Wrong Turn: Bloodlines

Description from Netflix:
The local authorities already have their hands full with the legendary Mountain Man festival on Halloween, but they're in for some real trouble when a family of inbred cannibals feats on a group of college students.

Notable actors: Doug Bradley

My thoughts:
As near as I can tell, this movie took place after the events of part 4, but before the events of part 1.  The events at the hospital from part 4 are referenced (albeit clumsily).  We find the family of cannibals being taught in the art of killing by a calm psychopath by the name of Maynard (played by Doug Bradley, aka "Pinhead".  It should be noted that this makes the second movie with "Bloodline" in the title, the first being 1996's Hellraiser: Bloodline).

Bradley was terrible in this.  He didn't so much chew through his lines as much as he grabbed the lines, gnawed on them for a long time, spit them out, gnawed on them some more, then left their bloody remains strewn across the floor.  In a movie full of terrible acting, it takes a remarkable effort to stand head-and-shoulders against the rest.  And yet, that's what Bradley did here.  I realize that he didn't have much to work with, and playing it over the top was his best option.  But it just didn't work.  It was awful.  He was a one-note character who did absolutely nothing with that note.

Moving on from my Doug Bradley hate-fest.
The movie pretty much follows the same formula, with some slight changes.  Teenagers are terrorized/tortured/murdered by a family of inbred cannibals in the hills of West Virginia.  They try to get away.  Most of them don't, and they die in gruesome ways.

None of the teenagers were overly obnoxious, which was nice.  There wasn't much to them (this wasn't exactly Cold Prey) and I didn't love any of them, but I didn't really hate any of them either, and that's always a welcome change of pace.

There was some strange subplot with a newswoman who was sent to cover this Mountain Man festival (a music festival where everyone dressed up like inbreds.  They reference Burning Man, Coachella & Lollapalooza, which seems fairly close.  Except with lots of people dressed like deformed rednecks).  She went full Phil Connors, left, changed into an outfit eerily reminiscent of April O'Neal, and went running in the woods.

She is shocked by the lack of turtles in this movie

She doesn't return (obviously), and the sound operator has to step in.  It's a big moment for her career.  But who cares?  This story only takes up about 5 minutes of the movie (if that).  It doesn't set anything up, except for the fact that there are some inbred cannibals on the loose.  And it also gives us the title screen.  But that's it.

There were moments in this movie that felt really dirty & mean-spirited.  I have watched all of these movies (for better or worse), and none of them gave me the feeling that this one did.  I would go so far as to label it misogynistic, and I rarely do that with horror movies.  It just felt like they had too many scenes in this movie where the sole purpose of the filmmakers seemed to be, "Let's see how bad we can hurt these women.  Punch her harder in the face.  More violent."
Don't get me wrong, I've watched my share of movies with violence against women (as evidenced by this blog), but this is the first time I've really been uncomfortable watching them.  The women had no chance of escape.  They weren't really setting us up to cheer for any of the girls.  It seemed like they were just torturing these women because they wanted to.
There were also two sex scenes with nudity, and the second one didn't really have any bearing on the movie or the characters.  It was just, "Hey.  Boobs.  Right here."  Not for any reason, and not to set up the character as some kind of harlot who had violated the rules of slasher movies (she was a no-name character who was not killed).  Just to show a girl getting naked and blowing a fat guy.  If the rest of the movie didn't have such a negative vibe about women, I wouldn't have thought twice about this scene.  But it did, so it left me feeling dirty.
Maybe I'm off.  Maybe I'm reading this all wrong.  But that's the feeling I got from this movie, and, by the end, I just couldn't really handle any more.

Needless to say, I did not like this movie.

Rating: 1/5

Midnight Meat Train, Wrong Turn 4

Midnight Meat Train

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 3.5/5

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 3/5

Wrong Turn 3, The Crazies

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

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

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