Author: Martin Minnock

When I was a child I thought as a child, I acted as a child, I spoke as a child, as the biblical quote tells us. This I think is probably true of most people who go through a childhood, with the exception of those weird kids who seem to be born with the mentality of a forty-year old. You may have noticed that I left out the second part of the verse, the bit about putting away childish things, as quite frankly I think the subject of some people’s ability to grow up is a debate best left for another day (and I’m not keen on drawing too much attention to myself on that one). Looking back at when I was a nipper I often think about extremes of emotion; times when I was particularly happy or particularly sad, or especially in the case of writing about horror as I sometimes do, times when I was afraid.

Norman Bates is imagining you naked

Psycho is a whole film, it is more than just one scene but you’d never think it whenever you talk to someone about the film or see any references to it on TV. It might be because that scene is such a powerful piece of cinema, or it might be because the rest of the film is actually quite strange, or (and I think this is most likely) it might be because most people have never fucking seen Psycho.

The chances that most people haven’t seen Psycho is a shame because it’s good; really, really good. The story that’s told is one the surface a simple morality tale about how if you go about stealing money it will eventually lead to your brutal murder in an out of the way motel, but the slow burner way in which it unfolds and they way the tension is built up is pure genius. Making young Norman Bates as unassuming and charming as Perkins played him was the master stroke of the whole thing as he simply embodies the notion of the serial killer being just like everyone else.

The acting in general is great, particularly Anthony Perkins as Norman, though there are one or two shaky moments, ironically when he’s trying to act nervous and shaky. If he only had to play quiet he’d have been perfect all the way through the film. Janet Leigh gets all the glory but it was Anthony Perkins who really carried the film along with John Gavin as Loomis.

Hitchcock really stirred things up in 1960 with Psycho, adding in levels of sex and violence that are tame by today’s standards but unseen in a film of this standard in America at that time. In so doing, he managed to set in motion events that lead to massive increases in tolerance for certain subjects in art forms, like films, while simultaneously reducing the levels of censorship Hollywood had put up with until then. The really clever part was making Psycho such a good film.

Two Thumbs Firmly Up for Psycho. 

*I know people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, I’ll be the first to admit that, but that sack of shit scared the piss out of me with that goddamn TV program of his and I’m not quick to forgive the prick over it.

Psychotic Links for the discerning Motel visitor:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054215/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_%28film%29

I wonder what defines a film adaptation of a book? How much of the story or dialogue, or characters need to make it onto the screen for the film to be able to honestly say that it’s an adaptation of a given book. From experience it seems that really all that has to happen is for a film to have the same name as a book and maybe feature a character with the same name as one from that book, and the scumbags from the marketing department slap “adapted from the novel by…” on the opening credits.

The opening credits of Dracula (1931) roll accompanied by music from Swan Lake which is unusual to say the least. The film proper starts with a carriage taking people across the Carpathian mountains on Walpurgisnacht, so the carriage is in a big hurry to make it to the inn before sundown, due to the evil that will be walking the earth that night. One of the travellers doesn’t want to stay at the inn but instead wants to go onto meet another carriage that will take him on to castle Dracula, much to the dismay of the inn keeper, who tells of Count Dracula and his wives (yes, wives as in more than one, maybe he was a Mormon?) and how they’re all shapeshifting vampires. The eager gentleman is on business however and has to go to the castle immediately, so an old woman gives him a crucifix to protect him up at the castle and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the young mans departure.

Castle Dracula appears to be abandoned and large parts are in ruins and infested with wild animals. The Count himself appears and introduces himself to the young man who we learn is a Mr. Renfield and who has kept his visit to Transylvania a secret as per Dracula’s instruction. The purpose of his trip is for Dracula to sign a lease on Carfax Abbey back in England and Dracula plans to travel to England the very next evening to take up residence in his new digs. Later that night, poor old Renfield suffers a turn after an encounter with a large bat and collapses in his room just as Dracula’s three wives approach, though Dracula himself turns up and sends them away before moving in and attacking Renfield himself.

The action then moves to the Vesta, the ship carrying Dracula and Renfield (who’s now a slave to Dracula obsessed with drinking the blood of “small lives” like insects) to England. By the time the ship reaches England there’s no one aboard left alive except Renfield who has gone totally around the twist and is committed to an asylum, conveniently located next to Carfax Abbey, Drac’s new crash pad.

With Dracula loose in London, no flower-girl is safe and he gets down to some murder almost straight away. Once he’s fed he ponces around town in his best clobber and takes in a show. At the show Dracula meets his new neighbours, Dr. Seward who runs the asylum next door; Mina the doctors daughter; Jonathon Harker, Mina’s fiance; and Lucy, the puzzle-factory’s owner’s daughter’s friend who takes a shine to the count. Dracula is a bit odd and talks about death and such, though they put it down to him being from a shit-hole in Eastern Europe as opposed to him being a raving looney and vampire.

Dracula makes a move on Lucy and ends up killing her, leaving a bunch of medical professionals who investigate her death to wonder how she lost so much blood so quickly. Meanwhile, Renfield is having a hard time in hospital as the staff are reluctant to let him eat the flies and spiders that pass his way and his case attracts the attention of Prof. Van Helsing, who studies Renfield’s blood and decides that Renfield is a bit of a vampire. To prove his conclusions the professor confronts Renfield with some wolfbane and puts his bad reaction down to vampirism (as opposed to maybe an allergy).

Shortly after Mina is attacked and is unwell as a result. Those around Mina try to figure out who the vampire is behind the attacks just as Count Dracula pays a visit and Van Helsing notices that he has no reflection in a mirror…

For me, the quintessential Dracula film will need to feature a few core components and thankfully they are all present in the ’31 Dracula. The count himself, Mina, Jonny Harker, Renfield, and vampires that avoid sunlight are all requirements, but there are a couple of pieces of dialogue I always like to hear in a Drac outing and they both occur near the start; when the Count hears the wolves howl and says to Harker “Ah, the children of the night, what music they make” and when he tells Harker “I never drink… wine” during the dinner early on. Both these made into Dracula though there is a major difference in how it did both those scenes, and that was no Harker!

In this version it’s Renfield who goes to Transylvania and brings Dracula to England to wreck havoc, which actually makes a lot more sense as it’s never been clear to me how Renfield fell under Dracula’s spell before Harker encounters him in Transylvania (unless Renfield had been there earlier and returned or something, then why send Harker if that was the case? – this is what happens when you adapt a book written by a drunken Irishman!) Seeing as how Renfield is the one to go east, Dracula doesn’t become interested in Mina or any of the rest of the gang until he gets to England and actually meets them, which also makes a bit more sense as Drac was heading to England anyway which is why he was picking up some property there.

With Renfield taking more of a centre stage role, Harker is left in the background, so Dracula makes this Harker into a bit of gobshite. Renfield, as played by Dwight Frye (who played the doctors assistant Fritz in Frankenstein) is proper disturbing when he’s playing the man gone mad, and his maniacal laugh is a fucking nasty (and therefore amazing) piece of acting. In fact, Renfield is one of the best things in Dracula, after Dracula himself, as he gets the most pivotal role and has the best death in the film too, when he ses his end is near and his conscience is getting the better of him for all the flies and spiders he’s murdered and realises that the afterlife might not be as kind to him as he’d always hoped.

The other stellar performance in Dracula is of course Bela Lugosi as the Count. Lugosi’s accent (which was actually his own, he didn’t really “act” all that much in Dracula) was perfect for the role and he managed to play the vampire aristocrat exceptionally well. The scenes featuring Dracula and Van Helsing together are the best in the movie as the way the vampire and Van Helsing play off each other is brilliant.

There were some pretty decent special effects for a film that’s now over eighty years old, and I especially liked the scene early on where Dracula walks through the cobwebs without disturbing them – the accompanying analogy of the spider spinning a web to catch an unsuspecting fly was a nice touch too. Some of the other effects are as good as you could reasonably expect from a film of this vintage, though the absence of a reflection for the Count is particularly well done while the bat effects are shite.

Throughout Dracula there is only one scene with any music and that’s set at a concert so the music is coming from the stage, apart from that and the opening credits there’s no soundtrack to Dracula, so all the scenes are left to hang on dialogue alone and the resulting silences are fucking creepy. Once you’re in immersed in Dracula you don’t feel like you’re watching a film at all seeing as how there are no musical cues to tell you when a scene is dramatic or romantic or going to be scary.

This Dracula strayed from the book that inspired it but that really didn’t matter as the result was so good (despite a bit of a chopped off ending) and became so iconic that the version of the vampire Count from Transylvania that it presented is now how most people imagine him.

Two Thumbs Up for Dracula.

I vant to cleek on yoor Leenks:
Links:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_%281931_film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021814/

When you see a film at the time of its first release you are seeing it at the right time. If a film contains subtexts or commentaries about the state of the world or is trying to make some political point or other, then it helps to be aware of the situation in the intuitive way that can only come from living through the right period in history. When you see a film donkeys years after it was first made then you need to bear in mind what was going on at the time as the flick may contain some references to those events, or it may just have some cheap looking effects because all the money was being used at the time to pay for World War 2.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney) sets things in motion in The Wolf Man (1941) by returning to his ancestoral home in Britain after years away in America, where he tries to bury the hatchet with his dear old Dad after the death of his older brother in a hunting accident. Larry’s Dad, Sir John Talbot is the lord of the manor and patron of the nearby village and he encourages Larry to get to know the place and become involved in the running of the estate.

Larry impresses his father with the technical skills he picked up while stateside including a knowledge of advanced optics which he puts to use in repairing his Dad’s telescope. While testing the telescope Larry spies an attractive girl down in the village and he heads into town to meet her. The girl, Gwen, runs an antique shop and Larry buys a cane for himself so as not to appear too creepy (though that ship had well and truly sailed after Larry comes across as the stalker of the century by telling Gwen he could see into her room). The cane is topped with a silver wolf’s head and pentagram design and Larry carries it around with himself all the time (just in case he runs into Gwen; that way she’d believe that he really wanted it as opposed to copping onto the truth that he just wants into her knickers).

Larry talks Gwen into “going for a walk” with him that night, though she drags her friend Jenny along too, and all three end up at a nearby gypsy camp where they can get their fortunes told. Along the way the women tall Larry about all the local folklore which for some reason is fixated on Werewolves. Later that night, as they make to leave the halting site Jenny is attacked by a large dog and Larry tries to save her. He beats the creature to death with his cane but is bitten in the process and is too late to save Jenny.

The next morning Larry is visited by the local constabulary who are investigating two deaths at the pikey encampment, that of Jenny and a traveller named Bela (played by none other than Bela Lugosi of Dracula fame). Bela had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument and Larry’s cane was found next to him. Larry can’t believe the story he’s told so he tells his side of things about how he killed an animal with his cane and had been bitten, though when he tries to show the copper the wound he received it has disappeared.

Trying to get a handle on what’s going on, Larry nips back down to the knackers to try to gather some information. There he meets Bela’s mother who has a strange tale to tell about her son as well as some really bad news for Larry, just as the wolfbane starts to bloom, and the autumn moon gets bright…

The Wolf Man managed to become the standard by which early werewolf movies were judged and for all the right reasons as it’s quite good. While most people think of the dodgy effects of the transformation from man into wolf, which were limited at the time due to technology and a massive global war ranging on and making things hard to come by, The Wolf Man is really a master class in setting an atmosphere in a film. From the moment Larry lands back home the film sets the stage for something weird to happen, and once he makes it down town you just know things are going to kick off.

The quiet little village just oozes menace and the inhabitants add to that notion with the little rhyme they all know and recite at the drop of a hat:

What really makes The Wolf Man are the performances, with Lon Chaney especially excellent as Larry Talbot, the poor prick who catches a wicked dose of lycanthropy off the gyppo’s. He was VERY American though and it’s a bit of a stretch to believe that after only eighteen years away in the colonies he’d gone quite so native; I would have expected more of a mix of an accent then the pure Californian he one ran with (and I’m a bit of an expert on the subject, if I do say so myself!).

The surprise cast member in The Wolf Man was Bela Lugosi, who was pretty severely typecast when you think about it, what with the vampire Dracula or the gate selling/wife beating/bare knuckle fighting/horse trading traveller Bela both examples of what passes for Romanian aristocracy. As Lugosi was Romanian though there were probably very few roles out there for him beyond vampire or pikey.

The Wolf Man single handedly defined and to an extent killed the warewolf film as the iconic images of a hairy Lon Chaney amount to what passes for such a creature in too many minds. The Wolf Man is a creepy film that while isn’t scary does qualify as horror by dwelling not on the killing the creature does but rather on psychological impact on the victim of the curse and those around him.

Two Thumbs Up for The Wolf Man.

Linkanthropes:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Man_%281941_film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034398/

Everything and everyone eventually gets old. There’s no escaping that simple reality. You can stay young at heart of course and try to stay in touch with your inner child, but the laws of physics dictate that time flows along in one direction and there’s bugger all we can do about it. However, just because something is old doesn’t have to mean that it’s rubbish, nor does it necessarily have to mean that it’s any good either.

Frankenstein (1931) introduces a quite frankly mental version of the good doctor who along with his assistant Fritz (not Igor) likes to dabble in a little bit of body snatching after dark, and happily digs up fresh corpses from their graves even going as far as to cut down a dead man from the gallows. Dr. Henry Frankenstein is collecting body parts for a set of unholy experiments concerning reanimation.

Henry’s devotion to his idea of science has led to him cutting off all ties with his friends and family including his fiancée Elizabeth, who’s worried sick about him. She contacts her friend Victor and confides in him about her concerns and together they travel to see Henry’s professor Dr. Waldman to find out what Henry’s been up to and to get a little help refocusing the young man on less intensive matters than his work.

Dr. Waldman is less than helpful really, pointing out that poor old Henry’s gone round the bend on the subject of creating life. Waldman, Victor, and Elizabeth go to visit Henry in the old watchtower he’s converted into a laboratory. As they arrive a storm is in full swing and Henry’s not happy to see them, only reluctantly letting them in to get out of the wind and rain.

Once inside they get a look around the lab and through that a look into the twisted mind of young Frankenstein. Henry plans to use the lightning from the storm to blast life into the body he’s cobbled together from spare bits and at the right moment lightning strikes.

Revelling in his triumph, Dr. Frankenstein finally gets rid of the last of the marbles that were rattling around in his head just as the poor creature he built stumbles about the place much like a monstrous child unaware of his own strength… and escapes.

The ’31 Frankenstein is a strange film to say the least. The oddest thing is how out of time the movie is with some of the settings and costumes suited to a film set in the nineteenth century with then other things that, I guess, were contemporary in 1931. These anachronisms serve to set the viewer on edge early in the film which helps to gloss over some of the other strange things, like “Henry” Frankenstein? What the hell’s up with that? And just who or what is Fritz the hunchbacked assistant? 

More seriously, there are times in Frankenstein where it seems like the film was being made with more then just a nod to the original story by Mary Shelly (though in the credits for Frankenstein she’s credited as “Mrs. Percy Shelly”). There are scenes where Henry’s experiments are looked at as stepping on God’s toes and the scene where the monster comes to life was subject to censorship when it came out due to Henry screaming “Now I know what it feels like to be God!”.

Apart from the religious subtext, there are some very disturbing moments in Frankenstein, with the most well known and definitely most awful scene being the one where the creature accidentally kills a little girl by drowning her. This single thirty seconds of footage turns Frankenstein from a quaint and quirky little retelling of the well known story to a flat out horror film, and from that point on it stays firmly in the horror genre, making the last ten to fifteen minutes (with angry villagers with flaming torches and everything) really excellent.

The last bit aside though, the majority of Frankenstein feels too disjointed, too all over the place, and when the final act is played out and you see how coherent it could have been, then all those odd out of place things in the rest of the film serve to make it feel cheap and stupid. Perversely, if the end of the film wasn’t as good as it is, then the whole film would feel better. The good bits really show up the bad.

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for Frankenstein.

The Links! They’re ALIVE!!!!!:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021884/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_%281931_film%29

I can’t stand to be conned, duped, swindled, or tricked; not many people I know enjoy such an experience. What I really hate is when you go about buying something thinking you’re getting one thing and then end up getting something completely different. Different and shit.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is a German retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and remake/homage to the classic 1921 film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Moving the actoin from London to Wismar in Germany, Nosferatu tells of young Jonathan Harker, an estate agent who’s given an important assignment by his weird boss Renfield to sell a large though derelict house in Wismar to the even weirder Count Dracula. Harker travels for weeks to Dracula’s castle in rural Transylvania in order to get the contract for the house signed.

Once in the same parish as Dracula’s place, Harker has a tough time getting up to the castle as none of the locals are willing to lend a carriage or even a horse to anyone planning on making that journey. The only thing the natives give Harker (apart from a hard time and bad dinner) is advice about vampires, which he puts down to just being bumpkin bullshit. Making the last of the trip on foot, Harker finally makes it up to the castle, which isn’t in the best of repair, and encounters Dracula. The Count turns out to be a raving lunatic and chronic shut-in, pale form the lack of sunlight and just a little bit odd in his mannerisms and general appearance.

Relations between Harker and the Count are a little strained but when Harker inadvertently shows Dracula a picture of his bird Lucy, Dracula changes his tune and quickly signs the contract, apparently motivated by the knowledge that his new Wismar gaff is only around the corner from Jonathan and Lucy’s place. The next day Harker sees some of Dracula’s men loading coffins onto carts and realises that they’re to be shipped to Wismar. After a little investigating he realises he was wrong to dismiss the warnings he’d received as Dracula is every bit the vampire and is making his way to Harker’s home town…

When I purchased Nosferatu the Vampyre on DVD I thought I was buying the 1921 film not some fucked up late seventies German nonsense. I didn’t realise my mistake until after the opening credits. The opening is in colour and not the glorious black and white I was expecting and that was my first clue that there was something wrong. Try to imagine my shock when the film kicked off and it finally sank in that I was not watching a classic piece of German expressionist cinema but rather some bastards shallow attempt to cash in on a cool name for a film.

Well, actually Nosferatu the Vampyre is a remake of the ’21 film so it’s supposed to be similar to it’s inspiration and it was the cover of the DVD that duped me, so whoever made that up is the person who’s really on my shit list, not the film-makers, so I did try to be fair to the film.

The film is dirt!

Nosferatu the Vampyre is dull, overly long, full of what I suppose are meant to be “artistic” images but are actually just weird clips of bats and rats, badly acted, and just fucking German! I have no problem with German cinema, I’ve enjoyed a good few movies from that part of the world, but the German films I’ve liked have been proper German, in that they were in the language with English subtitles. The version of Nosferatu the Vampyre I saw was in English. Did you catch that? The VERSION I saw was in English!

When Nosferatu the Vampyre was made., all the scenes that features anyone talking were filmed twice, once in the actors native tongue (German) and then filmed again in English so that the film could be sold in English speaking countries without dubbing or subtitles. A nice enough idea on paper, but the actors weren’t really comfortable chatting in English so every scene comes across as wooden and badly staged.

Apparently the film is better in German but I find that hard to believe as all the rubbish bits will still be in it and if anything it will be longer than it already is. As a quirky bit of cinema trivia Nosferatu the Vampyre is interesting enough for how it was made and then remade straight away, but seeing as how it’s not the film I was expecting, as far as I’m concerned it’ll never be more than a sham.

Two Thumbs Down for Nosferatu the Vampyre.

Fake Links:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_the_Vampyre
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079641/

Everything I know about career advancement I learned from watching Robocop. But I also learned a few other important things about life from other films. Some of the things I’ve learned include not to feed certain people after midnight, never to run up the stairs when you can get out the front door, never to bring a knife to a gun fight, and perhaps most importantly of all, if someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes!

Ghostbusters (1984) begins with three “scientists” Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Akroyd) , and Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) from Columbia University in New York, investigating the sighting of a ghost at the city’s main library. Unable to do anything about the ghost and frightened away by spectre the three return to the university to discover that they are being kicked off the campus and that their research grants have been cut off. Effectively out of a job they do what most people did in the early part of the 80’s boom and decide to go into business for themselves, as paranormal investigators and eliminators using equipment they designed and built themselves.

They set up shop in a disused fire station, buy a busted up old ambulance to drive around town in, put some ads on TV, and then sit about waiting for customers. One customer does finally show up in the form of Dana Barrett (Sigorney Weaver), a classical musician who experienced some unusual goings on in the kitchen of her Central Park West apartment. The lads set about looking into her case with Peter particularly interested because he fancies Dana. A brief look about the apartment reveals nothing and Venkman finds himself kicked out after making a move on Dana.

Finally a more substantial customer calls and the boys successfully capture a ghost that had been plaguing a downtown hotel for years. News of their exploits spreads around New York and the Ghostbusters become minor celebrities as they’re inundated with work. Forced to hire some additional help they recruit Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) who joins the team but is horrified to learn that there appears to be something very wrong in the city as the level of paranormal activity is much higher than usual and the containment system used to hold the trapped ghosts is approaching capacity.

The Ghostbusters success attracts the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency who send Walter Peck (William Atherton) to investigate what the lads are up to. At the same time as Peck’s investigation develops into serious action, the disturbances in Dana’s apartment increase severely and she is attacked by something terrible but that turns out to only be the harbinger of something worse…

“Who you gonna call?” “GHOSTBUSTERS!” Everyone knows this movie and I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t love it. But right now I know that there are people reading this who are thinking “But, Ghostbusters isn’t a horror film, what’s it doing on the list?” Allow me to address that.

Ghostbusters was released with great fanfare in the UK just in time for Christmas 1984, and that was when I saw it first in the cinema. I was eight years old. For the most part, Ghostbusters is a comedy, there’s some decent humour, some great special effects, and the ghosts like the iconic Slimer, aren’t all that scary. Except for that fucking bitch ghost in the library at the beginning.

Fuck you it’s a comedy!

Its ability to scare small children aside, Ghostbusters is a wonderful film that crosses two or three big categories. Yes, it is a comedy there’s no denying that, but it also has a lot of science fiction elements, some horror bits, and some great action scenes. Twenty Eight years after I first saw this film though, the thing that really struck me about it last night what extremely down to earth, blue collar types the main characters are. At the start of the film, when the dean is kicking them out of the university he accuses Venkman of treating science like a dodge. That’s not strictly true as in the story Venkman holds PhD’s in both Psychology and Parapsychology, so he didn’t exactly dodge doing several years of work to get those. It’s more like he stayed in college because he had nothing better to do and, with the exception of Egon, that seems to be the case for them all.

At the beginning of Ghostbusters, Venkman doesn’t think the ghost catching thing will work and he’s not even convinced there is such a thing until he sees the one in the library (the scary bitch); all his work at the university revolved around ESP and such. Stantz and Spengler were genuinely interested in catching a ghost, Spengler from the research point of view and Stantz from the true believer perspective – he’s the only one at the start of the film who seems genuinely excited by and interested in the paranormal. Once they loose their university funding, they go out and start a business, not because they want to be rich but because there’s nothing else to do. All the way through the movie, all the lads are hardworking, normal blokes, with nothing special about them except their jobs, which they manage to reduce down to the level of exterminators, even though they’re each walking around with a portable particle accelerator strapped to their backs (and if you listen carefully in the dining room scene you’ll hear Venkman reveal that he knows a lot more about the Proton Pack’s operation then you’d expect!).

It’s probably a little too easy to rush to say that Ghostbusters is a good film without at least trying to be critical of it, but as I watched it there was nothing I could find that took away from it at all, no insight I could garner at the expense of anyone or anything in it. Ghostbusters stands the test of time extremely well and as such it’s not too easy to say that it’s a great film.

Two Thumbs Firmly Up for Ghostbusters.

Have you or any of your family ever seen a spook, spectre or these Links:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters

You may be aware of a popular television series called Strictly Come Dancing (as it’s called on UK television, in the US it’s called Dancing with the Stars). The premise of Strictly is that a celebrity of varying quality, from washed up has been to well-known presenter or soap star, is partnered with a professional dancer who then teaches them to dance a new routine each week. A panel of judges issue their opinions on the quality of the dancing along with a score and the public then vote on which celebrity/dancer pairing should be kicked off the show or saved for another week.

The dances each celeb has to learn are all quite complicated and technical and have to be done just so. The costumes and props have to be just right as well and there’s a lot of sequins, latex, open-shirts, un-necessarily tight trousers, fake tan, and brightly coloured dresses (and the girls’ outfits are quite something too) but as camp and all as Strictly Come Dancing is it’s still nothing compared to a Twilight film!

Riley’s disappearance in Seattle following the attack turns out to be just one example of several such incidents that have been plaguing that city that the Cullen family have been taking an interest in as they seem to be the type of thing that newly made vampires (called “New Borns” in Twilight speak) would be getting up to and the Cullens are worried that someone is deliberately creating vampires near by, and that the Volturi (the head vampires) will turn up and raise all sorts of hell, particularly when they see yer one Bella is still human. Their investigations reveal that the vampire Victoria (from the the first movie) is in the area and (like everyone else in the pacific northwest) has the hots for young Miss Swan and that a vampire, other than Edward, has been in Bella’s bedroom.

Meanwhile, to make matters even more awkward, Jacob the Werewolf, who had stopped talking to Bella because he loves her but she doesn’t love him, is needed to provide Bella with some security while the Cullens try to find the vampire or vampires who are coming after her. Jacob and Bella get to spend some quality time together and she slowly begins to realise that she might actually have feelings for him after all which puts a bit of a strain on her relationship with Edward just as she needs him most…

OK then, another Twilight film… Let me start by saying this, if I were a member of the target audience for these films and books (and I thank my personal Gods that I am not) I would be extremely pissed off at Twilight: Eclipse. At the end of the last film, the Cullens made a deal with the local werewolves not to make vampires and Bella was to be the exception to this once she married Edward, so the big set up was that there’d be a wedding and all the hoopla that goes with it. Now, along comes Eclipse and from the start there’s talk of marriage, and that talk goes on for an hour and a half, and at the end of the film whadda get? A fucking engagement! I thought that’s what happened at the end of the last one of these films? Eclipse is nothing more than the same shit on a different day.

Here’s how the Twilight films break down in terms of plot:

1. Twilight: Down in the mouth horsey-featured girl meets effeminate boy in school who turns out to be the worlds worst vampire and they fall in love despite him being clinically dead and her looking like she is. Vampires try to kill horsey girl.

2. New Moon: Horsey chick and girly vampire struggle to be together due to their respective disabilities (Him – vampire, Her – moody bitch). Girly vampire goes away. Horsey girl hangs out with wolf boy. Wolf boy loves horsey girl. Vampires try to kill horsey girl. Girly vampire comes back.

3. Eclipse: Horsey chick and girly vampire struggle to be together due to their respective disabilities (Him – vampire, Her – moody bitch). Girly vampire goes away. Horsey girl hangs out with wolf boy. Wolf boy loves horsey girl. Vampires try to kill horsey girl. Girly vampire comes back.

Basically, the first three films in the Twilight Saga are all about vampires with more sense than Edward trying to kill Bella, and the second two are the same film dressed up slightly differently, like how Days of Thunder is really the same film as Top Gun only re-done for race cars. As to why the vampires are always wanting to murder her, well that’s definitely more believable than everyone in Forks loving Bella so much; in fact, if the Twilight saga had actually been a collection of short films about vampires trying to murder Bella Swan without all the romance shite, I probably would have been a fan!

Unfortunately, there’s no getting away from the fact that the central piece to the story is the love triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob. Making one film out of that story was pushing it but two is flat out taking the piss, especially as so little is offered to continue this nonsense. Jacob continues to pine for Bella long after she told him to get lost and now it seems that all that moping after her might pay off as Jacob is brought back so as to add a little tension into things. At no point does he, or Edward really, do anything that would be worthy of Bella’s affection. Jacob hasn’t changed a bit since the last film and all he does is bang on about his feelings for her and that seems to be enough to get under her skin and make her admit that she does love him after all. If any of that kind of stuff had any basis outside of the raving fantasies of hormonal teenagers then the lives of everybody on the planet would be radically different as we all would have hooked up with whoever we had a crush on when we were seventeen (so, in my case Gillian Anderson had a lucky escape).

To be fair, that whole love triangle thing did lead to one decent scene, where Jacob has to snuggle up to Bella to keep her warm when she and Edward are in a tent on a cold night (seriously there’s a scene like this in Eclipse, I couldn’t make this shit up). Bella falls asleep and Eddie and Jake have a bit of a chat; it’s a stupid scene but the banter between the two lads is pretty good even though the whole thing is lost on Bella herself as the only reason Jacob has to be there is because Edward has no body heat of his own seeing as how he’s a fucking corpse.

I could never really enjoy a Twilight movie the way they’re meant to be enjoyed because I’m not an adolescent girl and because as films go the Twilight’s are pretty stupid. Eclipse commits a cardinal sin by being extremely lazy and simply rehashes the basic stroryline from New Moon. Once again, the only hope for something decent to emerge from a Twilight, that is more of Carlisle Cullen and his family, is ruined when Eclipse tries to show some of the Cullen’s histories in the form of flashbacks but for some inexplicable reason all the juicy stuff is left out. Carlisle seriously needs a film of his own as he’s the best thing in Twilight by a country mile.

Thankfully the Twilight phenomenon seems to be fading and soon all that will be left will be a handful of ruined careers and the occasional reference to Teams Edward or Jacob. One unexpected casualty of the Twilight films might be Dakota Fanning, as quite frankly she was brutal in Eclipse as one of the Volturi which is a crying shame, though when you think about it, what actor in their right mind would want to be known for doing their best work in a Twilight film?

Two Thumbs Firmly Down for Twilight: Eclipse.

P.S.
Here’s what legendary Friends of Dorothy and Strictly Come Dancing costume designers Right Said Fred had to say:

Thanks, Fred.

Try not to get Eclipsed by these links:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1325004/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Saga:_Eclipse

Early on in Poltergeist the mum and little girl in that film bury a dead canary in a shoebox in the garden (at least I hope it was dead, that little girl was a bit… off, if you know what I mean). There are really only two reasons for giving a family pet a good Christian burial; sentimental reasons especially if there are children involved, and because a dead animal lying about the place starts to stink after a while.

Swapping life in the city of Chicago for the gentler pace of life to be found in small town America, Pet Sematary (1989) introduces Dr. Louis and Mrs Rachel Creed and their young children Ellie and Gage as they move into their new home. Louis makes friends with his neighbour from across the road Judd, an older gentleman who enjoys telling stories and drinking beer. Near the Creed’s new house is a path that leads into the woods and it intrigues everyone.

As Stephen King has never been shy of a bit of publicity, and as Pet Sematary is based on a Stephen King book of the same name, it’s no big surprise that he turned up in the movie, getting a neat little cameo as the preacher.

 

What is a big surprise though is just how similar Stephen King looks like that other horror author, Garth Marenghi…

On a more serious note, Pet Sematary is a deeply disturbing film having selected the impact the death of a child has on a family as the core of the story being told. Like most Hollywood films however, the nature of that trauma is dressed up as something that invariably destroys the marriage of the parents, though in the case of this movie that gives the father the opportunity to do his grisly work and reanimate his deceased nipper.

The scenes after the death of the boy are dog rough. From the exhumation onwards Pet Sematary seems to have lost the run of itself, casts off all inhibitions, and goes full bore in trying to shock the viewer; the second half of the film bears little resemblance to the first.

Buried down the back like a rotten old dog, here are some links:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098084/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sematary_%28film%29

It happens, from time to time, that a film comes along that fits into a genre and simultaneously challenges the accepted wisdom of that genre. In so doing, not only does such a film provide an insight and analysis into the make up of the type of film it presents itself as, but it also makes it really fucking difficult for people like me (smart arses) to review! The Cabin in the Woods is such a film.

The story told in The Cabin in the Woods is impossible to review without giving away some of the details that honestly, if you haven’t seen it, you would be better off not knowing until you do. Even watching the trailer gives hints of things that might start you off trying to guess what’s going on in the film before you see it (that was definitely the case with me, anyway), so I need to mix things up a bit here, firstly by starting at the end:

Two Thumbs Firmly Up for The Cabin in the Woods.

The Cabin in the Woods is an excellent, excellent film. If you haven’t seen it then stop reading and go find a copy as soon as you can, but trust me, it’s brilliant!

If you haven’t seen it but plan on reading ahead like that little prick in school who reads ahead a bit so that it looks like they know all the answers and appear smarter then they really are (i.e. me) then be warned:

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The Cabin in the Woods starts off with two engineer types making small talk as they get ready to work over a weekend. Exactly what it is they do is not clear but they seem to work for a large corporation or public utility like the electricity company and they talk and act like they are just cogs in a very large wheel.

That same weekend some college students are getting ready to head away for a camping trip. There are five young ‘uns made up of the sort of characters you find in every horror film; there’s the jock Curt (Chris Hemsworth), the booky lad Holden (Jesse Williams), the stoner Marty (Fran Kranz), the slutty girl Jules (Anna Hutchinson), and the unattached kinda booky ordinary girl next door but still attractive one Dana (Kristen Connelly). Curt and Jules are a couple and they are trying to hook their friend Holden up with Dana, while Marty is a friend but is really just along for comic relief purposes. They are travelling in a camper van up the mountains to stay in Curt’s cousin’s new place, the titular cabin in the woods.

En route they stop for petrol and directions and run into a cantankerous old bastard in charge of the last filling station for miles. He is a right prick and is incredibly rude to them, singling out Jules for some abuse as he calls her a whore to her face and in front of her boyfriend, who shows huge restraint and just gets the gang back on the road as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, the two engineers are working away, continuing preparations for their work. This includes getting staff from other departments in their organisation to visit them in the control room where they work and place unusual bets. Once they’re ready, they get down to doing whatever the hell it is they do.

The kids arrive at the cabin and settle in, picking out rooms and such. Dana settles into her room by unpacking and starting to get changed. At the same time in an adjoining room, Holden discovers a two-way mirror hidden behind a rather gruesome picture, that allows him to see into Dana’s room. Before she reveals too much of herself, Holden does the decent thing and lets her know he can see her. In a further act of chivalry he swaps rooms with her so she needn’t feel uncomfortable.

The fact that Holden and Dana have swapped rooms is something the two engineers make note of and it becomes apparent that they are monitoring everything that’s going on in the cabin. They even receive a bizarre phone call from the old fucker at the petrol station telling them about the kids.

That night, as the group set about making merry, they discover a cellar beneath the cabin that contains a vast assortment of old items. Among the collection is a diary of a young girl who once lived in the cabin and was subjected to severe abuse at the hands of her deeply religious and extreme red in the neck family, the Buckners. As Dana reads aloud from the diary she inadvertently summons the zombified remains of the Buckners who approach the cabin, while two engineers in a control room watch with interest…

The Cabin in the Woods is an example of a perfect horror film! Everything, absolutely everything, is just excellent in this film. The story, the characters, and even the effects are spot on. This is one of those rare times when the film exceeded the hype by a long way.

The twisted version of the classic “teenagers in a remote cabin attacked by something scary” story that’s presented in Cabin is utter genius with the reasoning behind the organisation that orchestrates the whole thing giving the film a grand scope and purpose that far exceeds anything else in its class. The final third of the film, where the big reveal takes place, is so extreme and yet so compelling that I found myself thinking about it long after the film was over. There are several scenes and pieces of dialogue that just stuck in my head and I found myself nicely disturbed by some of the content, though not because it was bloody or gory (which it is) but because the ideas presented are just horrific.

Humour is used extensively throughout The Cabin in the Woods and at times it feels almost like a comedy. Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins as the two engineers are at the heart of most of the funny sections and they play their parts well. I’ve been a long-time fan of Whitford’s ever since The West Wing and it was a delight to see him do so well in such a good film. The way he meets his fate is exquisite not just as a plotline but as an amazing special effect and fine piece of comedy! The humour is rampant but Cabin is firmly a horror film and there are scenes that are absolutely not for the squeamish with visuals and sound effects that will make you squirm.

One thing does give me pause about The Cabin in the Woods, and that’s the writer Drew Goddard. He was the man who wrote the creature feature Cloverfield and as people who know me know, I had a bit of a rough time with that movie and I am now deeply concerned that the same thing might be happening again. I saw Cloverfield in the cinema and I loved it. I mean I LOVED it! I went mad for that movie and thought it was one of the best things I’d ever seen. When it came out on DVD I bought it the day it was released, that’s how much I loved it. Imagine how utterly crushed I was when I brought the DVD home, sat down to watch it, and realised half way through that it was shite. As a once off, Cloverfield was awesome, but once you knew how it ended you could never enjoy the film in the same way again. Cloverfield was no Usual Suspects, there was no compelling plot that was made the better for knowing the ending; there was never going to be a reason to watch Cloverfield over and over again and love it more each time. Cloverfield was shit. I hope and pray that The Cabin in the Woods is better the next time I see it because right now, to me, it’s high concept horror at it’s best.

Two Thumbs Firmly Up for The Cabin in the Woods.

Some Links in the Woods:
Official Site: http://discoverthecabininthewoods.com/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabin_in_the_Woods
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259521/

I would like someday to live in a big mansion style house, somewhere with lots of rooms that can each be dedicated to a specific task, like a music room, computer room, gaming room, maybe a little cinema, and so on. Considering how so many older house often have a spooky aspect to them it might be nice to have a room dedicated to seances, so when the local ghost hunting types turn up (usually around Hallowe’en) I could have a room all ready for them, nice and far away from the non-lunatics.

The Changeling starts off in late November in upstate New York, where a family on vacation are having car trouble and we meet John Russell (George C. Scott who you might know from Patton) and his wife and daughter pushing their car through the snow to get to a phone. While on the phone trying to get help, Russell witnesses the death of his wife and daughter in a freak traffic accident involving a truck skidding on the icy road.

Some months later Russell, an accomplished composer, packs up his home in New York and moves to Seattle to start teaching at the university there. He moves into an old Victorian mansion maintained by the local historical society and gets down to work and coming to terms with his tragic loss. The house is old and hasn’t been lived in for ages so it’s no shock to anyone that there are the occasional odd noises about the place. However, the noises grow in intensity and objects begin to move of their own accord to the point where Russell can’t ignore it.

He investigates the house and learns some of its past including its previous owners as well as discovering some rooms that haven’t been entered in nearly a century. One of the rooms seems to have belonged to a child and in there he uncovers a music box that plays a tune he had composed himself. Russell decides that there is something supernatural going on and he seeks help. A seance is held and a medium reveals that there is something unsettled, inhuman, and lurking in the house…

Scott’s performance as Russell in The Changeling is remarkable. In the early stages of the film he goes from happy family man to grieving father and husband with an honest depth that makes you really feel for him. The scene where he’s explaining the grieving process to his friends in Seattle is a particular triumph and displays his talent incredibly well. Once the activities in the house kick off you can see how and why he throws himself into getting to the bottom of the mystery as an obvious distraction to the pain he carries with him. All the while everything feels restrained, like Russell is normally the type to bottle up emotion and really only expresses himself through his music, which is how I imagine a lot of great artists and musicians must really be like.

The only failing with the film is in how the story shifts in emphasis from ghostly horror to a less supernatural mystery in the last third. All the effort expanded in creating such a wonderful atmosphere is glossed over once Russell starts to confront people with the things he knows. This is salvaged somewhat near the end but at that point the mood is gone. Regardless of this, The Changeling seems to have been the inspiration behind a lot of horror films that came after it, with the likes of The Ring heavily inspired by many of the concepts present, giving The Changeling a far-reaching legacy that is to be admired.

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for The Changeling.

Changeable Links:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080516/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(film)

Beginning in Texas, USA, The Wicker Tree (2010) sees virgin country-pop singing sensation Beth Boothby and her equally untouched fiancé Steve preparing for a trip to Scotland where they intend to spread the good word in keeping with their evangelical Christian born-again stance on life. In Scotland they are put up by Sir Lachlan Morrison and his wife who provide them with access to and credibility among the local heathens even as the media drag up Beth’s less than wholesome past.

Beth and Steve try out their door to door brand of God-bothering in the more urban areas of southern Scotland and are totally ignored. Switching to the countryside they get a warmer welcome but are confused by the natives interest in more pagan style religions, with many people claiming to worship a goddess in that hipp-dippy style of goddess worship where every little thing is the manifestation of the bitch, from a nearby river to the moon and everything in between.

As Beth and Steve encounter the locals their host, Lachlan, is busy with the nuclear power plant he runs, though his idea of running the place is really to continue to cover up an accident that happened some time previously, the result of which is a poisoned water table which has rendered everyone nearby sterile.

With May Day approaching, many of the villagers are busy with preparations for the festivities and Lachlan reveals to Beth and Steve that he wishes them to play very special roles as part of the fun, though he fails to mention exactly what’s expected of them…

A scene from Dobbin the Pantomime Horse’s little known Sex Tape

Apparently it is possible to get too much of a good thing. I’m not sure if that’s really the case. I wonder if you start off getting a load of a good thing and then that thing stops being good and that’s where the trouble kicks off? What if you were getting a load of a good thing and it kept getting better? Wouldn’t that be cool?

Somewhere in South America at the start of Outpost: Black Sun (2012), a rotten old geezer is awaiting death in a nursing home, whiling away the hours playing board games and forgetting things. A young woman called Helena turns up at the home to see this particular chap, claiming to be his niece. In fact, she turns out to be some sort of bad ass there to hurry up his dying process as he’s an old Nazi who’s been hiding out for years. She baulks at actually killing him as she’s after his old boss, the uber-Nazi Klausener, who ran the concentration camp where her grand parents died. After breaking his fingers and nicking some WW2 memorabilia from him, she splits when he gives her a lead on his old manager.

Travelling to Eastern Europe on the trail of Klausener, Helena hooks up with Wallace a scientist who is on a search of his own for a certain piece of long lost German built technology from the mid-nineteen forties. The part of the country they are in has become a restricted zone and there are a large number of military personnel operating in the area from a variety of unknown nations and other organisations. At the centre of the restricted zone is the item Wallace is after which is causing a large and ever-expanding magnetic field to cover the region for several miles and is somehow creating an army of reanimated Nazi’s.

Helena and Wallace travel into the zone as far as they can before the field causes their car to conk out. Moving ahead on foot they soon start to encounter un-dead Wehrmacht types before they encounter some quite alive soldiers who are making their way towards the same machine as Wallace is after, though they’re on a mission to disable it in order to stop the hoards of zombies before they march all over Europe.

It took a while for me to run into some Nazi zombies until they finally turned up for me in the first Outpost film. Once you’ve seen a Nazi zombie or two running around the Eastern European countryside there’s only one thing you want from that point in your life onwards. More Nazi Zombies!!!! Outpost: Black Sun delivers on all fronts, and then some!

The way the story moves from the end of the first film to the start of this one is excellent. When you see the details of the magnetic field expanding all over the place you know that there’ll be zombies everywhere and they’ll be right hard to kill. This develops the action aspects of the film well and once again the military details are great, from the way the squads of soldiers move to the way they shout “contact” whenever they start shooting up the place, even down to the look of the portable EMP weapons they carry around; everything feels just right even if it’s not all that accurate or in the case of the EMP even realistic.

Just like the first Outpost, and just like any film featuring lots of soldiers (like this one for example), telling everyone apart can be a hassle and ultimately not worth the effort, it’s better for everyone to just focus on the lead characters though in Black Sun the tried and tested trick of giving the soldiers uniquely identifying traits is employed, this time the squad are all from different parts of the UK, so there’s the squad leader with an educated neutral UK accent, the semi-psycho from Scotland (who gets the best lines), and the smart arse from London (who also gets some good dialogue). In the real British army there must be whole squads of lads from roughly the same place, so here’s hoping they never do anything to deserve having a film made about them because you’ll end up with another Black Hawk Down and not have a clue what’s happening.

Nazi Zombies make for excellent villains, making the most out of two of Hollywood’s old reliable baddies. Zombies have always been hard to deal with with the traditional approach to killing them being to remove the head or put a bullet through what’s left of the brain. In the Outpost movies the zombies have an electromagnetic aspect to them so there’s the added problem of needing to deal with that somehow, which is a nuisance to be sure but not insurmountable. What bothers me about the Nazi Zombies in both the Outpost films is that, when confronted with them, no-one tried pretending to be German, or a Nazi. If these guys are Nazi’s first, which they seem to be as they’re following a command structure, then surely if you could convince them you were on their side they should leave you alone, or at worst detain you for questioning? If these buckaroos are zombies first and foremost then that was a pretty stupid plan for continuing the Thousand Year Reich, even for Nazi’s, the masters of stupid fucking plans.

Two Thumbs Firmly Up for Outpost: Black Sun

Concentrate now, these Links are a gas:
Official Site: http://www.outpostblacksun.com/
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1418712/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_%28film%29#Sequel

This is notorious gobshite Jar Jar Binks:

Opinion on Jar Jar Binks splits fans of Star Wars into two camps: those who hate Jar Jar and those who really fucking hate Jar Jar. Whichever camp you belong to though, there is no denying that the three Star Wars prequels are just that, prequels. They start off with little orphan Anakin Skywalker, off out in the desert playing with robots and racing pods for fun, and follow him as he grows up into a fine young man committing genocide on a galactic scale for fun. If, on the other hand, in Episode 1 Anakin was a bloke in his late teens/early twenties, working on a farm for his uncle who then went off to fight in a galactic rebellion then it wouldn’t have been a prequel, it would have been a remake.

Across the barren, frozen wastelands of the South Pole, The Thing (2011), opens with three hardy Norwegian bucks travelling along in a snow cat following an unusual signal they’re receiving. As they speed along the ice, a crevice splits open and the snow cat tumbles into it. Wedged towards the bottom, the headlights shine onto something buried beneath the ice, something spaceship shaped.

The Norwegian dudes are part of a research team based down in Antarctica and the head of the team, Dr. Halvorson, recruits Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the chick from Final Destination 3) to come down to the Pole to check out the discovery as she’s some sort of top palaeontologist (and that’d be a useful expertise to have on the team if you thought that maybe dinosaurs had crashed their spaceship down there).

The team visit the ship under the ice and from there go to the research station to inspect a specimen of one of the creatures from the ship that had been recovered from the ice, which is why Kate is really there. The creature is a large, almost insectoid type thing (hence the name of the film) with arms and/or legs everywhere. Dr. Halvorson insists on getting a tissue sample from the beast before packing it off for proper investigation in a lab somewhere.

That night, all the gang are celebrating the fact that they’ve discovered proof of extraterrestrial life, when the creature in the ice rather predictably wakes up and bursts free of its chilly tomb. Once out and about the monster works its way through the members of the research team (literally works its way through them), hell bent on killing all round itself. With the number of dead stacking up, Kate and the remaining team members make the horrifying discovery that the creature is able to mimic other living things and that one of Norwegian lads might actually be from much further away than Norway…

The latest version of The Thing is nothing more than a remake tarted up as a prequel (proof of this comes in the opening titles where you find out that the film is called “The Thing” whereas the film it’s supposedly prequeling is called “The Thing“). The most damning evidence of all for this conclusion however comes from the piss-poor way the final scene was tacked onto the end of the movie in order to provide a bridge into the film it was allegedly preceding; honestly, the film was over and the credits had started to roll when suddenly an extra bit is cut in to deal with how the story gets to the opening scene of the 1982 film. It was as if the producers were sitting in the test screening back at the studio and when the film was over someone jumped up and went “Holy shit! This is meant to be a fucking sequel!!! How does this lead into the other fucking film? We can’t fucking release this! The nerds will fucking crucify us!” (In my imaginings Hollywood types tend to curse a lot).

Having acknowledged their blunder in not actually making a prequel at all but instead a bit of a remake, how does the 2011 The Thing stack up? Not too well I’m afraid. The original was a wonderfully stark, foreboding, isolated, lonely horror film with an original setting, quirky characters, and some excellent effects. The 2011 film uses the same premise, roughly the same setting, and adds three things to the original formula without any added benefit: a spaceship, a computer, and some women.

Allow me to to address the last item on that list first. The first The Thing was an all male affair. Set as it was in a research station in the South Pole in 1982, that was either incredibly accurate or woefully unrealistic; having never been to a research station in the South Pole in the early eighties I have no idea what the staffing levels were like when looked at by gender. However, as a film, it seemed realistic that those types of places were among the last bastions of truly sexist recruitment policies. In the 2011 film, the producers were quick to get a couple of girls into the mix and this I found to be far more sexist than if they’d left the cast all-dude.

Putting the couple of women into the film is an such an obvious difference from the first one that it draws your attention immediately and makes you wonder why it was done. Was it the case that the story was better told by having a strong heroine? Perhaps. Strong female characters are no different from strong male characters just as weak female characters are no different from weak male characters (lilly-livered nancy boys!). Was it a case of political correctness? This seems more likely; putting a woman front and centre does highlight the difference between the 2011 film and the 1982 film and so allows everyone to feel good about it. But this is a pretty cynical ploy to appease who exactly? Is there a strong lobby out there for more women in horror films? Last time I looked the vast majority of horror movies depended on girls being the most baddest bad-asses they can be so how could anyone who’s ever seen a film like this be worried that women are under-represented?

Maybe the idea was to get more women into the cinema to see The Thing? That’s possible, and almost reasonable, except none of the marketing materials for the film (that I saw anyway) indicated that there was a female protagonist. Perhaps, most sexist of all the possibilities, was that a leading lady was introduced as audiences were more likely to be afraid for her, believing that she wouldn’t be able to look after herself and was therefore in the most danger. This is, like I mentioned, the cornerstone of loads of horror films, but hardly any of those films were remakes (pretending to be prequels) that had a male lead replaced with a girl.

The overuse of CGI was inevitable for The Thing and in it’s own way not too bad. But when looked at in terms of the film it was claiming to lead into you see immediately how shitty an approach to effects CGI can be. The original film used extensive stop motion and model and make up effects with stunning results and is rightly held up as an example of how to do this sort of creature effects. The 2011 film used some physical models from what I could see, but still depended heavily on the old computer effects. What bothered me about the CGI is that the artificial nature of the technology removes any semblance of emotion from what you’re watching. When you see someone attacked by an amorphous alien creature that proceeds to consume their hapless victim’s living flesh you’re supposed to think “by Jesus, that looks sore!”, but if the effect is handled by a computer then it’s hard to feel too bad about some pixels on the screen getting all blurry.

My final gripe is with the spaceship. The ship kicks off this version of The Thing and kinda ends with it too (except for the tacked on scene mentioned above). Showing a spaceship removes all mystery surrounding the creature and what it’s up to. In the original movie the creature springs out of nowhere and scares the bejesus out of everyone, particularly the audience. With the ship on display from the get go, quickly followed up by an alien in a block of ice, all doubt about the nature of the creature is gone and it’s really just a waiting game until the killing starts. Not very scary at all, and not much of a prequel either.

Two Thumbs Down for The Thing (2011)

Links:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0905372/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%282011_film%29

I like a wide variety of musical types, bands, and singers, but I know that the bands and music I would consider to be my favourites do not appeal to everyone, as most people are plebs with no taste. Knowing that taste is such an important factor in music it takes a brave soul to set out to make a film, in or around the horror genre, about music and bands and things, as no matter what direction you go with it you’re likely to annoy someone. Unless the music you choose is Norwegian Black Metal as anyone with any class at all loves that shit.

Not for the first time, Jerry regrets not getting that job at the Apple store

Suck is not a musical but instead a film about music. As such, it depends heavily on cameo appearances from various rock stars playing either themselves or as full blown characters. Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, and Henry Rollins are among the recognisable faces that turn up during the film. Moby even appears as “Beef”, the dog-rough, tattooed lead singer of a meat orientated band from Buffalo, and he was good even though the follow up jokes about “eating Beef” fall a little flat, but he was also indicative of the trick the producers were trying to pull. Getting lots of famous people to pop up from time to time in a film like Suck distracts from the weaknesses the movie suffers from.

Suck is a small-time movie. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, many small movies are great, but Suck, regardless of all the famous people that they managed to get to appear in it, feels… small. The story is small, the settings are small, the effects are small… and it’s kinda shit too, but in a good way. The biggest thing about the film is its heart. The ideas are all OK and the general point of the film is quite fun, it’s just a shame that it wasn’t made by some people with a bit more talent. The best way I can put it is that Suck is one of those movies that will turn up late at night on the SyFy channel, if it hasn’t already.

That aside, there is still a lot to like about Suck and there are some quite funny moments and dialogue. Even some of the characters are quite compelling, especially Malcolm McDowell as the vampire hunter (though if I were him I’d be very worried about the state of my career after this flick and Halloween 2). I also liked the border crossing guard who’s a prick until he realises the guys are in a band so he lets them go as he was in a band himself and seeing Jennifer throw up into her bag really brings him back. Jennifer also gets one of the lines of the film where she asks for help and bluntly states that she wants someone to dismember a body and dispose of it.

Parody can be surprisingly dangerous when it doesn’t take itself seriously enough as it can move towards standard issue comedy. Scream had quite a light touch regarding its inspiration; it had to otherwise all you had was another Scary Movie, which were great in their own right, but far more heavy handed. Scream was about homage and entertainment and a good fright. The biggest dangers faced by the Scream franchise was that it would end up getting mean, sloppy, and purely money driven; in other words too much like the films it was based on.

Continuing the story some time after the events of the second film, Scream 3 kicks off with Cotton Weary, the kinda baddie from earlier in the series, receiving one of the iconic Scream phone calls that tells him that a killer is waiting for him at his home in Hollywood. Worried about his girlfriend, Cotton hurries home where the ghostface killer is indeed waiting and who proceeds to murder Cotton and his missus.

 

 

 

With the setting moved to Hollywood the movie couldn’t help itself and focused more on the oddities of that city and the type of people who live there instead of worrying itself about giving the audience a good old fright. As a comedy set in Hollywood Scream 3 bears a striking resemblance not to any of the Scary Movies, which is the now obvious comparison, but more to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, to the point that there are a lot of cameos in Scream 3 taken straight from that film, cameos like Carrie Fisher as well as Jay and Silent Bob themselves, I shit you not!

Fucking Jay & Silent Bob in Scream 3

As part three in the series a big deal is made about movie trilogies and the rules that allegedly govern them; things like how all the rules are changed and even main characters can be killed off. With all the talk about trilogies in the film they leave out the obvious – that a lot of third films are not wanted. Some are, like when the second two films in a series are really a two part story themselves, like Empire and Jedi or even the less well loved Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, but most are more like the third X-Men or Spider-Man movies. Just like the worst trilogies that overplay something, with Scream 3, you’ve had your fill of people getting stabbed to death, it was really time for something new.

The acting is atrocious, Courtney Cox is diabolical in Scream 3, and dragging out the same old core characters and then adding in some new ones is too simple a ploy – if a character wasn’t in the last film then their chances of surviving this one were slim from the outset. The characters in Scream 3 are so weak they even had to squeeze in characters from earlier films that were dead, that’s how hard up they were.

Something has always bothered me about the Scream films and it really bothered me third time out. There was never a supernatural element to the Scream films, all the baddies were people with murderous tendencies. So, knowing this, why was everyone so scared and acted so stupidly? Never mind running up stairs why didn’t someone try punching the fucker with the knife? Or better yet hitting them with a big stick? For the most part, everyone just runs around screaming and then dies. Probably as they were ready to do anything to get out of this crock of shit film.

Two Thumbs Firmly Down for Scream 3

I really enjoy a good urban legend. I like those mad stories of how someone stuck a razor blade into an apple given out to trick or treaters on Hallowe’en (like in Halloween 2 – actually, according to Snopes.com that story is true!), or the story about the escaped lunatic beating on the roof of a car with the head of its missing driver, or the one about the groom walking out of his wedding after revealing that the bride and best man were really good friends. Some of those tall tales are just plain funny while some of them are really quite horrific, so of course there’s a movie or two about urban legends.

The cleverly named Urban Legend (1998) opens on a wonderfully clichéd “dark and stormy night” that you don’t really see that often in films. University student Michelle is driving home from somewhere on the night in question and stops for go-go juice. The petrol station attendant is more than a little creepy though that’s largely due to his ramshackle appearance and speech impediment. He manages to lure Michelle inside the petrol station under the false pretence that there’s a problem with her credit card and that the card company are on the phone and need to speak with her. When Michele realises that there’s no one on the phone and that the attendant wants something unmentionable from her, she makes a break for it and speeds away in her jeep, just as the attendant overcomes his stutter to shout that there’s someone on the back seat!

Whoever it was hiding in the car murders Michelle with an axe and sets of a chain of events on the campus of Pendleton University, where we meet Natalie and her student chums, Brenda, Parker, Sasha, and Paul (Jared Leto – I’m only mentioning the famous actors this time). Parker regales the rest of the bunch with a story about one of the student halls of residence on the campus that is now closed as a result, Parker claims, of a massacre that took place there about twenty five years previously.

The next day, Paul gets into a spot of bother with the university authorities who are not happy that he’s written a front page article for the campus newspaper detailing the murder of one of the students by an axe-weilding psycho and are censoring him by stopping the distribution of the paper. It’s from the newspaper that Natalie finds out about the murder and she’s pretty upset by it. That night she goes for a drive with another of the group, Damon (Joshua Jackson – from Fringe and some other soppy girly shite from a few years back), who uses the opportunity to make a move on Natalie. She rejects him and he steps out of the car to answer the call of nature before returning to the college. While outside the car Damon is attacked and left hanging from a tree with the other end of the rope tied to the car. The killer startles Natalie and she attempts to drive away, thus killing Damon in the process.

With Michelle and now Damon dead in ways that resemble well known urban legends it quickly becomes apparent to Natalie that there’s something very wrong on campus and she tries to warn her friends, but they’re not too inclined to heed her warnings despite the danger to themselves…

There’s a lot to like about Urban Legend, much like the legends themselves. Urban legends, or modern folklore, or whatever you want to call them are fun, scary stories that are designed to frighten a little in order to teach a lesson about the hazards of modern living and as such form a great basis for a horror film. With such great source material the only real challenge to making a film about urban legends is how to tie them all together into a complete story. In Urban Legend they manage to do that quite nicely and, almost, believably, though due to the quantity of legends used it does feel like all you’re doing is lurching from one legend to the next.

The legends used in the film are all quite low-key and therefore didn’t overly tax the effects department. Unfortunately, those types of legends don’t offer much in the way of scares either when you see them on the screen, even though they might be quite powerful when told in front of the fire on a dark night, or in the break room of a stormy Tuesday afternoon. 

Urban Legend occurred at a perfect time for films of this kind as a lot of TV shows had created minor stars of people who were around the right age to be in a film like this and at the same time horror was going through a bit of a resurgence. Particularly worthy of note were Jared Leto as Paul, Alicia Witt as Natalie, Robert Englund (yes, the Freddie Kruger Robert Englund) as the Professor, and even Joshua Jackson (from Dawson’s Creek) turned in the right kind of performance.

As you might imagine there’s a a load of trivia associated with this film (check out the links below for more details) and a lot of urban legends are referenced throughout the film without being major plot points. Other little bits feature and I especially liked the  Dawson’s Creek joke at Jackson’s expense (when he starts his car the theme music from that show is playing on the radio) but they could have made more of Robert Englund’s past.

Urban Legend is an enjoyable, harmless little movie with lots of details you might recognise, much like the stories that inspired the film.

One Up and One Thumb Down for Urban Legend.

Here are some Links that actually happened to my cousins room-mates dogs groomers best friend:
Snopes: http://www.snopes.com
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Legend_%28film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146336/

A non-event is a terrible thing. That awful feeling that you get when something you were hoping would be really good or exciting turns out to be dull as dishwater can be so crushingly disappointing that it can ruin your entire day if you let it. Anyone who looks forward to anything in life is setting themselves up for a let down from time to time but if the only alternative is to never get excited over things then you are better off running that risk; that’s really living!

The Pact (2012) opens on a downer, with a young woman called Nicole planning her mother’s funeral. Nicole is trying to get her sister Annie to come home in order to attend the funeral and to help sort out the house. Neither Annie nor Nicole were particularly fond of their dear departed mum but Annie is adamant that she’s not going to bother going.

One night, shortly before the funeral, Nicole is disturbed by something in the house and goes to investigate and that’s the last we or anyone else sees of her. Annie does make it to the funeral but Nicole never shows, instead she meets her cousin Liz who’d been looking after Nicole’s young daughter Eva. All three of them stay in the house that night and try to figure out where Nicole may be, assuming that she’d gone back to the old drug loving ways of her youth.

That night there’s a series of disturbances in the house and Annie is attacked by some violent, invisible force. Liz vanishes from the house and Annie flees with the child. Annie goes to the police to report the two disappearances and the events in the house but, unsurprisingly, they’re not inclined to believe her. One of the law men, Bill Creek (Casper Van Dien) thinks that Annie had something to do with the disappearances herself and invented her story to deflect blame.

Unwilling to stay in the house, Annie stays at a motel the next night and sees a series of odd visions. Annie investigates further and goes through her mothers papers. She discovers a set of blueprints for her mothers house and notices that they feature a room in the house that she was unaware of despite having grown up there.

Seeking help from an unusual source, Annie contacts a girl, Stevie, who she was in high school with who allegedly possessed psychic powers. Annie gets her to visit the house and go into the newly uncovered room. Stevie has a grand mall spaz attack and repeats the name Judas over and over again before she’s dragged out of the house  by one of her friends.

Looking into the name Judas on-line, Annie finds the usual biblical references and also a mention of a serial killer operating in her neighbourhood several years prior and who had a strong link to her family…

I have as of today seen The Pact twice, having managed to catch it in the cinema when it was first released. This is not a film for the cinema (I certainly didn’t enjoy it there anyway) but I thought it might be worth a second look in just in case I’d missed something, or that maybe the cinema setting had just been too much for a small film. After taking that second look it’s clear that The Pact has a lot of troubles stemming from one all-encompassing one.

The biggest problem is that there’s fuck all to say about The Pact. It’s slow, dragged out, shit that has a dodgy start, poor middle, and weak ending. There’s little to redeem it and so little goes on in it that there’s not much to actually review.

While it’s a common complaint for a lot of films, in The Pact it is especially hard to find any level of sympathy for anybody in the film. The two sisters Nicole and Annie had a tough childhood. So what? None of that’s explained anywhere so you never know what it was they went through. Maybe they were terribly abused or maybe they just didn’t get that pony they wanted for Christmas. I don’t know, so I don’t care.

There’s something spooky in the house that makes people vanish and it has something to do with a serial killer no one’s ever heard of that has some connection to the girls family. Yawn. There’s a supernatural element that is going somewhere, all to do with a restless spirit guiding Annie to some much needed resolution; but suddenly, there’s a rational explanation for everything and the ghostly happenings are all forgotten, not that it really matters. The whole ninety-odd minutes is jam packed wall to wall with shit you don’t care about because the film is just so boring due to the incredibly slow pacing.

The Pact is a stunningly slow film; it’s so slow and dragged out it should be shown to the terminally ill in an effort to drag out their final days as while it’s only an hour and a half long it feels like days pass during a viewing. The Pact has to be one of the best non-event movies of all time.

There are one or two positive things to be said about The Pact. There are some half-decent attempts at scares so maybe 7/10 for effort on that front, but it just takes too long to get to them and the gaps between the interesting bits are intolerable. The other highlight was seeing Casper Van Dien getting work again as the cop Bill Creek, and he has by far the best line of the film, though if you liked him in Sleepy Hollow or Starship Troopers, then it would be best if you avoid watching The Pact, not that it has anything to do with Casper Van Dien, it’s just that it’s shite.

Two Thumbs Down for The Pact.

Casper Van Links:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2040560/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pact_%282012_film%29

Horror is supposed to be shocking, that’s kinda the point. In developing a shock or fright the makers of a movie need to play on fear and make the audience uncomfortable, that way, when things turn out to be OK and the viewer realises that they’re safe and well, they’ll get a warm fuzzy feeling and will decide that they like the film they’re watching. There must be loads and loads of ways to make an audience feel uncomfortable but some might not be best used in a film designed for entertainment purposes.

The start of Chernobyl Diaries (2012) introduces us to to a bunch of young American’s, Chris, Natalie, and Amanda,  travelling across Europe to meet Chris’ brother Paul in Kiev. Chris is planning to propose to his girlfriend Natalie in Moscow and has brought Amanda along to help her get over a recent break up (which is pretty fucking sinister really. I mean, “Hi Amanda, I know you’ve just moved to splitsville but would you mind dragging across Europe so you can watch me propose to my long term girlfriend in a massively romantic gesture?” What a prick Chris is! I liked him from the start!).

Once in Kiev we’re introduced to Paul who is a bit of a gobshite. He’s been living in Kiev for a while and has gotten to know a local dude, Uri, who runs an “Extreme Tourism” business, though he really only seems to offer one tour and that’s of the city of Prypiat about 100km away. What makes the tour so extreme is that Prypiat is the town where the workers and families of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant used to live and the city has been deserted ever since the hurried forced evacuation in 1986.

Uri has two other customers for the Prypiat tour, an Aussie called Michael and his girlfriend Zoe, and they and the rest of the gang pile into Uri’s cold war era van and head off on their tour. Uri is an ex-military type and he knows the guards manning the checkpoint into the exclusion zone around the city but that doesn’t mean they’re prepared to let him in, stating that there’s “maintenance” going on. Uri is a resourceful bloke so he takes a less known route through the forest into the deserted city.

Prypiat turns out to be a fascinating ghost town and everyone is impressed and a little awed by the desolation. Even Uri’s lame jokes strike a cord and a good time is had. The good vibes soon vanish when the group are startled by a large bear roaming around in one of the apartment blocks and they decide to leave, only something in Prypiat doesn’t want them to go…

Why did it take 26 years for a film like Chernobyl Diaries to be made? The answer is pretty obvious really. Because it’s a massively insensitive exploitation of a film, that’s why. Everything about this film is about praying on the intended audiences (i.e. non-Ukrainian teenagers) lack of knowledge about Eastern Europe, the Chernobyl accident, the effects of radiation, and the trustworthiness of former USSR ex-special forces dudes.

Believing that the audience would be utterly clueless when watching Chernobyl Diaries gave the film-makers incredible freedom to use the old style soviet city in any way they liked. The setting of Prypiat is undeniably awesome, but the poor buggers didn’t have a clue what to do with it.

Setting a film in and around Chernobyl really gives you three options:

1. Monsters: creatures like Godzilla or the beastie from Cloverfield, some hideous genetically altered animal created by the fallout from the reactor meltdown
2. Ghosts: of the now dead inhabitants – there are some issues with this as I for one have no clue how many people actually died in Prypiat at the time of the accident or subsequently after they’d moved away, but there’s certainly no big harm in having some phantoms causing a stir in the (old) USSR as you could make them quite sympathetic characters
3. Mutants: The safest bet on the surface and the one ran with in Chernobyl Diaries, but also the most controversial as the events there took place well within living memory there are some people living with deformities as a result, and labelling anyone who suffered in or after Prypiat as villains is treading on thin ice. Mutated people tend not to be all that scary either as once you hear the explanation for what happened to them you’ll start to feel sorry for them (unless it was their own fault, and no one was going to use that argument in a film about Chernobyl).

Choice of antagonists aside, Chernobyl Diaries is well made. The sets are spectacular and really do invoke those documentary images of the empty city that you see on the Discovery Channel every April around the anniversary of the explosion. It’s by no means one of those first person perspective films, unlike the director Oren Peli’s other well known work Paranormal Activity, but there are one or two scenes of video camera footage and they work well to add an air of realism to the film.

The characters and actors behind them are likeable enough, normal types, nothing too special. The presence of an Australian tourist is a nice touch as those fuckers get everywhere. The issue with the the characters is, like far too many of these films, that they aren’t written or presented in a way that makes you give a shit about them or even want to give a shit about them. This simple problem, not making more out of the characters other than victims in waiting, starts a rot in a film like Chernobyl Diaries that overwhelms it and eventually brings it down.

Chernobyl Diaries fails to frighten as no sense of dread could be established and maintained for long enough for it to work. Out of all the people in the film the only one I liked and wanted to see more of was Uri the tour guide. It’s not that there was a lot of depth to him or anything, it’s just that he had a cool van and a shooter, and in Chernobyl Diaries that made him the most interesting person in the whole production.

As a result of the real life disaster in Chernobyl, a lot of people got very sick and died or passed along severe health issues to their children. There’s no sensitive way to deal with that in the setting of a horror film which is probably why the makers of Chernobyl Diaries didn’t bother trying. Why they didn’t bother making a film that was more than just mediocre is another question.

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for Chernobyl Diaries.

Ось деякі посилання про фільм минулої ночі і в Чорнобильській благодійність:
Chernobyl Children International: http://www.chernobyl-international.com/index.aspx
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Diaries
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1991245/

Some people are batshit crazy. There’s no easy way to say it and there’s definitely no politically correct way to say it (no matter how hard you try), some people are just loopy. Screwballs. Nutters. Line workers at the puzzle factory. Thankfully, no matter what mental malady a person may be suffering from they can always turn that condition into an asset and secure employment as a provider of psychiatric care to other psychos.

Set on October 31st 1978, the same Halloween night as in the first film, Halloween 2 (1981) continues the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as she and wacky, incompetent, psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) confront Michael Myers. Loomis finally gives up on all those years of medical training and experience and just shoots Myers as he remembers to old adage about how doctors can hide their mistakes in the graveyard.Loomis isn’t a bad shot and manages to pump six rounds into Myers but is horrified to discover that Myers hasn’t been stopped and has managed to escape.

The emergency services arrive and take Laurie off to the hospital and Loomis off to search for Myers, who’s out and about in downtown Haddonfield and finds the time to murder a girl before discovering that Laurie, the one that got away, has been taken to the hospital. Now knowing where she is, and for some unknown reason, obsessed with her, Mike heads off to the hospital to get Laurie.

Laurie is in a right old state after the night she’s just had, and has a couple of broken bones and a stab wound so the doctor looking after her has dosed her to the eyeballs with some sedatives. While under, Laurie experiences visions of a young boy in a mental hospital and more disturbingly of her own apparent adoption by her parents.

Myers makes his way to the hospital and once there he starts into his usual brand of mayhem, by cutting off the phones, slashing the tyres of the cars in the parking lot, and then getting down to some wholesale murder, working his way through the hospital staff to get to Laurie.

Loomis meanwhile is off with the Sheriff and makes some shocking discoveries about Myers’ true nature and that of his family…

It’s no secret that I don’t think much of the original Halloween from back in 1978, and that I believe that people who bang on about it being a great horror film have probably never seen it. However, when it hit the cinemas in the late seventies, people did go to see it in their droves and so it spawned a handful of sequels. In going about putting together a sequel it must be very easy to just do enough to get by, safe in the knowledge that the cash will come tumble in regardless of whatever crap gets flung at the screen.

Everybody knows the deal with sequels so no one really expects that much from them. Of course, the film-makers know that expectations are going to be low for a second film in a series so if they want to cause a stir all they have to do is make a decent film. There have been one or two cases of this in the past but they are extremely rare. Halloween 2 is not one of those rare films, it was never going to create a stir by being stunningly good, but it is actually quite good. No, to call it good is a bot too much, actually, it’s not that its good its more that it’s not completely shit.

The way the film continues the story in such a literal way, by recapping the final moments of the first film and then carrying on, seems like a risky move for a film of this calibre but it paid off. The join between the two films is almost seamless and you’re sucked back into the events of that October 31st very quickly. I do wonder what it would be like to watch the two films one after the other as I can only imagine that a whole pile of mistakes and continuity errors must have crept into the second film that you’d only be aware of after a recent viewing of the first film.Without that “luxury” I didn’t really notice anything glaring and certainly nothing that would have ruined the enjoyment of the film.

A couple of good choices in the plot really helped Halloween 2. Jamie Lee Curtis’ character Laurie isn’t in it that much, despite being the focus of the whole thing, which is good as she’d gone from being a dowdy cow in the first film to being a dowdy cow in a hospital gown in the second. Donald Pleasance as Loomis seems to be in Halloween 2 a lot more then he was in the first one, which is good because he’s madder then the patients he’s allegedly treating (that is if shooting them multiple times, reloading, and shooting them some more can be classed as “treatment” – Loomis’ medical competency once again gets called into question every time he opens his mouth in this flick).

There are some other nice touches in Halloween 2, like the people of Haddonfield finally copping on to the fact that there’s been a lot of murders in the area overnight and that those left alive in the town either know the victims or are related to them! There’s also a clever in joke about a mother taking her young son to the hospital in the middle of all the action. The young lad in question is dressed like a cowboy and has obviously been out trick or treating and has fallen victim to the urban legend of someone sticking a razor blade into an apple. It’s a sick joke but perfect for a Halloween movie.

Overall the effects are somewhat muted as is the violence, for a brutal killing machine Myers seems a little bit squeamish.This reduces Myers effectiveness as a villain and that only serves to draw the audiences attention to the fact that Halloween 2, despite its good points, is a little bit boring; once thing that really sticks out is that there’s just too much of the film set in the hospital as so little goes on there for such a long time, and all during that time hardly any of the main characters feature.

Halloween 2 (1981) does well for a sequel in its class and it’s certainly miles better then the remake/reboot Halloween 2 (2009). This is a film made a little bit for entertainment but mostly for cashing in but it can still teach us something; be really, really careful where you get psychiatric help from as some shrinks will only make matters worse, just ask Michael Myers.

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for Halloween 2

Jamie Links Curtis:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_2
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082495/

When writing a story choosing where the action takes place is all important. Some great films have used unusual settings to emphasise key points in the plot, like Dawn of the Dead occurring in a shopping mall of all places, Devil taking place in a lift, and The Haunting in Connecticut happening in… well, Connecticut.

Based on the video game of the same name, Silent Hill (2006) kicks off with a young girl, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) off out sleepwalking one night. Her mother Rose (Radha Mitchell) and her dad Christopher (Sean Bean no less) chase after her across roads and fields and when they final catch up to her she’s murmuring the words “Silent Hill” in her sleep. It turns out that this is a frequent occurrence and poor old Sharon is always banging on about Silent Hill without understanding why she’s doing it.

Rose and Chris, who it turns out are not Sharon’s biological parents but rather adopted Sharon not too long ago, are getting rightly pissed off that the kid they got is turning out to be faulty. Chris wants to bring the girl to the doctors as he thinks she’s just a little bit loopy and some nice pharmaceuticals will sort her out. Rose, on the other hand, thinks there’s more to this whole Silent Hill thing and begins to look into what it means. Discovering a that Silent Hill is actually a town not too far away, Rose sets off with Sharon one day to see what she can find out.

Silent Hill turns out to be an abandoned mining town, abandoned due to the massive subterranean mine fire that has been raging for the past thirty years. Rose manages to arose the suspicions of a local bike cop, Cybil Bennet (Laurie Holden) who follows her into the town. On the way in both Rose and the cop suffer separate accidents and awake to find themselves stuck in Silent Hill as fog and ash obscures everything, with young Sharon missing.

Rose begins to search for Sharon and as she looks around the town she discovers that Silent Hill is not exactly deserted, the inhabitants aren’t all exactly human, and that there’s a very sinister link between her daughter and that strange town.

Any film based on a video game is going to have a hard time to get passed the material that inspired it as fans of that game are going to make up the first section of the audience that the film makers are aiming for. This is a bit of an odd idea when you think about it. If you’re a big fan of a game you know its story, and if you’re any good at it (or just plugged away it it for long enough) then you know how the story ends. For those not familiar with the game, like me, any film has to stand or fall on it’s own merits, and in the case of Silent Hill it falls with a big splat.

Silent Hill is one of those tragically shit films that took a solid idea and wiped it’s arse with it. The basic storyline isn’t spectacular really, just a bunch of odd goings on in a remote town with a relatively mundane cause behind them, but what was a brilliant plot device was setting the action in a town evacuated because of a mine fire. You see, there really is a town like that, though it’s not called Silent Hill, in fact it’s really called Centralia and it was the other inspiration behind the film.

A ghost town is a magnificently creepy setting for a horror film made even better with the addition of the fires of hell literally burning under the ground and spewing out poisonous gases everywhere. With a location like that you’d imagine that any old gobshite would be able to make a scary movie there, but the gobsites they got for Silent Hill weren’t any old gobshites, they were the extra special Hollywood kind that can ruin anything.

Silent Hill is basically a filmed version of a video game complete with CGI monsters at every turn, platforms and obstacles to be overcome, and even end of level bosses to be defeated. This video game style narrative leaves nothing surprising in the plot and so Silent Hill is in no way frightening. There are a couple of decent gory bits, usually revolving around people either on fire or having been on fire but there’s no scare worth mentioning and nothing to make you jump.

The performances are shoddy in the extreme, with not even Sean Bean able to elevate this crap-fest despite his best efforts at an American accent (which is always funny to hear him do). Silent Hill is notable for the fact that at no point in the film does Sean Bean’s character die, which is one of the few horror aspects present in the whole sorry effort. The only other cast members worth mentioning are Laurie Holden as the cop as she plays Andrea in The Walking Dead, and Alice Krige as the head baddie as she was in Star Trek: First Contact though I only mention these two for the trivia factor as they were as bad as everyone else in Silent Hill.

Silent Hill is a terrible film, but worse then that, it’s a real missed opportunity; the team behind the film had the chance to make a defining ghost town film with an excellent setting but went for the easy option and simply made the film of the game. However, they have hopefully inspired someone else to take a look at a mine fire town to set a horror film in, and that tiny sliver of hope is the only thing keeping Silent Hill from the very bottom of the barrel.

Two Thumbs Down for Silent Hill.

Silent Links:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_%28film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384537/

Back in the mid-nineties there was a band called Space who released a song called Neighbourhood. In this song, they detailed all the little secrets of the people living in their area, spilling the beans on how everyone in the locale was mad in their own little way. I like this tune because I like the idea that you can never tell what dirty little goings on occur behind closed doors. There’s something delicious about the notion that on those who go out and about wearing a mask of respectability could be up to anything when they’re at home, and whatever it is it’s probably disgusting!

Set in a very odd suburb of Las Vegas, Fright Night (2011) opens with a teenage boy roaming around his house during what appears to be a bloody home invasion. His parents and sister are dead and he seeks refuge from their attackers by hiding under his parents bed, a not altogether stupid strategy as his Dad keeps a gun under the mattress. As he struggles with the trigger lock, the bed is pulled away and he is taken by the attacker, who doesn’t look at all like your regular criminal.

The next young man we meet is Charley (played by Anton Yelchin – you may know him as Chekov from the latest Star Trek movie), an apparently quite popular young lad who’s popularity is growing further thanks to his romantic entanglement with the attractive Amy (played by Imogen Poots – you may know her as Tammy, the girl from 28 Weeks Later). Charley lives with his mother Jane in that same unusual suburb after his Dad did a runner. Jane is a real estate agent and she’s just off loaded the house next door to construction worker Jerry (played by Colin Farrell – you may know him from Daredevil or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus). Jerry is a bit of a charmer and manages to catch Jane’s eye though at first this doesn’t bother Charley as Jerry seems pretty cool.

At school, Charley’s social status has been steadily improving ever since he started shunning his geeky friends in favour of a more in crowd, which seems to have been a factor in his snaring Amy as a girlfriend. However, one of his old nerdy chums, Ed (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse who you may know as Red Mist from Kick-Ass), just won’t go away and Charley is forced into talking to him. Ed is worried about the number of kids who’ve been missing school lately and wants Charley to come with him to find out if one of them, who Ed and Charley once hung out with, is OK.

Their investigation reveals nothing, as the friends house is deserted. Ed reveals that he has a theory about the kids and Charley’s new neighbour. He’s convinced that Jerry is in fact a vampire and he’s the reason so many are missing. Charley decides that enough’s enough and goes home, leaving Ed to get home himself. On the way, Ed runs into Jerry who is in fact a creature of the night and who turns Ed into a bloodsucker.With Ed now missing, Charley slowly starts to believe that there might be something suspicious about the pale man next door who only works after dark and won’t come in unless he’s invited…

The 2011 edition of Fright Night is a loyal update of the 1985 original, but not just in terms of following the original script, but also by keeping true to the spirit of the first movie. The story is faithfully handled and modernised nicely without trampling all over the important elements, and while it wasn’t a slavish adaptation there were some very recognisable parts up to whole scenes that came almost straight from the ’85 flick.

The Acting was all top-notch with David Tennant providing a real surprise, and a good one as he was excellent as the re-imagined Peter Vincent (this time an extreme magician type who collects supernatural stuff as opposed to a late-night TV show host). Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots both handled their roles very well, though it was a little hard at times to believe that a bloke like him was going out with a girl like her.

There is a high level of humour in Fright Night but, much like the original, it’s sometimes pretty subtle so I’m not sure if you could classify Fright Night as a flat-out comedy, it’s more like a light hearted horror. A film like that could never deliver any real scares and Fright Night is no exception; this is a film about fun with only mild hints of horror, though the way the way Jerry holds onto his victims for a while in order to feed off them slowly is a pretty disturbing thought.

The whole production is stylishly crafted, and I particularly liked the graphics and music used for the opening and end credits which included one of those songs that features sound clips from the film, the type of track that was once really popular in the 1980’s but that you don’t get with a lot of films any more.

Fight Night would have gotten my top rating but for two things. Firstly, it was made for 3D so there’s too many shots of things flying towards the viewer, blood splatters and the like. This leads to the second problem, as in order to get those splatters to go in the right direction it was necessary to turn to CGI to get the job done. While the effects department had the PC warmed up for that task, they then decided to do a few other bits and pieces, including some of the vampire effects, which is unfortunate as it severely reduced the impact of the vampires by making them more like something from a Sci Fi film then a horror; a solid make-up effect would have been a much better choice.

Sadly, these shortcomings are enough to lower the score as they do break you out of the action as you shout “for fuck’s sake” at the screen every time it happens, but they don’t ruin the film entirely. The remake of Fright Night is an enjoyable, fun, and stylish movie that keeps the vampire tradition alive, much like the original did.

Two Thumbs Up for Fright Night (2011)

Hiya Colin Farrell – all the Links say he’s pretty fly… for an Irish guy:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fright_Night_%282011_film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1438176/