Trackman (2007)

 

Trackman starts with a bankrobbery gone to hell - two policemen are killed and the robbers take hostages as they flee down into the underground into a an abandoned metrosystem. One of the robbers is planning to kill the others to get all the money but all of that is thrown aside as a killer with a fetish for plucking out eyes starts to hunt them throughout the dark tunnels, killing robbers and hostages one by one.

What we have here is basically a slasher, people are killed by a generic masked killer. There isn't really anything new or fresh about the story itself, the characters have all been seen before in similar movies and we never really learn anything about the killer other than he is tall and masked, likes to remove eyes and kills with a large pickaxe. The fun part about Trackman, the thing that makes it rise a bit above the usual slashermovie, is the setting: the dark, wet tunnels of an abandoned Russian metrosystem. Here is where the movie shines, the filmmakers uses the location exceptionally well with good cinematography and a strong pace that never bogs down into bickering or anything else that scriptwriters use for padding their movies into full length.

It is always fun to watch a Russian take on a very western genre and at first I though I rated this movie higher just because it is Russian but in reality there isn't really anything particularily Russian about Trackman. It is "just" a very competent slasher that uses its resources very well and as such is a a lot better than a lot of similar movies. There are no bubbly teens, no jiggling silicone boobs - just people trying to outwit a killer in a very atmospheric location and that is all I need. I suppose there could have been a bit more gore but we do get a couple of glimpses of pickaxerelated violence and a semi-gory eyeextraction or two. Good clean fun, worth picking up if you are into well made slashers.

Werewolves on wheels (1971)

Short version:

Bikers.

Satanic rituals with dancing nude chicks.

Werewolves.

See the movie.

Slightly longer version:

Basically, Werewolves on wheels kicks ass. Seventies horrormovies has a certain atmosphere when done right and this one nails it, even though the story might feel a bit goofy. But WOW manages to pull off that very particular feeling of people outside the grid travelling through the backside of America as a group of bikers are cursed by a coven of satanists, turning some of them into werewolves. The bikers are gruff, the scenery is awesome and there is enough exploitation to satisfy me even though the film was toned down after a battle with the MPAA. The werewolves even look old school and cool, like straight out of a 40s flick. In all, one of my favorite seventies horrors ever. This makes a perfect doublebill with Race with the devil, or maybe Devil's rain.

Geekend report

I just came back from the latest edition of one of the hottest new horror festivals out there, Geekend in the woods - winter 2013 edition. GITW 2013 featured tons of prominent guests from all over the globe and some of the best new horrormovies out there. Ok, I might be stretching the truth a little bit. Geekend in the woods is actually "just" me, Fred of Ninja Dixon and Jason of Cinezilla going out to a cabin and watching movies for two days. Two days of great fun.

The best kind of forestroad for going somehere to watch horrormovies, wouldn't you say?

So, after driving through the snow for a couple of hours (stopping only for some meat and a lot of snacks) we finally arrived at the cabin, the weather being quite nice for the occasion.

Yes, we were slightly overambitious with the amount of dvds we brought with us. And thus the moviewatching began (after a light snack consisting of pasta and meat).


We needed to start out strong with some major cheese and there is no better movie for that than Bruno Mattei's wonderful Rats - Night of terror. I remember it as being pretty dumb, but it goes way beyond that. Rats is one of the stupidest movies I have ever seen with dialogue and plot development from the nether pits of some hellish mire of unfathomable dumbness that makes Troll 2 look intelligent and enlightening. But still, Bruno Mattei treated the whole thing like the professional he was and it is a good looking movie (shot on the sets of Once upon a time in America), no matter how daft the proceedings are. Hilarious good fun that makes me miss Mattei even more.

After all this fun we had to go a bit more serious and what better way than with Beverly and Ferd Sebastians Cajun revenge story, Gator bait. This is a strange mixture of good-natured goofy redneck fun and a pretty nasty (though not very graphic) rape/revenge story as the extremely adorable/sexy Claudia Jennings roams around in the Louisiana swamp in a very skimpy outfit killing the people that raped and murdered her sister. Miss Jennings is so cute that I go all butterflyish in my stomach just watching her.

Movie number 3 was Ryan Shifrings Abominable, most likely the best Bigfootmovie ever made. Basically Rear window with Bigfoot, this has everything a horrorfan needs: Boobs, blood and bigfoot.

After that we decided to go back into Mattei county again with one of his last movie, the supremely sleazy The Jail - The Womens hell. This is a cheapo throwback to the 70s genre of Women in prison movies that has so more nudity and sleaze than your average pornflick. When there is 30 minutes left of the movie we are suddenly treated to Matteis version of The Most dangerous game and we get quite a bit of cheap gore as the halfnaked women are hunted and killed in the jungle. Only Mattei could make them like this, it looks as cheap as it probably was but Mattei never held back, exploitation is served in large amounts.

Did you know Shakira was in a Bruno Mattei movie? Here is proof!

Then we moved on to Satanico Pandemonium, a quite odd Mexican movie where a nun tries to hold back temptation from Satan. It looks like a fifties flick but with a bit more nudity (a lot) and that feeling is strengthened even more when the lead actress reminds you quite a lot of Audrey Hepburn. Lots of nudity and sin, good clean fun.

Giorgio Ferronis Night of the devils is one of my favorite 70s horrors, a slow burner with more atmosphere than a hundred PG13 horrors. It takes its sweet time building up to a great climax but it sure as hell is worth it, this is a movie everyone should own and it's out of dvd and blu from Raro Video. Get it. NOW.

I remember Ruggero Deodatos Camping del terrore aka Body Count as being a good movie but then again, I had only seen a blurry vhscopy. Now that it's been released on a decent dvd in Italy it was time to watch it again, with some anticipation. I cannot say I was dissapointed but I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a good movie. Camping del terrore is an Italian slasher, complete with unexisting characterization and weird plot. Generic but well made and has a couple of nice kills and some nudity. It does have a feature that you rarely see in slashers, in that the "final girl" takes off all her clothes.

Taxidermia, Hungarys submission to the oscars in 2008, is one hell of a mindfuck of a movie. To describe the plot is useless, I will just say that it involves penises shooting fire, obese people getting more obese and live taxidermia. And not in a avant garde "just got out of film school" way, but a genuinely strange and engaging story.

Gyo: Tokyo fish attack is a 70 minute long anime adaption of Junji Ito supreme manga; Gyo, about a sudden epidemic of dead fish with metallic legs attacking everything living. If you compare it to the manga you might be a bit dissapointed characters have been changed and new ones added but you are never bored and that is more important.

Next up, Jack Curtis wonderful The Flesh eaters. Made over the course of a year in 1964, this doesnt offer much in production values but excels with the help of some minor early gore, a fun plot and decent acting. Fans of b&w scifi/horror will love it.

Survive! is Rene Cardonas exploitationversion of the 1972 Andes flight disaster where survivors of a planecrash survived by eating the flesh of the dead. Not as exploitative as one would assume but still an entertaining oddity with the survivors eating what looks a hell of a lot like beef jerky.

Joe D'Amatos Anthropophagus was next on the menu and really feel that the movie gets more negativity towards it than it deserves. It's great fun watching George Eastman munch his way through the dubbed cast and while D'Amato uses the zoom a bit too much at times, it is still a good looking and atmospheric little goremovie.

The Geekend ended with 1987 monstermovie The Kindred, a flick that really needs a proper dvd (we watched a fullscreen german dvd, most likely sourced from a vhstape). Another one that takes its time getting to the goods but for those with a little patience we get a lot of nice tentacly fun.

13 movies in two days, I know we could have done better. But then again, we had a really good time and that is what matters. Until next time.

Deadline (1984)

One of my favorite exploitation movies of all time is James C Wassons lovely Bigfootflick Night of the demon. While not exactly a good movie per se, it is shamelessly entertaining and has a story structure that in itself is absolutely brilliant - the movie stops on several occasions while a character relates a story about a previous victim of the nasty bigfoot. A prefect recipe for creating nonstop entertainment; as soon as the movie starts getting boring you add a scene of a biker getting his dick ripped off or a scene where a couple of girl scouts are gorily dispatched. Nothing but awesome.

Deadline uses a similar gimmick. While not actually a horror movie it still manages to find a clever way of inserting gory horror scenery, telling the story of a writer who perhaps delves a bit too deep into his own imagery. We follow the life of Steven Lessey, a successful horror novelist and screenplay writer who is under quite a lot of pressure. Not only is he getting bashed by members of the public who feels his writing is pure exploitation with the only intent of shocking and making money, the producer of a movie he is writing is pressuring him to add more and more nasty violence into the script. Adding to this mess, his wife is having an affair and a drug addiction, something she blames on him. And of course, their children are being neglected by both parents; something that will have some pretty horrible consequences in the end.

Deadline is basically a drama about a man who is losing control of his life, still wanting to believe that his work is of some literary value but slowly succumbing into writing exceedingly violent horror. I suppose there might actually be a point behind all of this, some sort of statement about cinematic violence but since the movie is more interested in showing us all of these gory scenes from the movie he is writing that point soon becomes lost. As for the human drama, it really isn't very interesting. All the characters are self-centered assholes who only think of themselves and their needs, be it artistic integrity or being high on coke. They are all very unappealing and very hard to root for so when tragedy strikes you really don't feel anything else than that they had it coming. It probably would have helped if there were any good actors but other than Stephen Young in the lead who is ok, the rest of the ensemble are all hovering slightly below mediocre.

Fortunately there are other redeeming qualities for the gorehounds out there. There are quite a few random scenes of violence in Deadline and all of them nicely bloody and gory with good special effects. They don't don't add anything to the movie other than confusion about the scripts purpose and more importantly - entertainment.

Nuns eating pounds of flesh from a priest? Check.

Young children setting fire to their grandmother? Check.

A new wave band using some sort of nazicontrolled soundwave to make bums melt? Check. (What the hell? Who came up with that?)

Yes, Deadline is not a very good movie. It tries but the message is muddled and unappealing so its only enjoyment comes from watching the nasty gore scenes, although I will admit that the final 10 minutes of debauchery are both pretty fun to watch and actually quite horrifying. Too bad you don’t care at all about the lead character by then.

10 movies you need to see

A found footage horrormovie that starts like it's trying to be a complete list of all the genres faults but punches you in the gut halfway through and goes completely insane! My review here.

This french microbudgeted monstermovie deserves more attention than it got, every selfrespecting monstermoviefan should own this. To quote my own review, Think Wrong turn meets Tremors. Without the rednecks. In France.

Another french movie, this one with a Lovecraft tint and set in basically one room, a prison cell. Great acting and good characters makes this essential viewing. My review here.

Western/horror mashups are rare and I sincerily wish there was more, especially since The Burrowers show that you can really do something good with it. It might be slow paced but the dread feels more real than most. My review here.

This one is hard to describe, think Alien/The Thing but set on a cold and wet Irish farm with mutant cows! Sounds preposterous, but it isnt - on the contrary. Isolation is an excellent dreary little gem of a horrormovie. Review here

The hands down best horrormovie ever to come out of Scandinavia. It might not answer all your questions about what is going on but the ride is so delicious that you really don't care. Review here.

The second best horrormovie ever to come out of Scandinavia. Skjult takes it's haunted house story into the dark Norwegian woods and hands out some pretty awesome chills. Review here.

A young French woman is impregnated by a weird parasite that forces her to kill people to feed it as it grows inside her belly. Sounds like a Troma movie but is an excellent comic book style gorefest of epic proportions. Review here.

Here is a little gem that I tend to talk about a lot, a french horror/scifi/musical which for some reason is really hard to get, and that is a real shame. Tentacled aliens and Vanessa Paradis, how can you go wrong? Review here

While The Carrier is not exactly a "good" movie as far as acting and production values go, it is still one of the more stranger experiences out there without going down the avant garde / just got out of film school route. Like if David Lynch did an adaption of Stephen King. Review here

The Squad

Trailers, dont you just love them? The way they can lure you into their world, making you believe that what you are about to watch is an entirely different experience than you are getting. Colombian movie El páramo aka The Squad is a perfect example of this, with a trailer promising some sort of supernatural military horror and when end up with something not quite so. Or do we?

A squad of nine special forces soldiers are sent up into the Colombian mountains to investigate a remote military outpost who hasn't been heard from in several days. A guerilla-attack is suspected so tension is high. Upon arriving they find that the whole crew is dead or missing, and this is where paranoia sets in, everyone expecting guerilla soldiers sniping at them any moment from the surrounding mist-shrouded mountainside. The situation changes however when they find an insane woman behind a bricked up wall filled with wards against evil. Then a logbook is found, one that implies that the woman is a witch and has brought a curse upon them. Some of the soldiers believe that she is behind the deaths of the crew and when she escapes and a soldier is found dead, mayhem ensues.

I was really hoping for, as the trailer suggested, a tense supernatural horror where the soldiers go up against nasty supernatural creatures but this is not what The Squad is about. Instead we get a nailbiting psychological horrormovie where the threat remains somewhat ambigious throughout. And that's the beauty of this movie, if you are into this kind of horror and can accept not getting every single answer spelled out for you in capital letters, i e: THE BUTLER DID IT. We never really know who or what is causing all of this, is there some kind of supernatural prescense here or are the soldiers going insane? The woman is real, but who is she? Is she the cause of the deaths or are the soldiers just seeing things where there arent any? People start to die, sometimes by unknown causes and sometimes by the hand of a former comrade. Sure, there are more questions than answers here but the mood and atmosphere is as bleak and full of dread as it is here, it doesnt really matter. Your mind is prefectly capable of making up what might be in the blank spaces (And if it isn't, then you should be watching Transformers 3 instead). The locations are striking, the armybase on a small mountain peak surrounded by trees, rock and fog, all shot in a lovely grey palette with the corridors of the base itself dull with streaks of red from the former crew.

Ok, enough praise now. Not everything works. The actors are all fine and decently sketched out as all coming from different parts of Colombian life. The problem is that all are dressed in the same dirty military garb and are at times, mostly in the beginning, somewhat hard to tell apart. This gets better as the movie slows down after the first really tense 30 minutes but if you arent paying attention it will probably get a bit annoying. The ambigiuty of the whole thing can be stumbling and the ending just might kill the movie for you, I'll leave it at that. Personally I found it good, if somewhat cliched, but I can see why people arent liking it. But other than those small flaws I cant do anything else than to recommend this, Jaime Osorio Marquez has crafted a tense movie with more atmosphere than most movies I've seen in the last year or so. It's just too bad that it is marketed as an entirely different movie than it really is. I mean, just look at that dvd cover.

The arrival of Wang (2011)

Gaia, a young Italian woman working as a Mandarin translator gets a phone call about a well-paid job that has to be done immediately and in great secrecy. She is picked up by car, blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed location where she is to act as a intermediary in an interrogation. The whole setup is strange from the start and she is taken into a dark room, not allowed to see the person she is supposed to translate and the interrogator is more than a little aggressive in his questioning. She finally has enough and demands to see who it is she is talking to, and the man reluctantly agrees. It turns out, to some major discomfort and quite a bit of panicking, that the subject isn’t actually a human but a tentacled alien with the name Wang who only speaks mandarin (since it is the most spoken language on Earth) to make communication easier. Wang states that his mission is only of peace and exchange of cultures but the interrogator refuses to believe him and torture is soon brought into the picture, much to Gaia’s dismay. Why is Wang here? Is Wang as peaceful in his intentions as he claims to be or is the interrogator right with his brutal methods?

Antonio and Marco Manettis L'arrivo di Wang is what I call classic Sci-fi, pretty much nailing the feeling of your favorite sci-fi novella or one of the better Outer limits episodes. A breath of fresh air actually, going back to old school pulp and although there are some budget related limitations (mainly some of the special effects), the concept works really well due to a well written script that keeps you intrigued throughout the entire movie, culminating in one of the best final lines in years. The script could have used some trimming, there are some parts toward the end that feel a bit "filler-ish" and going back to the Outer limits reference, this would have been a perfect 50-60 minute tv-episode. Don’t let that detract you from watching this, L'arrivo di Wang aka The Arrival of Wang is good stuff with some solid acting from the leads and a well animated tentacled monster, something that could have killed this movie from the moment he was shown. The reason I picked up this movie was the fun setup and it pulls it off with gusto, especially since it is mostly set in the interrogation room. Well written old school sci-fi, you know you want it.