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Post by Joker on Jan 29, 2011 2:10:13 GMT -5
Girl Slaves of Morgana le FayTwo beautiful lesbians take a trip to the countryside only to have one disappear. Her lover goes to look for her and winds up in the clutches of immortal sorceress Morgane le Fay. The beautiful ancient sorceress lives in a castle in a lake protected by magic so there is no escape from her and her sapphic harem of gorgeous eterneally young servants (and their sinful dwarf in guyliner). It's a beautifully shot piece of Eurotic horror that unfortunately has nothing much on the line when it comes to the stakes being a prisoner of le Fay or escaping back into the bleak countryside. It's very gothic and there are plenty of frequently nude beautiful women, but that's about it for just a few scenes interspersed between lots of dull talking. Act of Vengeance (1974)And Smash Cut is on my queue, can't wait for a healthy dose of David Hess. He is always a blast to watch. If you haven't already, check out Hitch Hike or House by the Edge of the Park. Good down and dirty Italian fun. I don't really like movies with rape in them and this one winds up being pretty scummy as a beautiful young woman is attacked by a hockey mask-wearing serial rapist and finds the police are no help. She is one of five women who have been brutalized by this narcissistic beast and decides to create a "Rape Squad" with the other victims to fight back. Some swinger date rapist gets a dose of justice as well as a filthy phone caller and a pimp. Eventually the rapist becomes a killer and the women are being hunted by him. The problem here is that this film seems like it will be about female empowerment and righteous vengeance, but decides to be more about how evil and clever this bad guy is while these women seemingly lose their intelligence and resourcefulness significantly near the end. They'll go after the pervert who makes phone calls to one of their number with guns, but then are easily lured into a trap at the climax by this guy armed only with billy clubs - then split up in the darkness far from any kind of help. In reality these women would never leave home without guns ever again after using them once to such successful effect. The movie does have some character stuff thrown in and commentary on a backwards legal system, but that quickly goes away. Personality-wise they would probably be tougher and turn the tables on this monster much more easily. The overacting by the leads and the drawn out monologuing by the rapist do not help either. Some genre publications would tell you this is some sort of golden classic of exploitation cinema, but I see it as a lot of wasted potential due to lazy writing and conventional crap.
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Post by Joker on Feb 5, 2011 23:58:57 GMT -5
Blood Scarab
Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Monique Parent) has married Count Dracula for some sort of new life in L.A. when he gets burned up by the morning sunlight due to his scatterbrained assistant Renfield (Del Howison) being unable to get him to his coffin in time. It's no problem with lesbian vamp Bathory since she never liked him that much. Meanwhile, there's a newly revivified mummy walking the streets who is the key to the countess being able to survive in the sun.
This is what happens when a monster kid grows up to mash some horror cliches together in a soft core nudie film. Parent is frequently nude along with the other hot women in the cast, but you have to sit through a campy story to get to it. Renfield's insect addiction becomes tiring after a while and he could seemingly be replaced with an alarm watch. On top of all of this the film is a sequel in a series of soft core horror films from director Donald F. Glut, which look a bit better. It's...functional as a film of it's kind, but of course it's not much of a story to watch.
UnConventional (2004)
I've never been to a horror convention since they're too far away and I don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on swag at my disposal. This documentary shows you what goes into a horror con, in this case the Chiller Theater Convention on their 13th anniversary. 42nd Street Pete narrates the shindig and there's lots of horror celebs there like Tom Savini, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, and Linda Blair. However, the bulk of the doc is hanging around with Gunnar Hansen from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, b-movie scream queen Tiffany Shepis, and b-movie casting director Bob Gonzo.
Hansen comes off as the most professional as he meets with fans who like his Leatherface over the remake's interpretation. Shepis really likes to drink and seems pretty ditzy while Bob Gonzo seems more lecherous to me than the hot women working at his booth think. Maybe it was just the editing here, but hanging with the rest of the guests would have been more interesting. Savini winks in and out of this film too quickly and Haig and Moseley are barely in the doc.
42nd Street Pete sounds a lot like Howard Stern after a while and some of the convention goers are kind of creepy. The guy known as "Chiller Charlie" gets wayyyyy too friendly with guests there who continue to humor him in an increasingly disturbing way as it becomes apparent that he has impulse and behavior control issues (i.e. grabbing women inappropriately). The reason for this convention, John Zacherle, is shown in frequent clips from his old horror hosted show and introducing the band The Dead Elvi, but there is no interview with him.
There are a lot of interesting people at the con, it's just too bad the camera wasn't on them more.
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Post by Joker on Feb 11, 2011 21:57:00 GMT -5
The Curse of the Crying Woman (1961)
A young woman and her husband arrive at her aunt's mansion out in the country which none of the locals will go near. It seems that there were some brutal murders nearby and the victims were drained of blood. As the young lady begins to seek out answers from her aunt and malformed servant it become apparent that she is a part of a cycle of evil passed down her family line and will help to resurrect the dessicated corpse of the "wailing witch" impaled on the estate - whether she likes it or not...
"La Llorona," or The Crying Woman, is a Mexican legend about a woman who drowned her children in a river and now is damned to haunt the riverbanks there weeping for her lost kids and/or luring people to a drowning death depending on which story you hear. The Crying Woman here is The Wailing Witch whose cries are heard at night by anyone in the mansion. That's about all of the connection there is here.
Mexican horror films had bad special effects due to low budgets and this one suffers because of it. The aunt occasionally turns into an eyeless woman with big appliances over her eyes with black cloth to seem like empty sockets, but when the light hits the black part it's very apparent it's cloth. There is no real explanation as to this transformation other than her desire to commit evil. A bad double exposure on the dessicated witch inplies that she is an undead thing or her spirit exists between worlds or something.
On the plus side there is a cool psychadelic sequence where the background is full of eyes as the curse overtakes this poor young woman. Also the climax where the witch must be resurrected at midnight winds up being a bit suspenseful (although the motivation to make either choice there seems like it's been influenced in a very Catholic conservative way because it's in Mexico). It's an okay film if you like Hammer-type movies.
Offerings (1989)
This is an Oklahoma-lensed regional horror film that is heavily influenced by John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). And when I say heavily influenced I mean totally ripped off.
As a boy John Radley was a mute but intelligent child who was bullied and fell down a well, scarring up his face. Then he killed and ate his mother and has spent the last decade in a mental institution in a catatonic state. Now he's escaped and his psychiatrist and the local sheriff are after him as he kills everyone in his path, leaving body parts on his now grown female friend's porch. As the giant psycho murders people in bloody ways (and manages to get the teens to eat some of the flesh in a strange scene) you get very irritated that even the music seems identical to Carpenter's original. The movie goes nowhere and has obviously been done better before.
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Post by Frameous on Feb 15, 2011 0:32:03 GMT -5
UnConventional sounds great. I, too, would love to visit some of the big horror cons that are held each year, but lack the scratch. Maybe one day...
The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
This is a nasty little fake documentary about a serial murder stalking the east coast, in and around Poughkeepsie, New York. The premise involves the discovery of over 800 videotapes that the killer compiled while in action. Various FBI and local law enforcement individuals provide profiles and background information throughout. They paint a picture of a multifaceted and elusive mastermind, who intentionally switches up his modus operandi and victims to befuddle his perusers. First he takes the life of a child, then abducts a teen. When that draws media attention, he switches to prostitutes to throw the FBI off the trail. Meanwhile, the abducted teen is being dehumanized by the killer, turning her into his slave. Eventually an ex cop is captured and believed to be the killer, but that's far from the end. There's much more to talk about, but I don't want to spoil the fun. The first person footage is equally chilling and tedious, and the acting leaves something to be desired. Still, this is an effective thriller gets under your skin like an infection. Despite this film's release issues, it producing/directing team, The Dowdle Brothers, have gone on to more mainstream work, like the recent summer release Devil (which was much more uneven and disappointing than this). I also want to mention the music and sound design, which give the flick much of its evil resonance. Bottom line, if you can get your hands on it, check it out.
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Post by Joker on Feb 15, 2011 22:48:30 GMT -5
Dead Snow
"We should have gone to the beach like I told you."
A group of medical students go on vacation in the snowbound mountains of Norway with no means of communication with the outside world. A weird old man shows up to warn the kids away as decades ago the nearby townsfolk chased away a bunch of cruel Nazis during WWII. Supposedly they all froze to death in the snow, but when they start to show up to kill and eat these people it becomes apparent that something else is at work here...
There's a subgenre in horror of zombie movies, and there's a sub-subgenre of Nazi zombie films. Some are pretty bad like the late Jean Rollin's Zombie Lake and others are very creepy like Shock Waves (1975). This movie is trying to be scary and serious at the beginning with these young folks in a terrifying seige on their cabin with these undead soldiers. A scene where one guy finds the old man in his tent in the middle of nowhere is a good shock. Then the movie gets outrageous and bizarre as the gore washes all over it. At the climax one guy thinks that these things are contagious after he gets bitten...
They never did explain why the Nazi undead are flesh-eaters or even why they're still around in the desolate mountains decades later. I was hoping for some mad science or occult reason behind it, but there's really no time for an explanation when these people have to just stay alive. It's a bit uneven, but still a very well made film with naturalistic performances from the actors.
Night Creatures (1962)
In 1776 Captain Nathaniel Clegg had a mulatto man's tongue cut out, his ears mutilated, and left on a desert island to die for assaulting his wife. Sixteen years later Clegg is long dead and buried in a small town on the English coast where the local vicar (Peter Cushing) helps run a smuggling operation of French liquor that helps keep the town prosperous by avoiding pesky duties from the monarchy. Then a platoon of Royal Navy soldiers arrives to investigate rumors of smuggling the town kicks into overdrive to conceal it from them - even as their mutilated mulatto servant has a moment of recognition when he sees the priest.
Where does the horror come in? It's only when the ghostly "marsh riders" terrify a man to death at the beginning and seem like a looming threat outside of town that there's anything scary happening. Other than that this is mostly a period crime film with the ultimate Peter Cushing performance here playing a layered character and a young and intense Oliver Reed as the young fiance of the local Hammer standby, the busty super-hot woman working at the local tavern (Devil Doll's Yvonne Romain). It's an excellent non-Dracula/Mummy/Frankenstein/Jekyll-Hyde entry from Hammer.
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Post by Joker on Feb 18, 2011 20:55:03 GMT -5
Threads (1984)
Different people in Sheffield, England go about their lives as an international military conflict escalates. A young pregnant woman, her lover, and a local emergency organizer all wind up seeing a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran enflame tensions with Russia until suddenly a mushroom cloud explodes in the city. Emergency services are ill prepared for the amount of refugees, a lack of resources and food, and the unburied dead littering the rubble strewn wreckage of the city.
People are burned by the explosion, poisoned by fallout, and are forced to take desperate measures to survive as time rolls on agonizingly after the attack. The emergency services people are buried underground with poor communication with the outside world. With the father of her child gone the young pregnant woman must walk through a hellscape of death and despair and faces a bleak future...
The ultimate horror is some sort of nuclear war started by leaders who openly speak about religious apocalypses (a disturbing trend from the last decade) when it would appear a man-made nuclear hell can easily be inficted seems the more likely scenario. Someone won this nuclear war, but that person is not in this film. This film presents a fictional story of survival with the facts of how a nuclear exchange would unfold in a docu-drama format. It's one of the bleakest films I've seen since The Road. It's still a terrifying and important film to see.
Human Beasts
Paul Naschy is Bruno, a "professional" hired by a Japanese crime boss to help steal a fortune in diamonds. He falls in love with the boss' sister and gets her pregnant when he suddenly decides to double-cross them all and gets badly wounded in a deadly standoff with the gang. At a remote villa he is nursed back to health by the two daughters of an elderly man who used to live in Africa with his late wife. For some reason they keep him sedated as he recovers and falls for one of the daughters. Then someone begins killing people there while his Japanese lover hunts him. What are they feeding the pigs on the property and why does he keep seeing the family's supposedly dead wife around?
Paul Naschy (a.k.a. Jacinto Molina) was a giant horror star in Spain, usually playing the doomed werewolf Waldemar Daninsky along with several other monsterous characters in gothic horror films from the 60's and 70's. This Spanish/Japanese co-production crime movie becomes a "giallo" (a kind of murder mystery with gory murders that were very popular in Italy at the time) that suddenly involves cannibalism in a bizarre turn. Along the way there appears to be a costume dinner party that becomes a strange criticism of upper class snobbery that adds little to the film. It's pretty slow and builds to an insane conclusion, but otherwise in an okay film.
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Post by Joker on Feb 26, 2011 23:49:46 GMT -5
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue a.k.a. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
The latter alternate title of this Spanish/Italian film shot in the U.K. makes this seem like a parody, but it's a serious film. Somewhere in the English countryside an antique dealer (Ray Lovelock) gets his bike wrecked by a young woman in a car and winds up accompanying her to her sister's home. Along the way she gets attacked by a homeless man who supposedly committed suicide earlier that week. When they finally get where they're going the strange man attacks again and these two young folks are suspects in a murder investigation run by a fascist cop.
Then the nightmare begins after these people get trapped in a crypt by zombies resurrected by a sonic pest-control device. These people have to try to survive against the creatures' onslaught as they multiply and take over the titular morgue.
This is one of the spookiest zombie films where the big empty British countryside becomes a haunted place in broad daylight and flesh-eating ghouls attack the living. There is a subplot about environmental issues and the mean cop played by Arthur Kennedy becomes the worst villain as he won't listen to the young folks story of walking corpses as things unravel. One of the best zombie films ever.
Slaughter of the Vampires (1962)
A vampire couple flee a vengeful mob of villagers who kill the female while the male escapes to a cellar beneath a castle. Unfortunately, a family has moved into the place and he sets his siights on the wife. This movie seems to be going into an unconventional direction where vampirism becomes a preferable alternative to a stifling bourgeois existence for this woman, then the movie just goes for the terribly usual idea of a doctor who believes that all vampires should be exterminated. The movie just becomes a bland gothic cliche-fest that has long sequences of nothing happening as evil simply must be defeated simply because vampires are inherently evil. *yawn*
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Post by Joker on Mar 2, 2011 19:39:32 GMT -5
Blood Hook (1986)
At a remote fishing resort the "Muskie Madness" fishing contest is going on while a bunch of people are going on vacation. Suddenly someone begins killing the visitors with a giant phallic lure covered with sharp fishhooks. Could the killer be the crazy veteran constantly polishing his M-16, the resentful old caretaker who hates the young kids on vacation in his deceased friend's house, or the sinister friendly Norse guy who runs the bait shop? Something is triggering someone to kill with this fishing M.O. and the very Nic Cage-looking hero (Mark Jacobs) has to find out what it is to find the killer...
Back in the 80's there was another slasher movie popping up faster than you could say, "Final girl." The reason why was because of the rigidly formulaic plots where creativity was shoved aside to make a quick buck off of slapshod horror product. In the Scream movies they talk about the "rules" of a slasher movie when the reality is that these were simply cliches that were terribly worn out to the point that people thought that this was some sort of tradition. There were in reality only the lurid and excellent Italian "giallo" films of the 60's and 70's and a couple of American and Canadian films that successfully channelled the frights, suspense, and tension of them such as Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978). From the slasher movie was born the pointlessly repulsive "torture porn" film (or just "torture film" in my own words.) They just make them more gory and take out any suspense or fright these days is all. For further info on the slasher film phenomemenon you can watch Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film on Netflix.
What all of that means is that this lazy subgenre was so silly that it was ripe for parody. A lot of slasher films would be self referential with characters in these films actually pointing out how the situations they were in were "just like in a horror movie." In the 80's there was only one parody that I knew of called Student Bodies (1981) that openly mocked these kinds of films. There were probably many more that I didn't know of during that decade before the 90's came with films like There's Nothing Out There (1992), the Scream films, and the Scary Movie franchise.
The other parody is this film, which I didn't like when I was younger, but now can see as making fun of this subgenre in an appropriately absurd way. It's not really all that funny, but the ridiculous killings and bizarre final showdown make this a better parody than most. It must have been by design by Jim Mallon and crew even with some gruesome makeup FX with bug-eyed corpses kept tied together with rope through their jaws under a dock like fish. It's neat to see a non-Hollywood regional film every once in a while though and Blood Hook is a curiosity in that way. They never had a special edition DVD of it, but you can watch it on Netflix now.
Deadtime Stories (1986)
An exasperated father tells his son increasingly inappropriate stories to help him go to sleep. In the first one two witches keep a young guy as a slave and need him to kidnap a young woman to help bring a thrid witch back to life. Then a young woman in a red hood loses her virginity while a werewolf guy menaces her grandma for her meds so he can be sedated when the moon rises. Finally, a crazy family called Baer escapes from an asylum only to discover a nutty telekinetic girl has taken up residence in their house with all of the corpses of her attempted lovers as the inept police try to close in on them.
You should not be telling a kid about this stuff, but this loser dad just makes these stories more lurid so we have something to watch. It's pretty much Troma-quality here, whcih means low-brow and an even lower budget. The makeup FX on the resurrected witch, the werewolf, and the corpses strewn about the Baer house are cool for what these people had to work with. The subplot about how the girl loses her virginity seems out of place in this immature film really. The strangest part of this whole film is that Melissa Leo plays "MaMa" Baer in the silly "Three Baers" story and I just watched this movie the night after she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in The Fighter (2010). Well, everyone's got some skeletons in their closet...
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Post by Joker on Mar 6, 2011 2:03:05 GMT -5
Santa Sangre (1989)
A young man named Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky) in a mental institution has been there for years as doctors try to reach him. In the past he was a part of a travelling circus while his mother was a pious devotee of a young armless girl whose blood fills the pool in the center of their temple to this Santa Sangre. When that gets bulldozed she becomes a part of the circus and kills the owner for seducing her and then cheating on her with the voluptuous tattooed woman. The young boy saw it all, including the mutilation of his mother by the dying owner where her arms were cut off. His relationship with a deaf-mute mime girl is ended abruptly.
Now he's free and joins up with his armless mother and be her hands in her stage act. His sexual frustration with women gets worse when his mother orders him to kill any woman who tries to take him from her. As the bodies fill a nearby empty lot the grown mime girl eventually finds him and he must choose between a life-affirming love with the young woman or the sick and bloody relationship he has with his mother.
Alexjandro Jodorowsky makes very artistic films and because of this they are loaded for bear with metaphors and are a visual feast to enjoy. The bloody giallo-type killings add goro to this dark character study with incredible imagery. A dying elephant represents the end of this boy's innocence and how his life has been irrevocably changed. The burial of the elephant becomes a horrible thing to see as the dusty poor of a slum smash through the giant casket to feed on it's meat like crabs. Whenever Fenix has the bright long nails of his mother on his hands the stanglehold on the young man becomes terrible. And on and on it goes in this powerful and vibrant film.
Fright Night
A young man named Charley (William Ragsdale) becomes obsessed with the guy living across from him (Chris Sarandon) because he thinks the handsome man is a vampire. Then one night the vampire attacks him in his house and things get desperate. His girlfriend (Amanda Bearse) doesn't believe him and neither does his intensely irritating obnoxious best friend (Stephen Geoffreys). The only person he can get any help from is a local horror host and former actor named Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) who gets hired by Charley's friends to convice him that his neighbor isn't a vampire. Things just escalate from there as Vincent becomes aware of the real threat to everyone and the vamp abducts Charley's girlfriend...
It takes a while to get to interesting parts and the film falls back on that old contradiction of making it seem more desirable to be a vampire even though they simply must be destroyed by the heroes. The makeup FX are great though and the FX-heavy confrontation betwen Vincent and the annoying best friend is devestating until you remember the guy's voice was like a knife in your ear.
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Post by Frameous on Mar 10, 2011 22:53:32 GMT -5
I love Firght Night, and have ever since I was a wee one. Great mix of comedy and horror. Santa Sangre impressed me, as both El Topo and Holy Mountain did. It's a shame Jodorowsky hasn't made more films. He is one of a kind.
Dreamescape (1984)
This sci-fi/fantasy/horror tale has a similar plot to the hit film Inception: What if it were possible to enter people's dreams and use that power for nefarious reasons. While Inception was filled with more interesting postulations on how that premise could be executed, it is of note that the basis of it was used in this film first. It opens with the widowed US President being haunted by dreams of his dead wife in a nuclear apocalypse. Convinced the Cold War stranglehold at the time will lead to annihilation, he's determined to disarm the US. But sinister CIA advisor Christopher Plummer refuses to let that happen. Meanwhile, Max Von Sydow and Kate Capshaw are professors who are working with psychic Dennis Quaid on the art of infiltrating trouble patients dreams in order to aid in sleep disorders. It's only a matter of time before Plummer arranges for the President to take part in this experiment so his own psychic assassin can take care of the problem. I've wanted to see this after I head of it's blatant similarities to A Nightmare on Elm Street years ago. I find it suspicious that while Wes Craven had unsuccessfully shopped his script around to all major studios, that this 20th Century Fox film contained a similar premise, and a scene where the villain sports razors on his fingers and kills someone in a dream. It seems Craven won in the end, as this is a slow, and mostly forgotten movie with little to offer. Co-writter Chuck Russel would go on to make Nightmare 3, the most memorable and trend-setting of the Freddy sequels.
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Post by Joker on Mar 20, 2011 0:12:18 GMT -5
The Horror Show (1989) a.k.a. House III
Detective Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen) tracked down deadly serial killer Max Jenke (Brion James) and sent him to prison. When Jenke swears revenge against the cop at his execution it seems the story is over. Lucas goes back to his wife and family in their suburban home despite the dire warning of a scientist who thinks Jenke isn't dead. Nightmares plague the detective and reality becomes more warped as Jenke seemingly has come back as an electrical spirit haunting them all.
This is supposed to be the third in the House horror franchise, but there is no connection to the first two films. It's a mediocre film anyway in spite of good makeup FX. When the co-writer of the movie is Alan Smithee (the pseudonym taken by filmmakers who don't want their name on a film due to embarrassment) you know something's wrong. The end of this film seems to be stapled together stuff that makes less and less sense as it unfolds.
Henriksen is not the most charismatic lead and comes off as a jerk most of the time. Max Jenke seems to have been an attempt to make a new slasher villain for a franchise that never was so James is the most interesting character. Freddy had nothing to fear.
Fright Night Part II
Charley goes to a psychiatrist for the events of the first film and seems to have accepted that they never happened the way they did and that vampires don't exist. He's in college dating a cute young woman (Traci Lind) while Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) continues to host Fright Night. When a bunch of strange people show up and Charley has a nightmare about being bitten by the beautiful woman leading them (Julie Carmen) he still doesn't think anywthing is wrong. Eventually Peter finds out that they are indeed a coven of vampires and the two vamp killers have to destroy them again.
I don't know what they were thinking with this film as it just becomes a joke near the end. A really bad joke. One guy is clearly a werewolf, but I guess they just had to make him a vampire. Come to think of it the film has a bad habit of not making bigger roles for the interesting characters like him and the fanboy mental patient in the asylum later in the film. Instead there's an androgynous vamp on roller skates, a squeamish bug-eating chauffeur, a crew of mansters going bowling, a dull femme fatale vamp, and the slowly vampirizing goofball Charley.
The whole movie is just too tongue-in-cheek. When a movie can't take itself seriously it really destroys any chance of investing any emotional attachment to any characters and you don't care what happens to them. If you want to make a comedy it better be really funny. So this movie doesn't work really.
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Post by mitchell33 on Mar 20, 2011 1:20:00 GMT -5
god "Blood Hook" though i think it's great that "Jim Mallon" i believe did an actual film before he met the guys to do this great show. i thought it was a horrible film. sadly. but it was better than "Deadtime Stories' which was even WORSE! so that's a plus that his film is better than the latter.
i LOVE both "Fright Nite" films actually. even if the 2nd one was from what i read on a "Roddy McDowall" site that it was filmed 2 years before it was released in (1989)!
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Post by Frameous on Mar 21, 2011 0:41:23 GMT -5
I think I liked Fright Night II a little more than you did, Joker. It's no classic, but I could think of many worse. I'm also partial to its director Tommy Lee Wallace, as he is a John Carpenter disciple. His TV adaptation of Stephen King's IT, while in no way perfect, is a seminal horror flick. Also The Horror Show is in my queue, I need closure on the House franchise.
Red State (2011)
I'm a Kevin Smith fan, and I paid the chunk of change to see this movie early and attend his Q&A. But unlike many, I don't feel that all he touches turns to gold. His latest film is a mixed bag. I really wanted it to blow me away and be destined for classic status. What I saw falls short of that. The plot involves three teen boys who venture to the outskirts of town with the promise of sex promoted via the internet. What they get is abduction by a local religious fanatic group to be sacrificed for deviant ways. After this set up, the film spirals in a number of directions, some well done, others not so much.
It has some pacing issues and a central protagonist is never established (the films most fatal flaw in my opinion). Michale Parks delivers a powerhouse performance as the Fred Phelps-ian minister, and anytime he was on screen I was captivated. The violence is realistic yet subdued, and the likes of John Goodman, Kevin Pollack, and Stephen Root give their all.
I was surprised at the level of humor in the ending. There was a lot more of it than Smith has led people to believe. I suppose it was to let up some of the tension. Still, he nailed the ending. It pretty much sums up the message of the film. Overall, I think Smith's writing (which has always been his strong suit), is his undoing. The characters are well crafted, but his disregard for character trajectory and three act structure sabotage the results.
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Post by Joker on Mar 30, 2011 20:19:59 GMT -5
Torture Garden (1968)
A group of people take a tour through a carnival horror show with it's strange guide, Dr. Diabolo (Burgess Meredith). The temptation of seeing the salacious delights in a back room is too much for them so they all go in to find the mysterious statue of Atropos, the goddess of destiny, who shows them a direction their lives will take depending on a bad decision in the future - which will cut their lives short just as she cuts the thread representing them short.
A slacker guy lets his uncle die and searches his house over for the source of his wealth and finds a coffin with a cat inside that seems to be the key. A young opportunistic actress backstabs her way to the top in Hollywood and investigates why the actor she idolizes is ageless. A woman becomes infatuated with a piano virtuoso, whom it seems is using a piano possessed by an ancient spirit of music, whom doesn't like this new female muscling in on her man. Finally, Jack Palance is what we would now call a fanboy of Edgar Allan Poe who contacts a Poe collector (Peter Cushing) who mysteriously has unpublished work by the classic American horror author - and has one secret part of his collection of infernal origin that this fan would do anything for...
The anthology film is a forgotten kind of horror movie that has been lost to time. The only anthologies that come out today are from shot-on-DVD auteurs. This is an Amicus anthology film with some classic horror stars. The stories are offbeat and written by Robert Bloch, so they may not be scary, but they are at least different. The story with the evil piano winds up being hilarious as there is one scene where the giant instrument can somehow hide in the shadow of a room, waiting to strike. The somewhat tongue-in-cheek ending kind of ruins things a bit, but otherwise it's alright.
Bad Dreams (1988)
A young woman named Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin) awakens from a coma thirteen years after surviving the fiery mass suicide of her Manson Family-type cult and their charismatic leader, Harris (Richard Lynch). Now she lives in a mental hospital with the other colorful patients in a new support group led by a young doctor (Bruce Abbott). Then the hallucinations start for her and the sometimes hideously burned Harris seems to be killing off the other members of the group. The killings get worse and the charming evil spirit seems to be the only sorce of salvation for the woman.
The free-love generation and it's ultimate end that became disillusionment after the Manson killings and the end of the Vietnam War becomes a grisly catalyst for this film. It seems like it's trying to be a new Nightmare on Elm Street-type film franchise, until a rational explanation near the end reveals the real villain responsible for the killings. It's all pretty mature with the extremely likeable Richard Lynch (who burned himself as part of some sort of protest against Vietnam, the light scarring you can see in every closeup). Abbott is another winsome character as a progressive therapist and Dean Cameron plays the manic Ralph, a man with a problem with self-mutilation, steals the movie in his scenes.
It's deceptive as it seems like another Freddy clone, but winds up being a great movie.
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Post by Frameous on Apr 9, 2011 2:19:13 GMT -5
I obviously didn't dig Bad Dreams as much as you did, but that's what makes criticisim so fun ;D Interesting note on Richard Lynch's personal mishap with LSD. I had no idea, and it explains his rather bizarre look. Perhaps that's why he chose to take part in that film. It's flower power cult is certainly a comment on the time in which his incident took place.
Insidious (2010)
After a normal suburban family moves into a new home, their son takes a fall from a ladder. A day or so later, he falls into a catatonic state that doctors are certain is not a coma. Unable to be treated or diagnosed, he returns home for his mother to care give as he lies in an unending sleep. All the while, strange happenings plague his mother, who is reaching her wit’s end. She pleads with her growingly absent husband that the house is the cause, and that they should move away at once. He makes this happen, but it becomes clear that the problems for both son and mother have followed. Enter the husband’s mother with pertinent information that sets into motion the second and third acts of the film.
At this point, there is no description void of massive spoilers. What follows is a cornucopia of jump scares, unsettling visuals, image trickery, and a playful sense of dream and horror archetypes. Director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell (of Saw fame) deliver an effective and uncharacteristic effort that once again shows they produce maximum results with minimal budget (something absurd like a paltry $1 million). The performances are solid, featuring Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye, and Barbara Hershey (who is on the comeback trail as of recent). The film is rife with allusions and references to other horror films, yet employs that into something more original. Its PG-13 rating also shows that horror can be as frightening as ever without graphic violence or Rob Zombie-esque characters spouting vulgarity at every instant.
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