October is upon us. Aliens are invading, wolfmen howl at the moon, vampires avoid mirrors, and the walls are bleeding. It’s the month of Halloween, which means it’s time for the October Horrorshow, a whole month of horror film reviews on Missile Test. The good, the bad, and the putrid will all be represented in these pages. It doesn’t matter, as long as there’s blood. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: [•REC]”
October Horrorshow
October Horrorshow: From Dusk Till Dawn, or, a Tale of Two Movies
October has come again. It being the month of Halloween, we at Missile Test choose to celebrate by watching and reviewing horror films. Ah, blood. There just can’t be enough in October. Today’s selection has plenty of it, even though it’s mostly green. But what the hell, it’s all in fun.
Quentin Tarantino was riding high after the success of Pulp Fiction, a film that had a strong case for winning Best Picture at the Oscars the year it came out. Was it Tarantino’s youth which kept his opus from taking home the top prize? Who knows? Some of the competition were no slouches in their own right, but none broke any new ground, nor did they spawn a whole genre of imitations that crop up in cinema to this day (just like Alien and all its clones). And the winner that year, Forrest Gump, felt like little more than the Baby Boomers trying to justify their actions in retrospect by infusing their youths with blandness and innocence, when naiveté (with a sharp edge, at least) would have been a more apt description. This trivializes the profound role they played in turning public opinion against the war in Vietnam, but their role was not nearly as important as that played by the news media who brought home the images of war to the American public. The youth had always been suspicious, and were never onboard with the war policy from the beginning, but every other demographic in America couldn’t have given two shits if we had been winning the war instead of losing it. Anyway, I honestly can’t tell if that film was an apology to their parents or an apology to the directionless void of malaise left behind by their sudden thrust into real adulthood that was then passed on to their slacker Gen X children. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: From Dusk Till Dawn, or, a Tale of Two Movies”
October Horrorshow: The Human Centipede
The air is finally crisp here in the big city. The last gasp of humidity fled with the coming of Autumn, and in its place came the sounds of screams carried on the wind. For it’s October, when movie screens and television sets across the country run red with blood. It’s the month of Halloween, and to celebrate, it’s time once again for the October Horrorshow — time to dedicate Missile Test to watching and reviewing horror films. And we start out with a real winner.
I watched this entire movie. I could not regret that decision more. I was hoping for something — any unexpected or tragic event to occur while the film was running that would enable me to look away. Car accident outside. House fire. Power outage. Meteorite impact. Terrorist attack. Stroke. Aneurysm. Anything at all. Because I just could not turn away from this sick, sick movie. And that is my fault. My fault alone.
Written and directed by Tom Six, The Human Centipede is the story of a surgeon with a dream. Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, in a hell of a performance) is obsessed with an idea he first tried out on his beloved Rottweilers. Using his unmatched surgical skill, Heiter dreams of creating a single creature by attaching multiple people mouth to anus, creating the human centipede of the title. It’s as disgusting as it sounds. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Human Centipede”
October Horrorshow: Halloween II
Halloween has finally arrived. Across the country the ghouls and goblins are out in force, and scary movies are lighting up the airwaves. We’ve been celebrating here at Missile Test for the entire month of October with the second October Horrorshow, when the site is devoted to watching and reviewing horror films. There’s been no rhyme or reason to it other than one common denominator: blood. Good films, bad films, entire franchises viewed out of order...so what? It doesn’t matter. It’s all in fun, as long as there’s death and gore involved. To close out this year’s October Horrorshow, we present a review of Halloween II, the sequel to John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece from 1978. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Halloween II”
October Horrorshow: Diary of the Dead
The October Horrorshow rolls on here at Missile Test, when we devote the entire month of October to watching and reviewing horror films. The good, the bad, and the putrid all have a viewing. With this review we wrap up the run of zombie films made by George A. Romero. Sure, we’ve been reviewing them out of order, but it doesn’t really matter.
Diary of the Dead, from 2007, is Romero’s followup to Land of the Dead. For whatever reason, Romero regressed when it came to his budget with this film. Land of the Dead wasn’t exactly a blockbuster production, but it did recoup its $15 million budget three times over, yet Diary of the Dead was made with the paltry amount of $2 million. A cut in resources like this isn’t normally made by choice, but Romero did decide to make this an experimental film of sorts, so maybe it was on purpose.
Anyway, Diary of the Dead takes place on the eve of the zombie outbreak that began during Romero’s first zombie flick, Night of the Living Dead. With each of his Dead films, Romero has played fast and loose with the real world timeline when it comes to the zombie apocalypse, which is why the outbreak in his films occurs in the 1960s, ’70s, and 2000s. In that way, his story of the outbreak is timeless. Despite the intervening years between releases, all films take place within the same continuity. That’s only a flaw if one lets it be so. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Diary of the Dead”
October Horrorshow: Day of the Dead
The zombie hordes have once again invaded the October Horrorshow here on Missile Test. After a short interlude that featured an amorphous blob, a ghostly pedophile, and a village full of children with psychic abilities, we return to the realm of the undead with George A. Romero’s second sequel to his groundbreaking film Night of the Living Dead, 1985’s Day of the Dead.
In this film, the survivors of the zombie apocalypse portrayed in the first two Romero films have been whittled down to a small handful of government scientists and soldiers living in an underground laboratory. Their remaining purposes in life have been reduced to scavenging the surface for supplies, searching in vain for other survivors, and researching the zombie condition, in an attempt to find a cure. The new order of things is open to interpretation among the group, as only the scientists have any interest in continuing the experiments. Their juvenile military protectors don’t seem to find any useful purpose in the scientists’ work, and increasingly assert their control over their egghead compatriots with threats and intimidations. Romero establishes the hostile attitudes these two groups hold for each other early on, and the viewer can be assured that this conflict can be even more dangerous than that presented by the undead. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Day of the Dead”
October Horrorshow: Village of the Damned (1995)
The October Horrorshow continues here on Missile Test with a film from the latter half of John Carpenter’s career. The man whose work has inspired no less than three remakes (with more on the way) was no stranger to remakes himself, having previously applied his unique talents to The Thing. More than a decade later, 1995 saw the release of Village of the Damned, a remake of the 1960 British production of the same name. Carpenter’s Village of the Damned is not that bad of a film, but it suffers from the same great flaw that typifies much of his work. That is, the ideas in the film are better than the execution. Carpenter flicks will get the gears turning, a good thing, but in Village of the Damned, like in They Live or even a classic such as Escape from New York, so much territory feels left unexplored. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Village of the Damned (1995)”
October Horrorshow: The Blob (1988)
Things have calmed down a bit here at Missile Test. Today is the second straight day without a zombie sighting in the October Horrorshow. No walking dead, no rambling hordes, no barricaded windows or locked down shopping malls. Instead, we return to the realm of the creature feature with the 1988 remake of the classic b-horror flick The Blob. Directed by Chuck Russell, who shared the screenwriting credits with Frank Darabont, this remake is a fine movie in its own right. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Blob (1988)”
October Horrorshow: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
There have been quite a number of zombie sightings on Missile Test this October. It is the October Horrorshow, when the site is dedicated to watching and reviewing horror films, but believe it or not, there are other iconic creatures that inhabit the catalogue of horror cinema. One of those icons is Freddy Krueger, the brainchild of horror auteur Wes Craven. Since his original Elm Street film appeared in 1984, and the last in the series in 2003, it was past time for Hollywood to milk this cow one more time. They chose to do so with a remake, or a reboot, as the popular industry term would have it. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)”
October Horrorshow: Dead Alive, aka Braindead
It’s raining again. Cold, dark rain. If I close my eyes, the sound of the drops slashing against the windows and spattering on the roof sounds just like a shower of blood. For this is October, when innocent thoughts turn to dreadful deeds, when the creaking of an old house at night is nothing less than the sinister wanderings of evil spirits, and when an innocent trip in the wilderness becomes a fight for one’s life. October is the month of Halloween, and to celebrate, Missile Test is dedicating the entire month to watching and reviewing horror films. Speaking of blood, today’s review is of a film that has plenty to spare. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Dead Alive, aka Braindead”