Schedule clash? Came home late? Forgot? Don't panic - you can now get your regular dose of nubile girls screaming at fake spiders (etc) an hour later on Zone Horror + 1... |
I thought, as a fan of the horror genre - and as a person who has mentioned Zone Horror (formerly The Horror Channel) half a dozen times in my Digibox write-up - that I should review some of their offerings.
Schedule clash? Came home late? Forgot? Don't panic - you can now get your regular dose of nubile girls screaming at fake spiders (etc) an hour later on Zone Horror + 1... |
The 'ratings' shown (i.e. 15, 18, etc) are the ratings given by Zone Horror (in the EPG).
Indented blocks are comments relating to "Jason's reviews" on the channel's website.
I have scored the films 'out of ten', aka "The Rick 'VideoFiend' rating":
| Wa-hey!, real home-grown material! |
| Small-town America bites back! |
| A movie made "Down Under". |
| Made "Down Under and right a bit". :-) |
| Un film d'horreur, normalement en français et avec des sous-titres. |
| Un film dell'orrore da Italia, normalmente in italiano e con il sottotitolos. |
| Sumimasen - eigo-ga wakarimas ka? |
Quick links (158 reviews, 18 favourites (and 136 pictures 
; with links to 19 larger pictures)):
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Flowers In The Attic −
Ghost Game −
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Horror 101 −
Humanoids From The Deep −
Hunting Humans −
I Am Omega −
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Malevolence −
Maniac Nurses −
Maniacts −
May −
Momentum −
Mommy −
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Pumpkinhead −
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Foreign title quick links:
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My favourites (8/10 or more) quick links:
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A girl who can move things by thought is dumped at a locked gate by her agitated father. The gate is opened by a creepy hooded monk who lets her in and locks the gate behind him as he leaves.
Finding her way to the classroom, she encounters four other 'girls with problems' (who also turn out to have powers of some form), a priest (played by Ron Perlman of "Hellboy", "La Cité Des Enfants Perdus", etc), and an icy woman who just screams "I'm on a power trip".
In the process of reform, and the girls wearing pseudo-kinky tartan-skirted uniforms (well, this is supposed to be a horror movie, right?), they start to discover more about each other, about lead girl's pet ghost theory, and about what exactly is going on in the bizarre school... or should that be convent?
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Sombody: She is trash, man. Somebody else: You're talkin' about my girlfriend, man. Somebody: Get outta my face, man!And then they come face to face with a bent-up cage, a rat busted out. A really pi***d-off mutant rat.
Without the slightest hint of a doubt, this was Zone Horror's best acquisition. I said this when the channel was called "The Horror Channel", and years later under the name of "Zone Horror" it still holds true.
Ellen Cole is an agency nurse. She goes to work a shift at a mental facility. The staff are not interested in knowing her, referring to her as "the agency" (well observed - that happened to me too!).
In actuality, she is an undercover reporter. Her brother is in the facility for the murder of their parents - something Ellen believes him to be innocent of. Somehow she must find a way to expose the abuse and get her brother out; for he never should have been sent to that facility in the first place.
Ellen gets more than she bargained for. Sexy female doctors, blood, sultry nurses, blood, the 'nice bloke' who happens to turn a bit 'odd' when he is holding a machete, blood, and the Christmas party.
Oh yes, and vampires.
Lots of vampires.
This is a new (in 2004...) British film, made by a new company called Revolt Films who promises more of the same in the future. I cannot wait!
As you watch this film, it is really difficult to believe that this is a debut feature for the new Revolt Films company - even in its best moments, Hammer Horror isn't a patch on this!
It is quite clear that the creators of this film are avid horror fans. This is certainly no "cash in on the trend" type of horror flick, nor another "let's put a bunch of teenagers in a forest..." film. Oh no. This film has been written by horror fans so it contains all the things that horror fans would want in a movie. Some great characters, great situations, and considering the low budget - the special effects were okay too.
It is really nice to have the humour played subtle, rather than several recent 'big' horror movies that were mainly funny because of stupid things they said or other movies they ripped off. Asylum Night is not like this at all. It assumes we viewers have a brain. It is a thinking man's horror movie.
In fact my only complaint with Asylum Night is the finalé, however this didn't put me off the movie - everything up until that point was near genius.
(I think I'll just have to shrug and say 'artistic differences')
I won't spoil it for you by telling you what I didn't like. Watch the movie, perhaps you can guess... If you really really cannot wait, open the 'source' of this web page and read the comment.
Ellen Cole is well played by Adrienne Carlyle; and David Horton puts in a brilliant performance as the sanest person in the asylum.
This is definitely a not to be missed film, and congratulations to Revolt Films for such an entertaining and intelligent horror movie...
Some behind-the-scenes pictures: Adrienne Carlyle (Ellen Cole) gets the giggles; filming the Happy Hacker scene; and the leading ladies at the film's premiere...
In Italian with English subtitles.
The odd screen format is space for the subtitles!
Imagine a Jean Rollin film given a slice of Italian style. The result? This movie. Black Magic Rites.
The story concerns a group of people in an old castle, following an uneasy shift of perspective forward and backward in time. A girl is captured and sacrificed to a creepy-looking statue. In the dark ages, a 'witch' was burned at a stake. The statue is, I think, a representation of this witch and it needs hearts and eyes and blood from virgins to bring it alive.
The group gathered in the castle are enjoying a song and dance; but they are, not entirely coincidentally, the descendants of the ones that were originally involved in the witch burning.
Lots of attractive girls will scream, and lots of people will act really badly. But somehow you don't mind as the sets are colourful in a way that perhaps only the Italians can manage (a horror film verging on ever-so-slightly-tacky cartoon qualities). And, being a film made by somebody other than Dario Argento, it contains all of the colours of the rainbow.
I'll tell you what, guys... Grab a beer, watch this movie, and see if you can tell me what the exact plot is supposed to be. There's a basic premise which could be written in one paragraph, and there's everything else which makes little sense and is full of logic faults!
Never mind. It is nice to look at. :-)
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A low budget movie, and it shows! A bunch of people camp in the woods. Some weird guy with a guitar sings a creepy tale and... well... The gory effects are amazingly fake and the acting is so hammy...
That's why I liked this film, to be honest. It is a great one to share with a few friends and a couple of cans. You can all shout at the TV, like: Hey, moody dark-haired girl! You're scared, right? You're looking for your boyfriend, right? So WHY ARE YOU WALKING AROUND THE FOREST ALONE???
But it gets better, you can all shout NO! Don't go into that dark cave, you stupid girl!!!
Yup, this film has 'em all. Horror story clichés pile up relentlessly, like a motorway crash in thick fog. It just doesn't stop!
Oh, the plot? Well there's this bunch of people (supposedly teens, but a little bit too old) in the forest. And there's this guy with an axe and his face obscured by a gas mask. Just like in Dr. Giggles, they run and he walks and he still catches them. Who is he? We never find out. Why is he killing? We never really know. Why don't these kids run the moment one of them disappears? That'd make a crappy movie. Who is the weird old person? Local colour, I presume. Why is GasMaskGuy's shack missing most of it's walls? Better visuals?
To be honest, the plot is little more than "young adults vs deranged killer"... But it's a fun ride all the same...
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Three babies, all born at the same time during a solar eclipse...
That's the sci-fi rubbish that prefixes this film that looks as if it is from the late '70s or early '80s. We catch up with the three children about ten years into their lives. And, suddenly, as if it is some sort of born destiny, they start killing people.
This is one of those movies where you watch and have to ask "how stupid ARE those adults?"...
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You can download the script from the Bloody Murder Films website (direct link (incomplete?)).
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You can download the script from the Bloody Murder Films website (direct link (incomplete?)).
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Bone Snatcher, The [click to redirect]
The movie, basically, is an attractive female med student is assigned a particularly difficult case in an asylum as part of her thesis work. To pass her course, she has to communicate with him and learn enough about him in order to be able to write up about him.
But he has a few surprises up his sleeve - including warnings about the shadowy creepy dude called Molokai.
This is a movie that you need to watch without disturbances. Take the phone off the hook, lock the doors, close the curtains, turn the lights out. Then watch this film, while taping it. When the twist in the tale is revealed, suddenly everything that has gone before will take on a slightly different context, a 'paradigm shift' if you will. Rewind the tape, watch it again to see how everything falls into place.
I cannot say anything else, I don't want to spoil it for you!
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Brink, The [click to redirect]
Now you might be thinking that this doesn't sound so bad, right? The sad fact is that the above paragraph covers fifty four minutes of the film, which really should have been edited down to around ten minutes so that something interesting can happen.
So, now that we have the extra characters, the films picks up, right?
Yes and no. I mean, stuff happens but you are waiting for the big climax (if nothing else) and it never arrives. I found the film's ending to be badly structured and just as you are hoping for the film to really get going, the credits roll...
Chair, The [click to redirect]
Audrey Hepburn on The Horror Channel? Say it isn't so!
Actually, it is so. This gentle film follows a woman's discovery that her husband had a whole secret life that she didn't know about. And following his death, there's a whole lot of money that a number of unpleasant characters want.
This film isn't scary, but it provides plenty of opportunities for the well-dressed Ms. Hepburn to scream and be scared; including her enduring a rather innovative torture in a phone booth.
Set in Paris. There's no flag as I'm not sure (right now) if this is an American or British production.
You can download the script from the Classic Movie Scripts website (direct link).
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Following on from Children of the Corn, this film takes up the story, but it is perhaps bizarre in that it continues exactly where the original left off - no 'year later' or anything like that.
We, essentially, follow the story of a jaded newspaper reporter and the son that doesn't think much of him. And along the way they encounter a woman running a B&B and a young girl on a moped, respectively.
What to say? Well as a lot of material written by, or based upon, Stephen King - the undertones of the story are the religious weirdness that exists in some parts of America. We have the priest banging on about 'fornication' and 'sinning most vigorously', while the evil children are evidently led by an entity referred to as 'He Who Walks Behind The Rows'.
You'll notice through much of the early part of the film there is a boy dressed entirely in black, black hair, and his eyes are weirdly black as well. This should have been a bit of a clue to... like... everybody.
This won't win awards for being a great horror film, and it probably won't even go into a 'classics' category. But it is worth watching, in a Bloody Murder kind of way - don't take it seriously, it is actually sorta funny...
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Choke, The [click to redirect]
Thora Birch plays both lead roles - a blonde girl trying IVF treatment who has nightmares featuring...
...a much prettier, though less stable, brunette who has some pretty mental things happen in her life; like waking up beaten and vomiting up a key. This girl has the blonde in her dreams.
It goes along as a great little film, there's some really menacing stuff, and we are left for ages wondering if these two girls will find out about the existence of each other. Will they meet? Are they both real, or is one the dream of another? So many questions, so many possibilities, all let down by a muddled and lacklustre ending.
But, hey, watch the other 99% of the film and then in your head devise a better ending! ☺
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Dark Dealer, The [click to redirect]
When she was a little girl and televisions had not yet discovered the delights of colour or video editing, my mother would run home from school to watch a series that has attained a cult status. A series called "Dark Shadows".
This, showing on Zone Horror is a late eighties remake. Actually it is copyright 1991 however the clothing and especially the hairstyles seem late-'80s, unless California clung on to that decade a little longer than the rest of us. In any case, a remake was inevitable given that the original was recorded on to videotape in the days before proper tape editing (so fluffed lines and accidents remain); the whole concept was actually quite a good one, perhaps just a little before its time.
It is hard to explain what exactly "Dark Shadows" actually is. A woman goes to a spooky old house called Collinwood, in Maine (filmed in California), to be a nanny to a very young Joseph Gordon-Levitt who you may know from "Third Rock From The Sun". There is crossing and double-crossing, a vampire called Barnabus, a fairly convincing French accent in a girl going by the name of Angelique (which, incidently, is the 'name' of my laptop - no relation)...
I find it a little bit cheesy in a "Dallas" sort of way, however mom says it is fairly faithful to the original series. One thing we cannot deny is that it is extremely complex. If you are faithfully following the story, you'll find it sucking you in regardless of the cheese or the ham.
This is truly one of this series where you miss an episode and you won't know what the heck is going on - and God help anybody stumbling in part-way into the story! Unfortunately this may have been its ultimate downfall, for only around 12 episodes were made...
Maybe Zone Horror could try to secure the rights to show the original b/w series? That would be most cool...
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Of course Dead Mary (isn't that a rock group?) turns up. Of course people die. Of course they come back. This is a horror movie, after all. The question is, as always, which girl will survive. Or something. It was okay, if rather uninspired in the plot. It actually looked to me like a cast and crew doing their best with a rather lame plot, all filmed over a weekend on a tiny budget.
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Dead Of Night, The [click to redirect]
This is a funny, witty, and sharp story with some memorable characters - especially the dumb (or is she?) blonde in the bunny outfit. There's a name that ought to be familiar - Tiffany Shepis.
If you wish to look this up on IMDb, I should point out that the end credits say this movie is called The Hazing. The "Dead Scared" title is probably an English version because we Brits don't have the tradition of 'hazing' ceremonies.
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A young nurse, fetchingly played by Linda Blair works at a hospital where a doctor is trying a new therapy. The therapy of sleep.
Essentially, you should think of this as a poor man's "Coma", that while Robin Cook revelled in the plausible technical details of medical horror stories, this one is a little harder to swallow, but it is engagingly played by Linda, who makes it believable.
Special marks also for having nurses that look a little frumpy - like real nurses - instead of the slutty sorts you often find in horror movies.
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A bunch of teenagers travelling down a lonely road in a posh minibus, en route to some sort of competition that they will take part in. They think they hit somebody. It turns out to be a gun-toting drug-pushing black man with a bad attitude (this unfortunate cultural stereotype is, really, the only let-down of the film).
The man directs them, at gunpoint, to a ghost town where it is always sunset - hence the name Sunset Valley - in order to track down the man's accomplice who just ripped him off. Sadly for them, the ghost town isn't just a ghost town. Time stands still, and as if that isn't enough, it is full of zombies!
Chelsea Jean, pictured above, makes a suitably quirky and fiesty lead character, even if it does appear as if she is trying hard not to giggle in a few scenes. She plays it this side of calm and collected, which is a touch creepy in itself. Bus hijacked? Oh, okaaay. Zombies gonna get you? Oh, okaaay. Sure, she gets upset once or twice. She even screams once. But nothing seems to get her down. I wish she'd be my girlfriend if I ended up in a horror flick!
I think we need a 'heroine' who isn't going to lose it as soon as things start to turn bad, who is suitably girly for a girl, without being all Gung-Ho Ripley. She's cute too.
This is obviously a low-budget affair, and it shows (the logic of the plot frequently defies itself and indeed the very definition of logic), but the sheer enthusiasm of the cast glosses over the various (numerous) deficiencies - you know, like the guys walking and the zombies running and they still get away, despite the place having some sort of weird circular thing going and it being about the size of a postage stamp...
As I check this review in MSIE, I notice that either my digitiser's idea of colour is seriously messed up (over-yellowification aside), or Chelsea's top is kinda blue in one picture and kinda green in the other! Oh, and with such an open-neck garment, you can also play "spot the bra straps" which appear to come and go, not to mention the 'blood' which looks to have been randomly applied by a finger dipped in red ink.
But hey, the girl isn't too freaked about the living dead, so I guess vanishing bras and tops that change colour aren't going to faze her either. Just so long as she has the bra when she needs to leg it, right? ☺
Bottom line? The photography is decent, and provided you don't attempt to take the plot seriously, this film is well worth a watch. For "artistic reasons", okay? To check out the rich lush and vibrant perpetu-sunset photography...
The ending credits has this to say:
A young man called Cory (Eric Larson) wants to go and discover his roots after having weird dreams. He takes his sweet (in a librarian sort of way) girlfriend Elaine with him (Francine Lapensée). Despite warnings from 'the locals', he carries on going. And, along the way, a bunch of friends turn up for a party.
The first thing that isn't right is the house is a ruin. You can walk all around it. But go inside the front door, it's a house. Intact.
From here we have gore, grizzle, and all sorts of Evil Dead-style hijinks; in fact this is pretty much a rehash of The Evil Dead, only with a lower budget.
Much about this movie doesn't make sense, some of the acting is awful, and the effects are obviously effects (such as the oatmeal-puking zombies), but through it all it is so silly it is pretty funny...
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Dentist, The [click to redirect]
Two descendants of Poe meet each other and all sorts of chaos is unleashed as one of them has a bit of murder in mind, which is presided over by the ghost of Poe looking somewhat like a hammed-up John Cleese. You almost expect to see Manuel appear with his "I know nah-thing!" catchphrase.
There are a some action bits in this movie, not so many scares, but loads to giggle at.
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Twenty years ago, a crazy old man was arrested for murdering... himself, apparently. Thus he was never sent to jail.
Fast-forward twenty years and this man knows something. You can't go in that room. The room protected with a really silly little lock. The police come to take him away, again, as he is refusing to let anybody near that room even though the old theatre has been closed a long while and foreclosed just then.
Our intrepid reporter has a feeling so she goes to find out what all the fuss is about. Along the way, being 'intrepid', she unlocks the room and walks in. But there's nothing in there!
Can't you just see the clichés piling up? Well here's the sci-fi part. Every twenty years there is some sort of... I don't know, cross-dimensional alignment or something. By this time my brain was more interested in eating spaghetti in the dark without spilling it than the flimsy science. Anyway, stepping into that room would, somehow, cause your 'double' to arrive on earth. Your double, of course, being the exact opposite of you (but looking pretty much the same, same hair colour etc). So for our intrepid reporter, her double was a good journalist that dished dirt, popular with the guys, and into kinky sex. In short, everything our original isn't.
This film does quite a good job of following the reporter's confusion ('but I didn't write this!?'), though one might suspect this had more to do with the cost and logistics of getting the same person on-screen twice rather than any major character development.
Hokey ending, but an enjoyable enough way to waste some idle time provided you don't try picking holes in the plot!
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You may find that one of the cast looks really familiar but something isn't quite right. Given the face, and given the name (Charlie O'Connell), it is pretty obvious to me now that he's the younger brother of Jerry O'Connell (you may know him from Sliders, Joe's Apartment, etc).
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...you guessed it. A possessed doll. This time the doll is female, and the child is female. But it doesn't really matter. The amusingly-named Rip Torn as the father of the family, his wife, the two children, and the religious Spanish-speaking housekeeper are basically not given enough decent material here. Nothing is scream-worthy. Hell, the possessed children aren't even scary when they've got their game faces on. In fact, I'd reckon anybody older than the young girl (usually wearing a puke-making "little girl" dress with frilly lace and such) in this film would probably find the dolls amusing rather than creepy.
I hope and I pray one day for a film to take up this genre and do something new an interesting (as Asylum Night was for the well-worn vampire genre), but, alas... this is much a by-the-numbers sort of film.
That isn't to say it is unwatchable - it is quite okay for watching while eating your ready meal, just don't have too many expectations. In fact, don't have any expectations at all...
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Dreaded, The [click to redirect]
The story? Erm, there isn't one exactly. Elvira is this bizarre combination of Kelly Osbourne and Gonzo (yes, the muppet), and she is a witch who has just inherited a haunted house. No, not a clichéd warts and cackle sort of witch, and definitely not a Neve Campbell sexy-leather-look witch. She's the sort of witch that you might expect to find in a Leslie Nielsen movie.
No, I'm not going to tell you how the film goes. It is unbelievably silly. But trust me on one thing - next time you feel 'down', pop open a beer (this movie is best experienced when you are not entirely sober) and if it doesn't at least make you giggle, you'd have to be a tax inspector...
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Evil Below, The [click to redirect]
An amusingly kooky woman is an artist. Living alone in a rather cool apartment with her artwork and her adopted cat (not exactly a clever mix, I speak from experience!) after breaking up with her boyfriend.
Only, her boyfriend - a computer programmer according to the EPG description, but not really mentioned in the film - doesn't take nicely to her new-found independence. So he keeps close tabs on her (by that I mean ridiculously close) and looks for innovative ways to ensure her life doesn't continue for much longer, unknown to her. But when the penny finally drops thanks to a chance video diary segment... well, what next? Watch to find out!
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The first problem in the arrangement is the lady of the manor, the children's grandmother. She has decided that things would be better all around if the grandfather doesn't know of the existence of the children - apparently conceived in sin between a woman and her brother (though all looking rather normal for such inbreeding). The woman decides to lock the children in an upstairs room and give them the run of the attic, but since the children are 'unholy', she will never show them affection.
They are helplessly trapped and - slowly they come to realise - forgotten. But what can be done with four children that no longer exist?
Starring a young Kristy Swanson (later to be seen as the movie version of Buffy, as well as other sort-of-action roles), and based upon a novel by Virginia Andrews, this is an interesting tale of what people are capable of when all that matters is money...
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Grapes of Death, The [click to redirect]
Greenskeeper, The [click to redirect]
Seen in the credits - thanks to: "Rami's Mom for her awesome meatball recipe", plus some other amusing stuff. So don't turn over as soon as you see the credits roll.
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Let's start with the lead actress. Tatum Adair. Looks to be mid-twenties to thirties. Blonde, round face. And - especially important - a little on the heavy side. Not 'fat', but not the fickle waif-like 'hip chicks' that often feature in horror movies (and are usually sex-obsessed and get slaughted before the first advert break). While this film has all the elements of a horror film, Tatum - playing the part of Rebecca (Becky) - made this film both watchable and believable. This is very important. And that is why some films score lower than you might expect.
I give high points to films with artistic merit or good stories or to a story you feel you can believe in, where you actually care about what happens to the lead characters. Compare this with, say, Hell's Highway where you watch to see how the girls will get dispatched and if any will beat The Big Bad - but if you are really honest with yourself, asides from perhaps picking a 'favourite', you can't say you really care which ones live and which ones die.
Not so with Ghost Lake.
And before I describe the premise of the film, I feel I must mention that the little girl is called (in real life) Azure Sky Decker. Azure Sky? Come on! Still, a flick through Google ought to find kids given far worse names than that...
Becky is prompted by her parents to go out, to enjoy herself. She wants to be back by ten (ahhh, isn't that sweet?) but they tell her she can stay out until eleven at the earliest. Well, she meets a bloke with one of the cheesiest chat-up lines ever and she belies her niceness by getting into her car and getting her brains porked out before even a first date. She returns after this blast of insane promiscuity to find her parents dead. For those watching, bear with me as this part of the story is intercut with the funeral. When she starts seeing ghosts in the house, she leaves. Runs, a long way, to a little house by the lake - the only place she ever felt 'safe'. Only, there's something in the lake. One might imagine the title of the film could be a bit of a clue! Knowing about it is no real use really. Doing something about it. That's the key. And that, as always, is the hard part.
Overall, this was an extremely enjoyable film, and one with quite a long running time (around 1h55ish!). Because it was filmed on the border of a lake, and sometimes in the rain, it seemed Becky had to get herself soaked at practically every opportunity - sometimes for reasons bordering on the illogical - and all the while those around her not believing the things she said she saw, all adding up to the idea that perhaps Becky is more than a little bit unhinged; the whole time she was wrestling with the fact that she indirectly killed her parents (had she returned at 11pm, they'd not have died).
As you can tell from my score, I liked this film a lot. While I could nit-pick (as you could with anything), I found this film to be enjoyable, believable, entertaining, and well-presented.
A girl out in the desert vanishes in a big whirlwind. She looks at this wall of dust approaching and she screams. Twice. This is followed by her being 'dragged' along the side of the car in what may be one of the lamest special effects to grace any movie I've watched this year.
Thankfully it got better. Essentially this is a good ol'fashioned Western, with the added complication of some time-travel stuff in it. It's a sort of a haunted town, a town of ghosts (erm... hence the title!) who are trapped until some wrong can be righted.
As with the majority of westerns, it is fairly clear what/who/how from reel one. What makes this film worth pursuing is the ride. There are a few nice touches along the way. No spoilers!
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A bunch of people take a weekend off work to go up to an old house in the woods. The male lead entices a workmate by telling her that there will be an orgy and then she'll be fed to the monster (woo! can't hardly wait, huh?).
Barely into the journey, the females pick up another female and then this entourage make it to the house.
As you can imagine, people die. Well, actually it starts with decapitated dolls and moves on to people, along with a slightly distracting music track and a unnecessary psycho clown (Stephen King's It anyone???).
For much of this movie, I would have rated it maybe a five or six out of ten. That was until the denouement which was unexpected, amusing, and wrapped up the film nicely.
Grim Weekend isn't an award winner, but it is worth watching...
My main problem with the movie is that just as it actually starts to get moving, it offers a three-shots-ring-out ending, and then the credits roll.
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Haunting of Morella, The [click to redirect]
It is hard to imagine why this film has an 18 cert as it doesn't pass as a horror. It is more a slightly creepy detective flick - and there's plenty of character-building here to take place between the incomprehensible beheadings. There's a reasonably attractive female detective (who has a somewhat bizarre dress sense), and the old cliché befuddled male cop who smokes and drinks too much and doesn't have a clue really. The twist this time is that his wife found love in the arms of another woman, so at least that's a small diversion from the norm.
Now the problem is that this demon thing will decapitate anything that gets in its way, and this includes the two detectives lumbered with the task of trying to put everything together. This film, on the whole, was quite likeable - but by this point we introduce the fact that the demon can assume people's identities (like it can become your mother, kind of thing - like the T-1000 in Terminator 2). As of this point, the film just seemed to become a little bit formulaic, by the numbers. It was obvious for the last twenty or so minutes roughly how it'd turn out.
The characterisations aren't bad, the location shooting around Miami isn't bad (we do get beyond the dark-alley zones of some other movies), and the whole voodoo demon thing is absolute garbage, but enjoyable garbage, if you've nothing better planned for your evening...
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Sadly, the stories are ludicrous rather than scary, and the obviously-fake prosthetic effects make the dead people look more like a mouldy version of that big marshmallow guy from Ghostbusters than anything actually... you know... dead. (cue excited moans and whimpers from the prisoner!)
If you dubbed over some of the bad language (à la ITV), then you could probably show this in the afternoon... on ITV perhaps?... for kids to smirk at. I think Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid Of The Dark has more spook-potential than Hellblock 13.
Furthermore, to be pedantically picky - the female prisoner says that the block is known to the inmates (living and dead) as 'hellblock six, six, six' so why is this film titled something else?
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Let's get the complaint out of the way first. The EPG description says:
Friends on a road trip pick up sexy hitchhiker Lucinda, who turns out to be a homicidal maniac. It's time to kill or be killed, but Lucinda refuses to die.Excuse me? What? Like, did you even watch the same movie?!? Not only is there no hitchhiker that they pick up, but I've read the credits and there's not even an actress called Lucinda, never mind a character with that name! The credits here prove that. (yeah, I have no life, that's a given...)
The film... Well, a group of young adults go on a road trip. In a big-ass motor home. They are crossing... somewhere. It looks like Thelma & Louise country, so perhaps Arizona or New Mexico? The driver suggests a little detour to a location where some seriously weird drugs grow, could be some cash in it, right? The creepy weird dude at the run-down gas station tells them to leave in no uncertain terms. It isn't safe, you see. Crazy people, away on the drugs, roam the lands. Of course, it is a horror movie so they completely ignore the warnings and plough headlong into a desolate hell.
The characters. Let's see: there's the goth girl, partial to black, called Cashie (yes, cash-ee, not Casey). A gay homey - if you can imagine it. A lovey-dovey-make-us-pukey couple. Two more girls, the first (the blonde) is rather clueless. She has a fuzzy-teddy shaped backpack. The other (with the horrible blue (?) hair) is like a big sister. Both of them enjoy sucking on pacifier-shaped lollipops. Tell me, are Harmony and Tara New-Millennium Valley Girl names, or is the writer of this film perhaps aware of the creations of Joss Whedon? :-) Actually, Harmony (the blonde) does a pretty good job of sounding like Kermit in parts. I wonder if she was originally from Baltimore? Anyway, that leaves the driver. He is dorky in a cool sort of way. Like Riley. Or what's-his-name from Dawson's Creek (no, so totally not Dawson!). Oh yes, and nobody called Lucinda.
The dialogue is snappy, and amusing. The characters are rounded enough that everything just 'flows' nicely, even if the Big Bad of the film is a little illogical (what's the weird floaty-cam business all about?). And in some parts the cinematography belies the fact that this is a budget horror flick. And one of the best bits? The evil in the film makes sense. I'm not going to give it away, but there is a definite reason and sequence of events.
Nothing is so depressing as a manifestation of evil that just 'is', with no rhyme or reason. Refer to The Evil Below for an example of how to make evil suck...
As usual, as a film viewer (and some-day-writer) I have some ideas for alterations, but these are more personal 'tweaks' than anything else. That, for me, is one of the signs of a good movie (perfect movies would need no tweaks; crap movies I wouldn't entertain the thought). Certainly, I'm glad I have it on videotape. I can watch it again when my Digibox isn't working... like maybe tomorrow night?!
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Horror Story, The [click to redirect]
The reality? The first flaw is the god-awful narration. It is like one of those private-eye movies, only the narration is spoken with the sort of smug self-assurance I'd hoped was left to die in the late '80s.
The second flaw, and this is a very critical one, is "so bloody what?". Do we have a cute girl in peril? No. Do we have a decent guy fighting for his life? No. Do we have... actually, I'll tell you what we have - we have a killer with no positive attributes what-so-bloody-ever. None. Not a one. Even Hannibal Lector (as in Silence Of The Lambs) has attributes that made him likeable, and a whole mind-play with Clarice Starling.
The critical importance of this is revealed when you start to examine the movie's plot. If you don't like, empathise, or at least have some sort of feeling for the main character then you are not going to care if he has met his match. If he lives. If he dies.
Worse still - spoiler alert - his match is another smug self-assured prat that thinks of himself as a serious killer. Or something. By this time the cynical crap spewing out of Aric's mind (but not his mouth) was really starting to annoy me.
I suggest you watch this movie once. Then while the credits roll you can let your mind float and give to you all sorts of cool ideas that would improve the movie. It's a shame that the writers didn't do this in the beginning...
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In French with English subtitles.
This is a rather interesting French movie. The video quality is grainy and fuzzy. To be honest, it looks like something I could have made with my HandyCam. So you begin watching and think "mmm, it'll be a half hour shortie". In fact, this movie goes on and on and on. Two hours of it. And along the way we are treated to an amazing array of post-production effects and things that - if really filmed with a HandyCam - must have been pretty difficult. Some of the scenes are quite frenetic, and somewhat low-bitrate MPEG starts to break down and everything gets a bit blocky. Amazingly, I felt that this actually added to the film!
Anyway, enough of the nerdy crap. A bunch of young adults are in a flat in Paris. Having a bit of a party, discussing comics and horror videos and so forth. Suddenly this cloaked weirdo starts bumping off the cute girls and anybody else who gets in the way. It is death. He'll take you out in whatever way best suits him, the more overkill, the better!
The story is more involved than that, involving dead people doing Death's work for him, and Death getting to like his work a little too much, but I don't want to give too much away.
All in all, once I became accustomed to the somewhat distracting camera style (and bizarre bizarre editing that made me keep thinking my Digibox was losing signal), I found this to be a very enjoyable and blood-soaked film.
In the French way of speaking, the 'i' is said like an 'ee', so the title would be spoken as I am the reaper (Je suis le moissoneur), which makes more sense than 'ripper'.
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Here, the man is not interested in having sex with children. Film censors and general morality is rather touchy about that sort of thing, so instead we'll make the ice cream man your regular loner-slash-murdering-nutcase. I think it speaks volumes about society's so-called morals when raping kids is way beyond taboo but murdering them is fine.
Anyway, he's mad. As expected. Everybody around him isn't much saner, and those working in the mental health facility are so beyond help. And he is an ice cream man. A figure of many communities that is just begging to be a person in a horror flick.
As I write this on my PocketBook II (Psion) organiser, I am sitting in the dentist's waiting room. They made a horror movie about a Dentist. I think the star of that movie is busy drilling inside somebody's mouth eight metres away... and it is my turn next.
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The plot of this film from 1980 is less confused than some Argento creations. Basically there's a story of three woman (described variously as 'the three mothers' and 'the three sisters'). This story passes from New York to Rome, and back again, and everybody who encounters the story dies in some manner. It's a fairly nifty idea for a horror movie and a lot has been done with it (such as The Ring bringing the cursed object into the video era).
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Mere hours later, the bugs have escaped and mutated into gigantic form - a praying mantis that stands twice the height of a human, a beetle bigger than an armadillo.
As much as I might have wanted to like this film, I just found it to be a little bit... well... dull... The jock was thick, the nerdy girl was a picked-on nerd, the look-at-me-I'm-wonderful Cordelia-type was exactly that (though she did at least get her come-uppance). The large blonde (Cami's sister?) was a lesbian, the Asian girl worked out with lethal-looking knives (surely against security policy to have those on campus?), the male security guard sat in the tree and masturbated over watching the Asian girl work out... and apart from geeky-girl they were all more interested in sex than anything else. This made the characters somewhat predictable, and when coupled with the CGI bugs that where quite well done but still CGI, and a story-line that went along more or less as expected.....
I don't know. It was a pleasant way to pass a few hours and I also used this film as a test (the computer recording directly to harddisc, never tried it for the duration of an entire film, I now have to look to XviD'ing a 4Gb file on a 450MHz machine, ouch!); but all in all there is nothing special. It's just a by-the-numbers soro-house horror with big-ass bugs being the Big Lurking Evil, and that synopsis is about all you need to know.
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You might be inclined to compare it to a latter-day War of the Worlds; but this is only true in a very general sense. The big point here is that it could have gone two ways, and the military decided to shoot to kill. In a way, the title of the film - Invader - prejudices you. From the outset you are lead to think of this alien as an invader, when 'visitor' could equally have been valid.
Perhaps on a repeated viewing this will be elevated to the eight-point-zero necessary to make it a "favourite". For now, it loses just a tad because I'm not entirely certain about the ending. There are good characters (especially the subtle change in viewpoint of the male as he starts to let fear lead him to the military conclusion - shoot and then think), and a good premise.
All in all, a quite satisfying sci-fi movie!
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Invisible Maniac, The [click to redirect]
Iron Rose, The [click to redirect]
This is obviously a budget film, pretty much all of the action takes place at a ranger hut in the woods, and the surrounding (fairly generic) woodland. However this film could be used as an example of when a budget movie works.
What I think lifts it out of the ordinary is the ambiance. There is plenty of it, along with a good dose of creepiness, and an appropriately chosen soundtrack.
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Let's see... There's a teleport machine that is supposed to zap a bunch of military girls to Germany. Only they don't arrive in Germany, they arrive here:
Now "here", it turns out, is about 600 miles below the earth's surface. We know this because in some rather naff dialogue, two different characters come up with this exact same number.
They are inside the earth.
The Deep Digger makes an appearance later, dropping down from the sky, hence suggesting this world is an inner earth inside the planet. Deep inside, beyond the prescribed 600-odd miles of rock. So some questions - why is it not curved more? Surely it can't be much larger than the moon? It's a world with dinosaurs, really big spiders, and creepy plant life. How did this stuff get there? How has it managed to survive? Where is the ambient light, looking a lot like sunlight, coming from? It should surely be pitch black, or at least lava red! Why is there air to breathe? Why hasn't the forces of gravity crushed everything? These girls get hot and sweaty as it is a warm place, but it is a warm place that looks suspiciously like some local scrubland as opposed to any real attempt to imagine what the inside of the planet might look like.
The naffness continues - we see the Deep Digger making its way into the earth from side on, passing by what looks like two layes of darkness - rock we can assume. Of course, if it was digging a hole for itself, it would be completely impossible to see it side-on.
So why the high score? Because it was a fun movie. Suitably predictable, suitably enjoyable. Not one to take at all seriously, but one to pass a rainy evening with Emily-the-scientist brightening your day.
Oh, as what may be something of an in-joke, the Deep Digger is referred to, most of the time, as "Deedee"!
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A Jean Rollin film where an Asian-looking woman (picture Lucy Liu) driving a big old American car goes around killing people and leaving a little model car at each murder scene.
The story is one of Rollin's more logical, it makes sense and there isn't a vampire or demon in sight. The let-down is the obviously low budget production values and some of the hammiest acting outside of an Italian horror flick... I can sort of imagine this working with a few more psychological games (instead of the "victims" remembering too easily something they shouldn't recall that quickly). Jean Rollin does quite well with his budget that must have stretched to four figures including both sides of the decimal point. Hats off to him, also, for keeping the camerawork relevant (instead of his usual penchant for long shots of trivia) and, for him, what would pass as tight editing. This film doesn't linger, it moves. That's why I've scored it 6 instead of the 5 the plot would deserve.
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The film begins with a girl, running, hit by a car. She is taken to hospital, and there she recounts her story as a series of discussions with the nurse and flashbacks. It started with an advert - freeloaders wanted. A bunch of young adults would be selected and stuck in a house together. There would be TV cameras all over the place. It would be a Big Brother sort of deal. Only it all goes very wrong when it turns out the house is booby-trapped and whoever is running the show has mass homicide in mind.
Perhaps one of the most critical points of this movie, and the one that has critics and viewers inventing all sorts of theories, is the ending. As before, you can read the HTML comments for more, or you can watch the movie...
The title, Kolobos, is loosely explained in the movie - something Greek and something about self-mutilation.
However, Jason was more than a little disturbed by the title of this movie. Actually the title "Kolobos" is what enticed me to watch this film in the first place. It wasn't "House of Horror Live" and "Evil Dude Three - Slasher House" or any of the run-of-the-mill 'dumb' names that horror movies get saddled with.
Kolobos was a unique name. Kolobos was a different name.
Jason, poor bloke, then goes and Googles and reads up on the biblical mythology and spends a lot of time to discover uncanny parallels between Armageddon and the happenings in this movie. While his efforts are very much appreciated (neither the end of the world nor Liv Tyler popped into my head upon watching this!), I am reminded of a long argument I had many years ago when a friend couldn't believe that I had a soft spot for Teen Wolf. He accused the film of doing grave injustice to the lycanthropic cause, and I had to eventually say "Dude, show me a real live werewolf and then we'll talk...".
SPOILER ALERT! The thing that remained with me longest after this film was the demise of the perky waitress. She had been slashed open, twice. Okay, it was a bit daft to think that a towel will stop the bleeding when there are practically guts falling out. But unlike so many movies of this genre, she died a slow and painful and scared death. It wasn't slash-ugh-dead. This girl lived awhile after the attack. It was almost a blessing that her body 'vanished', we viewers didn't have to keep watching her pain.
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Aliens kidnap a bunch of mismatched humans so they can study them and perform strange experiments on them. Look out! Tin-foil aliens!
This is, actually, one of the last things I'd have expected to see on the channel. It is so much like a cross between Space:1999 and 'dude, aliens stole my cow' that it is hard to even begin to consider this a horror movie.
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La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Girl) [click to redirect]
La Vampire Nue (The Nude Vampire) [click to redirect]
Le Lac des Morts Vivants (Zombie Lake) [click to redirect]
Living Dead Girl, The [click to redirect]
A woman, celebrating her 21st birthday, goes to a frat house with a friend. There, it all goes wrong. She drinks too much, finds herself drugged, and is gang-raped. In the middle of it all, she ODs and dies. Charming story... but that's just the opener.
When she wakes up, her first issue is to come to terms with being dead. Her second big issue is that it isn't heaven or hell. It's the, uh, frat house... only with nobody in it. Her third big issue are the zombie-like soul-suckers who feed on the souls of the recently deceased. Not only that, they can assume the identities of people (or maybe they are the people?) so who can you trust?
A perfectly creepy horror offering for my birthday. Well done Zone Horror!
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Enter the Leprechaun. This is pretty much a wise-cracking Munchkin with a bit of an attitude. The sort of "Irish thing" that the Irish themselves would probably scratch their heads and think "Tha's s'posed tuh be Oirish?". If you think you'll need to forgive my bad attempt at an Irish accent, forgive this Leprechaun too. Anyway, he's after his gold coins. Exactly 100 of them. The movie explains, so I won't. :-) It doesn't take long before the Leprechaun turns up, but - you know - it is like the sarcastic way that people respond when you say you've seen a vampire. Really? It cannot be denied once everybody has seen it, and it's a whole cat'n'mouse chase thing.
The star of the show is Anniston, who plays a fine line between brave and terrified, and only for one brief moment do we see her lose it - which is really refreshing. The world is not full of Ripley clones who'll enjoy laying waste to an army of leprechauns, instead they're more like Anniston's character. Incredulous, then terrified, but smart enough to realise that being scared is only gonna get you killed.
The ending seemed, to me, to be somwhat contrived. I must mention this as you may watch the film on my recommendation and think 'naff ending'. Yeah, it is. Never mind. The rest of the film wasn't so bad...
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That's how I feel about this. The Oompa-Loompa Munchkin is back. In case you manage to miss the connection between the Irish past and the L.A. setting, the Leprechaun slept for 1000 years inside this tree, which was "given" to Harry Houdini by the people of Ireland. It has to be Houdini as the protagonists (other than the Leprechaun, that is) are a boy and a girl. The boy is running, with his drunk father, a sort of haunted tour of stars who died in nasty circumstances (and I guess the Houdinis were the least likely to sue?). The boy wants to woo the girl, but she is losing interest fast. The Leprechaun needs to find a wife, this he does once every thousand years by causing his chosen girl to sneeze three times.
There is a certain tameness to this film that you might expect from cheesy not-quite-horror movies from the early '80s. Saturday the 14th comes to mind. Because of this, and because the plot has so many failings, I just didn't find this to be that enjoyable. Certainly one might argue that I shouldn't judge a film by its predecessor. If that's to be the case, don't make sequels. The first was so much better. Or, as I said at the beginning, "Why, God? Why?".
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Le Rose De Fer (The Iron Rose) [click to redirect]
Les Deux Orphelines Vampires (The Two Orphan Vampires) [click to redirect]
Les Raisins De La Mort (The Grapes of Death) [click to redirect]
Lonely Ones, The [click to redirect]
The caption says "we have a serious ozone problem". This is followed by a little bit of arty nature footage, and just when you're getting bored, there's an absolutely lovely dissolve from an angry sun to a fresnel lens in a bright torch. We see a woman showering, and quickly we discover they are some sort of scientific team and something wants them dead. We then switch to a grouping of people getting ready to go find out what happened to the scientific team.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is one of the team is the inept dad from "Lizzie McGuire" (Robert Carradine), only his language is not like anything he'd say to Lizzie... until maybe she's a couple of years older.
Next, they're treking in the ozone-killed Amazon jungle, which looks suspiciousy like a hilly birch forest, which is amusingly silly. Perhaps the most distractng thing for me, over the pseudo-science and general cheesiness, was the audio. It was an uneasy mix of extremely hammy acting and what sounded like location audio, not to mention some distracting background music.
This film tries to build atmosphere, but since one of the women dated one of the men, then another of the men, and finally married the good doctor... there's just this whole who-loves-who issue getting in the way.
Perhaps the most amusing character is the black man with all sorts of voices and vocal effects, like the big bloke in those Police Academy films.
This film is rated in the EPG as 18. Perhaps that was relating to "Underworld"? I hope so, because I've seen gorier films with a 15 rating. I've also seen more interesting films... actually, maybe I'd have preferred the one they didn't show...?
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This had the premise of being an interesting psychological horror. They could have focused on the young girl and asked "how will she cope" with being taken a hostage by some unstable bank robbers, especially when they are starting to turn on each other and she or her mother could be killed at any moment.
Instead they introduce the generic canned psycho (who wears a sort of a pillow-case over their head, what is it with slashers and masks!?!? re. Jason Voorhees et al) and they go for the cheap shocks.
It's a shame really. They could have come up with all sorts of inventively cruel ideas - the girl is tied up, they give her lots of fizzy-pop to drink, and then they tell her if she pees in her pants her mother will be killed, along with a good description of how - so will the girl pee in fright, from the drink, or won't she? And so on and so on. Given the right direction and some good acting, this could be a slow-burner of good proportion. Which, to my mind, would be better than yet another homicidal maniac: Backslash, Blood Reaper, Do You Wanna Know A Secret, and pretty much anything set in a cabin by the lake or teen camp or sorority house ...
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Troma's movies, on the whole, tend to have little in the way of plot. The dubbing is usually horrible. And... it is basically just an excuse for guns and perversions in a way you might not have thought could be legally broadcast on British TV.
And this brings us to the badly dubbed Maniac Nurses. Some nurses wearing extremely short uniforms and toting guns need to go out to fetch people to bring back... for the thrill of dissection, murder, and the obligatory chainsaw moment. But much of this to to please the pretty blonde (Sabrina) who just basically gets her kicks from killing things. The others? Well, the others appear to like lesbianism and sado-masochism, but they are bored. I know they are bored because the bloody annoying narration said that they were bored...
The narration exists as a plot device. We can see girls kissing each other and 'nurses' walking around with their guns for longer because the narration removes the need to actually have to form some sort of sequence of logical plot-related events into the actual action. Oh no, the person in charge can come and fondle Sabrina, while Sabrina thinks about guns ... because this stupid narration is explaining - in detail - critical parts of the story.
Here, of course, is where it all falls apart. You see, David Lynch has a very sick view of reality, but sadly for us it seems his perceptions are possibly closer to the truth than we'd care to admit. Those things happen.
Troma, on the other hand, create an impossible reality. The sort of thing where you should suspend all notions of reality and just go along with what is often an excuse for soft-porn with S&M thrown in to keep it all moving (yes, bring your own subtext)...
There have been better Troma movies... and, sadly, there have been worse. :-)
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A deranged serial killer (Jeff Fahey) is institutionalised in a special private place where it seems he is the only sane one there. He meets a cute girl (an equally nuts serial-killeress with an unhealthy obsession for Queen Elizabeth, played by Kellie Waymire, pictured above) and they fall in love, you know, as one does. Awww...
With his brains and wit and her gung-ho attitude, things are bound to happen.
Given its premise, this movie is surprisingly tame (or maybe constrained by budget?); however the two leads pull it through, along with a good number of throwaway gags, not to mention the time-old tradition that states "in an asylum, the inmates are the only sane ones".
The title is probably due to the act-based format of the film, bookended with captions such as the one shown above. Emily Booth, in the introduction, suggests this might be best described as a "serial killer rom-com", and that's not a bad way to think of it. Not a deep sharp dose of panic like "I Am The Ripper", nor as bleak as "Pulse", nor as outwardly funny as "Serial Killer", and thankfully no teens in a camp in the forest... but an enjoyable spirited performance of a slightly wacky concept played just right.
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By the end of this movie, there were two prime thoughts - firstly, I cannot believe that this is a Troma Team movie. It was, actually, pretty good! Reasonable actors and nobody got their kit off. And, secondly, by what cruel twist of fate was this movie assigned an 18 cert? There's a lot less bad language and violence in this movie than there is in Grosse Point Blank, and that movie was given a 15 rating!
Basically this is a 'spoof' horror movie. There's a monster. An ugly-looking beast. Kills people. It seeks refuge in, and apparently travels between, closets. Yes, you read that correctly - I said closets. Hence the title 'Monster In The Closet'...
Hot on its tail are a group - a scientist who looks like every Einstein cliché possible; another scientist who looks remarkably like Linda Hamilton in the first Terminator movie; a soppy newspaper reporter with big thick glasses and the name Richard Kent (mmmm, I wonder what that could be a reference to?); a too-smart kid that - thankfully - isn't allowed to join in much of the action (he was annoying); and the sort of slimy Ken-haired reporter that has no tact, less brains, and you can imagine a certain magnate started off like this...
As for the movie itself - it is an amusing affair with ideas pilfered from all sorts of sci-fi movies of the mid-'80s. Our 'monster' is communicated with using music. A five-note sequence. Sounds familiar, yes? But wait 'til you see how! :-)
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Morella, The Haunting Of [click to redirect]
So she is driving around trying to keep up with the police radio reports. She runs right into him. He dives in the car and makes her drive away at gunpoint. The police open fire, shooting her in the chest. She passes out.
In his loft, he fixes her up and - when she awakes - he finally explains things to her. Not that she believes him at first. It's all about the final four vampires that he had just killed. But wait, others have arrived, including the 'King of Vampires' (Sunnydale, this isn't!). And a bit of mystic 'total eclipse' nonsense thrown in too.
If you think you know the ins and outs of the vampire genre, be prepared for a logic fault of massive proportions. No stakes, no garlic, they can walk in sunlight...
It was interesting to see Don's character get thrashed. In many of the fights, Don wins (I'm giving nothing away, if he died the movie would be over) by using his brains and a whole lot of luck. Most of his adversaries are fully capable of pounding him to a bleeding pulp; which is certainly a welcome change from the Van Damme/Seagal method of one-on-one combat.
But there is something nasty. Something so nasty that I took an entire point off of the score I've given this film. It would have been a 6/10 if not for this one seriously annoying thing. It is, quite simply, that as soon as Don starts fighting, the camera starts to shake. No, I don't mean a cinéma vérité thing in the close-ups, you come to expect shaky camerawork if you're having the camera in the fight. Oh no... Even the wide shots shake! - at an almost predictable cadence, as if somebody is shaking the camera mounting. What the hell is that? The visual equivalent of a power chord?
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Just when you think things might be getting a shade predictable, there is a lovely twist.
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Like I said, this is not a horror. In fact, not an awful lot really happens in the course of this movie (and, I'm sorry to say, I saw the ending coming from miles off). But, with a strong bluesy soundtrack and loads of atmosphere - I would recommend this. I would certainly recommend this to the same sort of person that liked the pacing of Fried Green Tomatoes and would like to try something a little bit creepier.
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...as for that 'from a true story' nonsense, why do so many Americans think they have been "visited". I mean, there's only so many humans you need to dissect to learn all you need to about the human body, and there's only so many Americans you will want to abduct before moving on to other nations... or planets.
However there are plenty of Americans that have a pathological need to be special. In the old days they would have had religion, now they can be abductees. Not much difference really.
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Thunder rolls, lightning flashes. Wind howls. And you'll howl with laughter at the seriously low budget when you see the storm has not the slightest gasp of actual wind, and no rain either. There's a car crash (not suprising, the way these people drive) and we see a wheel roll by. Cut to a remarkably uncrashed looking car, the door open, and the girl lying unconscious in the most provocative position she could manage. Migod, how much cheese can a person take?!? This is Gorgonzola territory for sure!
After the Mascarpone crash, the doctor leaves the girl and goes to the creepy castle. He wanders around opening doors and seeing the weird stuff going on. Well, that's mistakes one through thirty, then, isn't it? The next mistake is to encounter the girl he didn't exactly help in the car crash - who has been waiting for him for such a long time...
...wait, hang on... why is the girl (called Susan Smith - very Italian, no?) from the car now walking towards the castle? Why is she talking to a bloke that is dressed like Lothos the vampire (Rutger Hauer in the original Buffy movie)?
The truth is quite simple - the people in the castle are the evil doppelgängers of the two that happened to be passing on the road outside. If you think that is convenient, wait until you see the rest of the film - pretty much any theory no matter how illogical will suddenly start to make sense. If you told us the guy was a distant distant relative of Jesus, we'd all be like "yeah, that explains the hairstyle..." or something!
This film is very lyrical and poetic, but I think a lot of it gets lost in translation, so we're left with amusing things like:
Don't think about the past, or the present...
...just think about now.
Erm... now would be the present, huh?
To be honest, this film deserves perhaps a 5/10, but it is just so damn funny. The fake spider, looking rather like Dave Lee Travis' beard on the loose, killed me - it really did - so I'll add another point and a half for brightening up my night... :-)
And I don't think I'm giving much away by saying - do you remember that thing from the '80s that went "this is your mind on drugs"? Remember that phrase when you watch the end. I've never been 'high', but I kind-of imagine it'd be something like the end of this crazy crazy movie.
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Nude Vampire, The [click to redirect]
Omega, I Am [click to redirect]
Fifteen years on, we are transported to a reality that could only exist in America. A reality where his worried parents, desperate to have Henry home, build an entire computer-controlled ultra-high-security cell in their house. Thus, Henry can come home.
I don't think I need to carry on, what happens next should be pretty obvious...
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Helen (Fiona Horsey) was abused when she was younger. Now, when she sees the right sort of man she gets terrible cramps. She absolutely has to have sex with the man. And in the course of doing so, her (whispering? talking? moaning?) vagina sucks the man in! (yes, seriously!)
Woompf! He's history. # No good to me, he's history, na na na-na...
Along the way we have twins joined at birth, later separated with an electric bread-knife, bank robberies, and all sorts of peculiar things.
This film, a fairly recent British creation - filmed in Portsmouth, London, and the Isle of Wight - is one of those films where you keep asking yourself "Can it get any weirder?", and... yes... it can.
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It's delightfully creepy, invoking well that whole Blair Witch vibe, and it is quite incredible how effective it is given how much takes place within the cramped confines of the car.
And, thankfully, for once in a horror film we have the girl peeing into a plastic cup (and I think she pees again later on but I'm not sure in or on what) - it's a personal bugbear of mine that we can have a group of people trapped in a lift for a day with lawyers and lesser demons banging on the walls and nobody ever needs to go to the toilet!
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No, this isn't the one with the boy and the disbelieving dad and the freaky electrics...
For a moment, I thought I was over the way on FilmFour. This is a Japanese horror - and I think it is fair to say that the Japanese make the most intense (if not always entirely logical) horror films.
It begins with a floppy disc. Strange images on a computer screen, and female geek (see? I was born the wrong side of the planet!). Sounds innocent enough, right? From there we are quickly sucked into a complex story involving ghosts and vanishing people. One thing is for certain - you don't want to get too introspective about stuff, because if you do you might realise exactly how lonely you really are. And that's not a good thing.
The EPG description describes this as "deeply unsettling", and I would be inclined to agree. In keeping with many Japanese horrors, it isn't about cheap shocks and piles of dead bodies. It is about ambience. Spirit and emotion. They don't go in as much for a guy bursting out of a cupboard with a chainsaw. That's more a Western thing. For the Japanese, providing thirty seconds of fright is not as good as providing an hour or so of it, building and building. Sometimes it is said that the Japanese films do not have good endings. In a way you could view the ending of this film as something of a cop-out. But if you decide to engage your brain, you'll see that in reality the ending is more a beginning. This is where people more learned than me couple spout a few Taoist maxims, instead I'll simply say that this movie leaves you with its creepy ambience after the credits have rolled and gone away. In fact, a nice tidy everything-explained all strings-neatly-tied ending would have been ghastly.
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In this suspenseful movie, a bunch of young adults from the city are going for a vacation in a cabin in the woods. Near to a little shop, they get out their dirt bikes and play around. The little boy, who was left guarding the shop, runs across the land to stop the dog from being injured. One of the dirt bikes comes whizzing over the hill and flattens the boy.
In a panic, and possibly because of excessive alcohol consumption, the dirt-bikers flee. The girlfriends don't want to go but they do. In the end, it is left to one poor sod to stay with the kid and wait for his father (the shop owner) to return.
The child dies.
The father, brilliantly played by Lance Henriksen, vows revenge. And in a big way. He visits a local creepy woman in the middle of a bleak forest. Exhumes a body, and the woman does some mojo that raises 'pumpkinhead'. It is called pumpkinhead because it's head... erm... looks like a pumpkin. :-)
Father soon realises that he might have been a bit harsh. Pumpkinhead, on the other hand, will not rest until every single one of the biker mob (and anybody else that gets in the way) is dead. Through a spiritual connection, father experiences every single killing. He figures he unleashed this evil, it is up to him to try to stop it...
A good film in the classic sense of 'horror'. No 'knowing' references, no silly gags, just pure and straight horror movie material.
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A group of people plan a heist. Holding up an armoured truck to net a cool $800 million. They bury the money in the woods to let the dust settle...
Weeks later, one of the group is picked up by the police. The others panic and run to collect their share of the money.
Only, it isn't there.
A crazy hunt-lovin' redneck is there instead. It's his forest and trespassers will be shot. Lots. The redneck is... well, check out the picture on the left - he's a walking cliché!
There are plenty of twists and turns. Nobody is 'innocent', everybody would have a motive for stashing the money. Where did it go? You'll be guessing right to the end...
If I had to level a complaint at this film, I would say that the music backing is too obtrusive. Too loud. Too jarring.
Oh, and - you know what? I'd have expected $800,000,000 to be a teensy-weensy bit, you know, larger than the assortment of money bags that we see. Other than that, this film was okay. I liked the druggie character with the jazzy t-shirt!
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I cannot say I was entirely following the film, the dialogue left me wanting (subtitles, perhaps?) and the special effects were unfortunately the sort done on a computer where it looks really computer generated - check out the totally unconvincing helicopter, that doesn't even entirely move like an actual helicopter (sheesh! they surely could have watched a few reruns of AirWolf to see how a helicopter behaves?). And then we have the special bit of magic in the form of a gadget that allows people to move through walls and - of course - there is a huge wall in the way. Between you and me, I feel that was a plot device designed purely so somebody could play with the CGI tools for a little bit longer. There's a whole "big budget" feel to this movie. But not a cool one, like Mad Max, but rather a sort that tried too hard to be something it isn't and lost a lot along the way.
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Red Right Hand, The [click to redirect]
To me, this film seemed to be an uneasy blend of Trancers and Blade, with some really appallingly obvious computerised effects - like most of the gunfire!
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Called Vierges et Vampires in French. Made in 1971.
aka: Caged Vampires, Crazed Virgins, Dungeon of Terror, Requiem Pour Un Vampire, Sex Vampires, etc etc etc etc...
In French with English subtitles.
Those who know anything of horror will know Jean Rollin. In the mid-'70s, this French director made a series of horror films that usually included: vampires, nudity, lesbianism.
Vierges et Vampires (or Requiem for a Vampire, in English) is no exception. The movie starts with two precocious (teenage?) girls, dressed like clowns, in a shootout. They kill, they run. They hijack a food wagon. They break into a creepy old castle. They find a bed. They instantly get naked with each other.
The EPG description reads:
Two young girls are trapped with no escape, forced to submit to the horrors of the pit, their innocence violated beyond description in an endless nightmare of terror.When the owners of the castle turn up, they are - as the EPG suggests - subjected to horrors and violations beyond description.
Really? I'd have thought these girls would have enjoyed vamping and bonking.
It is a real shame because the beginning of the movie does anything but portray these girls as cute and sweet. So when the 'horror' begins, and the girls are frightened (not that they can act particularly frightened), you sorta think "who cares?" or "you kinda deserve that". You'd find yourselves willing the vampires on - these girls are not sweet, suck 'em and be done with it...
Something else that people have noticed are the girl's appalling shoes. Okay, visually and stylistically they are not appalling, they are 'just shoes'. But when you have the two girls running around in the castle, it is 'clop clop clop', and it is annoyingly distracting - it sounds like the Foley team consisted of fifty monkeys with a hundred coconut halves to bang together!
This film is of interest for the interesting location photography and - quite frankly - the outrageous costumes (though I do like the red/white outfit that the blonde girl is wearing - even if it is dated!). It is, perhaps, unfortunate that the editing is so patchy, though given some of the oddities if it, I do wonder if this is a fault of the original edit or it is is due to later patches because of damaged film?
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![Uuurgh! Uuurgh! Uuurgh! Uuurgh! [no, it isn't the Tardis...]
(this image was taken off-screen using a digital camera)](../../images/thc/psychotr.jpeg "Uuurgh! Uuurgh! Uuurgh! Uuurgh! [no, it isn't the Tardis...]
(this image was taken off-screen using a digital camera)")
The EPG describes this film as:
According to a review on IMDb, the movie is noteworthy as being the first film shot entirely on location in Chicago since before World War 1. It was also an entirely independent production. It used local talent.
The lead character, Peter Spelsen, also wrote and produced the movie. He was an out-of-work actor who figured the easiest way to get back into movies would be to make his own. Without sounding too cruel, I can see why he was 'out of work'. The storyline is dreadful, the acting worse - the horror here is that they had the balls to broadcast it at all.
Pretty much the only thing that can come from this movie is the word "psychotronic" which just lends itself to a generation of crazed-robot flicks ('Maximillian' would have been psychotronic; Davros was psychotronic (though his pepper-pot underlings were more moronic than psychotronic...)!).
In fact, the entire plot line of the movie is this amazingly-'70s-looking man (complete with the really stupid hair) holds his head and goes 'uuurgh!' and somebody dies. Then he holds his head and goes 'uuurgh!' and somebody else dies. Every so often he experiences a really weird premonition, so he holds his head and goes 'uuurgh!' and somebody dies. A few more times he holds his head and goes 'uuurgh!' and people die.
By the end of this movie, I held my head and went 'uuurgh!', and I died.
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Risen, The [click to redirect]
To be honest I quite enjoyed this film. Okay, I had a few beers and an entire pack of chili nachos, but that is perhaps the way to do it. Don't expect serious horror. Don't expect much in the way of frights. There's an interesting twist in the end, but by and large you'll probably laugh your way through most of this film. A definite example of "so bad it's good".
(I have nicknamed one of our cats "Santa's Little Helper", and after watching this it may be
hard not to accidently refer to him by the title of this movie!)
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Scarecrow, The [click to redirect]
A British horror writer (called Ray (Patrick Olliver)) with a penchant for writing cheesy scenarios moves into an old house with his new American wife (called Victoria (Amy Raasch - do both of these people have doubled second letters in their surnames or are my eyes wonky?)) who is young enough to be his daughter.
Ray, however, is more interested in his fictional characters than in his wife, and is not above uttering extremely horrible phrases such as "I'll have to be dead first" when talking about when he will sell the rights to his books to the media.
Given this, it isn't too much of a surprise that Vicky starts to find herself more and more attracted to the handyman.
Along the way, an old flame turns up and we endure an excruciating scene in which Ray discusses how best to murder him. I mean, a common failing of action movies is the BlahBlah scene where the Bad Guy Explains His Big Idea, do we have to have a narrative of the rest of the movie? Please!
Then comes the event that gives rise to the title of this film. Ray has an accident (or was it?) that renders him temporarily blind. So Vicky and the handyman flirt shamelessly at the dinner table in front of Ray, safe in the knowledge that he cannot see them. When Ray's sight returns, he pretends to still be blind unknown to his 'wife'...
There are a number of twists and turns in this story and the basic premise is actually quite a good idea. Unfortunately it is badly executed - the Big Moments are set up so you can see them coming miles off (and they look so contrived, especially the ending) and the general pace of this film is so slow that it never really builds any tension.
Which is a shame, as there's a lot that could have been done.
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A bored school student, Casey (Justin Ulrich), fills in his 'your ideal career' paper as "Serial killer". This gets him the attention of the kooky girl in class - Sasha (played by a 34-year-old Lisa Loeb! yes, her with 'those glasses' and the catchy hit song). Casey plays well as the bored and fed up student that decides to enter into the subtle art of murder. He decides that being a serial killer; not just any, but the most notorious; should be his life's goal. And why the hell not? It beats serving fries for a living, doesn't it?
Only, there are problems. Casey can't even kill the annoying yappy-in-the-middle-of-the-night dog next door. Sasha wants to be his first victim, and, well, there's no way he's going to be able to kill her, she's way too cute, and he's in love anyway. So he figures he'll off a few old people. Probably be doing them a favour. I worked for a few years as an Agency Care Assistant in various nursing homes and, well, a number of residents ('victims') would have prayed for Casey to slash them to death. But, you know the way it turns out. He can't even croak the crusties. His 'going on the rampage' outfit is totally like something you'd expect from 'Data' in The Goonies. Heck - he can't even 'act cool' in front of the mirror!
To confound matters, while he has been blabbing about his ambitions, somebody else has been bumping people off. And, naturally, everybody suspects Casey...
This has some really funny moments. The sort of DIY clerk you wished you knew (Corey Feldmen, remember him?). How about the neighbour with a fettish for explosives.
All in all, a very enjoyable movie.
According to IMDb, this film is called Serial Killing 4 Dummys... yes really - 'dummys' and not 'dummies'...
Additionally, this film is also called Serial Killing 101.
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Autumn Falls. It's a town. Where Bridget grew up. Now voices and dreams have called her back. But the main thing that called her back was the diary. Written by a person with the same name, a century before. It documented the entire town's descent into madness. Obviously she is intrigued, but she certainly isn't expecting what's to come. Neither is the newsgirl and her cameraman who are looking into the same story.
This film is only slightly marred by obviously low-budget effects. I'm sorry, there's just something about digitally rendered fire that makes it look like a graphic from the game Quake. Having made this criticism, it is an interesting film with a good story.
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It is amusing to think that Jason once said "It is, quite simply, horrific that a group of people, who are so completely without talent as the makers of Grim Weekend, were ever let loose with a camera." about the film Grim Weekend.
It is amusing because I think that should read "It is, quite simply, horrific that a group of people, who are so completely without talent as the makers of Shower Of Blood, were ever let loose with a camera."...
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Shredder is, basically, the same. Same situation, same plot, same twist in the tale where the person you thought was the psycho killer isn't... The difference, this time, is that the ados are staying in a condemned old lodge in the mountains, at a ski resort that closed a while ago. Why this deviation from the norm? Well, it isn't a deviation really. It's an isolated location with trees and stuff, only snow too. And, hey, blood looks oh-so-good squirting over the virgin powder.
There are a number of amusing moments and this film doesn't take itself too seriously. Watch for some action and screaming, but don't be surprised if you get a sense of déja vu.
'Shredding', by the way, is apparently the name for snowboarding down steep inclines in an 'extreme sports' kind of way. There's some good footage of this sort of thing, and I'm sure the cast and crew had loads of fun making this movie!
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Now unlike the Bloody Murder films, this one plays for subtle comic value. The protagonist is Angela Baker. She's the happiest of the happy campers. Oh, and she has exceedingly strict moral standards. Anybody who doesn't meet her expectations is burned alive, hung, drowned, stabbed, etc etc. A brilliant performance by Pamela Springsteen (yes, she's related...).
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The action in this film actually takes place at Camp Rolling Hills, as can be seen on Angela's sweatshirt in the picture...
The EPG mentions that Angela is a 'transgendered' psycho. You'd need to have seen part 2 to realise that as part of her original 'treatment', she was made a she from a he. I'm not exactly sure how this makes any difference to the story, especially given that the actress (Pamela Springsteen), does not exactly look like she was once male... but never mind, this is one of those horror films that doesn't take itself seriously and just lets rip. If you want to watch something like Bloody Murder with a sense of humour, Sleepaway Camp is for you.
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The plot? Killer slugs. Some mutant version that are three or four times normal size, have a real taste for meat, and multiply like crazy.
The reason? It is explained in the movie. If you can't wait, think La Morte Vivante and you might get an idea...
The era? Mid-to-late '80s.
We essentially follow a public sanitation officer who cottons on to the potential threat pretty quickly, and his battles to prove that he isn't crazy - when faced with council officials who either don't care, or are too busy thinking of the big bucks from a new development plan to let a little thing like slugs get in the way...
But, along the way, the story is set for a number of gruesome deaths - you'll certainly think twice before eating a caper salad in the future (can't stand the things, myself).
And - before you ask - the answer is yes. Apart from various small modifications to make the movie 'flow' better, it was more or less the same as the book. Makes a change, huh?
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A cute hairdresser makes an uneasy transition into topless photo shoots for better money. Along the way she finds all sorts of slimy characters, and manages to acquire numerous stalkers - including one in an ice cream van!
Our lead character has the sort of wide-eyed innocence you'd expect from an early Sally Field movie, so one wonders how she ever agreed to get into the topless modeling scene.
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One of the girl's uncles is exploring a cave. He uncovers a weird carving and the next thing you know, he is a homicidal monster.
Conveniently, the girl and all her sorority friends are spending a weekend in the little cabin in the woods not far from this cave.
Standard fare. You can guess the rest.
(return to quick links)Jason says: "the unfeasibly large spectacles adorned by good-girl Sara may raise a chuckle or two", and "husband and wife writing team, John (who also directed) and Lynette McBearty".
Would you believe it - good-girl Sara is Lynette McBrearty; as can be seen by the parts of the credits inserted into the picture above left.
Perhaps Jason doesn't remember Twin Peaks, as Madeline wore genuine 'unfeasibly large spectacles' as shown in the picture on the right...
Igby has a nice car. He also has a sweet (but very quirky) French girl living in the apartment next door, with a hair cut not unlike the infamous Amélie...
Those are the good things in his life.
The bad things? Everything else. His name is silly. His boss (a slimy director) doesn't like him, other crew on the movie wouldn't hesitate to pound his face, his job sucks anyway, his girlfriend isn't, and it goes on.
I've included pictures of Juliet, played by Eliane Chappuis (who is also one of the executive producers of this movie, and sings one of the songs in it). If you want to picture Igby, think of Scott Bakula in his Quantum Leap days, then make him the weediest nerd possible.
This is not really a 'horror' movie. It is more a loss-of-control movie much in the style of Falling Down, only Igby's war - when it happens - is on behalf of Juliet; thanks to a load of 'important' people in the movie business who simply don't care about the little people - with the studio boss (pictured right) being excellently portrayed - a real piece of work.
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Source, The [click to redirect]
A 'disturbed family', the Merrye family, live a peaceful existence in a manky old house, looked after by the chauffeur who made a promise to the children's dying father. The house is avoided by locals, and all is well until some distant relatives turn up looking for the gold mine of an inheritance that they think should have been theirs.
The 'children' are two adorable girls aged around twenty-something (Beverly Washburn and Jill Banner), and one weird bald bloke of the same age who looks like an extra from Les Misérables or something. The man spends most of his time going up and down in the food lift. The girls have fallen for the lifestyle of the spider... Actually it is more complicated than that. The children suffered a freak degenerative disease that would cause them to 'become mentally younger' as they passed through their teenage years. For some reason this would involve the girls turning towards cannibalism; but then again the blonde girl isn't above trying on a little bit of incest.
This is a brilliantly quirky film, also known as "Attack of The Liver Eaters" (I'm not quite sure why as they neither go on an attack (the hunt is a hunt, not an attack) nor are seen eating livers) or "The Maddest Story Ever Told". The old black and white photography adds a certain je ne sais quoi that I don't think you could ever match with colour.
I think a number of viewers would dislike this film because they would judge it against modern horror movies; and also there is a bit of a general dislike of self-referential comihorror movies since the Scream franchise spawned dozens of rip-offs.
Yes, if you think 'Scream' was a whole new twist to the horror formula, 'Spider Baby' did it decades earlier.
Psychologically, this film works well because it was made in an era before explicit gore and obscenities. Everything is astonishingly polite and the violence is hinted at rather than shown, save for an ear... For it to be effective, though, you will require a deeper 'immersion' into the story.
In black and white.
You can read an interview with Jack Hill (writer/director).
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This film doesn't really deliver much spookiness, but it is reasonable in a very eighties kind of way - building up to the final showdown with pretty much full disclosure all the way...
...or as the scientists recently said about the possibilities of a 'supervolcano', it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
Despite being set in small-town America, this film was actually shot in New Zealand!
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This film has plenty of naff blood-squirting effects to giggle at, but to be honest the drug-guy annoyed me. He wouldn't shut up! He explained stuff, and then explained more stuff, and gave a whole procession of snappy dialogues − but it all got a bit too much...
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A South African movie, we are big on sand. One wonders how much skill and attention it took to have the usual movie entourage around without having lots of footprints in sand that is supposed to be unwalked upon! We are also big on characterisation, a bit of violence, and - of course - the Big Bad looking like evil movie monsters generally do. But - tell you what - the actual "scientific" explanation of what is going on will blindside you. Yes, I quite liked this movie.
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While there is a predictability about this film (especially seeing as the 'still' chosen by Zone Horror for the ad-break title was possibly the biggest spoiler going), what raises this film above the mundane is some snappy dialogue and a lot of throwaway one-liners, plus some reactions that are touchingly human. I'll give you an example, one of the girls is talking to 'London' saying that death is all creepy and stuff, why can't she fall in love with kittens or something. London considers this a moment and then says "Dead kittens would be cool!". Okay, maybe it's a "you had to be there" kind of moment, but I liked it.
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I score this almost-six because of the cast of virtual unknowns give this hokey material their best shot. Some of the characters are quite amusing - like the short girl (Tara Taylor, pictured) who is face to face with the undead and is giving them fashion advice.
Some of the dialogue is, perhaps unintentionally, amusing; but one simply cannot escape the sad fact that this is a pretender to "The Faculty" that doesn't even do it the justice of being a decent rip-off (like that other one, whose name escapes me).
Only while "The Faculty" had a plot, this film... it begins with creepy goings on in a medical facility. We then shift to a hazing ritual where two "geeks" are thrown into a burial pit in a graveyard. The dead turn up, and quickly turn into the undead. So they walk around school all weird. Not like "aaargh zombie" but more... let's say that I saw guys like this at college - it was the result of a joint too many behind the bike sheds.
Somehow these normal looking kids turn into these damn-ugly monsters at night, and back again - with their same clothes on. These monsters vomit a lot both as monsters and as kids, and there isn't a drop of it on their shoes, never mind their clothes. Oh, and when they monster-out they aren't dressed. When they unmonster, they are dressed in the same outfits. Convenient, huh?
The audio effects sound like a five-year-old with an iMac pretending to be a Dalek, and the budget for the special effects must surely have run into double figures.
This film passes easily into the so-bad-its-good category thanks to the sterling work of the cast that try their best with a so-bad-it-hurts concept. If you can imagine "The Faculty" made as "a student video project starring my friends" then you get an idea.
A shame, really. Nice twisty "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" kinda deal going on at the end, but so many logic flaws and errors. Some more time spent on the script and refining the concept could have worked miracles.
Never mind, material like that can give hope to us budding scriptwriters, for if they managed to get this made... ☺
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This film was fairly inevitable since I know people who would probably watch 24 hours solid of the goriest and scariest movies ever made than have to spend half an hour in the dentist's chair. Trust me, I recently had four wisdom teeth extracted, including one difficult tooth that needed what seemed like a Draper hammer drill and chisel set to gouge out - it was no problem at all until the numerous injections wore off, and then the codeine-enhanced prescription painkillers didn't even touch it. I suppose in our candyfloss and bubblegum culture, visits to the dentist are likely to be increasingly necessary (assuming you can find a dentist, that is). And this is where this film scores big. The dentist is feared, except maybe by those with balls of steel, and perhaps other dentists.
So here's a dentist who is "an instrument of perfection", and almost psychopathically convinced that he alone is the sole warrior against decay. When he discovers his wife with the pool guy, it flips something in his brain and he decides to exact revenge on not only his wife but everybody that is bugging him - though you can't help but raise a small smirk when the sleazy tax man sits in the chair...
As for the young girl, Sarah, what is she wearing?!?
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A weary vampire seeks refuge in a small town in southern America (Texas, I think). There's all the 'you won't believe who moved in next door' type of comments.
The good-looking vampire happens to 'fall' for the kind and demure librarian...
There is not much suspense, and nothing particularly 'dreaded' here. It is more a character piece between the vampire and the woman, though the very ending was an unexpected twist.
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But, amazingly, this film manages to miss on every single point. The underwater effects look like it is somebody splashing around in a swimming pool with a rubber fish; the water is so murky it is hard to see; the acting is hammy; there's not much empathy with the characters; and the suspense just isn't there. In fact, the problem with a lot of films like this is that evil happens. It isn't like The Fog where the fog is the manifestation of the evil... here the evil is more a metaphysical thing, a curse, while the rubber sharks that turn up are more 'possessed' than inherently evil. What exactly is the evil here? The sharks? No. The ship itself? No. The treasure? No. It is all covered by the so-called curse. A complete non-entity. A story told generation to generation, but never really seen. Compare this with The Goonies where 'the evil' was just a story, and the actual problems were land developers, the crazy Italian mobsters and an elaborate sequence of traps, but no actual evil. And this, I feel, is where The Evil Below falls flat on its face. The evil, the Big Bad of this entire movie... it just doesn't convince.
This is confounded by a bad movie score that doesn't really fit the mood that the movie is supposed to be trying to set, and the pace just feels bad too. I mean, you can make a good suspenseful movie without the frenetic bloodfest that is Asylum Night or Reign In Darkness - two examples of the polar opposites to this would be Spider Baby and The Iron Rose. But, sadly, The Evil Below just misses, and misses, and misses. Even as The Iron Rose is seemingly doing nothing, there is something going on. A character building, or maybe just a suggestion of the state of mind of the two characters. In this film, however, when nothing much is happening - it is exactly that. Nothing much is happening.
Annoyingly, I can't quite put my finger on the problem - it is just missing... something... interest perhaps? A sense of "like I care?" when I wonder what'll happen next to the hapless tour operator and his passenger/girlfriend/whatever? Just... something... hence the 3/10 score.
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In Jean Rollin's interesting little drama we begin with people spraying vineyards. Then we see two girls in a train. A little bit of dialogue sets up the girls' stories. The train stops, and a confused man gets on. Of all the compartments in all of the carriages in all of the train, the confused man sits down with one of the girls. He goes all kind of gross on his head so the girl runs out... and finds her friend murdered.
She pulls the emergency chain and runs away from the train...
Given that this film is set in a run-down village in the countryside of southern France, this film manages to be pretty claustrophobic. The story? Zombies. Not like the lovely Françoise Blanchard sort of zombie, these just laugh and drool and kill. There's more to the story than I'm letting on here.
The thing to pay attention to is the crop spraying. Perhaps this should be an homage to those that cover their crops with unknown chemicals (one well-known company makes pest control products and biochemical weapons - need I say more?).
Jean Rollin himself apparently acts in this movie. I'm not sure which part...
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Now the problem with this movie is that it takes a few ideas from I Know What You Did Last Summer and a few ideas from Grosse Point Blank and somehow it manages to combine them in a rather bland way. And the freaky woman (you'll know who I mean if you watch it) is not really explained to my satisfaction, not to mention the ending that seems like either "oops, we've run out of budget" or "oops, the writer ran out of ideas".
On the plus side, the real name of the person who played 'Jake' is John Doe. How cool is that? I bet he has eyebrows raised when he signs things!
They have a website, http://www.corporatesucker.com/ which should be worth checking out for the amusing name alone. It's just a shame the movie itself didn't live up to it's potential.
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Okay. The son of a couple who own a posh country club is having a birthday party. He invites his friends - generally the girls are sex-obsessed bitches and the blokes are sex-obsessed dope-heads. Frankly, when the "greenskeeper" starts going on his rampage, the world probably wouldn't really regret the demise of this lot! There's loads of violence, swearing, drug abuse and - of course - blood by the bucketful.
The fact that this movie is rated 15 is either an error on the channel's part, or it stands as great testament to the amazingly arbitrary nature of the film censor - especially considering that The Iron Rose has no gore, only a few seconds of nudity, no drug references, and very very few obscenities - yet it is rated 18. Go figure.
This is one of those horror films where 'all is explained in the end', and it is a satisfyingly lame excuse - just what you would expect.
If you are looking for serious and intelligent horror, give this a miss. If you fancy getting a few friends, some beer, and some nachos and looking for something amusing to watch - this film has plenty of daft gory action to talk about so give it a viewing!
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If you consider my review against that of Jason (on the website, under 'reviews'), you'll see a heck of a disparity.(return to quick links)
Jason has picked up on the aspect of parental abuse that I hadn't really mentioned. This is primarily because I have never felt that serious subjects and horror films go together.
What's the lesson here? If you were abused then you can go and kill people for revenge?
Quite a number of us have upset in our childhood years - I don't know my father, he died when I was young. Maybe in somebody's book this can justify me beating up the grannies. But, you know, most of us adapt, accept it. Personally I think it was more traumatic to have a dozen teachers tell me I'm worthless for years (I'm actually dyslexic-with-numbers and short-sighted, but the teachers weren't that smart).
Thankfully I have never been 'abused' in the way of the protagonist of this movie. But if I had, I'm not certain I'd appreciate a horror movie about it. Not this one, because through the moralism in this film (yes, I did notice, it wasn't even slightly subtle), the ending just feels cheap... Like we've sat through this film and seen this character develop and that is it? That's how it ends? Are you for real?
I repeat:
All in all, a substandard film.
Months later, he escapes from the insane asylum and takes a job teaching a rather dopey bunch of students attending 'summer school'. Is this perhaps a nudge towards the callibre of staff that teach at this time of the year? Nothing seems out of place. Awkward nerdy teacher by day, scientist experimenting on his pet rabbit by night.
Then, one day, he hits upon the formula. And this is where the fun begins. His libido goes into overdrive (a side-effect of the serum, it is explained) and being invisible, he quickly finds out what the pupils really think of him. They laugh at him. Uh-oh!
So he does what any frustrated invisible maniac does. He gets homicidal. And cue some lovely unitentially-comic scenes as various people battle and fight things that aren't there. The budget of this movie simply didn't allow for decent 'invisibility' effects, so instead we watch people tripping themselves up, running around with their arms in the air. It's a hoot, it really is!
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Called Le Rose de Fer in French. Made in 1973.
aka Nuit du cimitière (French) or Rose of Iron (English; literal).
In French with English subtitles.
| I really like this film - the problem is that the sound mix is absolutely dreadful in parts. Is this the best that the studio had to offer of this film? Was there no better recording anywhere in La France? | |
| La qualité sonore sont vraiment terrible! Est-ce qu'il n'y a pas de meilleur enregistrement de ce film en tout de la France? | |
| Parts of it change tonality noticeably, and much of it needs to be put through some sort of filtering to remove the loud hissing. This is really a shame as the audio track sounds like it'd have been pretty good in its original form. I'd have voted this maybe 8¾ or so, but for the sound problem. | |
This Jean Rollin film begins with a girl throwing an iron rose into the sea. The sea location looks like the same one as used in The Nude Vampire.
We then go to a big wedding bash (we have wallpaper like that in one of the rooms!). The next day, a male from the wedding do woos a girl that was there. The girl is kinda sweet in a sort of maybe-not-entirely-as-innocent-as-she-appears, the boy is, well, slimy is the word I'd use for him. They arrange to meet in a railway yard. This railway yard looks like the same one (and possibly also the same big stream train) as is seen in The Two Orphan Vampires.
After a romp in the rail yard our two cycle off and take a stop at a cemetery. The boy walks straight in, the girl isn't far behind...
...sure, if I was trying to impress a cute French girl, a ramble around the cemetery would be real high up on my 'list of places to take my nénette on a first date'... wouldn't you agree? (or is this where I've been going wrong?)
Suddenly it's like "Hey, why not stay here?". The next thing, the boy is opening an underground crypt and saying "Hey, this one's open, let's go inside and look around"... He has to be deranged to stand beside the scared girl, whilst inside the crypt, and say "It's not bad here"...
Fairly quickly they arrive at the idea of, erm, 'consummating' in the cemetery, in the crypt no less, while a depressed clown (shades of Requiem for a Vampire, anyone?) lays a flower at a grave above them.
When the two have finished bonking, they realise the sun has set. Slowly and slowly we come to realise that even the cemetery has an agenda in this crazy world.
Much of this film is set in the claustrophobic confines of the nighttime graveyard and with only the boy and the girl. This is especially interesting in that we don't actually see deaths and gore (there are some memorable scenes - only in a Rollin movie would we have the characters 'getting it on' in a pit full of dry skeletons). What we do see is, in this case, perhaps of less importance than that which we don't see. Much of this film is psychological - their reactions, the alteration of their behaviour, and the story leading up to the extraordinary but understandable ending.
On the technical side, the timing of this movie is impressive for a Rollin film - the camera doesn't linger for ages on things that are visually impressive but mean nothing to the plot. Indeed, it could even be considered a 'tour de force' to set pretty much an entire movie in a graveyard, with only two characters, and yet keep it interesting. The leads are suitably quirky enough to carry the film (she's very tactile and impulsive, he's a sick sod) from the logical start to the truly extraordinary conclusion. As I said in the beginning, this film would score higher if it wasn't for the sound problems.
I'll tell you what, though - I had figured this movie to be early or mid '80s... Imagine my shock? surprise? horror? to discover that it is as old as I am! Yikes!
Called La Morte Vivante in French. Made in 1982.
In French with English subtitles.
Some workmen are dumping nasty stuff in a crypt. An open, well lit crypt with coffins in the corner. This is unlike any crypt I've ever seen (not that I make a habit of visiting crypts!), it is open and the coffins are just lying there, they might as well have 'Vole à moi!' written on them! And why were these workmen dumping this stuff in this crypt? Doesn't the French countryside method of disposal involve a friendly farmer digging a big hole?
Anyway... The stuff dumped, the workmen decide on a spot of grave robbing (well, tomb robbing). There's an earth tremor and some of the nasty stuff leaks out. I'm not sure what it is - radioactive toxic waste or something? Anyway, it revives a seriously beautiful woman, Catherine. She doesn't look like she's been in the coffin for minutes, never mind years!
The EPG writeup says she is revived "as a zombie", but don't think of the "grrr-aaaargh" type of zombie.
Catherine and her childhood friend, Hélène, made a pact back when they were children; to live together and die together - you know, 'friends forever'.
So Catherine turns to her friend for help. In the beginning Catherine cannot speak so she makes a phone call and plays a music box. That's all Hélène needs to figure out that Catherine is 'back', but on their first meeting she can't quite believe it. She also can't quite believe that Catherine has left blood-drained bodies in the other room; though it doesn't take Hélène very long to figure out that, as 'friend forever', she is now supposed to supply her morte vivante girl with lots of bodies.
It is ironic that so many reviews on IMDb refer to the vampirism in this film. Yes, Jean Rollin is known for vampire movies, and yes, Catherine drinks blood in order to stay alive - but that is a myth with far greater scope than vampires. Even humans, back in the Dark Ages, used to drink blood as they believed they would inherit tendencies of those whose blood they drank. Therefore calling this a vampire film is possibly showing that you spent more time trying to see through Catherine's exceedingly flimsy night-dress, and not enough time paying attention to the subtitles!
Unfortunately...this is a French film. Had it been American, Hélène would have found people and Catherine would have drunk their blood until the cops (most likely a semi-drunk disgraced renegade who's just had a divorce and his partner killed in the line of duty; that old cliché) caught up with them.
Oh no. Not in a French film. Cette sorte de chose ne se passe pas en films français!
Catherine is fully aware of what she is and what happened, and she spends a great deal of time agonising over the fact that she is evil and should be dead. Like I said, she's a cut above your average zombie. In fact, you will find yourself starting to feel really sorry for Catherine and her situation. She isn't an evil person, or even an evil zombie; rather she's a victim of a circumstance. She didn't ask to be brought back to life.
Hélène, on the other hand, just gets more and more frenzied. The things she's doing shock her, and... well, there's more than a subtle hint that Hélène would get serious satisfaction out of sharing space with Catherine, if you know what I mean...
One thing I do wonder about is Hélène's behaviour. There is no suggestion of 'brainwashing' or anything that I have noticed, though it would fit in with her scared reactions to some of the things that she does. Therefore, if she hasn't been cerebrally zapped - she is doing this stuff of her own free will. That's kinda scary, how quickly a 'normal' person turns into something evil; and a cute twist to have an evil human and an agonised zombie!
La Morte Vivante simply oozes atmosphere!
As the film comes to a close, and the unexpected and disturbing final scenes finish... this movie will stay in your head for quite a while.
Well done to Jean Rollin for making a sympathetic zombie part; possibly the only one in cinema history - most of the zombies I remember just hold their arms out and gargle mindlessly.
Well done also to Françoise Blanchard (Catherine) and Marina Pierro (Hélène).
This is a well realised film (not perfect, but pretty good - could have done without the annoying Americans and a bit of tightening up in post-prod.). Nevertheless, I completely enjoyed it.
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This unknown cast try hard to make the material something fresh, but sadly the material is almost as old as teens-in-peril horror flicks.
Let's see... A group of adolescents go on a sort of camping trip thing to a chalet hidden deep deep in the woods. There's an old tale about something bad that happened in a chalet. Geeky computer girl looks it up and - try hard to look shocked now - yup, it's this chalet! Creepy things start to happen. There's a hard-ass guy toting weapons who knows things...
Actually, it isn't a bad movie exactly. The assorted cast keep it bubbling along nicely despite the somewhat daft plot and the low budget. I think what I liked about this film is that the leading girls were not only quite cute, but they had brains too. The blokes? The usual assortment of hormones-meets-wannabe-heroes. At least we didn't have a 'bro dealing in smack' (the one major letdown of Death Valley).
Don't expect too much, and maybe this film will surprise you? Let's put it like this - if I was chained to a chair (ooooh kinky!) and told I had to spend all day watching a "teens in a cabin" film over and over, I'd either choose Ghost Game or this...
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Called La Vampire Nue in French. Made in 1969.
In French with English subtitles.
All of the Jean Rollin trademarks are here - the pretty girl with the flowing flimsy dress, the nudity, the lesbians, the interesting costumes, the vampires...
And, sadly, another Rollin trademark is here - that is the taking of extraordinarily long shots of things; whether it be longer-than-normal shots of coloured liquid running into flasks, or that entire scene with the coloured girl and the artist which had no real relevance to the story, but hey - it was a naked girl so we'll watch her for minutes... Or holding shots for much longer than is really warranted, a good example being the people marching on the château.
The story is a pretty girl in a flowing nearly-transparent dress (sadly, a bright orange dress, so she looked a little like a giant goldfish!) is being kept away from people so as not to traumatise her to her 'condition'. She cannot tolerate sunlight, she can regenerate her body after injury, she's immortal, and she needs blood to survive. Some men, who like the idea of immortality, are studying her. Her food is generously provided by a suicide cult that worship her. And there are others who want in on the action or maybe to stop the action. Through it all, the man in charge has a son who is not only falling in love with the girl, but is also starting to doubt his father's motives.
Indeed, it is almost a shame that the sexuality figures so heavily in this film because the story is an interesting one, and certainly an interesting spin on the traditional 'vampire' story. As always, Rollin produces a atmospheric pieces with bizarre characters (like the twins) and visually striking imagery.
As for the two on the right... Isn't there something sorta creepy and Oompa-Loompa-ish about them?
The editing is still a bit hit'n'miss, but the whole production is much much better put together than, say, Requiem for a Vampire. As always, Rollin's flare for a good angle and interesting use of light shows up (even if some of it is a little on the fake side).
This movie would have benefited from tight editing in post-production and less time spend with the nudity. But, then, it wouldn't be a Rollin film without these things!
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I quite liked the way the soundtrack was put together. It reminded me of a Tarantino soundtrack, only it wasn't dripping cool in quite the same way.
A lovely touch, in the end credits, was to dedicate the film to "Il Maestro" Dario Argento, and to say thanks to well-known directors of the genre (such as Wes Craven), and thanking the caterers for the espressos. And you can have a little bit of fun seeing how many times you can see Todd Rex and Karl Hirsch in the credits (don't miss the songwriter credit).
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A group of teenage misfits find a source of supernatural power around a rock in the forest... like you do. One is a computer whizz and figures out not only what it is, but how to 'charge' yourself with it. It can give you things like telepathy, the ability to heal, telekinesis, etc. How cool to be rejected by most of your teachers and the 'in' crowd at school, and to suddenly have the power to influence people's minds and make stuff happen. But, such power has to be used wisely...
There is a good story lurking under this digitally overprocessed movie. While some effects are necessary for the plot (such as the vibrant colours while charging themselves up), a lot of the things - like the eye flashes - are performed with all of the finesse of a five-year-old that has just discovered Magic Markers. There is also a lot of tonality shifting (the teacher shot on the right has a strong green hue). Jean-Pierre Junet did a similar thing in Amélie, the métro was tinged green, but it was more subtle so it affected you on a more subconcious level. In this movie, the green tinge is like looking at the world through a bowl of Jell-O. It is certainly an engaging and vibrant movie, though my hopes are that if this production team reunite for another film, they'll exercise a little bit of restraint with their digital box of effects!
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There are several stories running in parallel here - the old witch, the rednecks, the blonde and some other relative who turns up... and along the way bodies pile up all somewhat gorily...
Well-played by the two young girls.
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Called Les Deux Orphelines Vampires in French. Made in 1997.
Dubbed in English.
Jean Rollin's topsy-turvy tale of two blind little orphan girls stuck in a Catholic orphanage. Oh, did I mention, they are vampires?
Jean is never one for sticking rigidly to the vampire mythology - which I guess explains how the girls can be cared for by nuns without their bursting into a cloud of dust. Additionally, it seems that while the girls don't dust in the sunlight, they are only capable of sight at night. Night, by the way, looking an awful lot like broad daylight with a filter over the camera lens!
It goes entirely without saying that these girls are more than a little amorous with each other - this is a Rollin film after all!
The premise and the purpose of the film is hard to understand; though as I watched it I was rather strongly reminded of Beautiful Creatures; I wonder if this was any inspiration?
In a departure from the regular Rollin offerings on Zone Horror, this film was entirely dubbed (which initially filled me with dread). I noticed a 'redemption' logo popped up before the film started, so maybe this company is dubbing in a new soundtrack instead of using subtitling?
But after watching the film - let's have three cheers for the dubbing effort! I have heard some horrible attempts at dubbing (including one film that sounded as if the entire cast was dubbed by the same person!). So to have this match up visually and psychologically was a welcome relief.
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Tooth Fairy, The [click to redirect]
Mary is fairly pretty, in a slightly emotionless anorexic sort of way. She's eighteen years old, and a great fan of horror movies (at the start of the film you can see some videos by her TV − ironically including 'Devil's Prey' which Zone Horror showed just before this film!).
Her father forbids her from seeing more scary movies, so she wishes he'd just go away, and sneaks out to see a new release called The Wisher. At the cinema we're treated to a pretty cheesy movie-within-a-movie which is fairly amusing in how accurate it is about certain <cough> movies. But shortly into the film, for no reason, Mary leans forward and tosses her cookies onto the floor. She runs out of the cinema, shortly followed by her friends. She leaves with a muscle-bound football jock that has the hots for her, and on the way home they pass her father's car − wrecked. It seems that The Wisher is real, and has just made her father go away. Be careful what you wish for Mary!
And so it goes. This movie had loads of potential, a bit of work could have made it a 'favourite' of mine. But sadly as this movie ends there are just so many things that they could have done something with, especially the movie-in-a-movie concept. Mary confides to the school consellor that being scared turns her on, but when she is scared she doesn't shove her hand up her dress, she just screams like anybody else would. The "Wisher", of the movie, is evidently granting Mary her wishes but giving them a cruel twist (for her father, she wished he'd "just go away", he did − terminally). When the identity of this character is revealed, it just seems like a let-down. A tacked-on ending because they couldn't come up with anything 'cool'. And looking back, so much if it seems totally unbelievable.
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It's a shame, to be honest. Here we have a collection of people acting not entirely badly (except the head alien - you'll know who I mean) who are given a script which should have dared to try something a little bit different instead of collecting together a bunch of alien movie clichés...
To give you an example, Dark Star (1974) covers some familiar material, but the way it is arranged makes for a totally inventive and fresh film. It is a shame They Are Among Us chose to take the road well travelled, so this is essentially just another rehashing of that familiar "my mom's an alien!" concept...
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A young woman's car breaks down. She tries to change the flat tyre. Headlights approach. She screams. And we're propelled into credits interspersed with driving-at-night scenes, in this low-budget horror from "The Overseas Filmgroup".A little soapbox rant - you can skip this...In all honesty this probably doesn't quite make the +6 score grade for the plot conveniences, not to mention the not-so-special effects, but it scores a little extra as it is so enthusastically overacted by Tamara Hext.
It is rather ironic that in the news as I write this is Mel Gibson and claims that he is anti-semetic - when not many people seem to worry much about "pentagram = black magic". Practicioners of black magic probably do use a pentagram, but then traditional devil worshippers use an upside-down crucifix, so shall we assume those who worship the symbol of the cross are satanists? To say such a thing would upset many people, not to menion breaking numerous laws in numerous countries. It is just a shame that the same degree of 'protection' is not regularly afforded to followers of the Wiccan faith, and it is a shame that so often we hear the word "pentagram" alongside the words "black magic".
(a D-registered red Metro features, so if I remember correctly that would date this film as being made around 1986)
So what's the deal? Anna is a has-been rock star who still performs, but seems to spend more of her time mostly in solitude so that she can write new material. But her life is not her own. Her brother/manager bosses her around and drowns her in pills. She meets up with a 'new' boyfriend, the handyman, who in his way wants to control her. The seriously camp friend and her sister also try to control her. And to deal with this, Anna drowns herself in alcohol and consequently loses control (which, ironically, serves to justify those trying to control her). Count how many times I have used the word "control" in this paragraph and I think the primary theme of this film will become rather obvious.
Without wanting to give too much away, there is a very interesting plot twist for the end quarter of the film, and is where things become extremely... you know... interesting! :-)
In more competent hands, and with less singing, this could have been a good film and scored a seven or eight out of ten. I compromised on 6/10 as I didn't have the heart to score it lower. This film isn't bad, just mishandled.
If/when you watch it, I'm sure you'll understand exactly what I mean.
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I suppose if your daddy is a well-known director of horror movies, sooner or later you'll end up in one. After a quick decapitation, we meet a young man saving a girl (played by Asia Argento, with a heavy Italian accent, who is not unlike a young Julie Delpy) who is quickly picked up by two men from Youth Services and is taken back to a clinic that she doesn't want to go to, while a group of people get involved in the seance from hell. Are you following all of this? A complex web spins out in under ten minutes.
While this is a more commercial film than ones such as "Suspiria", there are numerous things that are to be expected from Dario Argento - quirky dialogue, rain, interesting camera angles, rain, a twisty story, and the odd spot of rain...
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For what it is worth, many years ago I wrote a short teleplay about a Killer Bahji that flew off of the plate in an ordinary Indian restaurant, and went around killing people by squirting vindaloo-power curry spices in various orifices where it would hurt like hell... maybe there's milage in that idea yet? [and if there is, you know who to send the royalty cheques to - I'll even volunteer to be a hapless 'victim' ☺]
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The premise... Some futuristic society when bad people are stuck in strange prison camps and regularly abused by those in charge. I'm sure you know the score - it is fairly staple future-fodder from Rollerbabies to Escape From New York...
Here, we meet a collection of misfits that are imprisoned. In some cases the characters are likable enough (if odd - why does that woman shower, fully dressed, in the middle of the night?) but in other cases the characters are annoying so you hope for them to meet a nasty end when the bad stuff starts to happen.
And sure enough, it happens. It happens in the form of the 'Turkey Shoot'. Some of the inmates are given their outside-world ID tags and allowed to walk out the door. The only thing they have to do now is stay alive until sundown.
There are parts of this movie that are totally daft - like the bit with the fighter jets. I guess this is to prove that the film has a bigger budget that first appears, and it might have worked if it wasn't: a, a totally ridiculous plot development; and b, obviously library footage.
Through it all, it held my attention which is why I have given it an higher score than you might have expected. It is an enjoyable enough romp.
The camera 'tonality' and the future vision suggests to be that this film is either very late '70s or early '80s. It in interesting because parts of the soundtrack sound exactly as if they'd been inspired by Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner.
In fact, if I had to sum this movie up in one sentence:
It is nice to see this debut on The Horror Channel (7th March 2005) because 'horror' it isn't. It is more a foray into the darker side of sci-fi; and that's perfectly fine by me!
Two Orphan Vampires, The [click to redirect]
Unborn 2, The [click to redirect]
This film stars Roddy McDowell as the wise older medical technician, a not unattractive woman as the plunky one rising up the ranks of StarFleet (okay, it isn't quite StarFleet, it's something similar in concept), and a bunch of oddball characters who don't seem to be a lot other than be put in danger so they can be killed after bouts of hammy acting.
It's a very dialogue-led movie with plucky woman and Roddy having lots of dialogue to make up for the poor plot and poorer special effects. Sadly there are many contrivances - for example:
A woman: We've been walking forever - there's nothing here!
A man : Wait, look here!
That sort of dialogue is just too awful for words - it might have worked better if they inserted a cut-away scene in between. But, given that this is a low-budget movie and says so all over it, perhaps it is only to be expected...
Oh, yes... There is some issue with a virus picked up on a Russian ship that sent out a distress signal, and a not-at-all-scary latex monster with tentacles. I'm surprised Roddy McDowell is appearing in such a film - I thought that was the providence of Luke Hamil after his Star Wars fame...
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This film knows it is a nutty premise, and it plays with it. Apart from a few minor little things, I was satisfied at the end, rather than thinking "great idea, it's a shame they didn't realise it" as with so many films in this genre. Oh no, VA is a great antidote to a boring rainy evening.
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This is a series, set in a school (with remarkably few students) where they are trying to 'humanise' teenaged vampires by night, and teach sort-of normal kids by day (as the cover).
I guess, like The Lost Boys, they're prettier when they are 'young'? Anyway, it doesn't have the pace or the action of the likes of Buffy - it struck me as more akin to a Roswell or Dawson's Creek without the outdoors, and a small amount of Charmed tendencies just so you know some supernatural stuff is going on... Set in a dusty school. Oh yes, and they (mostly) happen to be vampires.
There is a lot of character building going on here, which is good, but sometimes it seems as if most of the episode is character building and you're asking "what's the plot, exactly?". The plot, sadly, is often annunciated by a brief voice-over. To be honest, I consider such tactics to be making up for a lack of plot (please - don't tell us, show us), or a cheap attempt to rip off a detective film-noir. And, in the case of Vampire High, it isn't the latter...!
While Vampire High doesn't have anything like the same level of 'zing!' as the first season of Buffy, it reminds me a lot of it. No, not because of the vampires! It reminds me because the first season of Buffy seemed to be almost timidly restrained, as if it wasn't aware of what it was and where it could go. The same with Vampire High (despite being saddled with such an amazingly daft title - doesn't it sound like one of those '80s spooky movies, in the Ghost Chase genre?). You see, even with such a small cast and fairly claustrophobic settings, a lot can be done - there is potential here - it only needs to spread its wings and learn how to fly (perhaps, with a slightly bigger budget...).
(sadly, it looks like the series was cancelled after about twenty episodes)
It is a big step forward that they are showing a series. Before, as explained somewhere on one of their forums, they were classified as a 'movie' channel so they had to show movies; and, I guess, fill time with advertising and horror-related reviews - I'm sure we've all enjoyed the behind-the-scenes of Asylum Night, and laughed at that poor girl (Mo Lovett?) that had to keep a straight face as she interviewed a 'half-vampire' in a bookshop...
...perhaps not for much longer? They're showing a series!
I wrote the above review back in 2005. Since then, further teleseries have been added to the channel's line-up. Check the EPG for details.
Since I first wrote the description of Vampire High, the series itself has also included more... people, locations, and some passable stories. I think the series has limited itself by the "ongoing war" scenario, as the humans seem to be reasonably 'unbothered' by the prospect of vampiric activity - but to mention that weird Federal Agent with the Bad Hair Day (so reminds me of Judge Canon on Ally McBeal!), and the various procession of strange 'things' that come looking for these few 'special' vampires. I think also time is against them - each episode lasts in the order of 22 minutes (to fill a half hour slot, with advertising) and you have to zip through the story in that short amount of time. All in all, nonsense plots aside, the series is certainly improving. I could make an analogy with 'fine wine', but then I'd have to become one of the undead for using such a terrible cliché - and talking of clichés, so's one of the actresses. Seriously - read the credits! :-)
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Vierges et Vampires (Requiem For A Vampire) [click to redirect]
Wisher, The [click to redirect]
A tiny French town, a lake, nubile girls, and Nazi Zombies. Full of logic holes, extremely dodgy effects, and bad acting. This seems, essentially, an excuse for soft-porn - underwater shots of naked woman, that sort of thing.
One of the players (don't know which) is Jean Rollin.
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This document completely written by hand (in MetaPad) and tested using:
Early (until 2008) video shots taken using an HCCS Video digitiser (single-field memory frame store) and !Vision24 software (RISC OS). Some captures live, others from VHS video in LP mode. All captures originated from a Pace BSkyB 2500B Sky Digibox; composite video, using the PAL broadcast standard. I would appreciate if you provide a credit and link to me if you use these particular images yourself, but I cannot claim any copyright over them...
The flags were designed in !DrawPlus (RISC OS 3.70) except Italy, New Zealand, and Australia which were pain-stakingly bitmap-tweaked using PhotoImpact 5 (Windows 98SE). If you use these (original size is slightly larger than used on this page), you MUST provide a credit somewhere AND a link to my site - it took quite a while to draw the flags! :-)
Images gamma corrected to R1.40 G1.62 B1.55; though as this is a perceptual thing, there may be slight differences between the images (the 'big' ones were made at a different time to the smaller images). You might have noticed I like contrast. :-) Some images have been edited slightly for artistic reasons.
The really contrasty pictures are most likely the ones that I took off of the television screen itself using a Fujifilm iX-1 digital camera, or more recently a Trust Powerc@m Flash (because switching computers to take a couple of screenshots is quite a pain in the...).
Current video shots either taken from a full-frame (720×576) acute;roMedia PCI capture card, or a half-sized (352×288) video capture (MPEG1 or XviD depending on whether or not I have transcoded it), recorded using PCTV and the PCI capture card; imported directly into PhotoImpact5 and tweaked until it looks okay. The images as of 2008 are courtesy of a SilverCrest SL65 digital satellite receiver. Same request for image use/credit as above.
NOTE that permission is not granted for any form of URL munging or link redirection except in the specific cases of providing human language translation, or content archival services (i.e. webcaches); and - of course - automatic corrections for off-line copies (i.e. "Save As...", etc) for personal use.
It is expressly forbidden to munge/modify/alter links in order to trace, advertise, redirect to content other than that which I intend, and similar even if such activity is performed automatically (MSSmartTags, are you listening?)...
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Every image on this page is 'enhanced' with informative and/or amusing captions, which are now available to Firefox (etc) users... Perhaps you'd like to go and read them if you've not already? :-)
About me...
I'm Rick Murray, 34 years old and single (so if you are a single female geek, email me!).
In case it wasn't obvious, I quite like the horror genre; I'd be hard pushed to think of my favourite-of-all-time horror film though, but you can see from this page the sort of thing that I like - albeit a rather eclectic collection.
I decided to write this page because, well, why not? It started out a lot as a record for my own use - what I thought of the movies and what I didn't enjoy - so I could keep an eye on the schedules and watch repeats of things that I liked.
It wasn't a big jump from there to drop in a few assorted pictures and tidy it up for consumption by the general public (that's you).
As you can expect, all of these reviews are heavily biased to my likes and dislikes - especially if a film contains cute girls that are still alive by the end of it, and particularly if the film has some sort of ambiance to it (some, like Asylum Night are intelligent, others like Demon Wind are so-silly-it-is-funny; but then you get the odd few that just have no good attributes). Of course, while I may hate Revenge Of The Psychotronic Man, it could be your favourite film (God help you!), that's how it goes.
I would like to hear from you - do you agree with my thoughts, have I slated a film you liked (state why, I'll give it a second chance and see if I've missed anything or been too harsh). Or vice versa? Have my reviews guided you in what to watch (or not watch)? Tell me...
One final thing - these reviews relate to films shown on Zone Horror. While I quite enjoyed the silliness of Scary Movie 2, it won't ever be reviewed here . . . unless ZH shows it. Okay?