31 Days of Horror – October 11th – “Doomsday”

In 20o7, a deadly virus pandemic breaks out in northern UK. The British government’s solution is a massive quarantine over all of Scotland. Those left in the quarantine area are left to fend for themselves, which doesn’t go over so well.

Fast forward about 20 years later and enter our badass leading lady, Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), complete with eyepatch. The Reaper Virus is back, and the Big Kahunas send an elite group of soldiers into No Man’s Land formerly known as Scotland to see if they can find anything that might lead to a cure. Who is selected to head up the task but our one-eyed heroine… who, coincidentally was one of the last few lucky people to make it over the wall the night they put the quarantine into effect.

I was mega excited to see this “Doomsday“, having enjoyed both of Neil Marshall’s previous films (“The Descent” and “Dog Soldiers“). The opening scene had my interest piqued- massive disease pandemics are high on my creep list.  About twenty minutes in, the movie takes a more bleak, post-apocalyptic angle. Right on! I’m thinking “Fallout 3 meets Half Life 2: The Movie”, and I’m ready for some action! About thirty minutes in, the movie makes a 90 degree turn for the 80′s. Complete with the psychotic bad guy, Sol, with his silly punk rock hair-do and spiked jacket. Sol does a jig on stage, eats some human flesh, and I’m lost.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 105 minutes

Directed by: Neil Marshall

Written by: Neil Marshall

Starring: Rhona Mitra, Craig Conway, Sean Pertwee

Theatrical Release: 03/14/08

DVD Release: 07/29/08

Production Budget: $33 million

Domestic Gross: $11 million

Metacritic Score: 51/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 48%

The confusion doesn’t end there, either- there’s still a “Gladiator” scene, a car chase scene that looks a little more like a car commercial than anything else, and the neatly packaged ending.

There’s so much wrong with “Doomsday“, and so much that could have been right. Either the disease pandemic angle or the bleak post-apocalyptic angles could have been awesomely scary. And if Marshall wanted to do an 80′s action/apocalypse homage, that’s cool, too, but pick a genre and stick with it. I’m not necessarily a big fan of the medieval-meets-cheesy-punk-rock apocalypse style, but I’d tolerate it if the movie at least made sense.

“Doomsday” has a disconnected feel, as if it were written in 10 or 20 minute chunks that wind up not really corresponding to one another. Eden’s eye patch, for example, disappears after her first scene.

This was Marshall’s first big budget movie, and think a lot of directors get dollar sign fever when they finally get the big budget. They forget the old adage that “less is more.” Hopefully Marshall will get back to basics for his next feature.

31 Days of Horror – October 10th – “The Wizard of Gore”

Next up in our 31 Days of Horror countdown is “The Wizard of Gore“, a “kind of” remake of a 1970′s Herschell Gordon Lewis movie of the same name.

From a writing perspective, I think “The Wizard of Gore” could have been good- probably even great, and maybe could have cracked my top 5 horror movies, given my penchant for film noir. It’s got the mystery, the shape shifters, and to top it off, a creepy magician. Unfortunately, the directing and production are such collosal failures, the movie assumes the shape of a giant terd.

Montag the Magnificent is not your garden variety magician. When he chooses a female audience member to be part of his show, instead of making a purse disappear or pulling a scarf out of an ear, he slices them open and pulls out their innards or stuffs them inside a giant barbeque and lights it up. But at the end of the show, just as everyone’s about to flee from the theatre in horror, he says his magic words and the girls appear alive and well before the audience’s eyes. But while the girls may leave the stage unharmed (except for being hypnotized into getting naked, no biggie!), one by one they show up corpsified. Journalist Edmund Bigelow (Kip Pardue) becomes obsessed with the show and the disappearing girls.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 95 minutes

Directed by: Jeremy Kasten

Written by: Zach Chassler

Starring: Kip Pardue, Crispin Glover, Bijou Phillips

Theatrical Release: N/A

DVD Release: 08/18/08

“The Wizard of Gore” looks cheap and amateur across the board. The colored lighting and craaaaaazy camera angles are reminscent of mid 90′s MTV, and I don’t mean that as a compliment, in case it wasn’t obvious. There are odd visual flashes throughout the movie that I found confusing since they tip off the already obvious twist. If they were going to be there at all, they should have been a lot more subtle a la Fight Club. Perhaps director Kasten should focus a bit more on communicating the plot to the audience and a little less on the camera tricks.

Dourif (as a crooked herbalist) and Glover (as the aforementioned creepy magician) give good, if not over-the-top, performances. I get the sense that both actors are desperately trying to save a movie they know is destined for the crapper. Kip Pardue struggles as the lead. His lines are delivered so stiffly, it’s almost as if he’s never seen a noir film.

When I noticed the credit for the Suicide Girls in the opening, I thought, “Send in the boobs.” There should be a Countdown to Titties clock in this movie. Anytime you see a chick with tattoos, put 60 seconds on the clock. And it’s not that I’m opposed to breasts in movies, but pointless mam-shots have become so predictable for horror movies that I find it a bit annoying. Make a decent movie and then you’ve earned your tatas.

31 Days of Candy – October 9th – Hot Tamales

Hot Tamales are one of the few non-chocolate/gummy candies that I can remember adults taking an interest in. An for good reason: these tasty treats give you a tantalizing tingle on the tip of your tongue… Okay, enough with the t’s. Seriously though, Hot Tamales combine spicy cinnamon with gummy goodness in such a way that only a wuss wouldn’t like them.

I was always tempted by their fruity counterpart, Mike and Ike since you get 5 flavors instead of just one, but in retrospect, Hot Tamales are better.

31 Days of Horror – October 9th – “Cube”

From the opening scene “Cube” thrusts the audience, along with 6 characters, directly into a booby-trapped maze of cubed rooms.  No one, neither characters nor audience, knows quite why they’re there.  But the film never lets up by leaving those claustrophobic cube chambers for a flashback or an easy explanation.  It maintains an intense focus, and the suspense just builds and builds.

This is a pretty cold open:  Six people in jumpsuits awake in a strange arrangement of connected cubes.  Each cube has a door on each of its 6 walls (including up and down.)  They quickly discover that some of the rooms are booby trapped with a variety of motion detecting traps such as poison gas, tons of slicing mechanisms, flame throwers or a face melting acid spray.  Yikes.  An early, and disturbingly painful, death shows just how high the stakes are.  Without food and water, they’ve got maybe 3 days to find their way out.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 90 minutes

Directed by: Vincenzo Natali

Written by: André Bijelic, Vincenzo Natali, Graeme Manson

Starring: David Hewlett, Nicky Guadagni, Nicole de Boer

Theatrical Release: 09/09/97

DVD Release: 01/26/99

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: $501,000

Metacritic Score: 61/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 58%

Tension builds as a viewer, but it builds even more for the characters.  They’re pushed to their limits, and when one snaps, it changes the group dynamic completely over the second half.

Released in Canada in 1992, “Cube” has slowly but surely found an audience on DVD.  Borrowing some from John Carpenter’s “The Thing“, the basic premise of confined characters searching for both meaning and salvation in their actions makes this more or less a blueprint for the “Saw” series without the lame Jigsaw the master puppeteer angle.  I’ll just say that “Cube” is many many times better.

Beyond being without some of the unrealistic behavior that you see in movies like “Saw“, “Cube” isn’t all contrivances and manipulations.  It’s more than just setting up twists.  It gives the audience plenty to really think about with a clear philosophical theme of chaos vs. order.  The question of why they’re here is an obvious one, and one that they can’t know without getting out, if ever.  Did someone meticulously plan this cube and specifically target them to bring them here for some grand purpose?  Or was it all a lot more random – the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, more or less – based on the little information we have on the cube’s construction, the latter at least seems plausible.  The characters discuss it at length.  Both sides of the debate seem reasonable enough.

“Cube” engages the audience in the best way a movie can. It asks big questions. It leaves a lot to the imagination, but it makes you think. It doesn’t just present easy, digestible answers that are more about convenience than meaning. The movie does not fit into a neat little “Cube“.

31 Days of Candy – October 8th – Butterfinger

I am not a fan of the Butterfinger, but it’s such a quintessential trick or treating item that I didn’t feel right leaving it out. There’s really nothing good to be said of the Butterfinger… it’s too sweet and to crunchy. It’s like airy peanut brittle, which may be what they’re going for and may be why I don’t like it, since I don’t like peanut brittle.

The only redeeming quality is that it’s covered in chocolate. And since there’s always a Butterfinger fan in every crowd, it can always be traded for something more desirable.

31 Days of Horror – October 8th – “Giallo”

Famed Italian horror director Dario Argento has been in the news a lot lately.  His most popular film, 1977′s Suspiria, is getting the big budget Hollywood remake treatment courtesy of Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green.  That’s slated for a 2010 release.  Perhaps even more exciting to Argento fans, his newest movie, Giallo, starring Oscar winner Adrien Brody, came out this year as well.

So I watched Giallo.  Let’s nobody get their hopes way up about that second part.

It turns out Giallo is little more than a very cliché cop vs. serial killer story.  This plot line is so tired, I was nodding off just a few minutes in.  We’re told through exposition that Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Brody) understands the bad guys and gets all the serial killer type cases.  (He doesn’t demonstrate this skill much in his actions, though it’s apparently important enough that the themes and the final scenes hinge on the notion.)  He hunts a killer credited simply as Yellow (played by Adrien Brody with heaps of makeup) that likes to smash beautiful girls’ faces with tools.  Linda (Emmanuele Seigner) is the sister of the girl currently on the receiving end of Yellow’s torture tools.  She meets up with Enzo and tries to help him crack the case before her sister’s head gets cracked like an egg.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 92 minutes

Directed by: Dario Argento

Written by: Dario Argento, Jim Agnew

Starring: Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner

There is no atmosphere here, no sense of a real world populated by real people dealing with the dread this kind of scenario would produce – in fact, there are literally almost no characters at all aside from the cop, killer, victim and sister.  Huge chunks of back story are explained through awkwardly inserted flashbacks of both the cop and killer’s childhood traumas.  Sounds more like Dr. Phil than Dario Argento.  All telling and no showing makes TV Casualties sleepy.

Further on the lack of atmosphere – every word of dialogue is about the murders.  There is virtually no characterization.  There is nothing said with style.  No signs of anything these characters care about or think about, and thus, no real reason to care about them.

Fine.  So it’s a shitty plot with shitty dialogue.  Can Oscar caliber acting salvage that somewhat?  Brody hams it up in the double role.  He overacts with twitches and funny faces as the murderer and tries to pull off a constantly smoking, gravelly voiced noir detective that comes off as silly part of the time.  Emmanuele Seigner plays her role with the charisma of a dead dog.

As I alluded to somewhat earlier, the final scenes go through the motions as though the filmmakers are saying something important about Inspector Enzo.  As though this piece of shit could deliver something meaningful.

31 Days of Candy – October 7th – 100 Grand

I’m salivating profusely as I type this… the mere thought of caramel + crispies + chocolate is drool-inducing. In my opinion, this is one of the finest candy bars man has ever made. It’s the prefect combination of chewy and crunchy. If only they’d start making a dark chocolate 100 Grand, life would be complete.

31 Days of Horror – October 7th – “Dog Soldiers”

“Dog Soldiers” puts itself ahead of the pack right off the bat by coming up with a realistic reason for a bunch of people to be stranded in a dire situation. There’s a challenge in coming up with a premise that isolates the characters in some kind of horror hell. So many movies half-ass the set-up that they immediately fall flat.

A group of British soldiers embark on a training mission in the Scottish wilderness… and find they’ve bitten off more than they can chew when they discover most of a Special Ops group torn to pieces at a nearby camp. It’s 50 miles to the nearest town, and night is falling quickly.

Lots of good old fashion gore, not to mention a decent, comptent story (another horror rarity), follows. There’s an action scene towards the middle of the movie that comes off like a bunch of boys playing War, perhaps not helped by the incredibly fake sounding gunfire. But for the most part, the performances are solid. The dialogue is relaxed. A lot of (bad) horror movies are a little too aware of the fact that they’re horror movies, and the exchanges are forced and stiff.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 105 minutes

Directed by: Neil Marshall

Written by: Neil Marshall

Starring: Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee, Emma Cleasby

Theatrical Release: 05/10/02

DVD Release: 09/4/07

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 79%

The monsters reminded me more of the Egyptian god Anubis than your standard werewolves, which wouldn’t necessarily be bad, except they just look a little silly. Considering the budget, I have to cut the movie some slack. However, what a lot of movies don’t understand is that the unknown is scarier than the known, so not showing too much of the monster works to their advantage. This is especially true when the special effects are subpar. So even though I’ll forgive “Dog Soldiers” for the low budget effects, I think it would have been scarier had they not shown quite so much of the big dog heads.

Just to give you an idea of how low budget we’re talking, the movie was originally shot on 16mm and blow up to 35mm. For such a low budget affair, it’s a damn good movie, and no surprise that writer/director Neil Marshall went on to make “The Descent“, which is probably my favorite horror movie.

31 Days of Horror – October 6th – “The Last House on the Left”

“The Last House on the Left” opens with a long campy sequence that is reminiscent of “Happy Days” or even “Leave It to Beaver” in its quaint cheeriness.  Mom and Dad sit in the den and joke with their coming of age daughter about her upcoming birthday.  Life is simple.  Everyone is all smiles.  And then the lead character and her best friend get raped.  Yep.  That’s basically the summary of the first act.

Welcome Wes Craven to the big screen.

The forementioned daughter, Mari (Sandra Peabody), and her best friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) make a grave mistake on their way to a concert when they ask a stranger, Junior (Marc Sheffler), if he knows where to find some grass. He takes them to an apartment where they are immediately held against their will by two escaped convicts, Fred (Fred J. Lincoln) and Krug (David Hess) (those names sound familiar?), and their crew.  Phyllis is raped almost immediately.  The next morning the convicts load the girls into the trunk and take them on the road.  When the car breaks down they haul them into the woods for more torture and rape.  Their murders look inevitable.

Pretty bleak, eh?  Despite many production shortcomings, there are a lot of things that work really well here.  First of all, the torturers seem sadistic in a believable way, maybe partially because they are also pretty dumb, basically insensitive, rather than the super vindictive genius masterminds that we see in torture porn movies lately.  Krug and Fred work as villains because they are horrible but still somewhat subtle, and a scene of reflective remorse shows that they are ultimately still human.  On top of that, Craven’s directing goes over the top in a few scattered comedy scenes and grows subtle and careful during some of the most horrifying violent displays.  The first rape scene happens off screen, the camera slowly zooms in on Mari’s horrified face as she watches a man attack her friend.  One of the early torture scenes keeps cutting back to a music videoesque montage of the Mom and Dad in 70′s garb hamming it up as they bake a birthday cake for their daughter, which somehow heightens the creepiness of the whole thing.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 84 minutes

Directed by: Wes Craven

Written by: Wes Craven

Starring: Sandra Peabody, David Hess

Theatrical Release: 08/30/72

DVD Release: 05/12/09

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 65%

There’s a major shift for the final act, though, and the story almost does a 180 degree turn.  At this point, it becomes morally gray in a new way.  Those subtle displays of violence earlier turn more graphic.  And the movie doesn’t really tell you what to think of it all.

Craven’s debut (as both a director and writer) somehow succeeds at being disturbing and being ironically funny, sometimes achieving both within just seconds of each other.  Despite a very tight budget with a young, inexperienced cast and presumably production team, Craven keeps it entertaining and shows flashes of great instincts for what will really effect the audience. The slang, bell bottoms and acoustic rock soundtrack (actually written and performed by the actor that played Krug) gives “The Last House on the Left” an interesting 1970′s atmosphere that actually adds more than it detracts as far as dating the film.

31 Days of Candy – October 6th – Nerds

You always knew you got a box of Nerds whilst trick or treating because of that distinct rattle. Nothing else sounds like a box of nerds.

Just the right mix of tart and sweet, plus you they come in packages with 2 flavors in one box- genius!

I never considered it before, but the illustration on the box really suggests you’re eating those little Yoshi/Lemming looking dudes, and that’s kind of creepy.

Next Page »