Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 21st, 2008
A tough-as-nails cowboy (James Denton) unwillingly hooks up with a naive greenhorn (Chris Kattan) when they have a run-in with a bent sheriff. They may think they have some problems now, but things are much worse than they think, as the town and the surrounding countryside are in the initial stages of a zombie plague.
Simon Pegg and company might well be starting to rue the day they came up with Shaun of the Dead. Though not the first zombie comedy (that would probably be Return of the Living Dead if we exclude some non-cannibal zombies appearing in some 30s horror-comedies), their magnificent film and its success are the proximate cause of the current flood of would be “zombedies” (as this flick labels itself). A western zombie comedy might seem like a promising mix, until one realizes how few western comedies have actually worked, and this one isn’t breaking the trend. Its opening scene (a clumsy zombie attacking his family) veers uncertainly from the tired slapstick to the truly distasteful, and the rest of the film has all the comedic zing of dragged out SNL skit (Chris Kattan, I am casting my baleful eye at YOU). Turgid stuff.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on March 4th, 2008
"The Invasion" is a remake of the classic "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers". This time around, Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig are the heroes that uncover the diabolical truth behind a secret plot to take over the world. This is a film that has been re-made several times before, in various forms. Each time, the film is turned into a heavy-handed metaphor for the current political climate. That is most certainly the case this time around as well, as the oblivious citizens are expected to accept everything their leaders tell them, no matter how implausible that information might be. I'll spare you the pop politics, but the parallels between the Bush administration and the story are rampant.
I don't have the slightest problem with films that use metaphors as long as they are done in a subtle and graceful way. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing subtle and graceful about this film. Forty minutes in, there is a montage scene that is meant to shock the viewer, "The Usual Suspects" style, by showing a series of fast cut images to help the viewer put together the plot in their own minds. The real problem is, by the 15-minute mark, the whole of the plot is obvious to even the most oblivious viewer, and the remaining hour-and-a-half are spent laboriously trudging through to the inevitable conclusion.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 29th, 2008
Blackgate Prison is built on ground where massacres of one sort or another have occurred throughout the history of the United States. When a disused wing of the prison is reopened, all sorts of nastiness emerges. Michael Paré is the officer called in when a guard mysteriously commits suicide, but that is only the first of many unexplained deaths yet to come.
So here we go with another haunted prison film, and a great deal that we have seen before. Take a cinematic tone that seeks to borrow the eeriness of Session 9 (but fails), mix in creepy little girls in jump-cuts (from the J-horror remake of your choice), and season with a cast that’s a collection of down-on-their luck pros (Tom Sizemore) and a lead in Paré who clearly took the part when From Hell It Came’s tree turned the role down for something with more range. Wake me when it’s over. Our hero’s performance is not helped by a script that appears to be composed entirely of lines from CSI fan fiction.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 16th, 2008
The neurotic Shannyn Sossamon goes to Paris to visit sister Alecia Moore (aka Pink). The outgoing Moore cajoles her mopey sister to attend a party in the city’s catacombs, where the bones of some six million people are stacked. It doesn’t take long before Sossamon becomes separated from her friends, and is pursued by a maniac through the maze of tunnels.
Other reviewers have commented on the film’s overuse of shaky camerawork, ADD editing and strobe lights. I won’t belabour the point here other than to note that they are absolutely right. That the film is not actually shot in Paris is painfully obvious thanks to the awful French accents of the Romanian extras. The leads are strong enough in their roles, but Sossamon’s character is such a bringdown that she’s hard to sympathize with. The ending manages to be simultaneously idiotic and clever. One senses a great deal of effort to transcend a limited budget, but this is ultimately another case of reach exceeding grasp.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on February 15th, 2008
Barrows, Alaska, is just settling down for a month-long winter’s night. Many of the residents leave for the dark period, but those who remain encounter a series of strange crimes (all the cell phones in town being stolen and melted, for instance). It turns out that the incidents are the work of a man preparing the way for an invasion of vampires. After all, what better hunting ground than a town with no day? Josh Hartnett leads a dwindling band who hunker down and struggle against overwhelming odds.
Faithfully transcribing Steve Niles’ graphic novel to the screen, this is an enormous breath of fresh air in a horror market dominated by poor remakes of Asian films and tired franchises. The opening shots are breathtaking in their beauty, simultaneously (and appropriately) echo Nosferatu and John Carpenter’s version of The Thing. Those are the films that are the spiritual forefathers of this one, which melds the atmospheric chill of the latter with the thoroughly horrible vampires of the former. There is nothing glamorous about these vampires. They are completely vicious, ghastly creations, and are thus the first truly frightening vampires to grace theatrical screens in many and many a year. But as unappealing as its monsters are, the film is nonetheless filled with images of beauty as breathtaking as it is terrible. An overhead shot of the town under siege is a perfect example, and demonstrates a real commitment to the art of horror on the part of the filmmakers. If the sense of hopelesness and dread can’t fully be sustained for the length of the film, this is nonetheless one of the most effective and gorgeously crafted horror films in recent memory.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on January 28th, 2008
While strolling through the local Blockbuster store, I'm always amazed at how many direct-to-video sequels there are to big name movies. Sure, Bring it On was never in the Lord of the Rings echelon of franchises, but it was still a successful movie at the box-office. Yet I still can't get over the fact that Bring it On now has its own trilogy, just like LOTR.
Most of these low-budget sequels exist solely to cash in on the movie's title, which is usually unrelated to the original film. The roles are recast or characters done away with, and some dumbed-down script that rehashes the first film is approved. But every once in a while, a cheapie comes along that does more with less, and surpasses the original. See my review for I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer for more proof of this. Usually, it has to do with the talent attached to these films. IAKWYDLS featured the sure-handed direction of up-and-comer Sylvain White, who is slated to helm the big-budget Castlevania movie, and White Noise 2: The Light was directed by Patrick Lussier of the surprisingly good Dracula 2000 and an accomplished editor.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 27th, 2008
Despite being very thoroughly dead, Jigsaw is up to his old games again. This time, SWAT commander Rigg must race against time to rescue to kidnapped fellow officers. Jigsaw's messages send him all over town, to one gruesome event after another. Meanwhile, the FBI is also on the case, interrogating the killer's ex-wife, which means the audience finds out quite a bit more about Jigsaw's backstory.
The film gets right down to work with an extremely detailed autopsy of Jigsaw, so the target audience should feel well-served. The torture devices are as baroque as ever, and the deaths are elaborately gruesome. “Elaborate” and “baroque” are pretty good terms to describe the plot as well, only not necessarily in a good way. The main problem here is excessive flashbacking (rarely a good tactic in cinematic narrative) and equally excessive reliance on the audience remembering every detail of the previous entry. On the other hand, there are some very nifty transitions between scenes, and I confess to being rather more caught up in the story than I was expecting, this many episodes in. For the most part, this is actually an improvement over the third entry. Then there's the difficulty of the ending. The need to have each film end in a twist here results in a conclusion that's borderline incomprehensible rather than shocking.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 12th, 2008
The trailer trash Myers family (inexplicably living in a pretty big house) is a powder keg waiting to go off, what with the rampaging abuse and a young Michael (the admittedly creepy Daeg Faerch) butchering small animals and looking like he’s mad as hell and soon not going to take it anymore. Snap he does, going on a killing spree, before he is captured and locked up for years, while eccetric shrink Dr. Loomis (a shameless Malcolm McDowell) making a career out of trying to learn what makes him tick. Growing to Godzilla proportions, Michael makes his escape, and proceeds to pick up his spree where he left off in his home town of Haddonfield.
I trashed this fiasco in a Brain Blasters column back in September, and the unrated version of the film does nothing to change my opinion. Zombie misses the fact that restraint of the original film was a large part of its success, stupidly gives Michael a backstory and thus nixes his fearsome aspect as supernatural boogeyman, distractingly fills small roles with Look Who It Is cameos (Udo Kier, Richard Lynch, Brad Dourif), and, after expanding the original movie’s single shot prologue to an entire act, compresses the actual rampage to the point that there is no time for character development, and so we care not a whit for the victims. An idiotic, crashing bore.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 11th, 2008
Arthur Kennedy and wife Teresa Wright are an older childless couple who discover a young man (Tom Happer) living in the crawlspace of their basement. Though they are initially alarmed, he seems harmless, and they take him under their wing. What seems to be a nice, if bizarre, solution for everyone becomes tense when Happer, tormented by locals, shows a potential for great violence.
This release from Wild Eye in their TV Movie Terror Collection is a much stronger entry than The Devil’s Daughter. Rather than highlight the limitations of television when it comes to horror, the film plays to the medium’s strengths. The tone is low-key and character-driven, and off-kilter in just the right sort of way to generate a nice current of unease. Happer is a disturbing figure, but he’s also sympathetic, much in the same vein as the Frankenstein monster.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 8th, 2008
Nathan Maguire (David Leon) is having a very bad day. The boneheaded bully at school has it in for him. Jessica (Samantha Mumba), the girl he loves, doesn’t show up for their meeting where he was finally going to declare his feelings, and then he sees her in the car of one of the local studs. Plus he gets soaked in the rain. And just to cap things off, he is accidentally hanged, and his distraught mother performs a voodoo ritual to bring him back from the dead, only the manual was missing a page and he returns as an infectious zombie. Oops.
Thank you, Shaun of the Dead, for turning the zombie comedy into a veritable cottage industry. Boy Eats Girl certainly doesn’t have the brilliance of the former film or the likes of Fido. The characters are pretty generic (the Nice Girl, the Losers, the Jocks, the Slut, etc.) as well. But the film is efficiently paced (a mere 80 minutes), and the performances are engaging. We may have gone down these teen comedy paths before, but the conviction of the cast and script makes it all seem fresher than it should be. There are some very funny moments (as Nathan starts exhibiting superhuman strength and an alarming lack of pulse, for instance), and the gore, which is remarkably restrained for most of the film, explodes with would-be Dead/Alive enthusiasm at the climax.
