So much horror is garbage that every occasion that sees a thoughtful and intelligent entry to the genre is a welcome reminder that a film that tries to scare the viewer to death is not automatically bad, or packed to the gills with cliché. While slasher flicks and the endless variations of SCREWED scenarios (see the review of Quarantine for a definition) are good fodder for the bloodthirsty moviegoer, the need for true quality is still there. All the camp, all the gore, all the outlandishness that gives the horror genre its identity is, unfortunately, as full of as much grace and depth as a carnival funhouse. Enjoyable as that can be, and as much as it keeps bloody murder from being weighed down by too much realism, a well-handled production with a talented cast, a talented director at the helm, and a good story can always be applauded as something that is, my goodness, actually worth seeing. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: 28 Days Later & 28 Weeks Later”
Tag: Gory Flick
October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
Tom Savini, as with Martin Becker before you, I salute you. In a film that otherwise struggled at times to hold my attention, the exquisite onscreen deaths perpetrated by Jason Voorhees and engineered by Savini saved the day. From the morgue attendant attacked with a hacksaw and a vicious neck twist, to the harpoon crotch lift, to the young lover whose skull is crushed against a shower wall, to the most brutal machete attack put to film since Apocalypse Now, there wasn’t much that was mailed in, and I have a suspicion a good deal hit the cutting room floor to bring the film down to an ‘R’ rating. All that sweet, sweet blood, and the occasional chest shot, is really the only draw to the film. Juvenile? No doubt, yet Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is still a sight better than most films in the Friday the 13th franchise. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter”
October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th Part 3
The first two installments in the Friday the 13th franchise managed to be oddly engaging, even while being bad cinema. Friday the 13th Part 3 is just bad, what little effort at quality went into making parts 1 and 2 obviously too much for the filmmakers, who must have found themselves overly occupied with tinkering with 3-D effects. That’s right, Part 3 was filmed in glorious 3-D, part of the 1980s revival that brought the moviegoer such lasting film gems as Amityville 3-D, Jaws 3-D, and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Like these films, Part 3 pays great homage to the 3-D monster fare of the 1950s. That is, it looks cheap, feels cheap, and lacks much more than contrived 3-D shots to keep the audience engaged. There’s no cachet, no horror show charm to this film, and therefore no reason to remember it. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th Part 3″
October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th Part 2
Why fix something if it isn’t broken? Well, that depends on one’s definition of broken. Friday the 13th was a little movie that could. Little plot, little acting, little in the way of developing much of what makes a good movie. But it had a substantial body count, and had huge returns on its little budget. So a sequel was made, but one that was less a sequel and more a remake. Friday the 13th Part 2 still had a tiny budget, but was blessed with enough funds to afford some of the finer things in moviemaking, like extras, better film stock and lenses, and better actors. Part 2 breaks out of some of the claustrophobia that was a necessary result of the shoestring the first movie was hanging by, but the plot, what little of it, remains faithful to the original: Lusty camp counselors encounter psychopathic murderer in isolated lakeside campsite. Got it? Cause that’s it. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th Part 2″
October Horrorshow: Zombieland
The zombie apocalypse has struck again, this time in director Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland. Bad meat was the culprit this go around, spreading a virus throughout the population that turns otherwise normal people into ravenous cannibals. That’s good for the audience, bad for the characters who inhabit the former United States, re-imagined as a nation/amusement park of the undead in the mind of Columbus, the movie’s main protagonist, played by Jesse Eisenberg. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Zombieland”
October Horrorshow: Quarantine
There’s a subgenre in horror/sci-fi cinema, where a limited number of people are trapped in a contained space and terrorized by some malevolent force. They are picked off, one by one, leading to climax and resolution. There may be a term for this, I don’t know. “Alien-type” maybe. I don’t really want to put the time in researching whether or not there is. After all, most of these films are awful. I did come up with an acronym, however. Arguably, more time was needed to come up with the acronym than researching terms for these dogs, but it was fun. So, from this review forward, films where a small cast is in a reclusive environment where everyone (almost) dies, will be referred to as SCREWED movies. That’s Small Cast, Reclusive Environment, Where Everyone (almost) Dies. How clever. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Quarantine”
October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th
There’s bad cinema, and then there’s bad cinema. Some movies are just unwatchable, displaying a profound lack of skill on the part of the filmmakers. There is nothing to them, not even the satisfaction of shock value. Take, for example, something like Theodore Rex, a film I wrote about last year. That movie was pathetic, with no redeeming qualities at all. It was even uncomfortably racist. But, had the title lizard gone on a murderous rampage, the filmmakers may have had something. Imagine that, a film so bad that it elevates grisly murder to the level of ‘redeeming quality’. Truly, a film that must be seen to be believed. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th”
October Horrorshow, Retroactive: Deep Rising
Yikes. Sometimes a shitty movie crosses my path and I don’t know whether to lose myself in the fun of it all, or to hate it. Deep Rising, written and directed by Stephen Sommers, whipsawed me back and forth between deep belly laughs and outright revulsion so quickly that by the end I was praying for something, anything, to appear just for a moment, a fleeting second, and justify the mystifying amount of time I spent with this dog. Didn’t happen, so now, instead of letting the experience fade away into the deep recesses of my memory, I’m going to write about it. Continue reading “October Horrorshow, Retroactive: Deep Rising”
The Empty Balcony: Excalibur & Monty Python and the Holy Grail
VHS tapes, once upon a time, dominated the space below millions of televisions in American homes. They were in your house, a friend’s house, a family member’s house, stacked tall and deep in all sorts of cabinets upon which the TV was perched — cheap particle board constructions bought at the local big box with fake wood grain or flat black veneer, peeling up at the edges always. That awful furniture can still be found. The shapes have just changed a bit as tapes have disappeared and been replaced by DVD boxes. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Excalibur & Monty Python and the Holy Grail”
The Empty Balcony: Robocop (1987)
Dystopian future societies are the stuff dreams are made of. They are what grow from the seeds of our own decadence and shallowness. The moral bankruptcy, and sometimes outright horror, of the settings of films like Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, THX 1138, Escape from New York, and Soylent Green wouldn’t be possible if writers and directors didn’t look around them and see the lightning speed with which we throw ourselves into unknown futures, sometimes without regard for so many of the present realities which work so well and don’t need change. The ever-present message is that change, sometimes jarring change, is inevitable. Films that look to the future warily revolve around placing the viewer in the role of Rip Van Winkle. When the theater lights dim, the familiar world of today dissolves into the freak show of tomorrow. The overriding questions always being: Why are the people onscreen comfortable with this? Why doesn’t everybody see how wrong things are?
Simply put, because that’s how things in the future work. People in the future grow up among the bizarre, things we wouldn’t recognize, as though these were the normal conditions of existence, rather than a manufactured reality that mankind has created for itself. The irony is, of course, that we, in real life, away from the fantasies of Hollywood, live like these silver screen wraiths, embracing the fast pace of technological advance, throwing off the yoke of millennia of human history to embrace the dictates of the electronic age. Implicit in films that depict the future is that civilizational advance is a given, destroying the ways and mores of the past, creating something unrecognizable to those who weren’t witness. This resonates because that is exactly how our ancestors would feel would they awake in today’s world. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Robocop (1987)”