Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 18th, 2009
“You may only see it once but that will be enough”
That was the marketing slogan for the first Friday The 13th film in 1980. Apparently they couldn’t have been more wrong, because most of us have seen the film countless times, and no, it was never enough. The franchise would thrive with over 10 sequels or affiliated films, taking us right up to the present remake/reboot of that very first outing at Camp Crystal Lake. No, my friends, once was never going to be enough.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on February 13th, 2009
What a great time it was to be a teen in the late 1970’s. No, I’m not referring to disco music. It was a great time to go to the movies. It was the culmination of the perfect date, and Hollywood was riding the beginning of a trend that remains alive and healthy today. I’m talking, of course, about the slasher film. You could argue that Hitchcock started the ball rolling in 1961 with Psycho, but it would be decades before that film would find its true audience and plethora of imitators. Although The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween came before Friday The 13th, can it be argued that any horror film franchise is as widely known? The truth is that even the man behind the film, Sean Cunningham, never really knew what it was that he had. It was never his intent to follow the film with a barrage of sequels. He also scoffed at the idea that Jason could become the centerpiece for future films. By now Jason has become such an iconic character that there is an entire generation out there that doesn’t know that Jason wasn’t the culprit in the first film. Jason’s stature has reached the heights of the classic monsters of the Universal days. While some of us hesitate to put his name and hockey mask up there with the likes of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, and The Mummy, the recognition and sheer dollars generated make it difficult not to. By the beginning of the 1980’s names like Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers would be scaring audiences around the world, rendering the classics somewhat silly in the eyes of a more visceral generation of teens.
It’s hard to believe, but in 1980 the slasher formula had yet to be born. And while Halloween laid down the foundation, this was the house that Jason built. By now it’s all old hat. You know exactly how it’s supposed to happen. There have been spoofs like the Scream series where these rules and expectations have been lampooned. It’s a shame, really, if you never got to see Friday The 13th before this style was so bloodily ingrained in your head. A group of teens gather at a lakeside campground in remote New Jersey. The camp was the scene of a horrific accident and subsequent murder rampage some 5 years earlier. Now someone wants to reopen the place the locals refer to as Camp Blood, but which moviegoers would long remember as Camp Crystal Lake. Despite warnings from the townsfolk, the teens gather to whip the place in shape for a summer filled with kids and fun. But on a stormy first night these teens would be eliminated one by one in “Ten Little Indians” fashion at the hands of a brutal killer. Victims would meet their ends under the most bizarre of circumstances. They would find themselves axed, skewered, and slashed. And as you know by now, but didn’t then, one will survive. The film would end with one of the most clever and effective jump scenes in movie history. No one knew then that a short epilogue intended only to deliver one final kick in the spine would give birth to one of the most infamous monsters in screen history.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 31st, 2009
It’s 1980. The Reagan Years are upon you. The country is hopeful it will soon come out of the toilet bowl it was in for the last four years, and while things may seem bleak, you’re one of the lucky ones that still have a job, a girl, and a reason to live. As April becomes May and the days grow considerably hotter a little at a time, what better way to take a break from it all than driving you and your sweetie down to the local movie house for opening night of a new horror film you really haven’t heard all that much about entitled Friday the 13th?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 24th, 2009
“They’re longtime friends on separate life paths, but they share a horrific destination, where a seemingly innocent incident from their school days comes back to terrify them. Something, someone wants payback.”
If there was an award for cramming the most horror movie conventions into one film, Amusement should win it hands down. You’ve seen it all before: young couple stranded on a trip, that pesky rural shortcut, psycho truck driver, isolated house in the woods, spooky gothic looking hotel, ingenious little torture contraptions, a maze of traps and filthy bloody rooms, a demented clown, escaped psycho returning to the scene of his childhood to kill, and the usual assortment of sundry death scenes. In just a little under an hour and a half you get to see parts of Saw, Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday The 13th, Hostel, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and even Killer Clowns From Outer Space. A pretty solid collection of hits, but ultimately Amusement is a jack of all trades and the master of none.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 21st, 2009
“When one starts to perceive one’s own reflection as a completely separate being, one is suddenly confronted with two entirely separate egos, two entirely separate worlds that can surface at any given moment. A feeling of self hatred usually triggered by a psychological shock can split the personality in two, hence creating two or more personalities with distinct memories and distinct behavior patterns within the same individual. The patient has the false perception of the existence of two distinct worlds, the real world and the world inside the mirror.”
Or maybe not so false, at least according to the 20th Century Fox thriller, Mirrors.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 21st, 2009
I have to admit that I’m usually very wary of direct to video sequels to films that weren’t exactly box office smash material to begin with. The original film was a typical and predictable mess of a film that didn’t even make use of a better than average cast for this kind of film. It took me by surprise when Boogeyman 2 came out, but I’m a glutton for punishment, so I rented the title mostly because it had Saw franchise star Tobin Bell in it. I ended up halfway liking the feature, and considerably more than the original film. When I saw the chance to review the third entry, I wanted to see if the DVD franchise was heading forward or backwards. Boy, was I pleased to find out that the answer is both.
Audrey (Sanderson) is the daughter of Dr. Allen (Bell) from the second film. She’s trying to deal with his death when she happens upon his journal. There she reads about the Boogeyman and his need for people to believe in him, which gives him power. So what does she do? She tries to get people to believe that it was he who killed the victims of the second film. She gets killed in an apparent suicide, but her roommate and best friend Sarah (Cahill) witnesses the event and is the only one to know it was the Boogeyman who killed her. Of course, she also comes across Dr. Allen’s journal and picks up where Audrey left off. As her friends begin disappearing and she has strange visions of the creature, she begins to understand that she is pretty much to blame. By using her spot on the campus radio station to spread the fear, she ends up feeding the beast. She attempts a noble self sacrifice in the end.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on January 16th, 2009
“It’s not about monsters, or zombies, or vampires. It’s about kids.”
One of the horror trends going around involves the isolation of a young couple who find themselves suddenly terrified. The pursuer can be a creature or undead vengeful spirit, but more often than not the attacker is very much human. The location can be a desert or even a hotel room as it was in one of the better examples of the subgenre, Vacancy with Kate Beckinsale and Luke Fox. Many of these kinds of films have become far too predictable and, dare we say, boring. They rely totally on jump scene scares and a few gallons of gore. So, when Britain got into the act, I admit I was bracing myself for more of the same. Happily, Eden Lake is a standout film. Its quality took me totally by surprise, but everything about this film was pretty well done. Of course all of the cliché moments are there, but if you check out Eden Lake you’re in for an entertaining, if not disturbing, ride.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 13th, 2009
A disfigured young man with an unhealthy interest in his sister attacks and kills a woman. Five years later, he is released (by psychiatrist Jess Franco) into his sister’s care, who is helping organize a language school on property owned by her disagreeable, but very rich, aunt. In short order, the female students at the school (and there are ONLY female students, for reasons not explained) start being killed off. But no one other than heroine Olivia Pascal actually believes that anything is going on.
This was Jess Franco’s contribution to the slasher craze, though it demonstrates just how much that subgenre owes to the giallo by incorporating many of the elements of the latter (whodunit, unseen killer instead of hulking masked figure, etc). The production values are perhaps a bit higher than usual for Franco, and the gore effects are, all proportions maintained, quite good (and certainly very gruesome). But it’s obvious that this is work for hire, as the work lacks many of the more endearing eccentricities and personal obsessions that mark the films he’s more interested in. There is also some unnecessary animal cruelty involving the decapitation of a snake. The sharp-eyed will catch Lina Romay in the credits (as assistant director, under her real name of Rosa Amiral).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 12th, 2009
The giallo was never a genre that specialized in tight, coherent, logical storylines. But even by the bizarre standards of the form, In the Folds of the Flesh takes some kinda cake. Trying to summarize its plot is next to impossible, as the first two thirds of the plot are incomprehensible, and are cleared up only in the final third, which feels more like a play than a film, and where the revelations and twists pile up to such a degree that they don't induce whiplash – they torque your head clean off. So, for what it's worth, we have a castle (whose interiors look distinctly un-castle-like) where, thirteen years ago, a man was decapitated. His body was disposed of by the woman living there, and she and two children, now grown and thoroughly insane, dispose of anyone else foolish enough to come prying into their lives.
This is certainly no lost masterpiece. Its story is clumsily told, and would be offensive if it weren't so ridiculous. The murders vary from the delightfully cheesy (the decapitations) to the utterly WTF (death by cuckoo clock?? ). But the demented nature of the exercise makes it compelling in the nature of a train wreck (and speaking of trains, what's with the constant shots of one?). Lovers of the deranged will find much to feast upon here.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 9th, 2009
A group of low-life gangsters kidnap a starlet (Ursula Fellner) and hightail it off to a jungle island, where they subject their victim to endless indignities while waiting for the ransom money to arrive. Al Cliver is dispatched to rescue her, but his helicopter arrival draws the attention of a group of hostile natives and, more to the point, a red-eyed, cannibal zombie-god who holds them in a grip of fear.
It was 1980, and so the short-lived cannibal subgenre was in its heyday, so naturally Jess Franco was faced with directing his own contribution. Of course, he did so in his own peculiarly idiosyncratic way. Released the year prior to Severin's other recent cannibal release, Cannibal Terror, it shares that film's conceit of gangsters running afoul of dangerous locals. Also common to both films is some unintentional hilarity (“primitive” tribesmen sporting wedding rings and running shoes, a park bench visible in the background of the jungle around minute 93, or the hero climbing a “vertical” cliff face on his knees, thanks to the wonders of a tilted camera). The usual racism associated with the cannibal movie is somewhat problematized (deliberately or not) by the odd and obvious multiracial composition of the tribe. Where Franco's film steals the march on its poorer successor is a greater sense of expansiveness, even on what couldn't have been much greater means (we even get a helicopter crash), and a more lush, somewhat more convincing jungle (even though we are still pretty clearly in Spain). As well, Franco keeps the pace up with a wealth of incident, not to mention that strange mixture of elements (crime, action film, cannibal film, supernatural terror, even a little bit of King Kong). And the scenes of cannibalism, while far more simplistically mounted than in the likes of Cannibal Holocaust (an extreme close-up of a mouth showing meat and dribbling blood) are nonetheless suitably disgusting. The only shot of innards being yanked out is so brief, it feels like the contemptuous dismissal that it is. All in all, a sleazily entertaining mish-mash that could only have been made by one man, bless his twisted little heart.
![Friday the 13th Uncut [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/friday-the-13th-uncut-blu-ray-large.jpg)
![Mirrors [Blu-ray] dvd cover art](https://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/mirrors-blu-ray-large.jpg)
