it deserves high marks for taking advantage of the pre-sold nature of the format to take a weird left turn, not at all the lower-budget-rehash approach of so many DTV sequels. It follows a drastically different template: the Hitchcockian voyeur thriller. It even uses a quasi-Saul Bass movie poster font for the title. But it doesn’t feel like they took an old suspense thriller script and grafted a bug man onto it, because it ties into and builds off of the world of MIMIC in smart and interesting ways.
This one is written and directed by J.T. Petty, whose THE BURROWERS I’ve been meaning to check out forever. He also did SOFT FOR DIGGING (a $5,000 student feature that I believe got him this gig), S&MANand HELLBENDERS. Here he’s made a movie that kind of feels like it comes out of the same school as early Soderbergh or Nolan – the hyper-intelligent indie guys that were more into old noirs than drive-in movies. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alexis Dziena, Amanda Plummer, Donald A. Wollheim, J.T. Petty, John Kapelos, Karl Geary, Keith Robinson, Lance Henriksen, Rebecca Mader
Posted in Horror, Monster, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, November 24th, 2020
One thing we’ve learned from sci-fi and horror films is that monsters and weird things find ways to survive, to evolve, to adapt, to keep coming back. It was true in the case of the Judas Breed, a bug genetically engineered by Dr. Susan Tyler to be a sellout traitor that kills off the diseased roaches of the Manhattan sewers and then dies out, that instead managed to squirt out tens of thousands of generations in a couple years and evolve into a six foot termite-mantis that can mimic the shape of a human to survive on the streets. It was also the case with the MIMIC movie series itself. Guillermo Del Toro and the Miramax marketing department created an identifiable enough brand, the Weinsteins or somebody okayed a direct-to-video sequel, and with a third of the budget and no need to attract box office I suspect it was able to be hatched with less of their scrutiny and meddling. While MIMIC is an interesting movie that doesn’t entirely deliver as slick mainstream entertainment, its sequels are in a good position to exceed expectations. They’re better than you fear and different than you expect, thus fulfilling the potential of the DTV sequel format. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alix Koromzay, Bill Cho Lee, Bruno Campos, DTV sequels, Edward Albert, Gary J. Tunnicliffe, Jean de Segonzac, Joel Soisson, Jon Polito
Posted in Horror, Monster, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 11 Comments »
Monday, November 23rd, 2020
It really didn’t occur to me, when I decided to finally rewatch MIMIC, that it was a movie about a pandemic. One of the main characters is the deputy director of the CDC! But it’s not at all similar to the pandemic we’re currently in – “Strickler’s Disease” seems to only affect children, putting them in comas. Because it’s spread by cockroaches, aforementioned CDC guy Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam, THE NET, AMISTAD, THE INVASION) recruits a brilliant entomologist, Dr. Susan Tyler (then-recent Oscar winner Mira Sorvino, between ROMY AND MICHELE’S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION and THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS), who comes up with a novel plan: she genetically engineers a new bug called the “Judas Breed” that infiltrates cockroach colonies and pukes up a bunch of enzymes that increase their metabolism so they starve to death. Give the roaches a disease to stop them from giving us one.
Three years later, Strickler’s disease has been wiped out, the two doctors are married, and everything seems fine, except weird shit is happening under Manhattan. A mysterious vagrant type guy drags a priest underground, and only an autistic kid named Chuy (Alexander Goodwin) witnesses it. Chuy’s guardian Manny (Giancarlo Giannini, BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA) is a shoe shiner, so the kid has become affixed on people’s footwear, and for some reason he calls this attacker “Mr. Funny Shoes.” I don’t know why, but that’s one of my favorite details in the movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alix Koromzay, Charles S. Dutton, Dan Laustsen, Donald A. Wollheim, F. Murray Abraham, Giancarlo Giannini, Guillermo Del Toro, James Costa, Jeremy Northam, Josh Brolin, Matthew Robbins, Mira Sorvino, Miramax, Norman Reedus, Ole Bornedal, the god damn Weinsteins
Posted in Horror, Monster, Reviews | 23 Comments »
Thursday, November 19th, 2020
HIS HOUSE is a horror movie that recently went straight to Netflix. The kind that played Sundance and that critics love (I just checked and it’s still 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes after 82 reviews). That’s about all I knew about it, which is a luxury we have during this time when many of the big movies go straight to streaming. I like and recommend watching movies blind when you can, but this is a review, so here we go.
It’s about a refugee couple who escape South Sudan and are given a temporary home on the outskirts of London, only to find something evil there. It’s one of these stories that relates supernatural happenings to trauma and makes the line sort of blurry for the characters so they don’t at first know which one they’re experiencing. It benefits from great leads and strong direction by rookie Remi Weekes (also writer, with a story credit to Felicity Evans & Toby Venables). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: apeth, Felicity Evans, refugees, Remi Weekes, Sope Dirisu, Toby Venables, witches, Wunmi Mosaku
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Monday, November 9th, 2020
Well, now that that’s taken care of…
November 9th, especially one right after an election week that makes Halloween seem like two months ago, is not necessarily the optimal time to review a movie that takes place on Halloween. But I felt this particular seasonal viewing was strong enough it should be entered into the record.
The title HAUNT doesn’t refer to ghosts, but the term for “haunted houses” or horror mazes that have grown in sophistication and popularity in recent non-pandemic years. There seem to be many of them in the L.A. area, judging from the horror podcasts I listen to, and I think there’s a documentary about them. They’ve evolved from the old fake spider webs and a guy jumping out in a Leatherface mask to “extreme haunts” where you have to sign a waiver because they’re really going to try to make you uncomfortable. This is a film about a group of college age friends who end up at one of those places after a Halloween party. They don’t know they’re in a horror movie, but we do, so we’re more tense than they are waiting to find out which danger is not fake.
There are a bunch of similarly themed and named movies of recent vintage – this is the 2019 American one with a clown mask on the poster. I didn’t know until afterwards that writer/directors Scott Beck & Bryan Woods are the guys that wrote A QUIET PLACE. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Lewis Caldwell, Bryan Woods, extreme haunt, Katie Stevens, Samuel Hunt, Schuyler Helford, Scott Beck, Shazi Raja, Will Brittain
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 11 Comments »
Thursday, November 5th, 2020
First of all, kudos to CHROMESKULL: LAID TO REST 2 for getting so close to the RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II naming scheme. If it only used Roman numerals it would match BRADDOCK: MISSING IN ACTION III. Or I guess LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III.
Despite that titelistical swagger, I found the sequel pretty disappointing. The pacing, limited locations and somewhat grimmer tone make it way less entertaining than the first one, but it’s at least admirable that it’s not at all a rehash and that it adds a bunch of weird new stuff to the mythology. I respect that. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Allison Kyler, Brian Austin Green, Danielle Harris, Jessica Cannon, Johnathon Schaech, Nick Principe, Owain Yeoman, Thomas Dekker
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, November 4th, 2020
You know I love the slasher movies, but I admit that part of their magic is that most of them are transmissions from a bygone era. The ineffable chemistry of eager Hollywood outsiders trying to jump onto a specific bandwagon, either with great passion or comically overconfident cynicism, sometimes in some obscure neck of the woods we’ve never seen in a movie before, often with the freshness/awkwardness of beginners who don’t necessarily know the cinematic rules they’re breaking, is frozen in time on beautiful (or beautifully ugly) 35mm (or even 16mm) film. Most of that can’t be re-created in a computer lab. Usually when they try it looks too clean, also too cheap, they try to avoid needing many makeup FX, they’re too self conscious, or too gloomy, or too fucking boring. I’m generally suspicious of the new shit. This is all to explain why it took me eleven years to get around to LAID TO REST. In my defense it was released in 2009, the twilight of the nu metal era, with a metal skull on the cover. It was easy to make assumptions.
During the opening credits I was ready to write it off. It has the ingredients of a cool NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET style montage of the film’s wannabe-slasher-icon ChromeSkull (Nick Principe, “Slick,” AGENT CODY BARKS) preparing his implements (a shiny skull mask, a bunch of surgical tools, a camcorder), but it’s annoyingly smothered in corny fake glitches, Avid farts and shaky video of screaming and torture and shit. It lists the bands that are gonna be featured on the soundtrack before a naked lady gets graphically cut open. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Johnathon Schaech, Kevin Gage, Lena Headey, Lucas Till, Nick Principe, Richard Lynch, Robert Hall, Sean Whalen, Thomas Dekker
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 18 Comments »
