Posts by David Annandale

Having accidentally caused the death of her mother, Helen (Jenny Neumann) develops an unhealthy fixation with broken glass. Now an adult and an aspiring actress, she auditions for a role in an absurdist play. She gets the part, and also the attention of her handsome co-star. But then someone starts killing off the cast and crew of the play. Is it Helen?

Three children are born at the moment of a total solar eclipse. On the even of their tenth birthday party, we discover that these kids, for astrological reasons, are complete sociopaths, and are having a merry time offing anyone in the community who even vaguely annoys them. The only ones who even gradually suspect that something is going on are high school senior Joyce (Lori Lethen) and her little brother Timmy (K. C. Martel). They soon become the target of the psycho kids’ wrath.

Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) is a social worker with a new case, one that she specifically sought. She has been assigned to the Wadsworth family. It consists of a terrifying matriarch (Ruth Roman), sexpot daughters Germaine (Marianna Hill) and Alba (Suzanne Zenor), and Baby (David Mooney, credited as David Manzy), a grown man with, apparently, the mental development of an infant. But Ann suspects Baby is capable of more, and that there is something fundamentally wrong going on at the Wadsworth residence. The Wadsworths, meanwhile, do not take kindly to Ann’s prying, and will stop at nothing to preserve their way of life.

The third BloodRayne film (and second with Nastassia Malthe in the title role) sees the titular dhampir slicing up Nazis, and so the chronology of the third film rejoins that of the first game. During a raid on a death camp train, Rayne accidentally infects a Commandant Michael Paré. Becoming a dhampir himself (a human/vampire hybrid), he and Mengele-figure Clint Howard (because who else are you going to cast as a Nazi scientist other than Clint Howard?) plan to use Rayne’s blood to grant Hitler immortality.

Renée Zellweger is Jane, a former country singer who has lost the will to live since an accident left her in a wheelchair. Forest Whitaker is Joey, who can talk to angels and ghosts since he witnessed the death by fire of his family. These two wounded souls bond and bicker, and when Joey finds a letter from Jane’s son, whom she gave up for adoption years ago, he decides that she must see him.

Rango (Johnny Depp) is a chameleon with an enormous imagination. In his terrarium, he has developed a social network with inanimate objects that would be the envy of Castaway’s Tom Hanks. He essentially lives inside his head, but then reality (perhaps – the film maintains a certain ambiguity here) suddenly intervenes and he finds himself cast from his safe, hermetic world. Marooned in the desert, he arrives in the town of Dirt, where his inclination for the dramatic has him claiming to be a sharp-shooting, quick-drawing hero.

MGM's Limited Edition Collection heads into enjoyable but far-from-classic territory with this goofy horror tale. Tom Selleck is an art historian living in the Philippines with his in-therapy wife (Barra Grant). He buys a painting (supposed to be centuries old, but looking for all the world as if it were commissioned for a motel) that depicts witches being burned, and the central witch bears an uncanny resemblance to Grant. Then the weirdness begins.

This is a biopic about two very obscure people whose relationship has escaped the attention of all but a select few. All kidding aside, what we have here is a dramatization of how the heir to the British throne (Nico Evers-Swindell) meets Kate Middleton (Camilla Luddington), and how their romance gradually blossoms. He arrives at university, and every blue-blooded young woman has him in her sights, but it is, naturally, the down-to-earth girl who draws him, the turning point being when she shows that she’s sexy as well as smart during a student fashion show.

Courtesy of the website of the same name (check it out at http://trailersfromhell.com/index.php) comes this collection of trailers of horror, SF and exploitation films. The collection is eclectic, following no particular theme (though there are several Hammer films present), and the era covered ranges from 1941 (The Invisible Ghost with Bela Lugosi) to 1998 (Trauma’s Terror Firmer). Present are the likes of The Devil-Ship Pirates, Gorgo, Donovan’s Brain, Deep Red, Flesh Gordon, and so on. Twenty altogether.

The setting is a comfortably large house in the English countryside. Kin and friends have gathered for the funeral of the family patriarch bringing with them their foibles, eccentricities, and disasters waiting to happen. At the centre are the two brothers, Daniel and Troy (Matthew MacFayden and Rupert Graves). The former struggles under the shadow of his famous brother’s success as a writer, his plight encapsulated by the fact that everyone in attendance is disappointed that Troy will not be giving the eulogy. But his problems are about to become much, much greater, as the funeral descends into a chaos of unwelcome revelations, blackmail, drug freak-outs.