October Horrorshow: Dracula 3000

What a putrid mess. Films this bad don’t seem to come along all that often. Sure, bad movies get produced all the time. The film landscape is littered with poorly made schlock-fests. But this...this is an endeavor worthy of mockery, a movie that makes no pretense of clinging to anything of value. This movie, in other words, is typical of the quality of film that one gets streaming from Netflix. As Felix Salmon of Reuters pointed out this past January, no model exists whereby Netflix can afford the streaming rights on more than a handful of good movies at a time, so everyone out in the tubes with a subscription gets treated to movies as bad as Dracula 3000. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Dracula 3000″

October Horrorshow: Shutter (2004)

Shutter was a new experience for me. As far as I can remember, I’ve never seen a movie from Thailand before. If there were a line in Vegas on whether or not the first Thai movie I chose to watch would be horror or shitty, what would that line be? Or would that be a sucker bet? It is October, after all. The month of blood and death. Of course I’m watching horror. So the only question is, is it shitty horror? Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Shutter (2004)”

October Horrorshow: Dawn of the Dead (2004)

The canon of the zombie genre is not set in stone, but it generally follows that George Romero’s films are the authority from which all subsequent variations derive. Not being based in fact, those variations are many. For instance, we all know that in order to kill a zombie, one must destroy the brain. That is, unless the film in question is Return of the Living Dead (a film that prides itself on being zombie apocrypha, as it were), where nothing short of total incineration can kill a zombie. Or 28 Days Later and it’s sequel, where the zombies (not zombies, according to the filmmakers) are not undead but still living, and can thus be killed by anything that’s lethal to a normal person. Or The Last Man on Earth, from before the genre had a rulebook, where a stake through the heart was used to dispatch the hordes. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Dawn of the Dead (2004)”