Dead Silence

Dead Silence
Starring: Ryan Kwanten, Donnie Wahlberg, Amber Valletta, Bob Gunton
Directed by: James Wan

Style: Supernatural Killer
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Ripping out tongues
Overall rating: 1 out of 5

Dolls are creepy. They look like people and have the horrible habit of coming to life and trying to murder us, skittering about like rats and occasionally giggling just to drive us up the wall. In the town of Ravens Fair, there used to be an old woman named Mary Shaw. She was a ventriloquist who was murdered by an angry mob over a boy disappearance. Now, her ghost inhabits her collection of puppets, and if you scream, she tears out your tongue and kills you. Now, Jamie (Kwanten) must find a way to stop her before everyone in the town ends up dead.

This movie should have been better. It had all the makings of a direct-to-DVD movie with a kick to it, with some decent actors, a creepy premise, and decent production values. However, everything goes out the window because the director doesn't know how to work with an art department. The entire film feels like it was run through the Sharpen feature on Photoshop, giving everything a little too much edge and distinction to it. Also, the color palate is way out of whack, with entire scenes drenched in blue filters and then cleared with wipes. The director of photography would go on to be the DP for I Know Who Killed Me, to give you an idea of the look to the film. The best horror films let subtle things creep into the audience's subconscious, allowing them to scare themselves before flipping the switch to make us all jump. This film climbs into a Mack truck, runs everyone down, then points at them while screaming, "Scary, huh?!"

The actors try their hardest to be good, but the director keeps avoiding the performances, instead choosing to focus on atmosphere and effects, leaving the audience with no reason to care about anything that is happening. There is a moment or two of general creepiness when we can see the evil spirit behind the doll, peering out with maniacal glee. Again, these moments are quickly rushed away to allow for chases and manic energy rather than creeping dread.

This film should be used in film classes as an example of how to take something good and instead focus on something crappy. You may get a thrill from this movie if your idea of horror is living dolls. Otherwise, the only thing besides the film that will be blue is you, realizing you actually paid to see this thing.

Fido

Fido
Starring: Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, K'Sun Ray
Directed by: Andrew Currie

Style: Zombie Comedy
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 3
Weapons of choice: Biting
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Zombies are a plague upon the earth. All they long to do is feast upon the living and shamble about, moaning and decomposing. However, what if we could find a way to keep zombies from wanting to eat us and instead make them do our every wish? That would be ideal, right? There is no possible way that could backfire.

In Fido, radiation from space has caused the dead to rise from the grave in the 1950s/ Luckily, a company called Zomcom has found a way to collar the dead, thereby turning them into a harmless batch of slaves for humanity to exploit. Timmy (Ray) comes home to find his mother has bought the family a zombie which he names Fido (Connolly). However, Fido's collar isn't quite right, and soon he is killing those who threaten Timmy. As the bodies pile up, Timmy can't let Fido be found out, as Zomcom will destroy him, and gosh darn it, the killing isn't his fault.

Fido works on several levels. Firstly, you have a great zombie comedy that pokes a bit of fun at the typical zombie scenarios while combining them with old screwball comedies of errors. Second, you have the social satire aspect which is hinted at more than being overt, allowing the comedy to play out as it would rather than being bogged down by "symbolism" and "meaning." Finally, you have a great family movie that happens to involve a zombie and people beaing eaten alive.

Connolly makes this movie. His expressiveness as Fido allows for all of the scenes to have depth to them, and that investment into the characters is what stands out in this film. It's not your typical zombie comedy where it just makes fun of the stereotypes but never really has much substance to it. Following in the tradition of Romero's zombies, the film isn't a zombie movie. It is a social satire that happens to have zombies in it. Even better, the movie is fun, which is more than can be said about a lot of comedies recently.

At the end of the day, this film is not groundbreaking, nor is it the best movie you will see this year. However, it does deliver on its intended promise of entertainment with just a hint of social commentary to stick in the back of your head. If you are in the mood for something different, this could be what you didn't evn know you were looking for.

Session 9

Session 9
Starring: David Caruso, Paul Guilfoyle, Josh Lucas, Peter Mullan.
Directed by: Brad Anderson

Style: Psychological Thriller
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 4
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Everyday items
Overall rating: 5 out of 5

When kids talk about what they want to do when they grow up, tearing down old wards for the mentally insane is not usually near the top of the list, much like being a junkie. However, there are always hard working people who are willing to take those jobs. Unfortunately, these people also have to deal with whatever happens to currently be inhabiting these old insane asylums. In this case, Gordon (Mullan) and his team find that a former patient at the asylum, Mary, had multiple personality disorder, and her other personality Simon was both murderous and sinister. Soon after this discovery, members of the team start disappearing. Everyone's a suspect, including the distinct possibility Simon has not vacated the premises.

One of the biggest strengths of this film is the atmosphere it creates. Part of tearing down such a large building involves having the crew operating various machines alone for long periods of time. This feeling of isolation is then tainted by the sheer creepiness of the building. Old chairs with straps, gurneys, and other medical bric-a-brac is everywhere. The entire building is in a state of decay and plays out like a place of nightmares. There is also little music, and the tapes of the little girl talking about the crazed personality Simon is haunting. Finally, the movie never really shows too much of what happens to those people that disappear. Up until the end, when the killer is revealed, they just turn to see someone approaching and then are never heard from again. It adds to the paranoia, and soon the audience is wondering if they are seeing things as shadows scuttle around corners.

All of the actors do an excellent job of not playing up the disappearances too much. Because of the isolated nature of the job, there is never a sense that something happened to the people, only that they went missing. Everything plays out very realistically, and the final moments of the film hits with a force rare for horror movies made in a time of jaded audiences. The entire movie plays out as a horror film that isn't trying to be a horror film, and its success leads to the audience being dragged along for the ride.

In the end, this film shows just how flexible the horror genre can be in finding ways to give the audience shivers while still telling an excellent story. It is differnet than most horror films you will see, and rather than being the same crap that comes out of "independant" horror, this film is a worthy addition to the genre.

Event Horizon

Event Horizon
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson
Directed by: Paul W. S. Anderson

Style: Haunted Ship
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 4
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: One's Own Sanity
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

The worst part of space exploration, besides the fact that the smallest of errors can result in horrific deaths for you and your crew in the frigid void, is that it is far larger than we can even comprehend. The most horrific thing ever thought by the most twisted minds ever to exist is mild compared to what mathematically is probably out there waiting for us. Sanity would dictate that the easiest way to avoid that is to not visit these places. Instead, the ship Event Horizon is sent out to see what it can find. With the ability to bend space, it can visit anywhere instantaneously. In 2040 it disappears without a trace. In 2047, it returns, seemingly empty. You know, the type of seeming of a demon that is dreaming. Logically, we send a crew to investigate what happened. What they find will haunt them forever, and their only hope is to escape and live to tell about it.

At its core, Event Horizon is the classic haunted house story placed in an environment where there is no escape. Everyone always wonders why nobody just walk out of a house where the walls bleed. Here, there is nowhere to go. Predictably, the rescue ship is damaged, leaving only the haunted ship as inhabitable while repairs are made. This is a prime example of how Event Horizon operates. It will takes the horror conventions, things any horror fan has come to expect, and still injects enough surprises into that framework that the audience will be white knuckled. There are some distinctly creepy moments, such as the discovery of the old crew's video and the suicide attempt, each designed to ratchet up the tension. With haunted house movies, one's own sanity is in danger, so anything could conceivably happen at any time.

All of the actors, particularly Neill and Fishburne, do an excellent job of portraying people whose concept of reality has just been changed. They feel like people who don't believe in monsters and ghosts and yet now have to face real ones, and that acting draws in the audience. A horror audience doesn't really believe in what it is watching, and so when the characters convincingly don't either, it makes the situations more engaging because they are like us, the audience. Both Fishburne and Neill also capture the slow erosion of sanity excellently, something that is never easy in horror. Without such strong characters, Event Horizon and all of the tension it has would never have worked.

It should be said that if you really do not get into supernatual horror, this movie may not really get under your skin. The twist that comes in the last third of the movie about what has really happened to the ship is borderline ridiculous if you haven't bought in to what came before it. Also, because the film's structure is built like other horror films, some of the occurances are predictable, though the way in which they happen still has an underlying intensity.

In the end, this film is a solid thrill ride best watched in dark places. Before the studio made Anderson cut it down, it was apparently much more dark and violent. One has to wonder what would have happened if they trusted that vision.

Quarantine

Quarantine
Starring: Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris, Jay Hernandez
Directed by: John Erick Dowdle

Style: Undead Plague
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Biting
Overall rating: 3 out of 5

Reporters have an easy job. You go to a scene after everything bad has happened and tell people what happened. However, you could decide to tag along with people who handle terrible situations, thus putting yourself more in harm's way and ultimately tempting fate into showing you the error of your ways. Angela Vidal (Carpenter) chooses the latter, tagging along with the late night fire shift to a routine emergency call. However, things get ugly quickly when the medical call turns out to be a quarantined apartment building. Soon, the government won't let them out, and the infected won't let them live.

Quarantine is a remake of the Spanish film Rec, a film nobody has seen because the studio bought the distribution rights and kept it from hitting America until after their film came out. Therefore, I can't really compare this one to the original. However, despite having the possibility of having a very creepy atmosphere and enough scare tactics to take the audience on a thrill ride, Quarantine devolves into a pretty generic zombie picture once everything hits the fan for our characters.

The film does a good job of setting up our characters as actual people, with the first 20 minutes of the film being an introduction and lead up to them actually going to the apartment building. However, the movie never really does anything with those characters, save for Carpenter's reporter who has a few conflicts of morality throughout. Thus, instead of having a good build up, the film instead looks like it is stalling to fill out the movie to feature length, particularly because the film could have cut 10 minutes off of the end of the movie. I'm not spoiling anything by saying the last 10 minutes attempt to explain the disease long after it becomes pertinent to anyone, especially because the explanation is more of a half-explanation that doesn't connect to anyone we've really met.

The main problem with Quarantine is that it fails to uphold the basic necessities to make a movie scary. It makes attempts at building suspense when the characters are more likely to be extremely cautious and paranoid, leading them to do things that have the audience screaming "Stupid!" After a resident goes crazy and attacks people, there are still two more occasions when people approach residents with the exact same symptoms and try to carry them to help. Suspense is more effective when people are forced to deal with infected or when they do not know where the infected are. Once you introduce what happens, using that same scenario twice more is predictable. Also, several of the scenes are very reminiscent of 28 Weeks Later. Now, rage zombies can be used and still not be a rip-off, but there are a few very moments that seem pulled almost directly from it. Very little of this film feels new, and that hurts a film trying to scare you senseless.

Overall, this film had the potential of being as tense as High Tension or other classic white knucklers. While there are a few good moments, usually with the cameraman trying to creep quietly down the hall without knowing what is in the room, the film has too much that feels reused, and the last 10 minutes seem to take forever after the conclusion is foregone. Finally, spoiling with your trailer is unforgivable. This may be a good midnight movie good for a few cheap thrills, but it should have been so much better.

Chopping Mall

Chopping Mall
Starring: Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, Russell Todd, and Karrie Emerson
Directed by: Jim Wynorski

Style: Killer Robots
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 3
Weapons of choice: Items found in a mall
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

If you are a teenager, your life revolves around the mall. Unfortunately, there are things outside The Steak Shack that could kill you. That's right: security robots. In yet another foolhardy move to trust robots with our safety, Park Plaza Mall installs high tech security with low tech lightning protection, leading to the robots chasing down teens who just want to sneak into the mall and party all night. The robots must be stopped to make the world safe again for trespassers of the world.

This movie falls into the classic conventions of 80s horror: teenagers threatened by things outside the realm of reality. It's not intended to have real fright connotations and instead is supposed to fall into the category of cheap thrills with some comedy to boot. The trouble with this formula is that a lot of the 80s horror films are interchangeable, distinguishing themselves more with their villain than with the movie itself. This movie is no exception, to the point that I remembered it for a long time as "that mall robot movie" before I learned it was called Chopping Mall.

A lot of this film will be forgotten, and the performances are passable but are nothing special. Where this film fails is that the death sequences aren't even that interesting. If you are going to forgo quality on everything else, you still need to have interesting death sequences. This movie tries a few things that fail to impress, leaving the audience to wonder why they didn't rent something better.

As a result of the generic tone of the film, I'm kind of left with little to say about this movie other than to call it run-of-the-mill late-night fare for television. If it's on and you're bored, you'll watch it. otherwise, no real reason to seek it out.

Terrible Thursday: The Happening

The Happening
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan

Style: Unexplained happenings
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Anything nearby to the afflicted
Overall rating: Terrible

Philadelphia has never been a wonderland of joy ever since Benjamin Franklin robbed that cobbler for the Washington Elite series clog. However, Elliot Moore (Wahlberg) finds himself having to flee the city after New York is hit by some sort of attack when people outside suddenly all kill themselves in whatever way happens to be handy. Soon, other cities and towns are affected, targeting smaller and smaller groups of individuals. Where can you escape to, if you can't go outside?

There are several fundamental problems with this film. Many people criticize its ridiculous nature, which Shyamalan has countered by saying he was making a B-movie. This seems like an excuse, but let's approach the film as a B-movie. We'll even ignore that the marketing department in that case mispromoted the heck out of that, because that's not Shyamalan's fault.

Firstly, Shyamalan took the completely wrong tone to his film for it to pass off as a B-movie. Yes, all of his actors are ridiculously over the top, from Wahlberg doing his best Napoleon Dynamite impression to Zooey Deschanel having moon eyes the entire film to Betty Buckley showing up as an batcrap insane recluse, everyone is hamming it up. Where this tone fails is that at no point does the movie insinuate that it is purposefully bad. There is no subtle wink to the audience. Combine this with the fact that the rest of the production strives to be realistic, down to graphic death scenes, and you have actors who look out of place rather than ones who are laughing it up.

Next, you have the fact that Shyamalan does not know how to do violence. In interviews he gave about this film, he talks about how he wants to break all conventions and hit audiences with things that they felt they would be safe from. This translates to I am going to kill kids in the film, and you'll never see it coming. Except for the fact that it happens when they are trying to break into an inhabited house and suddenly go from normal character kids to hooligan tactics. Not two minutes before, they were waxing philosophical about respect and relationships, and then they are trying to kick down doors. In fact, the first violent deaths occur about 2 minutes into the film, and the convention is set that when things go wrong, people will kill themselves. Knowing that convention tips his hand, and from then on, nothing we see will shock us as much because it's is completely and utterly expected. By the time you get to the lawnmower incident, the part of the trailer that people found most shocking, it is a ho-hum effect.

I'll skip the ridiculousness of the science in the film, because it is B-movie, so it doesn't matter, but what this film comes down to being is a very boring, rather uninventive movie about the possibility of humanity ceasing to exist. It's not fun, unless maybe you are very drunk. It's not exciting, because everything is telegraphed. And it's not scary, because nothing sneaks up on them. They are chased by wind in a scene reminiscent of when frost chased people in The Day After Tomorrow. So what is it then?

Terrible. Just terrible.

Midnight Meat Train

Mirrors
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Leslie Bibb, Roger Bart, and Vinnie Jones
Directed by: Ryuhei Kitamura

Style: Psycho killer thriller
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 4
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Butcher's Mallet, Knives
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Trying to get ahead in the world of artistic photography is tough. Everyone is always looking for the newest thing, but nobody ever knows what that new thing is going to be. That is the problem facing Leon (Cooper). He takes great photographs, but they are not cutting-edge great. That is, until he foils an assault on a woman in the subway, only to have her go missing the next day. Doing a bit of investigation leads him to discover there is a butcher (Jones) who boards late trains and butchers the passengers. The trouble is, the police don't believe him, and now the butcher has taken an interest in Leon.

Midnight Meat Train is not the type of film that will win over its audience with subtlety. Every moment in the film follows a predictable trajectory that many killer movies have followed before it. Instead, this film will win its audience based around the sheer unnerving situations that occur. People on the trains get killed. There is no surprises there, but putting characters in the line of danger and then just letting the scene run for minutes at a time causes these great moments of being on the edge of your seat even though you can see the killer coming a mile away. Combine that with a few decidedly strange goings on and a performance from Vinnie Jones that feels as if he can see the audience as he stares right out at you and you have a really taut thrill ride.

There are a few moments in the story that don;'t make sense. There is a growth on the butcher that they never fully explain, nor really a sickness he has for one scene, and Leon's psyche crumbling away happens far too quickly. As a subplot, the idea of having difficulty separating oneself from one's art is interesting, and approached with gusto by the script before being thrown into overdrive. However, the pace of the movie is what the director was clearly aiming for, so those oversights can be forgiven at the end of the day. The ending feels a bit tacked on but is true to the themes the movie plays with. Really, the focus of this film is Vinne Jones as the butcher, and every scene he is in is practically dripping with menace despite only having one line in the entire film.

This is the type of film that thrives on being a midnight showing at the local theater. It's short, hard hitting, and will give the audience a thrill. And, at the end of the night, some of us still have to take a train home.

Mirrors

Mirrors
Starring: Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart
Directed by: Alexandre Aja

Style: Supernatural Haunting
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 4
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Sharp objects
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

In New York City, the historic Mayflower department store remains as just a husk of its former glory. After a horrible fire, years go by as the building sits idle under the hopes that it will be renovated. However, no horrific incident slips by without horrific aftermath. Ben Carson (Sutherland) , on leave from the police force after accidentally shooting another officer, takes a job as the nighttime security officer while trying to regain control of his life and the trust of his wife with whom he is separated. On the job, he discovers the mirrors show him people burned alive from the fire. What's worse, the images have the power to alter reality, making what seems to be happening actually happen. Now Ben must find how to make the mirrors stop and save his family before it is too late.

As with Aja's previous movie High Tension, the power of the story comes from excellent sound work. A lot of tension is provided by distant wails, atmospheric background sounds such as doves and grit on the ground at the Mayflower, and subtle scoring. There is much less of the cheap jump scares and more of a sense of impending doom. Having mirrors stare back at people as they leave the room is creepy, yet Aja does not overuse the technique so that we become accustomed to it. Also, there are only a few moments of violence, which are harrowing and quite brutal, which means the audience never becomes overly sensitized to the gore.

A lot of criticism of the film has revolved around Kiefer Sutherland's acting. While he doesn't offer anything new other than his standard repetoire of muttered lines and cold-eyed stares, he does fit the need of a recovering alcoholic whose life has fallen to pieces. Paula Patton is excellent as his wife and mother of his children who slowly realizes that the madness her husband is talking about is real.

I also credit the story for how well it is crafted. All of the moments lead into each other, so that everything comes into focus piece by piece, and while the audience may be ahead of the characters by a few steps, it still manages to lead the audience places rather than having everything guessed out beforehand. I personally would have liked to have more made of the fact that the mirror world is backwards, especially when it comes to the key word that the entity in the mirror seeks. However, that is not anything major that detracts from the film.

Overall, this a solid horror film that should keep most of the audience on the edge of their seats and maybe even inspire a nightmare or two. A few more movies like this and High Tension and Aja may make a run at being one of the better horror film directors of all time.

I Know Who Killed Me

I Know Who Killed Me
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough, Brian Geraghty
Directed by: Chris Sivertson

Style: Cryptic Kidnapping
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Dry ice, glass knives
Overall rating: 1 out of 5

New Salem is being terrorized by a brutal serial killer who abducts and tortures young women, holding them captive for weeks before murdering them. Aubrey Fleming (Lohan), an aspiring writer, becomes his latest victim when she disappears without a trace during a night out with her friends. Days later, she shows up missing an arm and leg, having apparently escaped the clutches of the killer. However, she has no memory of her life, insisting that she is Dakota, a stripper who came to town after he hand mysteriously started disintegrating. Now, the FBI and family try to make sense of it all while Dakota/Aubrey continues to have nightmares that the killer isn't finished with her yet.

My main problem with this film is that it looks and feels like it was made to be this cryptic puzzler of the horror movie, keeping the audience in the dark as the tale unravels a bit at a time. Instead, the movie is so overt with its metaphor and symbolism that half the time it feels like you aren't even watching a story but a representation of a story. Lohan is decent, but the script never really sets any pace that can drive the film. There are too many facts being tossed around in the hopes of keeping the audience guessing. Instead, I just stopped caring what was happening. The ending appeared obvious, but I was wrong. That is, until I found out that the original ending had been that, but test audiences said it was too predictable, so the film chopped off the real ending. As a result, we get another horror film that just ends suddenly with several unresolved issues.

Horror movies also need to come to the realization that they either have to run in the land of realism or push the fantasy they are creating. If you try to throw a fantastical concept into a film pushing itself as reality, the audience scoffs at you. Without giving away the plot, I am referring to how Dakota / Aubrey loses her hand. Also, never introduce a robotic arm and leg unless you think you are being funny or know how to maintain tone. This movie does not.

Another unfortunate consequence of the director thinking he is the next Fincher or Lynch is the very overt use of red and blue throughout the entire film. Every scene has several objects almost glowing by the mere fact that everything else is so drably colored. The audience in my showing started calling out "Red" and "Blue" to mark just how much it was happening.

This movie is bad. It has potential, but the director and screenwriter do not have the talent to make anything of this very sloppy movie. Surprisingly, I don't blame Lohan for anything other than wanting to be more of an adult actor, so she chose the stripper movie. It's destined to be reshown at many late night crap fests for years to come.

The Mother of Tears

Mother of Tears
Starring: Asia Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Moran Atias, Udo Kier
Directed by: Dario Argento

Style: Pandora's Box
Blood and Guts: 5
Fright Factor: 4
Laugh Factor: 2
Weapons of choice: Knives
Overall rating: 5 out of 5

An ancient urn is discovered during a dig outside a Rome graveyard. The priest examines its contents and decides to send it along to an expert in the occult at the Rome Museum of Ancient Art. As expected, one of the expert's assistants manages to accidentally summon the evil within, a terrible witch named The Mother of Tears. The Mother sets about stirring up chaos in the world, leading people to fight in the streets and commit horrendous acts merely because she is now loose. The only one who may be able to stop the Mother's rampage of chaos and evil is Sarah (Argento), daughter of a now deceased white witch. Sarah must discover her own power before finding the secret lair of the Mother of Tears and end her reign of terror.

Dario Argento is considered by many to be one of the greatest horror directors ever. His ability to blend surreal imagery with horrific sequences is a talent not seen elsewhere. There is an artistic quality to his approach. This film has suffered much criticism for being less than his normal artistic venture, yet the film perfectly blends horror and the surreal, leaving the audience unable to guess from moment to moment what might happen, and there lies the strength of this film.

The story does wander a bit, but the experience is much more of a ride that the audience is dragged along with. From the opening murder of the museum assistant to the abrupt ending, the entire film functions in a nightmarish dream, with moments so visceral that even hardened audiences might find themselves shocked, yet many things also left the audience giggling and the oddity of it all. For example, Sarah has a few sequences where she is being pursued by a howler monkey. It is funny, yet there is a sinister undercurrent to it, as we don't know what will happen if she is caught. Everywhere Sarah goes, people who assist her are brutally murdered, frequently with a overtone of disbelief from the audience. Did she just lick her tears of fear? Oh, and now she's horribly murdered! The direction is so masterful that even when a scare is telegraphed during one sequence, the entire audience still leapt from their scenes and screamed.

Overall, there are very few films like this one. It creates an entire world that is so surreal it makes the audience both laugh and scream, and by the end, you cannot believe what you just saw. It's a rare treat to get that from a horror film.

Open Water 2: Adrift

Open Water 2: Adrift
Starring: Susan May Pratt, Richard Speight, Jr., Niklaus Lange, Ali Hillis
Directed by: Hans Horn

Style: Survival Horror
Blood and Guts: 1
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: The ocean
Overall rating: 3 out of 5

A group of high school friends now grown up decide to spend a day out on the ocean courtesy of the yacht owned by their friend Dan. He brings a new girlfriend Michelle, while Amy brings her husband James and their new baby. Amy also conveniently brings her fear of the ocean, which she has had since her father drowned when she was a child. While out on the boat, everyone goes swimming except Amy. Dan decided to help her get over her fear of the ocean by pulling her into the water. The only problem is this leaves nobody on the yacht except a baby, and nobody thought to deploy the ladder.

The strength of the story lies in the fact that safety is always just out of reach. None of the characters can get high enough to pull themselves back on board, and a series of schemes each fall short. In fact, the movie gets quite a bit of drama out of people floating through the ocean. Each of the actors show quite a bit of range as they turn on each other. However, it feels as if the friends start panicking too early, probably in part to condense the story. They are barely in the water an hour when they act like they are on the verge of murdering each other. This is an instance of being larger than life is overdone. It's jarring in the film, and once they have reached that level of fear, there isn't much farther that the film can go. The film's best moments are when the characters aren't afraid but are taking turns emotionally breaking each other down because it is the only way to deal with the fear.

Also, for those looking for a film like the first Open Water, there is very little similarity other than it is about people trapped in the water. Whereas Open Water was about surviving against the ocean itself, Adrift is more about surviving the fear the ocean inflicts upon us. The title Open Water 2 is used more to link it in the audience's mind. It was probably a separate film before the marketing department got a hold of it.

Finally, there is the ending. I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't speak of the specifics. However, I really have a problem with films that abandon all the work it has done up until that point just to try and throw ambiguity into the mix. Clearly, the director wanted to spark debate, but it doesn't come off as a clever or smart choice. Instead, you have an ending that will have people griping about how the story remains unfinished. You can be ambiguous if the story is finished being told, but this is not the case for Adrift.

Adrift has some good moments of drama and character interaction. There are hints that this film could have been good. However, as the director's first big film, his inexperience in storytelling shows, and the film cannot hold itself together no matter how hard the actors work. This movie is probably good for a lazy Saturday afternoon, when you might be able to overlook its failings to appreciate the drama it contains.

Terrible Thursday: Lake Placid 2

Lake Placid 2
Starring: John Schneider, Sara LaFleur, Sam McMurray, Chad Collins
Directed by: David Flores

Style: Creature Feature
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Firearms, biting
Overall rating: terrible

Anytime your town suffers from an attack by some giant killer animal, odds are that you should just nuke the entire town afterwards and start from scratch. Why? Because there are always offspring, and these offspring will inevitably seek revenge, even if the people from the original incident pass on appearing in the sequel. This brings us to Lake Placid 2.

Once again, giant killer crocodiles have returned to Lake Placid. Once again, the sheriff (Schneider) and Fish and Wildlife Services (LaFleur) must do battle with these killers to save a town too stupid to move away from the lake, even though people continue to disappear there for years. Throw in an ornery old woman, who happens to be the sister of the ornery old woman from the first movie, and a big game hunter (McMurray), and you have yourself a race to see who can be the last one chewed on.

For the most part, this film is terrible from beginning to end. All of the characters lack any sort of enthusiasm or intelligence at all, to the point that the first ten minutes talk about how everyone is vanishing on the lake. One character even strips off her clothes and goes diving in her underwear, and she is the EPA / Fish and Wildlife person. I was hoping for some sort of skin infection to punish her with. Everyone else has one goal and will ignore all sorts of rational thinking to achieve it. For example, the sleazy reporter is led to the edge of the dock and left there as an old woman runs away, yet he fails to be suspicious.

The crocodiles are decent but look so out of place. All of the violence is from people writing on the ground pretending to be eaten as digital blood and croc mouth surrounds them.

To give you an idea of what this film is like, the characters just happens to have a grenade launcher lying around. And then, they try to not use it as much as possible. Terrible.

Lake Placid

Lake Placid
Starring: Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt, Brendan Gleeson
Directed by: Steve Miner

Style: Creature Feature
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 3
Weapons of choice: Firearms, biting
Overall rating: 3 out of 5

Lake houses are generally seen as peaceful places, especially if your lake is called Placid. However, if people suddenly start disappearing or showing up in pieces, that is usually a good sign to move to a city where all you have are lunatics and not giant savage beasts.

Alas, someone has to deal with those creatures once you are gone. That someone is Fish and Game officer Jack Wells (Pullman), sheriff Hank Keough (Gleeson), and paleontologist Kelly Scott (Fonda). Together they must find a way to deal with the giant crocodile, as neither lake nor land are safe from this hunter.

Overall, this film falls on the favorable side of the comedic horror line. There is enough of the bickering between the different leads and with an eccentric crocophile played by Oliver Platt to keep the movie clipping along. As for the horror aspect, there are never any truly suspenseful moments, but the movie can be forgiven for that as nothing ever feels really weak or out of place. The creature effects add a sense of realism to the movie, as the CGI blend they are using isn't half-bad. All too often a movie like this will put together a junk creature with bad special effects, but this film managed to get it right.

As for the violence, the film barely squeezed on an R rating. yes, there are a few mutilations, but most of it feels like something you would see on a late night movie on TV with a few extra seconds of gore added to tip the scales. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but the movie also doesn't have the suspense factor to back it up. All of the tense sequences feel tired, with other films doing it better.

It is hard to fault a film like this, as it delivers exactly what it promises up front: a well-paced, fun adventure with a giant killer crocodile. The reason this film isn't better is mostly because to never achieves anything beyond that good time. A movie like this that can provide a great time is what makes something into a cult classic. As it stands, Lake Placid doesn't have the snappy script or originality necessary to be one of those movies that everyone tells their friends about. It's fun, but don't expect much else.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Starring: Nathan Baesel, Robert Englund, Angela Goethals, Kate Lang Johnson
Directed by: Scott Glosserman

Style: Mockumentary Slasher
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 3
Weapons of choice: All sorts of pointy things
Overall rating: 5 out of 5

Everyone has a dream growing up. Some of us want to be astronauts. Some of us want to cure cancer. But for Leslie Vernon (Baesel), he wants to be remembered as the next great serial killer. He enlists the help of a college documentary crew to record the preparation for his rise as a serial killer, and even allows them to attend his night of carnage. However, lead reporter Taylor (Goethals) doesn't want to stand by while people die. Can she stop Leslie's quest for infamy, or will she be just another tally on his knife handle?

Every once in a while, a horror movie comes along that truly understands the horror movie experience. It understands that audiences usually have seen a number of the slasher films and have high expectations and standards for what constitutes a scary film. In this case, the film is about what goes into being the perfect horror villain. The first half of the movie is all about preparation and setting the stage for the night of carnage, and the film goes so far as to acknowledge its roots outright.

The selling point of this film is Nathan Baesel. He brings charisma and enough sly humor to the character that we overlook the fact that he is brutally murdering people. We sympathize with his quest for perfection, even if it is slaughter. There is one moment where Leslie is sitting in the dark waiting to begin, and he is so overjoyed that his plan is about to become reality. The humanity of that moment is heartfelt and genuine, and it is such a rarity among the horror genre.

The second half of the movie plays out the way any other slasher film would, except because we have such an attachment to both the killer and the film crew, their conflict carries us through to the end. We've already been told what will happen, and so when the crew interferes and changes the game plan, we are surprised anew. Even if those surprises still follow the clichè, they feel new to us because we have been guided the entire way.

Everything about this film shows much planning and forethought, as well as an understanding of how horror films function, and the result is one of the best horror films to come around in a few years.

The Strangers

The Strangers
Starring: Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman, Gemma Ward
Directed by: Bryan Bertino

Style: Cat-and-mouse Slasher
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Knives, firearms
Overall rating: 3 out of 5

There will always be people who take joy in other people's fears. People who like to make others squirm for no other reason than it is different. These are the people that come knocking at 4 a.m. James (Speedman) and Kristen (Tyler) have traveled from a friend's wedding to James's family vacation home. James was recently shot down proposing to Kristen, so the entire evening is already in the trash. Then three assailants in masks begin to terrorize them, first just appearing and disappearing, and each encounter grows more menacing. Surrounded and trapped, James and Kristen must find a way to escape before it is too late.

This film has all of the elements necessary to be a very solid horror film. The director clearly knows how to utilize slow-burn horror where danger is left in clear view without anything happening, leaving the audience to squirm and anticipate. If the audience doesn't know what is going to happen, they work themselves up about it. There are several long shots of the intruders walking around the home, not even chasing the protagonists, and it is chilling to watch. The violence is kept to a minimum except for a few graphic events, to the point that a bit of editing could have taken this one to a PG-13 rating. As a result, the actors are left to convey the terror the characters are feeling, and they do an excellent job at that.

The problem with this film, however, is that the suspense soon becomes a one trick pony. You can only have the intruders menace the characters for so long before it becomes repetitive. An intruder sneaks up on a character, is within striking distance, and then vanishes when the character turns around. This happens constantly through the movie, and it soon becomes clear that the intruders are more interested in toying with them than actually inflicting harm on them. It is here that the movie tips its hand too soon. The moment you realize that there is no real danger until the movie moves into its end game, the malice dissipates. It starts to become a cut-and-dry stalker film, not helped by the fact that it starts to follow all the conventions of those films. Every foiled escape ends exactly how you would expect it to the moment they announce the plan. Every "twist" is an element seen in other horror movies from the 70s and 80s.

Finally, there is the ending. Without going into too many details, it can be said that if you have seen enough of these types of films, you will probably know what is going to happen. Sure, the movie never pretends to be anything other than what it is, but at the same time, any suspenseful horror film worth its salt will give you a payoff equal to the amount you have sweated away on the edge of your seat. Anything less is cheating, and this movie cheats. After the movie, I left thinking, "Well THAT just happened..." but there was little satisfaction in the experience.

In the end, the film has a great sense of style and suspense, but that only lasts as long as the menace does, and for this film, it runs about a half hour too long. If this had run as an hour long horror movie, it would have been great. Since it doesn't, I was left feeling that this film has been done many times before, and usually with more skill. See the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre to see menace done right.

Timber Falls

Timber Falls
Starring: Josh Randall, Brianna Brown, Nick Searcy, Beth Broderick
Directed by: Tony Giglio

Style: Backwater kidnapping
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Double-bladed scythe, firearms
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

Mike (Randall) and Sheryl (Brown) are looking for a nice weekend getaway in the national park, free from all the craziness of the modern world. Instead, they find themselves victims of the crazy world of a fanatically religious couple living off the beaten path. Between the dark intentions of their captors and the deformed maniac that is the captors’ son, Mike and Sheryl can only hope to survive long enough to escape.

This film struggles throughout the story to engage the audience, and that is its biggest fault. The actors all appear to be trying their best, but there are a lot of moments that are very hollow and flat, particularly between Mike and Sheryl. As a result, there is never a strong, believable connection between them, so the rest of the plot that hinges around them drawing strength from one another to survive, is left out to dry. Other characters suffer too. At one point, it seems like the director is trying to make the point that not all country boys and actually malicious, but then it decides to portray its characters as that anyway.

The main antagonists all do well for themselves, but the story seems to be aiming for a much more deep-seated, psychological horror and ends up being too subtle with all of the events. In fact, the early scene where Mike and Sheryl are intimidated by some country boys coming back from a hunting trip has a greater sense of danger and malice than anything else that comes after it. As the movie progresses, it has to stretch more and more to even have a sense of danger conveyed, something that is not helped by the fact that Mike struts around like he knows he has a 95% chance of survival no matter what.

Not all of the movie is disappointing. The maniac son with the double-bladed sickle and some decent makeup effects feels at home to this style of film, though it is a shame that the movie instead tries to be something it isn’t by focusing on the kidnappers and not their homicidal kin. While it is noble to try other avenues of horror, one cannot get away with psychological horror without very strong characters and an excellent sense of atmosphere and timing, something this movie lacks. Nothing proves this more than the final shot of the film ripped off from a genre already suffering from cliches.

In the end, this movie suffers from being far too generic and dull. No matter how many seemingly new tricks it pulls out of its bag, it still feels like its clunking along thanks to a few wooden performances and a lack of decent story development. With a few revision drafts to refine the story down to something solid, this movie could have been decent. Instead, it feels too sloppy and falls to the wayside.

Altered

Altered
Starring: Paul McCarthy-Boyington, Brad William Henke, Adam Kaufman, Michael C. Williams
Directed by: Eduardo Sánchez

Style: Alien revenge
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Firearms, teeth
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Most people are suckers. Aliens abduct them in the dead of night, do all sorts of unspeakable things to them, drop them off again, and nobody ever does anything about it but whine and complain and try and convince others that it will happen to them. This is not the case for this group of four friends. Instead, they plan how to capture one of the creatures that abducted them years ago. Once it is captured however, none of them quite know what to do next. More importantly, none of them can foresee just how grave the repercussions of their actions will be.

Altered showcases how an independent little horror film can be better than many feature films. All of the characters are well fleshed out, allowing us to care about their fates and how the story plays out. The direction is also well done, allowing the tension and, at times, suspense of the scene to do the work rather than cheap camera tricks. The special effects are are well-used, with quite a bit of violence happening but all appropriate rather than excessive.

What makes this film work is that it isn't trying to be the greatest horror film you have ever seen. It is straight forward, simple, and sets out to tell you an interesting story. It never tries to be more than it is by utilizing outlandish or inappropriate effects, and all of the actors and crew work as if they are committed to the telling this story. The alien doesn't try to be outlandish and instead is actually very intimidating, especially when it is revealed what happens when it bites you.

If I had one criticism of the film, is that it overuses its darkness a bit too much. There are some effective shadows, but the entire film feels like it was soaked a little too long in the dark. It's the one film contrivance that feels forced, trying to impose an atmosphere rather than letting the story, the environment, and the actors do that naturally.

I would recommend seeing this film if you're looking for a different kind of horror film, one that uses story and character to chip away at your nerves before letting a vicious alien loose on all of it. It probably has better acting than you'll see in most studio pictures, and even more rarely, actually knows what it is doing.

The Reaping

The Reaping
Starring: Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba
Directed by: Stephen Hopkins

Style: Demon spawn
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Plagues, knives
Overall rating: 1 out of 5

Katherine Winter (Swank) has made an academic career out of disproving miracles. She and her assistant Ben (Elba) travel the world to find the deeply spiritual and make it mundane. All of this stems from Winter's daughter being sacrificed to lift a curse during a trip to to the Sudan. However, the town of Haven seems to be different. Their entire river turns to human blood, the cattle waste away with no biological explanation, and things only get worse from there. In the center of it all is a girl said to be a demonic child prophesied about in Biblical texts. Katherine must find the answers before the town decides that destroying the girl is the only way to stop the plagues.

This movie feels very rushed, like everyone started working when it was only half-developed, and as a result they have a jumbled mess that they released as a movie. For example, it is about ten minutes into the movie that you get a sense of who these characters actually are. They start off with a priest that has something weird happen to his pictures, then we meet Swank's character but have no idea what she is doing or why. It is only after that scene that she is introduced as a professor at a university studying miracles. Seriously, the beginning was like watching Outbreak.

This entire movie suffers from lazy storytelling. There is no real time for any suspense to be built as all of the plagues come almost on top of each other. They arrive and the river is blood. Next scene, the cows are having trouble. Next scene, the frogs fall from the sky. Also, there is a dream within a dream sequence that is supposed to leave us wondering if it happened but instead leaves us wondering what happened. Many scenes do not really advance a plot more as allow room for metaphors and flashbacks that try poorly to serve as suspense devices.

Meanwhile, all of the characters besides Katherine only have a cursory characterization to them. When the town is riled up and wants to murder the girl, there is never really a sense of danger because we don't really see the town as anything but crazy people who are about to fly off of the deep end. Subsequently, the ending of the film suffers because there is no connection or attachment to anyone. We don't see paranoia brought to a broil. We see people wanting to kill a kid to save their town, and that doesn't hold up for an entire movie.

Finally, there is the ending. I won't give it away, because unlike the movie, I have the ability to respect a surprise. However, the last shot is so hackneyed that I wanted the director to appear in the corner of the screen and wink at us. People need to realize that some hooks are not clever if you do not build the entire story with care.

Overall, this movie commits one of the worst offenses a horror movie can commit: it is dull. Very few scenes hold any interest, including when characters are in danger. It doesn't really offer anything new that we haven't seen in other demonic seed movies, and on top of it all, it thinks it is clever. By the end, I was the one feeling reaped.

Mulberry Street

Mulberry Street
Starring: Laurel Astri, Kim Blair, Ron Brice, Bo Corre, Nick Damici
Directed by: Jim Mickle

Style: Creature feature
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Biting, fists, baseball bats
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

New York just can't catch a break. However, it does catch a plague pretty well. This oft-besieged-in-movies city this time faces an outbreak of people turning into vicious rat creatures. One bite from an infected rat or ratbeast is enough to turn you, and the city soon finds itself in quarantined lock down. On Mulberry Street, tenants of an apartment building have to buckle down for survival while others caught outside struggle to make it back home.

One of my biggest problems with this film is that it takes a very interesting idea and slowly bogs it down with bad directing, uninteresting writing, and very rough cinematography. There are quite a few moments where scenes happen in darkness, making it very hard to discern what is going on. This can work, but the way it is utilized smacks of trying to hide incomplete make-up and blood effects. It seems cheap rather than effective. If you are going to do a close-up and point the camera directly at something happening, we need to be able to see what it is. Otherwise, insinuate and put it behind a table or in a long shot.

Meanwhile, all of the characters are incomplete. They show the beginnings of characterization but never really develop past the survival instinct and a few broad generalizations. There are some moments, but they are so fleeting that nothing sticks. Thus, when the story gets to the point when a well-liked character almost escapes only to be dragged backwards to his or her doom, the movie acts like the audience should care. There are several moments like that, when the directors seems to say, "Oh ho! I bet you didn't expect I'd kill THAT character," and instead the audience doesn't really care one way or the other.

The entire film feels like it was taken from a horror movie text book. The writers and director went down the check list of everything a creature movie should include, but they don't quite know how to utilize the convention. For example, a character is killed right at the beginning to introduce the danger. However, it is a character we see for literally 2 seconds before that, and it is in the middle of character introductions. You either start the movie with a death and then start the story, or you weave the death into the story. Don't just show a body in passing. Also, you can't use the technique of trying to be quiet only to make noise more than once or twice. Every character in this film seems clumsy because they always give away their position by knocking into something.

This movie has no drive to it, which means even the good aspects like the few make-up effects we can see or the occasional good chase sequence gets lost in a film that unforgivably drags along. In capable hands, this film could have been a slick little creature feature. Instead, it should be buried.

Terrible Thursday: Intermedio

Intermedio
Starring: Edward Furlong, Steve Railsback, Cerina Vincent, Amber Benson
Directed by: Andrew Lauer

Style: Supernatural
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 0
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Crappy CGI spirits, mining tools
Overall rating: Terrible

Welcome to Terrible Thursday. This is the weekly dissection of a terrible film. Something that, if you make it through, you should get a T-Shirt or some sort of medal. Our first offering is one near and dear to my heart: Intermedio.

The movie follows four friends on an ill conceived tour of a tunnel between Mexico and the US. Ill conceived because they never quite explain why this is a good idea. Also, there are random drug dealers down there. Oh, and there is also a murderous old man who controls equally murderous spirits. Well, maybe not spirits. I would say more like poorly executed flare effects with faces on them.

One of the reasons this film is so terrible is that there never seems to be any coherent story to drive it along. These kids decide to go down into the tunnel, then decide to try and rob the drug dealers, then other things happen, and then it ends. It is so bad that when I read the synopsis online to refresh my memory for this review, I thought somebody had seen an entirely different movie. I swore the kids went down there to make a drug deal, not randomly meet drug dealers.

What's worse, Edward Furlong's character appears to be constantly out of breath, as if walking at a moderate pace could result in a combination heart attack and aneurysm. Every line he delivers requires several moments of wheezing and gasping. I kid you not. Cerina Vincent's shirt is constantly shrinking throughout the film, something the movie makers did ON PURPOSE. How cheap can you be? This is how the filmmakers show how "cool" and "self-mocking" they can be. I instead wanted to break their camera hand.

Then there are the filters. It's like the director couldn't decide whether he loved filters or whether they are things you use for making coffee. The opening scene, for example, keeps changing shades of orange because the sun was in various states of setting when they were filming. They have filters to fix that. In retrospect, maybe the director just couldn't decide what color filter he wanted to use. Whichever is worse, that was probably the reason behind it. Then, filters come out of the woodwork, with every underground tunnel feeling like some high schooler's AV project. I was waiting for some scene to be double filtered, as goodness knows there was nothing else to pay attention to in this film.

Finally, the movie ends after a gloriously craptacular death by the old man controlling the spirits (if you use digital blood, you need to be slapped). If anyone can explain the last shot to me i.e. what it means and where the characters are, I congratulate you. I sure as heck couldn't, as it is so tacked on that I expected the next shot to be the director winking at the the camera, saying "Clever, huh?"

This movie is an ordeal. It is a bane to those who stumble across it on TV late at night and don't see just how terrible it can be. Throw it into a chasm. Burn every copy. Just don't watch it.

The Orphanage

The Orphanage
Starring: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep
Directed by: Juan Antonio Bayona

Style: Supernatural Suspense
Blood and Guts: 1
Fright Factor: 4
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: No weaponry used
Overall rating: 5 out of 5

All Laura (Rueda) wants to do is run a home for mentally disabled children with her husband Carlos (Cayo) and son Simón (Príncep). However, her son has never really been around other children and so has imaginary friends as his play mates. Perhaps the orphanage Laura lived at as a child was not the best choice of places to live. On an outing to the beach, Simón meets another imaginary friend in a cave and invites him home. It isn't long before Simón has disappeared and Laura believes that Simón's friend from the cave is instead a ghost who has spirited away her child to be an eternal playmate.

The atmosphere of this movie is unbelievably haunting. There is little music, so all of the creaks and groans of the old house are allowed to work their magic. All of the actors are top notch, which allows the story to be seamlessly told to us. Combine that with some excellent cinematography and you have an excellent backdrop for a supernatural story. Herein lies the strength of the movie: it doesn't resort to hackneyed techniques and cheap scares to thrill the audience. All they do is tell the story and let the natural dread and ominous nature of the film seep into the audience's bones. It is perfectly natural for Laura not to see that Simón's friends may be ghosts, especially when they reveal to him a secret his parents have not told him, and yet the way in which Simón describes everything immediately sets off the spook alarm. This is a great example of how to unnerve your audience without jumping out and yelling "Boo" like so many lesser movies do.

Much like other Spanish ghost stories like The Others and The Devil's Backbone, there are very few moments of horror. Instead, things that happen cause people to shiver for the shear fact that we are afraid of what might happen. That isn't to say there aren't terrifying moments in the film. When the imaginary child first appears to Laura and a sequence involving an ambulance both sent a strong shiver down my spine. All of the pieces slowly fall into place, along with a few red herrings that become sub-plots, and so there is never a sense of expecting what will happen next. Some people may take issue with the ending, but I think it is true to both the characters and the story they are presenting.

Overall, I would say this is a film everyone should see regardless of whether they call themselves horror movie people. It is much more of a supernatural story, and while there are frightening moments, it is nothing that will terrify people for nights on end. The masterful storytelling and the beauty of the film far outweigh any negative aspects.

Diary of the Dead

Diary of the Dead
Starring: Joshua Close, Scott Wentworth, Michelle Morgan, Joe Dinicol
Directed by: George A. Romero

Style: Zombie Horror
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Firearms, biting
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

We all know how it starts. The dead return to life and start treating the living as one big buffet table. The living, at first, think it is some kind of plague. It's still people, right. Finally, after things go beyond control, then people realize that it is in fact a zombie outbreak. This story follows a group of college students caught out in the forest filming a horror film. Upon returning to campus, they find it deserted and the walking dead roaming the streets. Not knowing where to turn, they decide to drive around in their RV hoping to find a safe place in a town that may have none left.

I was thrilled to find out that George Romero was releasing another zombie film. He always has a unique approach to the genre, and even when the films are not that good, they still offer up something that is entertaining and different. Diary of the Dead is admittedly not one of his best offerings. However, I think people have been harsher critics of the film than I think is deserved.

The entire film plays out like a grassroots horror film, with everything filmed through the view lens of two video cameras the characters carry at all times. All of the dialogue is a bit trite and bland, but I attribute it to being much more reminiscent of the YouTube generation of people who no longer need to be articulate and clever. This stems from the movie being much more of a social indictment of the cultural phenomenon of everyone wanting to record everything and post it online. One of the main characters even talks about how, in our rush to all be known, the truth is watered down, as everyone claims expertise but nobody knows who is actually right. As with the Blair Witch Project, the main character continue to film as it allows a distance from the horrific events that occur. I mean, how many times do you see people with cell phone cameras at the scene of an accident? In that regard, I think Romero is spot on.

The pacing is tight and all of the moments well filmed. There are several tense moments, and enough funny or darkly funny ones to really engage the audience. My favorite moment involves a scythe to the head, but there are also a few choice dialog moments too. The entire film is very successful in its tone and quality, though you need to accept going in that you are seeing a large scale YouTube movie with quality effects and an outstanding director.

There has been criticism about the plot and how you don't really get to know or care about the characters. While this is true, I don't think that this movie necessarily warrants that. We are supposed to see what it is like first hand to be in the beginning of a zombie outbreak. By doing so, the filmmaker is able to (sometimes a bit heavy-handedly) discuss the role of media in our lives and also where our society might turn if everything goes bad.

Overall, it is an excellent film to see, if only as the experiment that it is. Once again, Romero has proven that he doesn't make zombie films. He makes films of social commentary that happen to involve zombies.

1408

1408
Starring: John Cusack
Directed by: Mikael Håfström

Style: Supernatural Thriller
Blood and Guts: 1
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Psychological Warfare
Overall rating: 3 out of 5

Mike Enslin (Cusack) wishes he could see dead people. After losing his daughter, he becomes obsessed with exploring the most haunted locations he can find. After a night stay, he writes up each in his own sort of Zagat's Guide to Haunted Places. One day, he hears about room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel. The staff doesn't want him to stay, as many people have died or been driven insane by the room. Thinking it a ploy, he badgers them into letting him stay. Once there though, he realizes that it is far worse than anyone could warn him of.

based upon a Stephen King short story, 1408 is an exercise in classic horror. All of the frights are built out of variations of nightmares and phobias as the room tries to drive Enslin over the edge. Add to that a clock radio that spontaneously plays The Carpenters "We've Only Just Begun" and you have genuine creepy environment.

However, part of the weakness of this film is that it tells you from the beginning that all of the inhabitants are driven mad, and any deaths are self-inflicted. Therefore, Enslin's only real danger is himself. All the apparitions, while creepy, can never go beyond being a thrill into a deeper sense of horror as they have no physical power over Enslin based on the rules of the game that the movie sets up.

Also, none of the nightmares are ever repeated, so there is very little build-up between the scares, so the audience never really reaches a level of true fright. Something eerie happens, you hit the pay-off moment, and then all the tension is lost because something else is being built. Unlike other horror films, where the sense of danger is mostly constant even if we are not quite sure the source, 1408 plays out like a series of mini-horror films, a kind of textbook of horror films if you will. Each different scare shows a different horror technique, a sort of How To for any type of scene, but then it moves on to another one without any sort of tension carried over.

The acting is great, as I genuinely believed the character's terror and subsequent emotional stress with dealing with the death of his daughter, and I though the film was very effective with being creepy without using any on-screen violence other than occasional shots of characters hung or leaping to their death. The style is there for making this a great film, which I think part of what makes it so frustrating that it doesn't live up to the talent involved.

Ultimately, this film is interesting to watch but never gets beyond mediocre because it never connects the dots. A horror movie needs to grab the audience and drag them kicking and screaming through the movie, and this never does.

Pathology

PATHOLOGY
Starring: Milo Ventimiglia, Michael Weston, Lauren Lee Smith, and Alyssa Milano
Directed by: Marc Schoelermann

Style: Murderous Psychological Thriller
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Medical paraphernalia
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Ted Grey (Ventimiglia) is one of the brightest pathologists out there, and he knows it. Graduating from Harvard Medical School and now joining one of the best Pathology programs in the country, he has the world at his scalpel tips. However, he soon discovers that a few of his fellow doctors have taken to testing each others genius. Bodies start rolling in, and the after-hours club takes to trying to construct the perfect murder, one that cannot be solved by forensics. Social boundaries are crossed, limits tested, and Grey quickly discovers that there is a fine line between genius and madness.

I qualify this film as a horror film solely on the basis of the actors conviction in the roles. They portray the psychological distancing perfectly, each showing how they have lost all connection with reality. The conversations between Dr. Grey and his rival, Dr. Gallo (Weston) provide some truly unnerving face-offs. While there is a lot of blood and guts tied around dissection and a few messed up murders, all of the violence stems from the nature of the characters i.e. doctors, so it is almost never gratuitous. Hence, all of the terror comes from just how real the actors make these actions seem. We glimpse the rationalization of madness, which is what some of the very best horror films do.

Ventimiglia does a great job with moral ambiguity, where we can tell that being better than everyone else guides his actions, even when getting out of the game, as it is his way to prove to himself that he is better than the animal Gallo has become. His fiancée returning becomes his game, his ability to have done these horrible things and get away scot free. It is less that he truly cares for her, but rather she is status and a trophy to prove his superiority.

This movie hits all of the right notes and manages to be a rather gripping thriller. The plot never really deviates from the standard fare for these types of movies, so there isn't a whole lot to discuss about it afterwards. Its strength, however, lies less in surprising us and more grabbing us by the spine and pulling.

Review Archive

Below are links to all of the reviews on Never Check the Basement TT means it was a Terrible Thursday entry.

#
1408

A
Altered

B
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

C
Chopping Mall

D
Day of the Dead (2008)
Dead Silence
Diary of the Dead

E
Event Horizon

F
Fido

H
The Happening (TT)

I
I Know Who Killed Me
Intermedio (TT)

L
Lake Placid
Lake Placid 2 (TT)

M
Midnight Meat Train
Mirrors
Mother of Tears
Mulberry Street

O
Open Water 2: Adrift
The Orphanage

P
Pathology

Q
Quarantine

R
The Reaping
The Ruins

S
Session 9
The Strangers
Suspiria

T
They
Timber Falls

They

THEY
Starring: Laura Regan, Marc Blucas, Ethan Embry, Dagmara Dominczyk
Directed by: Robert Harmon

Style: Boogeyman-style horror
Blood and Guts: 1
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Light, darkness
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

Julie Lund (Regan) had it rough as a kid. Nightmares of shadow creatures plagued her and her friend Billy (Jon Abrahams) growing up, but now, on the verge of achieving her Masters in Psychology, all of that appears to be behind her. That is, until Billy shows up and convinces her that their nightmares were real as kids. Even worse, those creatures marked them as children and are now coming for them once more. Together with two of Billy's friends (Embry and Dominczyk), Julie fights to find out how to escape these creatures when all darkness leads to their world.

The premise of this film is great, which makes it that much more of a shame that it was hacked to pieces by the studio. Any time ten different writers work on a movie, you know there is trouble. For me, that is my biggest complaint about the film: inconsistency. The story never seems to be able to figure out what it wants to be and thus never really makes a consistent style choice. In fact, towards the end of the film, the film even breaks its primary convention by having the creatures attack someone in a well-lit, undarkened room. For me, that is unforgivable.

There are a few good moments in the film, such as when Julie is stalked through the subway tunnels, but they never build off of one another. A movie that feeds off of the characters being placed in threatening situations needs to have each situation more intense, however slightly, than the previous event. Otherwise, you have a series of small scares with no big payoff because the audience can predict that nothing will get any scarier.

Another weak point of this film is that they waste their supporting cast. If you have a film where there are really only four characters of any interest, those characters really need to be developed and respected until their untimely end, which is part of what builds the momentum of a fright flick. However, this film acts like the supporting characters are no better than the random party guy who wanders off and is the warm-up victim for the killer. Nothing is accomplished other than you get a scene that is tense but doesn't scare us because we don't care about a character the movie doesn't care about.

Overall, this film needed those making it to care about its story and its character more. Instead, it is chopped up and dumped onto the market in the hopes for a quick buck. It's too bad, because this film really did have promise.

Day of the Dead (2008)

DAY OF THE DEAD (2008)
Starring: Mena Suvari, Ving Rhames, Nick Cannon
Directed by: Steve Miner

Style: Zombie horror
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Biting, firearms
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

Life is never easy in secluded towns in Colorado. The isolation is a highly desired trait when scientists look to build labs for controversial research, and there is much wildlife nearby prone to mutation from said experimentation. However, this movie decided to tackle the tried and true threat to humanity: zombie outbreak.

The story follows Sarah Bowman (Mena Suvari), a tough-as-rock corporal charged with quarantining her home town. Things go bad when her sick mother needs to be taken to the hospital, as she has a flu that seems to be afflicting most everyone in town. Soon, the hospital becomes a madhouse of zombies and she must fight their way to survival. Joining her are several disposable army faces, most notably Nick Cannon, and later on, her mopey brother and his girl, and together, they must find a way to escape the town and its hungry, hungry inhabitants.

My first problem with this movie is that it has nothing to do with the George Romero original, yet they claimed adaptation so that they could use the notable title to drum up an audience. As hip as this movie tries to pretend it is, they could have done better than just ripping off a title. In fact, the entire movie feels like a project that was abandoned and rushed to DVD release. Why else would you have B-list stars, the director of Lake Placid, and the writer of the Final Destination series dump this crud directly onto DVD?

Another issue is that the zombies are of the fast variety, so that "suspenseful" chase sequences can be added, but the movie fails to employ this as an interesting technique. Instead of making the zombies run at breakneck speed and with pure rage-filled intensity, they run like guys in makeup that are struggling to make it across the street. They even go so far as to occasionally crawl across the ceiling like spider monkeys. The person who made that decision should be forced to watch the zombie classics for 3 months to learn why that is ridiculous.

Acting-wise, Mena Suvari does her best to look tough but just never gets there. Ving Rhames shows up for 5 minutes to out-act the entire movie, much like Sid Haig in Night of the Living Dead 3D. However, the "Murder him please" award goes to Nick Cannon. It's not his fault. His dialog was written by someone with a random urban banter generator. It was like a Will Smith Character but written by the Waynes Brothers.

Overall, there are one or two interesting ideas in this movie, but they are never given time to develop, and the whole movie gives up on any semblance of plot and just pumps in more zombies. It becomes just a half-hearted attempt at a zombie movie, and in my book, any film that goes with digital blood shows any lack of commitment to quality.