When I read the description for The Maze, I was all in. A group of teenagers stuck in an elaborate corn maze, being hunted by a psycho? Sign me the fuck up.
And then it all went to hell.
Below stock characters who's setups consists of a few sentences, and never give any cause for the viewer to be engaged in them.
They arrive late to the counties biggest corn maze and decide to go in anyway, once inside they decide to play a game of tag.
Of course there's a psycho hiding in the maze but he never really feels threatening. Even when he's doing his evil deeds there isn't a reason to not expect one of the males in the group to just kick his ass. He's never presented as anything more than just a dude doing vile things.
The chases are laughable. Adult men get tripped which somehow causes them to break their ankles or legs or whatever. There's a lot of crawling while "acting" scared. In fact, back to back kills are setup through tripping. It's like Vince Russo booked it.
You never get much tension even when the killer is hunting everyone. It's fine for them to not know where they are in the maze, but it'd be nice to give the viewer an idea. The whole maze angle, which is a pretty fresh and keen idea, is pretty much wasted.
As underwhelming and uninspired as the maze section of the movie is, there's more.
I was surprised when the film moved to a new location with about 35 minutes left. Surprised and underwhelmed.
Once out of the maze it becomes clear the movie has very little budget. There are also technical flaws, such as when the sheriff tells his deputy that the county is gonna come in and take over the investigation, while wearing a patch on his jacket that reads "County Sheriff". Just inexcusable.
Of course if you can accept that the county sheriff is working in a police station where it's just him and one other deputy then maybe that point wont bother you too much.
The acting in the 2nd half of the movie once new characters get introduced is dinner theater level. It goes from a horror movie to a low level stage adaptation of a Lifetime movie.
So yeah, paint by numbers at the start. Low rent and silly at the end, with no particular performance that rises above average at best, No titty or interesting kill scenes, The Maze is just a big waste of corn.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
2010 Horror Fest: A Serbian Film: 78 Out Of 100 Stars
Warning, most of this review will be filled with spoilers. Skip ahead to the last 2 or 3 paragraphs if you want a simple summation.
Well, when your lead actor is supposed to be the worlds biggest porn star and he looks like a Yugoslavian Roddy Piper with cancer, you're in trouble. But I'm willing to cut them some slack and see how it plays out.
So this dude, this retired stud, grand champion of fucking, now has a wife and a little boy and he's just chilling at home when an old friend contacts him about doing a movie for a big pay day.
The man making the movie meets our hero, Milos, who has starred in such masterpieces as Top Crotch. The man is loaded and vague about what he wants but Milos signs the contract and agrees to be in the film, even though he knows nothing about it.
Meanwhile, Milos' son is starting to get boners and daddy tells him to use his hand to follow the funny feeling.
Also meanwhile, Milos' brother, a cop, or as the subtitles put it, his "copper bro", is jealous of Milos' beautiful wife and child. After he sees his sister in law eating a peach he goes into the bathroom and jerks off. He later watches a tape of Milos' sons birthday while a hooker sucks him off. The tape cuts into one of Milos' old pornos and his brother and the hooker lay there and marvel at his craftsmanship.
This movie wants us to take a lot for granted instead of putting much effort into giving us a reason to think Milos is any kind of superior fuck.
On Milos' first day of shooting he is let out of the car on an abandoned street where 2 men with handheld cameras film him. He has an ear piece that tells him what to do. He is to go into a school for orphaned girls. When he gets inside he sees a nurse and a young girl. The young girl is whisked away by her screaming mother while the nurse gives him a blow job, while on the wall a video plays of said young girl eating a Popsicle. Milos cums hard while watching the video.
Day two of filming sees Milos walk into a dark room where one of the cameramen/soldiers, is slapping the mother from the previous and telling her she is a whore. She crawls to Milos and starts sucking his dick. Next thing ya know, the little girl is sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. Milos objects, but one of the cameramen/soldiers puts him in a choke while the woman starts biting his dick. The dude tells him to punch her in the face, which he does. She jacks him off onto her face, we see her face get splattered with a copious amount of Serbian seed. The little girls is clapping and smiling the whole time.
Next, the mysterious producer, known as Vukmir Vukmir, explains that the little girl is his and the woman is his wife and it's all cool, he would never do anything to hurt them. Milos is still uneasy.
Milos' brother informs him that Vukmir is a former child psychologist who moved to China and fell off the map. He has no reservations.
After having a dream about the movie that involves his son cheering him on, Milos decides to quit.
When he meets Vukmir to quit, he is treated to some sort of babble about victims and being Serbias backbone and that children need to prove how to exist on their own. He then shows him a movie about a true victim. Which brings us to THE SCENE.
A hot blonde chick is giving birth on a table, a bald man walks in and takes off his jacket and delivers the baby. We see the delivery in full detail. He then holds the baby and rapes it, while the mother watches and smiles. This may be the same mother from the first two scenes, I can't really tell. Anyway, it's sick yeah, but it's so silly that it really doesn't have much of an effect. I mean, I'm sitting here thinking about how hot the chick looked with her legs spread. Maybe I'm just desensitized. Anyway, Milos is grossed out and storms out of the room while Vukmir screams about newborn porn being the next big thing. I can't tell what this movie is trying to say.
As he's driving home, Milos stops at a red light and is approached by a hooker. He grabs her tits while she rubs his cock and he starts having flashbacks to the stuff he's seen, done, and thought. He awakes alone in his bed 3 days later. The bed is covered in blood.
He sees the car that would drive him to the set everyday parked in front of his house so he gets in and heads to Vukmirs. On the way he has flashbacks that help piece together the missing 3 days. Apparently he let her drive his car while she gave him a handy and he angrily mauled her tits. They are nice tits.
Upon arriving at Vukmirs now empty estate, he has more flashbacks. I guess the hooker was the doctor from day one of shooting, I couldn't tell. In the flashback, Milos is led into a room with a childrens bed, he is handcuffed. Vukmir explains that he was given some mega Aphrodisasic in his whiskey. Viagra for cattle was how he put it.
The mother from earlier in the film is brought in and handcuffed and spread out on the bed. Milos eyes her like a fucking wild bear in a boner induced stupor. His ear piece is put in, his pants are pulled off and his handcuffs removed. He pounces on the woman and fucks the bejeezus out of her, while in his ear piece Vukmir tells him of all the horrible things this woman has done, and let been done to her daughter. As the verbal attack gets worse and Milos is encouraged to beat the woman while he fucks her, he obliges. Suddenly a machete is placed in his hand. He cuts the bitches head clean off while he fucks her. The camera soldiers have to pull him from her corpse as he continues to fuck her. I gotta tell ya man, this was an intense and good scene. I was part turned on, part intrigued and well.....it wasn't a bad fucking horror scene at all.
Back from the flashback, Milos vomits. He continues through the house and finds a bunch of tapes featuring weird sex acts, including the ones he shot. He gathers them up and it's back in the car as he goes to the woods to watch them. The videos help him piece together more of the days he's missing. Seems one of the camera soldiers ass raped him while has passed out.
Apparently the girl who set Milos up with Vukmir, is pissed that Vukmir resorted to drugging Milos, she says she's taking Milos home. All this is being filmed by an unseen camera operator. The next tape he watches shows a chick, might be the aforementioned chick, might not be, chained with her wrists over head, naked, teeth knocked out, being throat fucked till she asphyxiates and dies.
Next we have what I think is a flashback, he might be watching a tape, dunno. Anyway, the little girls grandmother is thanking him for killing her mother because she was a whore. The little girls father was a war hero but is now dead and in his place Milos has come. The grandmother says the father was supposed to take his daughters virginity but now that gift belongs to Milos. The grandmother asks him to fuck the little girl. Milos is regaining his wits at this point and despite being urged on by Vukmir, he springs up and grabs a knife and takes his own cock hostage, threatening to slice it off. Vukmir tells his men to stand down as Milos jumps out of a window. Vukmir orders his men to chase him as the tape ends.
Milos continues to have flashbacks, remembering where he went and that he called his brother to come pick him up. In present time he remembers the house where the last video took place at, and drives by. He sees the little girl outside working, he drives on. Still in his flashback he is sitting alone in an ally when he sees a girl who is identified as underage but really looks perfectly old enough. He begins to jerk off while looking at her and two guys start beating him up for being a perv. He is saved by Vukmirs henchmen who drive up and kill the dudes beating him up.
In real time, Milos returns to the place he remembers Vukmir took him in his flashback. He was put in a room and shot up again by the nurse. He stabs her and tries to escape but is caught by one of the guards and led naked into a room. The movie at this point is nicely mixing flashbacks with real time, so as he walks real time into a room strewn with dead guards, he's also flashing back to being led into that room.
Ok, now this is sort of silly. I guess Milos was hopped up on cattle viagra again because in the middle of the room is a pretty bed, with pretty bedding set up very romantically. In the bed are two people, an obvious child, and a woman. There heads are covered with sheets. Milos is let free and he goes right to fucking them while Vukmir watches and his henchmen film.
Milos fucks the woman first and cums, then he goes to the little one, who he of course struggles to penetrate, lol. The bodies move slightly but it's clear they've been drugged. As Milos fucks the little one, a masked man joins him and begins fucking the woman side by side. This is not a half bad fucking movie.
Oh geez man. There's a shot of Milos from behind fucking the little one and blood is running down it's leg and fucking pooling up underneath him. That might of been the grossest part of the movie, lol.
The ending I will not spoil except to say that it goes deeper than a pure shock movie should, and has more than one twist.
This is a good movie. I think I'm keener than to fall for simple shock value, and truthfully it's not like I was aghast at much of what I saw. This is a fucking smart psychological thrill that works because of the subject matter yes, it's very foreign to mainstream and even underground films, it's a taboo fucking subject. But the direction, the editing, the way it's shot, are all excellent and do a great service to the story. As awkward as the lead looked at the start of the film, once you get past the idea that he's a porn star, he does a great job, a fantastic job really.
I also applaud the film makers for this. If you're going to go with an idea, go with it. Don't pussyfoot around the subject, go head first into it, and they certainly did. Because they took that tact, the film comes off much the better as a whole. Sure there's a ton of gross fucking shit, but it's built around a story that makes it seem natural in the context.
Fairly or unfairly I came into this film with a certain expectation that it would be funny crap designed to gross me out. It isn't that at all. And once the movie kicks into high gear I found myself throwing away all my preconceived notions and just going with it and enjoying it for the movie it was, a tense, twisted, thriller.
This will not be every ones cup of tea, but it isn't a bad movie by any stretch, in fact it might be one of the better thrillers I've seen in recent years.
Well, when your lead actor is supposed to be the worlds biggest porn star and he looks like a Yugoslavian Roddy Piper with cancer, you're in trouble. But I'm willing to cut them some slack and see how it plays out.
So this dude, this retired stud, grand champion of fucking, now has a wife and a little boy and he's just chilling at home when an old friend contacts him about doing a movie for a big pay day.
The man making the movie meets our hero, Milos, who has starred in such masterpieces as Top Crotch. The man is loaded and vague about what he wants but Milos signs the contract and agrees to be in the film, even though he knows nothing about it.
Meanwhile, Milos' son is starting to get boners and daddy tells him to use his hand to follow the funny feeling.
Also meanwhile, Milos' brother, a cop, or as the subtitles put it, his "copper bro", is jealous of Milos' beautiful wife and child. After he sees his sister in law eating a peach he goes into the bathroom and jerks off. He later watches a tape of Milos' sons birthday while a hooker sucks him off. The tape cuts into one of Milos' old pornos and his brother and the hooker lay there and marvel at his craftsmanship.
This movie wants us to take a lot for granted instead of putting much effort into giving us a reason to think Milos is any kind of superior fuck.
On Milos' first day of shooting he is let out of the car on an abandoned street where 2 men with handheld cameras film him. He has an ear piece that tells him what to do. He is to go into a school for orphaned girls. When he gets inside he sees a nurse and a young girl. The young girl is whisked away by her screaming mother while the nurse gives him a blow job, while on the wall a video plays of said young girl eating a Popsicle. Milos cums hard while watching the video.
Day two of filming sees Milos walk into a dark room where one of the cameramen/soldiers, is slapping the mother from the previous and telling her she is a whore. She crawls to Milos and starts sucking his dick. Next thing ya know, the little girl is sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. Milos objects, but one of the cameramen/soldiers puts him in a choke while the woman starts biting his dick. The dude tells him to punch her in the face, which he does. She jacks him off onto her face, we see her face get splattered with a copious amount of Serbian seed. The little girls is clapping and smiling the whole time.
Next, the mysterious producer, known as Vukmir Vukmir, explains that the little girl is his and the woman is his wife and it's all cool, he would never do anything to hurt them. Milos is still uneasy.
Milos' brother informs him that Vukmir is a former child psychologist who moved to China and fell off the map. He has no reservations.
After having a dream about the movie that involves his son cheering him on, Milos decides to quit.
When he meets Vukmir to quit, he is treated to some sort of babble about victims and being Serbias backbone and that children need to prove how to exist on their own. He then shows him a movie about a true victim. Which brings us to THE SCENE.
A hot blonde chick is giving birth on a table, a bald man walks in and takes off his jacket and delivers the baby. We see the delivery in full detail. He then holds the baby and rapes it, while the mother watches and smiles. This may be the same mother from the first two scenes, I can't really tell. Anyway, it's sick yeah, but it's so silly that it really doesn't have much of an effect. I mean, I'm sitting here thinking about how hot the chick looked with her legs spread. Maybe I'm just desensitized. Anyway, Milos is grossed out and storms out of the room while Vukmir screams about newborn porn being the next big thing. I can't tell what this movie is trying to say.
As he's driving home, Milos stops at a red light and is approached by a hooker. He grabs her tits while she rubs his cock and he starts having flashbacks to the stuff he's seen, done, and thought. He awakes alone in his bed 3 days later. The bed is covered in blood.
He sees the car that would drive him to the set everyday parked in front of his house so he gets in and heads to Vukmirs. On the way he has flashbacks that help piece together the missing 3 days. Apparently he let her drive his car while she gave him a handy and he angrily mauled her tits. They are nice tits.
Upon arriving at Vukmirs now empty estate, he has more flashbacks. I guess the hooker was the doctor from day one of shooting, I couldn't tell. In the flashback, Milos is led into a room with a childrens bed, he is handcuffed. Vukmir explains that he was given some mega Aphrodisasic in his whiskey. Viagra for cattle was how he put it.
The mother from earlier in the film is brought in and handcuffed and spread out on the bed. Milos eyes her like a fucking wild bear in a boner induced stupor. His ear piece is put in, his pants are pulled off and his handcuffs removed. He pounces on the woman and fucks the bejeezus out of her, while in his ear piece Vukmir tells him of all the horrible things this woman has done, and let been done to her daughter. As the verbal attack gets worse and Milos is encouraged to beat the woman while he fucks her, he obliges. Suddenly a machete is placed in his hand. He cuts the bitches head clean off while he fucks her. The camera soldiers have to pull him from her corpse as he continues to fuck her. I gotta tell ya man, this was an intense and good scene. I was part turned on, part intrigued and well.....it wasn't a bad fucking horror scene at all.
Back from the flashback, Milos vomits. He continues through the house and finds a bunch of tapes featuring weird sex acts, including the ones he shot. He gathers them up and it's back in the car as he goes to the woods to watch them. The videos help him piece together more of the days he's missing. Seems one of the camera soldiers ass raped him while has passed out.
Apparently the girl who set Milos up with Vukmir, is pissed that Vukmir resorted to drugging Milos, she says she's taking Milos home. All this is being filmed by an unseen camera operator. The next tape he watches shows a chick, might be the aforementioned chick, might not be, chained with her wrists over head, naked, teeth knocked out, being throat fucked till she asphyxiates and dies.
Next we have what I think is a flashback, he might be watching a tape, dunno. Anyway, the little girls grandmother is thanking him for killing her mother because she was a whore. The little girls father was a war hero but is now dead and in his place Milos has come. The grandmother says the father was supposed to take his daughters virginity but now that gift belongs to Milos. The grandmother asks him to fuck the little girl. Milos is regaining his wits at this point and despite being urged on by Vukmir, he springs up and grabs a knife and takes his own cock hostage, threatening to slice it off. Vukmir tells his men to stand down as Milos jumps out of a window. Vukmir orders his men to chase him as the tape ends.
Milos continues to have flashbacks, remembering where he went and that he called his brother to come pick him up. In present time he remembers the house where the last video took place at, and drives by. He sees the little girl outside working, he drives on. Still in his flashback he is sitting alone in an ally when he sees a girl who is identified as underage but really looks perfectly old enough. He begins to jerk off while looking at her and two guys start beating him up for being a perv. He is saved by Vukmirs henchmen who drive up and kill the dudes beating him up.
In real time, Milos returns to the place he remembers Vukmir took him in his flashback. He was put in a room and shot up again by the nurse. He stabs her and tries to escape but is caught by one of the guards and led naked into a room. The movie at this point is nicely mixing flashbacks with real time, so as he walks real time into a room strewn with dead guards, he's also flashing back to being led into that room.
Ok, now this is sort of silly. I guess Milos was hopped up on cattle viagra again because in the middle of the room is a pretty bed, with pretty bedding set up very romantically. In the bed are two people, an obvious child, and a woman. There heads are covered with sheets. Milos is let free and he goes right to fucking them while Vukmir watches and his henchmen film.
Milos fucks the woman first and cums, then he goes to the little one, who he of course struggles to penetrate, lol. The bodies move slightly but it's clear they've been drugged. As Milos fucks the little one, a masked man joins him and begins fucking the woman side by side. This is not a half bad fucking movie.
Oh geez man. There's a shot of Milos from behind fucking the little one and blood is running down it's leg and fucking pooling up underneath him. That might of been the grossest part of the movie, lol.
The ending I will not spoil except to say that it goes deeper than a pure shock movie should, and has more than one twist.
This is a good movie. I think I'm keener than to fall for simple shock value, and truthfully it's not like I was aghast at much of what I saw. This is a fucking smart psychological thrill that works because of the subject matter yes, it's very foreign to mainstream and even underground films, it's a taboo fucking subject. But the direction, the editing, the way it's shot, are all excellent and do a great service to the story. As awkward as the lead looked at the start of the film, once you get past the idea that he's a porn star, he does a great job, a fantastic job really.
I also applaud the film makers for this. If you're going to go with an idea, go with it. Don't pussyfoot around the subject, go head first into it, and they certainly did. Because they took that tact, the film comes off much the better as a whole. Sure there's a ton of gross fucking shit, but it's built around a story that makes it seem natural in the context.
Fairly or unfairly I came into this film with a certain expectation that it would be funny crap designed to gross me out. It isn't that at all. And once the movie kicks into high gear I found myself throwing away all my preconceived notions and just going with it and enjoying it for the movie it was, a tense, twisted, thriller.
This will not be every ones cup of tea, but it isn't a bad movie by any stretch, in fact it might be one of the better thrillers I've seen in recent years.
2010 Horror Fest: Night Of The Demons: 25 Out Of 100 Stars
I knew two things about this movie going in. One, it starred Shannon Elizabeth, which is A-Ok with me. Two, it was a remake of an 80's film by the same name that I wasn't sure I had ever seen.
Once the movie got going I realized I had seen the original and wondered aloud "Why the fuck are they remaking that piece of shit"?
The story varies a bit from the original, but it has the same exact lack of heart and soul. Fuck, it has even less heart and soul then the original, which is a hard fucking thing to pull off. At least the 80's version is campy, this one is just gutless and sterile.
The story, and I use that term loosely, is that there's a house where a bunch of people were murdered some 50 odd years ago, and today, in present times, a rich girl, Shannon Elizabeth, is throwing a Halloween party there.
Things started off promising enough when we're introduced to the 3 main female characters. Not because they add anything but skimpy outfits and hot bodies, but that's a good start. Then we have the three main male characters, one of whom is the guy who ate Eddie Furlong. Seriously, I was watching the movie for a good 20 minutes before I realized who the fuck it was. He's easily gained 50-60 pounds since his T2 days.
So by hook or crook, these 7 people end up trapped alone in this haunted house and the fun begins. I use the term fun very loosely. The story of how the house came to be haunted is marvelously ridiculous and extensive. You see, 50 years ago a chick wanted to woo a man who didn't love her, so she called upon demons to help her. Well the demons tricked her, demons will do that apparently. After inhabiting all the guests at the seyonce at which they were summoned, the demons needed only the womans body to complete their resurrection. So instead of letting that happen, the woman killed herself, trapping the demons in the house forever. The only person left alive was a maid who scribbled spells on a wall that somehow kept the demons at bay. Ok then.
So anyway, one by one the demons start to inhabit the 7 main characters. Apparently the way they do this is by kissing or fucking or touching, it's never really clear. There is a decent scene of butt fucking demonetization.
So a few characters get infected and chase the other characters, who end up in the room the maid scribbled her spells in. Of course our heroin figures out the entire story by reading the wall in about 20 seconds. It's just so overwrought and under thought. The two guys with the heroin, having no problem at all just going with her theory, decide to take a nap. Somehow I don't think napping is in the demon survival handbook.
This turd is just filled with some awesomely atrocious dialog and thought processes. One of the demons started to steam when hit with a rusted pipe which leads our heroin to conclude, "Demons are made from ancient elements, iron is an ancient element, and it rusts, which is why rust hurts them". You really have to stoned out of your fucking mind to think that plot point up.
The film is just a meandering exercise in contrived plot points and ridiculous assumptions. When a character falls 4 stories through multiple floors, how do you help him? Of course you open the box in the corner of the room that has a rope.
The ending is absurd but par for the course. Just know that after a number of her friends are killed and she's been chased all night by demons, our heroin still has time to crack one liners and not be the slightest bit upset with what's been occurring to her.
I guess the best thing you can say about this clunker is that it flies by pretty fast. All the chicks are pretty damn smoking but there isn't much nudity at all, although one of the girls has breasts like fucking pumpkins that were nice to look at.
Other then that there just isn't much here. It would seem a lot of thought went into the back story, but just because it's elaborate doesn't mean it's good, or sensible. There are numerous montages set to music and a lot of that herky jerky stop action shit that annoys the fuck out of me.
So let's run this down. Sub par film making, check. Sub par acting, check. Sub sub par story, check. Hot chicks, check. Well at least they got something right.
One last note, someone get Eddie Furlong some help. There are points where it seems like he's running out of breath delivering dialog.
Just an absolute turd of a remake of a turd.
Once the movie got going I realized I had seen the original and wondered aloud "Why the fuck are they remaking that piece of shit"?
The story varies a bit from the original, but it has the same exact lack of heart and soul. Fuck, it has even less heart and soul then the original, which is a hard fucking thing to pull off. At least the 80's version is campy, this one is just gutless and sterile.
The story, and I use that term loosely, is that there's a house where a bunch of people were murdered some 50 odd years ago, and today, in present times, a rich girl, Shannon Elizabeth, is throwing a Halloween party there.
Things started off promising enough when we're introduced to the 3 main female characters. Not because they add anything but skimpy outfits and hot bodies, but that's a good start. Then we have the three main male characters, one of whom is the guy who ate Eddie Furlong. Seriously, I was watching the movie for a good 20 minutes before I realized who the fuck it was. He's easily gained 50-60 pounds since his T2 days.
So by hook or crook, these 7 people end up trapped alone in this haunted house and the fun begins. I use the term fun very loosely. The story of how the house came to be haunted is marvelously ridiculous and extensive. You see, 50 years ago a chick wanted to woo a man who didn't love her, so she called upon demons to help her. Well the demons tricked her, demons will do that apparently. After inhabiting all the guests at the seyonce at which they were summoned, the demons needed only the womans body to complete their resurrection. So instead of letting that happen, the woman killed herself, trapping the demons in the house forever. The only person left alive was a maid who scribbled spells on a wall that somehow kept the demons at bay. Ok then.
So anyway, one by one the demons start to inhabit the 7 main characters. Apparently the way they do this is by kissing or fucking or touching, it's never really clear. There is a decent scene of butt fucking demonetization.
So a few characters get infected and chase the other characters, who end up in the room the maid scribbled her spells in. Of course our heroin figures out the entire story by reading the wall in about 20 seconds. It's just so overwrought and under thought. The two guys with the heroin, having no problem at all just going with her theory, decide to take a nap. Somehow I don't think napping is in the demon survival handbook.
This turd is just filled with some awesomely atrocious dialog and thought processes. One of the demons started to steam when hit with a rusted pipe which leads our heroin to conclude, "Demons are made from ancient elements, iron is an ancient element, and it rusts, which is why rust hurts them". You really have to stoned out of your fucking mind to think that plot point up.
The film is just a meandering exercise in contrived plot points and ridiculous assumptions. When a character falls 4 stories through multiple floors, how do you help him? Of course you open the box in the corner of the room that has a rope.
The ending is absurd but par for the course. Just know that after a number of her friends are killed and she's been chased all night by demons, our heroin still has time to crack one liners and not be the slightest bit upset with what's been occurring to her.
I guess the best thing you can say about this clunker is that it flies by pretty fast. All the chicks are pretty damn smoking but there isn't much nudity at all, although one of the girls has breasts like fucking pumpkins that were nice to look at.
Other then that there just isn't much here. It would seem a lot of thought went into the back story, but just because it's elaborate doesn't mean it's good, or sensible. There are numerous montages set to music and a lot of that herky jerky stop action shit that annoys the fuck out of me.
So let's run this down. Sub par film making, check. Sub par acting, check. Sub sub par story, check. Hot chicks, check. Well at least they got something right.
One last note, someone get Eddie Furlong some help. There are points where it seems like he's running out of breath delivering dialog.
Just an absolute turd of a remake of a turd.
2010 Horror Fest: Easter Bunny Kill Kill: 23 Out Of 100 Stars
Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear, where do I start? A quick glance at IMDB and cursory internet searches told me that this was gonna be a fun movie. Never trust the internet. I am beyond baffled.
The "movie" all pretty much takes place in a hallway. Early in the movie the mother mentions that she's redecorating, which I guess explains all the tarp hanging all over the place. In other words, some cheap ass folks done made a movie.
The premise is not unpromising. Mother and her retarded son are joined by moms white trash hillbillyesque boyfriend, who hates the retard but likes moms pussy. A stranger gives the little retard a pet rabbit since it's Easter eve. The boyfriend tells the kid he can keep the rabbit as long as he doesn't tell his mom all the mean things he says to him. Mom has to work a double shift, leaving kid and loser alone together, and all hell breaks loose.
The boyfriend offers the kid up to a pedophile in exchange for drugs and then goes and gets some hookers for fucking.
The rest I will not spoil except to say that it's dark, claustrophobic and not frightening in the slightest. Almost everything in the second half of the movie feels like it's being filmed in a tiny little space. The kills are nothing special at all. When all the tension comes from repeated shots of people moving their heads left and right because the set is as big as a crawlspace, well you better be a genius with the camera, and these guys aint.
The conclusion has a double twist that is laughable but on the bright side, any conclusion was OK with me as long as the drawn out thing was fucking over with.
The retard made me laugh, but they all do. The boyfriend was over the top and funny at first, but really started to wear as the movie went deeper. All the secondary characters and actors were fairly shit.
Have no fear film makers, the quintessential Easter horror movie is still waiting to be made.
The "movie" all pretty much takes place in a hallway. Early in the movie the mother mentions that she's redecorating, which I guess explains all the tarp hanging all over the place. In other words, some cheap ass folks done made a movie.
The premise is not unpromising. Mother and her retarded son are joined by moms white trash hillbillyesque boyfriend, who hates the retard but likes moms pussy. A stranger gives the little retard a pet rabbit since it's Easter eve. The boyfriend tells the kid he can keep the rabbit as long as he doesn't tell his mom all the mean things he says to him. Mom has to work a double shift, leaving kid and loser alone together, and all hell breaks loose.
The boyfriend offers the kid up to a pedophile in exchange for drugs and then goes and gets some hookers for fucking.
The rest I will not spoil except to say that it's dark, claustrophobic and not frightening in the slightest. Almost everything in the second half of the movie feels like it's being filmed in a tiny little space. The kills are nothing special at all. When all the tension comes from repeated shots of people moving their heads left and right because the set is as big as a crawlspace, well you better be a genius with the camera, and these guys aint.
The conclusion has a double twist that is laughable but on the bright side, any conclusion was OK with me as long as the drawn out thing was fucking over with.
The retard made me laugh, but they all do. The boyfriend was over the top and funny at first, but really started to wear as the movie went deeper. All the secondary characters and actors were fairly shit.
Have no fear film makers, the quintessential Easter horror movie is still waiting to be made.
2010 Horror Fest: Lake Placid 3: 21 Out Of 100 Stars
The first Lake Placid was a major studio film with A list actors that sort of underperformed at the box office, despite good, quirky fun.
A few years later Lake Placid 2 came out as a direct to video low budget B-list affair that was a solid and quirky film as well. I enjoyed both movies very much so I was a bit stoked for the third installment. But I suppose all good runs have to come to an end.
Lake Placid 3 holds very little of the charm of the first two, and really suffers from lack of focus, focus on the wrong things, and just general laziness.
The second film worked based on a couple of things. Get solid character actors, get a tight script with some tits, murder, and humor, and stay focused.
Here we have a cauldron of story lines and too many characters, most of which aren't engaging in the slightest.
First we have Craig Ferguson as the nephew of Sadie, the old lady who fed the crocs in the sequel. He's an EPA dude, who along with his wife and kid are cleaning out Sadies cabin. Seems she was eaten by crocs between films. Anyway, he's good enough, but the kid is annoying and gets too much of the focus early in the film. You know the scene where the kid has something important to tell the adult but instead of letting him finish they tell him to shut up, so he just sulks off? Well that scene happens much too early this movie. It just plays as a badly acted, drawn out story mechanism that's more annoying than anything else.
Next we have a group of college kids, except they can't just be college kids, they have to have their own back story as well. Seems that one of the couples isn't really a couple but rather a dude who lied to a chick about her boyfriend cheating on her so she would come with him to a fucking lake. That's fine enough but it leads into another group of grating characters. Seems the girls boyfriend is trying to find her so he hires Yancy Butler, playing a hunting guide or Rambo with tits, in A most dreadful performance, to take him out to the lake. Just a contrived and unnecessary plot. And the acting between the two is akin to a coke can up your ass.
Oh, Michael Ironside, an actual good actor is also in the movie, but is given very little to do.
Besides the hackneyed script, bad acting, and plot that gets way too fucking tedious for a movie about killer crocs, we have our last and maybe biggest problem.
In the second movie the CGI was kept to a minimum and the crocs were mostly seen for a few seconds at a time in the water. Here we are treated to way too many scenes of crocs on land, horrifically digitized, killing and chasing people and things. It looks ridiculous, and really takes all the drama and fun out of things. It's like instead of trying to hide the limited capabilities the film makers had, they decided to make them a focal point. Really fucking agitating.
So yeah, convoluted setup leads us to a convoluted conclusion. Everyone is kind of trapped in the cabin. I say kind of because one moment they can't go anywhere, and the next they just decide they can. People come in and out of the movie, get killed, go missing, whatever. The group that is left somehow trek from the cabin into town. But when they get into town, a town mind you, full of.......ya know, people, they still act as if they're all alone. They bang on a shop door in the middle of the night and when they get no reply they decide the best thing to do is break into a supermarket. This movie was always pretty stupid, now it's downright insulting. Of course the crocs have followed them over who knows how many miles to the supermarket. Jesus Christ.
Lake Placid 3 takes nothing from it's better predecessors and instead is content to be a brutally dumb, badly acted turd. The best thing I can say about it is that it has some quality nudity and hot bitches wearing very little clothes.
After two good stays, I'd be happy if my third trip to Lake Placid was my last.
A few years later Lake Placid 2 came out as a direct to video low budget B-list affair that was a solid and quirky film as well. I enjoyed both movies very much so I was a bit stoked for the third installment. But I suppose all good runs have to come to an end.
Lake Placid 3 holds very little of the charm of the first two, and really suffers from lack of focus, focus on the wrong things, and just general laziness.
The second film worked based on a couple of things. Get solid character actors, get a tight script with some tits, murder, and humor, and stay focused.
Here we have a cauldron of story lines and too many characters, most of which aren't engaging in the slightest.
First we have Craig Ferguson as the nephew of Sadie, the old lady who fed the crocs in the sequel. He's an EPA dude, who along with his wife and kid are cleaning out Sadies cabin. Seems she was eaten by crocs between films. Anyway, he's good enough, but the kid is annoying and gets too much of the focus early in the film. You know the scene where the kid has something important to tell the adult but instead of letting him finish they tell him to shut up, so he just sulks off? Well that scene happens much too early this movie. It just plays as a badly acted, drawn out story mechanism that's more annoying than anything else.
Next we have a group of college kids, except they can't just be college kids, they have to have their own back story as well. Seems that one of the couples isn't really a couple but rather a dude who lied to a chick about her boyfriend cheating on her so she would come with him to a fucking lake. That's fine enough but it leads into another group of grating characters. Seems the girls boyfriend is trying to find her so he hires Yancy Butler, playing a hunting guide or Rambo with tits, in A most dreadful performance, to take him out to the lake. Just a contrived and unnecessary plot. And the acting between the two is akin to a coke can up your ass.
Oh, Michael Ironside, an actual good actor is also in the movie, but is given very little to do.
Besides the hackneyed script, bad acting, and plot that gets way too fucking tedious for a movie about killer crocs, we have our last and maybe biggest problem.
In the second movie the CGI was kept to a minimum and the crocs were mostly seen for a few seconds at a time in the water. Here we are treated to way too many scenes of crocs on land, horrifically digitized, killing and chasing people and things. It looks ridiculous, and really takes all the drama and fun out of things. It's like instead of trying to hide the limited capabilities the film makers had, they decided to make them a focal point. Really fucking agitating.
So yeah, convoluted setup leads us to a convoluted conclusion. Everyone is kind of trapped in the cabin. I say kind of because one moment they can't go anywhere, and the next they just decide they can. People come in and out of the movie, get killed, go missing, whatever. The group that is left somehow trek from the cabin into town. But when they get into town, a town mind you, full of.......ya know, people, they still act as if they're all alone. They bang on a shop door in the middle of the night and when they get no reply they decide the best thing to do is break into a supermarket. This movie was always pretty stupid, now it's downright insulting. Of course the crocs have followed them over who knows how many miles to the supermarket. Jesus Christ.
Lake Placid 3 takes nothing from it's better predecessors and instead is content to be a brutally dumb, badly acted turd. The best thing I can say about it is that it has some quality nudity and hot bitches wearing very little clothes.
After two good stays, I'd be happy if my third trip to Lake Placid was my last.
2010 Horror Fest: Zombie Women Of Satan: 44 Out Of 100 Stars
A for effort, D for execution.
Zombie Women Of Satan is, settle in for this description, A British movie about A traveling freak show that features a perverted clown, a midget, a strong man without a tongue, a female rock star, and a burlesque girl. That's group 1.
Group 2 is a father who is a mad scientist who is doing studies on women and trying to turn them into zombies. He gets the women from his son, who runs a cult on the family compound. The scientist also has two daughters who help with both the cult and the experiments. And then there's dear old mum, who appears to be part zombie, and is chained up in a closet for her, and everyone elses protection.
The cult leading son also has some sort of tv show that focuses on weirdos, which is how the 2 groups end up getting together. But while doing the TV show, the female rocker thinks she sees her long lost sister, who is in fact, part of the cult.
Through a mix up, somehow some zombie blood gets into the punch being served to the cult girls and that's when all hell breaks loose as we are treated to dozens of topless zombie bitches breaking free and going after anything and everything they can get their undead hands on.
There is effort in the script. It produces some funny one liners and it aims to be as zany as possible. I think it's a decent script. I laughed a number of times, but it was the joke as written more so than as delivered.
Technically the movie just isn't very good. The look is fine, nothing wrong there, but the editing, blocking, actual cameraship, all are very flawed and lead to a stilted and choppy viewing experience. It's very hard to make one liners work when the camera always seems to be out of sync with the actors.
The acting for the most part is decent. Again, it's hard to tell if a line is delivered badly when the filming of it does it no favors. An actor reciting a line that doesn't flow in the conversation he's having because of the editing and cuts makes it hard to know if it's the actors fault or the directors. That being said, it's not like the acting is all that good either. It looks like a bunch of people who know what to do, but not quite how to do it.
I can't really recommend this movie as anything other than perhaps a stoned or drunk, late night, laugh at it sort of thing, but in the hands of more skilled film makers I think this could have been very entertaining.
Zombie Women Of Satan won't kill you with laughter but I'll be damned if it doesn't try as hard it can.
Zombie Women Of Satan is, settle in for this description, A British movie about A traveling freak show that features a perverted clown, a midget, a strong man without a tongue, a female rock star, and a burlesque girl. That's group 1.
Group 2 is a father who is a mad scientist who is doing studies on women and trying to turn them into zombies. He gets the women from his son, who runs a cult on the family compound. The scientist also has two daughters who help with both the cult and the experiments. And then there's dear old mum, who appears to be part zombie, and is chained up in a closet for her, and everyone elses protection.
The cult leading son also has some sort of tv show that focuses on weirdos, which is how the 2 groups end up getting together. But while doing the TV show, the female rocker thinks she sees her long lost sister, who is in fact, part of the cult.
Through a mix up, somehow some zombie blood gets into the punch being served to the cult girls and that's when all hell breaks loose as we are treated to dozens of topless zombie bitches breaking free and going after anything and everything they can get their undead hands on.
There is effort in the script. It produces some funny one liners and it aims to be as zany as possible. I think it's a decent script. I laughed a number of times, but it was the joke as written more so than as delivered.
Technically the movie just isn't very good. The look is fine, nothing wrong there, but the editing, blocking, actual cameraship, all are very flawed and lead to a stilted and choppy viewing experience. It's very hard to make one liners work when the camera always seems to be out of sync with the actors.
The acting for the most part is decent. Again, it's hard to tell if a line is delivered badly when the filming of it does it no favors. An actor reciting a line that doesn't flow in the conversation he's having because of the editing and cuts makes it hard to know if it's the actors fault or the directors. That being said, it's not like the acting is all that good either. It looks like a bunch of people who know what to do, but not quite how to do it.
I can't really recommend this movie as anything other than perhaps a stoned or drunk, late night, laugh at it sort of thing, but in the hands of more skilled film makers I think this could have been very entertaining.
Zombie Women Of Satan won't kill you with laughter but I'll be damned if it doesn't try as hard it can.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
2010 Horror Fest: Nightmare On Elm Street: 74 Out Of 100 Stars
This is of course the re imaging that came out last year.
This baby had a real chance to be a top flight film, and while the effort is clearly there, it comes up just short, but I appreciate how the series was revived and what the film makers were trying to do here.
The main difference between this version and the original is that a lot more of the story is focused on Krueger as a child molester, and the fact that it was the films kids that he diddled. It was a tight rope to try and focus on both aspects of Krueger, the supernatural part and the real, kid fucker, part. I thought for the most part they did a good job of separating the two aspects, but the longer the movie went and the more entwined they became, they sort of became a hindrance to each other.
I thought that the cast for the most part was pretty damn good. When you get pissed that a character has died, it's a good a indication you were enjoying him. The one exception would be the girl who played Nancy. She wasn't bad per se, I just didn't feel much for her, it felt like a lot of chicks could have done what this girl did and the film would have been better served to have a more believable and dare I say, sexier, girl. The male lead was very good.
I thought Jack Earl Haley was awesome as Freddy, but the makeup he wore was just a bit off. Too many times during the movie I found myself distracted by what I thought was a sub par effects job.
The kills were good, they called back to the original but had their own flavor.
A real solid beginning to what I hope is a series, much better than Friday The 13th re imaging which I have pretty much forgotten already.
Fans of the original and those who have never seen any of the previous films ought to have a fun time watching this movie.
You'll enjoy your time on Elm Street.
This baby had a real chance to be a top flight film, and while the effort is clearly there, it comes up just short, but I appreciate how the series was revived and what the film makers were trying to do here.
The main difference between this version and the original is that a lot more of the story is focused on Krueger as a child molester, and the fact that it was the films kids that he diddled. It was a tight rope to try and focus on both aspects of Krueger, the supernatural part and the real, kid fucker, part. I thought for the most part they did a good job of separating the two aspects, but the longer the movie went and the more entwined they became, they sort of became a hindrance to each other.
I thought that the cast for the most part was pretty damn good. When you get pissed that a character has died, it's a good a indication you were enjoying him. The one exception would be the girl who played Nancy. She wasn't bad per se, I just didn't feel much for her, it felt like a lot of chicks could have done what this girl did and the film would have been better served to have a more believable and dare I say, sexier, girl. The male lead was very good.
I thought Jack Earl Haley was awesome as Freddy, but the makeup he wore was just a bit off. Too many times during the movie I found myself distracted by what I thought was a sub par effects job.
The kills were good, they called back to the original but had their own flavor.
A real solid beginning to what I hope is a series, much better than Friday The 13th re imaging which I have pretty much forgotten already.
Fans of the original and those who have never seen any of the previous films ought to have a fun time watching this movie.
You'll enjoy your time on Elm Street.
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