Here’s the pitch for Callaham’s story: “What if instead of burying the heart in the floorboards, it was inside someone’s chest!”

Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that, but I’m guessing that’s what most people who write off this surprisingly solid thriller are going to say.  What actually happens is after Terry (Josh Lucas) receives a life-saving heart transplant he soon discovers that his new ticker booms like a subwoofer in a nightclub whenever he approaches certain strangers.  When he gets near them his head throbs in sync with the pounding of his heart and a nearly uncontrollable anger begins to take him over…

Now before you think this is another silly film about a person who gets an organ transplant from a serial killer and suddenly adapts their murderous personality, that’s not exactly the case.  However, there is a very specific reason Terry can barely control his urge to kill certain people and the way it all ties together is quite cool.  Intermixed with the mystery of what happened to his donor is a moderately touching story about Terry’s endearing relationship with his daughter, a young lass who is stricken with the irreversible genetic disorder that causes all the connective tissue in one’s body to turn to bone over time, and her doctor, Elizabeth (Lena Heady).  And as an informative tangent to that part of the story is Detective Van Doran’s (Brian Cox) suspicions about what Terry might be up to.

That’s not too bad of a cast, if you ask me.  I’m such a fan of Brian Cox that I’d watch a movie about Brian Cox watching paint dry for two hours, so it’s a delight to see him playing a gold chain-wearing boozer of a detective.  Lena Heady is always a welcome face, too, though I did find her latest genre effort, THE BROKEN (whose poster looks an awful lot like the one for TELL-TALE), to be quite boring.  But one of the main reasons to see TELL-TALE is actually for Josh Lucas, an actor I’ve always felt has the charm and the chops to be doing more than the occasional romantic comedy or big budget disaster movie.  He has a lot of emotions to work with here and he comes out the other end no worse for the wear.  And even though I have always liked him as an actor, this is the first film I’d recommend seeing specifically because of him.

It doesn’t hurt, either, that the rest of the film is consistently engaging.  It’s well shot, well scripted, and well paced, which are three checked off  boxes that I think most people probably aren’t going to be expecting from a film that went straight-to-video in the United States.  The technical merit of the production isn’t much of a surprise, however, when you learn that TELL-TALE was co-produced by Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scott Free Productions.  Director Michael Cuesta may not be as well known a name as his producers, but judging from this film alone I’d be willing to keep an attentive eye on whatever projects he attaches to in the future.

The only thing holding me back from declaring TELL-TALE one of the best straight-to-video discoveries in a while is because, though it’s well made, it’s not necessarily all that ambitious.  There are no edge-of-your-seat moments nor jaw dropping twists and turns.  You’ll come away pleased by the performances and how well-plotted the script is, but it’s a little light on the energy necessary to be wow’ed by it all.  Still, it may not be the best STV arrival in a while, but it’s certainly better than most.  And as far as modernizations of Poe’s classic story go, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a more enjoyable bending of the tale the heart is telling than this.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is also a strong revival of the long-dead “mad scientist” sub-genre of horror (something the upcoming SPLICE is looking to keep alive).  We get a regular stream of vampires and slashers on a monthly basis, but we’ve gone without a good mad scientist for too long now.  I didn’t even know I missed the dusty old trope until I saw Dieter Laser as Dr .Heiter, getting sexual satisfaction from administering shots or outlining the specifics of his experiment to his captive victims with blackly comic arrogance.

The set-up — a car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, two American girls wander in the rain before finding help at a creepy German’s house — is intentionally hokey, playing on audience expectations.  We’ve seen this story before right?  Of course, the crazy German guy will try to kill them.  Wrong.  He wants them very much alive; he just doesn’t want them to stay human.  He needs a new pet — a human centipede.

I was afraid that the concept would be the whole movie, with no thoughts toward suspense or characters, and an over-reliance on gross-outs and gore.  First of all, the film is conceptually troubling, but not particularly gorier than most studio horror films.  The audience’s tolerance for watching human suffering is challenged, but not your stomach (unless you have a really weak stomach, but, then, you probably wouldn’t be looking up HUMAN CENTIPEDE reviews on a site called Horror’s Not Dead if you did).  I was also surprised at how suspenseful the film actually is.  You keep waiting on the edge of your seat for a grand escape or a hero to come in and rescue the sufferers from their surgical fate as things get progressively worse.  You start to get the feeling that there probably won’t be a happy ending.

The biggest, most pleasant surprise of all was the characterization.  While the two Americans, Ashely Williams and Ashlynn Yennie, are vapid bombshells (again, this may be intentional, playing on what’s expected from a stock horror “final girl”), Laser is amazing as Dr. Heiter.  He’s a weird skeletal reptile of a man, preening and pathological.  He hates people, but loves animals (to the degree that he sewed three dogs together into his “sweet three-dog”).  Take note of the way he acts to the girls when they’re simply human, and the tenderness he shows them once they exist, not as individuals, but as one beast.

At the head of the centipede is Akihiro Kitamura, a resolutely defiant hero in a no-win situation.  I don’t know if it was his Japanese-only dialogue that sold me, but I thought he did a stand-out job as well.  Kitamura, by nature of the experiment, gets the most interaction with Laser, and I think their master/slave relationship is fascinating.  It was more than I could’ve hoped for from a film that seems to be talked about like it’s all-gimmick, no substance.

I don’t think the subtext I spit-balled about earlier was Six’s explicit intent.  The idea sprang from a joking form of punishment that he’d come up with, then snowballed into the feature film.  For such a thin idea, he gets a lot out of it, especially since he never quite goes all the way with the inherent yuck factor.  But, there’s something interesting about the loss of identity that everyone suffers at the hands of Heiter, far scarier than touching lip-to-butt in a Satanic conga line.  The greatest horror that THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE has to offer is the fear of being trapped in your own body as a non-human, without a means of escape.  That, and Dieter Laser.

Fast forward twelve months. The main thing anyone will want to know about A Nightmare on Elm Street is whether it is, at the very least, a worthy remake of the original Wes Craven film about a slain pedophile who resurrects in the dream world to kill teenagers in their sleep. The short answer is a resounding yes. Samuel Bayer’s film is the best remake in the Platinum Dunes stable; Jackie Earle Haley is an excellent successor to the original’s Robert Englund; and Freddy Krueger isn’t just scary again, he’s the most disturbing he’s ever been. The long answer is, of course, a little more complicated and requires plenty of qualifiers.

Read the rest of my review at Hollywood.com!

The French Canadian film had its world premiere last week at the Sundance Film Festival and starting today it will be available via the Sundance Selects program across a number of cable provider’s OnDemand platforms. And while saying 7 Days got under the skin of a hardened horror movie fan sounds like the highest of compliments, I hesitate to consider that grounds for recommendation. Yes, it is difficult to watch. Yes, it is disturbing. Yes, it is made with the utmost craft. Yet I feel it prudent to point out that, while those are qualities we all can agree define a good horror movie, this is absolutely a film not for everyone.

On the surface, it’s the story of a doctor who uses a cabin in the woods to methodically exact revenge on the man the police have accused of raping and murdering his eight-year old daughter. But beyond the torture is a harrowing journey into what happens to otherwise healthy relationships when they’re sundered by the unimaginable. This isn’t a tale of revenge in the Death Sentence tradition. This is an unflinching magnifying glass on what it means to lose everything. It spends as much time lingering on the physical torture as it does the mental; a combination that often times becomes almost unbearable to watch.

Read the rest of my review at HorrorSquad.

The trailers for THE BOOK OF ELI did nothing for me.  It looked like an over-stylized yet still monotone vision of the future banking on Denzel Washington’s inherently badass attitude and a number of quickly cut together action scenes.  Plus, it’s been 8 years since the Hughes Brothers made a movie, so buzzing the production as the latest film from the Hughes Brothers is meaningless to me.  It is with great relief, then, that I’m happy to report, to my own surprise, I liked THE BOOK OF ELI.  Truth is, I almost even loved it.

Don’t let the marketing fool you.  The Hughes Brothers have delivered a unique meditation on life after the end of times that does its best to be the polar opposite of everything the trailer looked like.  Denzel Washington plays the titular character (Eli, not the book), a man who has dedicated his life to walking west on a mission, a mission I will be touching upon below.  I’m not going to be spoiling anything huge (or non-obvious), but if you know next to nothing about THE BOOK OF ELI and want to keep it that way, I leave you here with a simple verdict: Yes, it’s worth a trip to the theater.

The world has gone to shit.  Gary Whitta’s script doesn’t spell out the particulars of what brought about Armageddon, but the severe lack of population density and decimated landscape looks like every nation in the world with the means to do so pressed the button.  Minuscule pockets of people managed to survive the apocalypse, however, and the story follows our hero, Eli, and his often fatal interactions with other wasteland wanderers on his slow, west-bound trek across total desolation.  He encounters a man named Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who runs a small town that has access to trickles of precious H2O.  Carnegie, it is established, is looking for an unnamed book that he calls “a weapon”…

The movie doesn’t tell you right away, but you’d have to be not only blind but completely ignorant not to figure out that the mysterious leather-bound book that Eli spends every night reading and every day protecting like its the water purification chip for Vault 13 or the Garden of Eden Creation Kit is, in fact, the Bible.  But before you assume that Warner Brothers has put out a movie with a message that says only God can save all of mankind, let me dispel that assumption.  THE BOOK OF ELI is not advocating any religion.  It’s not saying the world needs Christianity to function.  Its only commentary is on faith; on how simply believing in something – anything – can motivate the mind beyond the body’s ravaged limitations.  One of the (many) things I like about the Hughes Brothers’ film and Whitta’s script is that it’s still not that simple.

To talk about why it’s not that simple would indeed be revealing things a review shouldn’t, but regardless of which side of the ideological fence the film ultimately teeters on to (and there’s little question where it falls), it’s still an interesting premise that the Hughes Brothers leverage to give the film extra dimensions worth further examination.  But let’s not forget that this site is called Horror’s Not Dead, so I’ll step away from the ideas the film rolls around with and talk about why it should appeal to anyone reading a site called Horror’s Not Dead.

For starters, death rarely looks this striking on the big screen.  I’m not talking about just the people, though they are often dispatched in the most glorious ways by a convincingly hardcore Denzel Washington wielding a long, lethal machete.  The whole package is a magnificent portrait of what happens when everything kicks the bucket.  People, animals, buildings, dreams…all of civilization.  The directing pair do a fantastic job of convincing us everything we know now has been laid waste.  An accomplishment made possible by hiring not just great actors – Washington and Oldman are great, but the supporting cast of Ray Stevenson, Michael Gambon, Tom Waits, and even Mila Kunis are all up to the bar set by the film’s leads – and not just with an outstanding sense of visual style, but by delivering a sound design so strong that even non-audiophiles should pick up on its vivid purpose.

The main thing holding THE BOOK OF ELI back from being an outright excellent film is a waffling final act that’s capped off with a poorly executed ending.  The actual resolution of the story isn’t a problem, but how the ending treats certain characters is just plain poor.  And that’s unfortunate, because everything leading up to it is really something special.  The action choreography is top notch throughout and is even, at times, a thing of dark, blood-spilling beauty.  Acting is everything you expect from the big names and even more from the littler ones.  The cinematography will swallow you up in damn near every shot.  The vigilant sound design heightens every layer of the experience.  And all of this is in service of interesting ideas that will,  flaws and all, render THE BOOK OF ELI a topic worth talking about anytime post-apocalyptic movies are brought up.

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.

Considering Dunstan/Melton’s script would have been written right before the recent health care reform debate reared its hydra-head highest, it actually doesn’t come off as preachy as one might think reading that synopsis.  Save for a sentence or two, there’s no grand accusations that the ‘system’ needs radical changing and that Jigsaw should be Obama’s Torture Reform Czar; rather that the system is merely run by people and some of those people willfully cripple access to health care for profit, passing death sentences to other human beings in the process.  This setup finally allows the series to get back to focusing on Jigsaw’s original motivation of forcing people to come face-to-face with the moral dilemma they’ve been too glutinous to confront in the past.  That the series has moved on from helpless heroin junkies to greedy office works while still maintaining the same ideology is quite impressive.

For gorehounds the moral quandries of SAW 6 are not nearly as impressive as the gruesome setups, which are some of the best in the series thus far.  One still needs to suspend disbelief that any individual (or individuals) could meticulously engineer such intricate traps that never, ever fail to go off with perfect timing, but the kills this time around are all appropriate for the mood of the rest of the movie.  Self-mutilation has always been a requisite of the series, but this is the first time that sacrifice plays more of an important part than simply cutting yourself up to get a surgically implanted key or bleeding yourself out into a jug like some kind of twisted game of Double Dare.

Even Costas Mandylor, who has been a big part of the series for a while now, isn’t quite as flat as he used to be.  The contrast between himself and Jigsaw has never been so dynamic, which gives the series a new layer I always felt it was lacking in the past.  But the show this time around doesn’t belong to Mandylor or even Bell, but Peter Outerbridge as the insurance man dying to change.  He is a man on a terrible mission, perfectly striking the balance between greed in the beginning and raw desperation by the end.  All the other victims are solid, even if most are only ever required to look like they don’t want to lose a limb, but Outerbridge is easily given the best material to work with.  And he’s shaped the best “protagonist” the series has had since Angus Macfadyen in part 3.

Speaking of the previous entries, despite how good of a film SAW 6 is, the others are certainly a required watch before going into it.  While the film doesn’t crash between timelines, it does constantly reference things and characters that have been peppered throughout the franchise, so one needs to be at least passingly familiar with them to avoid total sensory overload.  Unfortunately that means enduring the complete mess that is 5, but at least SAW 6 is worth it.  If Dunstan and Melton are allowed to keep the script as restrained as they’ve now proven they can, I think SAW 6 is going to mark a very welcome turning point for the series.  At the very least, it no longer has me dreading the idea of going back to this well 2 or 3 more times.

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.

Read the rest of my VAN DIEMEN’S LAND review at HorrorSquad.

Money is the motive for Simon’s manipulation.  The Ashby parents are long dead, along with their youngest child Tony, who threw himself off a cliff as a boy when he couldn’t cope his the loss of his parents.  Simon and Eleanor are the only heirs to the Ashby fortune, under the care of their Aunt Harriet (Sheila Burrell), and if Simon can prove that Eleanor is not of sound mind, he becomes sole executor of their estate.  To that end, Simon hires a morally questionable nurse for Eleanor and carries out a simple plan to convince his sister that she might be hallucinating visions of the departed Tony.

Simon’s plan goes completely haywire when Tony actually shows up, alive and well (played with an almost comical stiffness by Alexander Davion).  Suddenly, it’s Eleanor who seems to be the sane one, while Simon quickly unravels, unable to covince himself that this man is the child they once knew.

Up to that point, Reed’s Simon is a surprisingly amusing spoiled brat, an abusive lush tempered by Reed’s oddly childlike glimmer of mischief, but as the story unfolds, and the stakes raise, Reed unhinges with a bug-eyed posturing that borders on camp.  It’s a lively role, one that helps make Paranoiac so memorable.  Personally, I’m a fan of watching actors wholly commit to a performance that walks the razor’s edge between realism and arch overacting (a couple of my favorites who’ve built careers doing this are William Shatner and Jeffrey Combs).  I like seeing how far the acting envelope can be pushed before it rips completely, and I’m sure actors like Oliver Reed take pleasure in testing how big they can go before the performance becomes phony.  Reed’s good at it, and it’s clear he’s having fun chewing the scenery as Simon Ashby.

It almost threatens to completely overshadow the acting by Janette Scott.  Alexander Davion is so wooden as Antony Ashby that it’s often up to Scott to do the emotional heavy-lifiting in their scenes together.  Eleanor Ashby is fragile and hungry for love (certainly not getting any familial support from Simon), but Scott doesn’t go for the kind of lunatic gusto that Reed is able to conjure up, despite the fact that she’s supposed to be the crazy one.  Her motivation is sympathetic but troubling–her blind adoration of the man who claims to be Antony is unhealthy and questionable.  Scott gets a few good scenes that reveal how deep her longing for Antony goes, and they’re realistic in large part to Scott’s grounded performance.

Paranoiac snakes along, offering several twists and turns on the way to its satisfyingly macabre ending (including an effectively creepy masked killer).  It’s more turgid than a Hitchcock thriller, less stylish, and certainly missing that director’s mastery of pacing, but screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and director Freddie Francis (shooting in black and white) do an admirable job of aping the type of psychological thriller that Hitch was routinely turning out.  This being my first exposure to Hammer’s non-Monster chillers, it’s better than I had hoped for, and I’m a little surprised that it’s been overlooked by Hammer fans in favor of predicatble Frankenstein and Dracula sequels.  Paranoiac is worth discovering.