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 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 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 Horror – October 5th – “The Uninvited”

The writers and directors of this movie should be Uninvited… from their professions.

“The Uninvited” opens with what turns out to be a crappy dream sequence. The main character, Anna (Emily Browning), is making out with her boyfriend at a party on the beach. He says, “I love you. And I have a condom.” And we say, “What the fuck?”  Apparently she has the same reaction because she stands abruptly and runs into the (very fake looking) woods. In the (very fake looking) woods, she discovers a little girl’s dead body in a garbage bag, which really has nothing to do with the rest of the story, just in case you were wondering. She proceeds to her home, where we see her sick mother in a hospital bed with a bell tied around her wrist. And then…. kaboom!

The next thing we know, Anna’s being released from a mental institution, with this farewell advice from her psychiatrist, “You’ve got to finish what you started.” Here’s a tip for the amateur screenwriter: The ironic line from the beginning of the movie that the main character will no doubt wind up repeating at the end of the movie really loses the effect when it’s delivered through a bullhorn.

“The Uninvited” is such a collosal failure at writing and direction- made pathetically worse because it’s based on a fanfuckingtastic Korean movie called “A Tale of Two Sisters“. “Two Sisters” is in my top ten favorite horror movies, and definitely somewhere in my top movies of all time. It’s got an excellent story, legitimately scary scenes (like “Ju-on (The Grudge)“, it’s one of few movies with scenes that are not to be repeated in my presence), and competent acting. The American “remake” has none of these things.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 93 minutes

Directed by: Charles Guard, Thomas Guard

Written by: Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro, Carlo Bernard

Starring: Emily Browning, Arielle Kebbel, Elizabeth Banks

Theatrical Release: 01/30/09

DVD Release: 04/28/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: $28 million

Metacritic Score: 43/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 32%

“The Uninvited” suffers from Insecure Writing Syndrome. Symptoms include: expository dialogue, unnecessary voice over, and the insertion of a superfluous love interest. The mystery and intrigue that made the original are no where to be found in “The Uninvited“. Perhaps the writers felt the original storyline was too complicated. The twists in “Two Sisters” are the kind that make you need/want to go back and watch the movie again, but I count that as a good thing. “The Uninvited” has actually been made more confusing and is rife with plot holes- I’m sure if I went back and watched it again (no thanks), it’d make even less sense the second time around.

At the very least, one would hope that a crappy remake would just directly copy the scary scenes from the original movie, right? Wrong. Clearly the people making this movie had no idea or interest in what made the original good in the first place.

I, like Anna, should have ignored that doctor’s advice. I should have turned it off after the first line like my gut told me to and NOT finished what I started. Save yourself the annoyance and check out the original.

31 Days of Horror – October 4th – “Pulse”

Day 4 in our 31 Days of Horror brings us cyber-intrigue and Kristen Bell. And by cyber-intrigue, I mean the opposite of intrigue.

Dear Horror Movie Directors,
Those “creepy” clip sequences you keep using for opening credits have now officially been beaten to death. Please find a new style of opening to bore us with. Thank you.

Yet another crappy American remake of a Japanese horror movie. In fairness, I have not seen the original movie, “Kairo“. Maybe it also sucks, but it’s got to be better than this.

All you really need to do to know that “Pulse” is going to be a crapfest is to check out the synopsis: a super nerd releases some sort of evil computer virus that infects humans. Symptoms include rapidly spreading inky stains on skin, loss of personality, and finally suicide. A crack team of co-eds must stop the evil virus before it takes over the world! Ugh.

The computer-to-human virus idea is way outdated as a movie concept. More detailed, more believable fictional computer and/or artificial intelligence realities have been around for almost 40 years at this point. Books like “Neuromancer” and even a huge budget blockbuster like “The Net” handled technological theories much more deftly years before the internet was literally a household occurrence. There’s really no excuse for this movie concept to get the green light in 2006. What’s worse is that there have been 2 sequels.

The cast is an odd assortment- Kristen Bell of “Veronica Mars” (one of tvcasualties’ favorite shows), Samm Levine of “Freaks and Geeks” (another TVC favorite), Boone- I mean, Ian Somerhalder, and… Christina Milian? Yikes.  Predictably, the script sucks, so I’ll let them all slide on the subpar acting this time. Except for Milian, for remaining unable to cover her middrift throughout most of the movie.

The evil computer ghost bits are clearly going for “The Ring” style creepy visuals, but they fail (like the rest of the movie) at even being interesting.  Other rip-offs of “The Ring” have done this and done it better. “Ju-on (The Grudge),” for example: the story didn’t make an ounce of sense to me, but at least the visuals scared the bejesus out of me. No one is allowed to talk about the way that woman crawls down the stairs around me. I can barely type about it without wetting myself.

“Pulse” is not even a proper crappy horror movie because it’s too boring to get any enjoyment out of making fun of it.

31 Days of Horror – October 3rd – “The Hills Run Red”

If you’re looking for a horror movie that deconstructs horror movies by acknowledging the movie making process, we recommend “Behind the Mask – The Rise of Leslie Vernon“. If you’re looking for a newer, much shittier version of that, you could watch “The Hills Run Red“. But we don’t recommend it.

The main character of “The Hills Run Red“, Tyler, is a horror movie junkie. He is obsessed with the mystery behind an 80s slasher film deemed too gory for public viewing. The movie and the director who made it have since disappeared, and all that’s left is the trailer.  Of course, Tyler sets out to find his Holy Grail, i.e. the original cut of the film. The premise is weak (not to mention not at all scary), so of course the first half of the movie is peppered with over-expository dialogue explaining to us why this is so very important. Next time they should just stick to the gratuitous boob shots and leave the plot to someone who can put together something at least marginally entertaining.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 81 minutes

Directed by: Dave Parker

Written by: John Carchietta, John Dombrow

Starring: William Sadler, Sophie Monk, Tad Hilgenbrink

DVD Release: 09/29/09

Along for the ride are Tyler’s girlfriend, Serina (Janet Montgomery), and his best friend, Lalo (Alex Wyndham). The three also happen to live together, so of course Serina and Lalo bang in one of the first scenes. I’m not sure why that happens so early on in the movie. Usually you’d wait until the audience has a speck of interest in the characters before you have them doing horrible things to one another. Maybe they realized that no one would ever give a rat’s ass about the characters in this movie and decided that it wouldn’t really be a crappy slasher movie without the obligatory, unnecessary sex scene in the first act.

The acting performances don’t help the lame script and silly storyline. I did initially think that Sophie Monk, whom plays the mystery director’s daughter, was the only one of the group with a remotely believable performance, but after the first half of the movie, I changed my mind.

Not surprisingly, this movie continues to make mistake after mistake. There are several discussions about horror movie cliches, which has been cliche since Scream did it 15 years ago. One of the biggest WTF’s in “The Hills Run Red” is allowing a gun into the story. Guns have no place in horror movies. They’re too fast and too clean to be scary weapons. The irony is that in real life, a man pointing a gun at you would probably be a lot scarier than a man wielding a knife or an axe or a chainsaw. But horror movies aren’t about real life.

The twist in “The Hills Run Red” is so obvious, it announces itself like a train approaching a station. CHOO CHOOOOO!  Just like that. Unfortunately, I think the movie could have been at least mediocre had they gone with an “April Fool’s Day” style twist. Not as “scary” in the long run, but when your movie already isn’t scary, at least you could come out of it with points for cleverness. Sadly, I get the impression that the movie fancies itself a clever version of “House of 1,000 Corpses“. But what made “1,000 Corpses” better (and I wasn’t even a huge fan of it, really) was that it was an unapologetically simple slasher movie. I can give “Hills” an ounce of credit for attempting the twist, but the execution falls so flat that it simply makes a bad movie that much worse.

The last mistake this movie makes is having false ending after false ending, in which each one seems to be trying to outdo the last in badness. Just let it die.

31 Days of Horror – October 2nd – “Wolf Creek”

In “Wolf Creek“, you’ve literally gotta fight for your right to party. The audience is thrust into the frat party underbelly of the Australian outback. We meet a group of backpacking college kids that simply want to exercise their right to peacefully binge drink and fraternize, maybe wake up on a beach surrounded by empty booze bottles. Somehow, their dream of drunken bliss slides into a torture porn nightmare at the hands of a maniac bushman. Hey! Don’t chop my fingers off and intentionally sever my spinal cord, bro!

Sound familiar? “Wolf Creek” is basically Hostel: Down Under, right down to the Crocodile Dundee enormous knife joke. Like Eli Roth’s movie, the creative energy here mostly gets spent on slasher-y torture slice-n-pokes and/or stalk-chase-kill scenes. (Hence the “torture porn” nickname.) Graphic? You betcha. Bloody? Absolutely. Heartwarming? Not that much, actually.

British tourists Liz and Kristy meet Aussie Ben and decide to travel with him for the rest of their vacation. They head to Wolf Creek, the site of a huge crater where a meteor hit, and hike about it’s crater-y-ness in the rain. When they head back to their car, it won’t start. Naturally. A mysterious stranger with a cowboy hat happens upon them after dark, though, and offers a helping hand. They accept. Later he offers a murdering hand. They mostly accept that, too. The movie is very loosely based on true events (there really was an Australian serial killer that tortured and killed backpackers.)

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 104 minutes

Directed by: Greg Mclean

Written by: Greg Mclean

Starring: John Jarratt, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi

Theatrical Release: 12/25/05

DVD Release: 04/11/06

Production Budget: $1.4 million

Domestic Gross: $16 million

Metacritic Score: 54/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 53%

“Wolf Creek” was made in Australia on a shoe string budget ($1.4 million in Aussie dollars, which is even less in Ameros.) Considering that, it’s actually fairly impressive as a production. It’s visually interesting and engaging, both in terms of the colorful Australian landscape shots and the special effects during the mutilation and maim scenes. There are also some effective manipulations of the conventions of the horror genre that provided some surprises as well. Beyond that, though, the plot and characters are very forgettable. Like most slashers, it’s style uber alles, with the story left to drown in the oceans of fake blood.

The movie came out in 2005 and was very successful financially. It’s impossible to not mention the critical response as well, at least in passing. While it got rave reviews among horror fanatics (Fangoria called it the scariest movie of the year), it got some surprisingly harsh ones from some mainstream reviewers. Roger Ebert (tvcasualties’ idol critic, more or less) gave it a rare 0 stars and said he wished he’d walked out of the theater and just kept on walking. Other elite reviewers responded similarly. I actually think such a strong response to a horror movie, even if it’s overtly negative, might mean that the filmmaker was onto something – something disturbing enough to rattle people that have watched thousands of movies and are pretty desensitized to what can happen on the screen. That said, outside of a little twist along the way that genuinely surprised me, I thought it was just OK.

31 Days of Horror – October 1st – “The Thaw”

Hell yeah, October is finally here! First up in our 31 Days of Horror, a slighting chilling Val Kilmer picture…

Straight outta Canada, “The Thaw” is – weirdly enough – a politically conscious rip-off of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (which happens to be my favorite horror movie.) Global warming is the theme here, and we’re not talking underlying. It’s pretty overt, maybe even heavy handed. The film doesn’t try to tap into fears about global warming so much as actually use a loosely connected monster movie to try to get a cautionary message across. All told, it isn’t too annoying in this regard, which it easily could’ve been, but I do think something about the preachiness made it less scary.

A group of science students travel to the arctic research facility of Dr. David Kruipen (Val Kilmer) to learn from his work regarding the melting ice caps. The Dr. has just made a grave discovery, though, as hatching parasites found on a well preserved wooly mammoth carcass prove to be devastating to his team of scientists. The students arrive to find the empty facility, and it’s not long before bugs are scuttling over tiled floors and stainless steel counter tops, picking off college kids one by one in classic horror fashion.

Truth be told, the storyline of “The Thaw” even more closely resembles that of a Season 1 “The X-Files” episode, “Ice,” which was also heavily influenced by “The Thing,” even going so far as to hire the same set designer as the John Carpenter movie.

It’s not the recycled story that lets this movie down, though, or even the cast, all of whom do a pretty a respectable job. (Kilmer is only in the movie for about 10 minutes, but the younger leads – “Superbad‘s” Martha MacIsaac and “Veronica Mars” alum Aaron Ashmore, in particular, bring a lot of life to their roles, considering the material.)

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 94 minutes

Directed by: Mark A. Lewis

Written by: Mark A. Lewis and Michael Lewis

Starring: Val Kilmer, Aaron Ashmore, Martha MacIsaac

Theatrical Release: N/A

DVD Release: 10/06/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: N/A

The production quality fails the movie. Clumsy directing syphoned suspense away multiple times. Those long, quiet scenes that lead up to a startlingly loud noise would cut to a new angle just before the bang, totally undermining that lingering anticipation and moment of surprise. It’s like they were going through the motions of a horror movie cliché without having any idea what made it work in the first place. The opening sequence also looked very cheap and amateurish. It aimed for a fast paced, semi-disturbing montage juxtaposing graphic footage of wounds and flame with news clips about global warming – sort of like a crappy version of the weird videos in “The Ring” – but the way it was edited seemed dated and trite.

The biggest failure, especially when holding this up to “The Thing“, was the utter lack of a paranoid and desolate atmosphere. It didn’t capture the claustrophobia of being isolated with characters pushed to the edge, unsure of any of the people around them; those slow shots creeping over the blustery tundra that stretches on as far as they can see in every direction. “The Thaw” didn’t deliver on those almost intangible style elements that make a great horror movie “feel” creepy and interesting. And when it comes down to it, a horror movie lacking style, lacking a particular atmosphere to capture our imaginations, is almost not a horror movie at all.

31 Days of Horror – 2009 Edition

Happy Halloween, nuggets! In honor of our favorite holiday, our gift to you is a horror movie review for each day of this kickass month!

October 1st – “The Thaw”

October 2nd – “Wolf Creek“

October 3rd – “The Hills Run Red“

October 4th – “Pulse“

October 5th – “The Uninvited“

October 6th – “The Last House on the Left“

October 7th – “Dog Soldiers“

October 8th – “Giallo“

October 9th – “Cube“

October 10th – “The Wizard of Gore“

October 11th – “Doomsday“

October 12th – “The Fog”

October 13th – “Cemetery Man”

October 14th – “Pitch Black”

October 15th – “Drag Me To Hell”

October 16th – “Dead and Buried”

« Previous Page — Next Page »