P2

What I liked:

The characters.  We had two main characters: Angela (the hunted: a driven, career oriented woman) and Tom (the hunter: a security guard at her office).  Angela did a great job at being freaked out, but also doing what she needed to survive (whether that was feigning interest in Tom or devising a plan to get away).  She may have been scared, but she kept a pretty level head throughout the movie.  Sure, there were a couple of moments where I screamed at the TV (“Turn around!  Don’t just stand there!  TURN AROUND!”), but, for the most part, she was aware of her surroundings and used what she could to escape.

Tom was great at being a psychopath.  Once she escaped from his office and into the general area of the parking garage, he was relentless in his pursuit of her, but he also knew that she couldn’t get far, so he tormented her psychologically as well.  He was a man in sick, twisted love.  He watched her on surveillance cameras for years.  He felt like he knew her, and he loved her.  So he kidnapped her, dressed her up in a dress, and chained her to a table so that they could eat a Christmas Eve meal together.  He loved her.  But he was also very crazy.

Also, there was a scene where he was wearing a Santa Claus outfit (complete with the beard), giving his best “Ho Ho Ho!” while Angela was still knocked out.  For some reason, that scene made me laugh really hard.

The setting.  The fear of walking alone in a darkened parking garage is one that we’ve all had.  “What was that noise?  Was that a shadow moving?”  Little Annie Adderall met her match in a parking garage in Scream 4.  If it could happen to her, it could happen to any of us, I suppose. 

And there were a number of moments that were done really well where Angela was sooooo close to escaping.  Whether it was being at a locked door while a taxi waited outside, or not quite being able to get to a spot with cell phone reception.  I just wanted to reach through the screen and help give her just that little push she needed.  I thought they did a great job in utilizing the claustrophobia that can sometimes accompany a big empty space.

 The date.  Using Christmas Eve was fantastic.  Not only did it establish Angela as someone whose job routinely got in the way of her family, it also had a bit of built-in hopelessness for her escape.  It was just Angela and Tom in the parking garage, and it would be for many days.  No one would be coming to the office for at least a few days, which meant that Angela was going to have to escape by herself.  Help was not coming. 

It also meant that it was very cold in the parking garage.  On top of all his other advantages, it seemed more than a little unfair that Tom was able to walk through the parking garage with a parka, while Angela ran around in a dress and no shoes.  The deck was hopelessly stacked against her at every turn.

What I didn’t like:

Length.  Honestly, it wasn’t that long (98 minutes), but it felt a little long at times.  They did enough different stuff to keep my interest for the most part (locking Angela in a trunk, watching Tom torture one of Angela’s co-workers that he was convinced tried to rape her, Angela trying to escape via elevator, etc.), but, after a while, it seemed to lose some of its edge, and the suspense died.  They were able to ramp it back up eventually, but there were a handful of periods in the movie where it didn’t really feel like anything was happening.  I guess those are your limitations when you’re working within the confines of a parking garage.

That’s really about it for my dislikes.  There wasn’t much I disliked about this movie.  And, while I liked a lot of things, I didn’t find that I loved too much about it.  It was an entertaining movie.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  But I can’t say that I loved it, and probably won’t be re-watching it at any point in the near future.  (Who am I kidding?  I'll be watching it this Christmas.)

It’s definitely worth a watch.  Angela was a great survivor girl.

Rating: 3.5/5

Notable actors: Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley

The Dead

In an attempt to get through a lot of the horror movies I have watched recently, I'm going to shorten these reviews.  I thought the best way to do that would be to cut out the synopsis of each one.  So I'll try to give a quick "what I liked, what I didn't like" review, and that'll be it.  So brace yourself for a series of short posts.

What I liked:
It looked fantastic.  It was set (and shot) in Africa (from what I understand, it's the first horror movie to be filmed entirely in Africa).  So it looks different from any zombie movie I have ever seen.  It's pretty creepy seeing zombies shambling through the brush.  Or appearing behind huts.  Or shuffling off in the distance in the desert.  It's a terrific setting for a zombie movie.

And the zombies look terrific.  Even if they didn't have skin hanging off their bones, they had a very distinct look to them.  It's their eyes, mainly (which brought to mind images of Sugar Hill).

What I didn't like:
Pretty much everything not listed above.  We follow two main characters: Lt. Brian Murphy (the only remaining survivor of an American military group) and Sgt. Daniel Dembele (a member of the African army).  They didn't like each other at first, but they formed an unlikely alliance to survive, and blah blah blah.  They just weren't very interesting characters.  I didn't care about them at all.  Even when Daniel kept talking about trying to get back to his son, I didn't really care about that, either.  I had no connection to the characters.  And, when I'm watching a slow-paced movie, I need some connection to the characters.  Whether I love them or hate them, I need something.  And I felt nothing for either of these guys.  And a large portion of the movie was the two of them, driving around in a crappy truck, trying to stay away from zombies.  It was like a boring road trip movie.  But with zombies.

Also, since the movie was set in Africa, I was pretty excited about seeing some animals in the movie.  With a nod to Zombi 2, would a zombie fight a lion?  I was certainly excited about the prospect.  But there were no lions, rhinos, giraffes, hippos, monkeys, cheetahs, zebras, gazelles, etc.  Honestly, I was pretty disappointed about that.

Overall, I didn't really like it.  It looked cool, but that kind of wore off after a while.
But perhaps my expectations were too high.  I heard nothing but glowing reviews for this movie, so I was expecting something amazing.  Perhaps I'll watch it again at some point and see if I feel the same way.
For now, I'll be forced to give it...

2/5

The Cabin in the Woods

I’m fascinated with fresh takes on horror movie conventions.  If done well, these movies can give you something new to think about while watching horror movies, and can also stand on their own as a great movie.  Scream helped to redefine the slasher movie in 1996.  In one masterful stroke, Wes Craven pointed out slasher movie conventions dating back to the beginning of the genre, while simultaneously reviving it at a time most had given it up for dead.  He also gave us a great new movie monster in “Ghost Face”.

A more recent example would be 2006’s Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.  We got to see a slasher movie through the eyes of the slasher.  Again, it successfully deconstructed the slasher genre while standing alone on its own merit, and introducing a new monster…something else to scare you when things go bump in the night.

Colin didn’t deconstruct the zombie genre, but it did allow us to see a zombie movie from the zombie’s perspective.  It was a touching story of a reluctant zombie that still clung to pieces of his past life.  For the first time in my life, I saw the crowd of zombie hunters and felt bad for the zombies.  It allowed me to watch zombie movies in an entirely different light.

Basically, these types of movies can almost be seen as a class in the genre.  How many people learned about “the rules of a slasher movie” from Scream?

All three of those movies rank among my favorite modern horror movies.  I was hoping The Cabin in the Woods would be able to join that list.  For the first hour, I thought I was right.

From the outside, the premise is simple: a group of five college kids (the jock, the intellectual, the comic relief/stoner, the slut and the virgin) head out to a cabin in the woods for a weekend vacation.  They hear noises, and they are all terrorized (and most of them killed) by some random terror.

All of this borrows heavily from the “cabin in the woods” genre, most notably Evil Dead 2 (right down to the look of the cabin).

Sadly, Ash was nowhere to be found

But, of course, there is more going on in this movie than the plot suggests.

Without giving too much away, I feel I can say this: there is a group of people who have set this entire scenario up.  They don’t control everything that happens, but they definitely have influence over the kids in the cabin.  Or, as one of the characters says, “We rig the game as much as we have to, but in the end, if they don’t transgress, they can’t be punished.”  

Still, it gives little glimpses into what causes these slasher movie stereotypes to act the way they do.  Why does the girl drop the knife after stabbing her attacker?  Why does the alpha male decide it’s a good idea for everyone to split up? 

 The Cabin in the Woods takes this horror subgenre and pulls back the curtain a bit, revealing a vast conspiracy behind the seemingly mindless slaughter.  They add a healthy dose of humor to the process, but they don’t skimp on the gore and jumps that the genre is famous for.  It’s a pitch-perfect deconstruction of the genre.

Until the final half hour.

[I don’t want to give anything away from this portion, so I’ll try to keep it vague.  I’m toying with the notion of starting up another blog to link to with nothing but spoilers – which would make for a better discussion area for those who have seen the movie – but, since I’m not sure anyone is actually reading this blog in the first place, I doubt I’ll do that.]

 During the first hour, I felt they did a great job of deconstructing the genre, while still revealing the vast conspiracy behind it.  There was still a little bit of mystery surrounding it, but that’s okay: not everything needed to be fully explained.  I picked up enough of what was going on to know why they were doing what they were doing…I didn’t need to know everything.  I didn’t need to see everything.  But that’s exactly what the last half hour of this movie was.  Instead of pulling back the curtain a little and inviting us in for a peek, they threw the curtain open and screamed, “Hey!  Look at this!”

It wasn’t terrible, but it just felt like a completely different movie.  The subtlety and humor from the first hour was thrown out the window in favor of a huge spectacle.  I know there were some people who enjoyed this portion of it, but it just wasn’t for me.  Give me the brilliant and entertaining deconstruction of the genre from the first hour. 

Perhaps it was a way to please all viewers.  I watch a lot of horror movies, so it was pretty much a given that I would enjoy the first hour of the movie more than the last half hour.  But what of the person who doesn’t watch many horror movies?  Perhaps they are more inclined to enjoy the last half hour.

My main problem with the movie was this: I feel like it could have been amazing.  And for the first hour, it was.  If they had kept that momentum going, this easily could have become one of my new favorite horror movies.  As it is, I still really liked it, but not to the extent that I could have.  

This movie was very close to perfect: I guess settling for pretty good isn’t the end of the world.  (Or is it?)

Rating: 4/5

I'll mention this once more, just in case I haven't said it enough: this movie was really funny.  Whether they were needling horror movie conventions, or just sitting around talking, there were plenty of extremely funny moments.

Notable actors: Chris Hemsworth, Bradley Whitford, Richard Jenkins, Amy Acker, Fran Kranz

The Silent House (La Casa Muda)

When the American version came out a few months ago, I looked up to see what the movie was about.  It was then that I discovered that it was a remake of a Uruguayan movie that came out a couple years prior.  So I thought I would check it out

The plot: Laura and her father (Wilson) go to fix up an old house owned by Nestor (in the American version, I believe the Nestor character is Laura’s uncle, but I don’t think there was any such connection between the two here).  The house is out in the middle of the woods, and, since no one has lived there in a while, it is broken down and the lawn is overgrown.  Laura and Wilson are supposed to fix up the house to get it ready to sell.  They get in a little late, so they decide to sleep in the house and get started the following day. 

Before too long, Laura begins to hear noises, and it’s clear there is someone else in the house.  She sends Wilson upstairs to check out a noise.  She hears a thump, and he ends up at the bottom of the steps: his head bloodied, his hands tied, and his body lifeless.  So Laura finds herself needing to fend for herself in the house.  Throughout the movie, she begins to discover an even bigger mystery about the house.

 This movie was shot in entirely one take; or, at the very least, shot in such a way to resemble one take.  As far as getting me interested in the movie, it worked really well.  I was on edge from the minute the movie opened.  Since there weren’t any tight shots, I was always looking to see if there was any movement going on in the background.  It made for an incredibly stressful movie watching experience.  For the first half or so, anyway.

There were some pretty obnoxious parts in this movie.  There were a number of times where I screamed at the TV, “Look behind you!”  With the knowledge that there was someone else in the house (someone who had already beaten her father to death), she spent a ton of time investigating rooms in the house.  There were a couple of scenes where she went into a room and spent two minutes looking at objects in the room, with her back to the door the entire time.  It got a little old after a while, but there were still enough tense moments throughout the movie that kept me interested the entire time.

 Also, there were a lot of parts that ended up not making any sense when the ending was revealed.  I can’t say much else without giving the ending away, so I’ll venture into some spoiler territory here.

[SPOILER]  As it turns out, it was Laura the entire time.  Basically, Nestor got her pregnant (while her father watched), and he killed the baby.  So the killings inside the house were her revenge.  But the camera basically followed Laura the entire movie.  We didn’t see the murders at all.  When her father was killed upstairs, the camera was on Laura downstairs.  So did she have an accomplice?  Was the camera only showing us what she thought was true in her original personality, not showing what her other – more sinister – personality was doing?  If the entire movie is based around using the one-shot approach, it has to make sense.  And there were many times where this movie failed to make sense.  Since I didn’t know who the killer was while I was watching the movie, it didn’t seem strange to me.  But, when I was thinking about it after I finished watching, I started wondering about these things.  [END SPOILER] 

Overall, I liked it.  I didn’t love it, mainly because of the glaring inconsistencies and the ridiculous room-searching of Laura.  But it was still a well-done movie.  It kept me interested for the majority of the movie, and the one-shot style definitely drove that.  It could have been better.  As it stands, it’s still pretty good.

I hope to watch the American version at some point in the not-too-distant future, and then I’ll be able to compare the two.

Rating: 4/5

Trollhunter

With the theme of “found footage” movies, I give you Trollhunter.

The plot is relatively simple.  We follow three college students (Thomas, Johanna & Kalle) as they make a documentary about an alleged bear poacher.  By asking around, they’re able to find out who is responsible: a man named Hans, who seems to be acting alone.  They try to interview him, but he keeps brushing them off. 

One night, they follow him into the woods.  Off in the distance they see flashing lights and hear a loud growl.  Hans comes running towards them screaming, “Troll!”  Thomas is bit, and they all end up getting into Hans’ jeep and taking off.

He sits down with them and tells them that he hunts trolls for a government agency (TSS: Troll Security Service).  He tells them that trolls can sense the blood of Christians.  He tells them that UV light kills trolls: sometimes they turn to stone, and sometimes they just explode.

He allows the students to follow him around, on the grounds that he hates his job, and that the public deserves to know the truth.

They ride around with Hans and observe him dealing with trolls.  Throughout these trips, he tells them how he got into the business, and when it all started to go south for him.  They also run into Finn, who also works at TSS, and is none too thrilled that Hans is allowing these students in on their secret.  Finn threatens the students, telling them that he will never allow them to keep the footage.  With each encounter he grows increasingly more hostile.

We also find out that the troll that bit Thomas had rabies, and that the majority of the trolls in the area have been infected by a rabid Jotnar: a 200 foot tall mountain troll.  So Hans and the students go to take down the Jotnar.

It was a well-done movie.  A little slow at times, but that’s pretty common in a found footage movie.  It was pretty funny at times, too.  A dark, dry sense of humor, but it was there all the same. 

The special effects were surprisingly good, considering this movie was not made on a huge budget ($3 million, from what I’ve seen).  The trolls looked pretty good.  Their movements were a bit choppy at times, but it never distracted from the movie.

It was a highly enjoyable movie, start to finish.

Rating: 4/5

Apollo 18

When I originally saw the previews for this movie, I was kind of excited.  A found footage movie of a lost Apollo mission that went horribly awry.  From the looks of the preview, it looked like there was a monster loose on the moon.  I had a hope that it was some sort of Moon-Yeti.

I was sorely mistaken.  Both in my excitement and in my hopes of seeing a Moon-Yeti of any sort.

 We follow three American astronauts on a top secret mission to the moon.  The goal was to place sensors that would alert the United States of any missile attacks from Russia.  Their trip is disguised as a satellite launch.  Once there, they start seeing odd things, and they realize that they are not alone.

The movie starts out amazingly slow.  But so did Quarantine.  And, since they’re the same style of movie (and Quarantine is amazing), I gave it the benefit of the doubt.  Fifteen minutes in, I was still on board.  “They’re setting something up.  We’re getting to know the characters.  It’ll pick up soon, and we’ll be invested in the characters.”  By the time the 30 minute mark rolled around with little in the way of anything interesting happening, I began to lose hope.  Then 45 minutes with nothing.  Once an hour hit, I had given up all hope and fast-forwarded to the end of the movie, just to see if anything interesting happened.

It didn’t.

There were moments where it appeared as though something interesting was going to happen.  The discovery of a dead Russian cosmonaut and his abandoned ship.  Their own equipment getting destroyed.  A crab-like creature that appears to be crawling inside a helmet.  But every time something even borderline interesting started to happen, it almost immediately subsided.  The movie would start building towards something, then nothing would happen for the next 5 minutes.  Build build build…nothing.  It kept on like that for the majority of the movie.

It was a good idea.  What’s more claustrophobic than the vast expanse of space?  A found footage movie only amps up that feeling of claustrophobia and panic.  This could have been a great movie.  Perhaps my expectations were a bit too high, but I think I would have hated it even if my expectations were low.  It was just a boring, slow-moving movie with no pay-off. 

 

This could have been good.  It really, really wasn’t.  Seeing as how I had just watched a terrific found footage movie not that long before this one (Trollhunter…which will be my next post), I knew how good a movie like this could be.  Which only highlighted just how bad this movie was.    

Rating: 1/5

Chillerama

I’ll be doing a number of single movie reviews for a little while, to get caught up with all the stuff I have watched but didn’t write about.  But, once I get caught up, I think I’m going to try to start another series like I did with Friday the 13^th.  There has been a call for Nightmare on Elm Street, so I may go that route.  I was thinking of possibly doing something a bit more recent (the Cold Prey series has come to mind), but I’m not sure I want to do something that recent.  I don’t feel bad for throwing around spoilers for 80s movies, but I would probably feel a little bad about throwing around spoilers for a more recent series.  I’m undecided.  I would appreciate any thoughts in the comments.

And now…to Chillerama!

This is a movie-within-a-movie (within-a-movie?) horror-comedy anthology. 

The set-up: there is an old drive-in theater that is getting ready to close.  On the final night of operation, the owner (Cecil B. Kaufman, played by Richard Riehle) shows four old, extremely hard-to-find horror movies: Wadzilla, I Was a Teenage Werebear, The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, and Deathication.  Of course, we are also watching the movie of the teens watching the movies (which is titled Zom B Movie), who are caught up in some problems of their own: mainly, an employee has been turned into a zombie, and dripped some of his zombie goo in the popcorn butter.  So, between the movies, we see the patrons of the theater slowly turning into zombies.

It should be noted that we see very little of Deathication, which is good news, because it’s just a lot of images of poop.

I’ll give a brief review of each of the movies.

Wadzilla is a spoof of 50s monster movies.  Basically, a guy with a low sperm count wants to raise that count, so he takes an experimental drug.  But, instead of raising his sperm count, it just makes him produce a very large sperm.  With teeth.  It terrorizes the city, eating animals and people.  Eventually it grows to be larger than a building and the army is called in.

It’s…unnerving.  I know that it’s supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t.  At all.  I don’t remember laughing once.

Notable actors: Ray Wise, Eric Roberts

I Was a Teenage Werebear is a musical.  It follows Ricky, a boy with a nice girlfriend, but who is remarkably gay.  He gets caught up with a leather-clad gang, who are all gay.  They are also werebears.  They turn Ricky into a werebear, but he fights against it.

There are a number of terrible songs scattered throughout this movie.  It got to be a bit long and boring, so I ended up fast-forwarding to the end.  I should have just fast-forwarded through the rest of this movie.

I did like Ricky’s girlfriend, Peggy Lou.  Early on, she gets hit by a van, and spends the rest of the movie with a massive head wound, saying random bits of nonsense.  She made me laugh.  But that’s the absolute best thing I can say about this movie: the girl with the head wound who blabbered on about nothing was the best part of the movie. 

Notable actors: Ron Jeremy

The Diary of Anne Frankenstein is also a musical.  But this one follows Hitler.  He finds Anne Frank and her family at the beginning of the movie and kills her.  She has a notebook that he takes, which has instructions on how to build a Frankenstein-type monster.  So, in an attempt to build “the perfect killing machine to win the war”, he makes the monster.  But the monster ends up being Jewish. 

To top things off, Eva Braun is a massive whore.

I actually kind of enjoyed this one.  Not the entire thing, but there were enough funny moments to keep me interested in it throughout.  It was worth watching to see Joel David Moore’s portrayal of Hitler.  He was fantastic.

Directed by Adam Green (Hatchet)

Notable actors: Kane Hodder, Joel David Moore, Kristina Klebe

As I mentioned earlier, we don’t see much of Deathication.

 Zom B Movie is the movie that is going on while the rest of the movies are being watched.  We follow a handful of main characters as they go to the closing night of the local drive-in.  Between the movies, we see the spread of the zombie virus throughout the people watching the movies, to the point that Deathication is (mercifully) interrupted by the zombies.  We spend the rest of Chillerama watching the chaos at the drive-in.  There is lots of running and screaming and shooting.  There’s a scene where two parents eat their baby.  There’s a scene where the owner dispatches zombies with a wide assortment of weapons and says random movie quotes between each kill.  “Say hello to my little friend.”  BLAM!  “I’m getting to old for this s***.”  BANG!  “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  BIFF!  “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”  And so on.

It’s not great, and all the references get a bit old after a while (more on that in a bit), but it had some funny moments.  Not many, but a couple, which makes it better than Wadzilla and I Was a Teenage Werebear.

Notable actors: Richard Riehle

I knew going in that Chillerama would have a terrible script and would be terribly acted.  That’s what they were going for.  Still, I was hoping for a much funnier movie.  If you’re going to make a horror-comedy, you have to make sure that it’s actually funny.  This wasn’t.  It was also pretty long, clocking in at just under 2 hours.  That’s way too long.  I was ready for this movie to be over much sooner than it actually was.

Also, I feel like they were trying to make Zom B Movie a little “smarter” than the rest.  There were lots of movie references that I felt like were forced…like they were saying them just so the audience would nod their head and say, “I know that quote.”  It failed.  Yes, I knew a lot of the quotes, but that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed it.  They were just beating us over the head with them, and it was a bit much.  There’s a difference between “smart” and “beating the audience over the head with tons of movie references”. 

One last complaint.  Bad horror movies can be funny in how bad they are.  It’s extremely hard to make a good horror movie that feels like a bad horror movie.  Chillerama tried to pull that off, but failed miserably.

 In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t really like this movie.  Aside from the girlfriend in I Was a Teenage Werebear and parts of The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, I didn’t really like this at all.  So, while I can’t say that I hate it, I can say that I disliked it immensely.

Rating: 1/5