When I’m feeling lazy, I like hang out on the couch, drink beer, and watch movies. At those times I have no desire to do anything to advance the quality of my life in any way, and my creative juices are certainly not flowing. The difference between me and director Gilles Paquet-Brenner is that when I’m feeling worthless and indolent I don’t decide to make a movie. At least that is the impression I’ve come away from WALLED IN with, because not one frame of the film suggests anybody involved in its making gave a damn.
Mischa Barton “stars” as a recent college graduate who is the youngest in a family of demolition experts. Her first solo assignment for the family company is to plan the demolition of an old apartment complex in the middle of nowhere, due to be destroyed because the “government” has “ordered it.” The building was designed by an eccentric architect, who made it a habit of burying people alive in the foundations of his creations in order to increase structural rigidity. Something about an ancient Egyptian myth, I think.
WALLED IN also features Cameron Bright (Nicole Kidman’s tiny love interest in BIRTH, who, by the way, isn’t getting any less creepy), and Debra Kara Unger (who isn’t getting any less plastically-looking). Although both of them outshine Barton by quite a bit, this is like saying Brett Ratner is a better director than Donald Petrie.
There’s no reason you should know this, but the only dedicated THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) post ever on HorrorsNotDead.com has been one of the most trafficked posts on this site. Apparently people enjoy reading about a mad scientist that kidnaps three people, cuts the muscle tissue connecting their kneecaps so as to disable leg extension, and then sews the poor souls together in an ass-to-mouth chain in order to create the world’s first Siamese Twins connected by a single digestive tract. And why shouldn’t it have gotten as many hits as it did? The plot description of HUMAN CENTIPEDE is, unquestionably, certifiably, smear-it-on-padded-walls, bat-shit insane. No one may want to see that visual come to life, but they certainly love doing a double-take when reading about it for the first time*.
And that’s appropriate, since reading the plot description is the best thing about writer/director Tom Six’ attempt at making a shocking horror film. Because without having the advantage of knowing what this movie, hypothetically, has in store, most horror fans would lose interest within the first 10 minutes. This gateway to the film is dominated by two annoying, spoiled-brat American girls who get lost deep in the woods of Germany. The acting in this introduction is grating at best, deal-breaking at worst, and unfortunately it takes another third of the film to pass before things begin to get even remotely interesting.
For a movie about turning a trio of people into an ass-to-mouth-to-ass-to-mouth affront to evolution that can’t walk, it’s pretty damned tame at doing what little it can with that glass-ceiling premise. It’s a pointless movie that has a weak opening, a weak middle, and an even weaker ending that will have you yearning, along with the film’s saving grace mad doctor, halfway through the experiment to kill the ailing abomination and start all over again.
Look, anyone who reads this site with anything resembling regularity should know that I am always willing to throw down with a movie about a pissed-off, larger-than-life animal. But the trailer for BEAR, which will be on the sales floor of this year’s American Film Market, is taking things to motivational level that even a Syfy veteran like myself is not ready for.
Written by Matthew Sturges, Mark Buckingham, Bill Willingham, Peter Milligan, Chris Roberson, Matt Wagner
Pencils by Luca Rossi, Kevin Nowlan, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Mike Allred, Amy Reeder Hadley
One of my favorite horror comics is DC/Vertigo’s anthology title Flinch, which was published for a too-brief sixteen issue run before cancellation in 2001. Flipping through Vertigo’s brand-new House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1, I got a little excited that I might be looking at something that recaptured what I loved about Flinch–incredibly twisted stories, written and drawn by some pretty big names in comics. My expectations were off the mark. House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1 is a much lighter comic book than I’m used to from Vertigo, and it serves as an entertaining “sampler pack” for Vertigo’s monthly titles.
The stories all center around a cursed mask, featured on the fantastically creepy painted cover by Esao Andrews, that passes through the hands of characters from Vertigo books, including, in order, the cast of House of Mystery, Merv Pumpkinhead, John Constantine, Gwen from the upcoming title I, Zombie, and Madame Xanadu. I knew Merv and Constantine, but I’ve never read the new House of Mystery title or Madame Xanadu, and the book didn’t do much to familiarize me with those characters. I never felt lost, though–just a tad left out.
I am not a consistent fan of the SAW series. I love that it is a franchise, I love that it has filled the Halloween event film void that went vacant for far too long, but as far as quality goes, part 3 was the last of the entries that I enjoyed. Part 4 had me likening the intertwining plots and bullshit twists to a Klein bottle, a hypothetical mathematical construct that works on paper, but cannot exist in the real world. And Part 5 found me writing the least professional review I’ve ever put my name on. And yet I am now forgiving of those two films, because SAW 6 isn’t only good, it’s good enough to make the mistakes learned on those two worth it.
It’s not just a matter of being pleasantly surprised by low expectations, either. Gone are the ludicrous plot devices, the endless retconing that kept re-writing the Jigsaw mythos, the need to build towards some hackneyed twist. What remains is a tightly wound story that keeps the Jigsaw tradition alive without the need to jump through holes in space and time just to keep Tobin Bell in the picture. Sure, the gore is still there and Jigsaw still does show up in flashbacks, but the script Dunstan and Melton have written is the most restrained, linear, goal-driven backbone the series has ever had. And though director Kevin Greutert, who has edited every single one of the prior SAW entries, has kept the staple spinning camera and boiler room lighting, his film also has more mature aspirations towards showing the ‘big picture’ of each trap, building tension by anticipation; as opposed to the last few films that were overflowing with surprises to the point of absurdity.
Basically, if you had written the series off, as I had, you’re going to be shocked at how solid of a film SAW 6 is. The script may be a little too topical for some, as this time around the story follows the journey of a man, William (Peter Outerbridge), who devised a formula for an insurance company to project possible earnings depending on an applicant’s probability to live long enough to pay them a tidy profit, rejecting coverage to those who don’t fit that bill. Jigsaw, who has spent 5 films explaining his twisted philosophy that life should never be taken for granted, has a bit of a problem with this, so he has arranged for William and his complacent staff to make the same kind of life-or-death decisions for each other that they make for complete strangers.
The revenge thriller is a tough nut to crack. The key to success is diving brain first into a unique angle on a time-tested formula. If you’re Pierre Morel with TAKEN you throw Liam Neeson on a plane to Paris and have him throat chop every scumbag that gets in the way between his ex-CIA skill set and his kidnapped daughter. If you’re first time Australian writer/director Steven Kastrissios with THE HORSEMAN, you send an average father with nothing to lose on the most intense, brutal, nerve-wracking, painful journey towards catharsis I’ve ever seen. Yes, I broke out the E-word.
Kastrissios doesn”t have money for an A-list Hollywood veteran, nor the backing for city-wide chaos, car stunts, or complex gun fights on yachts. So he wrote a script that starts off with Christian, a father who receives a letter and a video tape shortly after the death of his estranged daughter. The tape is of a gang-bang porn the strung-out daughter filmed while high on heroin the day she died. The cops have already told Christian that they found DNA from four different men inside her, but only three men are seen in the tape. It’s the last blow the already broken father can take, so he sets out to find out who made the tape and who the unseen fourth man is.
What follows is a white knuckle thriller that goes into deep, dark recesses that prey on the Mr. Hyde inside anyone who has truly loved another human being. I may have fears of the unknown, fears of tall, lanky grey men from beyond the stars staring at me while I sleep, but what happens in THE HORSEMAN is my absolute worst nightmare. I’m not yet a father, but if what happened to Christian’s daughter were to happen to my wife, I would track down and every single motherfucker who had even the slightest involvement and stick a knife in their throat. Just thinking about that scenario makes my blood boil, but to see that hypothetical captured so well on the screen, and to see how wrong needs for revenge can quickly go, shakes me to my core more than any horror movie I’ve seen this year.
Mockumentaries as anything other than comedy are damn near impossible to get right. A self-serious mockumentary, as with a horror movie without scares, is a recipe for disaster. Alas, AMERICAN ZOMBIE avoids failure on an epic level (something another recent zombiementary, THE ZOMBIE DIARIES cannot claim), but it is too worried about appearing realistic and legitimate to actually entertain. One of most appealing aspects of documentaries is experiencing that which would be unbelievable if it wasn’t true. If a “documentary” is inherently fictional and it doesn’t appeal on a visceral level, the question is begged: What is the point?
I think the “point” is that it’s easier to make a mockumentary than a traditional narrative film. Or at least it’s easier to make it professional-looking. And that is certainly one of AMERICAN ZOMBIE’S strong suits – it looks and sounds like a real documentary. The acting is solid, the cinematography is very documentary-like, and the zombie-infected world it creates is relatively believable. As a genuine documentary it may have been informative and enlightening. As a mockumentary it’s completely and utterly boring.
When I first saw the trailer for DAYBREAKERS, the Spierig brother’s follow-up to their freshman film UNDEAD, I thought two things about their take on a world overrun by vampires in dire need of some new human blood. First, that looks a hell of a lot better than UNDEAD ended up being. Second, there is no way that a world of only vampires could have a viable economy; if blood is their only food source, that eliminates trillions upon trillions of dollars in everything from the agricultural to shipping to utility industries with no conceivable means of replacement.
These are the things I think about when I watch science fiction — and trust me, though the horror crowd will want to hold onto it because the film has a lethal, gory seam to its bloodsucker proceedings, DAYBREAKERS is at its core a sci-fi film that happens to be about vampires. It also happens to be a pretty damned good film. Yes, it’s leagues better than their resourceful but lacking, low-budget zombie opus UNDEAD, but more importantly, the Spierig brothers’ script for DAYBREAKERS is legitimately concerned with the unsustainable state of a nocturnal, plasma-centric economy and a whole host of other problems that come with a world over-run with vampires, including but not limited to inter-species vampirism and the huge number of forest fires caused by transformed animals too stupid to realize that if they run out into the forest during daylight they’re going to burst into flames.
For someone like me, someone who cares about the little touches like that, DAYBREAKERS is an ideal blend of thought and action. And though ideal for me, that may be a problem for others considering DAYBREAKERS is perhaps lighter on the horror and action foundations than one might hope for. It’s also not flawless on the thought side, either, but it makes very noble strides into territory that no vampire film has gone before with an undead heart in the right spot every step of the way. Ethan Hawke is suitably morose in the role of Edward, a human-sympathizing corporate hematologist who refuses to drink 100% human blood, who only wants to convince his overlords that unless a blood substitute is found (and it isn’t likely), plasma-deprivation is going to turn all of the civil vampires on Earth into ravenous, uncontrollable winged creatures of blood lust.
I like that the original [REC]’s real-time unraveling of an apartment building under quarantine for a mysterious virus that turns the infected into fluid spewing, flesh clawing maniacs is logistically conducive to a sequel. I really like that returning filmmakers Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza can pick up from the second they left off and tell another (almost real-time) story still shot entirely in the first-person perspective without being confined to a single camera’s viewpoint thanks to our new story proxies by way of a doctor and his four SWAT-team escorts. And I absolutely love how [REC] 2 not only upgrades some aspects of the apartment, of the virus, and of the victims, but it completely overhauls the presentation of the proceedings. Yet I still have one nag.
[REC] 2 is not scary. Not one bit, actually. Even after 4 or 5 viewings (and the American remake, Quarantine), [REC] still turns my circulatory system into a NASCAR event, but none of that pulse dominating terror and anticipation is matched in the sequel. But what Balaguero and Plaza don’t deliver in the fear department, they deliver in the idea department. [REC] 2 may not be scary, but it damn sure has more concept and convention re-toolings than you can shake a rail-thin, pale-white, string-haired woman wielding a claw hammer at.
Trick ‘r Treat is the holy grail of Halloween themed horror films. Not because of the notoriously long path writer-director Michael Dougherty’s film has had to take to finally get released (a refresher: TrT was finished and first shown back in 2007 and, despite an overwhelming reaction to its first public exhibition, proceeded to be locked away in a vault at Warner Brothers for unspecified reasons), though that did turn it into a rare find to be coveted. No, Dougherty’s film is such a treasure because it is Halloween. It just had the misfortune of being born a decade too late, of being born into a time when studios only care about remakes or sequels and certainly not about anthology films. Dougherty had, as far as a studio is concerned, the audacity to finely craft, gasp, an original, American horror film.
Wrong-decade misfortune that may be, however, it’s great to be able to say that Trick ‘r Treat will still be watched on Halloween for decades to come. Those who love it, like I, will still be watching it with great devotion. Those who merely liked it will not be able to help themselves from putting it on as background to their Halloween parties. And those who hated it, well, those who hated it don’t exist. They can’t exist. To hate Trick ‘r Treat would be to hate the entire spirit of Halloween, a spirit Dougherty apparently has complete domain over.
Set a film in Tasmania in 1822 with prisoners on the run as characters and, as far as my frame of reference for the story is concerned, you may as well be making a movie on a different planet. And yet with nearly 200 years and half a globe of separation between myself and this true story of cannibalism among escaped convicts, Van Diemen’s Land still clawed its way under my skin. There’s one particularly haunting moment that I found nearly unbearable to watch; what’s amazing about that, however, is that Van Diemen’s Land is not a gory horror show, and the particular moment in question arrives without a single drop of blood.
Despite the integral plot element of cannibalism, there’s no abundance of body parts or organs floating about in Van Diemen’s Land. In fact, the film is remarkably light on the red, and yet there are nerve-crushing moments in which all semblance of humanity goes out the window. That loss of moral compass in the face of survival is the cornerstone of this fact-based story about a prison break that went horribly wrong: Eight prisoners in a Tasmanian penal colony overthrow their sole guard only to learn that the coast isn’t as clear as they thought, that their only true course of action is to either wait to be recaptured (and almost certainly executed) or flee aimlessly into the wilderness.
» Al Baker in Review: MARTYRS
This movie has a couple of scenes you should see if you like horror movies. I can’t imagine a horror buff hating this film. I mean,...
