Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 1st, 2007
Who says horror can’t be the cinema of personal expression? Director Tim Sullivan follows up his comic horror 2001 Maniacs with this heartfelt ghost story. Raviv Ullman plays David, a teenager whose depression and death-fixation following the demise of his older brother prompts his desperate parents to ship him off to an “Attitude Adjustment Camp.” Basically a brutal cross between boot camp and prison, this is a private institution (inspired by actual places) designed to transform any insipient Columbine-copycats. Once there, David must contend not only with the sadistic Captain Kennedy (Diamond Dallas Page) who runs the place, but also with visions of a ghost who clearly wants a buried truth revealed.
There’s more than a touch of The Devil’s Backbone here, what with the ghost-story-in-an-institution premise and the emphatic socio-political overtones. Sullivan isn’t quite Guillermo Del Toro yet – the spookiness is workmanlike but hardly heart-pounding, and many of the adult performances are pitched far too broadly – but there is a seriousness of purpose here that is admirable, a refreshing (and justified) anger, and the teen members of the cast are believably natural.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 24th, 2007
In the vein of Underworld, here is another tale of warring supernatural societies. In this case, both sides are werewolves (the “skinwalkers” of the title). The good guys seek to protect a 13-year-old boy who represents a cure for lycanthropy. The bad guys, who like turning into monsters, want to kill him to protect themselves. The weapons of choice in this battle? Fangs, you guess. Nuh-uh. Guns.
Yep, also in the vein of Underworld, gunplay is much more popular than monster mashes, but this effort makes its inspiration look like a masterpiece. The big showpiece gun battle (anatomized at length in one of the features) is a spectacular example of unintentional camp, whose highlight is the Sergio Leone-style drawdown between chief nasty Jason Behr and the boy’s grandmother. You read that right. In a stunning bit of blazing originality, the boy is also asthmatic. Sigh. Add in painfully expository dialogue and an almost total absence of transformed werewolves (who, when they do show up, are in no way worth the wait), and what you have here is a waste of time, which, fortunately, only robs you of just under 90 minutes, and not the 110 threatened on the case.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 14th, 2007
As a woman commits suicide by leaping to her death on the English seacoast, her daughter in Italy has a vision of her fall. Years later, the now-grown Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) is married to a wealthy businessman, and is suddenly plagued by visions again. Following the evidence, she discovers the skeleton of a young woman who has been walled up in her husband’s ancestral home for years. He is immediately arrested. Virginia works to prove his innocence by investigating the other mysteries of her visions, but she is letting herself in for more than she bargained for.
Having made quite a name for itself as a purveyor of lovely editions of classic European sexploitation, Severin branches out in spectacular fashion with this 1977 effort by Lucio Fulci. Fans of the director who know him exclusively for films such as Zombie and The Beyond will no doubt be disappointed by the lack of extreme gore. (Exception: the opening suicide, which delivers a nasty jolt as we see the woman’s face smash against the rocks as she falls. Unfortunately, Fulci has to show us the effect more than once, and it loses its effectiveness as its artificiality becomes clear.) But, as clearly derivative as it is of both Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Dario Argento’s Deep Red, this is still evidence that Fulci was more than capable of assembling a film that is gripping at the level of narrative and suspense. Unlike Don’t Look Now, where we are kept as much in the dark as its protagonist as to what the visions mean, here Fulci makes sure we are a few steps ahead of Virginia. We realize quite early that what she saw was a vision of the future, not the past, and watch helplessly as the strands of fate wind inexorably around her. There may not be much to her character, but her plight is so clearly articulated and so unstoppable that we cannot help but feel a soul-deep dread. A excellent slice of Eurohorror.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 12th, 2007
Bad horror movies are like watching a trainwreck. There are bodies all over the place and everybody is screaming in agony like a little school girl. And you can't turn your head away. So imagine my complete enjoyment when I received the Tripper to review. I screamed like a little school girl, my rabbit fainted and my girlfriend actually was able to turn her head away several times. I understand why they are the stronger sex cause I watched intently and was considering therapy when my 90 minutes was up.
The Tripper is the story of Ronald Reagan gone wrong. The back story indicates trauma to a young kid named Gus (played by Noah Maschan ) who chainsawed a tree hugger who was preventing his father, a lumberjack from performing his job. One would assume he spent the rest of his adolescence in a mental institution and then re-appeared as an axe wielding, Ronald-Reagan mask wearing psycho killer (played by Christopher Allen Nelson).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 9th, 2007
It’s probably a pretty bad sign when a film’s star makes a public apology to his fans for doing the film just when it is getting released on DVD. Brad Pitt did just that, and you know what? He should be sorry. This film is an absolute mess all the way around. I think it’s supposed to be a slasher film, but there are never any good 1980’s slasher moments to be found. It’s true that at this point in his career Pitt wasn’t exactly being offered the cream of the crop. He wasn’t paling around with George Clooney and friends just yet. So perhaps it’s not Pitt but the folks who made this film who should be apologizing. Cutting Class has no idea what it wants to be when it grows up. Is it a comedy or is it a drama? Ultimately it fails on both counts.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 7th, 2007
Stop me if this sounds familiar: in a far-northern community, night lasts thirty days, which makes the area highly hospitable to vampires. Yes, Frostbitten shares a very similar premise to the excellent 30 Days of Night. And while the Swedish film predates its American counterpart, it is more recent than the graphic novel. At any rate, the similarities pretty much end there, as Frostbitten is more interested in comedy than its cousin, and is also nowhere near as good.
The prologue is promising, with Scandinavian volunteers in the German army during WWII becoming lost and encountering vampires in a remote cabin. Flash forward, and the surviving member of the unit is now a respected geneticist performing experiments that only he knows the truth about on rather unusual patients. A teenager and her divorced mother arrive in the community just in time for all hell to break loose. Said hell does feature some inventive and humorous moments, but the film is hamstrung by dead clichés when it shifts its focus to the local high school and the group of characters we have seen far too many times before and never want to see again.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 6th, 2007
Hmm. A vision of elaborate torture in washed-out tones on the cover. A three-letter title. Gee, could Gag be inspired by Saw? Perhaps, but fortunately not in any slavish way, limiting its connections to the idea of extended torture, and that’s hardly something Saw invented. As opposed to the Saw franchise’s increasingly risible plot convolutions, Gag keeps its setup simple: a pair a burglars break into a house where they first discover a man chained to a bed, and then are captured themselves by the resident nutjob. The ensuing drama is a claustrophobic one, with the main characters trapped in the torture room at the mercy of a lunatic who has a definite, if mysterious, goal.
The film handles the grime and oppression quite nicely, and the torture scenes are genuinely disturbing. The limited budget is apparent in some of the sound design limitations, and the quality of the performances is variable, but still, this indie effort is far from dishonorable. I can’t help but feel, though, that the opening scene’s drooling voyeurism of a naked woman’s body just before she’s gruesomely killed isn’t gratuitous in the one sense that even this sort of film would do well to avoid.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 6th, 2007
Stephen King must be solely responsible for an acre of deforestation a year in legal pads and typewriter pages alone. I have heard it said that he writes at least ten pages a day, including holidays. A quick check of IMDB shows that he is credited for writing 106 television or movie stories, at least in part, since "Carrie" in 1976. While no writer - as I well know - can hit a home run every time they put pen to paper, King's "good to crap" ratio is far superior to that of the majority of the novelists working today.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 4th, 2007
Everybody remembers the first scary movie that gave them nightmares for days and months after they saw it. For some, it was the Exorcist and for more recent folks perhaps it was Scream or Saw. For me, it was Poltergeist. I was but seven years old and thought it would be something like E.T. Phone Home, but with swirly demons and ghosts? It was PG, how bad could it be? In the next two hours, I was treated to something that resonates with me to this very day. From the moment I heard "They're Here", I knew I would never see static on televisions the same way.
It's 3:00 in the morning, the national anthem is playing and then the television goes to static (remember those days, now we just get infomercials about losing weight). A small child named Carol Anne (played by Heather O' Rourke) gets out of bed and walks towards the television. She starts talking to the set and works up a pretty good conversation. The people inside the television were trying to communicate with the 5 year old child. However, there was something else in the television set, something far more sinister. There was more at work here than a girl perhaps making an imaginary friend.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 29th, 2007
OK, brace yourself when I tell you that Hallowed Ground was a straight to video release. I know, you're stunned, right? You can't even get up. I was as shocked as you. But I've got to hand it to the filmmakers, they've got a decent idea by putting a somewhat scary image on their cover and keeping a brother intrigued, so to speak.
Written and directed by David Benullo, he of Shadow Man fame, this film focuses on the town of Hope, where Liz (Jaimie Alexander, Kyle XY) finds herself standed. The people are nice to her, but for some reason, they just come off as being "too nice". She manages to find out the town is pretty much composed of religious fanatics, who find out that Liz is part of a prophecy as outlined by the town's preacher. The funny part is that the preacher died a century ago and was crucified and hung like a scarecrow, resulting in the semi-cool picture. So the town tries to hold her hostage while the scarecrow gets his pseudo freaky deaky on.
