Piranha 3D is a horror movie bar mitzvah. It turns boys into men, cleaving their lives into two distinct periods: Before Piranha 3D, a time we shall refer to as The Darkness, and after Piranha 3D, also known as The Awakening. Now that I have thankfully awoken in its glorious elysian fields of excessive gore and outrageous nudity, I never want to return to horror films that require fewer than 800,000 gallons of fake blood spilling forth from 500 bikini-clad extras. Anything less is an insult and, frankly, a malicious waste of my time.

Read my full review over at Cinematical.

It’s been a good while since I’ve seen SERBIAN FILM and I still can’t scrap its images and ideas out of my mind’s eye.  I’m honestly not sure I ever will be able to.  Saying that will only galvanize more people toward wanting to see it for themselves, and I understand that instinct, but I personally have absolutely no desire to ever watch it again.  But before I get to precisely why I’m fine with only having seen the film a single time, let’s talk about what Srdjan Spasojevic’s directorial debut is about.

Milos used to be a porn star.  He’s done everything he can to break from that decadent world and be a simple father.  But virtuous money isn’t easy to come by, particularly when he is still widely considered to have the best dick in Serbia.  His ability to get hard and stay hard is legendary, which is precisely why an underground porn director named Vukmir wants him for this next masterpiece.  Vukmir refuses to tell Milos what kind of a porn movie he’s making out of fear that it’ll render his performance inauthentic, a contractual caveat that gives the star cause for concern.  But the money is just too good.  And thus begins Milos’ hellish odyssey.

That description alone should give you enough information to know whether or not you want to see A SERBIAN FILM.  It’s all too easy to combine that synopsis with the knowledge that its content is churning stomachs and breaking faces every time it lights up the silver screen and imagine that you know how easily it can veer toward very risque, very taboo territory.  I’m here to tell you that you’re right.  I don’t even need to say what kind of images and acts are in this movie, your fear at what could be in it should get the job done.  That said, you’re also wrong.  It’s even more difficult to watch than you think.

Spasojevic and Radivojevic’s script doesn’t just veer into taboo territory, it blasts toward depravity with a Saturn V rocket strapped to its back.  However, it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t enjoy doing so.  The filmmakers behind these shocks are clearly terrified of what they’re putting on the screen.  But that’s supposed to be the point.  They’re supposed to be crafting a legitimately dramatic story that can co-exist with visuals and ideas that don’t just push the boundary of what is pornography and what is art, they chop its head off and fuck its corpse.

The trouble is I’m not convinced they pulled it off.  A remarkable amount of thought went into designing each of these characters, and particularly how best to escalate the creepiness, but there are fundamental narrative problems at play in A SERBIAN FILM that prevent it from becoming more than a film that will be talked about solely because of how ghastly it is.  The last two-thirds of the film, which finds Milos waking up from a drug-induced daze and retracing the events of the last few days, is very slowly paced and completely miscalculates the formula for escalating the creepiness that was so effective in the first third of the film.  It slogged down to the point where I was wishing it would all just end.  But it doesn’t.  It keeps going until it runs out of ways to make you regret starting the whole endeavor.

I’m unsure as to what kind of commentary the filmmakers are even trying to make to justify their content.  It would seem that all of their rage is directed toward Serbia’s self-loathing porn industry, essentially taking an “if it’s an inch, it’s a mile” attitude toward it– that if its citizens are going to keep denigrating themselves by making sleazy, but relatively normal porn, they might as well be making the extreme, avant garde stuff that Vukmir is selling to his rich, private clients.  They’re clearly trying to cut their way to some core statement, but they should be using a scalpel instead of the jack hammer that is the “make it end!” last half of the movie.

Any specific voice just gets lost in the bloody, messy struggle.  That’s a shame, too, because Spasojevic is an otherwise powerful filmmaker.  A SERBIAN FILM looks dynamite.  This isn’t some disgusting, no-budget snuff film made by some backyard wrestlers in their garage.  All of its sights, not just the gory ones, are striking and it has a remarkably effective score that dominates your ears in the same way the visuals take command of your eyes.  And the acting is aces all around.

Instinctively I feel it’s not a worthless film – it’s interesting and unquestionably provocative – but I’ve been struggling in the weeks since seeing it to discern what exactly its value is.  But for all I know that could be the intended effect.  Perhaps you’re not supposed to “get” A SERBIAN FILM, you’re supposed to just be taken over by it.  That’s a little too basic for me, but if that’s the case, then my hat is off and respectfully tipped.  I certainly felt like I had been fucked by the time it was over.

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!

Directed by Eli Craig, 2010
Written by Eli Craig, Morgan Jurgenson

TUCKER & DALE VS EVIL is hilarious.  It was easily the funniest film I saw at SXSW; BARRY MUNDAY, a film where Patrick Wilson plays an everyday office schlub who loses his testicles, coming in second place.  And it’s not hard to pin down why.  Sure, Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson’s script is a clever twist on the College Kids + Cabin in the Woods + Hillbillies = Death formula.  Sure, it’s got a fantastic amount of fake blood ready to splatter all over it’s cast.  But all of that is secondary to the pairing of Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine as Tucker and Dale, respectively.

Everyone should know how great Tudyk is on screen thanks to SERENITY and DEATH AT A FUNERAL, but unless you watched REAPER (and I told you you should have been, so you’ve got no excuse) on the CW, you’re probably not very familiar with Labine.  That’s okay because after T&DVE hits your eyeballs, you’ll be up to speed with why he’s a great comedic talent just waiting in the wings to really have a career take-off.  He and Tudyk have enough chemistry together that their on screen pairing should be traded on the stock market alongside Monsanto and Dow Chemical, which is why I really can’t explain how their first film together has yet been picked up for distribution.  When it does get bought up, though, it could well launch him into the mainstream not unlike THE HANGOVER launched Zach Galifinakis.  But before I turn this into the first official meeting of the unofficial Labine and Tudyk fan club, let’s get back to the story at hand.

Tucker and Dale head into the woods of the deep south to fix up Tucker’s newly purchased vacation home.  A bunch of young college co-eds are also in said woods and, through a series of not implausible mix-ups, the co-eds think the hillbilly pair have kidnapped one of their own, the incredibly cute Katrina Bowden.  The macho frat boy of the pack convinces them not to go to the police, however, and instead the group tries to get their hottest member back.  Every time they accidentally fail fatally and every time it convinces the other that Tucker and Dale are homicidal maniacs.

What makes the script so great is that it’s not filled with tongue-in-cheek winks and nods to other horror movies.  It’s got a lot of clever wit to it and has quite the understanding of how to structure a horror movie.  The kills are glorious, incredibly memorable and perfectly paced apart from each other.  The comedy, on the other hand, isn’t so perfectly paced.  The first half of the film comes quick and fierce, while the second half slows down on the breathless laughs.  But hey, if my biggest complaint about the movie is going to be “It’s first hour is more hilarious than it’s also hilarious second hour”, I’m absolutely okay with that.

A slightly smaller complaint would be that the macho frat boy, played by Jesse Moss, is a little too smarmy for his own good.  Sure, he’s the Alpha Jaeger-Bomber of the bunch and you’re supposed to hate him, but the over-the-top nature of the character kind of smothers a few of the other cast members.  As for those cast members, they’re all amusing caricatures of the horror movie co-ed, but the real stand out is Bowden.  She’s given the most screen time of the lot, which certainly helps, but this is the first role of hers that proves she’s got a lot more talent than just looking good while delivering one liners as Liz Lemon’s assistant on “30 ROCK”.

Even with those two wrinkles, though, TUCKER & DALE VS EVIL is still a winner.  Not only does it have laughs and gore gags to spare, but it’s got the most memorable horror comedy duo second only to SHAUN OF THE DEAD; and believe me, that’s high praise.

[In case you haven't noticed, things are slack at HND these days, so since I realize not everyone follows the other sites I write for, I am now committing myself to cross linking all my genre coverage at Cinematical, Horror Squad and Sci-Fi Squad here.  Operation: Climb Back Up Google Rankings begins with SXSW 2010 films.]

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Written and Directed by Gareth Edwards, 2010

Now indie filmmaker Gareth Edwards has arrived on the scene with Monsters, yet another fresh, unique take on the creature feature. However, unlike all of the aforementioned films, Edwards’ goal was not to make a giant monster movie, it was to make a small scale, intimate, on-the-road movie that happens to have giant monsters in it from time to time. It takes place in an alternate reality where a NASA space probe has crashed to Earth, releasing in the process the eggs of an alien race that soon spread across Central America. As a result, half of the United States is turned into a massive quarantine zone bordered by an enormous wall and military presence.

Six years after the world has become accustomed to the contaminated zone, Andrew (Scoot McNairy), a photographer in Mexico, is asked to escort his bosses’ daughter, Samantha (Whitney Able), back to America. When an arrangement with a ferry back to America falls through, the unlikely pair are forced to hire a guarded escort to bring them through the contaminated zone over land. And so begins a most unique spin on what giant monster movies need to be.

Read the rest of my MONSTERS review at Sci-Fi Squad.

You can also read a few more of my thoughts over at  Hollywood.com.

Written and Directed by Rob Stefaniuk, 2010

That said, SXSW is batting a thousand this year. Their midnight slate kicked off with the highly amusing and blood-splatter loving Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, kept things going with the note-perfect Australian wunderkind The Loved Ones, and then capped things off rather nicely with Suck, a fun and charming little import from Canada about a struggling band that coincidentally begins to find an audience once one of their band members starts fearing the sunlight and starts living off the blood of groupies and roadies. Now before you let out a justifiable groan at the idea of yet another vampire movie, you should know two things about Rob Stefaniuk’s film.

Read the rest of my SUCK review at Horror Squad.