The October Horrorshow is upon us once again, when Missile Test devotes the entire month of October to watching and reviewing horror films. The good, the bad, and the putrid are all represented. And, oh boy. This movie is a doozy, a humdinger, a lulu. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Growth”
Tag: Gory Flick
October Horrorshow: House of the Dead
There are two things every person should know before viewing House of the Dead. One: the film is based on a video game. Two: the film is directed by Uwe Boll, who is the object of an online petition calling for his retirement from filmmaking. At one time, Boll vowed to adhere to its conditions if the petition reached one million signatures. Of course, no one forces the public to watch his films. But it is an indication of the type of vitriol Boll engenders.
House of the Dead, without any sort of qualification and without my devoting any amount of unnecessary time in analyzing it, is one of the worst films I have ever seen. It represents just about everything that could go wrong with a film, horror or otherwise. The acting is bad, the screenplay is atrocious, and the directing is just awful. That’s 3 for 3. I’m digging, but the only redeeming quality I can find in House of the Dead is that it was filmed in color.
So what is the film about? It’s about an hour and a half long. Your life is too valuable to waste watching this crap. Stay away. You’ve been warned.
House of the Dead is far worse than Alien: Resurrection.
October Horrorshow: Night of the Living Dead
October has arrived. The leaves are changing, the air is cool and crisp after a brutal summer, and blood is in the air. October is the best time of the year to watch horror films, for obvious reasons. With that in mind, it is time, once again, for the October Horrorshow, when Missile Test devotes the entire month to watching and reviewing horror films. The good, the bad, the putrid, it doesn’t matter. Missile Test never met a movie it wouldn’t watch, for at least fifteen minutes, anyway. But that’s not a problem today, for today’s review is of the horror classic Night of the Living Dead, from iconic filmmaker George Romero.
Before watching for this review, I hadn’t seen Night of the Living Dead since I was a teenager, possibly even as long as twenty years ago. It didn’t scare me then, and it doesn’t scare me now, but that doesn’t mean Night of the Living Dead is a bland horror film. It just means that it came from a different era. It is only after being long inured to anything less than mercilessly graphic horror that old horror films lose some punch. Luckily for the viewer, Night of the Living Dead isn’t all scares. It’s a well-crafted film, still very taut throughout, and well worth the watch. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Night of the Living Dead”
October Horrorshow, Summer Edition: Halloween (2007) & Halloween II (2009)
Cruelty is a hallmark of Rob Zombie’s films. His antagonists revel in the infliction of pain, and Zombie revels in putting it on film. As a filmmaker, Zombie has embraced the current trend in horror films of making murder graphic and disturbing, bringing it visually closer to the real thing. This is no feather in his cap, nor is it a daring attempt to hold a mirror up to the violent society in which we live. There is no depth or complexity, no higher meaning that is being pursued, no redeeming quality that makes it worth the time and effort it takes to sit through one of his films. Continue reading “October Horrorshow, Summer Edition: Halloween (2007) & Halloween II (2009)”
October Horrorshow, Spring Edition: Class of Nuke ‘Em High
What a shitty movie. From Troma Entertainment, a production company well-versed in churning out b-movie fare (most famously the Toxic Avenger series of films and its spinoffs), Class of Nuke ‘Em High is self-aware schlock. From the opening scene to the end, the filmmakers never miss a chance to remind the viewer that what they are watching is not meant to be taken seriously. But the way they choose to draw attention to this fact, with overwrought characters and performances, only serves to make the film feel forced. It revels in cheapness, and this would be a good thing, if only they weren’t trying so hard. At every step of the film, Troma seeks to establish its brand, reveling in its ineptness at putting together something that is watchable.
The film has a strong beginning. After an opening shot purposefully evocative of Troma’s production logo, the scene shifts to the fictional town of Tromaville, New Jersey, where an accident at a nuclear power plant has leaked radioactive goo into the high school next door. A hapless student is exposed to the contaminant when he drinks from a water fountain before class, and his transformation from stereotypical 80s film nerd to smoking corpse is hilarious. But in that scene is a first glimpse of the film’s downfall. Most of the ensemble cast is present, and all exist, like the poor victim, as caricatures of the diverse collection of jocks, losers, horndogs, and punks that populate the banal visions of high school typical of so many films from the 50s to today. The problem is, there isn’t a straight man among the bunch to balance things out. Continue reading “October Horrorshow, Spring Edition: Class of Nuke ‘Em High”
October Horrorshow: Freddy vs. Jason
Is there anything that can save a movie with subpar acting and a weak story? Yes. Yes, there is. And that thing is outlandish and cartoonish gore. In 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, the two principal antagonists of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th horror franchises, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, come together in a crossover feat of mayhem and blood. The simple prospect of having such characters duke it out in a fanboy orgy surrounded by teenage cannon fodder is enough for any casual horror fan to take a look. Quite frankly, there is nothing surprising about the film, and nothing disappointing, either. The idea behind Freddy vs. Jason is the thing, the spectacular deaths of innocent bystanders is the charm, and everything else, acting and story, is just filler. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Freddy vs. Jason”
October Horrorshow: Land of the Dead
Cracked.com recently featured an article about surviving a zombie apocalypse. It concluded that all we know and all we’ve learned about surviving from zombie horror films is wrong. Tactics such as raiding the local gun store and fleeing from cities have become so imprinted on our psyches, Cracked argues, that everyone will have the same ideas, and those ideas will serve to create nothing but the world’s largest smorgasbord for the undead. They have a point. Well, they would, if the danger of a zombie apocalypse were real. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Land of the Dead”
October Horrorshow: Maximum Overdrive
“Stephen King’s masterpiece of terror directed by the master himself.” That’s how Maximum Overdrive was billed, right at the top of the poster. There’s an image of a bearded King peaking through a jagged rip in the side of what looks like a horse trailer manipulating characters and events in the movie marionette-style. There they are at the end of his strings, right above the chrome and lightning bolt logo for the film, slave to his every command and victim to every twisted whimsy. The poster implies quite explicitly that every other King adaptation to make it to the big screen was shit. But never fear, the master of horror has blessed this film with his presence — total creative control — ensuring that Maximum Overdrive is the quintessential Stephen King film. Suck on that, Stanley Kubrick. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Maximum Overdrive”
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 reading “October Horrorshow: Dawn of the Dead (2004)”
October Horrorshow: Event Horizon
Mix one part huge spaceship, one part small cast, and one part gore, blend on high, and what do you get? Alien. Or one of the many Alien clones that have dotted sci-fi cinema for the last thirty years. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Formulas in film that work well are often repeated ad nauseam, and while they never quite live up to the creative spirit at work in the original, they still serve to entertain, and that is the primary purpose of film. Even Alien itself is derivative of earlier films, most notably It! The Terror from Beyond Space, including many, many other sci-fi and horror films that portray a small group of people being mercilessly slaughtered one by one. But these days, where there’s outer space and buckets of blood, there is a debt of gratitude owed to Ridley Scott and his crew from 1979. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Event Horizon”