Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
I wish...
that they would put Freddy's Nightmares out on DVD. I've never seen it and was totally not cognizant of its existence at the time it was one, but I bet it's awesome. Plus, I read that one episode goes into Freddy's backstory which, despite rumors to the contrary, I am pretty sure they are never going to explore in a prequel. No one wants to see a movie about a child molester/murderer, especially not a wisecracking one. I know there are always debates about whether Freddy was actually a molester or JUST a murderer but 1. what a dumb thing to argue about, even on the Internet and 2. I think it's pretty clear that he was both. Anyway, I know I said a few posts ago that anthologies never work, but I think they work much better on TV than in a movie.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Halloween: Resurrection
Halloween: Resurrection might be the worst movie I've ever seen. What could have been kind of a cool idea-fake Michael Myers hanging around, not knowing the real Michael Myers is there too- was just stupid. I hated stupid Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks. And the movie started with the clumsiest exposition outside of the beginning of a Babysitter's Club book. Jamie Lee is in the mental institute. One nurse asks the other who the patient is. The other nurse says, "Let me tell you about her." Cue flashbacks. UGH!! And it's not good-bad, which is excusable; it's boring, the cardinal sin for horror movies.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
The Last Broadcast
I first heard about The Last Broadcast shortly after The Blair Witch Project came out. The story, about four guys that go looking for the Jersey Devil and go missing, until just one comes back and is charged with the murder of the others, was often called a low(er) budget ripoff of the latter, though it was actually made first. I was excited to see a movie about the Pine Barrens, but, since it was so hard to find (probably because it cause only $1,000 to make), I couldn't find it for rent until now.
It took me three weeks to watch this from start to finish. My enthusiasm was immediately dampened when I opened the envelope and found the cheesiest disc image ever: a cartoony looking blue devil rising up over the trees, superimposed by the title in bloody letters.
In execution, the film is actually not all that similar to the Blair Witch Project. For a good hour, it's more of a courtroom drama, as various players are interviewed about the trial of Jim Suerd, accused of murdering his friends who didn't come back from the woods. It's extremely repetitive and very boring. Also, the fact that a major plot point relies on Suerd's use of Internet Relay Chat immediately dates the movie.
The footage deemed to be "the last broadcast" from the group isn't actually shown until 2/3 of the way through, and is supplemented with commentary from the narrator throughout. It's basically a grainy videotape that periodically slows down, the audio track replaced with what sounds like the voice of Satan (though you can't hear what he's saying). The filmmakers could have done with a big dose of the "Show, don't tell" maxim. Also, it's one of those movies where you can tell they just got a bunch of their friends, cause all the characters are white guys in their 30s and none of them can act. The ending, meant to be shocking, was stupid and nonsensical.
After the huge success of the Blair Witch Project, there was an incredible backlash. Though I haven't seen it since it was in the theater, and didn't think it was all that scary, I do remember that the final scene, with the girl going down the steps and finding her friends all facing the wall, gave me chills. That's more than I can say for anything in The Last Broadcast.
It took me three weeks to watch this from start to finish. My enthusiasm was immediately dampened when I opened the envelope and found the cheesiest disc image ever: a cartoony looking blue devil rising up over the trees, superimposed by the title in bloody letters.
In execution, the film is actually not all that similar to the Blair Witch Project. For a good hour, it's more of a courtroom drama, as various players are interviewed about the trial of Jim Suerd, accused of murdering his friends who didn't come back from the woods. It's extremely repetitive and very boring. Also, the fact that a major plot point relies on Suerd's use of Internet Relay Chat immediately dates the movie.
The footage deemed to be "the last broadcast" from the group isn't actually shown until 2/3 of the way through, and is supplemented with commentary from the narrator throughout. It's basically a grainy videotape that periodically slows down, the audio track replaced with what sounds like the voice of Satan (though you can't hear what he's saying). The filmmakers could have done with a big dose of the "Show, don't tell" maxim. Also, it's one of those movies where you can tell they just got a bunch of their friends, cause all the characters are white guys in their 30s and none of them can act. The ending, meant to be shocking, was stupid and nonsensical.
After the huge success of the Blair Witch Project, there was an incredible backlash. Though I haven't seen it since it was in the theater, and didn't think it was all that scary, I do remember that the final scene, with the girl going down the steps and finding her friends all facing the wall, gave me chills. That's more than I can say for anything in The Last Broadcast.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Pet Sematary 2
When I was 11 and an avid Stephen King fan, I was dying to see Pet Sematary 2 in the theater. My parents wouldn't take me, and I clearly remember thinking that I couldn't wait til I grew up and could watch all the horror movies I wanted to. Somehow, I managed to miss out on watching this for the next 15 years. I'm sure I would have liked this movie when it came out, judging from how many times I watched another early 90s Edward Furlong horror vehicle in my preteen years, but on this viewing it came off more as black comedy that anything that could have been possibly conceived as a serious horror movie.
The bare-bones DVD release contains absolutely no special features, save the trailer. The script is atrocious and the acting just as bad, with wooden readings of lines that one would think would be ridden with emotion, like "Gus, what's going on here? Why did you dig up my wife from the grave?"
When Jeff Matthews' actress mom gets electrocuted on set before his very eyes, his veterinarian father moves him across the country to their summer home in Ludlow, Maine, home of the Pet Sematary. The perpetually-smirking preteen Furlong is apparently contracted to only play roles where he is required to wear a cut-off sleeved denim jacket over a flannel shirt. He befriends a chubby kid named Drew, whose sadistic stepfather shoots his dog, leading the boys to bury him in the Pet Sematary. Predictably, the dog comes back in red-eyed, CGI form and rips Gus's throat out.
Inexplicably, instead of being happy that he is rid of his stepfather, blame-free, Drew resurrects Gus so he can come back, climb in bed with Drew's mom (played by whoever played that homewrecker Hallie Lowenthal on My So-Called Life) with a giant hole in his neck, and have creepy zombie-sex with her. So then Jeff decides to bring back his mom, the caretaker of the real cemetary lets Gus dig her up for some reason, and she comes back and tries to kill everyone.
That's really all that happens, save some minor character deaths along the way. The events of the first movie are reduced to a campfire legend in which sole survivor Ellie Creed goes nuts and slaughters her grandparents. The soundtrack is wildly inappropriate and filled with early 90s relics (L7, anyone?) Pretty much everything that happens is completely unbelievable, even for a movie about a haunted Indian burial ground, which actually makes for a pretty entertaining movie. There are also some legitimately disturbing moments, mostly involving animals in peril. At one point, Gus espouses one of my long-held childhood beliefs: that cats are girls and dogs are boys.
It is hard to believe that the filmmakers didn't know how hilarious this movie was, with lines like (after a character has his neck ripped open by Zowie): "I hate that dog."
A remake of the original Pet Sematary with George Clooney as Louis Creed has been rumored for years, even though Clooney is now way too old for the part of a young father. The sequel couldn't match the palpable dread of the original (not to mention the novel's explorations of the madness of grief), and it's doubtful that a modern remake would manage to be as necessarily bleak as the 1989 film.
The bare-bones DVD release contains absolutely no special features, save the trailer. The script is atrocious and the acting just as bad, with wooden readings of lines that one would think would be ridden with emotion, like "Gus, what's going on here? Why did you dig up my wife from the grave?"
When Jeff Matthews' actress mom gets electrocuted on set before his very eyes, his veterinarian father moves him across the country to their summer home in Ludlow, Maine, home of the Pet Sematary. The perpetually-smirking preteen Furlong is apparently contracted to only play roles where he is required to wear a cut-off sleeved denim jacket over a flannel shirt. He befriends a chubby kid named Drew, whose sadistic stepfather shoots his dog, leading the boys to bury him in the Pet Sematary. Predictably, the dog comes back in red-eyed, CGI form and rips Gus's throat out.
Inexplicably, instead of being happy that he is rid of his stepfather, blame-free, Drew resurrects Gus so he can come back, climb in bed with Drew's mom (played by whoever played that homewrecker Hallie Lowenthal on My So-Called Life) with a giant hole in his neck, and have creepy zombie-sex with her. So then Jeff decides to bring back his mom, the caretaker of the real cemetary lets Gus dig her up for some reason, and she comes back and tries to kill everyone.
That's really all that happens, save some minor character deaths along the way. The events of the first movie are reduced to a campfire legend in which sole survivor Ellie Creed goes nuts and slaughters her grandparents. The soundtrack is wildly inappropriate and filled with early 90s relics (L7, anyone?) Pretty much everything that happens is completely unbelievable, even for a movie about a haunted Indian burial ground, which actually makes for a pretty entertaining movie. There are also some legitimately disturbing moments, mostly involving animals in peril. At one point, Gus espouses one of my long-held childhood beliefs: that cats are girls and dogs are boys.
It is hard to believe that the filmmakers didn't know how hilarious this movie was, with lines like (after a character has his neck ripped open by Zowie): "I hate that dog."
A remake of the original Pet Sematary with George Clooney as Louis Creed has been rumored for years, even though Clooney is now way too old for the part of a young father. The sequel couldn't match the palpable dread of the original (not to mention the novel's explorations of the madness of grief), and it's doubtful that a modern remake would manage to be as necessarily bleak as the 1989 film.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Black Christmas (1974)
My future husband started school a few weeks ago and has a lot of studying to do, which gives me the perfect opportunity to hog up our shared Netflix queue with all the stuff I want to watch and he doesn't. First up was the original, 1974 Black Christmas, which I've been wanting to see since I caught the remake with my friend and usual-horror-movie-watching partner Rob over Christmas vacation last year. It starred Party of Five's Lacey Chabert and Michelle Trachtenberg, who, in my head, I always call Harriet the Spy, as girls you don't care about getting killed by a guy who not only uses eyeballs for tree ornaments, but eats them (prompting an 8-year-old who totally should not have been in our theater to ask his mom if they were having eyeballs for dinner.)
I suspected that the original, often touted as the first real slasher movie and a godfather to Halloween, would far surpass the eyeball movie. And, mostly, it did. The film, about a group of sorority sisters picked off one-by-one by an unseen killer, established the through-the-eyes-of-the-stalker perspective so common in modern horror. Though Black Christmas is extremely dated, what with all the horrible 70s fashions and hairdos, it's also much more vulgar than the relatively bloodless--literally and figuratively--Halloween. Everyone boozes it up, especially the housemother, who says of her charges "These broads would hump the Leaning Tower of Pisa if they could get up there." One of the girls-Barb, played by Margot Kidder-calls her mother a gold-plated whore, notes that "you can't rape a townie," and gives beer to a kid at a community Christmas party. Jess (Olivia Hussey) is dead-set on an abortion, no matter how much her boyfriend tries to talk her out of it.
Whereas the remake has almost no character development, the original is 95 percent character development. That part of the movie is compelling and fun--but when the killer shows up, it's just not scary. I actually dozed off, which, though most of my friends will tell you is a common occurrence with me during movies, it usually doesn't happen at 3 p.m.
I suspected that the original, often touted as the first real slasher movie and a godfather to Halloween, would far surpass the eyeball movie. And, mostly, it did. The film, about a group of sorority sisters picked off one-by-one by an unseen killer, established the through-the-eyes-of-the-stalker perspective so common in modern horror. Though Black Christmas is extremely dated, what with all the horrible 70s fashions and hairdos, it's also much more vulgar than the relatively bloodless--literally and figuratively--Halloween. Everyone boozes it up, especially the housemother, who says of her charges "These broads would hump the Leaning Tower of Pisa if they could get up there." One of the girls-Barb, played by Margot Kidder-calls her mother a gold-plated whore, notes that "you can't rape a townie," and gives beer to a kid at a community Christmas party. Jess (Olivia Hussey) is dead-set on an abortion, no matter how much her boyfriend tries to talk her out of it.
Whereas the remake has almost no character development, the original is 95 percent character development. That part of the movie is compelling and fun--but when the killer shows up, it's just not scary. I actually dozed off, which, though most of my friends will tell you is a common occurrence with me during movies, it usually doesn't happen at 3 p.m.
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