Midnight Meat Train, Wrong Turn 4

Midnight Meat Train

Going in, I figured this would be a mindless, bloody slasher movie.  I got the “bloody slasher movie” part correct, but it wasn’t exactly mindless.  There is a psychological aspect to it that really held my interest. 

Bradley Cooper plays Leon, a photographer, who, in an attempt to get his pictures featured at an art exhibit, walks around the city in the early hours of the day, trying to capture the city as it really is (dark, dirty and dangerous).  He comes across a group of thugs trying to rape a girl, and he stops them.  He watches the girl go into the subway, and he leaves.  The next day, he finds out that she has gone missing.  He continues to stalk the streets, and comes across Mahogany (played by Vinnie Jones), someone who rides empty subway cars by day and works in a meat packing plant by day.  Leon becomes obsessed with Mahogany, who he believes has something to do with the disappearance of the girl he photographed.  It consumes his life.

Like I said, there’s a lot of blood, but there’s also something else that drew me into the movie a little more.  Also, there’s a twist at the end that I did not see coming.  So that was fun.

Overall, it was a good movie.  Much better than I was expecting.  Also, Bradley Cooper’s character is named “Leon”.  I found that endlessly amusing.

Notable actors: Bradley Cooper, Vinnie Jones, Leslie Bibb, Brooke Shields

Rating: 3.5/5

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings

Having watched Wrong Turn 1-3, I had witnessed the declining quality with each movie.  So, while I was kind of excited to watch this new movie, I did not have high hopes for it.  I knew this was a prequel, but that's all I knew.

In this movie, we see the early life of the inbred family that shows up in the first three movies.  At the beginning of the movie (set in 1974), they are children, living in an insane asylum in West Virginia.  They escape, release the other inmates, and kill all the employees.  

Fast forward to 2003.  A group of college kids head off for a ski trip in the mountains of West Virginia.  They get off course.  With a snow storm on the way, they needed to find a place to stay.  They find the abandoned asylum, and decide to stay for the night.

Of course, the brothers are still in the area.  They begin to terrorize, kill and eat the kids.

I liked it.  It wasn't as good as the first movie, but it was at least as good as the second movie.  The script wasn't amazing, but it was pretty good, and the story moved along pretty well.  The acting wasn't great, but it was better than I expected.  

And that's how I felt about the movie as a whole: better than I expected.  If you're a fan of the inbred-slasher subgenre, you'll like this movie.

Rating: 3/5

Midnight Movie, Slaughter Night

Midnight Movie

I read a review of this that sounded good, so I thought I’d check it out.  I ran to Wal-Mart and grabbed a 4-movie pack that had this movie in it for only $5.  Thank you, Sam Walton.

As it turns out, this movie was highly mediocre.

The premise is what made the movie interesting.  A madman made a movie.  After said madman watched it in a mental institution years later, everyone ended up dead, and the madman escaped.  Five years later, the movie (The Dark Beneath) was being shown for the first time since the incident, in a little run-down theater at midnight.  The movie itself pretty much looks like a rip-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with elements of Psycho thrown in for good measure.  Before too long, strange things start happening, and the handful of people watching the movie begin to realize that the killer is somehow escaping the confines of the screen and killing people in the theater.  So, basically, the theater turns into a horror movie, and the patrons are the victims.

Like I said, it was an interesting premise.  The slasher genre seems like a hard one to do something different with, but this movie manages to do it.  The acting and script weren’t great (which is a huge understatement), which made the set-up pretty rough to get through.  But the inventiveness of the plot was enough to carry the movie once it got going.

It wasn’t a great movie, but it added something new to the genre, and that’s always cool.  I can definitely recommend it, but it’s more of a, “Check it out if you get a chance,” rather than a, “You need to watch this movie now,” recommendation.

Rating: 3/5

Slaughter Night (SL8N8)

We were looking for a movie to watch after Midnight Movie.  I had added this one to my instant queue a week or so earlier, so we decided to check it out.   It’s called Slaughter Night, and the girl on the front was covered in blood (and was also fairly attractive).  What could go wrong?

A lot.  A lot could go wrong.  First of all, that girl on the cover doesn’t appear in the movie.  At all.  Second of all, it was awful.

There was a long set-up having to do with a 19^th century child murderer somewhere in Denmark (which is where the movie was filmed and set).  The cops tracked him down and killed him outside of the mine in which he operated.  Fast-forward to present day, and there is a girl who gets in a car wreck with her father.  He father (who had been studying this child killer) dies.  She becomes intrigued with the case, and decides to go to the mine with her friends, because…well, I don’t know why.  Fun, I guess?

They go into the mine, where the spirit of the child killer is still roaming about.  He surfaces, and people start getting killed.

I think that’s what happened, anyway.  After about 40 minutes, we came to the conclusion that the movie was terrible and boring, so we decided to fast forward it until it looked like something interesting was happening.  We stopped a couple of times, but even the scenes where someone was getting killed seemed boring.

In other words, don’t see this movie.

Rating: 0/5