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Die Farbe (2010)

2012-01-25T18:00:00.003+01:00

H.P Lovecraft’s The Color out of space is in my opinion one of his best short stories, detailing the deterioration of a small farm after a meteorite contaminates the land. The alienness of the decay in both humans and everything around them is one of the most memorable events in any Lovecraft novella. There have been a few movie adaptions of it earlier, such as Daniel Hallers Die, monster, Die! from 1965 with Boris Karloff and Nick Adams (not a bad little flick but not very Lovecraftian), David Keiths The Curse from 1987 that starts out as a decent adaption but fails miserably when it goes for the old "We need a biiig climax" shtick. Italian filmmaker Ivan Zuccon had a decent go at it in 2008 with his Colour from the dark, a movie that benefitted from excellent visuals and a strong production design when it came to the decay of the land but changed the concept into something more supernatural and ergo, less fun than it could have been. Now onto Huan Vus adaption Die Farbe (The Colour), a low budget independent movie shot in yummy b&w and is quite faithful to the original story while having the audacity to expand upon it with a new narrative that opens and closes the movie. How does it fare compared to the earlier tries and more importantly, how does it fare as an adaptation of Lovecraft?

What Die Farbe does with the story is to start with an opening set in America where a young man travels to Europe to locate his missing father who left for a small village that he had some sort of connection to. He meets an old man who recognizes the father and starts to tell a story. In flashback we move to just after the end of the Second World War where a German farmer comes home from the front, only to find that his farm has been annexed by American soldiers to house wounded people. They need a guide to go further into the valley but the soldier refuses at first. We then go further back in time as the young man watches as a meteorite strikes the ground near a neighboring farm, melting into the ground and making their crops grow abhorrently large, and as it turns out, totally inedible. The meteorite also seeps into the well, contaminating the water and turning both the land as well as its inhabitants into something else. Something alien.

Is this the Lovecraft adaption we all have been waiting for, the one that finally will give us a glimpse into that strange world that grew inside H.P Lovecraft’s head? The simple answer is no and I doubt we will ever see anything resembling the images we create in our heads when reading the short stories. Die Farbe does give it a good go. The extended narrative is evocative and helps expanding the story into something more interesting for those of us that know the story by heart, though there is a totally unnecessary twist at the end that comes out of the blue and only serves to confuse the viewer. It should have been left out of the movie. The actors are serviceable as long as they speak in the native German but the actor that is supposed to portray an American never comes close to sounding like one. The film also feels a bit toned down, the alien horror excesses never even comes close to the delirium of the original story but I suspect that was for both budgetary and maybe artistic reasons. I can live with it, the overall atmosphere of the decaying German valley might not be straight out of the Lovecraft story but it is still chilling enough for me. Die Farbes greatest strength lies in shooting the whole thing in evocative black and white, with the entity the only thing that has a color, a fun effect although it works more in concept than on film for the reason that it is just an earthly color we are seeing.

So, was Die Farbe a disappointment? At first I thought so, a friend of mine had hyped it and since I am a fan of Lovecraft’s fiction I had high expectations. Maybe I expected something else but when I stepped out of the theatre I felt slightly underwhelmed. The movies focus on ambience over goo was maybe part of the "problem", maybe I wanted more. But after a couple of days I started thinking about it, there were images that would not leave my head. To me that is proof that a movie does what it should, that the creators had something to say. It might fail as a Lovecraft adaption but it does a pretty good job as an art-house excercise in mood and ambience. Other Lovecraft fans will want to see this, it is still a lot better that the cheesy Curse and has more alienness than Colour out of the dark. A nice try, well worth watching.

You can get it here

The Beast and the magic sword aka La bestia y la espada mágica (1983)

2012-01-25T15:00:00.003+01:00

No matter what you think of this movie, no matter how much you may hate Paul Naschy, you must agree that we very rarely see ninjas and werewolves in the same movie! For that reason La bestia y la espada mágica aka The Beast and the magic sword is a masterpiece! This was the last Waldemar Daninskymovie (there were a few more low budget crappy flicks that utilized the character but they dont really count. Because I say so.), produced partly with Japanese money (the same deal also gave us the fun Human Beasts) and mostly set in Nippon as well (the concept is great, it's just a bit strange to watch samurai lords speaking spanish). This time Daninsky goes to Japan to find a cure for his lycanthropy, fighting ninjas, samurais and an evil witch intent on getting hold of his powers for her own use. Every woman in the vicinity falls in love with him, as usual and you know fairly soon who will be the one to kill him in the end. It's rather fun to see the Daninskymythology being rewritten in every movie, though mostly just in setting. And the movie has ninjas! And werewolves. Did I mention topless ninjas? Too bad there is no werewolf vs ninjascene, that could possibly have been the coolest scene in the entire universe.

If you have seen one Waldemar Daninsky movie you know what to expect, Naschy/Molina does not deviate from the formula one bit, instead deriving its strength from the novel setting of Japan and its myths and legends. The werewolf makeup even gets an upgrade, though I am still divided if I actually like it or not. Naschy also seems to have gotten a bit of extra cash since the movie looks quite good and makes great use of some excellent locations. If you have seen any of the earlier Daninskymovies you know exactly what to expect and it is all good fun. Good, yummy, furry, topless fun.

Phase IV (1974)

2012-01-18T22:30:00.001+01:00

Intelligents ants on the warpath? No, this isnt Bert I Gordon, this is Saul Bass superior scifimovie (his only full length movie). Bass was more known as designer for movietitles such as Psycho, Spartacus, Alien, Big and Cape Fear. Why he only directed one movie is unknown to me, he was a man with a great eye for design and judging on the basis of Phase IV he could have given us a lot of interesting movies.

During some sort of cosmic event an english scientist discover that ants all over the world have started to form some sort of collective intelligence, even between different species. He builds a laboratory in the middle of the Arizona desert and has the local population evacuated since the ants have exterminated their natural rivals and now begun to kill cattle. It doesnt take long before the scientists are under siege from the strangely intelligent ants.

Evil antmovies arent exactly numerous out there and succesful attempts can be easily counted, the only two being THEM! and this one (Yes, I know that Empire of the ants is entertaining as hell but it cant really be called good). Saul Bass has taken a concept that could be a sinking ship from the start and turned into an exciting and well made movie, thanks to an intelligent script and imaginative design. What impressed me the most is the microphotography where you get to watch the ants move around in their strangely geometricaly perfect world (the first sign that something is amiss). The scenes where you see the ants gather their dead in long lines are actually quite chilling. It might sound a bit odd but Ken Middlehams superior photography truly makes something extraordinary with it. The only real weakness with the movie is the somewhat weak characters which makes Bass direction give you quite a bit of sympathy for the ants as they go about their business.

The great cinematography and the setdesign (in particular the weird monoliths that the ants build outside the laboratory) is another strength of Phase IV, which brings the movie straight into the halls of fame of intelligent science fiction. The actors may not win any awards, especially since the characters arent that well developed but they do a servicable job. All of this moves forward to a spectacular ending which may raise more questions than it answers but it sure as hell looks awesome. So, Phase IV is well recommended to any fan of scifi and takes its subject seriously which is a big positive in my book.

Footnote: That poster. Wow. I would imagine quite a few people being dissapointed with the movie after seeing it.

And I would like to end this review with the conclusion that Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is a stupid concept since this is one of the movies they make fun of. Come on, I can accept Manos hands of fate, but this? You got to be fucking kidding me.

Adam Chaplin

2012-01-11T07:54:00.009+01:00

My first encounter with this movie was through this trailer which at a first glance (well, the first minute of it at least) looked kind of cheesy, that very particular cheese that so many low budget shot on video gore movies tend to be full of. You know, just a movie without ever reflecting on narrative etc, just pour on the gore. This can be good in itself but very straining on your patience. But then came a couple of really striking scenes and I knew I had to have this. I hopped on the filmmaker’s website and about five minutes after watching the trailer I had ordered it. It arrived yesterday (a bit smashed up due to the fucking post office but working just fine) and I popped it into the dvdplayer to hopefully get an entertaining experience.

And by God it is!

Adam Chaplin might actually be one of the best comicbookmovies I have ever seen. It is not based on a comic but the story, the visuals and most importantly - the violence, are all as if torn straight out an ultraviolent manga like Story of Ricky and Fist of the north star (the latter even appeared on the extras several times as major influence which just confirmed it for me). Adam Chaplin, our ultra-buffed hero (he is so toned and muscular that it almost looks goofy but then again, it is straight out of Fist of the north star) is in love but his girlfriend owes money to the ultra-evil mutant freak Denny and is doused with petrol and set on fire. Adam is consumed by rage and somehow summons a demon who grants him superhuman strength and superior fighting skills, something that will help him track down Denny and his two freak sons and get his revenge. All of this is set in murky hallways and ruined buildings in the fictional country of heaven Valley, a place that looks slightly post-apocalyptic at times but has a lot of normal looking traffic on its roads.

Ok, so the story offers nothing new, we have seen (and read) it many times before. What Adam Chaplin does with it is an entirely different thing. The budget was obviously low but Emanuele De Santi (Writer, director and star) and his team realized that to make this work they had to go all style. Heaven valley and its inhabitants are doused in great looking filters and small but significant visual aids, making the illusion complete and most importantly, making you forget that you really are looking at the same old abandoned buildings that we usually see in this kind of movie. The movie is full of these awesome little quirks that makes me applaud the filmmakers, things that shouldn’t work but does thanks to a bit of ingenuity. My favorite example of this is the demon that follows Adam Chaplin around, a sort of burned puppet that is constantly looking over his shoulder (or actually hiding in it), speaking to him and his victims all throughout his journey. Most of the people are in full makeup looking goofily mutated, another smart choice that at first feels strange but turns out to be very appropriate for the proceedings. The filmmakers have created their own style and look, slightly derivative of the before mentioned Japanese comics and animes, and this puts Adam Chaplin way ahead of similar low budget projects. The camerawork might be a bit claustrophobic at times, a lot of close-ups that can feel unnecessary but the photography is in general excellent. Another strength is the good editing, something other filmmakers should concern themselves with a bit more.

And then we come to the violence. Is this the bloodiest movie ever like the trailer promises? No, not really but there is plenty of it, long bursts of freaky splatter with liters of blood exploding out of torn limbs, impaled bodies and busted heads. All of this is mostly practical, some of it a bit cheesylooking but helped tremendously with a bit of cgi to make it look a bit better and more hard hitting. Gore hounds will be more than satisfied.

I really liked Adam Chaplin, it might look like the average shot on video gorefest on paper but it is really an exercise in what a bit of imagination and ingenuity can do when you go all out in the battle of style versus budget. Much recommended to all fans of gore and independent filmmaking. Buy it on the official website, the dvd has english subtitles. Well worth your money.

The Savage hunt of King Stach (1979)

2011-12-30T08:40:00.002+01:00

Seriously, I dont really what to make of this movie. It is a Russian gothic fantasy horror that plays like a mixup of The Blind dead series, Hammer and Tarkovsky. It is wonderfully designed and shot, a true feast for the eyes but thanks to a overly talky and pretentious script it becomes quite hard to keep up your interest.

A student traveling through some remote parts of Russia during the 19th century is on a quest to write down all the different myths and legends of the region and arrives at Marsh Firs, an old castle out in a swamp. He meets the neurotic owner of the castle who tells him about three legends of the are, The Little man, the Blue lady and the Savage hunt of King Stach (an ancient king who was murdered by his best friend and now roams the swamp looking to kill any descendant of that very friend), and of course - the curse on her own family. The castle and the surrounding marshlands are littered with strange characters and during his stay our hero desperately tries to survive all their odd machinations as people start to die after telling him about the Savage hunt of King Stach.

I dont really know what genre I should put this movie. The best thing about it is the design of the sets and the cinematography, it oozes Mario Bava and Terence Fisher. Or maybe if Tarkovsky made a remake of the old Hammer favorite Hound of the baskervilles? The environments of the castle are striking, pervaded in a gothic atmosphere with halls overgrown with vegetation or having lost to the waters of the marshes and are now flooded. The wet and cold marshes is a character in itself and the atmosphere cant be cut with a knife. The scenes with King Stachs riders roaming through the land are supremely surreal and makes you think about Amando De Ossorios Blind dead series. The problem with the movie is that all of these ingredients, the horror and the fantasy are only a small part of something else, something that would be more suited for a small room full of pretentious moviewatchers drinking wine in their Fassbinder t-shirts, not uttering a word until the movie is over. There are droves of heavy, doomladen philosophical dialogue without any obvious connection to the story and all of this becomes clear when you watch the dvdextras where the director clearly states that he wasnt interested in doing a fantasy/horrormovie. But on the other hand I will admit that it is impossible not to be drawn into this macabre world thanks to the visuals, the good acting and the interesting story. It requires patience. And the reward is a movie you most likely will never forget.

Shan Huas Xie ying wu aka Bloody Parrot (1981)

2011-12-28T08:59:00.003+01:00

I have to start this review by admitting that I wasnt able to follow the story with all its absurd twists and turns. It is never really clear what is going on with the plot and new characters are introduced all the time. Based on an old legend of The Bloody parrot, somewhat similar to the old genie in a bottle - if you see it you will get three wishes. Three wishes that of course will send you straight to hell. The Emperors advisor sees it, wishes the return of a great treasure and moments later he, his wife and his son are all dead. Now a great hunt for the treasure starts and a quest for finding out who the Bloody parrot really is. A tough as nails swordsman happens to be wandering around in all of this and manages to get mixed up in the violent shenanigans all while he gets the hots for a prostitute who in the name of exploitation spends just about the entire movie naked. There is a lot more to the story than this but it would seriously take me hours to write it all down so I'll leave you with this somewhat vague description. I recommend you see the spectacle for yourself.

And that is what you should do if you have any sense of fun, see this lovely movie. Shan Huas Xie ying wu aka Bloody Parrot is a nicely shot little thing with tons of well choreographed and violent fightscenes, eastern magic and nudity. If people arent slicing each other up with swords or other sharp tools of cutting they perform strange magic or assassinate each other. We even get some messy gore in the shape of a couple of really gross and fun autopsies. This is an excellent Wuxia that I would recommend to anyone that likes their kung fu movies a bit more violent and exploitative. An awesome double bill with the slightly similar Portrait in crystal.

Tetsuo - The Bullet man (2009)

2011-12-16T08:11:00.004+01:00

FINALLY! The Iron man is back! With a vengeance! And in... English? Wtf? Then again, we always knew that if there was another Tetsuomovie there would be lots of Wtfs. Twenty-two years after the original Tetsuo and nineteen after the sequel, Shinya Tsukamoto finally returns to the wonders of biomechanical psychopatics and more loving fusions of flesh and metal.

An American man living in Japan with his Japanese wife and their son is struck by grief when a mysterious man kills the young boy by running him over with a car. As this is a Shinya Tsukamoto movie this event triggers something in our hero, making him turn into a metal beast and he starts searching in his past to why this is happening all while trying to control the anger that is transforming him. Not so easy when your wife is demanding vengeance.

Yes, here we go again. The original is a frenetic masterpiece in b&w technofetish surrealism and while the sequel had a larger budget it actually suffered from having a slightly more coherent narrative. Some of the magic was lost as the scenario grew bigger and bolder. Tetsuo - The Bullet man goes back to its roots with a smaller scale which I liked but still does one big mistake. It substitutes the panicked, glorious kitchen sink mentality of the original with some sort of headache inducing frenzy, complete with camerawork that is just too much. Tsukamoto moves his camera like he is on the sugar rush from hell and I am certain that a lot of people will be put off by this. As soon as any sort of action starts there is instant migraine. Mind-blowing, soul tearing migraine. I spent the first half of the movie in a state of trance, trying not to get upset over this but suddenly I realized that I had gotten used to it. Or somehow during the process Tsukamoto discovered a pattern that your brain responds to better. I don’t know. What I do know is the fact that after this, Tetsuo - The Bullet man became a much more fun experience.

And then we come to another not so fun part. The fact that it was shot in English. I do not know the reason for this, maybe Tsukamoto has some sort of reason for it. But it doesn’t work. The American actors (per usual when it comes to non-Japanese actors in Japanese movies) aren’t particularly good. The lead actor does an ok job with the physical part of the role; the transformation into something that looks like it was ripped straight out of H.R. Gigers foundry in hell and left for dead fused to a concrete wall. But as soon as he goes for a bit of dialogue, you cringe, mostly for the fact that the dialogue doesn't feel "natural". The lead actress fares better but she struggles a bit with the English language, just enough to make you notice. And then we have Shinya Tsukamoto himself as the main baddie, not exactly fluent in English but strangely appropriate for the proceedings. Or am I just a bit more forgiving because it is the fleshmetalmaestro himself? This doesn’t really matter in the end, it is the same as with the weird camerawork - as soon as you get used to it (more accurately get sucked into it) you just go along for the ride. When The Bullet man takes on an entire swat team in his father’s house there is no going back and of course, things just get better and cooler as our hero continues to transform into something... more.

Tetsuo The Bullet man is a kickass movie that is a worthy part of the Tetsuo saga, even though it does not do everything right. I am glad that I did not watch this at a cinema; my head would most likely have exploded. It is much more suited to the small screen and those dvd subtitles are much needed. If you liked the previous parts you will most likely love this too but if you are new to this particular universe I recommend you start with the original. It is still the best one.

Brain dead (2007)

2011-12-13T11:20:00.001+01:00

You know that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you realize that the movie you have just started watching will be awesome? Ok, so there might be a small voice in the back of your head that keeps insisting that "no, the movie cant keep up this momentum. In the end, it will suck." but you ignore that and place all of your hopes on what the director (in this case Kevin S Tenney, the maker of Night of the demons and Witchboard) will dish out. When 20 minutes have passed and every single female in the movie has shown her breasts I know I truly am in for a treat.

During the precredits we follow a meteorite traveling through the universe in a decent sequence, especially considering the low budget of the movie. In an amusing sequence the meteorite (actually not much bigger than a coin) lands on earth, smacking straight through the head of a fisherman turning him into a member of that exclusive club of the living dead since the piece of rock contained an alien parasite. He kills his friend in a nice, juicy goresequence and then the movie sets about doing what it does best, bring a number of characters into a remote location so they they all can be killed in joyfully gory ways. Sometimes you dont need more than that. Not only does the first part of the movie contain the before mentioned nudity, we are also treated to an exploding head and an eyegouging followed by a head torn to pieces - all with good, practical effects. This is how Brain dead goes, from beginning to end and it is helped by a decent script and a bunch of actors who are all in on the joke. Lots of clichés and silly humour, but with a nice wink to the audience. There might be an accent or two that arent exactly believable but really, who cares? This is a movie about braineating zombies infested with alien parasites. What is more important is that you are never bored, not one second. This is guilty pleasure at its finest. The only thing that I can complain about is the zombiemakeup which mostly looks silly but on the other hand, I am a firm believer of the Italian style of claypot zombies. The makeupeffects are otherwise excellent, good old school grue.

Brain dead might not be for everyone, I'll admit that but to the likes of me that love old school gore it is a wet dream. The story is simple but effective and Kevin S Tenney is a good director, whatever the material may be. If you want 90 minutes of boobs and gore you can do much much worse.

Silk aka Gui si (2006)

2011-12-08T10:00:00.001+01:00

I loved Hideo Nakatas The Ring and Dark Water when they arrived on the scene back in the early 2000s and spent a lot of time afterwards soaking in all the spinoffs and ripoffs that poured in from every asian country imaginable, and then some. It didnt take me long to realize that most of them were pretty awful and that fact was sealed when the american remakes started dropping in one by one. So, I gave it up. I watched a Grudge sequel or two but never with any real joy. But then I found Silk. And a bit of hope for the genre. The filmmakers takes a concept that has been milked dry and twists and turns it around a bit with a bit of intelligence and voila! We have this fine piece of entertainment.

Silk stars The Menger sponge, a mysterious proteincube that a Japanese/Taiwanese team of scientists uses to catch a ghost, a sideeffect to its real purpose - creating antigravity. To learn how to master the powerful energies that the ghost emits (that they need to create the an antigravityfield) they need to study the ghost, a small boy, and learn how he died - and why. The team keeps him sealed up in a glass chamber and they study him constantly trying to make sense of his daily, very repetetive routines. They notice that he is talking to himself and bring in a young man with a few skeletons in his closet named Wang, an expert on reading lips. Now they need to find out who the boys is, why he died and why he kills anyone who looks him into his eyes.

The movies first half is top notch when it deals mostly with the science behind all this and the mystery surrounding the ghostly boy. All of this is handled subtly and with quite a bit of intelligence without gorging on the usual jumpscars - even though it has those too. Chao Bin-su, the writer and director of Silk also made Double vision, another really well made Taiwanese horrormovie with supernatural undertones and you have the same moods here. It feels fresh and interesting to focus more on the somewhat sad detectivework trying to find out more about the boys history. Together with good direction, strong acting and excellent camerawork we get a very competent chiller with brains instead of brawns that you watch with great fascination. Silk is a horrormovie of excellent quality that does weaken ever so slightly towards the end where it cant contain itself and goes into a more full on horror spree but it still feels a lot more fresh than the usual Ringu ripoff thanks to the lovely story. A very good asian horrorflick that I really recommend to fans of smart horror and is hopefully a sign that the genre isnt dead. A doublebill with this one and Japanese Noroi - The curse would be an excellent evening.

Splinter (2008)

2011-12-05T09:28:00.006+01:00

In these times of failing economies, religious strife and a general contempt for human life and dignity, it is nice that we all can agree on one thing. There can never be enough parasitemovies. To enhance the general quality of life as we know it we need more movies with strange lifeforms that takes over and changes human beings in ways that are as painful and gory as possible. When you ponder the masses of weird lifeforms in mother nature (and our bloodstreams) there should be about a million potential movie scripts out there. But as usual we get a shitload of crappy remakes instead. Thank you very much Hollywood.

Onto Splinter, which actually is an excellent example of a good parasitemovie. The plot is simple, almost waferthin but effective enough. Its only function is to bring people to an isolated location (in this case, a petrolstation) and let them try to survive the mayhem of a nasty parasite whose only purpose in life is to kill. And assimilate of course. The Slinter beastie is a very nice creation that absorbs its victims into a snarling heap of twisted limbs straight out of John Carpenters The Thing and the infection itself can be very painful, both for the victim and the audience who has to watch bones break in very excrutiating ways. It is a simple concept that works wonders for monsterlovers like me and the practical effects are marvelous. I also love the fact that we never learn the true reason for the parasite and just accept it for what it is: A hungry creature. The acting is another strong point, they do a good job with the material they have and actually behave fairly intelligent except for a slightly goofy sequence toward the end where they are trying to outwit the beastie using cold but it is only a very minor annoyance, the sequence works tensionwise but is a bit silly. I do have a bigger beef with the camerawork where the camera is all over the place a lot of times. It's like an manual on how not to use shakeycam which means that we dont get to see the parasite as much as we would like to. A choice of the filmmakers I assume but it gets annoying as hell at times. But that is about as negative as I can be towards Splinter and it does not detract from the fun of it all, just lowers the grade from Awesome to Really good. It is a fun and gory flick full of excitement which I really recommend and wouldnt actually mind to see in a sequel or two.

Five reasons why Firecracker probably is the best movie ever made.

2011-11-09T09:35:00.006+01:00

1. The Plot. Evil nasty drugpeddlers unfold the stupidest scheme ever to cut out a middleman while staging martial arts fights to the death in their private arena. Come on, this is brilliant! It does not fit together anywhere and is just awesome.

2. The "acting". Vic Diaz is his usual funny self, but the others? Jillian Kesner was not much of an actress and supposedly a female karate champ but the fightscenes are so goofy that you can never tell, especially since they are all slightly sped up. She does look really good without clothes and that topless fight on the construction site is one of the best pieces of entertainment ever produced anywhere. Period.

3. The music. As far as I can tell every piece of music is lifted straight out of Robert Houstons reworking of the first two Lone wolf and Cub movies, Shogun Assassin. And its credited to a Nonong Buencamino.

4. The violence. Not only does the before mentioned topless fight scene include a guy falling back on a scythe and a bad guy tumbling face first into an electric saw, the final demise of the evil, evil bad guy who killed our heroines sister is fucking great. Every movie should end with the bad guy getting *spoiler* his eyes gorily punctured in close up with wooden sticks! *end of spoiler*

5. That topless fight. Nuff said.

A special mention goes to the lovescene with the heroine and the main bad guy, where they slowly and very erotically slice off each others clothes with a knife, all set to schmaltzy pianomusic in what has to be the most unexciting sexscene since Don Dohlers Nightbeast.

No, firecracker is not a good movie. Actually, it hasnt any qualities that would make it come even close to being a good movie. But all that cheezy acting, the nudity and the violence and the general throwing in the kitchen sink feeling of it all just makes it so damn fun to watch. What you should do now is to go out and buy Roger Corman's Cult Classics: Lethal Ladies Collection of which this is part of. No extras on Firecracker, but a good print and an all round excellent dvdset. Go get it. NOW.

Inbred (2011)

2011-11-05T00:02:00.005+01:00

Watching Alex Chandons new movie Inbred starts out as a very familiar experience. Let's see if you've heard any of this before: Two social workers are taking a group of teens with different problems out on a trip north. North here means a rundown little town full of people with strange teeth and staying at an old house that hasnt been lived in for decades. We all know where this will lead, and it does. It doesnt take long before the locals and the cityfolk clash, resulting in injury and death. But this is where Inbred really takes off. Yes, we've seen it all before but rarely as fun as this. Instead of just pounding us with the latest ways of displaying that old "favorite", torture porn, Chandon takes his clichéd plot and infuses it with a lovely black and absurd sense of humour that reminds me a lot of the Belgian movie Calvaire with a dash of Monty Python, especially in the scenes where the locals put on a show which I will not spoil, it needs to be seen. Let me just say that there is a lot of twisted gore and demented imagery here that will put a smile on your face.

But what of the gore? Oh, there is plenty of that, all practical (well, 99.9% of it actually according to Chandon himself). Exploding heads, limbs sawn off with chainsaw, heads split open with an axe, you name it. This is a wet dream for a gorehound and the effects are really good, some of the best I have seen in a low budget movie ever.

If there is anything to complain about it is that the characters are somewhat weak, all of them products of the familiarity of the story but this is never really an issue since all of them are played by a really good group of actors, both the leads and the smaller roles. Everyone brings their own strengths to their roles, so even if the characters arent very interesting, they are still acted well enough for you to care about their eventual demise. The locals are especially fun to watch as they do their vile and bloody deeds when they are played by actors that obviously are enjoying themselves a lot.

Inbred falls firmly in the category of "Stupid and ignorant citydwellers fall foul of countryfolk" but instantly rises to the top levels of it because of the way it plays out. There is playing cat and mouse, there are traps and there are hicks laughing at dying Londoners, but thanks to the talent and energy both behind and in front of the camera we never really get the chance to realize that we've seen all of this in ten other movies, we just enjoy the ride. And you should too. Look for it in the future.

I saw this at the Weekend of horrors convention in Germany earlier today, together with Fred "Ninja dixon" Anderson and Jason "Cinezilla" Meredith and we were all blown away by the sheer fun of it, all of us starting to write a review in our heads. There was a short Q&A afterwards with Chandon and one of the producers afterwards where he told us that the version we saw was completed very recently and that they are looking for distribution. Let us all hope that this comes out soon, I want to own this now! In the meantime we will all bitch about who thought of Calvaire first. FYI, Jason stole it from me.

The Basement (1989)

2011-10-19T08:43:00.005+02:00

Here is an oddity, a shot on super 8 anthology horrormovie that was shelved when the footage was deemed unusable, but "rescued" in 2010 when technology was available to make it watchable and released on dvd along with an actual vhstape in a nice box with some other lowrent crap like Cannibal campout and the Video Violence movies. I do use the word crap with a bit of love for the same reason that I tend to watch movies like Burial ground over and over again, because they make me feel good. They give me a warm feeling in my stomach and a smile on my lips. Yes, it looks like shit (Shot on übergrainy super 8 film), the dialogue is pretty god damn awful and the actors couldnt even be accused of actually acting but the movie is full of so much yummy fun that you cannot hate it.

So, The Basement is an anthologymovie in the same vein as Tales from the crypt where a group of characters meet in a basement where a guy in horrormakeup tells them stories of their impending future. The first story is about a cheating bitch of a woman that discovers that her pool has a tentacled creature that eats everything that enters it and the way she uses it to get rid of people she hates, like just about all her neighbours. Not much of a story really, just all round goof and there is not really a twist or anything, but its so brief that you never have a chance to get bored.

The second story is the best, basically a goreversion of Scrooge where a teacher who likes to torment trick or treaters on Halloween is told by his dead wife that he will be given a message, cue lots of gore (and an awesome sequence where he fantasizes about killing all the students in his class). Not only is this sequence the only one that has an actor in the lead role that actually can act, but it is also loaded with cheap and cheerful gore, with effects that arent exactly Rob Bottin but still way better than you would expect. Good fun.

Story number three is about an assholish George Romero-hating moviedirector shooting some sort of awful zombiemovie, which means that the dead will rise and come and get him. Which they do. This piece is mostly set at night which means that we get a lot of murky looking footage (sorta looks like a gifanimation on a large screen) of zombies walking around, and of course some hilarious scenes of a couple of "groupies" that really have a hard time keeping themselves from laughing during the scenes where they dance for the moviedirector in his trailer. The zombies are funlooking and there is a sense of cheezy fun, but the lovely gore of the previous segment is mostly absent which sort of lessens the entertainment.

Fortunately the gore is back for the last episode where a young writer buys an old house where the previous owner killed some people in his hidden torturechamber before he vanished somewhere. There is a demon in the house which produces some excellent gore, but one problem is that it is set at night with basically no light whatsoever (the house has no power) which sort of makes it hard to make out what happens at times. It is still good, gory fun though.

This is all very low budget which some truly mindboggling "acting" but to The Basements defense is that it does not contain any padding, no mindless scenes of people sitting around doing nothing or travelling to some location. Everything is over before we reach the seventy minutemark and you come out of it content with joy. Yes, it is really awful at times but it does not hinder the entertainment. The prime of the movie is the special effects which are well done and bloody. I realize that a lot of people wont be watching this just because of its cheapness but if you've gotten this far you should be interested enough to watch it. Get the box, there is a lot of cheap fun here and if you have any interest whatsoever in low budget filmmaking you will have your hands full with the nice extras. And an actual vhstape of The Basement, which is fun if you still have a vcr which only strange people like Jack J still do.

Watchmen (2009)

2011-10-18T14:44:00.003+02:00

Being a fan of Alan Moore sublime comicbook I never felt any interest in watching Zack Snyders movieversion, for several reasons. I did love his remake of Dawn of the dead, but comicbook adaptions tend to suck major ass. The only reason I did decide to watch it was when I turned on a channel that was showing it by mistake and came upon a nicely shot sequence of some rather nice violence (when the hitman tries to kill Veidt) and thought, hey this could be good.

Wrong.

This movie only confirmed that Zack Snyder should stick to musicvideos or whatever he did before turning into moviemaking. Watchmen is an empty, pompous shell of a movie. It is visually strong but shallow and stupid. Just plain stupid. I reread the original comicbook after watching this which only made me loath this movie even more. Seriously, If I ever see a moviefight again where every punch results in a slomoshot I will kill myself.

Avoid.

The Wild man of the Navidad (2008)

2011-10-18T13:05:00.005+02:00

I am truly a sucker for 70s exploitation, the cheap rawness of all those fun low budgetmovies that poured out back then which is why I got interested in The Wild man of the Navidad. Part of me was a bit weary of it not being to reproduce that certain mood but the reviews seemed to tell something otherwise. So I bought it and watched it. And liked it, for all its various (but small) flaws.

The dvdcover boldly proclaims "From the producer of The Texas chainsaw massacre" which usually wouldnt mean anything but from the look of the movie I would say that the filmmakers did an excellent job in emulating the look of Tobe Hoopers classics, with our without pointers from Kim Henkel. The movie is set in Sublime, Texas, the type of small town that seems to have about sixty inhabitants, all living in rundown houses miles from each other and only meeting each other at the local bar. For years everyone has been afraid of the legend of The Wild man of the Navidad, a bigfoot/Sasquatch type of creature but for Dale S. Rogers this is a bit more real. For years he has kept his lands closed due to the fact that the creature lives there but when he loses his job he decides to open it up for hunters, fully realizing what will happen. And it doesnt take long before people start to disappear.

First of all, The Wild man of Navidad really does an excellent job in creating that very special atmosphere through some nice filters, especially since it was all shot on digital video, a format not particulary gritty. The Texas in this movie is hot and dirty, just like we expect it to be. Most of the actors, at least in minor roles, seem to be people that just had the fortune of being near the locations and are accordingly poor, something that actually serves the movie well. Sometimes you feel like you are watching some sort of weird documentary about the eating habits of the local inbreds. Another strength of the movie is its fun story, with the audience following the downfall of its sleazy characters while the titlecreature starts to kill everything it can find. And the titlecreature? Good stuff. It sort of resembles the beastie in that swedish classic Invasion of the Animal people aka Terror in the midnight sun. In a good way.

If there is anything I would like to moan about is that the goreeffects are rather cheap, mostly consisting of bits of torn meat flying around as the Wild man tears its victims into tiny little pieces. But that is about it though I suppose some people will have a problem with the amateur acting of the bitplayers. If you are a fan of bigfootflicks, 70s exploitation cheeze and , uh, "grindhouse", there is a fair chance you will like this. I sure did.

Ratline (2011)

2011-10-18T12:29:00.004+02:00

A movie with the following plot HAS to be included in a serious dvdcollection, there are no excuses:

Before the fall of Nazi Germany, the most sacred relic of the Nazi party, the Blood Flag, went missing. This cherished object possessed supernatural powers, infused by the occult experimentation of the SS Paranormal Division. The flag's current condition and whereabouts are unknown. Today, the search for the missing Blood Flag is on, and one man - with diabolical intentions - is getting closer to its hiding place. The flag is about to be unearthed - with nightmarish, blood-soaked consequences.

I admire Eric Stanze and co-writer Jason Christ for the talent and the guts to try to try to pull something like this off on an obviously miniscule budget and the result is very satisfying. The movie's biggest strength is the well written script that tells a fun story way better than a lot of crap that actually gets released these days. The strands of the story (all actually a bit goofy but perfect for a movie about lesbian killers, satanists and nazi experiments) come together in a fun climax and the only thing I wish is that the movie had had a larger budget, the material calls for even more outraging stuff. Still, Stanze is a talented director (I mean, he actually managed to make Savage Harvest, a shot on video Evil dead clone, into something really entertaining) and fills the movie with so much gore and nudity that you cannot help but like it all. Seriously, the first half hour is truly superior goresoaked and boobfilled glory, I love it. Especially when the goreeffects are as good as these. If you match this with some above average acting from actors you've previously seen in several Stanzemovie such as Emily Haack from Scrapbook, you are really in for a ride. This is a movie that really warrants a sequel. Recommended.

Island of the living dead (2006)

2011-09-30T09:42:00.003+02:00

One part of me would like to state that Bruno Mattei was a mediocre, incompetent moviemaker but that isnt really true. His movies are loaded with stolen scenes, bad scripts, lousy actors and dubbing that is out of this world and it is very easy just to point and laugh. But some years after his passing I realize again and again how much I miss him. One of these occasions was his next to last movie, Island of the Living dead, a very old school Italian zombiemovie. No, it is not a good movie. It is stupid, absurd and probably has the worst dubbing I have ever encountered. But when I think back on what Mattei gave us I realize that even though some of his movies were pretty awful, he was still a professional director of an almost lost era. He may have been a bit of an opportunist that went to great lengths to finish his movies, including ripping just about anything off, but the flicks always looked good no matter how stupd the scripts were. I have a little understanding for the fact that some called him the Italian Ed Wood but those people never saw an Alfonso Breccia flick. Another thing, which saddens me greatly, is that with Matteis death, something dear to me is lost. The age of the great Italian exploitation is over. Dead and buried.

Island of the Living dead is a pure and simple zombieflick that looks like it came straight out of a time capsule from 1987. It starts sometime during the 15th century on a Spanish colony in the Philippines where an outbreak of the zombie plague is causing some mayhem. 400 years later we meet a group of horrendously dubbed failed treasure hunters that end up on the very same island we saw in the beginning. The boat breaks down and they all decide to explore while it is being repaired. Yes, the island is full of zombies, the boat blows up when the self destruct device is activated (yes, every boat should have one) and now our heroes are trapped on an island full of ruins and zombies. And some vampirezombiepirates as well.

This is exploitation at its simplest. Made on a very low budget with the previously mentioned awful dubbing and overacting in the extreme, and a script that is about as original as a Joel Silver cop movie. If someone else than Mattei had done this it would probably have been unwatchable but he took it as seriously as he always did and manages to crank out a fun flick (shot on dv but still way better than most flicks in the same ilk. Mattei never forgot how to use a camera well) with decent pacing and always something interesting to look at, be it some cheap gore or some nice ruins. Mattei may not have been the worlds best filmmaker but he cared enough to make his movies entertaining, to give them a bit of heart. Thank you Bruno. We miss you.

Apollo 18 (2011)

2011-09-17T10:33:00.006+02:00

One thing that I find really amusing about this scifi/horrormockumentary is the fact that a lot of people seem to take this very serious and get really upset when they realize that it is a movie. Come on, are you for real? There NEVER was any doubt that this is anything other than a horrormovie and if you took it for real you really deserve to sit in the corner and feel ashamed of yourself.

Ok, this is a mockumentary consisting of "found" footage of a secret trip to the moon, the Apollo 18. They find a russian moonlander and a dead cosmonaut, and something else... the mockumentary concept consists of different handheld cameras and stuff placed in the moonlander and it works wonders. The lunar landscape and the sfx are excellent, making it look like actual footage of the moon itself. Yes, there is a scene or two that makes you wonder "who filmed that?" but never enough to dispel the magic. The acting is great, mainly a twomanshow but the script is good enough to sustain the movie from beginning to end. And the script is why I really love this movie. Yes, I really loved this movie and I dont really understand why the critics have panned it. What were they looking for? What we have here is basically an oldfashioned monstertale, an updated version of the old Outer limits tv-series. A horrormovie set on the moon. With monsters. Cool monsters too. Are all the critics upset over the fact that we never get any big reveal towards the end? That the ending goes a bit towards major cliché but still works?

No, I dont understand anything about the bad reviews this has been getting. From the moment I read about this movie my expectations were skyhigh, and they got even bigger when I saw the trailer. And the movie actually exceeded my expectations! This is a classic piece of old school horror, just the way I want it. I am already looking forward to the dvd/blu ray release so I can watch it again.

Btw, I saw this at a movie theatre in Las Vegas while my girlfriend and her cousin watched some show. We were about five people in a theatre bigger than anything we have in Stockholm, which was pretty cool. And sad.

The Burrowers (2008)

2011-09-01T12:34:00.005+02:00

There aren't really enough Western/horrormovies out there, which is truly a shame. You would think that the vast, unexplored plains of the old west would be the progenitor of some sort of weird beastie but so far we havent really had anything worthwile. Until now. The Burrowers, which at a quick glance looks like a Tremorsprequel, is exactly like I would want such a genrehybrid to be.

The movie starts whith a family living in the middle of the plains recieves a warning from their neighbour and hides out in their cellar. Their daughters suitor arrives the next morning only to find that the cabin is drenched in blood and the initial reaction is that indians are responsible. A group of gunslingers and some soldiers form a searchparty, but while the soldiers firmly believe the culprits to be indian, the other soon start to suspect that something entirely different is lurking. They split up and our heroes soon find a young woman buried in shallow earth with a strange wound in her neck, seemingly in a coma but they realize that the girl is still alive. She is very very paralyzed and they send her away with one of their own to find a doctor and start to follow some mysterious tracks in the wilderness. Yes, no injuns here. This is something that the indians themselves are afraid of.

I should "warn" you here, The Burrowers is a methodically slow movie which means that everyone that has grown up on Michael Bay will most likely either stop watching after half an hour or fastforward through it. Your loss. The slow pace is actually perfect for this type of movie, slowly moving forward with the plot to maximize the doomsdayish mood that grows stronger every minute as the characters discover what they really are up against. The script has brains, keeping a fine line between who is a good guy or a bad guy which really suits the movie well. They actually feel like real people. It is always nice when a movie tries to avoid clichés and the creators of this movie do an excellent job. Another strong point is the cinematography, capturing the beauty of the american wilds while still maintaing that cool feeling of dread and unease that you want to find in a good horrormovie. J.T. Petty, whose previous credits include Mimic 3, seems to know exactly how he wants everything here and I am looking forward to seeing what he does in the future, although I am not really sure if reworking Faces of death into a fictional narrative is such a great idea, at least if Wikipedia is correct. We'll see. Back to the Burrowers. If you want ensure the quality of a good script you populate it with a group of excellent character actors and here we have names like Clancy Brown, Doug Hutchinson and William Mapother, all doing what they always do, kick some acting ass. And then we have The Burrowers themselves, awesome creations that we do not really see that much of, exactly like it should be. We never really find out any major details about them, only enough to start to fill in the empty spaces ourselves, to enhance the fear they strike into you.

This is an excellent movie, with just the right amounts of horror and gore which I recommend to everyone that like to take horror seriously. There are no cool lines here, no flashy camerawork. Just a slow and gory horrormovie that takes your hand and leads you straight into a shivering nightmare. And gives me hope for the future. Essential viewing.

D4 (2010)

2011-08-24T15:30:00.001+02:00

Seriously, look at that cover. WTF? I bought the movie totally on assumption that this was some sort of syfychannel production with a huge, poorly animated cgimonster that would roam around in a jungle, killing people in various cheap ways. The type of movie that never really is any good but comfortably entertaing.

It was NOT what I got.

Instead, what I got could be more easily described as a low budget version of Predator, but with a script that way surpassed all those flicks I was expecting the movie to be like. A team of mercenaries are hired by a woman to infiltrate a government facility where her kidnapped son has been subjected to experiments. They go into the woods (which look awfully familiar until you realize that this was shot in the same state as Evil dead) and make their way to the site, only to find that something is out there, hunting them.

D4 is a lowbudget movie shot on digital video and is set only in locations that are inexpensive, just like your average syfymovie and along with that cover (from the Thai dvd I bought) it was those basics that made me think that this would be a cgi crapfest. The moment when it dawned on me that this wasn't the case was when I looked at the dvdplayer and discovered that an hour had passed without me even realizing it. Damn, they hadnt even arrived at the evil secret government facility! And that is the strength of the movie, its strong pace. The story is nothing you havent seen before and the budget doesnt allow for any real dazzle, but it is carefully plotted with decently acted characters and very little padding, opposite of what I was expecting. In the end we get a little twist that really doesnt come as a shock, but it works. Yes, it is full of clichés and may be a bit too familiar to some but as a whole it is a decent enough monstermovie. It may not be breaking any new ground but as a showreel for the filmmakers it is pretty damn impressive.

You can get the movie here.

Assault! Jack the Ripper (1976)

2011-08-23T14:00:00.001+02:00

I've seen a lot of depraved shit throughout all these years and I must say that Yasuharu Hasebes Bôkô Kirisaki Jakku aka Assault! Jack the Ripper is clearly one of the main contenders for the title of World champion of sick. I get a headache just trying to imagine who this flick was actually made for. Who the hell or rather, what the hell is the target group for this sick piece of torment? I did however find myself morbidly entertained by the debacle, which scares me. A lot.

A young and somewhat bitchy waitress finds herself interested in the pastry chef working at the same restaurant. She tries very hard to get his penis inside of her but it all ends with them running over a rather insane hitchhiker. This whole affair makes both of them rather horny and thay have some wild sex afterwards. They strike up some sort of odd relationship but it soon goes stale. However, they cant stop thinking about the dead woman and the accidental mutilation of her private parts that took place when they disposed of her body so they go out on the prowl, thinking that some killing might be a source of tittilation. And it sure is. The pair goes on a killing spree, murdering and mutilating to the left and right. Our hero the timid pastry chef soon realizes that he likes the mutilating better, especially slicing up vaginas and since the waitress doesnt approve of that (she mainly does it to keep him from leaving her), all hell will break loose.

That is one hell of a plot. The violence isnt particulary graphic gorewise but that only makes it even more disturbing, watching the pastry chef slice up naked women with his cakeknife, getting more and more into it. Yasuharu Hasebe has made a slick, well photographed piece of depravity and the fact that the movie looks as good as it does is another thing that irks me. I would have felt better if it had been made by a talentless hack. My mind wants to explode when I think of the fact that stuff like this actually played at a cinema in Japan some time in the seventies. Fuck all those pixelated hentaimovies and fetishporn, this is straight from the source, the reason for Japans infamy when it comes to cinematic perversion. And it actually is a good movie, even though it isnt something I would recommend to most people. Mondo Macabro has made an excellent job in releasing this piece of japanese cult on a fine dvd and removing it from the halls of notoriety and obscurity. I recommend it, if you think you have the stomach for it. An orgy of bloodlust and carnage indeed, this is one of the few times a posterquote is 100% true.

Yellowbrickroad (2010)

2011-08-23T11:45:00.001+02:00

I came out of this movie not really knowing what to think of it, it took me more than a week to sort out my feelings about it and finally put it into words. Yellowbrickroad is a hard movie to digest since it is essentially a moodpiece, not interested in laying everything out, seemingly more concerned with _not_ answering the questions the movie asks. I think this will piss a lot of people off, but then again, most of the reviews I've read online seems to feel the same way as me. It is all about the journey, not when, where and how. In that retrospect, Yellowbrickroad does an excellent job. Well, until that ending.

It was the plot that caught my eye, finding the movie on a dvdsite and I realized that I had to buy it, without reading very many reviews. In 1940 the entire population of Friar, New Hampshire left everything they owned and walked up a mountain trail. Months later after a large manhunt had searched the area, about half of them were found. Most had just frozen to death but some were mutilated. A massive coverup classified the details but in 2008 the coordinates of the trail are released and of course, a group of people with an interest in writing a book about the event start an expedition to travel the same mountain trail. And you know things will turn bad. The whole area is flooded out of nowhere with music from the 40s, a slow croon that normally would be comfortably soothing. Not here though. As people start to lose memories and behave erratically, the journey down yellowbrickroad wont have any happy endings.

Yellowbrickroad does not explain things. It shows you a journey into a degenerative landscape, where the environment is not exactly deadly but it does things to you. People start to lose previous memories and need to repeat things over and over again not to lose grip over their own minds. Strange soundphenomena assault the travellers both aurally and visually (in a truly awesome sequence that makes me rate the movie much higher than it actually might deserve). Clearly this is a place where they should not be, and this adds even more conflict. Some want to turn back and some want to follow the road to its end.

I did like this movie a lot, there is no doubt about that. It is well staged, scrumptiously enigmatic and has an atmosphere that I havent seen since Tarkovskijs Stalker. Some of the setpieces are truly spectacular, in particular the one I mentioned earlier where a rather nasty sound tries to fuck everyone up and ends with a very nasty and gorgeous image. The forest is a creature in itself since the movie never truly explains what is going on, making you feel like the woods and trees are in on it, slowly killing everyone both mentally and pysically. I am divided towards the issue of the movies vagueness. It does help in maintaining the overbearing mood, but it all leads up to what in the end is a very unsatisfying ending that comes out of nowhere. It is somehow fitting the movie and features more of that nice imagery but... It doesnt ruin the movie but it is vague in the extreme.

So, why should you watch this movie? It is a good and very unforgiving horrormovie. Very brutal and haunting. It is well shot, well acted and has a slowly calculated pace going for it, if you are into that kind of movie. You should go into it with an open mind, this is not your average slasher remake.

Brides of blood (1968)

2011-08-23T09:03:00.001+02:00

Really, do I need to review this movie? Just look at those lovely pictures... they tell you everything you need to know. Blood, boobs and glorious rubbermonsters. This is one of these movies that leave you with fluttering butterflies in your stomach.

A nice group arrive at an island in the Philipines to teach the natives the ways of civilization and look for any traces of nuclear testing. There's the elderly professor, his horny wife that screws anything that moves (except for her husband) and the young guy who would like to screw everything that moves and inevitably will get into the pants of the chiefs wife. It seems the natives have a lottery going on for the villages young females and the winner will be tied to a pole while an interesting rubbermonsters drops by to tear them apart. Yes, the ladies are of course topless, most likely to quicken the process. Our american heroes do not approve of this, but things get even worse when they realize that the island is full of mutated carnivorous plants that love to catch humans with their tentacles. And then there is the spaniard that lives in a mansion. He seems nice but his gang, all dwarves, roam around stealing stuff and the spaniard himself has some sort of disease that make him go out at night doing weird things. Just think what a little bit of radioactivity can do. All hail the holy white light!

As you can imagine, I love this movie. Brides of blood is one of those movies that came from the Philipines in the late sixties and got quite popular in the Us. As I mentioned earlier. it really has everything you require when it comes to fine entertainment, blood, boobs and monsters. And those monsters. Oh my god. The good direction helps a lot, managing an even flow of lovely action and with some above average acting and a decent script as monstermovies go, you can easily overlook some ropey special effects. This is great fun for all fans of exploitation and as the poster says: A brutal orgy of ghastly terror! You know, ghastly terror. One of the worst forms of terror. Recommended with all my heart.

Mummy theme park (2000)

2011-08-05T18:00:00.001+02:00

Al Passeri aka Massimiliano Cerchi must be the Italian Ed Wood, or maybe Ted V Mikels or Larry Buchanan. I liked his Plankton aka Creatures of the abyss, it had some fun stopmotion and groovy fishmutants but Mummy theme park is truly something extraordinary craptacular. I have never ever seen so much crappy bluescreen and miniaturework. Ever.

An egyptian sheik manages to find an undiscovered tomb with the normal quota of mummies within and gets the brilliant idea of turning the whole thing into a themepark, turning the mummies into animatronic cyborgs. The get some publicity he hires a photographer who arrives at the scene with his severely bimboish assistant but when the mummies react negatively to the cameraflashes and start to reanimate - Jurassic park goes Egypt.

Ok, I must admit that the whole idea of the movie is pretty fucking awesome, who comes up with a thing like this. The problem is that the entire movie is shot on a set with some "carefully" placed miniatures places in front of the actors to give the illusion of grand, richly decorated rooms. The movie is pretty much filmed from one static cameraangle, making it look like it is set on a conveyor belt. It has to be seen to be believed. Of course, it is "greatly helped" by lots of mirrors giving the effect of more actors and larger rooms and of course, it does not look believable once. And then we have the "acting. Since the movie is trying for some record in awfulness, the actors look like they are competing in the overacting olympics. Apart from the nonactors that barely keep a straight face.

But somehow I think that Passeri actually knew what he was doing, just making a movie with no resources whatsoever and going for camp. The script does not have a serious bone in it and contains some rather funny attempts of humour, like beertaps based on Tutankhamons golden mask and the egyptian restaurant that only serves pizza. No attempt has been made to make the Italian actors look like Egyptians and it goes with the flow of the movie.

Mummy theme park is a bad movie. Words cannot describe the lousy special effects but then again, I cant hate them. They are actually somewhat ambitous and Passeri was probably fully aware of the cheeziness of the whole affair. You do get entertainment out of this and there are a couple of nice gorescenes of varying quality. A part of my brain wants to scream out hate for it, but then again, it is an Italian goremovie and they are rare nowadays. The description cheap and cheerful is accurate and I w2as never bored. Read this review as a warning. If you choose to watch this movie, dont blame me.

Plaguers (2008)

2011-08-05T12:00:00.001+02:00

The only thing that comes even remotely close to my fascination for japanese rubbermonstermovies are Alienclones. You know, movies that take the story from Alien or Aliens only with one percent of the original budget and talent. Sometimes it works really well, Forbidden world and Galaxy of terror are great examples that ramps up the gore and the sleaze. Most of time it does not work very well. Like most of them. Ok, so how about Plaguers? Somewhere in between.

With the help of some pretty lousy digital effects we find ourselves on a spaceship heading towards Earth. The crew (consisting of a bunch of actors that look like they came straight from the set of a erotic thriller made for cable) has a strange green orb that they plan to smuggle through customs when they arrive but their plans are waylaid by a group of psychopathic piratenurses pretending to be marooned. They kill the pilot and hijack the ship and before you know it, one of them has stuck her pretty little head into the green orb, turning her into something straight out of Evil dead or Demons. The rest of the movie is pretty obvious. The crew gets smaller and smaller, while the alienzombies increase their numbers, all in the name of good fun.

No, the story here is nothing new, a collection of stuff we've seen hundreds of times before thrown together in a large, seething cauldron of clichés. But Brad Sykes, writer and director, adds something to the dish that more filmmakers should embrace, namely love for the genre. The silliness of the whole affair just make you enjoy everything more when you realize that everyone is in on the joke. The actors are way better than expected, especially since I was assuming that all of the them were just two softcore sexflicks away from making hardcore porn. The only known actor here is Steve Railsback and he wildly goes from looking bored or having fun, I dont really know what was going on there but hey, it is always great to see him in a movie. The digital effects are weak, looking like someone was making his own fanversion of Blakes 7 on an Amiga 500, but the filmakers compensate with some really good setdesign. The makeup effects are awesome with some cool looking zombies/aliens and although I could have gone for a bit more gore, there are some fun scenes to look forward to. Brad Sykes should be commended for what he has done, this is some great fun.

Isolation (2005)

2011-08-04T08:19:00.001+02:00

Alien on an Irish farm? Not interested?

Ok, a movie where genetically modified cows spawn flesheating mutants?

Here goes: On a remote farm in Ireland, John "It feels like an alligator" Lynch has agreed to take part in an experiment not exactly sanctioned by the government, doing some strange stuff to his cows. A vet is bitten by an almost fully grown calf still inside the womb and when it eventually emerges it is very agressive, attacking its mother again and again. They decide to euthanize it and discovers a couple of pretty nasty things about it. For starters, it was actually pregnant even before being born and those fetuses were horribly deformed, their bonestructure being on the outside of their bodies. Of course, they are still alive and very dangerous, not to mention the infection they spread with their bites...

This movie really kicks ass. It is basically an Alienripoff but the story and atmosphere is clearly more influenced by Carpenter and Cronenberg than Scott and Cameron. For a first time director, Billy O'Brien shows a lot of talent. His craft is incredibly good looking and moody, taking its time to let the events of the script play out in a slow, orderly fashion perfect for the movie. There is no action here, only sharply defined plotstrands and it is only towards the end that it begins to unravel slightly when the movie turns into something resembling your average "chased by nasty monster" flick, only on a farm. And cooler. If you thought that the concept wouldnt work, think again. Just the fact that all of this is set on a run down, cold as hell remote Irish farm makes it worthy to be a part of your dvdcollection. The only negative things I can say about the movie is that the script does go a bit cliché towards the end, with lines in the vein of "if they get out of here thousands of cows will give birth to hundreds of mutants each and then it will be the end of the world, bla bla.". When the movie is so dark, dreary and otherwise fresh and original, dumb dialogue like that just pisses you off. The minimalism that has worked so well up until then dissipates somewhat. Not so much that it takes away the fun of it all, but gives you a sour aftertaste when you keep thinking about it afterwards. I know I did.

Ok, a few overused lines wont destroy a movie when it is as well made as Isolation is. The wet, cold and windy environments are perfect for the story and the mutant is a well designed little critter, just as nasty and disgusting as we want them to be. The actors are excellent (John Lynch is always good, no exception here) and if O'Brien had polished his script a bit, this would have been a masterpiece. As it stand now, it's just a fucking good movie which I recommend to everyone that likes a good monstermovie.

Zeiram (1991)

2011-07-28T08:14:00.006+02:00

Zeiram is an awesome dude. He/she looks like the lost brother of Gigan and the fungusmonsters from Ishiro Hondas wonderful Matango (and if you're not into japanese monstermovies, a proper description would be that Z looks like John Wayne designed by H.R Giger.), wears a cool cape and wields a gun that looks like the chestburster from Alien. Enhancing the awesomeness, Z also has the ability to spit out cocoons that burst into weird critters hunting it's victims. And it gets even better! After taking a full frontal hit from a bazooka, Zeiram turns into something large and spidery, and it doesnt stop there! Zeiram is not just an awesome bad guy, it is one of THE awesomest. This japanese scifi/monstermovie is full of so much bubblegum entertainment that I almost exploded from watching it. It is that fun.

So Z heads to Earth followed by a couple of bountyhunters (robobrain Bob and cute Iria). They plan to set up a trap by enticing Z into a virtual arena, a duplicate of a small japanese town but of course, nothing ever goes as planned as two electricians are drawn into the arena after investigating a rather large power surge. Let the mayhem begin!

The movie starts with a really cool black & white sequence where Zeiram slaughters his/hers/it's way through a couple of dozen soldiers. Arms, legs and faces are turned into mush just to show the audience what a badass Z is. Things do slow down a bit allowing some characterdevelopment to take place, but as soon as Zeiram arrives on Earth, we get a nice rollercoasterride. Imagine the final 30 minutes of Terminator, Japanese style. An evil alien that can take a lot of damage, can be blown into little pieces and still be dangerous and finally turn into something straight out of The Thing. All of this is accomplished with lots of fun sfx, stop motion, full size puppets and good old make up. The only issue that I have with the movie is that the glorious massacre in the beginning is never repeated, the flick basically has a cast of three but thanks to all the different faces of Zeiram this doesnt make the movie any less entertaining. I would have liked some more gore, but the presence of Z is enough. This is a funfilled ride of a movie with loads of stuff to smile at and enjoy, especially with cutie Yuko Moriyama in a cybernetic bodyarmor that has no protection whatsoever for any vital parts. Z even has a strange penis-shaped tentacle with a female face instead of a dickhead. Awesome.

And there is a sequel too!

Seriously, if you have any love for japanese monstermayhem, you will love this.

The Appointment (1981)

2011-07-27T18:00:00.001+02:00

Lindsay C Vickers The Appointment centers around some kind of evil force that kicks off by killing a young girl taking a shortcut through a park (A truly, truly, truly awesome sequence). Three years later, we meet a family living near that very park. The young daughter is going to perform at a concert and dad (Edward Woodward) is just about to tell her that he cant make it since he has to go on a workrelated trip and this is something the somewhat fatherfixated young lady wont like very much. All fathers reading this, take heed. Go to your daughters concert. She gets VERY upset and that night dad has a very nasty dream about him dying in a carcrash. To make things even weirder, some rather odd things start to happen. A pack of dogs gather around the house, people move around in photograps but dad doesnt take thsi very seriously. Dumb dad. He starts his journey the next day in his car, and slowly and methodically the evil force starts to lay the puzzle, managing the events that may lead to the dream coming true.

The major issue with The Appointment is that it is so damn slow. Things happen at a regular pace but that pace is carefully calculated to be as droning as possible. It all leads up to a satisfying ending and is far from a waste of time but it does tear at your patience from time to time. In a weird way, that very flaw is also the strength of the movie. It feels like you are watching a nightmare that there is no chance of escaping from before it smashes you in the face, waking you up. Issues with logic never really matter. It starts out in an exceptional way with the sequence in the park (which is on youtube. Link) with the young girl walking in the park, suddenly hearing a girls voice calling for her from a nearby patch of forest, all while something entirely different is following. Well, you should watch the clip yourself, it is truly exceptional. After that we are slowly introduced to the dynamics of the family. The relationship between father and daughter feels a bit odd to say the least, you get a slight feeling that there is more to it than meets the eye. There is a somewhat strange scene where Edward Woodward is standing outside his daughters room, debating whether he should enter while she is sitting on her bed waiting for him. I may be reading too much into this, but it does darken things a bit, making the whole experience more uncomfortable.

Technically the movie is excellent, there are quite a few great scenes that I wont talk about here since I would spoil the fun but I can assure you that the direction and the cinematography are fine. Acting is just fine, I mean you cant really fail with Edward Woodward. The daughter can be a bit stiff with some of the lines but nothing major.

The Appointment is a quirky flick which has been compared to Dont look now, something I agree with, they both have a similar uncomfortable mood. It is slow, paced like a snail but you get out of it with a pleasantly(?) uncomfortable feeling in your gut, the same one as when you wake up from a nightmare and realize that it was a dream. The pros most definitely outweight the cons here. Recommended

Forever evil (1987)

2011-07-27T12:00:00.001+02:00

Sometime during the winter of 1990 or 1991, in the days when good film meant blurry vhsdupes of movies you only read about in Fangoria, a friend of mine and I had just gotten a shitload of tapes from a "contact" and decided to spend an entire weekend watching all of this. To maximize the mood we decided to go to his cabin in the woods and fortunately for us this was a good choice since this was one of those winters back when snow was a meter deep, temperature was a nicely dry -20 celcius and everything creaked as we put our feet on it. A perfect scenario for a movie. I really dont remember any of the movies we watched other than Giorgio Ferronis superior Night of the devils and Roger Evans Forever evil but had a weak memory of Forever evil being a creepy and rather nice movie. Now, the whole point of this little opening is to illustrate that even a mediocre movie can be ok under the right circumstances since that what was Forever evil really was. A mess of a movie with all the bad bits blurred by a nostalgic memory.

Ok, so it is not the worst movie ever made, far from it. To say that it is a good one is also not right, but at least it is ambitious. The first 30 minutes are actually quite decent, at least when you compare it to similar movie from the same era. We get to follow a number of friends going to a cabin in the woods and before you can say Evil dead ripoff all but one are dead and now the boredom begins. You see, it was the evil god Yog Kothag that behind the dastardly deeds and Marc, our hero wants to get even. He teams up with a young woman who experienced something similar and together they try to find out the truth about the resurrection of Yog Kothag, his undead realestatebroker henchman (who sounds like he used to work for the empire in Star Wars) and the zombie roaming around. Yes, just the one zombie.

Forever evil has no chance in hell of ending up on someones favorite movie list (unless he/she has the same memoryclouding issue as me and never did the dumb thing of watching it again) but I have seen a lot worse. The problem with the movie is that it is two hours long, two hours that start out well but descends into scene upon scene of badly acted filler interrupted by the odd gory dreamsequence. It isnt helped by the music that sounds like it is midiversions of pornmusic. The director does a decent job but totally overdozes on POV sequences, to the point of making you groan whenever the camera starts wandering again. The script is, as I stated earlier, ambitious and has an intriguing story, but is way too drawn out and massacred by a lot of not so good actors. If you manage to hold out unto the end you are rewarded with a decent ending with nice gore, but the road to it isnt easy to follow. I wouldnt really hold it against you if you stopped watching halfway through. Mostly for 80s horror fetishists. I do like the basic idea a lot, do a normal horrormoviescenario in the first 30 minutes and actually show what happens afterwards.

I have to mention one of the dreamsequences that to this day remains somewhat notorius where a pregnant woman rips open her belly and removes the fetus, a sequence that will ensure that the movie will be remembered in the future.

Ok, if you still finds this interesting you should go here where the writer of the movie talks about making low budget horror. He mentions a directors cut that only was available on vhs, but has since been released on dvd which was the version I watched. It has a very entertaining commentary track where the director and writer, fully aware of what kind of abomination they unleashed upon the unsuspecting public, go into lengthy detail about how the movie was made.

Ratman (1988)

2011-07-27T08:00:00.001+02:00

Wow. What the hell is this?! Well, the answer is actually rather simple. Pure and simple exploitation for the purpose of making money. Just like I want it.

And what a plot! A mad scientist has in his tropical island hideout managed to create a rat/human hybrid (played by Nelson De La Rosa, the shortest man in the world when this movie was shot). No hybrid of any kind who has some pride in his work can remain in the laboratory and promptly escapes. While this is going on a couple of models and their photographer end up at the scientists place. To make this even better, David Warbeck (dubbed) and Janet Ågren are roaming the island looking for Janets missing model sister who may or may not be one of the models in the first plot strand. You never really can tell because the Warbeck/Ågren part of the story feels like its taken from an entirely different movie. Ok, so who cares about that? What is important is that the Ratman is crawling out of toilets to kill people.

This is wonderful. The plot is enchantingly random, spiced up with fun gore, a heroine whose boobs are constantly almost falling out of her clothes, long totally unmotivated showerscenes (who am i kidding? There is no need for motivation when it comes to nudity) and the lovely little creature played by De La Rosa. I imagine that the script was written under the influence of a lot of alcohol and/or drugs and the low budget and poor production values doesnt exactly help with that. But to the movies defense, this is a perfect example of italian exploitation as I like and love it. Cheap, cheerful, violent and always entertaining.

The Objective (2008)

2011-07-26T18:00:00.001+02:00

Let us stop for a moment and think about what the words False advertising means. Wikipedia states:

"False advertising or deceptive advertising is the use of false or misleading statements in advertising. As advertising has the potential to persuade people into commercial transactions that they might otherwise avoid, many governments around the world use regulations to control false, deceptive or misleading advertising."

A perfect example of this is Daniel Myricks The Objective, a movie that the moviecompany didnt quite know what to do with. The dvdcover promises "A paranormal Predator". Not quite.

When the movie starts a narrator tells us that a satellite has transmitted a strange image from the Afghanistan desert, something that could be radioactivity but isnt. The CIA thinks that they have an idea of what it is and sends out an agent who will enter the area with a special ops team. First they have to find a guide who knows the area but when they track him down they find that he has fled into the desert, the very same area they want to go into. A place with a very bad reputation. Following his tracks they soon find themselves in an ambush by rebels but when the battle is over, mortally wounding one of them and clearly hitting several of the enemies, they find no tracks of any assailants whatsoever. A helicopter is dispatched to lift them out but the soldiers never see it, only hear the sound of it very close even though next day the base confirms that they were in the right location. To make matters even weirder, during the night they see weird structures and shapes that only are visible throught nightvision goggles. Something out there wants to inflict harm upon our merry band, something out of old legends.

No, no fucking paranormal predator in sight. The plot I lifted from Imdb works better: "A group of Special Ops Reservists on a mission in the harsh and hostile terrain of Afghanistan find themselves lost in a Middle Eastern "Bermuda Triangle" of ancient evil." Personally I would describe the movie as a paranormal Stalker or perhaps Blair witch project if it had been written by the Strugatskij brothers. The characters are going somewhere in a deserted landscape where the natural laws dont give a fuck about how you want them to work. The Objective does not paint a clear picture of what it out there and do go into it expecting answers. What it on the other hand hints about is very intriguing, taken from Islamic legends which adds some extra tension. Towards the end the movie spaces out a bit and I would be lying if I said that I knew exactly what was going on. I think (hope) that I have a decent theory but I am not really sure.

Dont let this keep you from watching The Objective. Daniel Myrick has borrow a couple of ingredients from his earlier Blair Witch Project and it works really well. You get that certain feeling that the soldiers have ended up somewhere truly and well off the charts and yes, the movie creates more questions than it answers, it still works really well as a moodpiece. The tension is high from beginning to end and thanks to excellent cinematography and good acting there is never a problem getting intrigued by what is going on on the screen. One thing that doesnt really work is the Martin Sheen/Apocalypse nowish narration that tries to push you along the journey, it it sometimes somewhat clumsy and unnecessary, at times even giving explanations that lessens the mood. But besides that and the fact that the story is somewhat "loose", this is an excellent scifi/horrorflick that I recommend to anyone that wants a bit of decent tension and atmosphere and can accept the issue with the questions/answers ratio. Too bad that it is being marketed as something it isnt, a choice that most likely will dissapoint a lot of people.

Actually, the Paranormal predator issue seems to have been dropped now, something I realized when I googled for a coverimage, but I did find another blurb from a blurayrelease. Dark horror meets hard Action. WTF? :)

Cut throats nine (1972)

2011-07-26T14:05:00.005+02:00

I can imagine the moviemakers having a meeting before the shoot, before a script is presented. They want to make a western, that has been decided, but the writer is seething with anger. He has probably just gotten through a nasty divorce and is angry. They want a movie without heroes. They want everyone that dies to die in the most brutal way possible and the mood should be uncomfortable and filthy.

Boy did they succed.

A group of soldiers are on their way to a fort with a number of chained convicts sentenced to hard labour for life. On the journey they are attacked by hoodlums who are convinced that the group has a shipment of gold with them, but they manage to escape, well most of them anyway. Our "hero" Sgt Brown, his young daughter and the convicts. Now they have to flee through a snowy mountain landscape and when the convicts realize that their chains in fact are made of the gold that the robbers wanted, plans to escape are made. A life is not worth anything out here.

This is a very harsh and brutal movie, you can belive that. When Sgt Brown is forced to watch his daughter get raped about halfway through you get a slightly sick feeling in your stomach while realizing that is was sort of inevitable and makes you wonder why it took this long for it to happen. Every single character is a coward or a psychopath, the environments are cold and dirty and all the violence cruel and detailed. This is helped a lot bu some good acting, in spite of the dubbing, and the locations are perfect for a movie like this. Director Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent does an excellent job on an obviously low budget (most of it is set outdoors, no need for expensive sets) and sometimes you feel the same chills as the characters are feeling as they drudge on through the snow, killing each other off one by one. The music feels like it was lifted straight out of a horrormovie but actually feels rather appropriate with its unsettling choirs and dark tones.

A very bloody and brutal spanish western with lots of burning, shooting and disemboweling, perfect for a cozy evening full of carnage and mayhem with your loved ones. And Emma Cohen is in it. You cant really fail when she's around.

At the moment this flick is only available on bootleg dvd, but Code red will release this properly in september. An essential purchase if I ever saw one. There is actually even a remake in the works, with people like Harvey Keitel and Mads Mikkelsen involved. It could be fun, only time will tell. It would at least give the original some well deserved attention.

Scorched heat (1987)

2011-07-19T07:47:00.001+02:00

I have seen things you people wouldnt believe. Satanically possessed turkeys wearing human faces, herds of giant killer rabbits feasting on human flesh and Kevin Costner slumming it in Dragonfly. But nothing prepared me for this.

Scorched heat is a swedish horrormovie, one of the few. It was obviously meant for an american market since the characters all speak english. Very poorly. VERY poorly. One of the leads, Harold "Harald" Treutiger, is now a somewhat famous tv-presenter in Sweden who for some reason doesnt list this movie on his official website. His performance is the worst I've seen since I first laid my eyes and ears on Andreas Schnaaz abomination of dubbing, Zombie 90: Extreme pestilence. There is a classic scene where Harald breaks down in tears which most likely would drive people insane by just watching, I know I lost a few braincells. Most pornflicks have better acting than this.

The plot isnt half bad actually, dealing with the return of a dead teacher which our heroes accidentally killed in their youth and along with a groovy score really has that 80s feeling. The teacher tends to appear as a burnt husk of a corpse which actually looks ok, and some of its appearances have a slight resemblance of cleverness but it doesnt matter, Haralds "acting" overshadows everything. You sit there for an hour trying to focus on the movie (which truly is impossible) and at the very moment you decide that this movie could have been ok if it werent for Harald, the filmmakers bring in the bikers. Yes, the lamest bikers ever, they look like someone is trying to do an imitation of a metalband, but dont really know how to. Even Mad Foxes had tougher looking bikers.

Here is a fun little highlightreel. Why doesnt Harald have this movie on his resume, I have NO idea...

I guess this really was a half-decent try of doing a americanstyle horrormovie in Sweden, as low budget horrorflicks go I have seen worse. But none of them had Harald Treutiger. He really is THAT BAD. I can seriously say that I have NEVER seen any worse acting. NEVER.

The Shrine (2010)

2011-07-15T12:50:00.002+02:00

When The Shrine starts you find yourself in familiar land, so familiar in fact that you pretty much lower your expectations. Backpacking youth gone missing in small European country, journalist defying her editor to look into it to the point of lying just to get a scoop and meeting some pretty hostile locals. We've seen this about a million times before, havent we? Preparing yourself for a predictable ride you suddenly realize that The Shrine might actually be a bit more interesting than that. Yes, it is familiar but the story goes in a direction you arent expecting. No inbred Polish rednecks, no rich americans killing people for fun. Something that is cool and intriguing. You see, the village is close by a strange cloud close to the ground, filling the forest with a thick fog. A place you shouldnt visit. Which of course our heroes do.

And thank heavens for that. As soon as they step into the strangely dense and glowing fog, the movie goes from being a walking cliché to something quite novel. And entertaining.

I always write as little as possible about the story in a movie I review and The Shrine will be no exception. You need to know as little as possible about it to enjoy it more. What you do need to know is that Jon Knautz first movie after Jack Brooks: Monster slayer (which I thought was sorta fun, but a little lame) is excellent viewing, taking a tried out plot and twists it around a bit, mixing it with great visuals and atmosphere and adding some fine gore. It's no masterpiece, and the polish audience will hate it for the truly awful polish accents, but to the rest of us it is a finely crafted moodpiece well worth watching. And the dvdcover is awesome.

At the moment this is only available on Canadian dvd which makes sense since it is a canadian movie and I bought my copy from Amazon.ca. The site stated that the delivery would take 30-40 weeks(!) but it arrived after four days.

Fear house (2008)

2011-07-09T14:40:00.003+02:00

Have this ever happened to you? You muck around on the internet on various moviesites and happen upon a movie with a really nice dvdcover. You let your guard down, read a couple of reviews and focus on the positive things. You have already decided that this is a nice movie. The negative reviews are ignored because you like the plot. Fear House isnt a movie that has been universally panned but it has gotten its fair share of bad reviews. Is it a bad movie? Nope.

The story isn't anything special, we've seen it before but thanks to decent craftmanship and a nice mood we get 86 cozy minutes of dread. Fear House has the usual characters who all end up in a house with some sort of evil spirit roaming its halls. A young female writer buys the house out in the desert and when her friends and family hasnt heard from her for some time they visit the place to find out why. And start to die one by one. Killed by the things they fear the most. You know. A really corny concept that I never really liked in any movie.

But thanks to good direction, a well written script that takes good care of its cliches and some decent acting, Fear house overcomes its looming iceberg that could have dropped it to the bottom of the straight to dvd ocean. There is actually some decent tension from time to time with one or two really atmospheric scenes and a couple of juicy makeupeffects without turning into a straight gorefest. From time to time the studiobased location is too obvious but that is never a big issue. So, nothing we havent seen before, but better than most of its similarily budgeted peers and the filmmakers do show a bit of talent and especially love for the genre. Keep your expectations in control and you just might come out of this entertained. And the dvdcover is really nice.

The Demon lover (1977)

2011-07-08T12:00:00.001+02:00

Anyone out there popping in to this blog from time to time will realize that I am somewhat of a fetischist, not only for rubbermonster but also for good old 70s exploitation. A movie I've been wanting to see for ages now is Donald G Jacksons The Demon lover, a flick I read about 25 years ago for the first time but never got around to seeing, mostly due to the fact this only has been available on vhs. For some mysterious reason I decided that now was the time to finally see this and managed to get hold of a rip off a vhstape, of course in fairly atrocious quality and to make matters even worse, I watched it on a 46" tv. The image was blurry and pixelated and the sound tinny.

It didnt exactly help that the movie sucked ass.

In short, The Demon lover is a movie with a few interesting ideas but is full of inept camerawork, poor acting and completely useless scenes just to pad the movie 10 75 minutes. I like the basic story, a satanist (with a naziflag in his place just to make him more evil. Nazisatanists are cool) who gets mad at his coven (I use the word coven very loosely. They just seem to hang around at his apartment doing hippiestuff) when they dont take him seriously so he decides to conjure up a demon to kill them all in various bloody scenes. While he is not bringing forth demons he goes to his local karateclub and a bar just to beat people up, the useless fillerscenes I was talking about. And then there is that demon. It's pretty cool, in a cheap way. It looks like they tried to make their own version of the beast in the 1957 Jacques Tourneur classic Night of the demon but failed miserably, making it look like some kind of plastic toy. No, scratch that, it looks like the Ro-man in Robot monster with glowing red eyes and horns, rumbling around like a bear with arthritis. It speaks in a barely intelligble reverbdrenched voice and possesses some of it's victims and makes them kill a friend or two. The movie is entertaining as soon as he is around or some other killing is being done, but the rest of the movie (Pretty much most of it) is just plain poor filmmaking set to a crappy synthscore. There is some bloody violence to keep us entertained but I dont really know if it is worth it. I suppose you could watch it for a laugh but there are a lot better ways to spend your hard earned hours off.

The poster is truly awesome though, I need to gets meself one of those.

The Redsin tower (2006)

2011-06-22T08:00:00.002+02:00

ToeTag Pictures is a small independent moviestudio in the US that produces lowbudget goremovies more or less without any story, focusing on extreme gore. Their August underground trilogy is a series of movies that are seen from the point of view of a couple of serial killers and from what I hear very gory and violent. They're even from what I hear decently made, way above average for the genre but that is only hearsay. I like plot with my gore. I'm oldfashioned and therefore have been ignoring the studio. In 2006 they released The Redsin tower which is their first attempt to make a movie with an actual plot, while still having large amounts of gore which meant I had to check it out. And their future looks bright.

The movie has a simple but functioning story. A young girl, Kim, has just dumped her slightly suffocating boyfriend who has begun deciding their future for them even though they're still both in school. Her best friend takes her to a party but it is interrupted by the police, with the help of a phonecall from her ex. The partygoers decide instead to go to The Redsin tower, an abandoned building in the nearby woods to party some more. The psycho exboyfriend follows suit, pretty pissed after having been beaten up by Kims friends. And if that wasnt enough, The Redsin tower have some nasty forces mucking about in its walls...

There is nothing that original about The Redsin Tower. The plot is lifted straight out of Evil Dead and ripoffs like Night of the demons, you've seen it a hundred times before. Fortunately, most of those times were a lot worse than this. Fred Vogel, the director, and ToeTag Pictures obviously didnt have a lot of money to spend but you do get the feeling that they sat down and planned this thing really well, making sure that they only wanted to show things that they actually could pull off which really makes a difference. The story may be full of clichés but it never feels silly or corny. ToeTag are fans of the genre and it shows. We've seen the characters before and I dont see any of the actors winning any acting awards yet, but they all feel natural in their characters. The Redsin Tower itself is a great location and the cinematography is surprisingly good, especially since most of the movies is set in dark corridors. Vogel is a competent director miling the mood for what its worth and there are quite a few moody scenes of the partygoers exploring the dark, dusty halls. The only problem with the movie is that it takes its sweet time getting to the tower, 40 minutes goes by before they reach the damn place! Those 40 mins are well spent introducing the characters but when the movie is only 85 mins long, that is a bit too long. Never boring, but when you are waiting for gore, it can feel longish. Because that is what you really are after. So, how is the gore?

It's excellent. Yes, you will have to wait for the good stuff but when it finally happens, it's all out. People are hacked to pieces with an axe, throats are messily slit, intestines are torn out, you name it, all with excellent practical makeupeffects. As an added exploitation bonus we even get some nudity so for the gorehounds with a bit of patience the last 30 minutes of the movie are well worth the wait. All in all, this is a more than decent little goreflick that manages to deliver both mood and gore, which is more than I can say about most of the straight to dvd flicks I've seen in the last ten years. I didnt have any realt expectations of this and I was positively surprised on how well made the movie was. It's not perfect, but if this is ToeTags first movie with a real plot, the future will be very interesting.

Attack of the beast creatures (1985)

2011-06-21T21:00:00.001+02:00

Wow.

On paper this sounds... well, not exactly good but at least interesting. Sometime during the early 1900s a boat sinks and the survivors float ashore on an unknows island. They go ashore to find food and water but soon realize that this is no ordinary island! The rivers are full of acid, turning people into red goo in seconds. And then there is the little thing with the things that attack during the night, first seen only as glowing eyes in the dark. Like this one:

Wow.

It turns out that the survivors have ended up on a island full of maneating, brightred puppets! Really badly manipulated puppets as well. The scenes of them running around in the undergrowth arent half bad but as soon as we come to some sort of attackscene we get puppets thrown from left to right and lousy actors trying to act panicky with a dussin dolls glued to their clothes.

Lousy is the main word here. There is a reason that none of the actors have any other actingcredits on Imdb and they arent exactly helped by a script with some truly abysmal dialogue. The only thing they do is walk, walk and walk. If they arent walking they are complaining about anything or get a doll or two thrown at them to the tones of a musician who tries to be Jean-Michel Jarre using the cheapest synth available. If you cut out all the dolls this could be a commercial for a company advertising taking strolls in the woods while complaining constantly.

Part of me likes the concept with the nasty island and the mean dolls but that doesnt make the movie all that watchable. As soon as the movie managed to whip up a bit of tension or mood it kills it instantly with overacting or horrendous dialogue. It is however not so bad that I will go so far as to completely hate it, the b-movielover within me has lots of patience for this kind of low budget dreck. I do love the dolls, the movieposter is awesome but I wouldnt really recommend to... anyone. Unless you really have to see EVERYTHING.

And I would buy it if it came out on dvd.

Night of the demon (1980)

2011-06-21T18:00:00.001+02:00

SEX = INSTANT DEATH!
VIRGIN = SLOW DEATH!

When a movie has a scene where the main characters set camp for the night and start telling each other that this is the site where that biker vanished some years ago, upon which they cut to a scene where a biker stops by the side of the road and promptly gets his dick torn off by Bigfoot, there is no going back. You HAVE TO worship that movie. It is fucking genius.

Night of the demon is one of those semiuknown little goreflicks of the eighties that never got a decent dvdrelease (the ones I know of are either cut or have fucked up audiotracks) and therefore hasnt got the recognition it truly deserves. Fortunately Code Red is about to release it and I will be first in line to buy it. Sure, it doesnt really qualify as a good movie, the acting is very uneven and the special effects are so so but where there's a will, there's a way.

We get the lovely company of a professor and some of his student following up on some rumours about Bigfoot, travelling into the woods and talking to just about any redneck not busy playing the banjo. They find out that a woman living in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere supposedly met the big hairy fella some years ago and hasnt spoken a word since. After a boatride into the deepest of deepest of horrormoviewoods they find the cabin. And the Bigfoot. And lets not forget the satanic Bigfootcult.

The best thing about this movie is the story structure. The scene I describe at the beginning of the review is not the only one of its kind, the movie stops dead in its tracks at least 5-6 times for a fun-filled gory flashback. "This is where the girlscouts got lost" or "This is where the fisherman dissapeared". A perfect way of lengthening the movie until the required 90 minutes. When our heroes finally find the cabin we enter one of those nice siegesituations with lots of slomo gore and it's just wonderful. Gore galore, arms are torn off, penises are torn off, people in sleeping bags are thrown on pointy branches, you name it. We even get a bit of Bigfoot rape as a bonus. This movie has everything. The story is ok, of course written to maximize the exploitation factor and while I cant really complain about the direction, the movie has that feel of the filmmakers making their first movie, both good and bad. I do love the music, alternating between the usual moodpieces and some glorious analogue synthmasturbation.

This is typical 80s gore, and if you like that genre you will gobble this up. The flick may have more balls than talent, but sometimes that is more than enough. Make no mistake, this is low budget schlock but it tastes so good! Guilty pleasure at its best.

Il mistero di Lovecraft - Road to L (2005)

2011-06-21T15:00:00.001+02:00

Here is a somewhat interesting Italian oddity. According to the script, Lovecraft visited Italy in 1926, travelling to some of the weirder parts of the country rummaging about in the local myths and legends and finding inspiration for his Cthulhumythos. The filmmakers have been very thorough and detailed when it comes to inserting their narrative into the existing mythos and have done a very good job. Unfortunately they forgot about the horror itself. Road to L is a mockumentary telling the story of a filmcrew travelling to the locations where Lovecraft supposedly visited, in the trail of a student who vanished mysteriously seven years earlier after locating documents that told of Lovecrafts journey. The locals arent exactly happy with the crew nosing about in their local legends and things dont get easier with all the internal strife within the group. They soon start to come close to the areas described by Lovecraft and as the clues start to become clearer, things start to get weird.

As a Lovecraftmovie, Road to L is among the most detailed and well made out there, at least all the details of the Lovecrafts supposed visit and fitting them into the known universe. The landscapes and environments are absolutely perfect for a movie like this as the filmcrew travels through old villages and mires surrounding the river Po. The mockumentaryconcept works extremely well although all that wining within the group does tend to get on your nerves. Road to L is completely saturated with hints of that ole' cosmic fear and the great score is perfectly integrated, enhancing the moods to create that ambience you really want a movie like this to have.

But all isnt well on the Road to L. While doing an excellent job with the backstory and the connections to Lovecrafts universe, the filmmakers forgot something. The Horror. Those scenes are few and far between, never taking the opportunity to immerse into that raw horror that the movie shows glimpses of. There are some imagery and scenes that show potential and are somewhat disturbing but Road to L really needed more of that. It's very competently made but somewhat tame, something that a movie like this should never be. If you are a fan of Lovecraft you will probably like this a lot, it is one of the better movies of that genre, but you end up wanting more. A wasted, yet excellent opportunity.

The Empty acre (2007)

2011-06-21T09:26:00.005+02:00

On paper The Empty acre looks like a safe bet, it has an interesting plot and a dvdcover full of praise. The story was the main thing for me, a somewhat Stephen Kingish smelling trail of events where something evil lurks in an area of dead land outside a farm in a tiny american town. A young couple spends their days bickering and it is obvious that their six month old baby boy is the the glue that holds them together. When the baby mysteriously dissapears their relationship starts to deteriorate. The wife hears the boy crying from somewhere in the dead piece of land and it doesnt really help that one of the neighbours starts to spread rumours that she is going insane. And who is the man on the nearby farm that seems to be helping the mysterious evil in finding victims?

The Empty acre's greatest strength is that the filmmakers did a good job in creating an unseen evil whose very presence seeps into everything in its vicinity. The story is effective and interesting and helped by a couple of simple but excellent dreamsequences. The cinematography is good but for some reason the great locations arent used very well. Everything is filmed in closeup which does great damage to the otherwise excellent mood. Then it gets worse. The biggest weakness of the movie is the acting where everyone seems to have been give instructions to underplay as much as possible, making it exceptionally hard to feel anything for the characters. Maybe it started out as a horrormovie but then the filmmakers decided to go the arthouse route? I dont know for sure, but the movie never really becomes particularily entertaining. You get the feeling that a newly examined filmschoolbrat freshly indoctrined in the virtues of Bergman and Tarkovskij decided to make a horrormovie the way his masters would have made one, or at least what he thought they would have made one like. The sad thing about such a promising concept it that the movie never feels like that, just low key, slow and empty of any substance. Everything is so ridiculously in the key of minor, especially the soundtrack. It starts out well but slowly slouches into the land of mediocreness, never to return.

The Men who fell (2007)

2011-06-08T07:53:00.007+02:00

Really good combinations of Scifi and horror are hard to find. Usually filmmakers try to hard (or too little) without even having that much of a love for any of the genres. Now The Men who fell arrives and it is a very nice try. It doesnt hold up all the way, but it is truly a nice try.

The movie takes place somewhere in the future on a planet that could be the remains of the earth, now a great wasteland full of looting nomads. Our two whining heroes arrive, convicts from an orbital prison sent down on a mission and promptly crash their spacecraft in the desert. The mission is somewhat vague they are to locate a place and retrieve an object. They dont know what the object is, only that they arent the first to look for it. The journey takes them down into a great underground complex that clearly hasnt seen life in ages, but it doesnt take long until they start to hear and see strange things. Are they alone or can everything be attributed to some strange hallucinatory gas? And what happened to the previous searchers?

The Men who fell is easiest (and probably laziest) described as a mix of those old favorites Stalker and Event horizon, and why not a dash of the russian computergame S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of chernobyl, without all those pesky soldiers running around. Most of the movie is dedicated to the journey into the complex itself with long scenes completely without dialogue, just enjoying the scenery. And the scenery is gorgeous. Huge abandoned halls full of strange machinery with enormous vaults and doorways, most of it greenscreen but it does look awesome (especially when you consider the fact that the budget was around $30000. The filmakers have been very careful with all the details and my brain automatically thinks of french comic books and the awesome manga Blame!. But(there is always a but!) now we come to the biggest fault of the whole production. The journey into the underground is drenched in atmosphere and tension, and the story does a good job slowly shining a light on the secrets below with good direction, but when we finally get some more detailed answers it all falls apart. Without spoling too much our heroes meet a character who is the key to everything is going on, and I couldnt hear a word it said due it's voice having been processed so much that all the dialogue is unintelligible. This of course sucks ass because The Men who fell is a an exciting, slowmoving piece of low budget triumph that I really loved but I guess thats what you get for pirating a movie. It desperately needs a proper dvdrelease as it is only available on dvd in Japan and Russia (the version I saw was a russian dvdrip with the english audio from the japanese dvd). I will be first in line to buy when it finally arrives.

Mission Mars (1968)

2011-05-30T09:42:00.005+02:00

There is a certain expectation when you look at a castlist and it includes Darren McGavin and Nick Adams, at least in my book. When you start watching the movie and it has a surfrock soundtrack and more stock footage than you've ever seen in a movie before, you know you are in for a ride. Darren McGavin and Nick Adams play astronauts about to go on a journey to Mars, both of them having some trouble with women, their ladies not wanting them to go into outer space. Especially Nick Adams ladyfriend who knows that Nick is a daredevil wanting to always go places that no one has gone before (a rather obvious plotpoint that inevitably will make Nick sacrifice himself for the greater good.). After about 45 minutes of the same stock footage repeated over and over ad over again (one scene repeated in reverse to simulate docking) they land on Mars and encounter a frozen Russian astronaut and some rather strange and hostile creatures (one of them a sphere that opens up looking a bit like a vagina).

That the budget was low on this one is an understatement, at least a fourth of the movie consists of stock footage and repeated scenes. The spacesuits are motorcyclehelmets with antennas on the top and the martian landscape is mostly a miniature. Not much happens on the journey to Mars and it drags a bit, consisting mostly of our actors doing really low budget spaceship things like being strapped on benches and swaying around pretending to be in a meteor swarm. But as soon as they arrive on the red planet, a bit of fun starts. The special effects are low budget but imaginative, and the creatures encountered more fun than usual. These arent your average martians, they're actually rather alien and no explanation is given for their behaviour, appropriate for their.. uhm.. "alien-ness?". The martian landscape is suitably atmospheric even though the miniatures very rarely match with the studiobased set but who cares? You dont go into a movie like this without expecting something like that and Darren McGavin and Nick Adams are both fun actors to watch and they do a decent job with the little resources they have.

Your average monsterscififlick then. If you like setups like this there is a good chance you might enjoy this movie, in spite of it's slow first half. I sure did.

Automatons (2006)

2011-05-29T19:39:00.007+02:00

In this odd little scifimovie we follow The Girl living in a small hidden underground base somewhere in a wasteland. She spends her days sending out battledroids to combat some sort of enemy and repairing the robots who make it back. Her free time is spent repelling radiosignals from the enemy that tries to take control over her robots day and night, although the concept of time doesnt really seem to exist as we know it anymore. While not fighting or repelling the enemy she listens to old messages from her mentor trying to describe why the world went to hell in the first place. The enemy signals are coming in faster and harder and it is just a matter of time before they find the right frequency...

Automatons is clearly a movie that you either love or hate, at least if you look at reviews and comments on imdb. The difference between this movie and all the other robotapocalypseflicks is that this is an ultra lowbudget movie that has a love for all the serials of the thirties and forties, where the robots are basically big tincans. The battlesequences are amateurish and silly but wholly on purpose and are full of really cheap landscapes and special effects. To add on the fun, Automatons is shot on b/w super 8 and processed to make it look even more cheap and ugly, sometimes it looks like they filmed a tv showing the movie. Arthouseish, yes, but it still works. The whole thing is slow and meandering but the concept is awesome. The atmosphere and the droning electronic score makes this a really pleasant experience. The acting and dubbing is poor, again on purpose with the exception of the taped messages from the mentor played by Angus Scrimm, an actor very suited for this type of role. If you find the concept interesting there is a chance that you will like it, but most people will probably ignore it due to the DIY feel of it. Too bad, it is a fine little moodpiece with an added bonus of some really nice gorescenes towards the end. Recommended.

Mutant girl squad (2009)

2011-05-24T08:30:00.004+02:00

So, the wave of insane Japanese goremovies continues in full strength. This swede loves silly gore and although the special effects arent top notch and somewhat overusing low end cgi, they are still nicely over the top and very rarely boring. There is truly something special when blood is shooting out of a body six meters into the air because of a small nick in the skin.

Mutant girl squad, on the other hand, isnt exactly the best of the new gore wave, far from it. I would even go so far to say that it is probably the worst. This does not mean that it is a bad movie, just that it isnt as crazy and weird as Samurai Princess or Vampire girl vs Frankenstein girl. The movie is a collaboration between Noboru Iguchi (Machine girl, Robogeisha), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore police) and Tak Sakaguchi (the lead in Versus, director of Samurai Zombie) who thought up the story while drinking and each directed a section of the movie. This means that the story feels somewhat fragmented, but seriously. Who cares? It's a movie about japanese school girls with superpowers that never would appear in a movie outside japan, and it is still way cooler than any fucking X-men movie. How about a chainsaw coming out of the ass of a young girl? That image alone makes the movie worth watching. The first part is the coolest when our heroine discovers her mutant powers, gets the entire neighbourhood after her and we get to see her dispatch them all in gloriously gory ways. I'll admit that some of the digital effects are rather cheap but I think that they are actually supposed to be that way.

If you liked the other movies I mentioned you will like this, it's as simple as that. It feels a little slapdash at times, but since there are three directors I can accept that and just enjoy. Still, if you are new to the genre I would recommend that you start out with Tokyo Gore police, Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein girl or perhaps Hard revenge Milly, movies that are a bit wilder and/or more accessible. Now, bring me more japanese gore please!

Gong tau (2007)

2011-05-07T14:00:00.001+02:00

Needle Gong Tau is some nasty shit.

Jack J of Backyard Asia will probably agree with me that some movies need to be dirty and nasty to achieve maximum effect. Check out the movies he writes about, most of them are very low budget trash made to revolt and arent available on any media other than some out of print vcd either dubbed to hell or with poorly translated subtitles that are only partly readable because the pan and scan transfer sucks ass. A part of me likes that, it takes me back to my youth when I first discovered gore and horrormovies, watching stuff like Devil fetus in the basement at night. As long as it's watchable it is fine by me.

That is why Herman Yaus Gong tau is such a strange experience. Here is a slick, decently budgeted movie with excellent cinematography and a plot full of gore, boobs and flying heads. I'm not used to this, where are the crummy subtitles and cheap gore-effects? The story is an excellent throwback to the seventies complete with the expected centipedevomiting, with tough cop Rockman (Yes, that is his name) unfaithful to his wife only to discover that someone put a curse on her. People start to die, fat is cut out of bodies and semen is used as a component in black magic. What else can you ask for?

Vile, gory and supremely entertaining, Gong Tau is a great nasty revamping of the black magic movies of old.

A couple of short ones.

2011-05-02T12:19:00.005+02:00

Cry of the Banshee (1969)
Not bad, Vincent Price as a sadistic witchhunter is always worth watching but somehow the movie could have better with LESS sleaze (A sentence I thought I never would write down).

Captain Kronos - Vampire hunter (1972)
Fun and fastpaced odd little vampiremovie suffers some from feeling more like a tv-series than a movie, but still good entertainment.

Quatermass Xperiment (1958)
One of the best british scifimovies of the fifties, great monster and surprisingly violent. A must see.

Fear no evil (1981)
Decent entry in the Satan vs the world genre. Not that exciting but ok-ish.

Law abiding citizen (2009)
Violent mainstream Saw-wannabe with one of the more worthless last acts in years. The explanation of what is going on is dumb to say the least. Too bad, the first half is quite thrilling.

Outrage (2010)

2011-05-02T12:04:00.001+02:00

Beat Takeshi goes back to his roots, eh? Outrage is truly a "classic" Yakuzatale, featuring several groups of gangsters being played out against each other by the top dog, and sadly, that is about it. The first 30-40 minutes of this movie arent exactly what I would describe as entertaining, it is just a collection of scenes featuring Yakuza screaming, beating each other up and so forth. Not that heavy violence is a bad thing, but when Outrage has no characters whatsoever it gets kind of... dull actually. They can shout how much they want but, beat up innocent people just for the fun of it but when there really isnt anything separating the characters other than the fact that one of them is played by Takeshi Kitano and the others arent, it doesnt make great viewing. The actors are all good, except for the fact that Kitano himself does one of those roles that he can sleepwalk through, good or bad you decide. I was even considering turning it off and "watching the rest of it another day". You know the drill.

But then the movie started to get a bit more interesting. All hell breaks loose. Our "heroes" all of a sudden are persona non grata (not that you didnt see it coming). Everyone gets killed in messy, bloody ways and you feel strangely drawn to the inevitable events as everyone dies, one by one. You dont really care about the people dying but it still fascinates you. Takeshi Kitano might have failed while writing the characters but he sure as hell knows how do get the feeling of doom.

And that is what the movie is all about. Outrage is a good looking, stylish crimemovie with a script that feels more like a Discovery channel reenactment of a crime, only with huge amounts of violence. The final massacre is strangely hypnotic and makes the movie worth watching, but it somehow feels like a missed opportunity. Worth watching, but somewhat flawed.

Kamui gaiden (2009)

2011-05-02T08:03:00.002+02:00

This movie has ninjas. It has ninjas killing sharks. What more could you ask for? More scenes of ninjas killing sharks I suppose. Instead, it fills the rest of the movie with ninjas talking, ninjas killing people and some ropey but fitting cgi. Fun stuff, based on a manga. The last sentence should let you know what you are in for.

Cold Prey 3 (2010)

2011-04-26T18:00:00.002+02:00

I. Don't. Like. Slashers. They are boring, uninspired and follow the same mold over and over again, and still people scream after sequel after sequel where the only difference is usually a different actor playing the psychopath. Ok, it's not really that bad. Most of my hatred comes from watching Friday the 13th sequels in my youth, getting less and less violent for each film. I can watch a slasher or two, there are some great ones like My bloody valentine and.. uh... the unrated My bloody valentine? So why is it that I actually like the Fritt vilt aka Cold Prey series? There is nothing new about these movies, they follow the usual pattern with teens heading into the hills, finding an old hotel and getting themselves killed? Main reason: Atmosphere. The norwegian mountains are awesomely barren and in the middle of nowhere, and the old run down, shiningish (what a magnificient word) hotel is an awesome setting. Good acting and cliched but wellwritten scripts help a lot. The first sequel even goes Halloween 2 on us, bringing the bodies of the first movie to a hospital with the only survivor soon being chased by the of course not particulary dead bad guy. Part 3, a prequel, is actually the worst of them yet, with an even more generic script but it still benefits from a good backstory and is way above a lot of other movies in the same vein.

So, what was supposed to be a review of Cold prey 3 turned into a review of the whole series. I still find myself amazed that I like them so much. Actually, the biggest gripe I have with the series is the presence of Johanna Mørck in part 2. She is a good actress but:
*spoiler*
watching her get killed just a couple of weeks before seeing her in Trolljegern somehow made the authenticity lessen slightly. I know, that is a retarded thing to be bothered about.
*end spoiler*

So, to end this review: Another proof that the Norwegians make excellent horrormovies, they even make excellent slashers.

Vampire doll (1970)

2011-04-26T12:34:00.002+02:00

A young man travels out into the countryside to meet his fiance, Yuko. When he arrives at the secluded house he is told by her mother that she has died in a car accident. He spends the night at the house and hears some strange sounds at night, even seeing someone that looks just like his dead love. Later he sees Yuko outside the house and follows her to a grave with her name. Cut to some days later where the young mans sister is worried since she hasnt heard from him in some time. She persuades her boyfriend to take her to the house, but is told that he already left. For the sake of proper plotdevelopment she doesnt believe Yukos mother and fakes the car breaking down so that they can investigate what really happened. Cue eerie Japanese vampire. Yum yum.

Vampire doll is a fine piece of gothic horror, straight out of the Hammerverse with an atmosphere worthy of Terence Fisher, yet firmly located in the Japanese horror folklore. It has that certain something that the old Fishermovies had, never particulary scary but rich in wonderful colours and settings, making even the lesser movies of the era watchable. This is the kind of movie that leaves you with a warm feeling in your stomach. Not only is it awfully nice to look at, shot in an oldfashioned gothic style, it has bundles of creepy locations and bursts of really graphic violence, just like we want it. The character of Yuko is a perfect mix of the classic vampire and the look of the typical asian ghost, something we have seen a lot of in later years. We even get the classic evil hunchbacked character, a cliche in the extreme but it works just fine.

Excellent stuff indeed, and to top it off, there are two sequels (unrelated storywise though) that I really look forward to watching sometime in the near future.

Interplanetary (2008)

2011-04-20T08:20:00.001+02:00

I do love my Alien ripoffs. Monsters in space is the ultimate drug and frankly, Interplanetary beats most of them. This is even cooler because of the fact that the movie was obviously made on a budget that wouldnt cover the cost of the food the actors are eating in the original chestburstingscene in Alien. It sets an example for the the alienripoffs to come, that you can make a good movie based on clichés as long as you treat them with respect. And a sense of humour.

The movie is set on Mars where one of those evil, faceless megacorporations has set up a small base, about ten people or so faced with the numbing task of protocol and paragraphs that comes with the territory. Two members of the scienceteam find an alien hand in a cave but one of them is killed by an assassin. The surviving member of the team naturally does the proper thing, that is documenting the find and broadcasting a message to earth, selling the news of the alien to the highest bidder. It doesnt take long before he is killed by an alien lifeform, all while a team of hired killers prepare themselves for killing the people on the base for an unknown reason. Yes, all this and boobs too.

I am fully aware of the fact that my reviews tend to look like this: First a small comment on the movie, then a semifunny plotdescription without spoiling too much of the plot (I hate reviews that break down just about the entire story from finish to end) and then some bits about the directing, acting, sfx etc. All in three decently spaced paragraphs. So, realizing that the first two paragraphs of this is just like it usually is, I will try to break off from this mold.

See? A fourth piece of text. Interplanetary is good stuff. It is very low budget (I havent looked at any of the extras on the dvd yet but it cant be more than your average 70s Dr Who episode) but with a script as fun as this, you gladly forget about the shortcomings and just sit down to enjoy. Most reviews describe it as a mixture of Office space and Alien, and that is a decent explanation. The actors wont win any awards but they do make the comedy in the script work and they most certainly dont bring it down which is more than a shitload of bigger budgeted movies with bigger "talent" (as in I directed a musicvideo - now give me $200 million to shoot a movie with Angelina Jolie) has made. Actually, the movie feels like a lost episode of the original Outer limits, with added boobs and gore. I seriously recommend this to anyone out there that enjoys some decent scifi with monsters. There is still hope for the Alien ripofflovers out there, people like me. Now, let us wish/pray for a sequel. Interplanetarys?

Ha! A fifth paragraph. Gotcha.

Bosque de muerte (1993)

2011-04-05T07:40:00.001+02:00

If you want to make a decent horrormovie there are a few rules. The most important one is: Keep the viewer interested in what is happening on the screen. Bosque de muerte is a mexican slasher that fails miserably with that. When you want to make a horrormovie you should try to have an even flow of events, a little gore here and there, a little excitement, a couple of thrilling events. This movie does nothing of that. It just sleepwalks with a group of mexican youths (played by 30 year old actors) going to a house in the country all while the girl whose dad owns the house sulks over the fact that her mother died there fifteen years earlier. Of course, this will have an impact on the youths lives but only after about sixty minutes into the eighty minute long movie! That's right, nothing happens until there's twenty minutes left. People go around moping, having silly flashbacks and fish. Someone disappears but you have no idea of what happened to him until after the seventyminute mark. Then all of a sudden we get a couple of violent murders, the killer is revealed in a groaninducing sequence and then its all over. Just like that.

It's a shame since the movie actually starts out fairly well. We see a couple of people doing stuff in the woods while someone is watching them with a scoped rifle. We skip forward a few minutes and we find out that the guy watching is a forestranger and the people in the woods were sawing down trees illegaly, so naturally he shot off the leg on one of them. Without even batting an eyelash, the police even congratulate him on a job well done. I like movies that open with some sort of bang and Bosque de muerte does a fine job of that. Unfortunately, it's all downhill after that, the rangercharacter is introduced as someone who has a deep love for the forest and that's why he shot the guy but nothing is made of it. It has no impact whatsoever on the plot other than introduce him as a red herring. The final fifteen minutes are actually fairly decent as horrormovies go, gory and exciting but why not sprinkle some of the red on the rest of the movie? It's never really boring, like Iced for instance, just kind of meanders on, then all of a sudden it's over. Not as bad as it sounds actually, but nothing I would recommend to anyone, other than for the fact of the novelty of watching an mexican horrormovie.

Black magic with Buddha (1983)

2011-03-28T08:24:00.002+02:00

I've learned something today. Evil Thai mummybrains arent something you should mess about with, it's as simple as that. And if you do feel like keeping them for your own personal gain, make sure you feed them regularly. They do tend to get rather mad if they are hungry. Like any other pet really. That's something the protagonist of low budget Hong Kong sleaze Black magic with Buddha learns when he goes to Thailand, takes home a brain with magic powers to use for his own personal gain. You see, our hero is somewhat of a looser. Only somewhat though, for a CAT III hero he is actually fairly likeable. He means well I suppose, he just doesnt seem to think of the consequences of what he is doing, and the fact that it kills his sister and his wifes family, well, he never seems to care that much about it. He comes of as a bit... nice but dim. I dont really know what to make of him, but he's not as cartoonishly evil as they usually are. Anyway, all this leads up to a glorious whopper of an ending full of yuck and gore and as these types of movies go, Black magic with Buddha is on the cheap but nicely weird and energetic, and never boring.

I wish more of these movies would be released on proper dvds, it's a genre that is like on open vein of gold for us gorehounds out there. Black magic with Buddha is a fine example of it, full of sleaze and fun stuff, but has never been released on any proper media. The version I saw was a download, most likely from a horribly cropped vcd where you could not see the first and last words of the subtitles. Fortunately, it is still easy to follow the mayhem on the screen but I would most definately like to have this on dvd. Silly, gory and wonderful entertainment. Thanks to Jack J for writing about this on his lovely blog Backyard Asia.. I stole the picture from him. Shame on me. And shame on Ben for stealing that brain.

Pumpkinhead 4: Blood feud (2007)

2011-03-22T16:28:00.001+01:00

Pumpkinhead 4: Blood feud is another one of those movies that for budgetary reasons are shot in Hungary or Bulgaria. The environments over there usually look great and are an excellent substitute for the "real thing". The only problem is that the casts are filled up with people not having english as a native language. Not the biggest problem out there, but Pumpkinhead 4 is supposed to be set in redneck county and has hungarian actors either trying a hillbilly accent (failing miserably) or being poorly dubbed. It's not a major issue, but big enough to get your attention. But, other than that, Pumpkinhead 4: Blood feud is one of the best Syfymovies I've seen so far.

As I mentioned the movie is set in redneckcounty with two clans of hillbillys being enemies over some shitty issue that only the elders remember. Jody and Ricky, each a member of the separate clans fall in love but the rest of the families wont have anything to do with it. While sneaking away for some nooky in the forest, Jodys brothers manage to get Rickys sister killed in an accident (well, they were going to rape her but she fell down a slope and broke her neck). Ricky, pissed as hell and obviously has seen the earlier Pumpkinheadmovies, raises our favorite demon to kill everyone. Problem is, he never saw the endings of the earlier flicks and there will be hell to pay. And some boobs. And a surprising amount of gore.

Pumpkinhead 4 is easily the goriest Syfyflick I have ever seen (I wonder if that has anything to do with my earlier statement of it being one of the best?). Heads are crushed in beartraps, torn off and stomped on. The titlebeast itself looks as cool as it always has and is 99% of the time a guy in a decently animated rubbersuit. My only little grain of bitching is that you get to see it way too much! In full daylight! I want a bit of shadow to put some mystery into my rubbermonsters, is that much to ask? Pumkinhead maims his way through a large cast of mostly dubbed hungarians, all with names like Billy-Bob or Emmet, all completely without any distinctive charactertraits that helps you tell the apart or sometimes even what family they belong to. Lance Henriksen pops up in one of those cameos that he seems to do hundreds of these last few years and he is still the best actor in the movie, even though he probably did it in 45 minutes. But who cares about that? Pumpkinhead 4: Blood feud is a fun, gory and fastpaced straightforward monstermovie. It stays far away from even trying to reinvent the genre but sometimes that is good. Corny and gory good.

Sanctum (2010)

2011-03-21T13:00:00.001+01:00

Have you seen Bruce hunts lovely little monstermovie, The Cave? My review of that underrated flick here. Sanctum is just like the Cave, only without monsters and even more hollywoodian sentiments. It's not a bad movie, on the contrary, it's just... a bit predictable and stupid.

Richard Roxburgh (who is a way better actor than this material deserves) plays one of those superpeople that only exist in movies, spending all of his time cavediving because "he cant handle a normal human life with mortgages etc". At the moment he is part of a team exploring an underwater cave in Papua New Guinea. The financer of the expedition, a young daredevil millionaire, arrives on the scene, bringing with him Roxburghs estranged son. The moment you find out who the characters relation, you realize that dad will die, but not before them finding each other again. That is not a spoiler, that is generic hollywood scripting at its laziest. It doesnt take long before a giant storm hits the place, starts flooding the cave and forcing the survivors to try to find another way out. Yes, people will sacrifice themselves. Yes, people will turn on each other. Yes, exactly when you know they are going too.

There isnt a single scene in this movie that feels fresh or in any way surprising, we follow the usual paths with any "twist" having been telegraphed half an hour earlier. It is based on the scriptwriters own experiences being trapped in an underwater cave but I hope to god that they didnt behave like this back then because this is just so stupid, so ordinary. All of this is a shame, Sanctum could have been a really nice ride with a bit more imagination. The director does what he can to milk out some suspense out of the script, the caveclimbing and divingscenes are well staged and the actors do a fine job, even better than the material deserves. You can do much worse when it comes to entertainment, just turn your brain off while watching.

Still, the movie is really inferior to The Cave. Sanctum could definately have used a couple of decent monsters to liven things up. At least a tentacle or two.

Djinns (2010)

2011-03-21T12:00:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I spend my evenings just surfing on the various sites where I buy my dvds from, just to see if I've missed something. Sometimes there is a movie or two that slipped under my radar, and we cant have that, can we?! Such a movie is the french horrorflick Djinns aka Stranded which is the english title on the dvd I bought. I dont know exactly why I bought other than that the story interested me, it had no english reviews on Imdb. Only a trailer. So I decided to take a plunge, it wasnt that expensive.

Looking bad I dont really know if it was a good thing or not. Djinns isnt a bad movie, on the contrary, it is well shot and well acted. Problem is, it never really goes anywhere, it doesnt stand out. The story, about French soldiers lost in the Algerian desert during the sixties while looking for a lost plane, is interesting and the supernatural parts of it are tittilating, there arent many djinnmovies out there (The only one I can think of at the moment is Alex Turners Red Sands which was a major letdown after his great Deadbirds,) and the movie does create a creepy version of them. The soldiers find a walled city in the middle of nowhere and a siege of sorts begins, with the djinns creating and feeding on bloody conflicts. And thats basically all there is, the soldiers fighting amongst themselves over petty things that escalate into violence. I wanted more demons, more supernatural carnage. I got a... thriller? Still, it is not a bad movie. Just not the movie I hoped it was gonna be.

And dont you love that cover that features something I thought was lost after the eighties, the added muzzle flash to a weapon to give an indication of great action. Yeah, right. I dont think so.

Exterminators of the year 3000 (1983)

2011-03-21T09:45:00.001+01:00

Here is a movie that is far more entertaining than it really is supposed to - an Italian Road warrior clone that is so low budget that you never get any sense of it being set in a postapocalyptic world, just the spanish desert with a burned out car or two. Everything in the movie is basically lifted straight out of the Australian original but you really cant hate a movie like this. I felt a strange enjoyment, even more than when I watched the other movies from the same era, all of which are more violent and full of exploitation. One of the reasons for that might be that the director, Giuliano Carnimeo, did a shitload of westerns back in the sixties and that is the general feel of Exterminators. Also, you have to love any movie by the director of the sleaze masterpiece Ratman. You have to.

We have the honour of following hardcore survivor Alien as he trudges to the remains of the world, has his car stolen (which he stole from the local evil gang himself) and is forced to help a young kid retrieve water. You see, it is lack of water instead of gasolin that separates this movie from Road warrior and the bad guys want it. Alien himself wants the water all for himself but you know he will have a heart in the end. Cheap battles straight out of Road warrior are fought, mutants are revealed and we get a Deus Ex Machina ending that is more idiotic than the ending of Star Crystal. But it only adds to the enjoyment. Oh, there is also a cyborg kid, played by the kid from City of the living dead. The first time I saw the poster of this movie I thought he was a woman.

Yes, Exterminators of the year 3000 is nothing more than an average movie, but it is still entertaining as hell if you are in the right mood. You get the standard electronic krautrock/synthdisco score, tons of bad dubbing, a bit of gratitous violence and lots of cars driving around in circles. You cant help but to love it.

Oh, do yourself a favour and buy the Code Red dvd. It is full frame (For some reason the distributor only had that print) but perfectly watchable. The coolest thing about it is a commentarytrack and a filmed interview from star Robert Iannucci who played Alien and if you want to get a good, entertaining look into how the italians made their exploitation ripoffs, this is good stuff indeed.

Book of Eli (2010)

2011-03-21T08:56:00.001+01:00

I'm sorry, I cannot hate a movie with Michael Gambon as a cannibal. I cannot. Even though it is a movie with an overtly religious message, but on the other hand, a religious message that says the the bible can be a horrible tool for destruction in the wrong hands.

With that said, Book of Eli is a scrumptious looking piece of postapocalypse, with decent amounts of violence and over the top acting that fits the tone of the movie like a glove. I likes it. A lot.

And I wont write anymore about this because it doesnt feature either Fred Williamson, Al Cliver or George Eastman, like any decent postapocalypsemovie should.

10 to midnight (1983)

2011-03-11T13:00:00.001+01:00

Charles Bronson stars in one of those copmovies he could sleepwalk through, a violent yarn about a sadistic serial killer who likes to murder young women while in the nude. Bronson finds the killer but cannot link him to the crimes, so naturally he fakes evidence which makes the psycho even madder and goes after Bronsons daughter.

10 to midnight is a perfect example of the "classic" movies that everyone in my class during the eighties had seen and said was an awesome and violent movie that I had to see. For some reason I never saw the movie myself and I admit, this would probably have been a lot better back then, it hasnt really dated that well. Everything about the movie screams 80s and the plot goes by the numbers. J. Lee Thompson, a fairly competent director, turns in a decent workmanship but you get the feeling that he, as well as Bronson, was somewhat bored with the whole thing. The only thing that stands out is Gene Davis fun performance as the sexmaniac with repressed homosexual feelings who deals with it by slicing up young women. Lurid, yes, but Davis performance makes the movie worth watching. All in all, a decent potboiler that is fair entertainment if you are in the mood for something that wont rock your world.

Primal (2009)

2011-03-11T09:45:00.001+01:00

Dont you just hate it when a movie is so close to delivering? When there is just one flaw that keeps it from being a really good movie? Primal, a rather good Australian evil shit in the backwoods movie, does just that. This review will be full of spoilers so if you dont what to know about some stuff that goes down towards the end of the movie you should stop reading after the end of this passage. In short, Primal is a decent little goremovie with a cool plot, fun violence and gorgeous Australian location photography. Well worth watching but there are some nags. Spoilers will now ensue.

A bunch of rather generic youngsters go out into the Australian wilderness to find some cave paintings that havent been seen by anyone in 120 years. They arrive, bicker a lot as usual in this kind of movie and when the blonde of the group goes skinnydipping in a small lake, all hell breaks loose. You see, there is something in the water which turns her into some sorts of mindless predator complete with lots of nasty teeth and a hunger for human flesh. There is also some sort of weird insects at the location, feeding on just about anything which results in destroyed tires and no way to leave. Even more, there is some sort of tentacled thing in a nearby cave that dissolves and feed on the remains of the bodies which the infected people leave there. All this, some decent gore and even some nudity.

Ok, so what is wrong with this picture? Well, for starters, there is not a character in this movie that you actually want to survive. They are a bunch of whiny, bickering idiots and you just want them to die. Horribly. Which, on the other hand, they do but still, not a single person to root for. Except maybe that tentacled blob in the cave. And here is the other problem of the movie. It doesnt really fit that well into the movie. In the last 10 minutes of the movie we are introduced to this slimy, tentacled thing that seems more appropriate in a SyFymovie than in this otherwise well shot and directed flick. I am a sucker of tentacled monsters but this did not sit well with me. It feels out of place and isnt particulary well animated. Still, it is a movie with a tentaclemonster, of which there can never be too many. I'm gonna stop this review here, not waste your time by contradicting myself over and over again. Primal is well worth watching, well shot and has some tension and gore, only slightly flawed. I'm gonna cry myself to sleep tonight. Sorry tentaclemonster. Sorry.

The Carrier (1988)

2011-02-22T11:20:00.003+01:00

Uh. What the hell did I just watch?

Ok, try to follow me here... the main character is a young boy living in a small town straight out of your average Stephen King novel, an outcast accused of causing the fire that killed his parents. He lives in a small rundown shack on the outskirts of town and during one cold night he is assaulted by some sort of strange creature that he manages to kill but not before being injured by its claws. This, naturally, infects him with some sort of disease that makes everyone he touches dissolve into a puddle of goo. Actually, every inanimate object he touches gets infected as well. This causes quite a big panic and after the only bridge leading into town is destroyed, people start to take things into their own hand, factions appear and everyone starts wearing plastic to avoid touching anything infected by mistake. When someone realize that cats can sense the infection the conflict heightens into a battle for ownership of the towns catpopulation.

Uh, yes. How's that for a plot? But the damndest thing is that it works just fine. The idea of the movie is frankly fucking brilliant, mindboggling in a good way. To actually manage to make a coherent movie out of this is pure genius. The budget was obviously low and some of the acting is rather amateurish but it still works just fine. The sheer spectacle of watching all these people walk around covered in plastic sheets like straight out of a low budget Italian postapocalypse movie, killing each other over who gets to own a cat is entertaining in itself.

Seriously, I dont know what else to write. This is weird shit. In an original, good way. The low budget and the nonprofessional actors keep it from reaching classicstatus, but as an experience it's so way out there that you really need to see it, without ever going into some strange arthouse mode. If only for the fact that you'd have a blast describing the plot to your friends. Think of it as Stephen King crossed with David Lynch. And face it, it's a movie about people melting. Come on. The sight of a naked woman melting into shards of broken glass make it worth watching. So buy it. Now.

Contagion (2010)

2011-02-20T18:27:00.001+01:00

I think there is some sort of international law out there that simply states one thing: Blobmovies are always good, and making it illegal to give any of them a negative review. I havent found any documentation that proves its existence but some day I will find it. Until that day, here is another blobmovie full of gooey fun!

Contagion does not exactly have a big budget, the story is limited to about two different rooms. But, one of them is an apartment where a dirty old man is shooting porn which gives you the required quota of nudity that a decent movie has to have. Our lead character is an alcoholic painter living in the room next to it and when a female friend appears with a strange suitcase he cannot resist to open it. You know, when a suitcase contains warning signs about not releasing a contagion you should bloody well leave it alone. But, on the other hand, we wouldnt have this movie if he didnt. The titlecreature is released, some sort of black slimecreature that starts to eat its way through the cast, taking over their personalities and, well, eats more people. What more do we need? Nude women possessed by an ancient blobcreature? Check. Characters drinking paintremover in an effort to save the rest of the cast? Check. Lots of goo? Check.

Contagion feels somewhat similar in tone to the NY ratzombiemovie Mulberry street, in that it's set in a couple of rundown, crappy apartments with characters on the poor side of town, giving it that little extra bit of realism that helps the movie overcome some of it's more corny choices of dialogue and the very uneven acting. But let's face it, we dont watch a movie like this because we want to learn something about the darker side of man, we watch it for the blobs and the boobs! And that is what this movie does best! The blob effects are simple but effective without too muich resorting to bad cgi, which makes me rate the movie higher. You also have to give the filmmakers credit for managing make a decent movie that is basically set in one room. It takes at least some talent to pull that off.

So, all in all, a decent blobmovie. It has flaws but also a great deal of slime. Which is enough for me.

Alien Vs Ninja (2010)

2011-02-19T18:36:00.004+01:00

This one has been getting a lot of bad press, people complaining on cheap effects and it's overall silliness but it seems to me that everyone is missing the point of it all. It's supposed to be cheap and cheerful, just like the grand old tradition of Kaijumovies in Japan. Because that is what it is, not another one of those movies that has followed the success of Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police. This is plain and simple Kaiju, with added gore. And it is entertaining as hell.

The plot is basically a ripoff of Predator with a bunch of ninjas heading home through a forest after a mission being hunted down by some sort of tentacled aliens that implants tiny aliens in the throats of the few they actually let live. All of this is just an excuse to show a lot of gore, silly humour and well staged fights. Men (and one really hot female ninja) in plastic armour fighting rubbermonsters. Now, where do I know that concept from?

Ok, so the movie has and will get a lot of shit because of some very silly humour, but as I stated earlier, that is beside the point. This movie is for people like me, lovers of rubbermonsters. You should watch this for the same reason as you watch Ultraman, Godzilla or Gamera. Because you sleep and breath rubbermonsters. If you aren't into that, then you can stop reading this review, make a mental note to never watch this movie and go back to that dvdbox of the X-men movies that you have been meaning to watch for the sixth time. But, if you are like me, you will love this. There are ninjas fighting men in rubbersuits, men in rubbersuits tearing people in half and stomping on heads and an incredibly hot female ninja doing justice to a very pretty and tight black tracksuit. Lovely. To use that old expression, it's like cotton candy for the brain. Not healthy but incredibly sweet and yummy.

If there is anything to bitch about when talking about Alien Vs Ninja it would be the fact the the movie has a rather low budget. It's set in a forest for most of the movie and the digital effects arent exactly top of the line. On the other hand, they are still effective and never spoils the entertainment. Very recommended viewing. For rubbermonsterlovers. And people who like ninjas.

Demon Resurrection (2008)

2011-02-19T12:10:00.006+01:00

Isn't it nice when a movie delivers? You dredge through movie after movie of lowbudget uninspired dreck, made with only fragments of talent just to find some entertainment. You know, some decent gore and some gratitous nudity. Oh, and some decent plotting. I have spent a lot of time being dissapointed with movies that show some promise but in the end just boils down to being a chore to watch. Which means it is especially fun to watch a movie that doesnt dissapoint. Like William Hopkins Demon Resurrection.

The plot of this movie feels like it's taken from a 70s horrormovie, complete with evil satanists, greatlooking zombies and vengeance from beyond the grave. A group of people go out to a house in the woods to do an intervention, they believe her new boyfriend has gotten her hooked on drugs or worse. Problem is, her boyfriend is an occult writer and to help him, she joined a satanic cult for purposes of research. But, the cult got her hooked and soon she was used in a ritual to bring forth some evil creature. Yes, raped by ethereal entity. Every good movie should have a scene like that. She managed to escape but is now pregnant with Satans spawn and the cult want her back. So, naturally, they resurrect a bunch of ancient corpses to go get her. Let the fun begin.

First of all, the plot may look a bit silly on paper but it really works in the context of the movie without never feeling corny, thanks to some decent acting and those fun zombies. Ok, so some of the actors arent exactly oscarmaterial but the leads take the material seriously, especially Alexis Golightly as Grace, the lady pregnant with evil and the fact that she has several nudescenes only makes it even better. But the best part of the movie is the zombies. These nasty fellas look like they are cousins to the etruscan nasties in my favorite Italian goremovie Burial ground. Oh how I have longed for zombies to look like that, and Demon Resurrection has them in droves. It isnt the goriest movie ever made but we do get several fine gorescenes, torn out throats, glass shards that slice up bodies and other fun and red yums. The movie is shot on digital video without any major processing but looks way better than most movies with a similar budget. All in all, Demon Resurrection is a great exploitationflick made with a lot more flair that you would expect from looking at the dvdcover which makes it look like another Andreas Schnaasmovie. I really look forward to see what William Hopkins does in the future. Recommended for all gore and zombiefans.

Official site here

Prime cut (1972)

2011-02-17T20:45:00.002+01:00

One of my favorite testosteronemovies is Walter Hills lovely firecracker of an actionmovie, Extreme Prejudice. Just looking at the cast of that movie will make your balls shrink in awe, characteractors like Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Michael Ironside, Rip Torn, Clancy Brown and William Forsythe. Awesome stuff indeed, a movie worthy of devotion. Now I've seen a movie where two actors manage to outman the entire cast of that flick... the greatness that is Prime Cut.

Lee Marvin plays a mobenforcer in Chicago who is sent to a small town in Texas where Gene Hackman is the cattlerancher in charge of a prostitutionring, owing the Chigago mobsters a substantial amount of money. The last person sent came in return as a package of sausages. Marvin takes a small posse, goes to Hackmans place where he is selling drugged out young girls for pleasure, calmly informs him that he has to pay up and takes one of the girls with him. Hackman gets pissed of course and sends his goons after them. Mayhem ensues.

Prime cut isnt really like anything I've ever seen. It's some sort of Lynchian Hitchcockmovie oozing of manliness and meat, going on in that special 70s pace that I love so much and is full of strange little quirks like that whole meatbusiness and an ending that is straight out of an entirely different movie. Marvin and Hackman chew the scenery like their lives depend on it and you really wish that they had more scenes together, not that the movie is dull when they arent sharing scenes but since they each outman the entire cast of Extreme prejudice youwant more. There are a couple of excellent setpieces such as when Marvin and the girl try to outsmart Hackmans aryan thugs at a county fair, ending with fun chase in a cornfield where a cropdust eats a car. Loving it. Watch this and Charley Varrick on a cozy afternoon and you have the perfect doublebill of what the seventies could offer at it's greatest moment.

And this movie also made me realize something. A 22 year old Sissy Spacek in one of her first roles is HOT! She spends the first half of the movie either nude or seminude and it is truly a gloriuos sight, making the movie even better.

So yes, if you like me is a sucker for excellent 70s thriller, you will gobble this up like an Elvis sandwich.

Not dead

2011-02-16T12:04:00.002+01:00

No inspiration at the moment, nothing else. I have a log of about 20 movies to review and I will try to get some reviews out before the weekend, ok?

Stuff like Prime cut, Demon resurrection, Contagion And Cry of the Banshee. And maybe Book of Eli.

The Cavern (2005)

2011-01-21T11:14:00.005+01:00

In 2005 we got Neil Marshalls superior cavehorror The Descent and it didnt take long until the copies started pouring in. One of those was Bruce Hunts The Cave which was mainly discarded as a poor copy, which in my book isnt true since its a nicely shot monstermovie, although with a fairly cliched script. Syfy released Caved in, a movie about giant bugs in a mine, a movie I should watch some day. Another movie that appeared at the same time was Olatunde Onunsamis WIthIN which I saw under the title The Cavern and seriously, it's been a long time since I've seen such a worthless movie without any traces of talent whatsoever behind the camera...

We follow a couple of spelunkers whose only trace of characterization are their weird names (Gannon, Ori etc.) on a trip to Russia to explore a recently discovered cavesystem. As soon as they go down into it one of their russian guides dissapears and they soon find him with his intestines outside his body. Panicky, they try to escape but find a huge boulder blocking their way out, meaning that they have to venture deeper into the caves, hunted by something that kills them one by one until we get a really, really lame twistending.

Oh my fucking god what a piece of crap this is. Osunsami has chosen to shoot this movie on digital video which is a cheap alternative and can be quite good in the right hands but for some reason the filmmakers chose to use some sort of idiotic filter which means that all colours are enhanced and all this results in you the viewer not seeing anything but gigantic compact beams of green and yellow light. Well, at least when you dont see shit because it's totally dark. Osunsamis version of exciting cinematography is to shake the camera as much as possible and sometimes turn it upside down from time to time, not exactly helping you see what is going on. The script isnt helping, only a pile of clichés that you've seen a thousand times before, done better every time. And the ending? Fuck me. The actors are actually rather decent but there's not much they can do with this wasted excuse for a script. Gorehounds can stay away too, there is a halfbloody scene or two with decent makeup, but it's too late by then. I wouldnt recommend this movie to anyone. Every single copy should be hunted down and burned, including my own.

Hard Revenge Milly (2008) and Hard Revenge Milly Bloody battle (2009)

2011-01-11T14:49:00.001+01:00

It doesnt take long for Hard revenge Milly to show that it will be great fun, when the lead character splits open a bad guy with her sword, giving us those glorious sprays of blood that only happen in Japanese movies. There must be something seriously wrong with the Japanese people, only a small nick in the skin results in a bloodspray two meters into the air. And we do get a lot of these here.

This is actually two movies, the first only 45 minutes long named Hard Revenge Milly and a 70 minute long sequel called Hard Revenge Milly - Bloody battle. It is set in Yokohama after some sort of war, stylishly postapocalyptic yet with working cellphones, telling the story about Milly, a woman out for revenge towards the Jack Brothers who killed her family and butchered her. Actually, they killed her husband, set fire to her baby and threw it against the wall all while cutting her to pieces. Seriously, I have no idea how she survived the treatment she got as she is stabbed in the gut over and over and over again. As we learn in the fullength sequel, a somewhat disturbed doctor rebuilt her body with mechanical parts, giving her some extra powers that do come in handy. Milly gets her revenge, violently, but the Jack brothers have more friends than she knows, as she will soon learn. In the meantime a young woman seeks Milly out wanting to hire her to get revenge for her dead lover, something that will have even more consequences.

You have to love a movie that has a scenetransition beginning with someone shaking a can of beer, opening it and then the movie cuts to a geyser of blood from a head sliced open. As plain and simple entertainment goes, this is top quality stuff. Writer/director Takanori Tsujimoto has a good eye for stylized fightscenes full of well choreographed violence, and that violence is lovely over the top. If you've seen Tokyo gore police, Machine girls and/or all the other fun movies of the new Japanese gorewave, you know what to expect (They even share the same makeupsfx artist). Storywise, both of the movies arent anything special, variations of the age old revengetheme with a sprinkle of Frankenstein but together with some excellent lowbudget visuals. Actingwise, both movies benefit greatly from the presence of the lovely Miki Mizuno as Milly, an actress who does seem to be a fairly accomplished martial arts artist(I havent watched the extras yet, but another review I read suggested this) and she carries the movie well. The other actors do a fine job, if theý have speaking roles or are there to be cannonfodder for Millys sword or shotgunleg. Yes, shotgunleg.

Excellent stuff indeed. Truly recommended.

Mannaja (1977)

2011-01-07T08:49:00.002+01:00

Uhm. Westerns. I dont own that many. I do like them but there has to be something special before I go as far as watching/buying any of them, like zombies or flesheating creatures that burrow under the ground, injecting you with a paralyzing poison and then let you be buried alive. Leone is always fine and stuff like Stagecoach is always entertaining. Il grande silenzio is another cool flick with the ending of a lifetime. Why then, you ask, why Mannaja? Well, because it was banned in Sweden on its release of course. I'm not really sure why though. There are some fair amounts of violence, yes, but nothing really that sadistic or gory. There is torture, but it's really mild, just a variation of the needlebit that Argento later used in the underrated Opera. Well, the Statens biografbyrå, the people who decided what we could see back then were never really consistent.

So, was it worth it? I guess so. Maurizio Merli plays Mannaja, a gunslinger with a mind set on vengeance and a gimmick of his own, axethrowing which he utilizes in a couple of the movies most violent scenes, as for example in the beginning where he chops of Donald O'Briens hand with a well aimed throw. He arrives in a small mining town controlled by the nasty McGowen and as always, gets into trouble pretty fast. McGowens right hand man Valler (played by John Steiner, the best actor in the movie) has some business with a bunch of thugs robbing McGowens silvertransports and, yes, Mannaja gets involved, gets beaten up, tortured and so forth.

Mannaja was shot by maestro Sergio Martino, a director known for making decent movies out of poor scripts. Here he presents a run down and filthy old west, full of mud and fog (which was there to disguise the fact that the outdoor sets were falling apart) which makes the whole situation feel more cold and nasty. Innocent people are executed in slow motion, all orchestrated by the nasty Valler who is an excellent villain, played to perfection by Steiner who seems to relish his role. But, what about the title character? Unfortunately we get the lamest main character I have seen in ages. Maurizio Merli is not a bad actor but he has the whitest teeth I have seen in a hobo bountyhunter. Seriously, there are several scenes in the movie where you miss out on what is happening on the screen because of thos shiny white pieces of jewelry. It doesnt help that the script keeps making him do the stupidest things this side of a Michael Bay movie, like going alone to deliver ransom for McGowens daughter, then hiding the silver and expecting to solve the situation himself, one man against ten? I would have been more satisfied with the outcome of that situation if they had shot him in the forehead and ended the movie right there.

But, this is a Martino movie which means that it moves at a good enough pace, and the action sequences, how stupid they may be written, are well directed and exciting. All of this would probably have been for nothing if the movie hadnt been blessed with the wonderful score by the De Angelis brothers, some sort of haunting folkmusic stuff with lyrics about what is happening on the screen, with excellent vocals. Heck, Donald O'Briens character even gets his own song. Fun stuff.

So, it's not the most perfect western movie of all time, but it's worth watching. mostly for John Steiners great performance and the excellent music. Martinos environments makes you feel cold and dirty and the story is sufficiently brutal. It could have been a classic if it hadnt been for that lame hero. A decent watch.

Fuck, I never though I would write this much, I was just planning for a few sentences. Be back next week when I massacre Hammers The Mummy.

Look at those goddamn teeth!

Assault of the sasquatch (2009)

2011-01-07T08:20:00.001+01:00

You cant really go wrong with a gory bigfoot flick. The End.

Well, I suppose you could, but the makers of Assault of the Sasquatch arent aware of this fact and has made a fine goremovie, very tongue in check and knowingly so. Director Andrew Gernhard (producer of such classy acts such as Predator Island and the Trees movies) and writer John Doolan even goes so far as to place the movie entirely in the city (except for a short sequence in the beginning when the furry freak is captured) and what we get is a goofy, gory version of Assault on precinct 13. You see, there is this unscrupulous hunter who has been hired by a weird millionarie to capture bigfoot aka Sasquatch. He manages to do this, but is arrested by the police and taken to a precint on the outskirts of a major city. The hunter is booked and put in a jailcell, with the police completely unaware that Sasquatch is locked up in his van. Not for long though. The creature breaks out and the gore starts. And a lot of silly humour.

And this is Assault of the sasquatchs biggest problem. There is a lot of very silly comedy here, and a lot of it isnt very funny, especially the parts with two geeks obsessed with Sasquatch, going around asking everyone they meet if they've seen him. On the other hand, as much as the jokes may not work all the time, the actors does seem to be in on the joke so it never gets as corny and unwatchable as your average Tromamovie. As a horrormovie it works a bit better. Pacing is good, never for a second letting its audience get bored. The policestation and its surroundings are excellent locations, and Gernhard handles the horror better than expected, although I suspect the whole thing was never supposed to be any scary. The gorequota isnt bad either, making it a rather enjoyable experience. In short, a goofy but somewhat funny little goreflick and who can hate a movie that features a bigfootcreature peeking on a woman showering? Just dont go into it expecting another Abominable, the ultimate gory bigfootmovie.

Killing birds (1987)

2011-01-04T09:47:00.002+01:00

I can't hate this movie, I really can't. Yes, it is another sloppy Filmiragemovie with a silly story about birdwatching, crazy vietnamvets and zombies that could only have been made in Italy, "actors" that obviously never have taken an acting lesson in their entire life and a shitload of really cheap goreeffects. Why is it that when someone has their throat slit they only get half of it slit? Did they reuse the same fake wound over and over? But then again, it does have Aristide Massachesi on photography which means the movie looks better than it should, even in the silliest of scenes. It is really embarassing to see Robert Vaughn in a movie like this, not only does he outclass the young "actors" by lightyears but it is also excrutiating to watch him spout the worst dialogue in all of his actingcareer.

But, I can't hate it. The movie is slow, but never boring. Zombies pop up from time to time, kill someone in a cheap way and dissapear, only to return when you start getting bored. The soundtrack is a perfect example of cheesy 80s synthdisco, something you cannot hate. I found myself humming along several times. You can do a lot worse if you're looking for a quick Italofix.

Screams of a winter night (1979)

2011-01-04T09:37:00.001+01:00

Here is another "legendary" flick that I read about in Phil Hardys Encyclopedia of horror, that I've always wanted to see, even though it never got any particulary good reviews. Screams of a winter night is a low budget anthologymovie, telling the story of a bunch of friends telling scary stories to each other while on holiday in a cabin in the middle of the woods. There is a bigfoot creature in the first story, a haunted house in the second and a psychopatic woman in the third, not to mention the evil creature that roams the woods in the main "story". Atmosphere is the key here, something that the filmmakers manage to create in droves. The cabin in the main story and the haunted house in the second are expecially nice. One thing that is different about this movie than similar movies is the fact that these are the type of stories that you would assume are being told around campfires, there are no twist endings. This works just fine, although it feels pretty strange at first. Another interesting thing is that the stories use the same actors as in the main story. Unfortunately these actors arent particulary good, not that they embarass themselves but none of them will be remembered for their acting.

In short, this is a fairly typical late 70s movie that needs a decent dvdrelease. It's not perfect, the acting is below average and at least one of the stories are just pointless (the psycho woman...) but the atmosphere works wonders and the final wraparound is excellent. I'm a sucker for Wendigos. It would've helped if the movie had been a bit more exploitative (there is no nudity and not much violence) but all in all, a fun flick. And that poster is awesome...

Btw, look out for a very young William Ragsdale in the beginning of the movie...

Cabin fever 2 (2009)

2011-01-04T09:29:00.001+01:00

Now, if there ever was a price for the most worthless sequel to a halfdecent movie, Cabin Fever 2 would win that, hands down. There is a lot of gore, yes. But it doesnt help when the movie is just a huge pile of totally uninteresting crap. This, and Wrong turn 3 was probably the worst movies I saw in 2010. Avoid.

Moon over Tao (1997)

2011-01-04T08:44:00.004+01:00

I am a huge fan of Keita Amemiyas great monsterflicks Zeiram 1 and 2, two flicks that truly could be described as live-action manga. Amemiya is a director with some flair, like Ryûhei Kitamura with some desperately needed restraint. We're talking old school sfx antics here, fullsize rubbermonsters and ladies in weird jumpsuits. Good stuff. If you've seen Zeiram, you know what to expect. Moon over Tao is a mixture between samuraimovies and scifi, and while not 100% succesful, it is still a fun experience with a final half hour full of goodies.

Retired warrior Suikyou is enlisted by his former lord when a friend goes missing looking for the source of a type of indestructible sword, and is sent into the mountains with another warrior, Hayate. They encounter a young girl living by herself who promises them to help look for the swords. In the meantime three alien females (all played by the lovely Yûko Moriyama from the Zeiram movies) arive on earth looking for something. Of course, all of this is related to an old enemy of Suikyou who has been manufacturing swords from a meteorite, a meteorite that contains something evil.

The first sixty minutes of Moon over Tao are fairly entertaining, containing mostly of some decent swordfights but it isnt until the meteorite gets a taste of human blood that the whole thing gets really fun. It grows into a large monster, thirsty for human blood and slaughters dozens of samurais. Awesome. The movie is full of cool touches and nicely edited actionscenes, although the budget couldnt have been that large since the whole thing is set in a quarry. The special sfx are mostly old school with some fairly decent (for the time) computer animation. The actors are mostly good, except for that annoying brat that seems to be there just to annoy the hell out of the audience. If you liked Zeiram you know what to expect of this, although I do prefer the Zeiram movies due to the monsterfree first hour. Monsters and violence, what more do you need? Well, boobs of course. Which you dont get any here, but the monster compensates.

Ghostkeeper (1981)

2010-12-09T19:54:00.005+01:00

I am truly a sucker for all those cozy 80:s horrormovies that mainly were released independently. There is an enormous treasuretrove of movies that havent been released on dvd but manage to find their way onto the internet in rips from old vhstapes. Sometimes you discover real gems like Strangeness (Now on an excellent dvd) and the bigfoot goreclassic Night of the demon. Of course, sometimes it's the other way around. I will never get back those 90 minutes that I spent watching Iced for instance. How about Ghostkeeper? Well, something in between I suppose.

It starts really well with an onscreen text about the Windigo, a cannibalistic creature of old indian legend. Having read Ambrose Bierce superior short story about this creature, this truly got my hopes up. Even better when I realized that the movie is set in a snowy landscape. All movies set in a snowy landscape are good. Well, Except Iced. Anyway, we follow a group of three driving on snowmobiles as they discover an old house that seems abandoned. When one of the snowmobiles break down they decide to spend the night there, only to find that the place is inhabited by an old woman and her unseen son. During the night one of the girls dissapear, though we see her getting her throat cut (well, we dont actually see it. The print was so dark you really have to guess by the sounds) and then fed to a grunting creature in an igloo in the basement. Eh? So, when morning comes they cant find her and to make matters even worse, the functioning snowmobile has been sabotaged...

On Imdb.com there is an entry where the director states that the movie ran out of funds halfway, making the latter half of the movie fairly improvised, making up scenes as they went along. Believe me when I tell you that it shows. The first half of the movie works fine, setting up the plot and the atmosphere fairly well but then it just collapses into a collection of weird scenes. The thing is the igloo is almost forgotten entirely, characters start to behave in odd ways and even though the movie isnt more than about 80 minutes, the last half feels like two hours. It all leads up to a decent ending but it is so drawn out and predictable that you yawn through all of it. There is no gore or any nudity to liven things up and the characters are so weirdly written, behaving like assholes that you just want them to die. With a cast of exactly seven, it does take its time. Too bad about all of this because the movie had some potential. The setting is great, the direction isnt half bad and there is a simple but nicely atmospheric score to set the mood. The flaws unfortunately outweigh the positives so I wouldnt really recommend this unless you really have to see EVERY horrormovie made in the eighties. Go watch Boogens or Strangeness instead.

There is an excellent interview here with the director about how the financing fell through and why the movie isnt as good as it could've been

Commando Mengele / Angel of death (1987)

2010-12-07T10:08:00.003+01:00

Praise the lord for Eurociné! Or, Death to the demon Eurociné!

Eurociné is a French moviecompany that has spawned more crap than Andreas Schnaaz. They have given the world such flyinfested pieces of vomit as Zombie Lake. Mentioning Zombie Lake is actually enough. Ok, so they might have produced a couple of watchable movies but who wants to mention that when I am about to review their most glorious masterpiece...

Here is a possible scenario. We have a couple of twelveyearolds who for some reason has gotten their hands on a 35mm camera. Someones dad might have some money and gives them a couple of franc to make a movie. The kids love movies like Eagles nest and The Guns of Navarone and decide to do a similar scenario, where a few brave fight a large army, this time nazis in Paraguay. They get some cheap European actors and start to shoot their movie.

Ok, that wasnt exactly what happened but it feels like it. This is what you get when two great schlockmeisters make a soup. Scripted by Jess Franco and directed (I'm not really sure if you are allowed to call it direction) by Andrea Bianchi. Both guys do know how to make better movies than this... thing that feels like Show and tell in Kindergarten. The cinematography is static and ugly, the actionscenes look like they have been edited by a blind person and you never get any sense of coherence whatsoever. There are a couple of fightscenes in slow motion that are so totally incompentently staged that you just sit there with your mouth open, trying to comprehend what you've just seen. The music consists of a one minute long piece of melody that makes the score from Zombie 4 - After death to sound like a lost piece of Grieg.

This is truly a spectacle of the grandest kind. It is really fun to hear classic Francoactors like Antonio Mayans, Howard Vernon and Jack Taylor speak english in their own voices, where Mayans is a true wonder. Let us not forget the wonderful computervoice that appears in a scene where someone has pasted a picture (really poorly done) of Howard Vernon on a picture of Hitler. This is Eurociné in its most glorious days and I would not recommend this to anyone.

Mindboggling is the word of the day. Yes, I loved it.

Resonnances (2006)

2010-12-06T08:40:00.007+01:00

Here is a movie I bought without reading any kind of review, just because I liked the plot. I did read some reviews after I already bought it and they all seemed to confirm that this was a movie I would like. Tremors meets The Thing. You cant go wrong with a concept like that. Except that the thing bit wasnt really in the movie. Think Wrong turn meets Tremors. Without the rednecks. In France.

When the movie starts we get a glimpse of Earth from space. It is the year 16something and we see a meteorite crash in a french forest. A young woman is close by and goes to investigate but flees in terror as something starts to follow her underground, tremorswise. The creature kills her and we move forward to present time where a group of friends is preparing a camping weekend. Their trip is cut short however when they run out of gas in the wilderness. They find a gasstation but manage to pick up an escaped convict who has murdered several people. Things get even worse when they drive into a fog, get assaulted by a giant tentacle and drive of the edge of a cliff. Wounded, menaced by a coldblooded murderer and hunted by an alien creature, It's hammertime.

Resonnances was obviously shot on a very limited budget and it does show from time to time in some rather poor digital effects. On the other hand, these effects are still effective and it seems like the filmmakers have gone for that route instead. There are quite a few really good miniatures and although the digital effects are rather obvious and not that well integrated with the whole, they are still way better than most syfymovies and similar low budget crapfests. This movie has a heart and it shows. Where this movie slightly fails though, is the pacing. The first half consists mainly of bickering between the characters (though way better acted than I expected) and running around in the woods and this is stuff we have seen so many times before. But as soon as the movie gets into the main monsteraction, Resonnances turns into great fun. Ambitious fun. You would think that when you have a limited budget you would tone things down, but not here. The filmakers pull of quite a few awesome sequences where the underground creature trashes the environment in search of its prey and it is genuinely exciting, all the time towards a great climax.

Yes, I was really impressed with this movie. Philippe Robert, the writer/director/producer/cinematographer pulls no punches and has made an excellent monstermovie, all the more impressive when you consider the ambitious sequences they manage to pull off. Yes, there is a bit of a problem with a not so thrilling first half but the last 40 minutes really reward you with lots of fun. One thing that might tick people off is the fact that the movie was shot on standard definition video, though the cinematography looks really great considering. The dvdrelease does look a bit bland though, more like vhsquality but that never detracts from the fun. I really look forward to what these guys will produce in the future. Someone has to give them a decent budget... that would be awesome.

The dvd from Synapse is barebones, with only a trailer which sucks. It would have been nice if they would have included some sort of Making of doc, when we are dealing with such an interesting movieprocess. But no....

Oh, there is no gore. But lots of tentacles. Mmmm.... tentacles...

Night of the demons (2009)

2010-11-22T08:55:00.003+01:00

The original 80s Night of the demons was never what I would call a classic. It is a fun little movie with some decent scares and gore (and that classic lipstickscene...) but without an ounce of originality. It got two sequels that I personally havent seen so I cant really comment on them, but did it need a remake? No. Still, it got one. Money money money.

The story is simple, a bunch of people are having a party in an old house with a nasty history. When the police arrive to disperse it, seven people remain for various reasons and wouldnt you know, there are seven demons in the house ready to possess the living so that they can be unleashed upon the earth. Simple and stupid. They find some tunnels underneath which they of course go down into, and spend hours in a "safe" room, while being picked of by the demons one by one.

And.. it's so boring. Technically the movie is servicable, with decent sets and excellent makeupeffects, but the script is so generic and dull that you dont really care. The classic lipstick scene is duplicated, but nowhere near as effective. The actors do a decent job with the little they have to work with but it doesnt really help. The movie never gets any exciting, just runs through the old rut. The movie does not take itself very serious and that helps, but all in all, the Night of the demons remake is a waste of celluloid. It's not really a bad movie, just clichéd and generic. Stick with the original.

Slow slow slow

2010-11-03T09:56:00.002+01:00

Ok, lately I havent been writing much, never got around to it... To get a fresh start I've decided to write a number of very short reviews in one big post. So here goes:

Winter kills.
Fun, well acted but ultimately too predictable conspiracythriller with Jeff Bridges and John Huston. Very entertaining but with an ending that wasnt exactly hard to guess.

Black Death.
Grimy, well made medieval thriller by the director of Creep, Severance and Triangle.

Scarecrows.
William Wesleys is a true classic, a well made horrormovie that clearly transcends a low budget with a great concept and some fine gore.

Room 205.
Danish haunted dorm movie with a cliched script straight out of an american collegemovie. It's a bit of a mixed bag since the actual horrorcontent is well made.

The Killer
One of John Woos finest with Chow Yun-Fat at his best. An awesome actionmovie with shitloads of great actionscenes.

My Dear Killer
A fine giallo with an exceptional first murder. It never really reaches the same heights as the decapitation by mechanical digger but still worth watching.

Piranha
Joe Dantes Jawsclone is almost as good as the original. Lots of cool cameos and cool fish.

Trick r Treat
Here is proof that the anthologymovie is alive and kicking. Well made, fun and really violent with good acting.

Centurion
Neil Marshall does it again. Roman soldiers in scotland are butchered by nasty picts. Huge amounts of gore, great landscapes with only a rather predictable ending to let it down. Still fun as hell though.

The Howling
Another fine Joe Dante flick with great werewolves

Monsters
Awesome. Truly awesome. The cultmovie of 2010. A roadmovie with gigantic, lovecraftian aliens.

City of the dead
Classic chiller in the same vein as Night of the demon and Night of the eagle. The atmosphere is thick as peasoup and Christopher Lee is great as usual.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

2010-10-22T11:03:00.001+02:00

Not really the type of movie that should be on this blog, but what the hell - lets give it a sentence and a word:

WHY did they have to change the ending?!?! Apes!

The haunting in Connecticut (2008)

2010-10-22T10:50:00.002+02:00

Why do I watch horrormovies? Back in the early days, watching a really scary movie could make me totally freaked out and I couldnt not go to sleep for many years without listening to music, a habit that I really didnt let go until I was somewhere between 20-25. And still I watched and watched. There is truly something special about being scared out of your wits. Problem is, after having watched thousands upon thousands of horrormovies, good and bad, you tend to be somewhat hardened and nowadays there are very few movies that give me anything near those chills that I used to get. The only genre that does give me goosebumps nowadays are ghostmovies. No, I dont believe in ghosts or anything paranormal but as a storypoint, there is always nice having something evil, barely glimpsed. One related fetish is Discovery channels documentary series A haunting, which is basically four seasons of dramatized "true stories" of hauntings. Perfectly shrunk into about fourty 45 minutemovies, this is great viewing that has the same set that is redressed for every episode. Believe me, there are truly a hundred ways you can decorate the same corridor over and over again. Then there is that great overly serious narration that goes something like this:
"The McBukkakis had recently started a family and was looking for their dreamhouse. After looking a long time for something that fit their budget, they finally found a house in northern Wisconsin/New York/Dala-Floda. Little did they know that something(enter any variation of the word Dark. Evil. Haunted.) was (waiting/lurking/sleeping/playing nintendo) there and it would try to (tear the family apart/kill them all/make them read The Watchtower). Well, you get the point. I kid you not, 35 out of 39 episodes starts like this. But after watching a couple of episodes you turned your brain off and just enjoyed the fleeting glimpes of satanic evil that wants to destroy the wholesome american families. Truly recommended if you like movies about evil ghosts.

So, why am I talking about a Discovery channel series in a The Haunting in connecticut review? A haunting also featured two longer episodes, one of which was based on the same supposedly true case as the movie. So, how is the movie? Not bad actually...

"The Campbell family moves into a new house to be closer to the hospital where young Matthew has his experimental cancer treatments. Little do they know that the house has a dark past and yadayada. The basement used to be a mortuary and when Matthew takes this as his room, nasty things start to happen. You know. Sounds. Fleeting images of humanoid shapes. Not so fleeting images of dead humans with their eyelids sewn shut. Eeeevil."

The narration would of course have sounded something like that, I'm sure. The haunting in Connecticut is a rather average haunted house movie. There is nothing you havent seen before, but you could do a lot worse. The actors are better than the movie deserves with Virginia Madsen as the mother of the family and Elias Koteas as a priest being the more known names. The scares are good, the backstory fairly interesting and there's a shitload of nice visuals concerning those dead people who cant see. If you get the unrated version there is actually even a bit of nasty gore. Did this movie scare me? A little. A goosebump or two which is more than I can say for a lot of similar movies. The haunting in Connecticut is perhaps more suited for horromovienovices but will also be a decent timewaster for most horromoviefans.

A decent horrormovie, yes. If you've gotten this far and find yourself interested I also would recommend you to get the dvdbox with all four seasons of A haunting. There is even a possible drinkinggame to be made - spot the moved around furniture in the same corridor in all the episodes.

I will finish this review with something completely irrelevant. Connecticut. What kinda name is that? Connecti-cut. Connect and cut? Yes, I am aware that the name comes from anglicized version of the Algonquian word "quinatucquet", but come on. Lazy explorers.

Mutants (2009)

2010-10-22T09:00:00.002+02:00

Yes, the zombieapocalypse is upon us yet again!

The difference between french movie Mutants and your average american zombiemovie is the way they treat plotpoints. French movie Mutants doesnt really offer up anything new, it is a movie about a couple trying to find a safe haven during your typical zombie (and/or really angry people) epidemic. They hear a radiobroadcast from a governmentoperation and head into the mountains to try to find it. Problem is, he has been bitten and she is pregnant. And here is the difference: Your average crapmovie would have glossed over this as a minor plotpoint while Mutants makes that the main story. Sonia, our heroine, desperately tries to keep the infection from consuming her spouse Marco, while hiding in some sort of abandoned factory/officebuilding in the mountains and trying to keep zombies and armed rednecks away.

Unfortunately Mutants never goes in a way that is really satisfactory, instead opting for a more generic ending which is a shame. It doesnt destroy the movie, just lowers the score slightly. But other than that you can do a lot worse as far as zombiemovies go. Mutants is completely set in a snowy mountain landscape and the filmmakers has really gone for the visuals, with excellent cinematography and environments. There is a fair amount of gory violence and the tension is great, up until the dissapointing ending. The actors are decent and all in all, an above average zombieflick that at least tries something different, even if it fails slightly.

Charley Varrick (1973)

2010-10-20T14:00:00.001+02:00

If there is one thing that I almost like as much as a decent rubbermonster, that would be gritty 70s thriller and by Gamera, Charley Varrick is one of best there is out there. It is also a perfect example of seventies PG movieviolence, starting with a bankrobbery where several people are killed including a policeofficer who gets a bullet in the forehead. Loving it.

The always excellent Walter Matthau plays Charley Varrick, a cropduster who has decided that robbing banks in small towns is a better way to make money. When the movie begins his crew robs a bank, killing and wounding several policeofficers and getting away with a LOT more money than expected. Oh, and his wife gets killed in the process. It turns out that this particular bank held a shitload of mobmoney. What happens when you steal mobmoney? The mob get mad at you. What happens when the mob get mad at you? They send Joe Don Baker. You dont fuck with Joe Don Baker. So, the rest of the movie is about Charley and his surviving robberpal (Andrew Robinson) as they try to outwit the nicely psychopatic mobman sent after them. Oh, And John Vernon is in it too, as a nice bonus.

Charley Varrick is a classic 70s thriller, full of violence and thrills, greatly helped by an awesome cast. Walther Matthau is as excellent as he always was, cool as ice, not letting you on if he is afraid of the mobs wrath or not. Andrew Robinson is great as the rather nervy sidekick who isnt as smart as he should be in a situation like this. And then there is Joe Don Baker, a man born to play mob hitmen. Add to this a small role for John Vernon and you have an great cast, all well directed by Don siegel, a man that made thrillers like this in his sleep. The pace is perfect, the story is well written with a mild twist or two, just like we want them. You cant really go wrong with this. Get it. Own it. Watch it. Now.

Necromentia (2009)

2010-10-20T12:10:00.001+02:00

Pearry Reginald Teo, the director of Necromentia, said in an interview that he wasnt influenced by Clive Barker when making the movie, other than "The only thing that Clive Barker inspired me to do was not be afraid of using metaphors to reflect on the darker aspects of life"

I'm not so sure I believe him. Just look at the cover where we have a very Cenobiteish creature and the story is full of pain vs pleasure where demonic creatures are luring people to hell. Then again, Necromentia is no ripoff. It tells it's own story and although it probably wouldnt have existed in the same way without the Barkerinfluences, it's still an ambitious piece of low budget filmmaking. The story is perhaps the weakest part, an anthology about three different people linked together in attempts to open up a portal to hell with ouijaboardlike tattoos painfully carved unto backs of people. The characters are rather bland and weird (in ways that are just overdone and silly. One of the characters job is torturing masochistic people but he is later on shown to be rather queasy) and the story never gives us any surprises. In fact, you realize fairly quick that it's all design here, plotpoints designed by industrial/goth fetishists. Not all of it works, hell itself is kind of a dissapointment but the rundown apartments, costumes and weird suicidegameshows are fairly inspired when you think of the budget. What really works though are the makeupeffects. The creature on the cover of the dvd may be unoriginal, but it is truly a looker walking through the corridors of hell on hooved feet. There is a fair amount of gore and violence, all impeccably designed. Really nice stuff. The movie also features a decent industrial soundtrack (duh) which works fine to the proceedings. Acting? Yes, there is acting. Fairly decent too. All in all, if you like darker horror and can overlook some cheeze, this might be for you.

The filmmakers clearly set out to be a bit indie and avantgarde, but all in all, it's just horror and not particulary original. Goodlooking horror though.

Bermude: la fossa maledetta aka Cave of the sharks (1978)

2010-10-11T09:15:00.003+02:00

As many horrormoviefans out there, I was a proud owner of Phil Hardys giant tome of snobby moviereviews, The Encyclopedia of horror movies. Many days were spent memorizing the damn thing and still today there are movies in it that I have never seen, longing for a nice dvd. One of those movies were Tonino Riccis Bermude: la fossa maledetta aka Cave of the sharks, a rather odd movie that has a fun and intriguing concept, but a low budget that hampers the fun a bit. Still, as corny exploitation this works just fine.

Hunky Andrés Garcia plays Andres montoya, a fisherman that was lost at sea for six months, not even having any recollection of where he has been. He gets together with his old girlfriend (Janet Ågren), causing friction with his brother who is in love with her but really, this doesnt have anything to do with the plot. Andres is hired by an american businessman (Arthur Kennedy)to recover valuables from an airplane that supposedly sunk in the bermuda triangle and when he and a friend goes on a dive they discover a mysterious cave full of sleeping sharks and Andres starts to get flashbacks to what may have happened to him earlier. When the american doublecrosses them, even weirder things start to happen. His friend is sucked into some sort of underwater portal for starters, there is a shitload of really poor underwater miniatures and the sleeping sharks awake, where we get a rather cool sequence when our hero tries to make it back to his boat by feeding the sharks with the bodies of the americans henchmen.

No, nothing really makes any sense. The bermudatriangle seems to be about a kilometer outside whatever tourist resort Tonino Ricci chose to film this at (you see the shore all the time), there is a long sequence where a bunch of hippies on a boat stare at a weird doll that starts to ooze blood through its mouth, upon which all of them commit suicide by drowning (a rather atmospheric sequence that really doesnt have anything to do with the rest of the movie) and then there are those fishtank miniatures... But the story in itself is fairly intriguing, the dreamlike visuals are atmospheric (a lot thanks to Stelvio Ciprianis bleeps and bloops) and although the miniatures are awful, they do bring a certain weird something into the story as long as you are in the right mood. This isnt a Jaws clone, it is a weird scifimovie with sharks and although nothing really gels into a coherent experience, it is still weird enough to warrant a watch.

Humains (2009)

2010-10-05T12:00:00.001+02:00

Hows this for a concept?

We take the usual Backwoodsstory with a number of people being stranded in a hostile environment and let them face the stupidest, goofiest antagonists since Harry and the Hendersons. I mean, it started so well. Just by setting the thing in the Swiss alps makes for an exceptionally picturesque setting, made for this type of movie. Put a couple of good actors in there and then spoil it all with bloodless kills and a general aura of Made for Disney tv. I was half expecting Kurt Russel or Lindsay Lohan pop up.

What a waste of celluloid. And yet, it isnt actually awful, just... bland. PG. The filmmakers clearly have a lot of potential so let us hope they grow a spine and give us some nasty gore next time around.

Telefon (1977)

2010-10-05T08:00:00.001+02:00

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep

This little poem by Robert Frost is one of the things that makes this excellent Charles Bronson vehicle so fun. The story is simple, yet so lovely Cold war that you cant do anything but enjoy it. You, back in the fifties those evil satanic communists in Russia planted 50 plus secret agents in the good ole´ Usa, people that werent even aware that they were agents. When hearing the codeword (the nice little poem) they revert to a druginduced programming to become suicide bombers, blowing up army depots and phone exchanges, all in the beginning of some sort of invasion. Now, things never got this far but some of the more communist communists dont like the way things are going in their country and one of the escapes to Usa, to phone some people and tell them a bit of fine poetry. Ok, the russians cant have this so what do they do? They send Charles Bronson of course!

Yes, the scenario is a bit preposterous but in that nice cozy way that was the seventies. Don Siegel is the perfect man for this kind of movie, moving along at a good pace letting Bronson and Donald Pleasence as the bad guy shine, while Lee Remick has that constant glamcam on her as soon as she is alone on the screen. So, we get 100 minutes of Bronson looking grim, Pleasence making people kill themselves in superbly over the top fireworks, the same hotel as in Mel Broosk High Anxiety and Helsinki standing in for Russia, complete with Åke Lindman as a russian lieutenant. Awesome. Really. If they just had trimmed that goof of an extended ending which plainly sucks. Not enough though. Get this.

The Sender (1982)

2010-10-04T21:50:00.001+02:00

Here is a another fine little flick that deserves way more attention than it got. The Sender (For some reason called Nattens sång in Swedish, which means Song of the night.) stars the excellent Zeljko Ivanek as John Doe #83, a rather troubled young man who starts the movie by waking up in a ditch and then going to a lake, filling his pockets with stones and trying to drown himself as holidaygoers watch his every move. He survives but is taken to a mental hospital and named John Doe #83 as he doesnt remember his name or why he was trying to kill himself. Soon strange things starts to happen around him, doctors and patients see things that arent there and his doctor is visited by a woman who claims to be his mother, asking them to release him in his care. And they start to give the young man shock therapy, all hell breaks loose.

It is always nice to watch a movie that relies on a good script instead of how powerful images the crew can bring upon the screen, not that The Sender isnt full of great stuff to look at - for example the sequences with shock therapy and a later try at a lobotomy. But the movie goes forward in an excellent pace, revealing as much to the audience as it needs to know toward a awesome ending sequence when secrets are revealed and hell is paid. The only complaint I have is the totally unnecessary "twist ending" which just about undoes all the fun we've had. Other than that, this is great horror low on excess (but some fine violence) but with great acting, good tension and an all out fine time in front of the television. Very recommended.

But... Song of the night?

Shaun of the dead (2004)

2010-10-04T08:10:00.003+02:00

Ok, what hasnt been said about this fabulous little movie that is not only a great homage to the zombiemoviegenre, but also an excellent little movie in itself, surpassing most attempts for the last 15 years. Good stuff. It has an awesome cast and a shitload of fun cameos. And Gore! No nudity though. Damn.

What else can I say? If you havent seen it already, get the fuck out of your sofa and get it! NOW!

Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974)

2010-09-28T16:09:00.001+02:00

Yes, this is as weird as they come. Prophecies of Nostradamus is a wonderful movie about the end of the world as foretold by the mysterious monk, part silly and goofy, part horrifying and creepy. Even more interesting is the fact that the movie was edited after an outcry from the public.

One of the coolest actors ever in Japan, Tetsuro Tanba, plays Dr. Nishiyama, someone who has studied Nostradamus prophecies all his life and are seeing things come true, one by one. All this will lead to the end of the world and the reason for all of this? Man's own folly. For starters - pollution has created these giant slugs the size of dogs, besides the fact that it is slowly killing humanity. Then Dr. Nishiyama is called away to New Guinea where radioactivity has created giant blooddrinking bats, huge leeches that suck blood and turn the people it feeds on into raving maniacs. And, my favorite, the natives that have gone cannibalistic because of the radiation. Woohoo, the whole sequence feels like its taken straight out of an Italian goremovie, only more psychedelic. Of course, things get worse and worse and worse, with radioactive smogclouds, an exploding plane that destroys the ozone layer over Japan, burning people to death and in the end.... Total destruction by Nuclear war.

Yes, none of this make any sense but is full of wonderful scenes of strange creatures and massdestruction. Tetsuro Tanba has that strength as an actor to make all of this worth listening to, when we arent treated to delisciously moody scenes of stockfootage of wars or models being destroyed set to the gloomiest narrator found in the acting industry. The whole narrative may be fragmented and almost psychedelic (towards the end of the movie when everything is about to go straight to hell, Dr. Nishiyamas daughter finds out she is pregnant and celebrates this by dancing on a beach), but the individual sequences are strong and imaginative (my favorite being the New Guinea happenings), expertly directed with the usual excellent japanese sfxtrickery and set to a marvelous score full of synths and choirs by Isao Tomita, an artist I'm really looking forward into delving into. If you like Japanese mass destruction, you will love this. I sure did. A W E S O M E !

Why it was edited? There are a few scenes that show the world after the great war where a couple of mutated children fight over a snake which was too much for some. I watched a japanese version, but that scene was in there...

The Green slime (1968)

2010-09-22T12:36:00.001+02:00

"You'll believe it when you find
Something screaming 'cross your mind
Green slime"

Now hows that for a themesong? This Japanese/American co-production has gotten a lot of bad reviews over the years, some of it welldeserved I suppose, but you cant deny that it is one heck of a fastpaced movie with lots of entertainment.

A meteorite is heading towards Earth and needs to be destroyed so a team of astronauts are sent from the nearby spacestation Gamma 3 to dig some holes, bury a couple of nukes and watch the piece of rock be blown to smithereens. They do their job but manages to take with them some green slime found on the asteroid which grows into oneeyed, tentacled monsters that feed on energy and electrocutes anyone they touch. It doesnt take long before Gamma 3 is overrun by these wobbly, rubbery thingies... Evacuation! Flying astronauts! Laser! Luciana Paluzzi looking hot speaking in her own, sexy voice

One thing that has always struck me is that The Green slime is a fairly brutal movie, at least for its timeperiod. People are thrown from platforms, blood splattering on the ground as they land and electrocutions with fairly good makeup of burns. this helps the movie immensly, giving it that intensity that it needs to keep the suspense going. Well, as much suspense you can get from a movie that features oneeyed wobbly tentaclethingies. It is all a bit silly but the movie is so fastpaced that you dont really care. Kinji Fukasaku was a good actiondirector and it shows, even how silly everything appears. The only thing that lets the movie down are the rather poor miniatures on display, as if Fukasaku had no idea how to light them. But who cares, it is a monstermovie we are talking about and as they go, The Green slime is an fine example of great entertainment. If you are into this type of movie, you know you will love it.

Just a final thought, kinda *spoilerish*:

Is there some rule in Hollywood that if a lead couple have broken up, the new guy has to die so that the old couple can get back together? I mean, twenty people can die to save a dog, but a new husband _will_ die a horrible death just because he married the wrong woman? Some christian thing against divorces, I dont know.

Malibu Shark Attack (2009)

2010-09-21T09:20:00.003+02:00

Sooo... what exactly are you expecting when deciding to read a review about a movie named Malibu Shark Attack? Well, I could tell you about its finer points.

1. It's shot in Australia but set in Malibu so the actors keep slipping into their original australian accents all the time. It stars Peta Wilson who is starting to look quite the milf, and she does have that sexy Kathleen Turnerish voice...

2. The Sharks. Yes, Goblin sharks look pretty ugly but, as the movie claims them to be, they arent extinct! It would take the scriptwriter ten fucking seconds to google it! They are all halfdecent cgi except for some rather goofylooking fins.

3. It has one of the coolest movielines ever. When asked what happened to a character, the response from our hero is: "There was a shark in the parking lot". You dont hear that one very often.

4. As usual, since this is a syfymovie, there is no gore other than some cgiblood and a couple of halfeaten corpses.

Yes, your average syfy sharkmovie. This one gets extrapoints for skipping the usual stockfootage but loses them when the cute blond chick doesnt take her top off. A heck of a lot better than Raging sharks and Blue demon though.

Event horizon (1997)

2010-09-20T15:13:00.001+02:00

Ok, Event horizon is a good movie. I admit that. but every time I watch it I think less and less of it, dwelling more and more on details I dont like and most importantly - that the setpieces never are as horrific as they need to be to keep up the all important momentum. The story is solid and a minor classic - the spaceship Event horizon mysteriously vanished some 20 years earlier and has now reappeared inside Jupiters atmosphere. A rescueship is dispatched to find out what happened and when they arrive they soon realize that the crew is dead or missing and something is really wrong with the ship. It has been somewhere nasty and as one of the crew members is saying after he tries to commit suicide: "He is coming".

The cast is excellent, although Richard T Jones horny black guy is just a big cliché. The direction is good, the photography scrumptios and the whole thing is a setdesigners dream. The problem is that the movie never really lives up to those incredibly ominous words. Yes, things happen, people die and we get glimpses of the nasty fate of the Event horizons crew but nothing that really stands out. There are some glimpses of what could have been on the extramaterial since the movie company forced the makers to remove a lot of potentially interesting stuff, but since a lot of these are in rather poor condition it never really feels part of the picture. As it is, Event Horizon is a decent, welldesigned movie that never really "bites".

Shutter (2008)

2010-09-20T10:00:00.001+02:00

The word of today is pointless.

Example: Mediocre, unscary, by the numbers remake of far superior Thai movie Shutter.

Heck, even the remake of One missed call was better.

Poultrygeist (2006)

2010-09-20T09:55:00.001+02:00

Troma. Yes, that says just about everything you need to know about this movie. Cheap, cheerful, gory, disgusting and plain silly from the first minute. If you want to you could even say that Troma wants to say something about the fastfoodbusiness but you know that isnt true. This is entertainment, pure and _simple_.

So, here we have a movie about a fastfoodrestaurant built upon an ancient indian burialground. With this concept we get a shitload (I said shit. giggle) of cheap jokes, a lot of cheap disgusting gore, several songs (yes, it's a musical too) and a cute little lovestory. You cannot compare anything of this to anything remotely resembling quality entertainment since this is Troma, but on the other hand, you cant hate it. I mean, chicken zombies. What the hell?

There's not much more I can say about this, it is a Troma movie. If you like Troma you will gobble this up, thats for sure. If you are not a Tromafan, well you still might like it. The jokes are cheap, the gore quota is high, the breasts are plentiful and funny and one of the songs, Slow fast food love, is pretty good. Did I mention giant chicken zombies?

A day of violence (2009)

2010-09-20T08:50:00.001+02:00

Any movie that features Giovanni Lombardo Radice as a doped out hobo who gets his throat slit should technically be worthy watching. The keyword here is should. The problem is just that A Day of violence, how ambitious it may be, still fails for a number of reasons. More on that later.

There's no doubt about it, if you like your violence brutal and plentiful, you will most likely love this movie. A Day of violence is about this loser of a thug who robs Hopper, a dopedealer for 100000 pound and slits his throat. The following day he gets a job for the local kingpin (who just to show how brutal he is, tortures our heros best friend and removes his genitals with hedgescissors, all in gory detail) to collect 100k from the very druglord he just killed and robbed. Yes, big trouble. Exactly how he will get through this sticky situation is what the movie is about, but since it starts with his shotgunblasted corpse in the morgue, we know it will be violent.

Ok, here is my main problem with the movie. Our hero is an asshole, we establish that from the moment he slits Hoppers throat. Sure, towards the end we are made aware of the fact that there were somewhat noble intentions behind the happening, but the train left hours ago. I couldnt bring myself to feel any sort of sympathy for the man, everything that came to him was well deserved. The actor playing him was ok when it came to actionscenes, but dialogue? Not his thing. It doesnt matter how much violence and boobs a movie has, if the main character is someone you feel deserve to die - it will diminish the netertainment value.

With that said though, A Day of violence is a well made exploitation piece, on a obviously low budget and has the audacity to never let the budget show through. Guns and gore galore, and if thats what you want, this movie is a good place to find it. The moviemakers clearly show potential so I really look forward to them doing something on a bigger budget in the future.

Samurai zombie (2008)

2010-09-15T10:37:00.000+02:00

Samurai zombie, what a nice title. I really had to preorder it as soon as I read about it, especially since it was written and produced by Ryuhei "Versus" Kitamura and directed by the star of Versus, Tak Sakaguchi. And you know, the story sounded fun too. Well, the further you come into the story the more it sounds like a rehash of Versus, only with less gore, less flair and cooler zombies. I wont spoil anything other than its about a number of people meeting up in a forest and all being hunted by zombies. Why? It has something to do with the past...

Yes, this is basically a remake of Versus, only more old school horror. As such, it works fairly well, the environments are excellent (a forest, an old abandoned village) and the Samurai zombies are really cool, lumbering creations. The characters and the actors are ok, we even get a weird policeduo, just like in Versus. Tak Sakaguchi is no Kitamura, but does a decent enough job with the atmospherics which is one of the main reasons for watching this movie. My only real complaints is that the story isnt anywhere near as wild as Versus, almost pedestrian and that the gorequota could've been much higher. There are a few scenes of decapitation and grue but unfortunately the focus of the movie is mood. A slightly above average zombieflick, well worth watching - mostly for the cool zombies and a very strange character who thinks himself immortal. I've seen lots worse.

12 rounds (2009)

2010-08-31T22:33:00.001+02:00

I like Renny Harlin. Most of his movies actually, especially Die Hard 2 and Deep blue sea. I even like his version of the Exorcistprequel a lot.

But this? An actionmovie with a really stupid script and a lead that used to prowrestle. The only redeeming factor is a decent bad guy and one or two ok actionscenes. But no... My girlfriend even forgot that she'd seen it after a couple of days. It's that memorable.

Skip it.

Nu-Meri: Book of the New Spawn (2009)

2010-08-31T22:00:00.001+02:00

Ok, the first question that popped up in my head after watching this movie was: Who was it made for? Well, me maybe. I do agree to the fact that there can never be enough nasty fishmovies and this sucker rates way above your average syfymovie, both in plot and weirdness. But still, the script needed a bit of tailoring if they really wanted to make an memorable horrormovie.

Our heroine, likes fish. A lot. No, not in any sexual way (put down your dirty mind, just because this is a japanese movie.....) but she wants to study them and help protect them. When she isnt carving them up in the fishmarket of course, where she helpd out her family on a regular basis. She also studies marinebiology and has gotten an internship at a local fishlab, along with a friend. When they arrive strange things start to happen - her friend tends to wake up staring in the night and after she dissapears her body is found in the ocean full of fishbites. Someone is obviously performing unethical experiments on the poor, unsuspecting fish. And then it gets really weird. I dont want to go into any major details to spoil anything, just mention that it involves flying, carnivorous fishheads. Yes. Fishheads.

The only thing is that for a movie that is only 75 mins long including credits, it is pretty dawn slow. Nothing happens until more than half the movie has passed, before that we follow the young girl living her life, meeting friends and praying at any fishrelated shrine she can find. It's almost like one of the narratorless documentaries following the life of a young japanese woman. Not that its totally uninteresting, the actors are decent and it feels fairly unscripted but not very horrormovieish. When the horrors finally come in the end, they are well staged and really creepy as soon as you accept the flying fishheads which are wellmade on an obviously low budget. Actually, the general weirdness of the last 15-20 minutes are more than worth the while. The buildup could have been a little bit... different. Still, I like the movie as it is. Recommended if you like your dope a bit odd. Like me.

Another thing. This is a sequel. To a movie that seems to be about bunnies. In a horrormovie kinda way. Wtf?