Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010
VISITING HOURS is up there with the best slasher movies I’ve seen. You think you’ve pretty much exhausted them and then you find out a gem like this that was sitting there all throughout the 1980s, its distinctive VHS box staring at you from the optical illusion eye sockets of its hospital room windows lit in skull formation. I knew that image like I knew my own hands but it never once occurred to me to ask “What is this movie? Should I watch it?” Not until you guys recommended it to me for the hundredth time. So thanks for that.
Some might consider this more suspense thriller than horror. It’s different from a HALLOWEEN or a FRIDAY THE 13TH because there’s nothing supernatural, there’s no mask, we know alot about the killer and he’s not a monster or a legend. He’s just a crazy weirdo who’s slipped through the cracks so far. But I consider it a slasher movie because it has a whole lot of the classic tropes: woman-hating maniac with sexual hangups on a knife rampage, suspenseful stalking sequences, upsetting murders, strong female victims-turned heroes. Carol J. Clover must not’ve known about this one either or she would’ve been all over it in Men, Women, and Chain Saws. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Canadian, hospital horror, Michael Ironside, Slasher Search, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 42 Comments »
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
LINK is a really unusual horror picture that starts out like a normal monster movie (POV of unknown beast crawls into a little girl’s room at night) but succeeds by avoiding any of the obvious formulas. Terence THE LIMEY Stamp plays Dr. Phillip, an eccentric professor at London College known for his books and lectures about primates. Academy Award nominee Elizabeth Shue (PIRANHA 3D, THE HOLLOW MAN) plays Jane, an American student who wants to learn from him and manages to become his assistant, staying at his remote property where he does IQ experiments with his apes Imp, Voodoo and Link. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Elizabeth Shue, Everett De Roche, primate horror, Richard Franklin, Terence Stamp
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 34 Comments »
Thursday, October 21st, 2010
You know John-Rhys Davies? I believe he’s the dwarf in the Lords of the Rings, but he’s best remembered as Sallah, loyal friend in the Indiana Jones pictures and passionate explainer of seatbelts in the Indiana Jones Disneyland ride. IN THE SHADOW OF KILIMANJARO is the story of Sallah’s further adventures as a mine operator in Kenya. The credits don’t call him Sallah, they call him “Chris Tucker.” But you tell me which is more likely: John Rhys-Davies is playing Sallah again, or John Rhys-Davies is playing Chris Tucker? I rest my case.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chris Tucker, John Rhys-Davies, primate horror, Timothy Bottoms
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 47 Comments »
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010
Episode 2.3: “Crossfire”
As the episode opens Seagal explains that one of their duties is to protect the public from “bad guys” who drink and get rowdy. Once again the Seagal Squad report to the scene of a truck shot full of holes, this time owned by white people for once. Around the corner there’s another vehicle shot up, this one with two people inside, but they say they didn’t see anything. Seagal gently narrates that they have a “street code” that prevents them from telling the cops anything. There’s also a long shot of a stop sign, possibly a reference to the street code and smoke shop t-shirt phenomenon known as “stop snitching.”
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Seagalogy
Posted in Crime, Documentary, Reviews, Seagal | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010
I never really thought about this before, but I think maybe there’s such a thing as Upper Class Horror. Alot of the horror movies are about the middle class, kids from the suburbs, babysitters, etc. The kids in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE driving around in that van probly don’t have a ton of money. And you got some working class horror here and there, some of the Romero movies, or different ones about cops or whatever. In PSYCHO you have a secretary desperate for money and a guy running a dying motel business. DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE the guy incinerates trash for a living.
But Upper Class Horror would be the ones about professors and celebrities and what not. THE EXORCIST, DON’T LOOK BACK, THE SENTINEL, these are movies about people with money. The men wear suits and ties. The heroines don’t have to get up and go to work every day. When they think they’re going crazy they have the luxury of just worrying about getting better, not about how they’re gonna pay the medical bills. They have the best doctors. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Michael Winner, Upper Class Horror
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 66 Comments »
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
The original MIRRORS (Alexandre Aja’s American remake of the Korean movie INTO THE MIRROR) was a pretty good little b-movie. Kiefer Sutherland played a troubled night watchman at a fire-damaged department store who starts seeing creepy things in the building’s mirrors, causes his estranged wife to believe he’s lost his mind, solves a mystery and faces down a curse or something. But that story left alot of questions unanswered, for example “What if a different troubled individual worked as a night watchman in a different not-currently-open branch of the same department store chain where a different bad thing happened, so he has to solve a different mystery about what the mirror wants, and kind of on a smaller scale as if it were being filmed on a smaller budget?”
Well, wonder no more, friends. MIRRORS 2 answers that question with fierce adequacy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, Nick Stahl, William Katt
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
Episode 2.1 “They Drive By Night”
The second season of LAWMAN opens with a kick to the balls – not literally, unfortunately, but still a surprisingly eventful opening. Seagal and his partners have responded to a call for an erratic driver going around with his lights off, hitting mailboxes. They catch up with the car and see it going the wrong way in traffic. You can hear officers yelling “No!” sounding seriously distressed. Many of these episodes have Seagal just showing up to the scene where other officers already have things under control, but here the camera captures a head-on collision over Seagal’s shoulder. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Seagalogy
Posted in Crime, Documentary, Reviews, Seagal | 12 Comments »
Monday, October 18th, 2010
In my opinion, slugs is not necessarily one of the top 5 scariest types of monsters to use in a horror movie. I know, I know, but hear me out. I have a right to my own opinion, no matter how unpopular or vile. Please be respectful of this open forum.
So here is the reason why: they’re fucking slugs! They can barely move. They are smooshable. You can kill them just by putting salt on them. They don’t even have a shell to hide in, like a snail. They ordinarily pose no threat to anyone or anything except for your garden. Even then they are not really that hard to deal with. I guess maybe if this movie was told from the point of view of a vegetable it would be one thing, but it’s not, it’s humans. Hard for a human to be scared of slugs. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: J.P. Simon
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 50 Comments »
Saturday, October 16th, 2010
After their disagreements over A BETTER TOMORROW 2, John Woo and Tsui Hark weren’t able to work together on part 3. But they both wanted to do a Vietnam war era prequel, so Woo took his and made it BULLET IN THE HEAD, Hark made A BETTER TOMORROW III: LOVE AND DEATH IN SAIGON. As far as artistic success I’d say Woo definitely won that battle, but at least Tsui got to clean up in the getting-to-hang-out-with-Chow-Yun-Fat department. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anita Mui, Chow Yun Fat, Hong Kong action, Tony Leung, Tsui Hark
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 22 Comments »
Friday, October 15th, 2010
A BETTER TOMORROW II is a crazy fuckin sequel. The story is incredibly convoluted, the plot (or plots) divided between Hong Kong and New York, continuing the story of Ho, Kit and Jackie, but also following a new character called Uncle Lung (Dean Shek) in conflict with the police and with two unrelated crime syndicates. The weirdest (and best) part is that they actually used the gimmick that’s always joked about but almost never actually done: Chow Yun Fat plays Ken, the never-mentioned-before-twin-brother of his deceased part 1 character Mark. I probly don’t have to say any more than that to convince you this movie is stupid. I liked it though. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chow Yun Fat, Dean Shek, Hong Kong action, John Woo, Leslie Cheung, Ti Lung, Tsui Hark
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews | 42 Comments »
