Zombie Club

Friday the 13th Part 3

2012-02-11T16:38:00.003-05:00

Even though the 3D in this movie is pretty funny, I opted towatch the 2D version (mainly because the mere thought of wearing thoseblue-and-red 3D glasses gave me a headache). This movie features two of myfavorite kills in the entire series. However,this movie also features Shelly, who is one of the more obnoxious characters inthe series. It should also be noted thatit is in this movie that Jason gets his signature hockey mask.

I will be sitting back with a beer and watching thismovie. Join me, won’t you?

The movie begins with the end of Part 2. Ginny runs intoJason’s shack, imitates his mother, and stabs him with a machete. But then there’s a twist we don’t see in partone. Instead of following Ginny and Paulas they make their way back to the cabin, we see Jason’s hand move, then heslowly gets to his feet. So, where theend of Part 2 kind of left youwondering, “Was that part a dream?”, the beginning of Part 3 shows that Jason is still alive, if wounded.

A woman in a trailer is watching a news report of the eventsof Part 2. The newscaster says that eight bodies werefound, which seems to imply that Paul survived, although his whereabouts areunknown.

Let’s meet our characters.

Chris: Oursurvivor girl. She had a terribleexperience when she was younger. She hada fight with her parents, so she ran into the woods to hide. She fell asleep under a tree. When she woke up, a man with a messed up face(she uses words like “hideous”, “grotesque” and “inhuman”) attacked her with aknife. She tried to get away from him,but wasn’t able to. She blackedout. When she woke up, she was in herbed. Her parents never mentioned a wordabout it. Since she grew up in the area,she’s a little jumpy about noises throughout the movie. Anyway, she’s kind of bland. I’ll chalk some of that up to her nervousnessof being back in the area where that incident occurred, but, really, there’snot much to her character. Which is ashame, because Ginny was such a terrific survivor girl. So, while I don’t want Chris to die, I’m alsonot very invested in her character.

Rick: Chris’ loveinterest. He lives at the cabin in thewoods they all go to visit. He seemsmuch older, and has virtually no personality. All he wants is to have lots of sex with Chris. From what I can tell, it’s the only reason heexists. On numerous occasions, hethreatens to leave or break things off completely if she won’t sleep withhim. Within 3 minutes of meeting him,Chris asks to take things slow, to which he replies, “Okay, but there’s only somany cold showers I can take.” Then hecalls her fat almost immediately after. It’sa good thing Shelly is in this movie, or Rick would be the most unlikablecharacter in the movie. He’s a realcreeper. But he has a fantastic death,so that helps to make up for some of his shortcomings.

Shelly: Fancieshimself an actor. Apparently that meanshe’s remarkably anti-social and has a very low self-esteem. He breaks out masks and fake blood atterrible times. He whines. He leers. His idea of flirting is hiding under a dock with a mask and a spear gunand grabbing legs. In short, he is aboutthe most annoying person you can imagine. In his own words, “Being a jerk is better than being nothing.” Wise words, Shelly. Unfortunately, he doesn’t die first.

Vera: Shelly’sdate for the weekend. They set her upbefore they left. She thinks she’sheading out for a great weekend with a fun date. Instead, her first impression of Shelly ishim wearing a mask and apologizing for his looks. They never really hit it off. Bless her heart, though…she really tries. She’s Hispanic, which brings up a moment ofracism in the movie. When she checks outat a grocery store, the clerk looks at her and says, “We don’t take no foodstamps here.” If you can’t avoid racismin a little dirt-road town, where can you avoid it?

Andy: Shelly’sroommate. He’s the one that broughtShelly along for this little trip. Heseems like a jock. Nice guy, for themost part. Not a jerk, which separateshim from most of the guys in this movie. He likes to walk around on his hands.

Debbie: Andy’sgirlfriend, and Chris’ best friend. Early in the movie, she makes mention of being pregnant, but it doesn’treally have any bearing on the movie or her character.

Chuck & Chili:Two potheads. They’re both older thaneveryone else. The movie never explainswhy they came along on the trip. Far andaway the most confusing part of this group. Seriously. What are they doingthere?

Ali, Loco & Fox:Three leather-clad bikers who – for some reason – live in podunk county. They harass Shelly and Vera at a grocery store,then follow them back to the house to get revenge after Shelly ran over theirmotorcycles with a car.

The killer:

Jason Voorhees:Although he starts the movie out maskless, he eventually gets his hockey mask from Shelly. He seems different in this movie. He’s still slow, but he’s not quite asclumsy. He’s also not nearly as slow toget up from a blow. He gets stabbed inthe leg, pulls it out, throws it at the person who stabbed him, and stands upwith barely a limp. He feels pain, butit doesn’t affect him too much. He’sable to bounce back in a way that he wasn’t able to in Part 2. The persona of Jasonthat lasts through the entire series gets its real start here.

The Deaths:

We follow a Harold & Edna, an unhappily married couple whoown a little country store. We see Jasonlurking around the store. They don’tever really get a good look at him, but they see glimpses. Harold goes outside to look around and gets ameat cleaver in the chest.

Edna hears a noise and goes out to investigate. Jason grabs her, and she gets a sharp objectin the back of her head and it comes out through her mouth.

Fox goes into the barn. She hears noises, and walks around to investigate. She ends up being killed off screen. Loco finds her with a pitchfork through herneck, dangling from a beam.

Loco goes into the barn to find Fox. He finds her dead, sees Jason, and gets apitchfork through the stomach.

Ali goes into the barn to find Loco and Fox. Loco’s body falls from the rafters ontoAli. Jason jumps down. Ali grabs a machete to fight, but Jasonknocks him out cold with a wrench. Heproceeds to bludgeon Ali with said wrench. He is presumed dead, but he shows up a little later to meet his truedemise.

Shelly – hockey mask and fishing spear in tow – hears anoise in the barn. He goes toinvestigate. He thinks it’s Chuck andChili having sex, but, for some reason, that doesn’t make him leave. He enters the barn, and the next time we seehim, he is stumbling to the door of the cabin with a slit throat. It is here that Jason gets his hockey mask.

Vera is sitting on the dock by the lake. She sees a figure approaching with a hockey maskand a spear. Thinking it’s Shelly, shetries to talk to him. It is not Shelly,and she gets a fishing spear through the eye.

After having sex, Debbie goes to take a shower while Andystays in the hammock. Andy is walking onhis hands with his feet straight up in the air. He looks up, sees Jason, looks shocks, and gets a machete through thecrotch (although, when we see him dead later, he is cut in half across hisstomach). This is one of my favoritedeaths. When Jason hits him with themachete, the sound is like a minor explosion. I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be. But every time I watch this movie, I laughreally hard, and watch the scene at least 3 more times.

Debbie goes back to the hammock to find Andy gone. She lays down to read a magazine (an articleon Godzilla in Fangoria), and blood starts dripping on the magazine. She looks up and sees Andy – chopped in half– above the hammock. She gasps. A hand grabs her head from under the hammock,and forces a machete through her chest. This is basically the same way Kevin Bacon’s character (Bill) dies inthe first movie. Except, while Bill gotan arrow through the neck, Debbie gets a machete through the chest. It’s worth noting that both of these deathsoccurred directly after sex.

After the electricity goes out, Chuck goes to the basementto check the fuse box. He fixes thefuse, and Jason immediately throws him back into the fuse box, electrocutinghim.

Chili opens the door to find Shelly with his throatcut. Thinking it’s a joke, she replieswith a simple, “Stop fooling around, man.” Then she realizes he’s actually dead, and runs screaming through thehouse, looking for the others. She getsa hot poker through the stomach for her troubles.

Chris and Rick – having been out in the woods, sitting by afire and talking – return to the cabin and find it dark and quiet. They split up. Rick goes outside. Debbie follows shortly after, but doesn’t seehim. While she stands at the door, he isjust on the other side of the wall from her, getting his head compressed byJason. This is my other favoritedeath. They show Rick getting his headsmashed by two hands. They show a shotof Rick’s feet being lifted off the ground, then they go back to his face…andit is painfully obvious that it’s a mechanical head. It looks nothing like Rick. And Jason finishes the job by compressingRobot Rick’s head to the point where his eye pops out. If I were watching in 3D, it would be comingdirectly at me. Either way, I alwayslaugh at this one. Like Andy’s death,this is one I rewind a few times every time I watch this movie. It’s glorious.

Just for fun, here's a gif of his death. Fair warning: you may spend the next hour staring at this.

Chris is now the only one left. Looking for Rick, she goes into thehouse. She finds a bathtub full ofbloody clothes, but no people. So shegoes out to the barn. Then the deadbodies start showing up. Loco is hungupside-down from a tree. She runs backinside. Rick’s body is thrown through awindow. Jason – wearing his hockey maskand wielding an axe – chases her through the house. She hides in a closet and finds Debbie’sbody. She pulls the machete out of herdead best friend and uses it to attack Jason. She stabs him in the leg and runs into a nearby room. She climbs out of the window (on the secondfloor). Jason grabs her before she canget completely out of the window. Afterstruggling with Jason, she is able to drop safely to the ground.

As he exits the house, she hits him with a log and runs tothe van. She takes off, but gets stuckwhen the van runs out of gas (the bikers siphoned most of it). Jason catches up with her, but she is able toescape. She runs through the woods andinto the barn. Jason chases her. She gets to the loft in the barn. She hits him with a shovel, wraps a ropearound his neck, and drops him out of the barn. He twitches, and appears to die.

But, as she walks past his body on her way out of the barn,he starts moving. He pulls himself upand out of the rope. Then he removes hismask, and she sees that he is the same man who chased her through the woods allthose years ago. He grabs a machete andwalks towards her. She screams andbraces herself for death…but Ali is still alive (he was sleeping in the barnall day?) and attacks Jason. Thatdoesn’t last long. Jason lops Ali’s handoff and sets to work hacking up his body with the machete.

But this gives Chris her opportunity. She grabs an axe and embeds it into Jason’shead. He reaches out his arms and triesto grab her. She screams. But, eventually, he drops to the ground,seemingly dead.

Chris goes outside. She finds a canoe on the lake. Just like Part 1, she pushesthe canoe into the lake and falls asleep. She wakes up and sees Jason in the second floor of the cabin. She screams. She tries to paddle away, but is blocked by logs. He emerges from the house and runs towardher. She looks down to get the logs outof the way. When she looks back, he’sgone. As she continues to look, thedecomposing (and worm-infested) body of Mrs. Voorhees emerges from the lake,grabs Chris, and drags her into the lake with her.

The movie ends with cops on the scene. Chris had apparently been talking about “alady in the lake”. So, basically, likethe end of Part 1. Except this makes even less sense. Jason drowned in Camp Crystal Lake. Mrs. Voorhees did not drown in this littlelake. Why was she there, and why didChris see her?

The movie ends with Jason dead in the barn, axe still firmlyimplanted in his skull.

Following the survivor girl:

While the rest of the people in the van smoke pot, Chrisrefrains.

That’s pretty much it. There really wasn’t much hedonistic behavior in this movie. The pot-smoking scene in the van and the sexscene with Andy and Debbie was pretty much the extent of it.

As survivor girls go, there wasn’t much to Chris. I liked her pretty well, but, compared toGinny, she just doesn’t hold up. Also, shedidn’t seem to have much of a personality. She had the whole backstory with Jason chasing her through the woods,but that only takes things so far. Ididn’t hate her, I just didn’t really like her all that much.

My favorite lines:

Debbie: Let’s go swimming. There’s nobody down there…we can do whatever we want.

Andy: Sounds disgusting. Let’s go.

Vera: I’m going to go outside, and when I get back in, we’lltalk.

Shelly: Sure. We’lltalk. [After she leaves] Bitch.

Overall, I like this movie, but it’s definitely my leastfavorite from of the first three. Thecharacters just aren’t as good. However,the hockey mask makes its first appearance in this movie, and the Jason that weknow from the rest of the series really starts in this movie. So, even though it’s not a great movie, it’san important movie for the rest of the series.

Here is Final Girl's chart of deaths in this movie.

Next week, I’ll tackle Part4: The Final Chapter. As always, I’dlove to hear your thoughts on this.

Hell Night

2012-02-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

I am taking a break from my Fridaythe 13^th reviews in order to join in on Final Girl’s filmclub. The selection this time around wasHell Night. I actually already had this movie added to myinstant queue, so this was a great excuse to watch it.

In Hell Night, we follow four fraternity pledges: Marti (played byLinda Blair), Jeff, Seth and Denise. Marti is kind of chubby and shy. Denise is British and kind of slutty. Jeff is kind of quiet and kind of noble (but that might just be hiscostume). And Seth is outgoing and kindof a man-slut.

The pledges, before being forced to run for their lives. L-R: Seth as Robin Hood, Denise as a flapper, Jeff as a gentleman cowboy, and Marti as a Victorian woman

Together, they are lockedin the grounds of the Garth Manor: a local mansion with a dark history. According to the local legend, twelve yearsprior, Raymond Garth killed his wife and three of his four children (all ofwhom had major birth defects), and then hung himself. Only one of his children survived (Andrew, achild who only communicated by a series of grunts), and they say that he stilllives on the ground. So the pledges haveto spend the night on the grounds.

Of course, the people responsible for this idea stick around the houseand attempt to scare the pledges. Theyhave speakers set up and pipe strange sounds through them. They set up triggers to open and close doorsautomatically.

But before too long, people actually start dying. It appears as though Andrew is still aliveand in the house.

It’s pretty standard from there. Seth and Denise hook up. Martiand Jeff do not. They are chased throughthe house (and the catacombs under the house) by Andrew. Seth is able to escape from the house andmake it to the police department, but they don’t take him seriously, so he endsup stealing a shotgun and returning to the house. Can Andrew be killed by the weapons ofmortals? Watch Hell Night and find out!

Seriously. How could the cops not trust this guy?

I enjoyed this movie. It wasn’tamazing, but it held my interest throughout the movie. The four main characters were all prettylikable, which is pretty rare for a horror movie. I didn’t really feel any major connectionwith the characters – there really wasn’t much depth to them – but I stillliked them, and was rooting for them to make it out alive. In most horror movies, I usually have atleast one person in each group that I think, “I wouldn’t mind seeing them die.” But this movie was different.

As far as Andrew goes, I kind of liked his look. There wasn’t really anything special abouthim, but he kind of looked like a monster. (Or, more accurately, like a child with a birth defect who had beenliving alone on the grounds for 12 years by himself, probably eating rats andwhatever else he could find.) When heshowed up in this movie, it conjured up visions of some of the old Universalmonster movies.

In fact, the movie itself seemed to borrow from a handful of horror genres. The three that really stood out to me were:
1. Universal monster movies
2. Haunted house movies
3. Slasher movies
It was interesting to see those three different genres mixed together.

All in all, it was a good movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And theending was dynamite.

Rating: 4/5

I end this post with a picture of Denise, because she was fantastic. And so happy.

Friday the 13th Part 2

2012-01-29T15:47:00.003-05:00

This movie opens with Alice (our survival girl from part 1)alone in her house. She’s having anightmare, and the events at the end of part 1 are shown again. She wakes up and gets a call from her mom. After getting off the phone, she startshearing strange noises. She opens herfridge, finds the rotting head of Mrs. Voorhees…and is promptly killed by Jason(screwdriver in the temple). I guess asurvivor girl is only guaranteed the end of her first movie.

The set-up: A bunch of teens gather at Crystal Lake for a class in camp counselortraining. This is not Camp Crystal Lake,but it’s another camp on the same lake. A murderer surfaces and begins killing them off.

Let’s meet our characters for part 2:

Ginny: Oursurvivor girl. She is Paul’s assistantin this counselor training camp. She’s anormal girl…very likable. She's fantastic.

Paul: Ginny’slove interest. He’s in charge of thecamp. He is tall, blonde, and looks likea classic 80s bully. But, once you getpast his initial introduction, he’s actually a decent guy.

However, someone needs to teach him how to wear a hat.

Ted: Theprankster of the group. Same kind oflook as Ned, but much more likable. I’mpretty sure DJ Qualls was a clone of this guy.

Jeff: DatingSandra. Wears a dressy hat and tanktops. Like a gentleman.

Sandra: She lookslike she’s 12 years old, so that’s off-putting.

Scott: Totaljackass. You can see it from the firsttime you look at him. He has one ofthose faces you just want to punch. Hewears a polo with a popped collar and dances with Terry’s dog to try to hook upwith her. It doesn’t work.

Terry: Remarkablyslutty. If there were actually kids atthis camp, she would be the most inappropriate counselor ever.

Vickie: Seems niceenough. Hits on Mark very aggressively anumber of times before he seems to realize what’s going on. She reminds me a little of Linda Cardellini.

Mark: Wheelchairbound. Seems like a decent guy. Isn’t bitter or angry about the fact thathe’s in a wheelchair.

Mark & Vickie, in happier times

There is also a black character, but I don’t think he has aname. Still, you don’t see him die, sothat breaks the “black character always dies first” stereotype.

The Killer:

Jason Voorhees:But he doesn’t get his hockey mask until part 3. In this movie, he simply has a bag over hishead. He uses a number of differentweapons: machete, pitchfork, knife, spear, pick-ax, and the aforementionedscrewdriver.

The Deaths:

Ralph (the town crazy from part 1) is the first to go. Strangled by piano wire while leaning upagainst a tree.

A cop chases someone through the woods. He finds a dilapidated shack in the middle ofthe woods. He goes in, snoops around,and gets a hammer in the back of the head.

Scott goes next. Terry (wearing not much to begin with) goes for a walk by herself atnight, and decides to go skinny-dipping. Someone is watching her, and they steal her clothes. We find out that’s it’s only Scott…laughinglike an idiot. He runs away and getscaught in a trap that hangs him by his feet from a tree. Terry leaves him to try to find somehelp. But it doesn’t matter. Jason comes by and slits his throat with amachete.

Terry comes back to Scott and finds him dead. She screams, turns to the camera…and we don’tsee her die. The next time we see her,she is dead at the shrine Jason built to his dead mother (the centerpiece ofthat shrine being her shriveled head).

Vickie goes back to her cabin to get freshened up. Wearing only a sweater and underwear, sheruns out to her car to grab her hairbrush. [Meanwhile, Mark, Jeff & Sandra are all killed.] She makes her way back to the main cabin (nowwearing pants). She finds Sandra in thebed…with Jason lying next to her. Vickiescreams, and is stabbed to death.

Mark, rolling out on the porch to look for Vickie,unceremoniously gets a machete in the face, and rolls backwards down a ton ofstairs.

Jeff and Sandra are upstairs in the main cabin, havingsex. Jason – having grabbed a spear fromdownstairs – skewers both of them.

Following the Survival Girl:

She takes off her shirt, but she’s wearing a bra. That wasn’t enough to save Brenda, but it’snot enough to kill Ginny.

While in a bar, Ginny talks about what Jason would be likeif he were still alive. She paints asympathetic picture of Jason…a child isolated from everyone but his mother, whohe was forced to watch die. It’s aterrific speech. It almost makes you seehim in a more positive light. Until yousee him killing more kids.

As Jason attacks Paul, Ginny repeats “Paul” while backingaway. I guess that’s why she’s called asurvivor girl and not a fighter girl. However, in a later scene she kicks Jason in the nuts, so I guess that’ssomething.

Much like Alice,Ginny spends a lot of time running from Jason. And, like Alice,there are a handful of times where she is able to knock him to the ground, butfails to deliver the finishing blow.

Once inside Jason’s hovel, she slips on his mother’s sweater(and grabs a machete) and attempts to talk to him like his mother wouldhave. He advances, kneels in front ofher, and sees his mother’s head. Shetries to cut him with the machete, but he blocks it with his pick ax and cutsher leg. Paul shows up, and, as hewrestles with Jason, Ginny is able to embed the machete into Jason’sshoulder. He keels over, presumablydead.

They get back to the cabin. Paul comforts her. They hear anoise at the door. Paul goes to check itout…and there’s a little dog. But Jason(sans mask) busts through the back window and grabs Ginny.

And then she wakes up as she’s being loaded into theambulance. She asks for Paul, butthere’s no sign of him.

Notes:

Jason is kind of a big, fairly uncoordinated oaf. He’s a far cry from the immortal killingmachine we see in future installments. He stumbles around, and he’s easily tricked. With his appearance (overalls and a sack overhis head), he looks more like a angry farmer than the symbol of terror hebecomes. But he’s strong, and he’sbetter than his mother.

Jason finds out that Ginny is hiding under a bed when shepees her pants out of fear. Not asurvivor’s girl finest moment.

Final thoughts:

It seemed like there were more people involved in thismovie. But really, the main list ofcharacters is only 9 (and of those nine, three of them – Paul, Ted and Ginny –are alive the last time we see them. Paul is assumed to be dead, but the last time we see Ted is at abar. As far as we know, he didn’t makeit back to the camp until the next morning, when the killing was all over). It also seemed like there was more sex andnudity. That wasn’t necessarily the case(still only one sex scene and one nude girl), but there was definitely moreskin in this movie than the last one.

I really like this one. Not only are we introduced to Jason (as the killer) in this movie, butwe also have Ginny, who is probably my favorite survivor girl in the series. She’s a very likable character. Also, if she needs to, she knows how to use a pitchfork.

As always, we’ll end with Final Girl’s deaths of Friday the 13^th Part 2.

Friday the 13th

2012-01-21T15:21:00.000-05:00

As I stated in my last post, I was planning on doing a liveblog of sorts for this movie. As itturns out, I’m terrible at live blogging. It turned into a four-page synopsis, with a handful of other thoughtsthrown in. But that’s no good. So I edited it down to try to make it a morecohesive post. In the end, it may be abit more cohesive (and it turned out to be a slightly better analysis of themovie as a whole), but it didn’t end up being any shorter. So I apologize for that. Hopefully you’ll stick with me throughthis. I’ll try to get better for thenext movie. If you feel like joining inon this, leave your thoughts in the comments. It would be fun to make this into a kind of movie club. After all, that’s how this blog got started.

I should also point out that there will be spoilersthroughout (starting in the very next paragraph). But, since it’s a classic horror movie thatwas released in 1980, I don’t really feel like I’m giving anything away. If you haven’t seen it yet, well, that’s yourfault.

I thought it would be cool to look at the “final girl” ineach of these movies (Leslie Vernon refers to them as “survivor girls”. I like that term better, so I’ll be usingthat). We know there are certain rulesthat a survivor girl must adhere to: basically, they must live a chaste andclean life. No nudity, sex, drugs,etc. But is that really the case? Our survivor girl in this film is Alice. Does she break any of these rules?

The movie starts in 1958, but the story starts in 1957 whena child at Camp Crystal Lake drowns. From what we learn later, he wasn’t beingwatched because the counselors were having sex.

In 1958, we are looking through the eyes of the killer asshe follows two counselors, who are going to have sex. They are stopped when the killer stabs bothof them.

After those deaths, the film takes us to 1980. A list of our characters:

Steve: His familyis from the nearby town, and he is in charge of getting the camp back up andrunning again. When we meet him, he iswearing cut-off jean shorts, no shirt, a red bandana around his neck, and aglorious mustache.

Alice: Oursurvivor girl. She appears to be at thecamp as a handy-man of sorts. She talksabout possibly needing to leave early to deal with some “family stuff”, but wenever hear anything else about it. Stevelikes her (he creepily hits on her), but not much happens.

Annie: She ishitchhiking her way to Camp Crystal Lake. We see her as she is walking through the townnearest Camp Crystal Lake. Ralph – “the town crazy” – tells her that “Camp Blood”has a “death curse”. She gets a ridewith one of the locals who dismisses Ralph, but then immediately tells her thatshe shouldn’t go out there. She laughshim off.

Jack: Played byKevin Bacon. He shows up with Marcie andNed. He and Marcie are dating.

Marcie: She isdating Jack.

Ned: The goofyone. There seems to be one of these inevery movie. Socially awkward, andusually very horny. There’s always oneperson that is a good friend of this person (in this case, that person isJack). He does a lot of things forattention, whether that’s running around in his underwear and an Indianheaddress or shooting an arrow at a target that a girl is holding. He’s an odd duck.

Bill: Good guy,if a little anonymous.

Brenda: Her and Alice seem to be goodfriends. She’s in charge of outdooractivities. I believe the first time wesee her is when she’s setting up the archery range.

Those are our 8 kids. Now meet the killer.

Mrs. Voorhees: Itwas her son (Jason) who drowned in 1957. The date of all these murders in 1980 would have been Jason’s birthday(in looking at the calendar, I found out that Jason’s birthday was June 13). There are a couple of things to keep in mindwith her. She will talk in Jason’s voiceand have conversations with him. Throughthese conversations, we learn that, not only are these revenge killings, butthat she believes it is still 1957. Sheaccuses Aliceof not watching Jason. Also, when wefinally see her later in the movie, we see that Mrs. Voorhees is not he mostcoordinated woman. She’s in her 50s, andat times she struggles to run. Most ofher kills have the element of surprise, but there’s still a certain amount ofstrength involved in some of them. Thiswill come up from time to time in this post.

The Deaths.

Annie is the first to go. After being dropped off by the local she was riding with, she hitches aride in a jeep (we don’t ever see the driver, but it’s Mrs. Voorhees). Annie realizes something is wrong, so shejumps out of the speeding jeep (head first…probably not a good call byAnnie). She runs through the woods, butthe killer tracks her down and slits her throat. Goodbye Annie. We hardly knew you.

Ralph shows up in the camp with an ominous warning: “You’redoomed if you stay. Go. Go.” If a crazy person shows up at a camp with a bad history, spouting wordsof doom, you should probably listen to him. Alas, they don’t.

Ned is the next one to go. He sees a figure entering a cabin, so he follows the person in. “Hello? Can I help you?” We don’t see himdie on camera, but it’s the last we see him alive.

Not long after that, a huge storm rolls through. Jack and Marcie enter the cabin Ned was justkilled in. One thing leads to another,and they have sex on the bottom bunk. Asthey’re having sex, we see that Ned is dead (throat slit) on the top bunk. After they finish up, Marcie goes to thebathroom and Jack lays back on the bed. He feels blood dripping on his head. Before he can react, a hand comes from underneath the bed, holds hishead, and jams an arrow through his neck from underneath the bed. Far and away the best death in themovie. This is one of those momentswhere the killer’s strength comes into question. How is a woman in her 50s able to hold Jack’shead against the pillow with one hand and jam an arrow through the bed andthrough his neck with the other? Thatwould take a lot of strength.

Marcie is in the bathroom in a small shirt and herunderwear. She hears a noise. She investigates. And then she gets an ax in the face. That’s what you get for getting naked,Marcie.

Alice, Bill and Brenda are all in a cabin playing stripMonopoly. They break out beer and weed. Bill partakes in both. Brenda partakes in beer but no weed. Alice – the survivor girl – partakes in both,thus breaking at least one rule (drug use) of the survivor girl. By the end of the game, Bill has lost most ofhis clothes, and Brenda has lost her pants and shirt, but Alice is still fully clothed. She is getting ready to take off her shirt,but they’re interrupted and the game stops. No nudity for the survivor girl.

Brenda goes back to her cabin, puts on her full-lengthnightgown, and reads a book. She hears acall for help, so she goes out in the rain to investigate. She goes to the archery range. The lights turn on, the camera leaves thescene, and we hear her scream.

(In looking at it from this perspective, Brenda would havealso made for a good survivor girl. During strip Monopoly, she had a beer, but didn’t have any weed. She took her shirt off, but she was stillwearing a bra, so she wasn’t nude. Butthat’s immaterial. She’s dead now.)

Alice and Bill go out to look for Brenda, after hearing herscream. They go to her bed and find anax covered in blood. It’s on, now.

They walk around the camp looking for their missing friends,but they can’t find them anywhere. Theymake their way to the office to call someone, but the phone line has beencut. They try to drive somewhere, butthe truck isn’t working. Bill and Aliceare trapped at Camp Crystal Lake, stalked bya killer they’re still not even sure is out there. (There’s a whole lot of horror movie clichésin that paragraph.)

Steve, who has been out all night, comes back to thecamp. In looking through the killer’seyes, we see him almost immediately killed (from the looks of it, a knife tothe stomach).

While Alicegoes to sleep, Bill goes out to refill the generator with gas. This is the last time we’ll see him alive.

Alicegoes out in search of Bill. She finallyfinds him…but he’s dead, and being held to the back of a door by a bunch ofarrows (another “how did a woman in her 50s do that by herself” moment). Alicescreams and runs. She doesn’t know ityet, but she’s the only one among her friends who isn’t dead yet. But she’ll find out soon enough.

She goes back to her cabin and barricades herself in. She grabs a bat and the fire poker to defendherself. The dead body of Brenda comesthrough the window. For reasons unclearto me, Alicedrops her weapons. This becomes a themewith her. She doesn’t deserve to live.

Mrs. Voorhees shows up in her jeep. To Alice,she just looks like a harmless old woman in a blue sweater. Still, Aliceshould know better than to just run to the first person she screams. After all, a stranger is killing herfriends…why couldn’t this be the stranger? Does Alicenot think?

It is this scene that we learn about Jason, and we find outthat Mrs. Voorhees is the killer. Shecharges Alicewith a knife. Alice picks up the fire poker, hits Mrs.Voorhees a couple times, knocks her on the ground…then drops the poker andruns.

Bam! Annie is dead inthe jeep.

Bang! Steve ishanging upside down from a tree. (Howdid Mrs. Voorhees find the strength and time to do that?)

The end of this movie is a lot of Mrs. Voorhees chasing Alice through the camp, Alice hiding, attacking Mrs. Voorhees withsome sort of weapon, dropping that weapon, and running away. Apparently her plan is to run Mrs. Voorheesaround until she collapses from exhaustion.

There’s a big showdown on the beach. It’s a clumsy fight scene that ends with Alice taking a machete andchopping off Mrs. Voorhees’ head. Forbeing a brutal killer, that last fight scene was severely uninspired.

Aliceends up in a canoe in the middle of the lake as the music swells. The cops come, she smiles…and deranged littleJason pops up from the water and pulls her in. But she wakes up in a hospital bed. That last part was a dream...or was it?

Some final thoughts. The concept of the survivor girl as being the only clean-living,virginal one in the bunch doesn’t really apply in this movie. The only people in that group that had sexwere Jack and Marcie. If Brenda had beenthe survivor girl instead, it would have made just as much sense. Basically, most of the people in this movieactually seemed to be decent human beings, which is in stark contrast to a lotof the jerks and horndogs that make up most slasher movies.

I was thinking of why this was. This movie borrowed pretty heavily from Halloween, and that kind of set up thewhole “killer with a code” rules. MichaelMyers was the boogeyman. Laurie Strodewas a chaste, studious girl. Her sexuallyactive friends were killed by Michael Myers as she made it out alive. Why wasn’t that the case here?

The answer I came up with was that the killer in this moviewas not Jason; it was Mrs. Voorhees. Shewas not killing out of some sense of a code. She was killing out of revenge. Her son died as the result of neglect, and itwas her duty to right that wrong.

But what of Jason? Does he have a code, or does he just kill? I guess we’ll find out in part 2.

Lastly, I am currently in love with the Final Girl blog. She has drawn up all the deaths of Friday the 13th 1-6 in comic book form. They're terrific, and I will be including them at the bottom of these posts. Please head over and check out her blog. It's a lot of fun.

Friday the 13th: The Intro

2012-01-20T17:04:00.001-05:00

After Christmas, I bought a pack of the first four Friday the 13^th movies. And then I bought Jason X separately (because all the movies in between are pretty much the same, but Jason X is pretty awesome). So I’m working my way through them. Since most of these movies are pretty much the same, I’m guessing these reviews will all be pretty short, and will be comprised mainly of me questioning the decision-making of these randy teens.

So we’ll go through them together. But I’ll do something different with this series, since I doubt I’ll have much interesting to say about them (as opposed to most of my reviews, which are great founts of wisdom). Instead of just a straight review with things I liked or didn’t like, I’ll try some sort of “live blog” attempt with these. I’ll follow the characters, and you can follow along with me. We’ll chart their lives, their conquests, and their deaths.

One of the reasons I thought this might be a fun little exercise is because it's an early example of the conventions that are all too familiar throughout slasher movies. Halloween came first (and is a vastly superior film) and Friday the 13th definitely borrowed (or stole) from it, but I have already reviewed the Halloween series. Besides, they both really helped to popularize the genre, and made it take off in a way that it hadn't done previously. The "horror movie rules" (as made so popular in Scream) find their birthplace in Halloween and Friday the 13th. So I thought it might be fun to go through and watch this series and write about it as it's happening.

This may be one of those things that sounds great in my head but will be executed horribly. But, since I only have a couple people who actually read this thing, I’m not in any real danger of alienating anyone.

Coming up tonight: the original Friday the 13^th.

Rammbock: Berlin Undead

2012-01-10T18:43:00.001-05:00

A man named Michael was dumped after being in a relationshipfor 7 years. Her name was Gabi. She dumped him, and then she moved to Berlin. I don’t remember where they originally lived,but it wasn’t very close to Berlin. Michael decides that he needs to returnGabi’s keys to her. So, in true stalkerfashion, he travels to Berlinto give her back her apartment keys. When he gets to her apartment, Gabi is nowhere to be seen, but there aretwo plumbers in her apartment. Immediatelyafter walking in the door, one of the plumbers turns into a zombie. He attacks the other plumber (a younger guy,named Harper). Michael is able to pullthe older plumber off and get him out the door. Michael and Harper barricade themselves in the apartment.

The apartment complex is u-shaped, so they’re able tocommunicate with the other occupants of the complex. However, the zombies are drawn to sound, sothey can’t talk to each other too much without drawing the attention of thezombies. Every time they try to discusssome sort of plan with the others, a pack of zombies flood the complex.

This movie had an interesting take on zombies…although theyweren’t really zombies, in that you didn’t have to die for the infection totake place, and they could run. It waskind of like 28 Days Later in thatrespect, but with a big difference. Aninfected person would not actually turn into the zombie-like creature unlesstheir heart rate increased to a certain level (if one wanted, they couldcompare this to a zombie version of Speed). There was a radio broadcast early in themovie that made mention of a possible cure, so the infected tried to stay calmas long as possible, in the hopes that a cure would come before they turned.

I kind of enjoyed that aspect of it. You had infected people trying to find waysto keep their heart rate down. Onecharacter tried meditation. Anothercharacter’s wife was infected, so he kept her on a steady diet ofsedatives.

The zombies looked good. Very creepy and menacing. Iparticularly liked their eyes, which where completely white. It made for a disturbing look.

That’s the good. Nowthe bad.

I hated Michael. Hated him from the very beginning. I’ve read a handful of reviews that described him as “lovestruck”. I describe him as useless. Everything was about Gabi. “Gabi this” and “Gabi that”. For the majority of the movie, he wasparalyzed in his decision making, because all he could think about wasGabi. He and Harper had literally justshoved a zombie out of the apartment door when they heard a banging at thatexact same door. Michael rushed to openthe door, convinced that it was Gabi. Harper had to hold him back. Heovercame this as the movie progressed, but by that time it was too late. I was already thoroughly entrenched in myhatred of Michael by the time he came around. I could appreciate what he did, but I still couldn’t like him.

I have one more nitpicky point. The movie is called Berlin Undead, but the creatures weren’t actually undead.

This movie was pretty short, clocking in at a little over anhour. And the last 10 minutes or so werepretty good. But it wasn’t a greatmovie. It was decent, and I enjoyedparts of it, but it wasn’t a great movie. But it wasn’t terrible, either. And, in a world filled with terrible zombie movies, that has to countfor something.

Rating: 2.5/5

Maniac

2012-01-04T18:42:00.000-05:00

I usually hear this movie mentioned in the same breath as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. I don’t think that I necessarily enjoyed Henry, but it was a good movie. So I thought I would give this one a shot.

After watching it, I can see why they’re mentionedtogether. They both had the same feel tothem: less scary and more unnerving. More like a documentary than a normal horror movie. They both are extremely raw, and unsettlingwith their intimate brutality.

The story is simple: Frank Zito is a lonely man. His mother was a prostitute, and she abusedhim. She died in a car wreck years ago,but he has never been able to escape her grip on his life. So he kills women, scalps them, and puts themon his ever-increasing collection of mannequins in his small apartment. He keeps one mannequin in his bed, who hetalks to as if she was his mother. Whenhe tires of that particular mannequin, he kills another woman, scalps her, andputs her hair on another mannequin.

Eventually, he meets Anna, a photographer. They go on a couple of dates for some reason(they don’t really talk about why she has agreed to go on these dates). He meets some of her friends at a photoshoot, and he kills one of them. Becausethat’s what he does.

The love story element of this movie bothered me quite abit. It felt extremely forced (the lovestory element of Henry, on the otherhand, felt very real and organic), which hurt the movie. It’s a complex movie, with a complex leadcharacter, which made the love story seem even more ridiculous. It’s like they shoehorned this storyline intoan otherwise well thought-out and realized story. I don’t understand it at all.

I also had a major problem with the ending. [SPOILER ALERT…even though this movie cameout in 1980] Frank had gone on a killingspree spanning a few days and several bodies. He terrified an entire city. Andyet, when the police are finally tipped-off, they send two cops to his apartment(one of whom appears to be comfortably in his 60s). They bust in the door, and find him on hisbed, stabbed through the stomach by a sword. Instead of checking his pulse, they shrug their shoulders andleave. When Frank opens his eyes at theend, instead of being shocked, I was just mad at the ineptness of thepolice. [END SPOILER]

There was one scene that was more popular than others, so Iwould be remiss not to mention it. Thatscene would be when a character referred to as “Disco Boy” on IMDB (played byspecial effects wizard Tom Savini) has his head blown off by a 12 gauge shotgunat close range. It was glorious: insane,brutal, and very realistic (Savini served in Vietnam and used his experiencethere to create as accurate a depiction as possible). It was pretty shocking, even though I knew itwas coming.

It wasn’t an amazing movie, but it was really good. Like Henry,I can’t say that I enjoyed it, but I’m glad I watched it. Again, it was in the same vein as Henry (Maniac came out 6 years prior to Henry), but it wasn’t nearly as good. So I guess I would say, “If you can onlywatch one serial killer movie that makes you feel pretty dirty, make it Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. But, if you have the stomach to watch two,make the other one Maniac.” Still, it was very well done, and extremelywell-acted (after seeing Joe Spinell in this movie, I’ll never watch Rocky the same way again). It was pretty disturbing and very unsettling.

Notable actors: Joe Spinell, Tom Savini

Rating: 3.5/5

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

2012-01-02T18:00:00.002-05:00

I read a favorable review about this movie yesterday, so I looked it up on Netflix, where it is currently available to stream. So, after watching the Cowboys lay an egg against the Giants last night, I went home and fired it up. And I'm glad I did.

This movie takes the "hillbillies in the woods killing college students" genre (like Wrong Turn) and flips it around. Here, we follow the hillbillies: Tucker (played by the always tremendous Alan Tudyk) and Dale (played by Tyler Labine) as two sweet, well-meaning hillbillies on their way to their new fixer-upper vacation cabin. On the way up, they run across a group of college students on their way to a weekend of drinking and debauchery. The college students are creeped out by Tucker and Dale.
After arriving at their destination, one of the college kids tells a story of "The Memorial Day Massacre", where a group of hillbillies tortured and killed a group of college students. Only one person survived. This story puts everyone on edge...until one person suggests that they go skinny-dipping. So they all run off to the lake. The very lake where Tucker and Dale are currently fishing in their boat. One of the girls sees them, slips, and falls into the lake. Dale rescues her and brings her onto their boat. The other college students see this, and assume he is kidnapping her (Tucker screaming, "We got your friend!" certainly doesn't help matters).

That's where the fun starts. The college students think that Tucker and Dale have kidnapped their friend, and try to devise a way to rescue her. They are led by Chad, who is gets more and more sadistic as the movie goes on.

The rest of the movie is a series of misunderstandings between the two groups. The college kids try to rescue their friend, but, through their own clumsiness, they keep getting killed in extremely violent and bloody ways.

Of course, to the outside world, it appears as though Tucker and Dale have been on a killing spree. This comes up when a cop appears and Tucker tries to explain what has happened. "Officer, we've had a doozy of a day."

There's also a terrific scene were Tucker appears to be chasing one of the students through the woods with a chainsaw, but he's really just running away from a swarm of bees.

This was a very funny and creative take on the redneck slasher genre. I have to admit, even with the good reviews I had read, I wasn't expecting great things. I have only seen a handful of great horror comedies: most of them seem content to just parody certain scenes in horror movies. I was hoping for something good, but was bracing myself for something extremely cheesy. Thankfully, I was wrong. I'm sure this will become one of my new favorite movies, and will add it to the list of great horror comedies that I will recommend to anyone who will listen (right now, that list is Shaun of the Dead, Severance, and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon).

I recommend this to anyone looking for a good horror comedy, especially if you're familiar with the subgenre of backwoods killers.

Also, as if you needed another reason to watch this movie...Katrina Bowden as Allison, the girl who Dale saves.

Notable actors: Alan Tudyk (Firefly, Dodgeball, 3:10 to Yuma, Arrested Development) , Tyler Labine (Reaper, Rise of the Planet of the Apes), Katrina Bowden (30 Rock)
Slightly smaller actors: Jesse Moss & Chelan Simmons (both were in Final Destination 3)

Rating: 5/5

Here's the redband trailer:

Tale of Two Sisters, The Bad Seed

2011-12-31T01:11:00.002-05:00

A Tale of Two Sisters

This movie follows two sisters (naturally), their distant father, and their overbearing, abusive, and possibly psychotic stepmother.
This is a pretty hard movie to give a plot synopsis of. The sisters move out into the family's house in the country. The sisters are convinced that their stepmother hates them and is planning something nefarious. The stepmother has reason to believe that the sisters (one of them, in particular) hates her and wish ill upon her. Before too long, there are strange happenings in the house: visions of a girl begin appearing in the house. Bloody bags being drug through the house are there one minute and gone the next.
So, basically, it's a haunted house movie. That's a fairly lazy comparison, as there are a lot of things going on in this movie, but it's the only comparison I can make without giving too much away.

This was a slow moving/developing movie. It took a while to set up, and I was a little bored at the beginning. But, after it got going, it roped me in. It really drew me into the world they had created, which is what is needed to really enjoy this movie. I can't say that I loved it, but I liked it. If you have a little bit of time on your hands and want to lose yourself in a movie, this isn't a bad choice.

Rating: 4/5

The Bad Seed

In my experience, classic horror movies can go one of two ways: they can still hold up and be enjoyable (Psycho, Bride of Frankenstein, etc.), or they can feel extremely dated and cheesy (The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Dracula). Thankfully, this one leans a little bit more towards the former. While I wouldn't put it in the category of Psycho or Bride of Frankenstein, it was still a very good movie. Of course, my only hope was that it would be better than The Good Son, so it definitely exceeded my expectations.

The plot is easy enough: a woman (Christine) has a daughter (Rhoda). The woman slowly comes to the realization that her daughter is an evil creature, capable of murder, and incapable of feeling. She doesn't want to believe it. It is, after all, her daughter. How could her own daughter be capable of such unfeeling evil? How does she act on this information?

The set-up is easy enough. After all, the movie is called The Bad Seed. Even if I didn't know what it was about before I started watching, the title would have tipped me off. Rhoda is convinced of killing one of her classmates over a penmanship award. Christine struggles with the information as she learns more about it: we immediately know that she is guilty. The gardener at their apartment (Leroy) knows, too. He claims that he knows that she is "mean" because he is also "mean". Leroy does not meet a friendly end at the hands of young Rhoda.

All in all, it was a good movie. Enjoyable throughout. And it had a very dark ending. I thought it was dark watching it recently: I can't imagine what the reaction to it was in 1956.

Rating: 4.5/5

Merry Christmas

2011-12-28T21:23:00.002-05:00

To get in the spirit of Christmas, I decided to watch some Christmas movies. That list almost always includes It's a Wonderful Life, Bad Santa, Ernest Saves Christmas, A Christmas Story, Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer, Miracle on 34th Street, Pinky & The Brain Christmas, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and others. But this year I thought I would check out a couple other movies to see if they would be added to that list.

Silent Night, Deadly Night

This movie starts with a family visiting their father/grandfather in a nursing home. Apparently he had not talked in a very long time. The parents leave the room, leaving Billy alone with his grandfather. His grandfather can talk, and he tells Billy that Santa rewards children who have been good. But, if children have been bad (even once during the year), then Santa will punish them. It freaks him out, and he leaves.
Meanwhile, someone dressed up in a Santa costume robs a convenience store and kills the clerk. He leaves the store, and breaks down in the middle of the road. Billy's family comes across him on the road, and they stop to help him. He shoots Billy's father and mother, while Billy flees, hiding in the bushes. He is extremely scarred from these events, and he ends up in an orphanage.
He grows up into someone who is still freaked out by Santa. He ends up working in a store, and, through a series of circumstances, is forced to play Santa. This does not end well.

He kills everyone who was working at the store (saying things like "Punish!" and "Naughty!"), then ventures out into the city, killing people who have been naughty. Of course, this usually involves sex, so there is quite a bit of nudity (of course there is...it's an 80s slasher movie).

So there is a lot of blood, a lot of nudity, and quite a few laughs (most of them over ridiculous things...like a deaf priest getting shot in the back).
Last but not least...there was a bit more rape than I was comfortable with in a Christmas movie.

All in all, not a terrible movie. I mean, it was terrible, but it was also pretty enjoyable. I'd watch it again.

Notable actor sighting: Linnea Quigley

Rating: 3.5/5

Silent Night, Zombie Night

It's a few days until Christmas in LA, and there are zombies. We follow two cops, who have been longtime partners (Frank and Nash), and Frank's wife (Sarah), who has been cheating on Frank with Nash. So Frank and Nash hate each other, while they both love Sarah. And, of course, zombies.

There's not much to this movie. They're dealing with their personal stuff, and they kill zombies. At some point, some survivalist types show up in their Hummer, blasting zombies. Apparently they're holing up at the airport, and they're gathering up as many survivors as they can find. One of the people involved is a pretty short woman, and she runs more awkward than anyone I have ever seen. How she had survived as long as she did was a miracle. So that was pretty funny.

They also had two different types of zombies: "roamers" and "runners" (or something along those lines). The roamers were normal zombies: slow, shambling flesh eaters. The runners behaved more like the zombies in 28 Days Later: fast and relentless. They have a scene where they talk about the differences: something about the runner zombies having something attached to their brains. They didn't expand on it too much, but it sounded like it could have been alien in nature. Like I said, they didn't expand on it too much, so I could just be reading too much into it. Either way, I thought it was pretty cool that they had two different kinds of zombies, and that they had a distinction between them. It was very well thought out.

It was an enjoyable movie. Very low budget, but the zombies looked pretty cool, and it was very well done. I recommend it.

Rating: 4/5

Midnight Meat Train, Wrong Turn 4

2011-11-03T00:11:00.003-04:00

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

2011-11-01T21:48:00.004-04:00

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

Favorite Horror Movies

2011-10-31T20:25:00.003-04:00

In honor of Halloween, I have decided to list some of my favorite horror movies. So here are two lists: the first is comprised of my favorite older horror movies, while the second is comprised of my favorite newer horror movies. I went with a top 5 classics and top 10 modern, because I make the rules around here.

If anyone is actually reading this thing, I would encourage you to comment with your own favorites.

The Classics Division:

5. The Bride of Frankenstein

4. Nightmare on Elm Street

3. Halloween

2. Night of the Living Dead

1. Psycho

The Modern Classics Division:

10. Scream

9. The Orphanage

8. Colin

7. 28 Days Later

6. Severance

5. Shaun of the Dead

4. Amityville Horror

3. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

2. Dawn of the Dead

1. Quarantine

I know I’m missing some (I feel like Trick R Treat should be somewhere in the Modern Classics), but, overall, I think they’re pretty good lists.

Cyrus, Rubber, Trick R Treat, Severance

2011-10-27T20:02:00.001-04:00

Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer

I saw this movie in Best Buy a couple weeks ago, and I thought it looked interesting, so I grabbed it from Netflix.

It was a decent movie, but not great by any stretch of the imagination.

In this movie, we follow Maria (played by Danielle Harris), who works for a show called Last Steps, in which she goes to places of notable murders and interviews people. She goes to a small town for a story on Cyrus, “The County Line Cannibal”. She finds a man named Emmett (played by Lance Henriksen) who knows a lot about the life of Cyrus. After we get his backstory, we see some of the murders.

The more Emmett talks, the more we realize that he knows a lot more details than he probably should.

Like I said, it was a decent movie, but it never really pulled me in. It seems like they were going for a specific mood, but I don’t think they were quite able to capture it. Danielle Harris and Lance Henriksen were great, but the guy who played Cyrus (Brian Krause) wasn’t great, and that kind of hurt the movie.

When I watched this movie, all I could think of was how much better Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was.

One final note: it says that this movie was based on a true story, but I haven’t been able to find out what story that is. I’m pretty sure it’s “Based on a true story” in the same way that The Strangers was based on a true story. Which, in this case, would mean that there once was a serial killer who lived in a rural area.

Rating: 2.5/5

Rubber

I had actually started watching this movie about a month ago, but I just wasn’t in the right mood for it. I’m not sure I was in the right mood for it this time, either, but I watched the whole thing. So that’s something.

Rubber follows a tire named Robert (I know it’s his name based on the synopsis…I don’t think they ever actually say it in the movie) who can explode objects (bottles, animals, human heads, etc.) through telekinesis. It rolls through a town, exploding everything it comes across.

There’s a whole “movie-within-a-movie” thing going on here, which is pretty funny. I thoroughly enjoyed the dialogue, and the acting was fantastic. I only recognized a couple actors (David Bowe and Charley Koontz), although there were a couple more that I’m sure would be recognizable to others (Wings Hauser, Roxane Mesquida and Stephen Spinella).

Overall, it was a really bizarre movie, but with enough funny moments to keep me interested in it. I doubt I’ll ever watch it again, but I’m glad I actually sat down and watched it this once.

Rating: 2.5/5

I had seen these next two movies before, but I rewatched them this past week, so I thought I’d throw them up here.

Trick R Treat

An anthology of horror stories, all taking place in a small town on Halloween.

I think I liked it better the second time around. It’s a terrific movie, and it’s extremely well done. Great stories. Great actors. And it’s legitimately creepy at times. There aren’t many likable characters in the movie, but it still works. If you haven’t seen this yet, you definitely need to watch it.

Notable actors: Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker, Brian Cox, Tahmoh Penikett, Leslie Bibb

Rating: 5/5

Severance

A British horror/comedy, which follows a group co-workers who head to a lodge in Hungary for a team-building weekend. They start hearing things and seeing glimpses of people outside of the lodge. And, eventually, people start dying.

It’s fantastic. It’s really funny, but there’s also a fair amount of gore and tense moments. They mix comedy with the slasher genre (as well as some scenes that would actually fit really well in the torture-porn genre) extremely well. The characters are funny, but also very human.

It’s never an easy task to mix genres, but they do it to perfection here.

Notable actors: Danny Dyer, Toby Stephens

From Hell, Chromeskull

2011-10-18T23:38:00.000-04:00

From Hell

The story of Jack the Ripper, as imagined by Alan Moore. In this version, we find out who Jack the Ripper is...and we find out that it may have been a little more than just one man acting alone.

This is, of course, a big budget movie. The headliners in the movie are Johnny Depp and Heather Graham (both of whom are fantastic). There are also a couple other recognizable actors in this movie: Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggins) and Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid) were the two that really jumped out at me.

I enjoyed it. It was a unique take on an old story, and it looked great. It really drew me in to the world they had created.

Rating: 4/5

Chromeskull: Laid to Rest 2

I watched the first movie in this series (Laid to Rest) a year or so ago. I enjoyed it for what it was...a pretty standard slasher movie. This guy was high tech, mounting a video camera on his shoulder to tape his kills, locking his victims in coffins and communicating with them by text message, etc. He never talked, and you never saw his face...he always wore a chrome mask, which I assumed was because he had a messed up face.
The killing was violent, graphic and quick (well, quick provided it wasn't one of his preordained victims...in which case it was slow).

This one was kind of along the same lines...but not as good. The "not as good" part mainly comes because the acting was terrible, the script wasn't great, and Brian Austin Green was prominently involved (seriously. That guy is terrible).
In this movie, Chromeskull isn't a one-man killing machine. He has an entire organization behind him. Brian Austin Green was one of his cronies, but he wasn't happy just helping out. He wanted to join in on the killing. So he does. Which doesn't make Chromeskull happy. It all goes downhill from there.

Stake Land

2011-10-15T22:49:00.002-04:00

With my baseball team (the Tigers) playing game 6 of the ALCS tonight, I wasn't planning on watching a horror movie. But a 9 run third inning by the Rangers is probably going to change that.
For now, I'll review a movie I watched a couple nights ago.

Stake Land

This showed up as a "you might like this movie" on Netflix. So I grabbed it.
You know what? They were right. They usually are.
This is a vampire movie that feels more like a post-apocalyptic zombie movie...all scorched earth and undead things roaming around. The big difference, of course, is that vampires can't come out during the day.
I don't remember them ever saying what caused it, but the movie begins with the world being overrun with vampires. We follow Martin as he is getting ready to leave with his family, only to watch his family get killed, and himself only surviving because a man (simply known as Mister) comes by and saves him. Martin begins traveling with Mister, and Mister shows him how to kill a vampire, and how to survive in general.
They pick up a couple of people along the way: a nun (Sister), a pregnant country singer (Belle), and a Marine (Willie). They are trying to make their way to New Eden, a place in Canada that is supposed to be vampire-free.
But vampires aren't the only thing they need to worry about. There is a fanatical religious group that calls themselves The Brotherhood, and is fronted by the sadistic Jebedia Loven, who believe that the vampires are a plague brought down by God.

The vampire behave more like zombies than vampires. They have one goal: to feed. They don't think. They don't feel. They can be killed in the standard vampire ways: stake through the heart, decapitation, and sunlight (although the only one we really see is the stake through the heart).

The movie moves a little slow in parts, but I think it works well. It sets a good mood overall. The music works really well for that mood, as well. Lots of piano. Pretty stark. It fits the feeling and mood of the movie perfectly.

Overall, I really liked it. It was a little different for a vampire movie, but it worked really well. There were some parts that seemed a little clumsy, but, overall, it worked.
There was one thing that threw me off. One of the cowriters of the movie was Nick Damici, who also played Mister. Mister is great at killing vampires, and he's always cool, calm and collected. So, basically, he's supposed to be a really cool character. And that character was played by the guy who wrote him. That just seemed a little cheap to me. But it doesn't distract from the movie too much. Just seemed a little odd. Then again, Sylvester Stallone co-wrote for the Rambo and Rocky series...but Damici is no Stallone.

There were a few people in the movie that I recognized. Danielle Harris (Rob Zombie's Halloween series, Hatchet II) played Belle, Kelly McGillis (Top Gun, Witness) played Sister, and Michael Cerveris (one of The Observers from Fringe) played Jebedia Loven.

Rating: 4.5/5

The Rangers are now up 12-4. Guh. Guess it's horror movie time.

Urban Legends, Ripper, Village of the Damned

2011-10-08T16:49:00.000-04:00

Urban Legend

It's an interesting take on the slasher genre: someone is killing college students (at Pendleton University) in the manner of urban legends.
People fight. People die. The ones that aren't dead try to figure out who is behind the killings before they die. There's really not much to it, but I think it's a fresh take on the genre. I really like it.

There are a handful of big names in this movie: Joshua Jackson, Rebecca Gayheart, Tara Reid, Jared Leto, and Robert Englund.
There are also some other, not-so-big names in this movie: Loretta Devine (who plays the Foxy Brown loving security guard), Alicia Witt (better known for her role at the clarinet player in Mr. Holland's Opus), Brad Dourif, and Danielle Harris. My favorite connection here is Dourif and Harris. Dourif played Harris' father in the Rob Zombie Halloween series. And, while they never share screen time here, I still liked that they were in the same movie.

Rating: 4/5

Urban Legends: Final Cut

This movie is a sequel in name only. The only character who shows up from the first movie is Loretta Devine, who is now working as a security guard at a new school.
This movie takes place at a film school. I can't remember the name, but I guess it's not really important. The main character can't figure out what her senior film thesis should be. But, after talking with Devine's character, she decides to make a movie where someone kills people in the manner of urban legends. Shortly thereafter, a friend of hers is said to have committed suicide, but she believes otherwise. As she begins work on her movie, her friends (and crew members) start being murdered. Although, unlike the first movie, they're not being killed in the manner of urban legends (except for one).

I don't like this one quite as well as the original, but it was still an enjoyable movie. I thought it ended really well.

Random actor sighting: Eva Mendes, Anthony Anderson, Joey Lawrence

Rating: 3.5/5

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary

Another sequel in name only. They reference the events of Pendleton University in passing, but that's about it. No characters from the first two movies show up at all.

The basic plot: the movie starts in the 50s at a dance. Football players drug three girls in order to...well...to do what football players do to girls after they drug them. One refuses her drink, and fights back. She is accidentally killed, and her killer stuffs her in a box in a storage room.
Fast forward to present day. Three girls are having a slumber party, and they talk about Bloody Mary. So, after a pillow fight, one of the girls says "Bloody Mary" three times. They giggle.
The next morning, the girls are missing. As it turns out, some football players drugged them and took them to a cave. Or something. Basically just to pull a prank on them. One by one, the football players start dying in terrible ways. We find out that it's the girl who was killed in the 50s, exacting her revenge.

This was a terrible movie. It was just awful. About the only thing worse than the acting was the script. This was an amazingly terrible movie. At about the 15 minute mark, I just started fast forwarding through the movie, stopping at points to see if it got any better. It never did.

The only person I recognized in this movie was Kate Mara.

Rating: 0/5

Ripper: Letter from Hell

Years before, Molly Keller (AJ Cook from Tru Calling) was the only survivor of a terrible massacre of her friends. She is now in college, and is studying serial killers under a famous FBI profiler. One by one, her classmates start getting murdered in the same manner of Jack the Ripper's kills. By studying Jack the Ripper, the class hopes to find out who the next victim might be, and who the killer is.

This was a fun movie. Not altogether different from most slasher movies, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Rating: 4/5

Village of the Damned

Since this was on Netflix instant watch, I opted for this version over the 1960 original.

In a small town, the entire population loses consciousness at the same time. When they wake up, all the women are pregnant. Then, 9 months later, they all give birth at the same time.
Before too long, it is apparent that these children are not normal. There are a series of deaths, all of them ruled accidents. As it turns out, the children are the spawn of an alien race, and are capable of mind control. As they get older, the children get stranger. They all have white hair, they all hang out together, they show no emotion, and they kill anyone who gets in their way.
The movie turns into a fight between the townspeople and the children. But, as the townspeople find, it's hard to fight against a group of mind-controlling children.

It was an enjoyable movie. The set-up was a little long, but, once it got past the birthing scene, it was really good.

Big name actors in this movie: Christopher Reeve, Mark Hamill and Kirstie Alley

Rating: 4/5

I Know What You Did Last Summer Series

2011-10-04T17:45:00.000-04:00

I had never seen either of these movies, so I did what any normal person would: I bought a pack with both of the movies on Ebay (for the record, I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer doesn't count as a movie in the series, so I didn't watch that one). Both of these were pretty predictable horror movies...pretty much exactly what I expected. But I thoroughly enjoyed them.

Our four main characters are Julie (the good girl), Helen (Julie's best friend), Ray (Julie's boyfriend...he's also supposed to be the poor boy in a rich town, only he doesn't look even close to poor. Of course, when you're played by Freddie Prinze Jr, it's kind of hard), and Barry (Helen's boyfriend. He also is, by far, the biggest jerk in the movie). Helen wins the local beauty contest, and the four of them go out to celebrate. They get drunk and hit a guy. Instead of calling the cops, they throw him into the ocean, presuming him to be dead.
A year later, with all four nursing some sort of guilt, people in the town start getting killed, and the four of them are stalked. They run. They fight. They try to figure out what is going on. And so on.
I will say this for Helen (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar): she's a fighter. Where Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) makes every stupid mistake imaginable, Helen scraps and claws and punches and jumps out of windows...all to try to get away.

The two survivors from the first movie (Julie and Ray) have defeated killed The Fisherman and are back to living their lives. Julie is in college, and Ray is working as a fisherman. Julie and her college friends win a trip to the Bahamas, so they go. Ray tries to make it, but The Fisherman reappears, killing his friend and putting Ray in a coma.
Somehow, some way, The Fisherman follows Julie and her friends to the Bahamas and starts killing people (including Jack Black, who shows up as a stoner). They fight back. And on it goes.
There wasn't much of a difference between this movie and the first one.

Again, there was nothing overly surprising about either of these movies, but I really liked both of them. For a high school slasher movie, you could do a lot worse.

Rating: 4/5

Horror Movies I Have Watched Recently

2011-09-03T16:11:00.001-04:00

It's been a while since I've updated this blog. Really, after the Zombie Prom, I didn't really have any motivation to keep up with it. But I'm still watching horror movies, so I thought I'd throw some more reviews at you.

Dead & Breakfast

This description of this was, "The American Shaun of the Dead." The cast includes David Carradine, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Oz Perkins, Diedrich Bader, Portia de Rossi, and other faces that you would recognize. Knowing those things, I assumed I would like this movie.

I was wrong.

The basic story revolves around a demon that was trapped in a box. It was accidentally released, turning Oz Perkins into Lord of the Zombies. Before long, he had turned the majority of the town into zombies, trapping the majority of the survivors in the bed & breakfast.

It doesn't sound bad...but it is. For some reason, they felt the need to include a country singer to narrate random parts of the story. It was supposed to be funny. It was not.

I enjoyed parts of this movie, but most of it just came off as extremely cheesy and forced.

Rating: 1.5/5

Insidious

I heard this was scary. And, for about 40 minutes, it was. There were creepy scenes, and parts that made me jump. It freaked me out a little.

Then the story took a turn towards the ridiculous, and I couldn't take it seriously after that. Also, this falls into the category of, "Once you see the monsters, it's much less scary." There is actually a scene where the main demon (which looks ridiculous to begin with) is sharpening his claws on a wheel. It's laugh-out-loud funny (it reminded me of the scene in Jeepers Creepers when the demon is sitting at a sewing machine).

This is a movie that starts out with great promise, but it falls apart in a hurry. There are still a handful of creepy moments in the last half of the movie, but they're few and far between.

Rating: 2/5

Monsters

This is really less of a horror movie, and more of a strange love story that takes place in a world with aliens.

The set-up: six years prior to the events of the movie, aliens crash landed in Central America. They are big, tentacled monsters (they basically look like glowing land-octopuses). During the six years, the government was able to quarantine them into an area just south of Texas (called the infected zone).

The story revolves around two people: Andrew (who goes by his last name, Kaulder) and Samantha (who goes by Sam). Kaulder is a photographer who works for Sam's father. Sam was injured south of the infected zone, and Kaulder is tasked with going down and bringing her back to America.

You can probably guess where the story goes.

I loved their characters. It's a sweet, well-written story that takes place in a world that doesn't look altogether different from this one. The cast was perfect, too. There were times when it moved a little slow, but I didn't really mind too much.

Like I said, this wasn't a horror movie, but I watched it because I thought it was one, so I thought I'd review it here.

Rating: 4.5/5

Quarantine 2: Terminal

I loved Quarantine. It is one of my favorite horror movies in recent memory.

So, when I saw that this movie was being released direct to DVD, I tried to temper my expectations. I wanted it to be good, but I wasn't expecting it to be good.

As it turns out, it was decent. This movie takes place on a plane (and then in a terminal), and it runs parallel to the events in the first movie.

There's really not a whole lot to say about it. It's a not-nearly-as-good version of the first movie, but I still found it enjoyable.

Rating: 3/5

Pelt

I watched this because it was set in Kentucky. It follows 7 college-aged students who go hiking somewhere in Kentucky (I don't think they ever said where), and run into murderous inbreds. It's a tale as old as time. This is basically the same movie as Wrong Turn (and countless others), but with less likable characters (seriously...I don't I liked a single person in this movie). And the acting was terrible.

Still, I kind of enjoyed it. I mean, I wasn't expecting anything from this movie other than lots of murder and some gore, and I got that.

If you lower your expectations, you may like it. But you won't love it...that's impossible.

Rating: 2.5/5

I have quite a few more to catch up with, so hopefully I'll get around to doing that soon.

Zombie Prom

2011-05-30T23:12:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post, the Zombie Prom was a tremendous success. Around 150 kids showed up, which far exceeded expectations. I hope this means that we'll do it again next year.

I was slightly discouraged at first. I had spent months putting together a playlist of monster/zombie/sinister songs, only to get 10 minutes into the event and have people start clamoring for Britney Spears, Willow Smith, Ke$ha, "The Electric Slide", and other such songs. So the majority of my playlist was scrapped about 10 minutes in.

Like I said, I was kind of discouraged at first, but, once I settled in, I had a blast. I was able to mix in some of my music with some of the top 40 stuff (Rob Zombie, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Misfits, Parov Stelar, Raveonettes, some horror theme remixes, etc.). Everyone seemed to have a ton of fun.

About halfway through the night, a big thunderstorm hit. It didn't really do any damage, but the lightning made for a great effect.

The people at the Arts Center set up a projector connected to a laptop, which put a bunch of zombie related clips on one of the walls. It was amazing seeing all these kids dancing while zombies appeared on the wall behind them.

So, it was a lot of fun, and I'm really looking forward to doing it again next year. In fact, I hope it comes a little sooner than that.

As promised, here are some pictures. You can find more here (courtesy of Paul Muth) and here (courtesy of Ryan Bowe).

The folks at the Arts Center boarded up the windows and made it look terrific.

Brandon and me, getting ready to start

Me again (I love this pic)

The Zombie King and Queen (they were crowned to my modified version of Nan Vernon's "Love Hurts")

As you can see, there were a lot of kids there, and there were some terrific costumes.

Thanks for all the fun, kids. Let's do it again, real soon.

Return of the Living Dead Series

2011-05-25T23:12:00.001-04:00

The Zombie Prom was this past Saturday. I'll get into it a little more in my next post, but I'll say this here: it was a lot of fun. Around 150 kids showed up, which far exceeded our expectations. The place looked great, and there were some fantastic outfits. I'll post some pictures in the next post.

I watched the entire Return of the Living Dead series on the day before and day of the Zombie Prom. That is an awful lot of Return of the Living Dead in a short period of time. So these will probably be very short reviews.

Return of the Living Dead

This is about the only movie I've ever seen that actually references other zombie movies (or previous knowledge of zombies). The story goes that the events that happened in Night of the Living Dead actually happened. The bodies that were taken were actually sent to a medical supply warehouse on accident, which is where this movie is set. Of course, one of the barrels breaks open, unleashing the plague upon the workers at the warehouse...as well as the dead bodies in the warehouse. One of the bodies comes to life and attacks the workers. But, unlike most zombie movies, a shot to the head doesn't kill them. In fact, nothing seems to kill them. They eventually cremate the body, which kills the zombie...but the ashes end up causing acid rain that reanimate all the corpses in the adjoining cemetery. Of course, all hell breaks loose.
I love this movie. It's funny and crazy and a little strange. It's a little different from your typical zombie movie, but it fully embraces that.

Rating: 5 stars

Return of the Living Dead Part II

Some kids are playing around in the woods at the beginning of this movie, and they find a barrel with a body inside. Like the first movie, it's opened, people get infected, and the dead are reanimated. Not much more to say, except for the fact that two of the main characters from the fist movie reprise their roles in this movie...even though they died in the first movie. Of course, they don't have the names, and they even make mention of it during the course of the movie ("All of this seems like it has happened before,").
There's not much to it...it's a pretty standard zombie movie. But it's a very good zombie movie.

Rating: 4 stars

Return of the Living Dead 3

There are a couple teenagers in love at the beginning of this movie. The father of the boy in love works for the government in a program where they try to reanimate corpses and control them for use in wars (through the help of an exoskeleton and a gun that freezes their brains (which stops them, and allows them to be stored for future use). Of course, this doesn't work. The young couple sees this experiment. They decide to start a new life for themselves, and they ride off on his motorcycle.
Of course, they get in a wreck, and the girl dies. The boy heads back to the lab to reanimate his girlfriend. He does. She starts eating people.
But she's a little different. She doesn't try to eat him (something about their deep connection). She is somehow able to curb her hunger by inflicting pain on herself...so she jabs nails through her hands, and spikes all over her body. It's a little strange.
It goes on like this. They have to fight a small gang (who she bites and turns).
It's good, but not great.

Rating: 4 stars

Return of the Living Dead IV: Necropolis

A group of kids are messing around on their dirt bikes. One falls off and is knocked unconscious. He goes to the hospital...but he is taken out of the hospital, and to a government laboratory that experiments with (you guessed it) the undead. The kids devise a plan to break in and free their friend, which they do...but they also free a bunch of other undead, including a couple that have been fitted for war. The kids fight the zombies.
Some odd things happened in this movie. For one, when a living person has been infected, they just start acting like jerks. In previous movies, they just act sick. So I don't know where that started.
Even stranger, in this movie, a shot to the head can kill the undead. In 1-3, nothing (short of burning the body completely) can kill the zombies. But a bullet to the head can now kill them, and they never explain why.
It's an enjoyable movie. Not the greatest in the series, but it was fun.

Rating: 3 stars

Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave

The survivors from Necropolis are now in college. Somehow the stuff that reanimates the dead gets put into pill form, and is sold as a kind of Ecstasy (instead of "E" it's called "Z", because it puts the user in a zombie-like state for a short period of time). The only problem is that it's not just a short period of time...it eventually will turn anyone who uses it into zombies.
The big scene at the end of this movie involves a rave, where most of the people have been taking Z. So they all turn into zombies, and it gets a little out of hand. Again, head shots can kill the zombies, so the humans begin killing the zombies, but there are too many of them. Cops come, and missiles are fired. Big fun.

I'll put this one on the same level as Necropolis. Not great, but an enjoyable movie.

Rating: 3 stars

Dead & Buried, Dylan Dog

2011-05-18T23:22:00.000-04:00

Dead & Buried

This is a little different kind of zombie movie. First of all, it's more of a mystery than a horror movie. We see a number of people getting killed in a small town by emotionless mobs. The bodies are found later, and all of them have been badly brutalized. In fact, we see a man being burned alive in the very first scene. The local sheriff is trying to figure out what's going on. The rest of the town seems to be in on it, but the sheriff is left in the dark. So he starts investigating the murders, and things keep getting stranger and stranger.
And then we start seeing the dead bodies from before...only now they're members of the town.
So they're zombies, but not modern day zombies. They're basically Haitian zombies (think White Zombie or Sugar Hill) as they serve the commands of their zombie master. However, they don't shuffle around and look brainless like Haitian zombies usually look...they are functioning members of society...they just happen to kill people when their master tells them to.

It's not a fast-moving movie, but it's an eerie movie. It's one that demands your time and attention. It's a little different for a zombie movie, but it's fantastic. It kind of feels like a Twilight Zone episode.

Random actor sighting: Robert Englund

Rating: 4 stars

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

This movie was playing at the dollar theater, so Daniel and I went to go see it tonight. I didn't really know what to expect, but I hadn't heard good things about it (it's currently at 3% over at Rotten Tomatoes). Needless to say, I wasn't expecting much.
This movie was a little...confusing. I didn't read the graphic novels, so maybe they nailed the feel of it. To me, it felt like they were going for a noir feel (the main character was a P.I. and he did a voice over and everything), but they didn't quite capture it. It was pretty goofy at times, but I'm not sure they always meant it to be goofy. I don't know...it's hard to describe.
The plot: Dylan Dog used to work as a kind of consultant for the legions of the undead living in New Orleans (vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc.), but something went wrong, he got kicked out, and now he's a P.I. Except he took a case that puts him smack-dab in the middle of that world again.
Also, his assistant was killed and came back as a zombie (he was the best part of the movie, by the way...I loved that guy).

Anyway, I enjoyed it. I was talking to Daniel afterwards, and we came to the conclusion that we liked it...but we're not sure if we can ever really recommend it to anyone. It's not a serious movie, and it's not even necessarily a good movie...but it's a pretty fun movie. If you're just looking for something entertaining, you could do a lot worse than this movie.

Rating: 3 stars

Night of the Creeps, Dawn of the Dead

2011-05-17T20:33:00.001-04:00

The Zombie Prom is this Saturday, so I dubbed this week to be Zombie Week. I'm only going to watch zombie movies in the days leading up to the prom.

Night of the Creeps

A zombie comedy. The movie starts in the 50s, on an alien ship. A vial gets released into space, and eventually ends up on Earth. The vial contains slug-like creatures who jump into people's mouths, kill them, then reanimate them. Luckily this only happened with one person in the 50s, and they were able to freeze him before anything happen.
Fast forward to the 80s, and his body is kept near a college. To try to get into a fraternity, two college kids break into the facility and release the body. The body's head explodes, releasing the slugs into the unsuspecting world.
They start jumping into college kids, and pretty soon the town is overrun with frat zombies. A detective, a college kid and his love interest try to stop the horde, armed with guns and a flame thrower.

It's a fun movie. Good characters. Funny lines. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Random actor sighting: David Paymer

Rating: 4 stars

Dawn of the Dead

This is, of course, a classic in horror cinema. Night of the Living Dead may have given birth to the modern zombie movie, but Dawn of the Dead took it to another level. On many lists, this is considered the greatest zombie movie of all time.
But not on my list.
I can understand it's place in history, and I can understand what it means to the genre as a whole. I understand it, and I can appreciate it...but I can't rank it at the top of the list. It spawned a generation of zombie movies, and that's amazing...but a number of those movies are better than this one.
For one, it kind of suffers from the 70s era of filmmaking, when scenes were drawn out longer than they should be, and the movie kind of dragged along as a result. I also had a problem with the characters. I didn't really like any of them. They also didn't really have much of a progression. It's almost like they completely changed how the characters were supposed to act halfway through the movie, but didn't really have any lead-up to it. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but that's how it felt.

All of this sounds like I hate it. I don't hate it. It's a little long and kind of boring in spots, but I still like the movie as a whole (and I love the theme). I can also see why it was so influential. It really did great things for the horror genre, and the zombie subgenre, specifically.

So...I liked it. I can respect it for what it is, but I can't call it the greatest zombie movie ever made. In fact, I have it ranked pretty far below Night of the Living Dead.

Rating: 4 stars

The Hills Have Eyes, Jennifer's Body, Night of the Demons

2011-05-15T22:01:00.001-04:00

The Hills Have Eyes

In keeping with the whole "inbred cannibal" theme, I went with this movie. In this case, "inbred" isn't really accurate. Sure, this family has deformities, but it's due to the nuclear testing site that they were living on. Still, they're crazed cannibals, so it still kind of fits in with the theme of Wrong Turn.
A family is driving through the desert when their tires are blown by a strip of nails thrown down by one of the deformed cannibals. The family, of course, has no idea what caused the blow-out, so they don't know that they should be cautious. Of course, members of the family go in different directions to try to find help. The cannibals descend on the Airstream trailer, and begin picking off the family members (there is an especially grisly and long rape scene). They steal a baby, and the family fights back. Some of them make it out alive, but most of them die.
I enjoyed it. Liked, but didn't love.

Rating: 4 stars

Jennifer's Body

I had heard terrible, terrible things about this movie, so I went in with extremely lowered expectations. Maybe that helped. (Something else that helped? A pint of Trader Joe's Vintage Ale.)
As it turns out, I really liked this movie. Yeah, it was a little cheesy, but, for the most part, it was pretty good. I thoroughly enjoyed Adam Brody's Satanic indie rocker. I thoroughly enjoyed Amanda Seyfried playing the bookish best friend. I thoroughly enjoyed the fact the J.K. Simmons was in it. And, of course, I thoroughly enjoyed Megan Fox as a man-eating demon.
Was it the best movie of all time? No. And maybe I was just in the right mood to watch it, but I really liked this movie.

Rating: 4 stars

Night of the Demons

I hadn't really heard much about this, but it showed up on my Netflix recommendations. From watching Undeclared, I'm a big fan of Monica Keena, so I thought I would check this one out.
Some college kids throw a party in an old mansion that is something of a local legend. The party gets broken up by the cops, but a handful of kids stay behind. They go to the basement and find a bunch of skeletons. One of them bites a girl, and she is quickly overtaken by a demon. Much like zombies, if the demon bites (or kisses) another person, then they will also be overtaken by a demon. So the demon spreads, and slowly most of the group is taken over by demons. The three remaining humans try to fend off the demons throughout the night (they find that if they survive until daylight, they'll be free of the demons...but, if they don't, then the world will be overtaken by these demons). So the humans fight the demons for the remainder of the movie.
It was a fun movie. Not great, but enjoyable. Also, it has a fantastic soundtrack.

Random actor sighting: Shannon Elizabeth, Edward Furlong

Rating: 3 stars

I finished three remixes, and you can listen to them here. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Wrong Turn 3, The Crazies

2011-05-15T00:16:00.000-04:00

Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

So, as it turns out, these movies get less good the further they go along.
This movie starts out with some pointless nudity, and then a bunch of killing. For some reason they decided to make the murder scenes more elaborate in this installation, even though they obviously don't have as big a budget. They use CGI, but not good CGI, so it just looks really cheesy. I have no idea why they would do this.
So, the plot: prisoners are being transported from one prison to another. Instead of taking the main roads (they suspect an escape plot), they take the backroads...which, of course, lead them into the family of cannibals that we know from the first two movies. Except only one of the original family members remains, so he has some new inbreds with him. They stalk and murder the prisoners and the cops that are transporting them.
There is, of course, a love story between one of the cops and a surviving member of the party that is murdered at the beginning of the movie. And a bunch of psychotic prisoners pitted against some insane inbreds.
That sounds like it should be awesome, but it's really not. It's a fairly boring movie, that really adds nothing to the first two.

Rating: 2 stars

The Crazies

I had seen this movie before, but Daniel came over on Friday the 13th, and he had never seen it, so we watched it.
Fantastic movie. There is a lull at about the halfway point, but, for the most part, it's pretty tense the entire way through.
The people in Ogden Marsh start acting - well - crazy. A local walks onto the field during a high school baseball game with a shotgun, and has to be shot dead by the local sheriff. As it turns out, this is not an isolated incident (as we find a little later, when a man locks his wife and child in the house and lights it on fire...then mows the lawn while the house burns). These incidents being to increase over the next few days, and pretty soon the entire town is under quarantine. I can't say much else without giving the entire movie away.
As I mentioned before, it's pretty tense throughout the entire movie, and there are a number of really creepy parts. I really like it.

Rating: 4 stars

Wrong Turn 2: Dead End

2011-05-11T23:06:00.000-04:00

It should be noted that, while I'm watching a ton of horror movies and trying to remix horror themes, my little sister is down in Chattanooga, helping a town that was recently hit with a massive tornado. In short, she's a much better person than I, and you can follow her time in Chattanooga at her blog. I would encourage you to swing by and check it out when you get a free minute.

Now...on to horror movies.

This movie starts with a slutty blonde chick getting part of her face bitten off by a man with three teeth. That really tells you everything you need to know about this movie.

This one takes place in the same area as the last one, and involves the same family of murderous inbreds. They're given more "personality" in this movie...meaning the girl laughs like Baby from House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. Also, you get to see a couple of them having sex (while the woman wears the scalp of a recently murdered girl). You also get to see one of them...um...pleasuring himself. It's lovely.

This movie follows a reality show set to simulate life in a post-apocalyptic world. It's hosted by Henry Rollins (of course it is), who plays an ex-Marine. It's a reality show filled with beautiful people, a couple strange looking ones, and one guy who you just want to punch in the face all the time. Eventually the family find these people and kill/eat most of them. Because that's what they do. However, they decide to kidnap two of them (including the girl who played Pepper in the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the jock from Final Destination 3). I have no idea why they chose these people to kidnap (and not kill), but it doesn't really matter, I guess. The girl is tied up to a chair while the family eats. It's pretty much the exact scene from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I will assume that this was an homage instead of a blatant rip-off.

There's a big final showdown, there is a lot of blood, and it sets up a sequel. Which I will be watching within the next day or two. It was going to be tomorrow, but the Red Wings, once down 3-0 in the series, won the last three games, setting up what is sure to be a fantastic game 7, so I will be watching that instead. But I sense a doubleheader coming up on Friday: Wrong Turn 3 and The Hills Have Eyes. Should be fun.

Anyway, I enjoyed this movie. Not as good as the first (that may have something to do with the extreme lack of Eliza Dushku), but still an enjoyable movie.

Rating: 3 stars

It should be noted that the Zombie Prom is coming up on May 21. That's a week and a half away. If you can make it, please try to. It's going to be a lot of fun. You can find more information (and buy tickets) here.

I have also been working on remixing some horror movie themes. At the moment, I have working remixes for Psycho, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Suspiria. I've been working on them during my lunch break at work. I hope to have at least one more done before the Zombie Prom (at the moment, that theme will probably be Dawn of the Dead, but I'm open to suggestions).

Wrong Turn, Phantasm

2011-05-09T22:35:00.000-04:00

Wrong Turn

I had seen this before, but it had been a while. I decided to watch the rest of the series, so I started with this one.
It is what it is: a slasher movie set in West Virginia, with a family inbreds killing and eating people. Mainly hot people, but people all the same. Eliza Dushku, Desmond Harrington (Quinn from Dexter) and a handful of other people are hunted down by this family. Some of them escape, some don't. It's basically A not-quite-as-interesting version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the entire family is Leatherface.
It's not exactly a groundbreaking movie, but, taken for what it is, it's actually quite enjoyable.

Rating: 4 stars

Phantasm

This movie is always talked about as a classic in independent horror, often mentioned in the same conversations as Suspiria. I liked (but didn't love) Suspiria, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Also, this was supposed to be a quasi-zombie movie, and it had been a while since I've really watched one of those.
For starters, the zombies looked like cloaked Jawas (but without the glowing eyes). Apparently they killed people and chopped off their legs? I'm not sure they ever really addressed this.
I started watching this movie, and kind of stopped paying attention at some point. Basically, there was a funeral home run by an ageless guy (the Tall Man, I believe he was called). He had an altar-ego (the Lavender Woman) who had sex with men, then killed them, then turned them into zombies. One kid kind of knew what was going on, and he was able to talk his brother and the local ice cream man into helping him stop those shenanigans. They confronted the Tall Man or something, and the kid went into a different dimension for a couple seconds or something and saw the Jawas as slaves of the Tall Man.
The movie ended with some kind of "it was a dream...or was it" nonsense, with the ice cream man talking to the kid in front of a fire. It was all very romantic and extremely uncomfortable.

Anyway, this movie was pretty terrible. There were a couple of kind of cool moments, including one where a flying sphere latched onto a guy's face and this happened:

Shortly thereafter a bunch of blood came pouring out of the front, like some kind of deranged spout.

That scene alone made it impossible to give this a 1 star rating...but not by much.

Rating: 2 stars

Trick R Treat

2011-05-07T00:38:00.000-04:00

I didn't really hear anything about this movie prior to its DVD release....and even then I didn't hear much, which is kind of shocking, because there were a number of recognizable faces in this movie (Dylan Baker, Anna Paquin, Tahmoh Penikett, Leslie Bibb, Brian Cox, the fat kid from Bad Santa, etc.).
It was an interesting movie. It followed 5 separate storylines, all involving people from the same block on Halloween night, in a small town in Ohio. All of the stories are interwoven, but not necessarily intertwined. Throughout the movie, we hear this line: "On Halloween night, the line between ours and the demons is thinnest," or something along those lines. And that's what drives this movie...a movie filled with ghouls and demons and serial killers and whatnot. Also, as it turns out, there is no such thing as a good person in small town Ohio. Everyone has a dark secret, and no one really cares about anyone else. It's a movie filled with demons and depravity.
That being said, I really liked it. Even if there weren't any redeeming characters in the movie, it was extremely well done. You could see different parts of the story from the perspective of different characters. It was a creepy movie, but not overly scary.

Here are the two lessons I learned from this movie:
1. Small towns in Ohio are terrifying.
2. Children in masks who do nothing but stand and stare are really creepy.

Rating: 4 stars

Halloween H20 & Resurrection

2011-05-03T23:00:00.000-04:00

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later

Welcome back, Laurie Strode. In this movie we find her twenty years after the events of the first two movies. Having faked her death, she is living in California under the name Keri Tate, and being the headmaster for a private high school. She has a son (played by Josh Hartnett...who has a little of the Michael Myers soulless eyes going on), and he has just turned 17 (the age Laurie was during Michael's first killing spree in Haddonfield). Of course, Michael finds out where she is (by killing the nurse of the late Dr. Loomis and stealing Laurie's files), shows up, and starts killing.
Really, it's the same formula as all the others, but this one feels more tense. More well done...less a sequel just to have another movie. And, of course, it's great to have Laurie back.
It's not as good as the original, but it's still really, really good.

Rating: 4 stars

Unexpected actor sighting: Michelle Williams, Janet Leigh, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Halloween: Resurrection

At the end of H20, we see Laurie chop Michael's head off. Well, as it turns out, that wasn't Michael...it was a paramedic who Michael knocked unconscious and put his mask on. Not being able to live with the guilt, she ends up in a mental institution, which is where we find her at the beginning of this movie. Michael comes back, yada yada, Laurie isn't in the movie anymore. Sad, really.
This movie follows an online reality show. They grab a group of college students, put cameras on them, and have them go into the Myers house to find out "what makes a killer tick". Of course, Michael comes back and starts killing them, but everyone thinks it's a hoax. At the end, they try to make it some sort of commentary on the downfalls of fame, but it falls a little flat, because no one really cares what a kung-fu obsessed Busta Rhymes thinks.
Not as good at H20, but still enjoyable.

Rating: 3 stars

Unexpected actor sighting: Katee Sackhoff ("Starbuck" from Battlestar Galatica), Busta Rhymes, Tyra Banks

The Zombie Prom is coming up (May 21), and I'm working on remixing some horror movie themes (currently working on Psycho and Nightmare on Elm Street, already have one for Halloween). Any suggestions for themes to remix?
Also, I've decided to go with the name of DJ Braineater.

Halloween 4-6

2011-04-30T22:40:00.000-04:00

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

Dr. Loomis is in this movie, but he's the only one that returns from the previous movies. And, unless I'm mistaken, they never really talk about how he escaped the explosion in the hospital from the second movie. Sure, he has some burns, but nothing major.
Anyway, in this movie, Michael returns to Haddonfield to kill his seven year-old niece, Jamie. Laurie (her mother) is gone...apparently presumed dead (although they never say why). She is living with her step family. Her step sister is babysitting her, Michael Myers shows up, lots of people die, but a handful (including Jamie, her step sister, and her adoptive mother) escape. There's kind of a twist at the end, but it wasn't anything major, and it felt pretty forced.
This was pretty boring...nowhere near as good as the first two.

Rating: 2 stars

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

This takes place a year after the events of Halloween 4. Jamie is traumatized...she doesn't talk, and she is in a children's mental institution. She seems to be channeling Michael Myers (by that I mean she draws the things that he is seeing, and she goes into convulsions when he kills).
Basically, this movie is like the fourth one. Michael comes back to kill his niece. He stalks and kills her step sister and her friends. There ends up being a confrontation between Michael and Jamie and Dr. Loomis in the Myers house. It's hard to keep these two movies straight, but I'm pretty sure there's a scene in this one where Jamie calls Michael "Uncle Michael", and he starts to cry. It's fairly ridiculous.
Also, there's some weird love story going on with Jamie and her institutionalized friend. It's very strange.
This is basically the same movie as Halloween 4.

Fun fact: the actress who played Jamie is named Danielle Harris. She went on to play Marybeth in Hatchet II, and Annie in Rob Zombie's Halloween 1 & 2.

Rating: 2 stars

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers

This one takes place 6 years after the events of Halloween 5. Dr. Loomis is retired, and Jamie is pregnant. At the beginning of the movie we see that she has been kidnapped by a group of druids who are helping Michael. Or something. Anyway, she escapes and gives birth to the baby...and then she gets killed by Michael. The baby is found by Tommy Doyle. In case you don't remember, Tommy is the boy that Laurie was babysitting in the first Halloween. Now he's older, and he's kind of a freak. He is also played by Paul Rudd, so that was pretty fun.
Anyway, Tommy lives across from the Myers house, which is now inhabited by the Strodes (Laurie's adoptive parents). Michael comes back to town looking for the baby (the last of his blood line), and he does what he always does: he kills lots of people. Tommy - with the help of one of the Strodes - tries to keep the baby safe. And, of course, Loomis shows up to help.
In the end, we find out that the druids have been controlling Michael all this time, and they've been the ones that have made him kill. Or something.
In case you couldn't tell, this movie was no better than the last two.

Rating: 2 stars

Here's what I learned about the Halloween movies: if there's no Jamie Lee Curtis, it's not a good movie.

Prom Night, Dog Soldiers, Halloween

2011-04-27T22:49:00.000-04:00

Prom Night

Yet another one of those movies that I had heard about, but had never seen. This was as good a time as any to check it out.

It came out 2 years after Halloween, but it seemed much more dated. Maybe it was the clothes. Maybe it was the hair. Or maybe - just maybe - it was the insanely long prom scene with a ton of loud disco. Yeah, that was probably it.

I could see what they were going for, and I can see how a lot of modern movies were influenced by this. As opposed to Halloween, you weren't sure who the killer was (although it was fairly easy to figure it out).

It was fairly entertaining, but not a great movie. Nowhere near on the level of Halloween. However, there are bonus points for the guy who played Lou...the "bad boy" in the movies, and one of the more hideous people I've ever seen.

Rating: 3 stars

Dog Soldiers

I tend to like monster movies, which means I also tend to like werewolf movies. I had heard good things about this movie, so I thought I'd check it out. There were werewolves. There was blood. There was a man with his guts held in by hot glue. There was lots of shooting. Honestly, this is a problem I have with werewolf movies. Even after the characters realize that nothing short of silver bullets will kill the werewolf, they still keep shooting them. I realize that it kind of knocks them back a little, but it does no real damage, and it most cases it does little in the way of slowing them down. It's not just this movie...it's a lot of werewolf movies.

Anyway, this movie was violent and bloody, and ended with a bunch of guys in an old house, shooting at werewolves.

I liked it, but I didn't love it. From everything that I had heard about it, I was expecting to love it. It was enjoyable, but it didn't blow me away. Maybe I needed to be in the right mood for it, but, for now, I'll give it a "Liked It".

Rating: 3 stars

Halloween

It's really not fair to review this along with Prom Night and Dog Soldiers. Those movies were decent. This movie is amazing. I've seen it a handful of times, and it only gets better with each viewing. I would have to rank this movie among my top 5 horror movies of all time (somewhere behind Psycho and Night of the Living Dead). First of all, it just looks amazing. The cinematography is terrific. The soundtrack is perfect. The character of Michael Myers is terrifying in that he has no back story. We don't know exactly why he kills...we don't know how or why he got to that point. We just know that he kills, and that he's relentless in his pursuit, and brutal in his murders. There's the supernatural aspect to the end (how is he still alive?). There's the camera itself: sometimes acting as the eyes of Myers...but not always, so it keeps you on your toes.
It's hard to describe all the reasons why I love this movie. I just know that I do, and I love it more every time.

Rating: 5 stars

After watching Halloween, I realized I had not yet watched the entire series. So I'm doing that now. I'm skipping 2 (which I had recently watched) and 3 (because Michael Myers is not in it, and because it's awful). I doubt my reviews of these will be much past, "Stabbing stabbing stabbing," but we'll see.

Zombie Prom Update: The prom will be taking place at the Danville Community Arts Center on May 21, starting at 8pm. You can visit the page (and buy tickets) here, and you can request songs through the Facebook page.

Scream Series

2011-04-26T18:48:00.001-04:00

Over the past week, I have watched all 4 of the Scream movies.

Scream

Pretty much everyone has seen this movie, so I won't talk too much about it. Watching it now, it's still really good. It doesn't really feel dated or anything. Just a good, smart slasher movie. For better or worse, this really did help to reinvent the genre.

Rating: 5 stars

Scream 2

Great opening (featuring Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett-Smith)...even if that opening involves people acting in a movie theater in a way in which people would never act in a movie theater: people running around in Ghostface masks, fake stabbing people. People chasing each other around. It was a theater experience that I have never seen, and it begs the question of whether Wes Craven has ever actually set foot inside of a theater. Other than that, I really liked it.
This pretty much carries on the same tradition of the first one. The main characters are still there, and they're dealing with a copycat killer (or killers). Randy is still around to spell out the rules for a sequel. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't as good as the original. It's still smart, but there are times when it seems like they're trying to make it too smart...which is a trend that carries forward to the next two movies.

Rating: 4 stars

Unexpected actor sighting: Aside from Epps and Pinkett-Smith, this movie also has Sarah Michelle-Gellar, Timothy Olyphant, Joshua Jackson, Heather Graham, Luke Wilson, Portia de Rossi (Lindsey Bluth!) and Rebecca Gayheart.

Scream 3

This one takes place on the set of one of the Stab movies. Sidney is off in hiding somewhere, but, of course, Ghostface tracks her down and she is forced to rejoin the world. She finds herself smack dab in the middle of more murders, and this time they're taking place on the set of a Stab movie...and the set looks exactly like Woodsboro, complete with a recreation of Sidney's house. People start dying in the same order as the script. The only problem is the fact that there are at least 4 different copies of the script running around, so no one knows who the next victim is.
It's good. And even if Randy's ominous line of, "Anyone, including the main character, can die. This means you, Sid. I'm sorry," never really leads to anything, it's still a darn good movie.

Rating: 4 stars

Unexpected actor sighting: Parker Posey (always one of my favorites), Emily Mortimer, Scott Foley, Lance Henriksen, Jenny McCarthy, Carrie Fisher and Jay & Silent Bob.

Scream 4

We went and saw this last Friday, which was kind of fun, because there was a tornado warning while we were in the theater, which led to thoughts of, "We might die while watching Scream 4." It was a risk I'm glad we took.

The openings of these movies are always fantastic (Drew Barrymore in the first, Epps/Pinkett-Smith in the second, and Cotton Weary in the third), and this one was more of the same. I loved the opening. This movie is almost worth seeing just for the opening alone.

Thankfully, the rest of the movie was good, too. It had been 10 years (and 7 Stab movies) since the events of the third movie, and Sidney is back in Woodsboro to promote her new self-help book (her agent is played by the terrific Alison Brie, which I loved). Of course, Ghostface shows up and begins killing. Dewey and Gale are still there....married, but facing some issues. There is also an influx of high school kids, including Sidney's cousin.

There are moments where it seems like it's trying to be a bit too smart, but it's never really too distracting. Also, as I covered before, you kind of knew what you were going to be getting with this movie. When a new movie in a series comes out 10 years after the last one, red flags are (naturally) raised. Luckily, there is no cause for concern in this case. While none of the sequels quite measure up to the original, they're all still darn good movies, and this is the same. A good solid slasher movie. Sometimes, that's all you need.

Rating: 4 stars

Unexpected actor sighting: Kristin Bell (love her), Anna Paquin, Rory Culkin, Adam Brody and Anthony Anderson.

House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, Event Horizon

2011-04-17T23:10:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed Rob Zombie's Halloween movies, so I thought I'd give his first couple a shot.

House of 1,000 Corpses

This follows two couples traveling through America in search of odd roadside attractions (the two guys - Rainn Wilson being one of them - are writing a book about these attractions). They find a place run by a large man dressed as a clown who goes by the name of Captain Spaulding who has a "death tour", where they learn about a local serial killer by the name of Doctor Satan, who was (allegedly) killed. In their attempt to find the tree of Doctor Satan (where he was hung), they get a flat tire, and end up at the house of the Firefly family. When they arrive, we already see one of the family members (Otis) torturing a group of cheerleaders.
It's all downhill from here.
The couples are - of course - terrorized and tortured at the hands of this sadistic family. There are Satanic rituals, and a ton of references to past serial killers (in one particularly rough scene, we see Otis skin someone and wear their skin, a la Ed Gein).
It's a rough movie to get through. There were a ton of very graphic and disturbing scenes.
It was kind of a boring movie at points, with the main plot seeming to be, "family tortures people for a couple hours." And the family themselves didn't seem to have any personality beyond, "murderous." It wasn't a bad movie, but there wasn't much to it.

Rating: 3 stars

The Devil's Rejects

This is the sequel to House of 1,000 Corpses. It follows the same family...but they seemed to have gained a personality. Otis isn't just a murderous psychopath...he actually has a sense of humor. Sure...he's still a terrible person, but at least he was kind of funny about it.
This movie follows the family on the run. The cops raid the family home, and they spend the rest of the movie holed up in a hotel with a traveling band. They mess around with them...a little murder, a little torture, etc. It's the Firefly family way.
More characters are introduced here, too. We see the cop who is hunting them down...the brother of a cop murdered in the first movie. We see his morals begin deteriorating throughout the course of the movie, in his tireless attempt to bring the family to justice.
There's more going on in this movie. More of a plot. More action. Less senseless butchering. And, like I said, the family (especially Otis) gained a personality.
Because of this, I liked this movie a lot more than House of 1,000 Corpses. In fact, I think I loved it.

Rating: 5 stars

Event Horizon

I remember watching this movie a long time ago, but I didn't remember much about it.
It follows a rescue team (and a scientist) boarding the Event Horizon...a ship that had gone missing 7 years prior. Everyone on the ship was dead, but there seemed to be something else on board. The rescue team starts seeing things...bloody bodies, suffering relatives, etc. There are some pretty creepy scenes.
I can't really say much more without giving away a ton of the movie.
I liked it, but it wasn't as scary as I had heard. Like I said, there were some pretty creepy scenes, but nothing that came close to the stuff in House of 1,000 Corpses. Overall, it was an enjoyable sci-fi horror movie.

Rating: 3 stars

Pontypool

2011-04-15T20:02:00.000-04:00

I saw a preview for this a while ago, and I thought it looked pretty cool. After the debacle that was The Horde, I was a little wary about watching this one. Another low-budget zombie movie? I decided to give it a shot, anyway.
This isn't your typical zombie movie. First of all, they're not actually zombies (it's really more mind control than anything else), but they do act like zombies, so it gets thrown into that category. Second of all, you really don't see many zombies. There are a couple of scenes towards the end, but the majority of this movie takes place in a radio station, with just 3 characters.
They managed to take those three characters (a washed-up radio shock-jock DJ doing local news, his producer, and his technical manager) in that limited setting and make a tense and frightening thriller. It starts slow...there are unconfirmed reports of a riot. Their "chopper reporter" calls in to keep them abreast of the situation, and eventually starts giving reports of murder and cannibalism. You can probably guess where it goes from there.
The ending wasn't great, but the rest of the movie was fantastic. I was surprised by how much I liked this movie.

Rating: 4 stars

The Horde

2011-04-13T22:46:00.000-04:00

I can't remember where I heard about this movie, but just look at that cover. It looks fantastic, right? Well, as The Zombie Diaries showed, you can't judge a low-budget zombie movie by its cover.
Really, this should have been a great movie. It follows a group of police officers who decide to avenge their fallen comrade by killing the people who killed him. Once they get to the building, the dead start coming back to life. These aren't Romero's zombies. They're undead, but they run, and they have superhuman strength. The cops team up with the criminals in an attempt to survive.
Sounds good, right?
There are some decent scenes, but this movie just kind of annoyed me. There wasn't much logic to the character's actions. Their entire plan was to get out of the building...but they saw that the streets were filled with zombies. So...you get out of the building. Then what? They never thought about that. In one scene towards the end, the zombies apparently don't realize that they can climb on top of a car, which leads to a ton of zombies standing around getting shot and butchered (in a scene very close to this one, we actually see a zombie jumping over a pile of bodies to reach its prey).
And the characters were awful. One of them seems to change midway through the movie, for no apparent reason. None of them were likable.
The dialogue was terrible. The acting might have been worse.
I didn't hate it, but I was pretty bored for most of the movie.
I was having such good luck with movies so far, it was about time I didn't like one.

Rating: 2 stars

Tonight is Pontypool, and I'm not sure where I'm going from there. I was thinking of watching the original Halloween series...but I'm also thinking about watching the first couple Rob Zombie movies (House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects). If anyone is actually reading this blog, I'd love to hear any thoughts.

DIEner, Dead End

2011-04-12T21:40:00.002-04:00

DIEner (Get it?)

Netflix thought I would give this movie 4 stars. And, since it was instant watch, I thought I would give it a shot. I was immediately turned off by the title. Yes...it's actually called DIEner (Get It?). They gave their movie a somewhat clever name, then ruined it by pointing out how clever they thought it was. Thankfully I was able to get past the title and watch the movie for what it was.
What it is is a low-budget zombie movie revolving around two unhappily married people, a serial killer, and a handful of zombies. The movie starts with the serial killer killing the cook and waitress in a lonely diner. Before he can leave, the unhappily married couple comes in, and he pretends to be their waiter as he plans to kill them. His plans are thwarted by a cop...but things take a turn when the dead cook comes wandering out of the kitchen. Before too long, there's a full-blown zombie-outbreak. The serial killer and the couple (now knowing who he is) try to hold off the zombies, and the couple tries to find a way to get away from the serial killer.
It's not a terrible movie. Overall, I enjoyed it. I did have a few problems with it, though. The serial killer character was the biggest one. He was pretty funny, and genuinely likable most of the time...but there are times when they tried to make him too funny...too clever. It got a little old after a while. The movie was only 76 minutes long, which was a good length. Much longer and it would've gotten really old. As it was, it was an enjoyable movie. Good, but not great.

Rating: 3 stars

Dead End

This is a movie that was suggested to me by a couple of friends. Beyond the fact that it starred Ray Wise, I knew nothing about this movie.
Short synopsis: a family traveling to visit relatives during Christmas. The father decides to take a "scenic route" to the relative's house, and ends up on a seemingly endless stretch of road. They come across a woman in a white dress, holding a baby, and they pick her up. Soon after that, people start dying.
The family was trapped on this road, and a series of horrific deaths kept taking place, picking off the family one-by-one. Every time a family member died, a hearse drove by with that person in the back of the hearse.
Basically, it was a haunted house movie...only instead of being trapped in a house, they were trapped on an unending road.
I liked it. It was done extremely well, and they mixed in a healthy amount of dark humor. The only downside was the fact that there was a twist at the end...but I could see it coming from a mile away. I'll deduct a star for that...but that was really the only thing I didn't like about the movie. This is definitely worth a watch.

Rating: 4 stars

I had another idea for a DJ name. DJ Samedi, after Baron Samedi in Sugar Hill. Thoughts?

Creature from the Black Lagoon, Aaaah! Zombies!!

2011-04-05T19:45:00.000-04:00

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Yet another classic horror movie I had never seen. There's really not much to say about it. The creature was in a rubber suit. The female scientist wore skimpy (for her time) bathing suits and swam in water that they knew housed a fish-man. For some reason, the scientists traveled with a big game hunter, who wanted to kill the creature.
It was a terrible movie, but it was a highly enjoyable movie. Like Galaxy Invader, but in black-and-white.

Rating: 3 stars

Aaah! Zombies!!

I have seen a number of low budget zombie comedies. From what I've seen of them, they're fairly hit-and-miss. In fact, for the most part, they're usually more bad than good. So, when I started this one, I did not have high hopes. It was clear that this was a very low budget movie. It was also clear that the acting looked to be terrible. It started off like a normal zombie movie: the government had accidentally developed a formula that would turn humans into zombies. A barrel ended up outside of a bowling alley, where it leaked into some milk, with which our main characters made ice cream (or "Ale Cream", since they mixed it with beer) with. They turned into zombies.
From here the movie took a turn.
The movie was shot in black-and-white and in color. The scenes in color showed the characters as they saw each other...but the scenes in black-and-white showed the reality. In color, they saw themselves as normal...but everyone else was moving fast (and talking fast). We would see the characters in color, and they would be talking to each other like normal. In one scene, we see them trying to hail someone who is down in alley. From their point of view, they were like regular people: raising their hands and saying, "Hey man...come here for a second." Then it would switch to black-and-white, and we'd see them as they really were: zombies growling and snarling and reaching out. It was a funny gag...but it did seem to get old after a while.
Anyway, we watched the characters shamble through their lives. Trying to survive. Trying to find love. All the while they're losing body parts and getting shot and everything else zombies endure. While it was the same general concept as Colin (seeing things from the zombie's point of view), it was a completely different movie. Where Colin was touching and raw, this movie was funny.
I wouldn't say it was amazing, but it was pretty funny, and definitely better than your average low budget zombie comedy.

Rating: 4 stars

Suspiria, My Soul to Take

2011-03-31T23:15:00.000-04:00

Suspiria

This is one of those I've always heard of as a classic, but just never got around to watching it. I imagine I'll finally get around to watching a lot of those during this little exercise.
This movie looks fantastic. The sets are amazing, and I really loved the way the music worked within the movie (although I did have a problem with it...more on that in a minute). I wasn't the biggest fan of the story (young American travels to Europe to join a famous ballet school, and people die), but it looked fantastic. There were some pretty creepy death scenes, which put me a little on edge (rare for an older movie like this). Of course, there were also some scenes that just came off as cheesy, but those were to be expected.
A minor annoyance: I loved the music, but it was a lot louder than the rest of the movie. The dialog was relatively soft, so I had to turn up the volume...but then the music came on, and it was nearly ear-splitting. It was a constant battle with the volume throughout the movie.
I liked it, but didn't love it. It was pretty slow moving, and the payoff wasn't great. But still, it looked terrific, and I can definitely see that it was far ahead of its time as far as how graphic it was.

Rating: 3 stars

My Soul to Take

This is the first movie written and directed by Wes Craven since New Nightmare. I loved that movie (and Craven is a legend), so I was looking forward to this movie...even if I was trying to lower my expectations. The previews weren't great, and reviews were terrible.
Maybe I was just in the right mood, but I really enjoyed this movie. Sure, it was pretty predictable (there were a couple "twists", and at least one of them could be seen coming from a mile away), but there were a lot of pretty tense moments in this movie, particularly towards the end. I didn't love all the characters, but I liked them enough to feel a little something when they died (well...for all but one of them).
The movie starts with the story of "The Riverton Ripper", who turns out to be a family man with multiple personalities. He kills his wife and is shot multiple times by police. On the way to the hospital, he attacks the ambulance driver and escapes. He is never seen after that, so he is assumed dead...drowned in the river. 16 years later, it looks like he has come back (the scenes showing the Ripper are actually pretty good). There were 7 children born the night the Ripper "died", and they start dying - one by one - on their 16th birthday.
It's not Craven's best movie, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you feel like turning your brain off and catching a modern slasher movie, you could do worse than this one.

Rating: 4 stars

House

2011-03-29T22:18:00.000-04:00

Last night, based on the recommendation of some family, I watched house. All I knew about it was that it starred William Katt (the star of Greatest American Hero). I had no idea that it also starred George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) and Richard Moll (Bull from Night Court). Needless to say, I was excited about this.

I had no idea what to expect from this movie. 80s horror can be a mixed bag. I assumed this would fall under the category of "so bad it's funny". As it turns out...it was funny. It was a terrific horror comedy, in the vein of The Evil Dead and Deadalive.

It's a haunted house movie, following William Katt as Roger Cobb, a horror writer trying to write a memoir about his time in Vietnam. He moves into the house of his recently deceased aunt...a woman who was assumed crazy, and claimed that her house was haunted. Cobb finds out on the first night that she wasn't crazy.

Sure, there are some cheesy parts (the freeze-frame ending would definitely be included in this category)...but this was a genuinely funny movie. I don't know if it's quite as good as Evil Dead 2 or Deadalive...but it's not that far off. If you enjoy horror-comedy at all, you're sure to love this movie.

Rating: 5 stars

In my search for good Zombie Prom songs, I decided to take Nan Vernon's "Love Hurts" (it ran at the end of Rob Zombie's Halloween II) and add some creepy sound effects behind it. I think it came out really well...I'm hoping it will work well as a zombie slow dance. I'm also still searching for a good zombie DJ name. Right now I'm working with DJ Zombi...but I'm not very happy with it. Suggestions?

Zombie Prom Preparation

2011-03-28T22:48:00.000-04:00

I have been asked to DJ a zombie prom in May. In preparation of this, I have decided to watch as many horror movies as I can between now and then. Get a feel for the music that is used. As I watch them, I'll post about them here. Maybe only a sentence or two, but it'll be something. They won't all be zombie movies, but it is to prepare for a zombie event, so I figure it makes sense to post about it here.
If there are any readers out there, feel free to post any movie (or music) recommendations in the comments. I'll try to get to as many as I can. I'll end each review with the rating I gave it in Netflix.

Let's kick this off.

April Fool's Day

I had never seen this movie, but I had heard good things. Also, there was an entire episode of Psych that revolved around it, so I finally decided to watch it. It was well worth my time. It started out a little slow, but it was a fantastic take on the slasher genre. The characters were your typical 80s slasher characters. but it was extremely well done. When it finally started moving, it was pretty tense for the rest of the way. It was a unique take on the genre, with some fairly interesting little twists. I loved it.

Rating: 5 stars

Doghouse

A British movie, following a group of friends who go away for the weekend to a small town. When they get there, they find that the town is full of women...and those women are all crazy. I had heard it was a zombie movie, but that's not technically correct. The women weren't undead...rather, they had all been infected with a virus. It was bloody and crazy and hilarious. I loved it.

Rating: 5 stars

Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies Go to College

I enjoyed the first couple Ghoulies movies, so I thought I'd track this one down. I should've known from the cover that this would be different. Where the first two were trying to be scary (yet were funny), this one fully embraced the campiness. The Ghoulies were wisecracking pranksters. Sure, they killed a couple people (one by plunger to the face), but most of the time they were perfect content to spy on girls in the shower and drink lots of beer. It made me laugh, but not nearly as much as the first two movies did. This one was trying to be funny...and that made it not nearly as funny as when it was trying to be a serious horror movie.
That being said, I'm still going to watch Ghoulies 4.

Rating: 3 stars

Child's Play

I don't know how I had never seen this movie...but now I have. I liked it. I had seen bits and pieces of some of the later movies, so I fully expected this movie to be goofy. It wasn't at all. It was a serious horror movie, and was actually fairly creepy at times. Some parts were obviously pretty cheesy (it is, after all, an 80s horror movie involving a talking doll), but it was darker than I expected, and I liked it more than I thought I would. I plan on watching the rest of them at some point, but this was a good beginning to the series.

Rating: 4 stars

Survival of the Dead

2010-11-06T13:53:00.001-04:00

George A. Romero is known as the father of the zombie movie. It makes sense...his Night of the Living Dead is a classic, and the movie that kick-started the modern zombie movie. His second movie, Dawn of the Dead, is usually considered his best movie, and also helped to introduce more of a social message into zombie movies. Personally, I like Night of the Living Dead better, and I like Snyder's Dawn of the Dead better...but that's neither here nor there.

It's no secret that Romero's zombie movies have been in a steady decline recently. I liked Land of the Dead, but I didn't love it. It appears as though I'm in the minority of people who enjoyed Diary of the Dead...but, again, I didn't love it. The message was extremely heavy-handed, and I really only enjoyed the movie because of some of the characters involved.

I can say, with no amount of uncertainty, that Survival of the Dead is Romero's worst movie. It follows a minor character from Diary of the Dead...one of the jackass soldiers that showed up and took the RV. It didn't help the movie that this guy was one of the worst actors I have ever seen. I actually started to watch this movie with Daniel...but he forced me to shut it off after he delivered a terrible line in the worst way possible: "You're dangerous kid, but not as dangerous as me." It should be noted that he said this to some punk kid, who was not a great actor, himself.

Jackass

Needless to say, I went back and watched the entire movie at a later date.

I wish I had not done that.

I guess the story wasn't terrible. It was set up like a modern western, but with zombies. I know...it sounds pretty cool. The majority of the movie took place on an island that housed two warring families. One of the families believed that zombies could not be cured and should be killed. The other family believed that zombies could be taught to be useful members in society. They also believed that zombies could be taught to eat something other than human flesh (they believed that zombies would also feast on horses). While we start on the side of the first family (zombies must be killed), we begin to see the point of the second family when we see zombies bringing mail in from mailboxes and whatnot.

The movie ends in classic western fashion...a showdown between the two families in a corral. A gunfight while using bales of hay, trees and fences for cover. With, of course, zombies roaming around.

When I write it out, it doesn't sound that bad. Trust me...it is. As I mentioned, the acting is atrocious. The story, while not terrible, didn't have much depth to it. The zombies looked decent, but the death scenes were terrible. Instead of using exploding blood capsules, they opted for CGI blood splatter, which looked awful.

Still...it's Romero. If you're a fan of Romero, you're going to watch it regardless. But this is just not a good movie. There are other good zombie movies that have been released over the past couple of years...watch one of those, instead. Colin showed what a zombie movie can be, even with next to no money.

I was unable to embed the trailer, but you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLTBnzJ7nRA

Sugar Hill

2010-09-19T18:31:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've updated this blog, but it doesn't mean I've stopped watching zombie movies.

This movie was ranked #24 in the list of Best Zombie Movies of all time in Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide by Glenn Kay. It was described as "The Shaft of zombie flicks, effectively combining a blaxploitation crime plotline with traditional zombie lore" (Kay, 303). That short sentence describes this movie perfectly.

The movie follows Diana "Sugar" Hill (played by Marki Bey). Early in the movie, her boyfriend (a club owner) is killed by the local mob (headed by the nefarious Morgan). Sugar goes to Mama Maitresse, a local voodoo woman, to help her get her revenge on Morgan and his crew. They go to see Baron Zamedi, the Lord of the Dead, to help her in her quest for revenge. He raises an army of the undead. With her army behind her, Sugar Hill kills her way through the local mob, which eventually leads her to Morgan.

Baron Zamebi loves to kill

The zombies in this movie are not of the flesh eating variety. Rather, it takes its cue from the zombies of voodoo lore. These zombies are not out for flesh; these zombies exist only to follow the wishes of their zombie master. They don't kill by attacking and biting; they attack by whatever means the zombie master wishes. In one instance, they kill by chopping up a man with swords, eventually decapitating him. In another, they throw a man into a pen of hungry pigs.

The look of the zombies is pretty cool. They have silver eyes which reflect the light to a fairly creepy effect. They walk around covered in cobwebs.

The acting wasn't great (Marki Bey, in particular, varied from very good to incredibly wooden), but it was good enough. The plot worked off a pretty standard revenge story, but it worked very well. The zombies looked great, and the scenery was terrific. I loved Baron Zamebi...he would show up at random times during the movie, and, when he did, you knew the zombies would be attacking soon.

This isn't your standard zombie movie, but I really liked it. One of the better zombie movies I've seen in a while. If you're looking for something kind of different from your standard zombie movie, check this one out.

Marki Bey demands that you watch this movie

Colin

2009-11-26T01:44:00.000-05:00

Once again, it has been a while since we've had zombie club. But, just because we haven't officially met for a while doesn't mean I have to stop watching zombie movies.
I have been looking forward to this one for a while. A considerable buzz has been building for this movie ever since it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. These two things always came up when this movie was reviewed:
1. The movie was told from the perspective of a zombie.
2. It was made for $70.

It's difficult not to mention those things, so let's get them out of the way. The movie follows a single zombie (Colin). We see him become a zombie, and we follow his shambling zombie self through zombie-infested London. Where most zombie movies follow the survivors, this one follows a single zombie, trying to navigate through these strange streets that he once knew so well. On his journey, he encounters a number of stereotypes in the zombie movie genre: the twisted survivor with a dark secret, a band of zombie hunters, the family member who wanted to try to save him (and the family member who wanted to kill him), people running and fighting for their lives, and some who have accepted their fates. The only difference is that we're seeing it from the other side. We know Colin, and now we're following him as a zombie. These zombie hunters appear to be terrible people in this movie...but put them in a Romero movie and they look like heroes.
I can't say that I was necessarily cheering for Colin, but I did feel a certain attachment to him. This isn't a faceless zombie, hell-bent on eating human flesh. This is Colin, a victim of circumstance. We see what he sees. He eats human flesh, not because he's a demon, but because he has no other choice. It is now in his nature. Furthermore, it shows what we could become. If Colin - a nice guy with a good life - could become a zombie, so can we. It wasn't his choice, just like it wouldn't be ours.
Throughout the movie, we see Colin recognize different objects and places from his "past life". This was reminiscent of Day of the Dead, when Bub was able to remember things from his living days. It didn't seem to apply to everything (he didn't recognize his sister or mother at all), but it did occur from time to time.

The movie was made for $70, which is pretty impressive. Sure, you can tell that it did not take a lot of money to make this movie. Still, for how much it costs, it looks pretty good. The lighting is a bit off, and there are times when the sound left something to be desired, but, for the most part, they did a great job. The zombies looked pretty good, and there were some pretty terrific looking death scenes. The acting was pretty good, too. All in all, they did great with what they had.

Overall, I really liked the movie. There were times when it seemed like it was running a bit long, and there were long periods where not much happened. But the goal of this movie was not to be action-packed; the goal of this movie was to see zombies from a different angle...for us to identify with zombies in a way that we may not have been able to before. The filmmaker (Marc Price) was building a mood throughout the movie...even in those times when it seemed like nothing was happening. Those times further helped us to bond with Colin...to see the world through his eyes. By the end of the movie, I didn't mind those slow moments.
Loved the ending. I don't want to give anything away, but it was somehow sweet and heartbreaking.

I highly recommend this movie...but know what it is going in. It's a zombie movie, but it's not your standard zombie movie. You can also tell that it was made on a low budget, but that's easy enough to get past. Once you get caught up in the story, you won't really care what the budget was.

Watch this trailer and check out the website

.

Fido

2009-09-06T22:04:00.008-04:00

This was the first Zombie Club which we consulted The Book. We were not having the best of luck with zombie movies, so we decided to try it out. I tracked down a number of highly rated movies. When it came time to decide on a movie, we chose Fido. Take a look at that cover...it's just asking to be watched.
Fido starts with this instructional video:

Here's the set-up: the earth passed through a radioactive cloud, leading to the entire population being infected with a virus. What kind of virus? Why, a virus that will reanimate the dead, of course!
A zombie war broke out, and nearly wiped out the world. The living finally beat back the undead (although all zombies were not wiped out). ZomCom was formed, and fences were built to hold the zombies out of areas where humans were living, leaving large portions of the world where zombies roamed free.
ZomCom found a way to use these zombies for the good of mankind. They developed a collar to put on zombies. Through this, the zombie could be controlled, and could be used for household tasks. A family purchases a zombie through ZomCom, that zombie is outfitted with a collar, sent to the family, and provides them with any number of household services.

Lawn mowing, for instance

It is with this that the movie begins. It is set in the 50s, which gives the movie a great look and feel to it.
The story follows the Robinson family; Bill (father), Helen (mother) and Timmy (son). Bill is a distant and disconnected husband and father, preferring to spend his time golfing rather than spending time with his family. Every Sunday, he takes his family on a "Sunday drive", where they go to the funerals of strangers. Bill takes pictures, while Helen and Timmy stand around awkwardly. As near as I can tell, this is the only thing Bill enjoys doing with his family.
Helen doesn't seem to enjoy Bill, and takes every opportunity to push his buttons, at one point proclaiming, "Bill, get your own funeral. Timmy and I are going zombie."
Timmy is a young, scrawny boy who is often picked on in class (especially by two brothers who believe themselves to be zombie hunters). He has no friends.
The Robinson's get a zombie because Helen doesn't want them to be the only family on the block without one. Also, the new neighbor is the new head of security at ZomCom, and they need to impress him.
At first, Timmy doesn't like their zombie. But, after the zombie protects him from the school bullies, Timmy takes a liking to him, and names him Fido. Fido quickly becomes Timmy's best friend.

Fido's collar stops working for a short period, and he bites Timmy's neighbor, an old woman that Timmy never really cared for. She bites someone else, and a small zombie outbreak occurs. Timmy kills the old woman and buries her, hoping that he or Fido will not be implicated.
Timmy goes to his neighbor, Mr. Theopolis (played by the great Tim Blake Nelson), a former ZomCom employee, who is able to fix Fido's collar. Fido goes back to being a docile zombie, and he and Timmy continue their friendship. Even Helen begins to like Fido.

I don't want to give away too much of the movie, so I'll stop with the plot rundown here.

For a zombie movie, it is extremely lighthearted, and it borrows heavily from Lassie (even including a scene where Fido shows up alone in the house while Helen asks him, "Where's Timmy, boy? Is he hurt?").
There really isn't much gore, but that's not really what the movie was going for. It's a good story with likable characters, good dialogue, and a fantastic look. Overall, it was a very enjoyable movie. Extremely well done, and highly recommended.

Zombie movie book...you have served us well. Let's hope this continues.

Here's the trailer:

Tombs of the Blind Dead

2009-08-13T22:57:00.008-04:00

About a month ago, we had a meeting of Zombie Club. It had been a while, but, since Cris was in the process of moving, we didn't have access to any of his zombie movies. That left us scrounging around for a movie at the last minute. We settled on Tombs of the Blind Dead, which I had picked up a couple of years ago on the recommendation of a zombie-loving coworker.

The story centered around a man, a woman, and the female friend that the woman had "experimented with" from many years ago. By "experimented with", I mean, "Sat around and lightly touched each others arms," (according to the flashbacks, anyway). The woman gets upset when her boyfriend starts hitting on her girlfriend in a train, so she jumps out and runs to a deserted castle to sleep for the night.

This castle is the resting place of the Satanic wing of the Knights Templar. These were the knights who thought it would be fun to strip women naked and sacrifice them to Satan. They were killed somehow, but still reside in the castle area. Apparently they come out at night to hunt for flesh. Or something of that sort.
The knights were less zombies and more skeletons. They had no eyes, which seems like a disadvantage, until you realize that they can hear a human's heartbeat. There's no way to stop that, and so they killed the woman that ran into the castle (after a very long and slow chase). There was a chase scene with the knights riding on horses...but the horses moved in slow motion. The maker of this movie didn't bother trying to make the horses look slow...he just made the film go in slow motion. This is kind of forgivable (it was made in the 70s on a small budget, after all), but it made no sense when the woman found a non-zombie horse and began to ride away from the knights, only to find that her horse also moved in slow motion. What?

(At this point most of these details are a bit fuzzy, and for that I [kind of] apologize. The movie was so dull [there was a span of 20 minutes with no dialogue] that, at the halfway point, we fast-forwarded the to the end [x4 speed]. I don't think we missed too much.)

Here is what I remember from the last half of the movie.

The woman who ran into the castle was bitten by the knights, and became a zombie. She walked around like Frankenstein's monster for a while, then got set on fire. Tragic, really.

For a zombie, she didn't look half bad.

The man and woman who were still on the train try to find her. They find some sleezy looking guy from town to find him, and he brings along his whore. The woman from the train and the sleezy guy go into the castle together, while the man from the train and the whore go together. While sitting in the graveyard (at night...good idea, kids), the woman tells Captain Sleeze that she doesn't really like men because of an incident from her childhood. He responds to this statement by raping her on a tomb. Pure class, this guy.

If I remember correctly, the woman makes it out of the castle without being eaten, and makes it on to a train. Blah blah blah. I won't tell you how it ends, but the woman makes this face:

Yay!

The end.

In case you couldn't tell, this movie was terrible. It wasn't even funny bad (although we did laugh at a couple parts). Please don't watch this movie. I beg of you.

After this debacle, we decided to watch Diary of the Dead directly afterwards. I won't do a big review right now, but it was not universally loved. I liked it, but not everyone else agreed with me. Perhaps I'll do a review of that one within the next couple of weeks.

We have not had the best track record lately of watching good movies. We've watched a number of movies that we didn't know too much about, and it has come back to bite us. However, our luck may be changing.

Scott bought this book for me for my birthday. I've gone through it, and it seems to agree with our thoughts on the movies that we have watched. It likes the movies that we have liked and hates the movies that we have hated. For the next Zombie Club meeting, we will consult with this fabulous book before deciding on a movie. In doing this, we hope to be able to find some good zombie movies.

Automaton Transfusion

2009-05-16T02:30:00.000-04:00

It's late, and I just got done watching this. Instead of a coherent review, I'll just throw this out there. These are some thoughts that I had while watching this movie.

Have you ever wanted to see a guy in a Ramones shirt reach into a pregnant woman's stomach, pull out the fetus, and eat it right in front of her as she screamed, cried, and, ultimately, died? If you answered yes to this question, then you would probably love Automaton Transfusion (or, at the very least, you would love one scene of Automaton Transfusion).

The acting was awful. The characters were all unlikeable (at best). The gore was pretty good for the most part. One girl had her jaw completely ripped from her face. Another was torn limb-from-limb. One guy was forced to kill his own father by pushing his eye onto a shard of glass (kind of like the splinter in Zombi II, but nowhere near as graphic or cool). But, when people weren't being ripped apart like animals, this was a terrible movie. And it was right from the opening credits.

I've never felt inclined to comment on the opening credits of a movie before, but these were terrible. Every couple of seconds, there would be a big flash of light. I felt like I almost had a seizure while I was watching it.

As one of the characters picked up a chainsaw, he said, "Ash would be so proud." That was good for a chuckle.

Our hero is a kid named Chris...some punk who thinks he's smarter than people and makes the worst possible decision available to him at that time. One of these decisions was to make his way across town to get a serum to make him immune to zombie bites...but he has conveniently blocked out the part about most of his friends being eaten alive. I'd say getting bitten is the least of his worries. Another of his decisions was to leave a perfectly safe garage in order to get to the school. His reasoning? "There will be survivors at the school." Never mind the fact that one of the big rules in dealing with zombies is to stay away from populated areas.

He's also terrible under pressure. When rummaging through a lab looking for the serum, his girlfriend cries out, "Where is it? What are we even looking for?" To which our hero replies, "Anything that can save us." I'm pretty sure she meant, "What does the bottle look like? Is there a label? How will I know when I've found this serum?" Jackass. She should have left him right then and there.

The ending will make you madder than you have any reason to be for a movie this terrible. I don't want to ruin anything by saying how it ended, but you will be mad.

In conclusion: if they were to splice together all the action scenes, it would make for a pretty cool 20 minutes. Suffice it to say, that's not what they did here. This was a bad movie with a couple of good moments...but those good moments didn't even come close to making up for the diaper stain that was Automaton Transfusion. That quote on the front of the movie that says, "One of the best zombie films in decades"? An out-and-out lie.

Why...hello there. What's your name?

Dead Snow

2009-05-15T20:48:00.002-04:00

I read about this movie in a magazine. I'm always up for a promising zombie movie...and the prospect of Nazi zombies was one that I would not miss. So I tracked it down and watched it last night.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The movie starts out a little slow, but I suppose most zombie movies do. There has to be some sort of set up. This one followed some med school students on Easter break. They decided to vacation at a cabin in the mountains. Do some skiing, go for snowmobile rides, play Twister, pretend to suffocate each other with pillows, have sex in an outhouse, etc. You know...it's what all the kids are doing these days.
An old guy shows up and tells them of the dangers of the mountains...namely, the hordes of undead Nazis.
Eventually, the Nazis show up and wreak havoc among these stranded rich kids. Blood and intestines flow like wine. People are ripped apart, houses are set on fire, and an undead Nazi's innards are used as a rope.
A little over an hour into the movie, the surviving members somehow stop being scared out of their minds and start fighting back. And oh, what a fight it is. Chainsaws, hammers, feet, machine guns, and (I'm pretty sure) a bird are all used against the Nazis. It's gory and funny and a little unnerving, all at the same time.
Here is part of the battle. It's my favorite scene of the movie. Make sure you watch it with the sound on, because the music makes this scene incredible.

See.

As you can probably tell from that clip, this isn't your standard zombie movie. Destroying the brain or removing the head isn't the only way to kill them. They can be killed in pretty much the same way as any ordinary human...like slicing open their stomach with a chainsaw and watching their intestines fall to the ground. John Rambo killed a man in a similar fashion (only with a handmade machete instead of a chainsaw...because that's how Rambo rolls).
They're fast, they're intelligent, and they're strong. None of these fits the standard zombie profile. But they are undead, and that has to count for something.

Overall, it's an extremely solid movie. Once you get past the character introductions, it really is a fantastic movie. And it's not that the intros are bad...it's just that the rest of it is so good.

Highly recommended. It's worth your time to check it out.

Update/Zombie Diaries Review

2009-04-18T13:20:00.000-04:00

We haven't had a meeting for quite some time. As was stated in the first post, we started Zombie Club because every female we knew was involved in a book club. Well, apparently the book club isn't meeting too often these days, so we haven't met for Zombie Club, either. We really need to just watch a zombie movie anyway, regardless if there is a book club that night or not.

In related news, I watched Zombie Diaries by myself the other night. Here is what the cover looks like.

Now I want you to picture in your head what kind of movie this will be.
Your response is probably, "An awesome movie!"
Your response would be wrong.
Nothing on that cover even comes close to happening. Never is there a scene even remotely that cool.
Now, I knew this going into the movie. Scotty had already seen and had warned me that it wasn't very good. So I went into it knowing full well that the cover is completely misleading...and that is how everyone should go into watching this movie.

It actually was not a terrible movie. The concept was that there were three different groups filming their experiences with a hand-held video camera. The footage was shaky, but that was to make it more real. Not a terrible concept. However, there were large portions of the movie that involved lots of running and shooting at night. The camera was showing the ground as they ran...and you really couldn't see any zombies at all. I suppose that's realistic; if you're the guy filming all this stuff, chances are you're not great with guns, so you'd be turning and running. The problem is that you didn't really see too many zombies at all.

A couple of the scenes were pretty unrealistic. One group that we followed consisted of two men (one with a gun, the other with the camera) and a woman. They were heading into town to get food, but they were being cautious, as there figured to be zombies there. The man with the gun mentioned how they didn't have too much ammo, so they had to conserve the bullets that they had. That's cool. I get that. But, when a single zombie comes stumbling towards them, he waits until it's within smashing distance, then shoots it in the head. If there's only one zombie and you're running out of bullets, you don't shoot that thing; you bash its head with whatever is close to you (say, the butt of the rifle that you have in your hand).

The end was pretty bad, too. I can see the message they were trying to convey, but they did it in such a terrible way that it had absolutely no impact. Also, it was a really stupid message.

There was a moment that made me jump. I don't want to ruin it for you, but the first zombie sighting was a bit startling. That was really the high point of the movie.

It's not a terrible movie, just don't go into it thinking that there are going to be massive explosions and an awesome guy walking into zombie town with a shotgun and a 9mm. If you're wanting to watch a movie like this that is actually a good movie, watch Diary of the Dead. It's a much better movie in so many ways.

The Dead Pit

2009-01-19T16:17:00.001-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, we had our first meeting of Zombie Club in a couple of months. The playoffs were in full swing, but there wasn't a game on Sunday night. Thus, Zombie Club.
We watched The Dead Pit, a movie we were extremely excited about. After the debacle that was Zombie Holocaust, we wanted to watch a movie with some actual zombies in it. This movie stated that, not only were there zombies, but that we would be cheering for these zombies by the end of the movie. What could go wrong?

As it turns out, a lot could go wrong. And it did. Were there zombies? Yes...but they didn't show up until one hour and six minutes into the movie, leaving plenty of time for a terrific story, filled with intrigue, gripping dialogue, and a doctor with red eyes and a gunshot wound to his forehead.

Okay...so the doctor with the red eyes was the only thing present. There was a story, it was just a terrible one. It had to do with a scantily clad girl with amnesia and daddy issues in a mental institution. She befriended an explosives expert who tried really hard to sound like Sean Connery. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he didn't. He was one of the most entertaining parts of the movie.

There was a dream sequence that showed the girl running around in her underwear and a mid-riff, looking like an extra in a bad 80s hair rock video ("Motorin'! What's your price for flight?"). She proceeded to get tied up and sprayed with a fire hose until her shirt disintegrated. The nurse who was doing these terrible things to her (was it Nurse Ratchet? I couldn't tell) laughed manically the entire time. At the very end of the dream sequence, the water began to take a part of her face off. They didn't show much of that, which was disappointing (it should be noted that this was the part of the movie that the pizza guy showed up).

The rest of the movie went on and on until the zombies showed up. Unfortunately, they didn't do much. We never actually saw them eating anyone...it was just kind of assumed that they killed people, even if we didn't get to see them. There was a lot of blood, and some dead bodies scattered around, but you never saw the live bodies become dead, and you never see the blood leave their body. It happens off-screen somewhere. There better be some fantastic deleted scenes running around somewhere.

These zombies proceeded to sit around the mental institution and study/play with the brains that they had somehow acquired. They kind of reminded me of The Thinker...only there's a lot of them, they have bloody brains in their hands, and they're undead. Also, they're treating the brains as though they were water-weanies. "Whoa...it's so slippery. I can keep moving my hands, and it just keep sliding through them...like a snake or something. I would much rather do this than try to eat someone."

So what killed these ridiculous excuses for zombies? Destroying the brain or removing the head? Of course not. That would be ridiculous.

It's holy water. That's right...throw some holy water on these zombies, and they will melt.

Just because it's a dumb way to kill a zombie doesn't mean it didn't look awesome.

And how did they find this out? Oh...because a crazy nun just so happened to throw some holy water on a zombie. No one said it had to make sense.

I won't tell you how the movie ended, but it involved a water tower and the explosives expert doing his thing.

And no, it wasn't as cool as that sounds.

This movie wasn't even fun-bad. It was just bad.

It did bring up an interesting bit of discussion though. Cris asked if zombies liked to eat brains or if they just liked to eat people in general. I believe that zombies don't necessarily go after the brain. Since they're non-thinking undead beings, they don't really process any information. They eat living humans and are completely indiscriminate about what parts they eat. Cris, on the other hand, believes that zombies may be drawn to humans brains, and enjoy that above mere flesh.
"The Zombie Survival" guide doesn't mention whether or not zombies are drawn to brains. Nevertheless, it is a view that is held by a lot of people and shows up in a number of movies. There is research that supports both sides of this argument.
What do you think? Give us a shout in the comments and let us know your take on the matter.

Zombie Club Update/Zombi 2

2008-10-19T13:26:00.001-04:00

We haven't given up on Zombie Club. In fact, Cris has bought a ton of great movies that we're really excited about watching. But the girls have decided to have their book club only on Sunday nights. With it being football season and all, we have been a little preoccupied on Sunday nights. So it's looking like Zombie Club is on hiatus until football season is over.
We did, however, watch a movie that was never talked about. So let's do that here.

We watched "Zombi 2" at our second meeting. This movie cover just says "Zombie", so allow me to explain that.
"Zombi" was the Italian version of "Dawn of the Dead". So, when "Zombi 2" was released in America, it was just referred to as "Zombie", seeing as how our "Zombi" was "Dawn of the Dead". Does that make sense?

Like I said, we watched this movie at our second meeting. We had heard good things about it, but we didn't know what to expect. There were two scenes in particular that we had heard about. One of them was a zombie fighting a shark, while the other one was a woman getting a wood splinter in her eye.
Neither of them disappointed.
The zombie/shark fight scene was a little slow, but it was about what you would expect. An underwater zombie slowly grappling a shark, repeatedly trying to bite it (I think the shark was bit, but there was no blood, so it was tough to tell). Chad had questions about how a zombie was able to "survive" underwater. We consulted "The Zombie Survival Guide" and found a section on respiration, which states:
"The lungs of the undead continue to function in that they draw air into and expel it from the body. This function ccounts for a zombie's signature moan. What the lungs and body chemistry fail to accomplish, however, is to extract oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. Given that Solanum obviate the need for both of thee functions, the entire human respiratory system is obsolete in the body of a ghoul. This explains how the living dead can 'walk underwater' or survive in environments lethal to humans. Their brains, as noted earlier, are oxygen-independent." (pg 12)

The other scene, the one with the woman getting a sliver in her eye, was pretty fantastic. It was slow. It was gruesome. It (somehow) took off half of her head. And it started like this:

The movie started kind of slow, but, once it got going, it was actually really good. The special effects left quite a bit to be desired (especially the Molotov cocktail fight at the end), but it was still extremely enjoyable to watch.

Highly recommended.

Zombie Sighting

2008-08-29T22:49:00.000-04:00

This picture was taken at Chad and Molly's wedding. Check out the short kid on the right. It's a good thing Scotty bashed in his head with a chair seconds after this picture was taken...otherwise, the reception would've been remembered less for all the fun and more for the zombie apocalypse that it no doubt would've started.

Thanks Scott.

Zombie Holocaust

2008-08-11T20:58:00.000-04:00

So, if you saw a movie that was called Zombie Holocaust, what would you expect? I can tell you what we expected. Zombies. Lots of zombies. Most likely, a bunch of zombies that were taking over the world. But, mainly, we just wanted a lot of zombies.
What did we get? Not a single zombie. That's right...not one. Look at the title again. Zombie Holocaust. Look at that picture? Does it look like a zombie? Yeah...kind of. Guess what it is. It's some sort of man who has had his face mutilated and his brain switched out with another person. All of this was done by a mad scientist.
But those aren't the only evils in the movie. Zombies? No...of course not. That would be ridiculous. There are some cannibals, though.
"Undead cannibals?"
Nope...just cannibals.
Somewhere in all this garbage were two of the slowest fight scenes I have ever seen, a borderline attractive brunette reporter who got scalped (one of the zombie-looking creations was wearing the top of her head as a wig), a scary blond woman who got naked for no reason in particular (including a scene when she was completely naked in front of the cannibals, yet still found it necessary to strut and pose), a British-ish guy who scratched his chest all the time (with absolutely no explanation for it at all), and some other guy who got his chest ripped open, his entrails eaten, and his eyes literally ripped out of his head and eaten by cannibals.
(Actually, that part was pretty cool.)
There was a pretty cool scene involving a creature and a motorboat.

That fight ended exactly like we thought it would.

It was a terrible movie. Granted, there were a couple of kind of cool moments, but it didn't make up for the fact that the rest of the movie was ridiculously boring. And it certainly didn't make up for the fact that we sat through a movie called Zombie Holocaust that featured the same amount of zombies that Mona Lisa Smile had...zero.
A lot of the set was taken from Zombi 2 (which we watched at our last Zombie Club), so it was kind of funny to be able to pick out different buildings, settings, vehicles, and even some stock footage from Zombi 2.
And all of this without mentioning that the ending was terrible and confusing. In fact, I still don't know exactly what happened. Do you want to know a secret? I don't even care what happened or how it happened.

Oh yeah...there were also waaaaay too many naked guys.

No 3D Extravaganza This Time

2008-08-08T21:16:00.000-04:00

It is with great regret that I must inform the ZC that I have been unable to locate a copy of NOTLD in 3D. They have the 2D version at Best Buy (it's even called "Night of the Living Dead 3D: 2D Version) but that would be pointless. The 3D one is on Amazon, but I would not be able to get it before the next meeting. I was looking at the reviews, and they seem to slam the movie and the 3D quality of the movie. I might be having second thoughts about this one. After all, there's always "Zombie Holocaust".

Alias'

2008-08-08T02:13:00.000-04:00

I also used an Alias, I think "Dusty" is the foolish one. When is Zombie Club Sunday? Is it around 7:30 again or are they having book club at a different time?

Day of the Dead

2008-08-07T21:10:00.000-04:00

Let's get this thing started...

We watched this movie at the very first Zombie Club. We were pretty excited about it. "If the remake of Dawn of the Dead was good, then the remake of Day of the Dead should be good, too." Right?
The original Day of the Dead was relatively boring...but so was the original Dawn of the Dead. We had high hopes for this movie.
Those hopes were set, it seems, a little too high.
Let's start out with the cast.
It starred Mena Suvari as a member of the army (I don't remember her position, and I don't really care to). Her job was to make sure the zombie outbreak didn't get out of the little po-dunk town that this movie was set in. As it so happens, it was her hometown, so you can just imagine the loads of hilarious jokes that came as a result of this.
Nick Cannon played the overly stereotypical black guy. He was also in the army, and his name was Salazar.
Ving Rhames was the army captain in charge of this rag-tag group.
There were some other characters (the horny brother and his quasi-hot girlfriend, the geeky love interest, the mother, the jackass who started it all, etc.), but most of them were too boring to even talk about.
Were there some good scenes? Yes. For instance, some high school kid went home to find that his mother (or someone) had eaten the rest of his family. There was a pretty wicked ending scene, involving a big explosion and a super-zombie (I won't give anything away, but I will say that the reasoning behind the super-zombie was inplausible at best and murderously retarded at worst).
There was also a scene in which a fat man turned into a zombie and attacked the quasi-hot girl in a radio station. You can see it coming from a mile away, but it still was one of the more entertaining parts of the movie.
A big flaw in this movie was the zombies. According to "The Zombie Survival Guide", zombies are slow by nature. Since they are the undead, they do not possess any supernatural powers. Try telling that to these zombies, who could run faster than the average man. Oh yeah...they could also climb on walls and ceilings and whatnot.

Last but not least, this movie had absolutely nothing to do with the original Day of the Dead. Here were the similiarities: it was called Day of the Dead. It had zombies. There was one zombie that had some memories of his pre-zombie life.
That's it.
Did a zombie learn to shoot a gun? No...at least, not that I remember. And that was the best part of the original.

It was not a good movie. In fact, I can't recommend this movie at all. The dialogue was terrible, and the acting was worse. As I said, the original Day of the Dead was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination...but it was still better than this one by a long shot.
Also, I'm not sure, but I don't think Romero had anything to do with this "remake".

Zombies on the ceiling!!!

Welcome to Zombie Club

2008-08-06T20:21:00.001-04:00

Zombie Club was created for two reasons:

1. We really like zombie movies.
2. Pretty much every woman we know is involved in a book club, which meets once a week.

Put these two thoughts together, and you have Zombie Club: a once-a-month meeting that focuses on watching zombie movies and talking about them. It's pretty simple, really.

I'm not exactly sure what we'll post here, but I'm sure we'll post some thoughts on each movie, as well as how consistent the actions were of the zombies involved. We'll be referencing Max Brooks' "The Zombie Survival Guide", as well as "World War Z".

Feel free to join in and comment on this stuff.

Oh yeah...here's a picture of zombies.