Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 14th, 2006
Synopsis
A dysfunctional family unit (single mother and infant, her sister and loutish husband, their autistic teen) are travelling through rural New Jersey when their car gets stuck. One after another, they head off to seek help, only to knock on the door of the sinister Mrs. Leeds and her homicidally retarded crew. And if that weren’t bad enough, there’s some kind of monster flapping through the woods.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 8th, 2006
It seems that most of the creators behind today’s horror movies just aren’t thinking anymore. Films like The Grudge or the remake of the classic The Omen just aren’t as scary anymore. Such is the case with the recent Universal film Slither, which ends up being an entertaining movie, but never really produces that spook factor that say the original Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street produced.
The film begins after a meteorite crashes in a Midwestern town. A man named Gra...t (Michael Rooker) stumbles upon a fossil and is infected by a life force living inside the fossil. Soon his super cute wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks) figures out that something is not right with her husband. He has a new found larger than life hunger for raw meat and he begins to crave strange body mutations. It turns out that a strange alien creature has infested Grant in hopes of infesting the entire human race. Now the next part sounds a bit out of the film Species. The creature inside Grant decides it wants to mate with Starla to create a whole new race. Bring in Deputy Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) and Jack MacReady (Gregg Henry) to do battle with this new creature and you have, surprisingly, a pretty entertaining film even if it never truly scares you.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 3rd, 2006
Synopsis
The murderous, cannibalistic Sawyer family is at it again, carving up yuppies and winning chili contests. Obsessed Texas Ranger Dennis Hopper is tracking them down, hoping for a final chainsaw duel. DJ Caroline Williams tries to help out, attracting the attention of the Sawyers, and, as it turns out, the puppy love of Leatherface.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 28th, 2006
OK, let's just get this out of the way at the start. Hellbent is a film from a cable network called Here!, which is America's foremost gay and lesbian television network. Consequently, this made-for-TV film is based solely around homosexual couples, as is all of the programming on the network. They make all manner of programming, including feature films, that deal primarily with homosexuality.
Now, here is my complaint. If you want to make programming that has homosexuals in it, I'm fine with that. But when the main focus of your programming business is promoting a certain belief or lifestyle, the stories will inevitably suffer. Every part of the film should serve the story. For those who think I am homophobic, I would say the same thing about movies that are made primarily to promote religion, victims rights, heterosexuality or any other number of beliefs. It has nothing to do with the beliefs or lifestyles themselves, it is the fact that promoting an outside belief moves the film from “interesting story” to “propaganda film”.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on October 20th, 2006
From the rather twisted mind of Stephen King, Pet Sematary is actually one of my favorite of his horror novels. It’s scary to think the story was never meant to be published and only offered up to finish a contract with his earlier publisher. As has been the Stephen King plague at nearly every turn, something ends up lost in the translation. In the novel, the deeper subtexts that King is so adept at take several hundred pages to set up and ultimately pay off. Unfortunately a mere couple of hours of celluloid never ...eem to scratch the graveyard surface soil. Pet Sematary is, sadly, a definitive example. While the original work taunts us with its mystic undertones that always seem far more believable than they ought to be, the film lays down a path as overgrown as the one leading to the titular graveyard. At first the two works are not so convergent, and a great deal of hope is to be had. Soon, however, the movie descends into the typical shock horror film so common in recent years. Startles and zombies begin to dominate the experience, while the story’s deeper and far more frightening elements lie as dead as the bones of the neighborhood pets.
The plot points are pretty faithful to the King work. For ages the kids in this suburban Maine neighborhood have been burying the remains of their beloved pets, often victims of a dangerous road, in the barren soil of the local Pet Sematary, misspelled by the countless kids who christened the field untold years ago. But beyond the pet graveyard is a more mysterious and foreboding place. It was here that Indians brought the dead back to life. Our unfortunate family is about to discover that perhaps “dead is better”.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 18th, 2006
Japanese horror films are all the rage these days, with the originals hitting DVD in the States, and the remakes showing up in the theaters. Therefore, it stands to reason that even Criterion would get in on the trend, offering up a film from famed director Nobuo Nakagawa, widely regarded as the father of the Japanese horror film.
Jigoku is both strange and fascinating. The film tells the story of two friends that are involved in a hot-and-run accident. While one of the young men is cool, calm and collected, the other is wracked with guilt over their actions. While the family of the murdered man begins to close in on the guilty parties, strange things begin to happen to the man with a conscience.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 16th, 2006
Synopsis
A meteor lands in your typical SF/horror movie Small Town (and it could well be the same meteor that brought the original Blob to town). Bullet-headed mug Michael Rooker stumbles over it one drunken night, and promptly becomes infected with carniverous slug-parasites from outer space. He sets about spreading the good news, as it were, and before long the entire town is a chaos of slithering nastiness and zombiefied townspeople.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 15th, 2006
This remake of the 1976 horror classic The Omen is a solid psychological thriller. I should admit that I have never seen the original, so I can’t make a comparison. For opinions from that perspective, I imagine an Internet search will find more than enough.
I can, however, weigh in on whether I think this move should have been made, a question always asked about Hollywood remakes. My answer? Yes, because it offers the film to a new audience, of which I’m a part. And now that I’ve seen and enjoyed this new version of The Omen, I’m also interested in checking out the original.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 15th, 2006
There’s a bunch of people stuck in a bar in the middle of nowhere. Monsters want to eat them. What will they do? That about sums up Feast, a film that’s part comedy, part horror, and all around over the top. This is the winning project from season three of Project Greenlight, a contest and documentary series founded by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck back in 2000. What does that mean? Feast is a low-budget film helmed by a rookie director, based on an amateur script.
Rookie and amateur are often words associated with low quality, but this gore-fest is actually pretty good. This is obviously a film made by big fans of horror movies, as it embraces many of the conventions and clichés of the genre, sometimes twisting them around or turning them upside down. The result is a decent amount of uncertainty for the audience, which helps suck us into the tense and scary moments.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 9th, 2006
I don’t watch a lot of horror movies, but when I do I want them to be scary or amusing, or both. I found Blackwater Valley Exorcism to be none of the above.
The story centers around the demonic possession of a young woman, and the efforts a group of people make to save her. This group includes her family, her father’s farmhands, a sheriff, a veterinarian and a priest who’s never dealt with this sort of thing before. Luckily, one of those farmhands just happens to be a former priest who has conducted an exorcism.
