The Collection (2012) – Marcus Dunstan

When we hear the word ‘sequel’ it instantly conjures up a certain feeling- like the one we get when we hear ‘remake’  or ‘Hitler’ but marginally less unpleasant. The reason for this is pretty simple. When a sequel is made, it’s generally something that was planned after the original film was written, filmed, released, and had some commercial success. So there are different motives for making a sequel than there are for making the original. And that basically boils down to “I want to tell a great story” vs. “I know an easy way to cash in on that story I told 2 years ago.” There’s nothing wrong with that-it’s the American Dream. But all too often, we see sequels just basically telling us the same story again. And to make up for the lack of originality, they crank up all the non-essentials, leading to a film that’s top-heavy. All sizzle, no steak, as they say.

Marcus Dunstan’s 2012, The Collection (follow-up to 2009’s The Collector) falls into this typical sequel trap. That’s not to say it was a bad movie (but it might be), I’m just saying it feels very sequel-y. In the first film, we had about 10 deaths, while this one has closer to 200. There’s an unexplained 2-3 minute dance party/techno music scene (think: the underground dance scene in the second Matrix movie) that contributes exactly nothing to the story. We get to see into the Collector’s lair, or his headquarters or whatever. It turns out to be an enormous hotel/mad science lab/elaborate Saw trap. Everything is so over the top like this, that it starts pulling you out of the realm of reality, in which we were firmly planted in the original.

(Warning: Minor spoiler to the end of the original film)

The Collection picks up a short time after the first film ended. Arkin (our hero) is still trapped in the box. Though he’s been moved (ostensibly, to the Collector’s hideout and then) to a back room in a secret underground dance club. We hear news reports that this guy has been very busy slicing, dicing and kidnapping people. Our new co-main character, Elena, happens to this dance club. The collector has rigged up some industrial farming equipment with spinning blades (google “combine harvester”) to mass murder all the ecstasy-fueled dancers. Elena is the sole survivor, Arkin escapes and the Collector takes Elena back to his hideout.

Arkin, the only person who knows where the collector lives, teams up with some mercenaries, hired by Elena’s father, and they go to save her. At this point the movie turns into a gory/torturey survival horror movie much like Saw II. The badass mercenaries get picked off one by one as they stumble through the trap-infested maze that is the Collector’s lab. There are all sorts of human experiments and bodies everywhere. Razor wire and spring loaded traps in every room. Empty elevator shafts while piles of dismembered body parts and pools of blood. Drugged up experiment victims/zombies that attack the good guys…basically the most hostile environment imaginable. Everything is very predictable and you can probably guess the ending.

I had two main problems with the film. The biggest was the lack of real character development. I loved the first movie because you get into Arkin’s head. You sympathize with and root for him immediately even though he’s a criminal. In this movie, we get exactly 0 development for him. In fact, he comes off as kindof a pussy. Everyone else in the movie was just a walking cliché. Elena is the closest to a real person. There’s a half-hearted attempt at some pathos/backstory that never gets followed up on. But then she rips apart her bra and MacGyvers the underwire into a hook/flimsy pretext to have her nips poking out for the rest of the film.

The other thing that bugged me was the sheer amount of work that it would take for the Collector to actually be able to build, maintain and operate this whole carnival of death/science lab from hell. The logistics are mindboggling. Where does he find the time? And the energy? This dude is somehow able to set up house after house after house into elaborate murder traps, kill everyone but one sole survivor, then take that survivor to his lair and do experiments on them. He’s got to have a degree in mechanical engineering, and some sort of human medical degree, and he’s also a licensed etymologist (this final fact is all but irrelevant in this film).

Anyway, the verdict is, it was a fun, but forgettable sequel to a great movie. They should have kept it a little closer to reality and focused more on the characters. Like, why don’t we know anything about the Collector himself? Don’t worry, they left the door wide open for “The Collection Agency: Dunstan’s Credit Cards are Past-Due so He’s Making Another Movie”

1. Is it scary? 3– You’re too distracted by the lack of logical progression to be scared. It turned out to be more of an action movie than a straight horror.
2. Originality: 4– The Collector’s bachelor pad was definitely worth some points here. But the movie falls flat in terms of being anything we’ve never seen before.
3. Blood: 8– From start to finish, there’s blood shooting across the screen. Incomplete medical experiments and body parts all over the place. The dance club massacre scene was pretty perfect to set the mood.
4. Believability: 4– The whole thing felt like a cheesy 90’s movie that they’d show on basic cable on a Saturday afternoon (anything with Van Dam or Steven Seagal). Cookie cutter action and violence. Clichés on top of clichés.
5. Setting/Cinematography: 6– They definitely did some cool things with light and shadows. The torture chamber setting was certainly effective, albeit heavy handed.                                                                                                                        

Final Score: 25/50

Under the Bed (2012) – Stephen C. Miller

In 1989, something amazing happened- something that changed the course of history and forever altered the way we look at cinema, art and culture. Since then, it has stood as a pinnacle of the achievements of the western world. It’s basically the American Great Wall of China. I’m talking about the movie Little Monsters (by the way, this blog is not about that film). Not only could this movie stop a horde of screaming Mongol invaders, but you can actually see it from space (If equipped with a large enough scree pointed up into the sky.) It’s about a kid and his brother (Fred and Ben Savage) who get visited at night by a lovable, mischievous monster (Howie Mandel) who travels to their world from under the bed. They run into some trouble and have to try save each other, and there’s a great Talking Heads song at the end. If you’ve never seen this gem, I thoroughly recommend it. It might look like a kids movie (and I guess it is) but it holds up very, very well. 

Anyway, some time passed by and director Steven C. Miller decides he’s going to take this basic formula and change it from a late 80’s story about friendship, courage, sacrifice, etc. into a legit, serious horror movie: 2012’s Under the Bed. Miller boils down the framework of Little Monsters and adds in a traumatic back story, a little blood, and some psychological/ mysterious grit. Unfortunately, I don’t think he pulls it off. It’s almost like the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s heavy on the melodrama and it moves at a slow, brooding pace. Some of the plotlines were confusing and lead nowhere. Miller’s directing was strong though and it leads me to believe this one might have gotten ass-raped in the editing room. (Though it certainly has other issues). Overall, I wanted to like it, but they didn’t make it easy for me.

The movie opens with our hero Neal, returning home after an extended time away. We find out that his mother died tragically and he was in some way involved. He comes home to a new step mom, a frustrated father and a relieved, but troubled younger brother Paulie. Turns out that something has been visiting Paulie from under his bed at night and that Neal used to have the same visitor before his undisclosed traumatic event. The bros decide to figure out what this thing is and why it comes to them at night. Their behavior is causing problems at school and at home and dad and stepmom are not putting up with it anymore. They decide that this thing is dangerous and needs to be killed. So they try to go in under the bed and defeat this thing on its own turf. (In broad strokes, this the exact plot of Little Monsters– even down to the un-understanding father (played by Daniel Stern in LM) The Stepmom even refers to Paulie and Neal  as “little monsters” at one point. This is not a coincidence.

Anyway, I don’t want to give away too much of either movie. Under the Bed is all slow, methodical build up for the first hour and ten, and then Boom- Payoff. The last 15 minutes or is balls to the wall. It gets pretty intense and even a little scary, and we finally see all the blood we’d been waiting for, but it’s really too little too late.  By this point I was literally fighting to keep my eyes open..

     

I think my biggest problem with the movie was how these events and plot points were revealed. I felt like they were holding a carrot out in front of us the whole time.  And the way it played out to me didn’t even make sense. It was like they gave 5 people an outline of a movie and had them each write 20 minutes of it in separate rooms without consulting each other.

Like I said, despite the structural issues, I think this movie was directed well and it had potential. I think another round of script revisions pre-filming to keep the pace more active would have done wonders for this film. You could basically watch the last 35 mins of the film and get the same experience. Not only did they wait till the end to give us all the action, they waited too long to give us the twist (for lack of a better word).

The basic flow of any story or movie is to have it basically look like a heartbeat monitor. Peaks and valleys of intensity that slowly progress into the big one. This movie would look like a dead guy who got one good jolt from the defibrillators after arriving, flat-lined in the ICU. And bad news, they couldn’t save him.

1. Is it scary? 3– There are some scary bits towards the end and a few creepy scenes throughout, but it just didn’t do it for me.
2. Originality: 3– I mean, it was a crappy un-remake of a great movie. They tried to put a new spin on it. I’ll give them that.
3. Blood: 4– There was definitely some surprise gore at the very end but it wasn’t enough to get a good score here.
4. Believability: 5– Though I was frequently distracted by some plot lines that went nowhere, I think this one was ok in this department.
5. Setting/Cinematography: 6– Nothing amazing here. I like the idea of the sterile, cold, suburban house being set against this nightmare, though.                                                                                                                                   

Final Score: 21            

Maniac (1980) – William Lustig

What do George Costanza and Norman Bates have in common besides being, well let’s call it, socially awkward? Mommy issues. Big time. If you were to combine the George and Norman, and then ramp up the insanity by about 25%, you’d get Frank Zito – title character of William Lustig’s 1980 exploitation slasher, Manic. If you’ve seen Seinfeld, you probably know that George was only about 3 episodes from going on a rampage anyway. That might have been a better ending to the series…but we’ll tackle that in a different blog. Anyway, Maniac is one of those cult movies that was banned, censored, etc. when it was released. The violence was too just gruesome and disturbing to be shown in its original form. Since then, the bar has been raised dramatically in terms what we consider “too gruesome”. Other than a scene or two, the violence in this movie is on par with a Saw or a Hostel or any other gory modern horror movie.

Technically speaking, Maniac is a nightmare-in every sense of the word. Conventionally, it is a nightmare to watch him butcher young ladies, cut off their scalps, and nail the hair to mannequins in his dingy apartment. For the first half of the film, I really wasn’t sure if there was going to be a plot. It was just a long and drawn-out sex tape that keeps getting interrupted just when it’s about to get good. And by interrupted, I mean by a knife, a shotgun or length of piano wire. As this plays out, we slowly get inside Frank’s head and that’s when things start to get interesting. I’d like to think that the way the film unfolded was a Tarantino-esque revealing of facts out of order, but I think it was more like a 16 year-old struggling to unhook his date’s bra in the back seat of his parent’s minivan.

The movie starts out with the killing of a young couple on a beach. Then we cut to Frank in his house acting sad and creepy, then back to another murder, then back to Frank’s house for more moping and Buffalo Bill/Leatherface/Ed Gein-style insanity. So the movie just bounces back and forth in this fashion for like 45 minutes, and we are starting to get a sense of who Frank is and why he does these things. Inexplicably, Frank meets and begins to date a beautiful European photographer- who, by the looks of her apartment in Manhatten, is doing very well for herself. This is inexplicable because Frank is a big, ugly fat, scared monster of a man. He’s able to turn on the charm and act like a completely well-adjusted member of society.

Of course, homegirl starts to figure out that something is off with this guy when he takes her on a date to go visit his mother’s grave. Remember I mentioned those mommy issues? I won’t give away the ending but it’s worth sitting through this one because the payoff at the end is worth the awkward set-up (see bra reference in the second paragraph). There are some serious plot holes in how Frank and his girl struck up their relationship. You’re going to have to flex your willing-suspension-of-disbelief muscles in a big way on this one. The storyline is patchy and confusing at times and downright retarded at other times. But, as with all movies like this, that’s not really the point.

Maniac falls into this sort of sub-genre of 70’s/ 80’s dark, gritty, New York City/urban horror movies- The New York Ripper and Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer are 2 good examples. They focus on how sick, crazy people can move unnoticed through a busy city. They can be sitting next to you on the subway or walking past you on the street and you’d never know it. When you think about it, this actually makes them a lot scarier than any monster/ghost movie out there. To build up their cult status, these movies usually shared 3 main elements. 1. Over-the-top violence and gore. 2. Not so subtle sexual violence toward young, attractive women. 3. A dismal, and gloomy view of city life. These movies are (in the grand scheme of things) presented in a realistic and plausible way. That makes them even scarier.

There are so many things that shouldn’t have worked in this movie, but they do work. Once you forgive the plot holes, and the awkward, flirty dialog (It’s like Sloth from The Goonies is trying to pick up Jennifer Aniston and it’s working) the movie actually falls in place and gets pretty intense. There are some jarring POV changes, but they work too. You go from following Frank around to following his next victim. That adds to the suspense because you know he’s close, but you don’t know where he is. Or sometimes you know he’s right around the corner but the lady getting out of the bathtub has no idea.

The gritty, realism of how Maniac was shot, is its biggest asset. It wasn’t fancy or pretty, it was dark, bleak, and unpleasant. You just feel uneasy watching this movie. It’s so un-stylized and low-fi that you almost forget it’s a movie. You get the sense that you’re in the filthy subway station with someone following you.

1. Is it scary? 7- A grim view of city life and some grisly murder scenes will keep this one pretty high on the list.
2. Originality: 4- It fits into that urban horror tradition I mentioned, but Lustig still tells the story from an angle that gives the audience something new (at least in 1980).
3. Blood: 8- Times have changed so this movie probably wouldn’t be banned if it was released today, but there are still some shocking moments. There’s a very famous scene where Frank does some reconstructive surgery to a dudes head with a shotgun. It’s appalling and vivid.
4. Believability: 6- There are some distracting technical issues, but the premise is believable. That’s what makes it scary.
5. Setting/Cinematography: 8- The dark, dreary way the movie is shot, and it’s setting in the dense urban jungle are what makes it a success.                                                                                                     

Final Score: 33/50

Grave Encounters (2011) – The Vicious Brothers

Have you ever seen one of those ghost hunting “reality” shows on like SyFy or Discovery channel? If not, you’re not missing much, and I’ll break it down for you. There’s usually some sort of semi-illiterate eye-witness who works at like an old bed and breakfast or an abandoned theater or something like that. (For reference, this person has on average, 3 more teeth than the eye witnesses on the bigfoot shows). Enter: crew of “paranormal investigators” who probably look like the members of the band Anthrax in 1986, complete with at least one cute-ish, beefy, goth chick with lots of cleavage. With an arsenal of the latest in ghost hunting tech, these real-life Ghost busters wait till the middle of the night and creep through the haunted building with night vision and microphones to try to capture evidence of a real live ghost.

That’s the premise of The Vicious Brother’s 2011 found footage horror film Grave Encounters. First off, I’m generally not a fan of found footage. I find it to be gimmicky and I think studios just like to do it because it’s a good excuse for cheap, low-production filmmaking. That being said, this movie is about as well done as I’ve seen a found footage film be (think REC in terms of how realistic it is). That is to say, after a while, you forget that it’s being shot like this and it just feels natural (as opposed to Paranormal Activity where you’re kinda beaten over the head with it.) In general, the movie is very well done, and terrifying. It’s got a good build-up, good atmosphere and great scares/shock value that come just at the right time. From what I’ve seen, this movie gets decent reviews, but I think it stands out as one of the better horror films of the past few years.

So the movie is about the film crew of one of these ghost hunting TV shows called Grave Encounters as they visit an abandoned insane asylum. They conduct some interviews and learn about the asylum’s disturbing past and then the caretaker locks them inside overnight. He’s scheduled to come back in the morning and let them out. So they start to explore the cavernous hallways of this old mental hospital. It starts out a bit like Session 9, where the atmosphere and environment play a big part in scaring us. Then we see some of the usual ghost movie clichés, windows swinging open, furniture moving, cold feelings. But all of this happening against the backdrop of this dilapidated old hospital still feels scary.

So the team starts to freak out, they’re waiting for 6am when the caretaker is supposed to come let them out. And for some reason THEY SPLIT UP TO COLLECT THEIR GEAR. Of course somebody goes missing. Now it’s well past morning, the sun is not up and nobody has come to unlock the door. Hours and eventually days pass and they are in some sort of perpetual night locked in this building. They try to break out but the doors and windows just seem to open up to more hallways and they’re trapped inside. And the ghostly events are getting more and more intense/frequent. Things keep building up and up and the cast slowly dwindles, disappears into the darkness. The survivors start to lose their minds as they’re tormented by the spirits of the past residents of the hospital.

In terms of scares, they’ve done just about everything right. Great setting. Slow but steady buildup of atmosphere and intensity. Structurally, it all just works; the movie is about a film crew filming in a scary old building. So there are different cameras, angles, etc. that we cycle through. You don’t even think about it.

In short, this movie is fucking terrifying. They do a great job getting into your head. You’re watching these people just unravel as they try to cope with something that they thought they wanted to find. Maybe they never really believed in the first place. Desperately crawling on their hands and knees through the pitch dark, twisted tunnels of this creepy old building, they’re like the patients who used to be trapped there.

1. Is it scary? 7- Not only does it look scary but it gets scary in your head. Serious nightmare material.
2. Originality: 4– I can’t say there was anything very original here but they did handle some familiar material very well.
3. Blood: 4– Not a lot of blood in this film. I like that they could get really scary without just dumping buckets of blood on everyone.
4. Believability: 7– Found footage can be a good way to draw the audience in and make  us believe what we’re seeing, if it’s handled right. This time they did it right.
5. Setting/Cinematography: 8– Found Footage: -1 point. Despite that, the atmosphere and setting of this movie were pretty much perfect. Just the right mix of internal and external scares.

Final Score: 30/50                                                                                              

Inside (À l’intérieur) (2007) – Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo

Well, you’ve done it again, France. You’ve come up with another twisted, brutal, gory movie in which the main character is literally soaked head to toe in blood by the time it’s over. Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury teamed up to direct 2007 pre-natal nightmare, Inside. It’s the classic story of boy meets girl, boy bangs girl, girl gets pregnant, strange woman attempts to cut open girl with scissors and steal her unborn child. And in typical French horror fashion, this thing is goddamn vicious and disgusting from start to finish. I’m not one to turn up my nose at anything horror/blood related but you could make the argument that this movie was too bloody. It got to a point where it was just shock value. By the end of the movie, the guts and gore are the central focus, not the story.

That being said, it’s definitely a terrifying film. They get you right into this woman’s head and you can feel what she feels. Alone, defenseless, and at the mercy (or lack thereof) of a maniac who wants to cut her open and steal her kid. Now, I should mention, that they back away from this a bit in the second half of the film in order to introduce a few more characters/corpses, and to dump buckets of blood, brains onto everyone. Bustillo and Maury do a great job of getting us into this woman’s head though. Every other shot is her blood-soaked face screaming in terror. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I think they could have kept up with that angle towards the end and pumped the brakes on the guts by about 15%. I think that was what made the movie good, not the shock and awe of bodily fluids flooding an apartment.

 So the opening scene of the movie is a head-on car crash. We see Sarah, our pregnant heroine, soaked in blood behind the wheel of a crumpled car with her dead husband in the passenger seat. Fast-forward 4 months and we see Sarah on the day before she will go to deliver her baby. We meet her mom and her new squeeze at work. Then she goes home to rest before her big day. When she’s about to go to bed, there’s a knock at the door. A woman starts harassing her and trying to get in the door. The woman eventually gets inside and stands over Sarah while she sleeps for a while being super creepy and sinister. Then all hell breaks loose. Homegirl grabs a big shiny pair of knitting scissors and tries to cut Sarah’s bulging belly open. They struggle for a while and Sarah locks herself in the bathroom.

A few visitors come over to check on Sarah, including the police, but most of them get dispatched in horrible and disgusting ways. Finally, Sarah learns very early that a mother’s work is never done. She determines that nobody is going to help her and she has to clean up this mess herself. Armed with a can of Lysol (weapon of choice for most moms according to TV commercials), a lighter and a big knife on a stick, she tries to defeat this crazy dark woman who wants to steal her baby.

There’s something about blood and gore in a zombie movie or even an action movie that doesn’t seem real. When it’s in a movie like this where it’s 100% plausible and it’s happening to a real(ish) person, it hits a lot closer to home. That’s what this movie was aiming for. They want you to be upset. They want you to squirm and cover your eyes. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’re desensitized to things that shocked and scared us even 20 or 30 years ago. But I don’t know that filling a bath tub with fake blood and having everyone in the movie splash around in it is the way to make a movie scary. I have nothing against it; I just think that that’s not the best way to make a film scary. That’s like the Howard Stern of horror movies.

Shock value aside, the movie is terrifying. You’re right in the house with these two women. Trapped in the dark and helpless. You have to give them credit for sticking to their guns though. They certainly pull no punches and they continue to ramp up the carnage until the bitter end.

Overall, it was a great, scary, modern horror movie. Though all the blood gave me a bit of a ‘style over substance’ kind of feeling.

1. Is it scary? 6– Intense and suspenseful throughout. The viscous scenes alone are enough to give you nightmares.  
2. Originality: 5– There really wasn’t much to this one. The plot was simple and unique. It’s really a clever twist on the “home invasion” genre so no big points here.
3. Blood: 10– I’m giving this one the rare 10 because I really don’t think you can go 3 minutes without seeing buckets of blood.  
4. Believability: 5– At the beginning, it was so simple that it had to work. Then as new characters get introduced, things get a little out of hand, but for the most part, I bought what they were selling.  
5. Setting/Cinematography: 7- The cinematography and lighting was one of the best parts of this movie. Everything is dark and gloomy and creepy. Then you have these shots of light and bright red blood on the pale, dark apartment. Visually, they did an amazing job.

 

Final Score: 26/50  

      

The Uninvited (2009) Charles Guard and Thomas Guard

Did you know that American cheese cannot legally be sold in the United States as “cheese”? It has to be labeled as “processed cheese food” or something like that so that no one would accidentally mistake it for cheese. There’s a pretty clear parallel between American cheese and American remakes of foreign horror movies. In America, we love to remix things, take them, water them down with some vegetable oil, filler, old newspapers, whatever. Then we dye them yellow and slap the word American on it and call it a day.

I’m not going to be a snob and say that all U.S. remakes of international horror movies are shit, because there are some decent ones (The Ring comes to mind first). But I will say that for the most part, these movies don’t live up to the originals and should not be remade in the first place. I’ve said this before, but if you can’t be bothered to read subtitles for 90 minutes to experience a superior movie, you should be sterilized by having fish guts poured on your junk and tossing you into a tank full of hungry piranhas. The bastardization on the docket today is The Uninvited, Charles and Thomas Guard’s 2009 remake of A Tale of Two Sisters. The verdict (in case you can’t read between the lines) is that this movie sucks balls. Like I’d rather get a lap dance from a belt-sander than sit through this boring 87-minute shitfest again. I think we should do what the cheese people did and make it illegal to market one of these remakes as “horror”.  Instead we’ll call them “American processed horror film product.”

 

Quick question, is it subtle homage or subtle racism to cast a girl that looks vaguely Asian as the lead in an all-white remake of a Korean movie? I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself. Anyway this movie follows the plot of the original pretty closely, but they take the Tarantino-style sequencing away so you lose part of the effect.  (In the original, the big twist comes about half way through the movie). So I’m not going to get too far into a plot synopsis because it will ruin the original. You should probably just watch that and save your time/money on this one.

Teenage girl Anna (the awkwardly not-Asian girl) in a mental hospital after some kind of trauma involving her mother’s death. We’re not really sure what happened till much later. They send her home and she finds and mom’s hot, creepy nurse has moved in and is currently banging the unnaturally tan and handsome widower father. Anna and her sister start to suspect that Daddy’s new gal-pal (played by Elizabeth Banks) had something to do with mommy’s unfortunate demise, and that this is not the first time she’s pulled something like this. The closer they get to solving the mystery, the more scary shit starts happening. Mom’s ghost makes a few appearances in what we’ll call the only “scary” parts of the whole movie.

I will say, they did a good job with the cinematography. There are some cool things happening with light and shadows throughout the whole movie. Peoples’ faces obscured by shadow in a bright sunlit room, dark shadows cutting across bright areas in this big house. Even the few scenes of ghost mom and a couple of ghost ginger kids were really well done. But there were just too few of them. They used the tried but true pale, twitchy, decomposed body ghost that they use in all these movies, you know, the ones that always look like they’re covered in dead lizard skin, but they did a good job with it. Overall, it looked fantastic but other than that it was garbage.

In short, there is no reason for this movie to exist. It’s like the Glee of horror movies. You take something that you know is great, say, a Beatles song. Cram a bunch of attractive tweens into it and dress them up in mint green Abercrombie and Fitch (is that still a thing?)  polos with popped collars and get them to ruin reenact someone else’s already-successful artistic expression in order to capitalize on it. You can’t use too much autotune or hair gel, just pile it on, but be sure to remove any semblance of actual artistic feeling, human emotion, or original thought.

Once you’re done, pat yourself on the back, you’re living up to the American dream. Go change out of your costume and have the butler make you a grilled American-processed-cheese-food sandwich.

For the record, this was more of a rant than a movie review. If you want to read a real review, go check out the one I wrote for the original. But make sure you watch it first.

1. Is it scary? 2- I ate a bowl of Count Chocula and it was scarier than this movie.
2. Originality: 1- It’s a shitty remake that sticks very very closely to the original in terms of storyline. The only departures they made from the original just weakened the movie overall.
3. Blood: 3- There are a couple of nice bloody scenes but they are few and far between.
4. Believability: 3- Nobody did anything outrageous like run up a flight of stairs.  But I don’t know if I bought Elizabeth Banks as the creepy evil stepmother. To be fair, I never really liked her, but I see her as a comedy actress, and I don’t know that she was the best choice for this movie.
5. Setting/Cinematography: 7- I have to give credit where credit is due. They did a good job here. The DP and the lighting team made it look as scary as possible.

Final Score: 16/50                                                                                              

The Pact (2012) – James McTeigue

 

So I was watching Starship Troopers on TV the other night, well, because it was on and it’s pretty much the pinnacle of mankind’s artistic achievement. (I’m only half-joking; I fucking love that movie). Anyway, I got to thinking, what ever happened to that dude who played Johnny Rico? Was he some kind of 90’s action hero one-hit wonder? So I looked him up on IMDB. His name is Casper Van Dien (of course), and he’s been working steadily ever since the early 90’s. Most of his characters have good porno actor/jet fighter names like Ace Logan and Griffin Stone, and for good reason. If I had to bang a dude, and Mark Wahlberg was unavailable, it would probably be this guy.

Anyway… It turns out he plays like the 5^th lead in a horror movie I’ve been wanting to check out on Netflix. It’s called The Pact and it came out in 2012, directed by James McTeigue. In short, it was a novice horror movie. That is, a horror movie for people who don’t like horror movies. It was adequately scary, but the story was confusing and the movie title had nothing to do with the plot. There was no semblance of a “pact” of any kind that I could surmise. The movie was alright, but just alright. McTeigue did a great job directing, though and the acting was all pretty solid too. It seems to me they got a little too ambitious with the plot and they had trouble keeping up the momentum that they built in the first half of the film.

The movie is about 2 sisters who go to visit their childhood home after their mother dies. There is some tension between them and their relationship with their late mother. Some strange things start happening in the house and mom’s ghost seems to be the culprit. One of the sisters disappears and the other one decides to put on her detective shoes and try to solve the mystery. She is a prime suspect in the disappearance of her sister but for some reason, there are no negative consequences for this whatsoever. She teams up with our boy Casper, the accidentally handsome town sheriff. Creepy things start to happen in the house and around the town as they get closer to solving the mystery. Of course they recruit a local medium and hold the obligatory ghost-movie séance. It turns out that mom’s ghost is not the one causing the disturbances.

Blah blah blah. Secret room, dark family past, serial killer, it’s all pretty familiar from here. I think they started off with a great premise but it got a little out of control and they weren’t able to follow through. Despite all that, the movie had some genuinely scary moments.

 

Overall, The Pact is pretty solid. Despite the fact that it exists on a rather well-trodden path of horror movie influences, and the somewhat disjointed plotline, it remains an interesting and creepy ghost story. There is a great dark gloomy atmosphere and that keeps us grounded in the horror universe. It’s odd that this is a fault, but McTeigue may have been too technical and by-the-book in his direction. Everything was technically proficient but it felt like it lacked a human touch. I’m not totally sure what I mean by that. It’s like the movie was directed by a directing robot.  That sounds worse than I mean for it to sound. Also, something I found odd, the whole movie seemed to be a commercial for modern cell phone/computer technology. People were constantly (and awkwardly) using Siri-like voice commands on their phones and Apple-chatting or whatever it’s called. It’s fine if these things happen organically, but they felt to me like the whole movie was underwritten by Motorola or something. Anyway, just a little annoyance.

The verdict: Decent movie. Decent scares. All held back a bit by some storyline choices. Maybe the director just had too much confidence in us, the audience. We’re not that smart, otherwise we’d be reading the book. Just tell us everything that happens and don’t expect us to connect the dots. The best part of the movie was obviously Casper Van Dien, even though he contributed exactly nothing to the plot. Just like Jessica Alba in anything she’s ever been in.

1. Is it scary? 6– There were some scary moments, mostly brought on by suspense and not so much by visual stuff.
2. Originality: 4– Like I said, it’s all rehashed horror clichés, but they still do it in a way that feels like fresh.
3. Blood: 4– There are some bloody scenes but this one’s more psychological than physical.
4. Believability: 5– I’m going back and forth on this one. Big picture, there are serious elements that I didn’t buy, but in  terms of the writing and the acting, everything felt pretty genuine in the moment.
5. Setting/Cinematography: 7– The whole movie has this sort of oppressive murky feeling to it. Everything feels dark and scary.

Final Score: 26/50                            

                                                                  

Evil Dead (2013) – Fede Alvarez

Ok, here we are again. All-too familiar territory: Classic horror movie remake land.  Whenever one of these remakes comes out, we ask ourselves. “Is this really necessary?” “Are they doing this because they have something new to offer the ravenous horror audience, or are they just trying to cash in on a popular franchise?” To say that Evil Dead fans disagree on the need for Fede Alvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead remake would be like saying the Nazis had a disagreement with the Jews. Nobody seems to be in the middle here.

In one camp, you have people who are excited to see the update and see how Alvarez stacks up to Raimi. Others feel that to remake one of the all-time greatest horror flicks is somehow a personal affront to them. They wander up from their mothers’ basements and squint through the bright sunlight in search of soapboxes on which to declare that the remake is an abomination that somehow takes away from the accomplishments of Raimi’s original. They take to the streets with torches and pitchforks and march towards the studio as if it were the lab of Dr. Frankenstein.

Those people can kindly go fuck themselves with Ash’s Boomstick. I understand being a purist and not wanting to disturb the canon or whatever, but in this case, the remake actually accomplishes something new. Now hear me out on this, and keep in mind that the original Evil Dead is my favorite horror movie of all time, but it is sloppy at times in that it  does not always know what it wants to be. (That is part of what we love about it but it’s the truth we need to face.) We know that it is intended to be part comedy and part horror, but how much of each? I still have the impression that Raimi never fully figured that out until ED2. Anyway, Alvarez’s remake knows exactly what it is from the very beginning. And so does the audience. This one is straight up, unapologetic horror. You could make the argument that it has about 5% comedy in that the gore and violence are so over the top that it gets absurd towards the end. It’s all part of the homage. Kind of tongue-in-cheek.

As for the plot, the new one is updated with some modern details so it feels fresh, while remaining true to the core story from the original. Five friends are visiting an old family cabin in the woods to help one of them kick her drug addiction. They find a book in the basement with some stern warnings (which are ignored, of course) and incantations. When they read the incantations in the book, they awaken a demonic spirit that possesses each of the friends and causes them to wreak havoc on themselves and each other. It’s a magic carpet ride of self-mutilation, blood, and dismemberment. By the end, there is literally blood raining down from the sky and there’s the obligatory chainsaw battle between our reluctant hero and a large demon monster.

Besides the focus on horror over slapstick comedy, one of the best arguments for this remake was just the advancement in special effects since 1980. Raimi’s Evil Dead was gory as hell and downright disgusting, but the whole movie was made for less than half a million bucks. The remake cost a whopping $17 mil. I’d wager that at least 10 million was spent on blood and guts effects. They really went all out. The sound was amazing too. You can literally hear flesh burning and tearing. The demon voices remind us of the original, while still being modern and scary. The original cut of the film received an NC-17 rating, and they had to cut it down a bit to get the R rating and get this puppy into theaters. I’m looking forward to seeing the full directors cut DVD in a few months. (Though don’t worry, kids, this one is still plenty gory.)

I realize I’ve waited until the end to make a final call. In short, I’ll say that this film was a fucking homerun- a bloody, disgusting homerun that accomplished exactly what it set out to do. Alvarez rebooted a classic and focused on horror rather than humor. He kept elements of what we loved about the original while creating a fresh, gory masterpiece that felt like its own movie. I loved it. The only thing that would have made it more “groovy” would have been a Bruce Campbell cameo.

1. Is it scary? 8- They might be a little overzealous with the tagline: “The most terrifying film you will ever experience , but it was pretty goddamn scary. Everything was dark, creepy, foggy, and gross. It made you jump at the right times and had enough visual stuff to give you nightmares until the next remake comes out.
2. Originality: 6– It is a remake, so the score can’t be that high, but they did a good job keeping it new and modern while keeping the essence of the original.
3. Blood: 10- If this scale went higher, I’d give it a higher rating. The whole movie is a revolting, bloody mess. It’s beautiful
4. Believability: 6- They did a pretty good job keeping things authentic. The acting was solid and it’s all so simple, there’s not a lot of places to mess that up.
5. Setting/Cinematography: 8- Great camera angles and tracking shots. There were a lot of shots that were reminiscent of the original. Camera shooting through the woods, quick-cut montage of the hero MacGyvering some contraption to save the day (Ash’s chainsaw arm) etc. 

Final Score: 38/50                                                                                              

City of the Living Dead (1980) – Lucio Fulci

If your idea of a nice relaxing evening is to sit down with a glass of wine and watch a Lucio Fulci movie, you’re probably a sick fuck- like me. If you’re not familiar with him, he was an Italian film director who went absolutely nuts with gory movies in the 1970s-80s. Think of him as the Italian Eli Roth. He directed tons of horror movies, most notably, Zombi 2, The New York Ripper, and the Beyond. His 1980 City of the Living Dead, is pretty much understood to be on a lower tear in terms of overall quality, but it hangs right in there in in the blood and guts department.

The plot of this movie is really just an afterthought. The whole film is more of a “Top 10 Horror Movie Deaths” YouTube video with a story tacked on so they could show it in theaters. Don’t get me wrong, there are some hall of fame death scenes in this one. At one point, this poor girl literally pukes up her own guts. It’s revolting, and surprisingly realistic. Fulci is just messing with us. He actually started his career writing and directing comedy movies. I have to think that he was dying laughing behind the camera as it pans across the room to show a pulsating, maggot-infested baby corpse.

Ok, so the plot-yeah, we’ll call it a plot. The movie opens with a priest in a cemetery hanging himself. As everybody knows, priest-cemetery-suicide is a key to opening up the gates of Hell. So now creepy stuff starts to happen in this town and people start to disappear/die. For some reason, a journalist from New York teams up with a psychic medium who he saves from being buried alive, and they travel to the town to solve the mystery/close the gate. This sounds fairly reasonable but it’s all presented in a backwards and confusing way. The first 30 minutes of the movie is spent introducing new characters. Ultimately this is fine because that really equates to introducing more body bags. It’s almost too much though. A lot of the characters are really pointless other than to have their skulls bashed in and their brains ripped out.

But don’t forget, that’s why you’re here. You don’t go to McDonald’s and order chardonnay. These movies are not about challenging your morality, or making you reevaluate your life choices, they’re about challenging your ability to keep your lunch down. City of the Living Dead is a visual nightmare. And Fulci is not timid about showing you every little detail. Walking, decomposed corpses, swarms of worms and maggots, and even a guy getting his skull ventilated with a large table-mounted drill. The scares are about 25% atmosphere and 75% visual. These images stay with you too, so get ready for some nightmares.

On paper, there’s not really much to this movie. It’s rehashed, formulaic and at times clichéd. But it still gets its point across and comes out as a solid horror movie. Fulci nails a couple of basic atmospheric details and handles the blood and guts special effects perfectly. Most of the direction is Horror movie 101. But he makes it work. There’s a fog machine running in just about every shot. You never see the sun; if you see the sky, it’s cloudy. Everything is dark, gloomy, oppressive. The sound effects are great. You can just imagine them sticking a microphone in a pot of wet spaghetti to get the pulsating guts, brains sounds. It’s a low-fi bloody masterpiece.

In short, despite it’s awkward storytelling and characterization, the movie is a homerun for any Fulci fans out there. If you’ve never seen any of his movies, you should check them out, but buckle up, they’re not going to be pleasant.

1. Is it scary: 7– CotLD is really more disturbing than scary. But it’s still pretty fucking scary.
2. Originality: 5 – Like I said, all the elements taken separately are not very original, but Fulci arranges things in a way that gives them new life. This movie is more than just the sum of its parts. I was expecting a typical zombie movie, this was not that.
3. Blood: 8– This is a quality over quantity movie. There aren’t tons of violent scenes, but each bloody scene is a monster.
4. Believability: 3-This movie was a technical nightmare. The sound editing/voice dubbing was terrible. The acting was delightfully terrible too. This just makes these 80’s movies better though.
5. Setting/Cinematography: 6– Like I said, in terms of setting, lighting, atmosphere, cinematography, it was horror movie 101. Nothing too adventurous or fancy, but they got the job done.

Final Score: 29/50                                                                                              

La Horde (2009) – Yannick Dahan, Benjamin Rocher

First, a quick PSA. I’d like to apologize to my legions (read: baker’s dozen) of loyal readers for my recent hiatus. Work has been more hellish than usual lately and I haven’t’ had time to do much of anything besides cry, drink whisky, and occasionally sleep. I don’t see it getting much better in the near future, but I’m going to try to post at least once a week.

It’s not a new concept that Zombie movies- the good ones anyway- are really about people, not zombies. A good zombie movie will look at the way people react to the situation of having an utter and complete breakdown of all societal influences. There’s no government, there’s no law, only survival. State of Nature, the Social Contract, all that good stuff. The Walking Dead does a great job with this. I guess it’s easier to develop that well when you have 13 hours times 3 seasons, instead of an hour and 40 minutes. In general, the zombie scenario is a quick, effective and believable (at least in terms of narrative) way to extract people from society and make your point that we’re all really good/evil/whatever at heart.

Ok, so we’ve got that. Now, put it on the back burner for a minute.

Now let’s talk about the French. They’re great at kissing and making toast and if you’ve been paying attention to horror movies in the last 10 years or so, you’re probably aware that they are sick and fucked up people who have made some of the most brutal, bleak, and nasty horror films in recent memory. High Tension, Martyrs, Irreversible, Frontiers, you get the picture. Take that vicious French horror trend and apply it to your standard zombie film. You’ll get Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher’s La Horde (that’s French for The Horde- I took French for about 5 years in school- you’re welcome).

In short, La Horde leaves something to be desired in terms of plot and originality. Overall, it’s not a bad flick. It aims low and it accomplishes its goal. Though it feels sort of stale and I found myself thinking that it seems like something straight out of the 80’s-in a bad way. That being said, the movie is ok, for what it is. It’s a fast-paced, exciting zombie movie with tons of bullets, blood, and berets. But that’s all it is. I think they attempted to shoehorn some of the social commentary that I mentioned above but it felt clichéd.

The story is about a team of cops who goes to this abandoned old apartment building to take revenge on the gang that killed one of their partners. During the raid, a zombie outbreak takes place and the cops and the robbers have to team up to try to survive. They shoehorn a little bit of “Who is truly good and who is evil?” routine in there but it all feels forced. In typical French horror fashion, the ending is grim, at best. We basically learn that everyone is a monster, not just the zombies. At least there’s a sense of savage justice or karma when all’s said and done.

Like many other modern zombie movies, La Horde is less horror than it is action. It relies more on suspense than it does on cinematography or subtle psychological tricks to scare you. Though there are a few cool shots that are lit so everything behind the subject (which is usually a wall of zombies) is completely black. It sets the mood a bit I guess.  Other than that, it’s all in your face rather than in your head and that is fleeting horror. This one isn’t going to keep you up at night.

Is it scary: 4– Like I said, it’s really not big on scares. But that’s not a big surprise   

Originality: 3 – It really feels like a bad 80’s movie that you might catch on TV on a Saturday afternoon. It just felt pretty stale.

Blood: 7– Lots and lots of blood. It’s like a strawberry crepe factory exploded.

Believability: 5– I had a hard time buying a lot of the back and forth with this. Though, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt because it was subtitled and I know that some of the subtitles were not completely correct. Also there’s always something lost in the translation.  

Setting/Cinematography: 5– Ehh, This was solid but not the greatest. Dark dilapidated old apartment building. Cut off from the rest of the world by hordes of snarling monsters. The cinematography was sufficient but didn’t contribute much to the feeling of fear.

Final Score: 24/50