What am I going on about? Well, if instead of going to Blockbuster to rent a horror movie I instead was giving a couple hundred thousand dollars to make a movie, the result probably would have been very close to BLOOD FEAST 2: ALL U CAN EAT.

Directed by gore legend Herschell Gordon Lewis and written by the cast driver of BUG and WAITING (no, really, the driver), BF2 is a sequel thirty nine years in the making that was released thirty years after Gordon Lewis’ previous directorial effort. His prior films are unseen by me, and perhaps this is cause for a notch to be taken from my Horror Card, but if it is any consolation I now plan to check out more of his work, because BF2 is delirious fun.

With all the production qualities of an impressive high school project…in the year 1995, BF2 transcends its budget despite looking and sounding like it was shot on VHS. It helps that no attempt whatsoever is made to ground the film in reality or remove tongue from cheek. Bad acting and nonsensical characters can more easily be forgiven when the filmmakers don’t even know how to spell “logic,” and make no apologies for it.

Instead of getting bogged down in exposition and terrible dialogue, like so many of its ilk, BF2 briefly sketches the characters and quickly gets to the good stuff. Surprisingly, the “good stuff” consists of not only the nudity and gore, but the writing as well. Not that the writing excels in the classical sense, but it somehow manages to be clever and dumb at the same time, with the clever outweighing the dumb for most of the running time. A perfect example of the clever/dumb formula: as two detectives are considering breaking into a home, one of them says something like “I’m always up for a little B and E,” to which the other guy responds “bacon and eggs?” That’s funny.

No? Well then screw you.

Not to be outdone by the comedy, BF2 proudly presents much gratuitous nudity (meet Trixi, Candi, Laci, Brandi, AND Bambi), and over-the-top gore (see: hand and arm of conscious person go through meat grinder, multiple disembowelments, body parts served as appetizers at wedding reception, and a variety of other delights). Somehow all of this depravity comes across as innocent fun, probably due the fact it is more of a farce than a horror movie.

You may have noticed I have made no attempt to describe the plot. Trust me, it is of no consequence, and if you are truly concerned that the story just might not grab, you then don’t even consider watching this. If, on the other hand, it is perversion and insanity and a lack of morality you seek, then BLOOD FEAST 2 is for you. Thirteen-year-old Brian K. fucking loves it (and his parents are going to be pissed if they find out he watched it).

DOG SOLDIERS takes place in the wilderness of Scotland, the creepy moors-like environment that American Werewolf in London used in a similar fashion.  It tells the story of a group of Scottish soldiers on a training exercise; finding themselves dropped in the middle of nowhere to play a war game with the wankers from Special Forces.  Everything seems all apples and pears until big beasties show up and start divorcing members of the platoon from their organs.  They end up being rescued by a mysterious girl who steals them away to a cottage in the woods to hole up.  How long can they stay alive with the hounds of hell circling outside?

Let me summarize by saying that this is not a good film.  It is very, very low budget, but that is not what makes it bad; low budget films can really be special when the filmmakers understand how to compensate.  The best compensation for lack of budget is to write a great script; followed closely by putting that script into the hands of a director with serious chops.  Look at what Carpenter did with HALLOWEEN (although he actually wrote HALLOWEEN as well as directed it so we got the best of both worlds there).  But the problem with DOG SOLDIERS is that the script is full of atrocious, fundamental snafus and the direction is amateurism at its worst.

This film is completely ruined by its script.  It suffers from some other faults that are forgivable given the low budget nature of it.  But the writing really kills the potential.  It honestly has a decent concept, but that concept is totally wasted.  Let me try to narrow down my list of examples as to the ineptitude of the script.  Throughout the movie, there are moments where people are sitting around talking about absolutely nothing while there are supposedly big hairy wolfies outside that want to eat them.  The dialogue is meandering and unfocused and amounts to a complete loss of a sense of what is at stake.  Then suddenly, out of nowhere, people are yelling at each other and speaking the ends of violent confrontations that have no beginning or middle.  I kept rewinding it to see if I had missed something but there was absolutely no build up to any critical piece of information.

Not convinced yet?  Ok, how about the female character who saves them near the beginning?  Apart from the fact that she is the driver of the truck that gets them to the cottage, she serves absolutely no purpose in regard to the story.  She is utterly devoid of charm and uninteresting and contributes nothing to a plot that is already tripping all over itself.  When the big reveal about her comes about, you aren’t surprised as much as you are totally confused as to why she was ever in this in the first place.  Or how about the character named Spoon who is only called Spoon so his death can set up a Matrix joke…..screenwriting?!!!!

There is a complete lack of mood or atmosphere in DOG SOLDIERS.  I got the impression that they were going to have a cool man-vs.-monster motif with the wilderness backdrop used for the added nightmare of isolation (a la THE THING).  But since no one in the cabin seemed to give a crap that there were monsters outside and the wilderness is not used as a secondary character to enhance the terror, we are left with a bland, befuddling set piece with no reason to feel anything but boredom.  This is not helped by the fact that the monsters look terrrrrrrible.  They look like gangly dance company extras auditioning for the new Andrew Llyod Webber musical “DOGS”!

They don’t use any of their animalistic traits and instead rely on grappling and punching with their victims.  Isn’t the scary thing about werewolves supposed to be that they are primal killing machines with the reasoning power of a human?  Or even if you are of the opinion that they have no reasoning power in wolf form, shouldn’t that mean they are even more vicious?  These goofy dancers in body-suits with Mardi Gras heads were actually the antithesis of frightening.

The performance from the main character, played by Kevin McKidd of the HBO series Rome, is respectable throughout.  However certain elements of his character illustrate the most apparent script snafus in the film.  The opening scene shows him failing a test he needs to pass to join Special Forces division.  Why?  Because he refuses to shoot a dog.  The asshole Sgt. tries to make some facile “if you can’t shoot a dog, how can you shoot a man” argument but it could not be more forced; the guy is already in the regular military, so obviously he can shoot people when necessary so that line makes no fucking sense!  But the big issue is what follows, when the word “dog” is uttered around 3.8×10⁵⁷ times in a two minute interval.  They go beyond establishing a character trait and start beating us over the head with foreshadowing.  Guess what animal ends up coming to McKidd’s aide when he needs it most?  Grrrrrrrrr.

Another quibble I have involves some of the lamest gore effects I’ve ever seen.  No, they weren’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but the fact that we were actually supposed to take these scenes seriously elevated them to ultra lame status.  Again, it would be forgivable given the low budget nature, but I’ve seen great gore effects on shoestring budgets; it can be done!  There is actually a scene where a regular dog starts chomping on human remains which is so bad it’s comical and would have worked in that capacity, but it comes at one of the only tense moments in the whole film so they successfully ruin that one gleam of actual horror.  The editing actually seems sentient of the terrible gore effects as it employs a series of jump cuts that hold no merit other than to conceal them.

Don’t waste your time on this lest you be counting down the minutes until credits roll.  There are no interesting characters, no scary beasts, no atmosphere or tension, and instead a lot of terrible writing and bad gore effects.  Pepper all that with palpable boredom and you’ve got DOG SOLDIERS.  Bear in mind, with this only being review numero dos and with me so far running at 100% pan, I do actually love horror.  It’s just that as of late, I have seen some stinkers.  I’m hoping my next AYIF horror entry will be a winner, but that is the nature of this beast.

When it comes to horror movies, I may not be the authority, but I like to imagine I can lay the law down with the best of ‘em.  When it comes to horror graphic novels, I’m a preschooler wearing a toy badge.  As nerdy as I am, I’ve no memory of reading a comic book of any sort in full until less than a year ago.  My first was Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales’ fantastic series Identity Crisis.  11 months later saw my second, 30 Days of Night, penned by Steve Niles and drawn by ben Templesmith.  I tell you this in the interest of full disclosure, for my review of the latter is coming from a still malleable set of standards.

Inspired by a real stretch of northern land where the sun never breaks for 30 days out of the year, Steve Niles has crafted an intelligent story that finds vampires finally recognizing the prospect of uninterrupted nightfall and sieging the town of Barrow, Alaska.  It opens with Eben and Stella, lovers and police officers, finding a pit containing what remains of every cell phone in the town, which had gone missing in the days prior.  Through a pair of binoculars, Eben notices a mob marching on the city, leaving only violence in their wake.  The couple round up as many people as they can find and hide within the city.   Due to the cold, the vamps cannot track them by their smell, providing enough time for potential heroics to be set in motion.  Meanwhile, an elder vampire, Vicente, reaches Barrow with great disdain, shaking up the entire undead situation.

Niles’ story hits some great notes with the revelation of Vicente and his purpose, as well with its brutal ending.  My only complaint – and this is where my untested tastes for the medium come into play – is with Ben Templesmith’s artwork.  The work itself is phenomenal and gives the piece an inescaple aura of grunge that fits the vampires perfectly.  However, for the purpose of storytelling, I found it a little too distancing.  It makes it hard to focus on any one element and never fully get into the plight of Eben and Stella.  Capturing the gritty horror with the pristine character relationships is a hard balance to strike and I’ve simply preferred if Templesmith took a more precise take on the material as opposed to the graphic opus he composed.

It is an odd complaint, I’ll admit.  Loving the art, but not its function.  But like I said, I’m new to this art form.  I’ve yet to experience enough of it to say what is or isn’t the optimal way to do something.  Did I really just say art should/does have an optimal way to it?  Am I crazy?

Be that as it may, I still know a good story when I see one and 30 Days of Night is a damn good story.  And I firmly believe under the scripting reigns of Stuart Beattie and the direction of David Slade, it’ll be one helluva film.

Though shadowed by its more successful and more popular followup, Three.. Extremes, Three.. (to my knowledge) started the trend of the Asian omnibus horror film. At its barebones, I love the idea of a film being directed by multiple directors, even if its just going to be a collection of shorts. However, as with any such anthology, some segments drastically outweigh the others, which cripples the film as a whole. Here, unfortunately, they all weigh each other down…

The first of the three; a rough way to kick it off…

The elegantly worded title cards relate the supernatural bond that forms between performers and their puppets and that were a puppet not to be destroyed after its master’s death, a great curse would befall those who adopted said puppets. Which is exactly what happens in this rural town after the death of one of the puppeters.

A very generic story, which is wholly uninteresting, save for the oddly hypnotic cinematography. The characters seem to have absolutely zero motivation, as they keep going back for the puppets. It has only been a day since I watched Three.. and while I can remember everything that happened in the Wheel, I can’t exactly remember why it all happened. Briefly scary, rarely thrilling, barely exciting.

It feels the most episodic of the trilogy – it would fit right in with some kind of Asian “Tales From the Crypt” – but by film standards I expected more from you, Thailand.

The only short of the three whose director I’m familiar with. A Tale of Two Sisters has a dreadfully suspensful and often times scary as hell first half, but dives head first into a sea of confussion and incoherence as it tries to correlate all of its oddities together, leaving it practically unwatchable (but man, the cinematography is the best any horror film has seen since The Shining). A Bittersweet Life, however, was actually on my top 10 of 2005, so the man is capable of making a very strong film which is universally so from begining to end. Memories, unfortunately, is far too like Two Sisters than a Bittersweet Life.

The opening sequence is a perfect blend of surreal horror; Our helpless main man awakes on a giant purple couch to a barren living room, met only with the cold gaze of a staring doll, a spinning balloon which floats at chest height, and a girl rocking back and forth in the fetal position. It is a superb sequence, tightly edited, tightly shot with a great degree of subversive imagination that would fit right in with something like Eraserhead.

If only the rest of the film kept that same level of quality. My problem isn’t that the rest of the film isn’t as surreal or as freaky, I’ve just grown tired of memory loss stories. They rarely hold any interest in me, here is no different. I don’t like the broken narrative they all use. I don’t deny its hard to make a whole story out of intentionally fragmented pieces, but I’ve just got more respect for a movie that doesn’t use a memory loss schtick for its mysteries.

The man on the couch can’t remember why his wife left him. The wife wanders the streets trying to dial a phone number to reach her husband. The disassociated memories get progressively re-assembled, but to little satisfaction or originality. Kim tries to make up for its tideous narrative with genuine bits of shock, but its actually too groteseque that it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the story. The image of a woman fingering an open wound in her head, spilling out blood and tiny chunks of brain just doesn’t help piece the puzzle back together. Its just gross. And it isn’t the only scene that does so, which shouldn’t be the case in a film that is only 50 minutes long to begin with.

If Ji-woon Kim cut after the title credit, it’d be a flawless film. But he didn’t and it isn’t. At least I have a new appreciation for his benchmark that is A Bittersweet Life, having seen his stumbling roots. It is the best of the bunch, but that isn’t saying much.

It opens very ominously as a man and his son arrive at their new (and depressing) apartment complex. The bold and hair raising score in the begining may make you think you’re in for more a more other-worldly affair, but you’d only be decieved. By opening the film through the view of the child and how ghostly desolate the apartment building is, one should resonably expect a ghost story, but there is no such intensity here.

The story revolves around the father, who is held prisoner by one of the other residents after discovering the dead body of said resident’s wife. The man is convinced that his wife is simply paralyzed from the waste down and that he can find some way to cure her, so he treats her like she is alive…bathing her, grooming her, kissing her…

It has the potential to be a very emotional, very moving story, but it just doesn’t soar. If its any reflection of how impactful the segment is, the most enjoyment I got out of it was simply from seeing Eric Tsang (who plays the father) on screen again. He always looks so content. Like if Homer Simpson was real. And Asian.

It has a dead body in it, but that’s not nearly enough to call this end to the trilogy a horror film. Its too timid in that regard.

I’ll make this brief because I wasn’t very impressed with it. I’m a huge fan of the Asian ghost film. These days they’re the only thing being produced that does actually scare me. It’s a mixture of the over use of negative space, harsh contrasts and that simple -transcedental across every entry- ghost that is just a blue skinned girl, snow white eye balls, and black hair. That ghost can be thrown anywhere and it’s pretty damn effective, especially if it isn’t actually moving, which is the first (and what I found to be the second most effective freak out in the film) tension tester in the movie.

But even with the barebones, but proven to work, ghost, the movie doesn’t really go anywhere. The plot revolves around an investigative reporter who has just finished a successful piece on sex offenders and is being stalked so she changes her phone number and moves out to a house by herself. The new number is, let’s just say special, and she starts recieving calls consisting only of what I can describe as nails on a chalkboard performed by someone who doesn’t actually know how to make the sound. The woman starts to “unravel” the mystery around the whole thing as people around her die and/or become slightly possesed. I use quotation marks because the plot really doesn’t ‘unravel’, it kind of just falls apart. The narrative is broken into flashbacks as to what really happened to cause the whole haunting, but often times they’re completely out of place and are actually more annoying than helpful simply because they come out of nowhere. And by the time the plot does fully reveal itself to the viewer (though it certainly isn’t impossible to discern it prior to), which is of course right up to the end, there isn’t too much concern for any of the characters. I found myself not caring at all what was going to happen and simply was waiting out the rest of the running time.

Though the film isn’t entirely without benefit. The sound mix on the Tartan USA disc is perfectly balanced, which I found rather enjoyable. And the little girl in it is actually a pretty damn good actress for her age. She shows more range in 60 seconds than any of the actors do throughout the movie. And she has one damn cool fit of screaming in a museum that is enjoyably laughable.