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.

[Model Home Teaser from Nicholas Brill on Vimeo.]

She’s the one in the kitchen.

---

July6^th:

So it’s been a few months since I’ve done a DVD guide.  It got to the point where I had forgotten why I stopped doing them in the first place.  They’re not the time consuming, really.  Then I actually looked at the line-up for this month and instantly remembered.  Horror has cycled back into a rut over the last few months.  Few theatrical releases means that each week the shelves are packed with straight-to-video titles, and rarely the good kind.

EYEBORGS is not a Syfy original movie, though it’s got the ingredients to be one: human-killing robots and really only one notable, B-movie actor (Danny Trejo).  BITTEN is also not a Syfy original, but it’s no stranger to the channel.  I saw a good chunk of it on the network months ago and thought it was better than most Jason Mewes STV movies.  But it also wasn’t that good if I couldn’t be bothered to watch the second half.

A Blu-ray double bill of DR. GIGGLES / OTIS surely signals that we’ve broken through the barrier of Blu-ray being a medium relegated to higher-end releases.  The cost of mastering a Blu-ray just ain’t what it used to be, I ‘spose.

After that it’s just a few random titles: GOD OF VAMPIRES, GAMERA VS. BARUGON, RECYCLED PARTS (which is an awesome title for a horror movie) and THE FAMILIAR.

July 13^th:

The best new release of the week is HANSEL & GRETEL, which really isn’t saying much.  I actually reviewed this Korean retelling of the classic tale nearly two years ago, there’s a reason it took that long to come out in the US of A.  It’s just not very good.  The concept is awesome enough to make it worth a watch on Netflix, but that’s about it.

The only other new release of the week that I recognize is OUTBACK, a screener of which turned up at my doorstep about a week or so ago.  I don’t know why it showed it up seeing as I never asked for it and I don’t usually deal with its distributor, so that was kind of strange, but oh well.  I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but the first few minutes were both bizarre enough to keep me interested and yet subpar enough to make me realize I wasn’t in the mood for low-budget horror at the time.  I’ll be returning to it at some point, though.

As for the rest of the week, you’ve got KILLER CAR, SCREAM GIRLS, THE SCARF, FEEDING THE MASSES and a Blu-ray release of the pretty cool remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13.

July 20^th:

I hated 2001 MANIACS.  Absolutely hated it.  That gross-out, fratboy horror humor has its fans, but I am rarely one.  Unfortunately, 2001 MANIACS: FIELD OF SCREAMS looks even worse than the first one.  I’ll be checking it out, but I expect it to be even less of the same since it no longer involves Robert Englund.

One of the rare times I do find myself being a fan of splatter-heavy horror happens to be Jake West’s EVIL ALIENS (review), which is available on Blu-ray this week.  It’s certainly a gross movie, but it’s not malicious like 2001 MANIACS is, which I suppose is the reason I can get behind it.  Worth a (drunken) watch.

I’ve only ever seen the pilot episode of BBC’s werewolf/ghost/vampire sitcom BEING HUMAN, which I thought was promising, but not all that great.  I’ve heard good things, though, and I know that two of the main actors from the pilot were recast for the series, so maybe now I’ll catch up with it.

Joon-ho Bong’s thriller MOTHER comes out on DVD and Blu-ray this week, which is a must-buy for fans of Bong (MEMORIES OF MURDER, THE HOST), but I’d qualify that by saying it’s also not his best movie.  The pacing is a bit strange, but it’s got a good story and, as with all Bong movies, it is absolutely gorgeous.  (I haven’t seen this disc yet, but I did review the Korean Blu-ray a few months ago for Cinematical.)  Accompanying MOTHER this week is Bong’s previously unreleased BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE.  It’s the one Bong movie I haven’t seen – I don’t even know what it’s about – but I will definitely be picking it up.

Rounding out the best week of the month are two Roger Corman Blus, GALAXY OF TERROR and FORBIDDEN WORLD.  I’ve seen neither, but Shout Factory have been doing a great service to their Corman catalog, so I expect these discs to be of equal caliber.

July 27^th:

This is a strange week where I haven’t seen a single one of the horror movies hitting stores.  To that end, I’ve got no recommendations, so I’ll just list ‘em.

But, since I don’t want to go out on such an uninformed note, I will point out that if you are even remotely a fan of martial arts movies, you absolutely must check out IP MAN.  Movie is baaaad ass.

1. MOTHER
2. BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE
3. THE PROWLER
4. EVIL ALIENS

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.

Hey, guys.  Remember me?  I used to run a site called HorrorsNotDead.com, but then I got paid to write about movies elsewhere on the Internet and totally abandoned my baby to the wilds.  Yeah, I suck.

The only benefit of me rarely updating HND is that everything that’s on the main page currently happens to be about movies I really liked.  One of them I even love.  It’s a little Australian flick called THE LOVED ONES that, for whatever God forsaken reason, cannot seem to find distribution anywhere outside of its homeland.  It’s about to come out down under, though, so a trailer for the film has finally been released.  Trouble is this trailer shows way too much of the movie.

Wayyyyy toooooo much.  To the point where it makes me want to elbow whoever cut the trailer together in the face.  So, my plea to you is that you do not watch this trailer.  It’s currently being hosted on every horror blog under the sun, which means they either A) haven’t seen the film and thus don’t know how many great gags are revealed in the trailer or B) have no respect for their readers and don’t give a shit if they lessen someone’s viewing experience when they don’t have to.  I can only assume that Bloody-Disgusting falls under category B, seeing as they’re quoted in the trailer and yet still gleefully shared the spoiler-packed thing earlier today without so much as a “Personally, I really think this trailer gives away too much”.

But since I’m breaking my month long radio silence just so I can tell you to NOT watch something, I think it’s only right that I also add some other new content to HND.  So, as soon as I hit publish on this bad boy, I’ll be starting up two reviews that I’ve been sitting on for far too long: A SERBIAN FILM and THE LAST EXORCISM.  My laziness shall eventually pay off.

UPDATE: I actually did what I said I was going to!  A SERBIAN FILM Review!

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.

And don’t download anything it asks you to.  But you knew that, because if you were an idiot you wouldn’t be on a site as awesome (and as infrequently updated) as this.

Thanks.

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.