Posts Tagged ‘cannibals’
Friday, October 28th, 2022
I was aware of this 2009 movie REYKJAVIK WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE (retitled HARPOON: WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE for us ignorant Americans) because it’s an Icelandic movie that has that title and then Leatherface himself, Gunnar Hansen is in it. Sounded like a spoof, I thought, but it’s not. It certainly has humor in it, but so does that other movie Hansen is most famous for. This is a solid, legit horror movie, with an extra layer of meaning if you’re a TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE obsessive like me.
I finally watched it for a different reason: the screenplay is by the Icelandic writer Sjón, a.k.a. Sjón Sigurdsson. He grew up with Björk and wrote some songs with her (including the Oscar-nominated “I’ve Seen it All” from DANCER IN THE DARK), and sometimes performed with the Sugarcubes under the name Johnny Triumph. But also he’s a poet, novelist and screenwriter, and after decades of all that he finally caught my attention this year by co-writing THE NORTHMAN with Robert Eggers. That’s still my #2 movie of 2022 so I figured shit, I oughta watch his horror movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Gunnar Hansen, Guorun Gisladottir, Iceland, Julius Kemp, Nae, Pihla Viitala, Sjon, Snorri Engilbertsson, Terence Anderson
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Friday, May 13th, 2022
“Just like you said, the wind’s shifting. Everyone’s gonna get it.”
At the 65th Academy Awards, the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar went to a French film – the historical drama INDOCHINE. I’m sure it was great, but people like me didn’t know to pay attention to movies like that. We paid attention to the French film that we heard was really cool looking and darkly funny and had something to do with cannibalism. That was DELICATESSEN, the feature debut of directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro, which Miramax released in the U.S. on April 3, 1992, a year after it came out in France.
I don’t know how many screens it played on, because it didn’t make enough to show up on the box office charts, but I think it traveled around for a while. I remember seeing ads for it at the arthouse theaters – it was a much discussed cult movie of its time. Since this is maybe the most interesting of the April releases that kept playing into the summer it seemed like the best way to kick off this 1992 – Weird Summer series. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Dharius Khondji, Dominique Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, post-apocalyptic
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Wednesday, October 27th, 2021
MACABRE (RUMAH DARA) is a 2009 Indonesian cannibal movie. It’s the first feature directed by “The Mo Brothers,” a.k.a. Kimo Stamboel (THE QUEEN OF BLACK MAGIC) and Timo Tjahjanto (THE NIGHT COMES FOR US). It starts out confident and unassuming and by the end has accumulated a DIE HARD level of injury and a nearly EVIL DEAD amount of blood.
In the grand horror tradition, a group of young people get stranded somewhere bad and have to escape. It goes down when Adjie (Ario Bayu, GUNDALA) and his pregnant wife Astrid (Sigi Wimala, SATRIA DEWA: GATOTKACA) take a road trip with their doofus friends. Jimmy (Daniel Mananta, A MAN CALLED AHOK) is pretty straight-laced, but Eko (Dendy Subangil, SANG DEWI) is the horny loud mouth who embarrasses them and makes them uncomfortable, and Alam is kind of the crazy one. That’s established when he threatens some guys at a bar for sexually harassing their waitress, Adjie’s sister Ladya (Julie Estelle, “Hammer Girl” from THE RAID 2!). It seems like a very successful stare down until he turns around and gets a bottle smashed over his head. So for the whole movie he’s wearing a large bandage on his head that’s completely unrelated to the horror movie stuff that happens. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arifin Putra, Ario Bayu, cannibals, chainsaw fight, Daniel Mananta, Dendy Subangil, Imelda Therinne, Indonesia, Julie Estelle, Kimo Stamboel, Mo Brothers, Ruly Lubis, Shareefa Daanish, slashers, Timo Tjahjanto
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Thursday, October 1st, 2020
You may not know this, because I’ve worked really hard to keep it on the down low, but Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 are some of my favorite movies. And although I don’t like any of the other chapters in the Texas Chainsaw Cinematical Franchise Property (TCCFP) nearly as much as those two, I know that for as long as they keep making them I will keep watching them and possibly kind of liking some things about them. That’s just my way. It’s what I do.
To date there are eight (8) official entries in the series:
• The two Tobe Hooper films (1974 and 1986) – Preeminent works of cinematic greatness.
• LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III (1990) – I thought it was laughable at the time, but kind of liked certain things about it on various rewatches.
• TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION (1995 sequel to the 1974 original written and directed by its co-writer Kim Henkel) – I was sorely disappointed at the time, but liked it a little more upon my last rewatch.
• THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003 remake) – I violently despised this at the time, but may give it another shot some day as a gesture of grace and compassion.
• THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING (2006 prequel to 2003 remake) – Didn’t like that one either.
• TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D (2013 sequel only to 1974 original) – This one is so fuckin stupid, but I got a kick out of it the way I would a lesser FRIDAY THE 13TH sequel.
• LEATHERFACE (2017 prequel to 1974 original) – I liked this one quite a bit. Though it’s a different sort of thing (a criminals on the run movie) and makes a few choices that bug me as a CHAIN SAW purist, it’s probly the most worthy non-Hooper one.
BUT WAIT A MINUTE – did you know that I’m missing one on that list, a 2012 the-names-and-details-have-been-changed type unofficial sequel written and produced by Henkel? Somehow I never heard about it until very recently, when JK tipped me off in the comments for my NEXT GENERATION review. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ali Faulkner, cannibals, Duane Graves, Johnny Walter, Jonathan Swift, Justin Meeks, Kim Henkel, Matt Hensarling, Sonny Carl Davis, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tory Taranova, unofficial sequel
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Thursday, October 31st, 2019
THE HILLS HAVE EYES is not my favorite Wes Craven movie, but in a certain sense it’s one of his purest. It has that LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT maniac-college-professor vibe – another raw, seedy gut-punch of a drive-in movie layered with completely sincere themes and social commentary. And it’s a little more fantastical than LAST HOUSE, with less straight up degradation, so I don’t feel as ashamed for liking it.
Instead of a gang of criminals we have a literal tribe of modern primitives – the wicked spawn of Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth, THE CANDY SNATCHERS), born “40 pounds and hairy as a monkey” in Nevada, mutated by nuclear tests and the nearby Air Force gunnery range, grew to adult size too fast, burned down his parents’ home, his dad split his face open with a tire iron and left him in the desert to die, but he survived in the hills and kidnapped some poor prostitute (Cordy Clark) “to raise a passel of wild kids” with. They wear animal parts and pieces of junk as trophies, and like the buzzards in the sky they stay above, keeping watch below, waiting to see what the highway brings them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Dee Wallace, Don Peake, James Whitworth, Janus Blythe, Martin Speer, Michael Berryman, Peter Locke, Robert Burns, Robert Houston, Russ Grieve, Susan Lanier, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, January 5th, 2016
Before THE HATEFUL EIGHT, Kurt Russell first teamed with his crazy mustache on a different ensemble western with bursts of outrageously brutal violence. BONE TOMAHAWK is kinda like a John Wayne movie that happens to bump into CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST for a minute. But don’t get too excited about that high mash up concept. For the most part it’s a straight up western, for people who enjoy westerns. It’s just that it’s got a scene or two that might make a few of those guys spit out their coffee.
In the opening scene two murderous bandits, Buddy (Sid Haig) and Purvis (David Arquette), trespass on some kind of skull-decorated burial ground that Indiana Jones might be able to tell them about. They were just talking about what’s proper to do with the Bibles of the travelers they murdered on the road, but they do not show the same concern for this particular culture. Anyway, they get into some trouble, you could say.
Purvis escapes and makes it into the town of Bright Hope, where he is not welcome, and quickly ends up shot and arrested by Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Russell). But during the night some kind of savages attack the jail, tearing one man apart and abducting Purvis, a deputy (Evan Jonigkeit, Toad from X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST), and a local doctor (Lili Simmons, who I guess is on Banshee, but I honestly thought she was Katherine Heigl). She was at the jail to attend to Purvis’s bullet, and yes, for the record she drops the slug into a metal canister. Anyway she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, she gets abducted. Most of the movie is about the rescue party traveling to cannibal territory to try to get them all back. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, David Arquette, Evan Jonigkeit, Kurt Russell, Lili Simmons, Matthew Fox, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins, S. Craig Zahler, Sid Haig, Zahn McClarnon
Posted in Reviews, Western | 46 Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2015
Eli Roth is one of the few name brands in modern horror. That’s weird because THE GREEN INFERNO is his first directorial work released in eight years. He’s spent more time producing and writing (the non-horror MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS being his most notable in that area in my opinion) and he was an Inglorious Basterd and what not. But as a director this is only his fourth film. At this point in John Carpenter’s career he was on his twelfth film, PRINCE OF DARKNESS.
I’m glad to have him back though because I’ve liked all of his movies. I remember CABIN FEVER being fun when I saw it at a midnight show, and though I had mixed feelings when I first saw HOSTEL it has grown on me on further viewings. And I especially like HOSTEL PART II, which I think is very underrated, even something of a modern horror classic.
Roth has always been one to talk worshipfully about the Italian horror directors, not just arty Argento but the slimy guys out in the jungle filming muddy maggot ridden zombies and cannibal savages cutting open ancient tortoises. So this is his tribute to those movies, his story of western travelers intruding on the territory of indigenous people who have, you know… different customs.
In the old ones they carried film cameras to make documentaries, these kids carry smart phones to livestream what’s happening. (Don’t worry, it has no found footage elements.) They come as activists trying to stop a corporation from plowing down the rain forest and the people inside it to get to the natural gas underneath. Or “unobtainium,” let’s call it. But their small plane crashes and leaves them stranded near the village, where they are manhandled, poisoned, caged, carved, cooked, eaten, etc. by a fictional Peruvian tribe (portrayed primarily by indigenous farmers who had never left their village deep in the Amazon). The captives plan and fight amongst themselves and try to escape. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Burns, Ariel Levy, cannibals, Daryl Sabara, Eli Roth, Ernesto Diaz Espinoza, Lorenza Izzo, Peru, rain forest, Sky Ferreira
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 56 Comments »
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (Somos lo que hay) is a one of a kind horror movie out of Mexico. Well, it was one of a kind until they just did an American remake, but it sounds like they changed things up for that one anyway.
The story in the original begins with a man stumbling through an upscale outdoor shopping center, coughing up blood and dying on the pavement, and nobody trying to help him. He kinda seems like he might be homeless, but he’s not. He has a wife and three kids to not come home to. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Mexico
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
I never heard of this one until I saw THE WOMAN. If you didn’t hear, Lucky McKee came up with that one because he saw OFFSPRING and was impressed by Pollyanna McIntosh’s portrayal of the feral, cannibalistic savage also called The Woman. OFFSPRING itself is an adaptation of a book by Jack Ketchum, which is in fact a sequel to another book called Off Season. So after I loved THE WOMAN so much I decided to read those.
In Off Season (published in 1980) a group of vacationers on the coast of Maine are attacked by a tribe of inbred savages. Like THE HILLS HAVE EYES this is a story inspired by the legend of the Sawney Beane Clan, cave-dwelling inbred cannibals who may or may not have terrorized 15th or 16th-century Scotland. The tribe in Off Season like to storm cabins, bash people over the heads, slit ’em open, take their favorite organs, or sometimes drag people back to their cave. They cook up body parts and eat ’em, collect bones, torture people, shit like that. They steal babies and raise them as their own. Their culture is very different from ours. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, DTV, Jack Ketchum, Pollyanna McIntosh
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Saturday, January 5th, 2013
About a third of the way into TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D, when the sound of the heroes’ van rolling off the road faded and I realized that everybody else in the theater was laughing too, it was clear we were on the same page. This is a dumb fucking movie, but we’re enjoying it. That’s not what I want from a sequel to my favorite horror movie of all time, but it’s about the best I hoped for. So I’m chalking this up as a win.
I have long considered Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE to not exist, and now I’ve been proven right. If there really was a remake (and a prequel to the remake) then how do you explain this being a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper’s original 1974 masterpiece, smart guy? Nope. No remake. If there ever was one it doesn’t matter ’cause there isn’t anymore.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 3D, Alexandra Daddario, Bill Moseley, cannibals, John Dugan, John Luessenhop, Marilyn Burns, Scott Eastwood, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 74 Comments »
