Tag 2010s

Monster Brawl (2011)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , , , April 5th, 2013 @ 9:25 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Jesse T. Cook

  • Writer: Jason David Brown (story), Jesse T. Cook (story)

  • Starring: Dave Foley, Art Hindle, Robert Maillet,Jimmy Hart

  • Run Time: 89 mins

Monster Brawl (2011)

It’s the fight of the living dead!

Eight classic monsters fight to the death in an explosive wrestling tournament set inside an abandoned and cursed graveyard.

 

That’s about as much story as you’re going to get from Monster Brawl. It’s an ill-fated film with a one-note idea – that of some sort of WWE-style professional wrestling organisation featuring classic horror monsters doing battle with each other – but it doesn’t work as a feature film in the slightest and seems to have been aimed squarely at wrestling fans. Quite simply, this has no real business being classed as a film and it’s more like watching a pay-per-view wrestling event with a handful of matches on the card.

The entire narrative is strung together by the two commentators who attempt to keep the film somewhat cohesive. But there are no character arcs to follow, no plot threads which unwind and no real centrepieces to the film. This gives Monster Brawl a very weird pace but again, it’s supposed to be aping a typical pay-per-view event so you’ll get the big attraction matches every so often with a load of filler build-up in between, as interviews and backstage clips of the competitors attempt to build the next match. Whilst it’s all done with a good heart, it doesn’t make for compelling film. Even the monsters are just there or thereabouts – nothing much is said about them, they have no real back stories or characters. It all makes for a very disjointed film which has no pace whatsoever and no real hook to keep the viewer interested.

To begin with, and the film’s biggest weakness, is that Monster Brawl requires wrestling knowledge, thus immediately alienating a lot of its potential fan base. I am a wrestling fan so it wasn’t rocket science to me to know what is going on but for novices or those with no interest in the ‘sport’ it’s going to be a bit of an ask to understand all of the in-jokes, references and actually give two hoots about what is happening. Plus there is the glaring fact that there is a lot of wrestling! Whilst a film series like Rocky managed to turn its boxing matches into exciting spectacles that non-boxing fans could watch without fuss, it also had characters and story driving them along. There are no characters here save for the two commentators and given the nature of the film, there is never any intention to develop them. Therefore the wrestling matches look just like those you’d seen on television.

The roster of monsters for the film reads as follows: Frankenstein’s monster, a vampire, a swamp monster, a Cyclops, a zombie, a wolfman, a witch and a mummy.The old fashioned monsters vary in their appearance, though one would question the inclusion of such ‘famous’ monsters as the Cyclops as a bit of a cop-out. Where’s The Gill Man? Or even the Phantom of the Opera or Quasimodo? Frankenstein’s monster looks pretty bad ass and the intimidating man under the make-up, Robert Maillet, was a professional wrestler before he switched to making movies like 300 (as the Uber-Immortal).

In fact all of the people playing the monsters were or are wrestlers in real life. So at least the wrestling matches have some degree of choreography and suspension of disbelief to them.  Given that the costumes range from the cumbersome to the silly, the matches work better than they should do, though anyone expecting a Savage-Steamboat classic (commonly heralded as the greatest wrestling match of all time from Wrestlemania III) should perhaps think twice. At times the matches get embarrassing and really hammer home the ‘wrestling is fake’ stigma that many fans like me just cringe at hearing.

Wrestling alumni Jimmy ‘The Mouth of the South’ Hart and Kevin Nash appear in small roles, presumably questioning just how low their careers have dropped since the glory days of headlining main events in WWF/WWE and WCW. And the referee is played by real-life MMA official Herb Dean. Ironically the most famous wrestler in the film, Nash, doesn’t even get chance to bust out any of his famous moves and Hart is literally hanging around the ring for name recognition only and contributes nothing to the film whatsoever. But then again, nothing much does.

Speaking of plummeting careers, Lance Henriksen lends his voice to the film, reciting a load of voiceover soundbytes that could have been lifted out of a Mortal Kombat game. At least he didn’t have to appear in it!

 

Monster Brawl would have worked well as a series of Youtube vignettes but as a film, it’s just a non-starter. These are the sort of low brow gimmicked wrestling matches you might see at a circus or carnival where the novelty value will keep you entertained for one match or so but not for the entire show. As a wrestling fan, this was a major disappointment.

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Night of the Living Dead 3-D: Re-Animation (2012)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , March 17th, 2013 @ 6:49 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Jeff Broadstreet

  • Writer: Jeff Broadstreet, Robert Valding (certain characters created by)

  • Starring: Andrew Divoff, Jeffrey Combs, Sarah Lieving, Robin Sydney

  • Run Time: 88 mins

Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation (2012)

The beginning of the end

Gerald Tovar Jr. runs a remote mortuary and has a problem – the dead bodies just won’t stay dead after being exposed to toxic waste. He tries his best to keep this undead epidemic a secret from his employees. But his snooping brother Harold turns up demanding money after he feels he was wronged in their late father’s will and stumbles upon Gerald’s secret.

 

Seriously? Like the army of the undead that continues to plague the market, so too do the hack merchants who continue to leech off the inimitable George A. Romero and his original classic zombie trilogy. If it’s not John A. Russo butchering the original in his Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition complete with newly shot footage, it’s the duo of Ana Clavell and James Dudelson making truly woeful sequels in Day of the Dead 2: Contagium and now Jeff Broadstreet almost single-handedly trying to make an entirely new franchise around the Night of the Living Dead mantra.

Unfortunately, back in the 1960s George A. Romero, John Russo and their company failed to properly protect the copyright on Night of the Living Dead which has led to the film being in the public domain for years and which allows any pretentious hack job with a camera and some money the opportunity to use the name and create their own spin on the project. It must be heartbreaking for Romero to see his work pulverised and desecrated so often and without so much as a hint of a royalties cheque. Night of the Living Dead 3D Re-Animation has nothing to do with Romero’s original so the question needs to be asked – if it’s supposed to stand alone, why use the Night of the Living Dead moniker? Oh yeah, I forgot – $$$$$$. Shameless, unscrupulous salesmen cashing in on a classic to trick genre fans into shelling out their money.

Following Broadstreet’s appalling Night of the Living Dead 3D homage/re-imagining/walking over the grave of the original abomination/whatever it was called comes this even more unnecessary prequel which tells the story of the events which led to the outbreak. Moving just as slowly as the shuffling flesh eaters in the cellar, Night of the Living Dead 3D Re-Animation is a clunking mess from the start. It takes ages to get going, with the zombies rarely making an appearance, and there’s nothing to maintain audience interest as a result. Like many low budget zombie flicks, the film seems to go out of its way to avoid showing us the title creatures. Dull human drama. A few unnecessary side characters who add nothing to the plot. Political satire that will fail to hit its target on anyone who isn’t a US citizen. Hardly cutting edge material like Night of the Living Dead was but it’s all just gloss anyway, attempting to paper over the glaring absence of the zombies.

Horror fans should immediately be attracted to this by the two genre names in the cast: Jeffrey Combs from the Re-Animator films and Andrew Divoff from the Wishmaster series. It’s a trump card for any horror film to feature such established veterans and definitely a key selling point but Night of the Living Dead 3D Re-Animation does absolutely nothing with them. The tedious family palaver between them takes priority over any zombie action and whilst the two men are usually capable of pulling out all of the stops to keep their performances interesting (just watch them in their best work and you’ll see), they are not required to even break into a sweat here. They could have been utilised far, far better than they are here and both seem to underplay their roles somewhat.

When it comes to the zombies, they will finally make an appearance, I promise. It’s just that you have to sit through so much to get to them. Even then, it’s a wonder that they bothered. The zombies do just as little as Combs and Divoff did, stumbling around the mortuary polishing off minor characters and not even threatening a mass break-out. The gore is mainly CGI-variety, which bugs me to no end in a normal splatter flick but makes me even angrier when there are zombies involved – I like my entrails real and squishy. I understand that it’s cheap to use CGI over real prosthetics but surely the local butcher could supply some unwanted pig intestines? The 3-D is also little more than a gimmick here, with the usual shotguns and shovels being thrust in front of the camera as if we haven’t seen one in the third dimension before. A couple of decent 3-D gore moments provide some minor highlights but Piranha 3-D  and My Bloody Valentine 3-D did the groovy gore a whole lot better with the glasses on.

 

Originality-free. Excitement-free. Scare-free. The only thing that wasn’t free was the over-inflated price I paid for the blu-ray. Night of the Living Dead 3D Re-Animation is an appalling and cynical cash-in to a battered film legacy which deserves more respect from the fan boy defilers who pretend to worship at its feet, only to add to its abuse.

 

 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Killer Mountain (2011)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , February 12th, 2013 @ 5:16 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Sheldon Wilson

  • Writer: Peter Sullivan (screenplay & story), Sheldon Wilson (story)

  • Starring: Aaron Douglas, Paul Campbell, Curtis Caravaggio, Torrance Coombs

  • Run Time: 85 mins

Killer Mountain (2011)

On top of the world there’s no one to save you

When an expedition to find the mythical land of Shambala in the mountains of Bhutan goes missing, a second research team is organised to go and find out what happened. High in the cold mountains, they find that the team has been killed and soon they too find themselves being hunted down by mysterious creatures.

 

And so we roll with another Sy Fy Original in Killer Mountain, about as bland a film that they’ve ever produced. Part Cliffhanger, part crappy monster movie, Killer Mountain is the a-typical low budget Sy Fy film down to a tee: not engaging in the slightest, cheap to make and with the lack of cash being evident on the screen, featuring a bunch of actors from other Sy Fy programmes and with ropey CGI monsters. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, worn the t-shirt over and over again until it dropped to bits, went back there to do it again, got a t-shirt and so forth.

The story is nothing special – just an excuse to isolate a bunch of people away from civilisation before monsters are set upon them. Predictably shallow characters are introduced and the “take a number and join the soon to be killed” chronology is obvious from the get-go. Anticipated events take place the way they’re supposed to. Dialogue is constantly forgettable. Nothing happens out of the blue here. There’s no depth to anything despite the lure of the mystical foundation of youth in Shambala. It’s all sooooo run-of-the-mill. Would it hurt these writers to get a bit creative from time-to-time? A lead character with a tragic past that must face up to his inner demons and overcome them. Dodgy business guys who are in it for themselves. Native guides who are there to provide the first monster fodder. It is as insulting as it boring. Since these films draw their characters from a vat of monster movie tropes, the audience comes with a set of pre-expectations about how they’re going to pan out as characters. And as Killer Mountain proves first hand, these expectations are always spot on.

Killer Mountain is not only bland in content but it looks bland as a film. The cinematography is bleak and murky and the colours are dark and dull. There’s not an ounce of life in this film from the camera and the same constant greyscale appearance of the film doesn’t lend itself to any form of life or energy. If it’s dull and boring to look at, it’s going to turn the viewer off even quicker. At least attempts have been made to make it look like it was shot on location even if it wasn’t. The CGI weather effects will convince no one but there are rock-climbing scenes (well more like rock-holding, as the characters don’t seem to climb up whenever the camera is on them) and the caverns and underground passageways of Shambala look believable enough. Dark enough for low budget special effects anyway.

Sy Fy has brought more or less every single creature known to man alive in their ‘creature feature’ films at some point and they’ve got to the point now where they can’t even be bothered giving them any sort of identity or explanation for their existence. The creatures, which resemble some sort of lizard-snake-dragon thing, appear out of the blue, menace the cast for a bit and are then defeated. No one is really shocked at the discovery of a new species and the monsters are only named as ‘drucks’ which means nothing to anyone. It’s a shame because the monsters aren’t the worst-looking CGI creatures that Sy Fy have created but they don’t give me any reason to care for them or fear them. They’re just there on the screen. The worst CGI effect this time around is for the helicopter and subsequent crash.

 

I think after my current batch of Sy Fy Originals have been watched, I’m going to have to put them on hold for a while. I can’t keep watching the same stuff over and over again because in turn I’m then repeating the same reviews over and over again. Killer Mountain isn’t the worst Sy Fy Original but it’s just a-n-other of the same old shebang. If that is your cup of tea then go for it.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Piranha 3DD (2012)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , February 7th, 2013 @ 7:55 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: John Gulager

  • Writer: Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, Joel Soisson, Peter Goldfinger (characters), Josh Stolberg (characters)

  • Starring: Danielle Panabaker, Matt Bush, Katrina Bowden, Jean-Luc Bilodeau

  • Run Time: 83 mins

Piranha 3DD (2012)

Double the action. Double the terror. Double the D’s.

Marine biology student Maddy returns home to find that her stepfather, Chet, has turned the friendly water park that they both inherited from their late mother into a seedy resort called Big Wet which features strippers as lifeguards, wet t-shirt contests and topless pools. In order to provide cheap water for the park, Chet illegally drilled into an underwater lake. Unfortunately for everyone, the underwater lake is home to the prehistoric piranha which attacked nearby Lake Victoria. On the opening day of Big Wet, the piranhas swim up the drilling pipes and into the pools.

 

Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3-D was one of the highlights of 2010: a delightfully gratuitous middle-fingered salute to the bastions of cinematic good taste with its unhealthy array of fishy violence, a year’s supply of fake blood in just one shoot, more boobs than a porn convention, not to mention a strong cast who weren’t afraid to send themselves up and a story which finely balanced itself between parody and serious. A definitive B-movie with a big budget and even bigger promotional juggernaut behind it, Piranha 3-D was the rare instance where everything seemed to align perfectly for the ultimate success story against all of the odds. With a strong box office performance, even better DVD/Blu-Ray sales and more importantly, pretty resounding critical acclaim, the film was a shoe-in to receive a sequel.

Only Alexandre Aja wouldn’t be back at the helm and, leaving with him that real sense of perverse violence. If you’ve seen any of his serious horror films, then you’ll know that he can deliver the grim and the intense in equal measure and for all of its cartoon comedy and overblown excess, Piranha 3-D still had a warped sense of the extreme flowing beneath where you knew that you shouldn’t laugh and smile at the violence and gore but it was a nervous laugh because of the underlying cruelty. And that was why Piranha 3-D worked better than it had any right to do.

John Gulager, fresh off the Feast trilogy, was handed the reins to direct this sequel and if you’re familiar with those films, specifically the two junky sequels, then you’ll know exactly the sort of direction that Piranha 3DD is heading. Going into overdrive with the absurdity and ridiculousness, Piranha 3DD is quite possibly one of the worst sequels of all time and easily one of the biggest disappointments of the year. How hard was it for Gulager to mess up the key ingredients that made the original work?

Virtually a lower budget, scaling down of the original, the film’s first mistake is confining the bulk of its action to a small, self-contained water park as opposed to the rivers and lakes of the original. Not only does this lead to incredulous plot devices of how the piranha manage to infiltrate the park in the first place, but it shortens the life span of any tension that may come from the attack scenes. Having piranha attack a flotilla of partying teenagers in a deep-water lake is one thing – having them swim around in small, man-made ankle-deep pools is just not scary in the slightest.

The film barely comes home with a time of eighty-three minutes as well, a disgrace when you consider that there are ten minutes of outtakes and bloopers tagged on to an overlong credits sequence. With such a short running time, you’d think that the rest of the film would go at it like a bull in a china shop to make sure not a second is wasted but there’s plenty of filler throughout. I think it’s simply a case that someone had a couple of clever ideas about the piranha in a water park and then built up an entire film around them.

The main problem with Piranha 3DD is that it tries way too hard to be hilarious and outrageous. In trying to out-do the original’s tongue-in-cheek approach, Gulager is guilty of making throwaway moments a major deal. Take for instance Jerry O’Connell’s severed penis from the original, a scene which provoked laughter (and a great deal of seat-shuffling and leg crossing from the male audience) and terror at the same time. That scene is rehashed here with more focus on the deadpan and comedy instead of the horror of male castration, with the resultant scene providing one of the  worst lines of all time. The majority of the film’s comedy just falls flat on its face because it is too stupid to laugh at – funny to drunken frat boys maybe, not to anyone else watching. Piranha 3DD almost turns into a parody, something that the original was always keen to keep away at arm’s length.

There is a well-cast line-up of characters to bring life to this story though. Christopher Lloyd and Vang Rhames add continuity by reprising their roles from the first one and it’s a shame that some of the others couldn’t return. Rhames’ role is somewhat pointless (didn’t he die in the original?) but at least Lloyd is able to get a few more minutes screen time than he did before. It’s still a criminal waste of his talent to be shoehorned into a five minute cameo but at least he’s back. As far as the newcomers go, David Koechner makes for a particularly unpleasant loudmouth and is perfectly cast in the role of the slimy Chet. He gets one of the film’s best and most distasteful scenes as he tries to make a getaway from the chaos at the park. The younger cast aren’t particularly impressive, with the majority of them filling the usual token teenager roles. Danielle Panabaker is likeable enough in the lead role but the gorgeous Katrina Bowden steals the show with a line of dialogue that would make John Barrowman’s infamous line from Shark Attack 3: Megalodon sound like Macbeth (Youtube it if you don’t know).

The main star of the film is the turn by David Hasselhoff. So often the butt of jokes about his acting ability, ‘The Hoff’ has now gone full circle and embraced his deficiencies, playing up on these jokes and becoming self-aware of his own limitations as an actor. His self-mocking performance is a riot, tearing apart his Baywatch role as a lifeguard completely out of his depth when the piranhas attack the water park. Worth sitting through the rest of the film for? Not quite, but those who have stuck through the rest of the film will at least find themselves finally being entertained.

 

Piranha 3DD is a catastrophic flop. The decision to debut it in less than 100 theatres in its opening weekend in the US (a travesty considering that the original made $83m in the box office) shows that little faith was instilled in it from the start by the suits in the boardroom and this is reflected in the final product – a shallow, shameless rehashing of the original. Good-natured gratuity has been replaced by ill-fated juvenility and no doubt sounding a death knell to a possible resurgence of big budget splatter comedies.

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Arachnoquake (2012)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , January 22nd, 2013 @ 9:51 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Griff Furst

  • Writer: Paul A. Birkett, Eric Forsberg (story)

  • Starring: Tracey Gold, Edward Furlong, Bug Hall, Ethan Phillips

  • Run Time: 86 mins

Arachnoquake (2012)

The world will quake in fear

A series of earthquakes around New Orleans releases a new breed of deadly subterranean spiders that begin to terrorise the city.

 

Sy Fy does its best ten years overdue Eight-Legged Freaks impression with this laughably inept spider invasion flick. To say that they’ve covered virtually every single creature known to man in their Sy Fy Originals, I can’t recall them doing too many about spiders before and then all of a sudden, a couple come along at once. Camel Spiders was first in 2011 (though I haven’t seen it yet) and now along comes Arachnoquake, a film which evidently tries to play on its witty title in some self-belief that it’s different the other genre films. But, with the same old tired routines, clichéd characters, regurgitated scripts and low end CGI effects, it was never going to be anything other than run-of-the-mill. Truth be told, this is by no means the worst that Sy Fy has put out in the last couple of few years but….let’s face it with a title like Arachnoquake you’re hardly expecting The Godfather of monster movies are you?

One look at director Griff Furst’s list of prior credits should read like a warning sign: 100 Million BC, Swamp Shark and Lake Placid 3, the former being one of the worst creature feature films I’ve had the misfortune of reviewing. I’ve heard that Mr Furst has directly responded to fans criticism in the past so if you’re reading this – please stop making films!

It’s hard to say whether Arachnoquake is better or worse than the others but at least this seems to be intentionally goofy and gets marks for at least knowing how silly everything is, or rather the first half of the film. The earlier scenes at least have a healthy sense of humour to keep them going and for some reason this is put on the back burner at the half-way point. Way to go, discarding the only differentiation between yourself and any number of generic ‘monster on the loose’ movies. Like virtually every Sy Fy Original going, it’s so generic and routine that writing constant reviews for these films gets to be more of a slog than watching them is! Don’t get me wrong – I love repetitive. I’m a massive monster movie fan. I’m a massive slasher fan. They streamline a simple formula and recycle the same things over and over again. But the films only work if they are given life and a spring in their step. When they don’t, it’s because everyone involved, from the cameramen to the writers and directors to the actors, feel like they’re going through the motions because they’re contracted to. Unfortunately that’s what these Sy Fy Originals feel like – they’re not made for love of the genre, they’re made for cheap cash and to fill schedules. So the routine and repetition becomes their undoing, not their strength.

There are small mercies: Arachnoquake wastes little time in getting the spiders out of the ground and attacking people. So you won’t be bogged down with exposition, not that the film needs to expand on its one-note characters any further than the limited back story and characterisation they receive before all hell breaks loose – they even manage to squeeze the father-son love-hate relationship into this as a slacker son who has failed to live up to his father’s expectations is given the chance to redeem himself in this crisis. Yawn.

The narrative is split into three parts, each focusing on a different group of survivors until gradually their paths cross and they join together. Only the Ethan Phillips-Olivia Hardt thread was any good and that was simply because Phillips is a sorely underrated character actor, if somewhat annoying at times, and Hardt is one of the hottest women I’ve ever seen and gets to parade around in a pair of tiny shorts. Regardless of which thread the film follows at any one given time, the predicaments and situations that the characters find themselves in are predictable and uninteresting. Main characters seem to have taken that invincibility potion which spells doom for the minor characters with a handful of lines.

And these minor characters meet doom quite a lot. If it isn’t small spiders scurrying out of the ruptures in the ground, it’s giant spiders climbing up buildings. If you’re familiar with Sy Fy work, then you’ll immediately understand the level of special effects that are on display here. The CGI spiders look alright and that’s about the best I can say about them. You’ll never believe that they’re real but they hop, crawl and drop across the screen on a regular basis. They can swim. They can breathe fire. An interesting idea with the spiders nesting inside human hosts, resulting in bulbous puss sacks on the skin which explode, was introduced but then never really taken any further. And despite the fact that these spiders are supposed to be attacking all of New Orleans, on many occasions you can see down the next street where filming wasn’t taking place and observe traffic and pedestrians going about their daily business as normal.

Edward Furlong – remember him? Falling from grace after his time as John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Furlong fell into alcoholism and drug addiction. Time has not been kind to the man (he’s only a couple of years older than me!) and I didn’t recognise him at first. His bloated appearance and bored-stiff attitude doesn’t help the film when he’s supposed to be one of the ‘star’ names to sell the project to potential markets. It also doesn’t help when he’s given the main role in a side story in which his creepy bus driver is ferrying a school bus full of cheerleaders when they’re attacked by the spiders. This originally promised a lot – cheerleaders + hungry spiders – but failed to deliver anything – nudity, gore or even a decent set piece. Furlong is left huffing and puffing along until he catches up with the other survivors.

 

Inventive title aside, Arachnoquake is hardly a world beater nor is it the coming of the Angel of Death. It’s a film which exists for ninety minutes or so and is content with staying in its own little low scale world despite promising something a lot funnier and more entertaining at the start similar to Tremors or Eight-Legged Freaks. Sy Fy have hardly outdone themselves this time around but it could have been worse – though is that really a criteria to review a film around?

 

 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Hatchet II (2010)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , January 22nd, 2013 @ 8:49 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Adam Green

  • Writer: Adam Green

  • Starring: Danielle Harris, Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, Parry Shen

  • Run Time: 85 mins

Hatchet II (2010)

Victor Crowley Lives Again

After Marybeth escapes from the clutches of swamp-dwelling maniac Victor Crowley, she finds out the truth about her family’s connections to the madman. With the help of Reverend Zombie, she leads a group of hunters back into the swamp to retrieve the bodies of her family and put an end to the legend of Victor Crowley once and for all.

 

Adam Green’s much-heralded 2006 slasher Hatchet might not have been the blood-soaked return to old school horror that it was cracked up to be but it was a solid gore ride which knocked the socks off any big budget slash that the mainstream Hollywood had produced for years. I’m not sure whether the genre needed another throwback slasher (as a lot of recent slashers proclaim themselves to be in order to distinguish themselves from the rest – but in doing so they create a new norm) and I don’t think it would have been a genre staple along the lines of The Burning had it been released in the decade it so craves to homage. But it was alright, certainly there are a lot worse out there. It met with a lot of critical praise whilst it did the festival rounds and its connection to the core audience meant that a sequel was inevitable. A few years later, and with a reported budget of only $800,000, Hatchet II comes along and follows on from where the previous one left of, albeit it with a different actress in the lead role.

Hatchet II had a bit of a choppy ride before it was released. The film was originally released in a handful of US theatres without a rating in an attempt to act a shining light to similar-minded film makers (not just horror film makers but anyone sick of the MPAA holding them back). Unfortunately it didn’t work out and after a bit of bad press, the film was pulled with the official response explaining this decision as ‘poor box office performance’ – but what do you expect when you only offer it to a small percentage of the population – you’re not going to get a Skyfall-esque opening weekend. The film has since been released onto DVD with the MPAA getting their way in the end and with it, the brutal crushing of a potential rebellion against the ratings system. Ah well, at least someone had to try.

So on with the review itself! If you’re expecting the same sort of over-drenched, tongue-in-cheek carnage as the original then you’re in the right place as Hatchet II does a faithful job of recreating the same sort of feel and atmosphere as the original. It does take time getting started and it takes over thirty minutes for the film to eventually get back into the swamp. Before then, you’ve got flashback footage of how Victor Crowley came to be. Let’s face it: people don’t normally watch sequels unless they’ve seen the first so anyone watching this should already know his back story and what happened. To me it just seems like a lot of filler to pad out the running time.

Even when the film switches focus to the swamp, there’s little real story to keep things moving. The group of hunters split up and then proceed to get killed off one-by-one before the final showdown with Crowley and the survivors at his ramshackle hut. Everything in between the kills seems like a real slog to get through. A lot of slashers have always been built around their set pieces and this is evident in Hatchet II, with stilted dialogue, thinly-sketched new characters and a tepid atmosphere which lacks any real tension keeping the pace of the film bogged down into the swamp. Clock watching until the next kill shouldn’t really be on the agenda here but it is. But at least they’re worth the wait.

Hatchet II ramps up the red level from the sublime to the ridiculous at times and the kills here are some of the most satisfying you’ll see for a long time. If it isn’t Crowley ripping off the jaws of his victims, he’s battering their skulls to pulp with hatchets, decapitating them using table tops and a conducting a final kill which has to be seen to be described. I mean basically the film is just a series of inter-linking jaw-dropping kills which are brought to life with amazing practical effects – you’ll not seen a sign of any CGI here. This is old school gore that Tom Savini would be proud of. It’s a slowly dying art but it’s nice to see people still have the passion and the ability to produce the goods when they need to.

Kane Hodder is back as Victor Crowley and he’s as physically impressive as ever. I dare you not to laugh out loud at the moment his deformed killer strides out of the woods carrying THE biggest chainsaw ever committed to film. Tony Todd had a cameo in the first one but his role is given centre stage this time around and the film is all the better for it by having such a genre great in a pivotal role. Todd oozes class and charisma and his Reverend Zombie character is one of the best parts of the film, switching between protagonist and antagonist whenever the situation suits him. Danielle Harris is a perennial favourite of mine for obvious reasons but she brings little to the role that she took over from Tamara Feldman other than her good looks. The rest of the cast is made up of generic-looking actors who fulfil the variety of redneck and psychotic hunter character roles without even trying. If you look like a redneck, that’s good enough characterisation for this film as the audience does the rest.

 

Hatchet II is just about as good or bad as the original depending on whether you like your slashers gloopy, gorey and a bit dopey or want a bit more meat to your meal. The film is definitely not up to the hype and publicity it received but it works fine as a low budget slasher homage. I was going to suggest that film makers leave the whole “80s slasher throwback” cliché alone for a while as it’s in danger of becoming saturated but then I have seen that there is a further sequel in the works. At this rate, The Hatchet series is going to become part of the problem, not the solution.

 

 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Shark Week (2012)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , January 19th, 2013 @ 8:10 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Christopher Douglas Olen-Ray

  • Writer: Liz Adams (screenplay), H. Perry Horton (screenplay)

  • Starring: Yancy Butler, Patrick Bergin, Josh Allen, Bart Baggett

  • Run Time: 86 mins

Shark Week (2012)

7 days, 7 sharks… 1 survivor!

A wealthy sadist traps a complete group of strangers on his secluded island compound where they are force to compete in a horrifying gauntlet against a relentless onslaught of man-eating sharks, each species more deadly than the last.

 

Saw meets Jaws or that’s what The Asylum would lead you to believe with in Shark Week, their latest CGI killer monster flick and next one off its production line of straight-to-DVD offerings. With its assault of colourful cover posters, catchy tag lines, sound byte-heavy trailers and generally over -indulgent self-promotion, Shark Week was never going to live up to anywhere near expectation. But having watched my fair share of Asylum flicks over recent years, those expectations were rock bottom to begin with and, as the case was with the utterly bonkers Nazis at the Centre of the Earth, Shark Week manages to mildly impress – though only because I’m setting it against the Asylum’s own benchmarks of bad film making rather than any feasible rating scale!

At first glance, Shark Week looks the part. In fact it may well be The Asylum’s best looking feature to date. The cinematography is crisp. The location work is top drawer with a variety of desert island settings and dank underground caverns really coming to life. The CGI-rendered landscapes of some of their previous outings have been mainly dropped in favour of actual location shooting which makes all the difference. The production values have definitely been stepped up a notch. Finally, The Asylum make a film which….well actually looks like a film.

Shark Week plays itself seriously, which has been met with some criticism by other reviewers, but I find that the material wouldn’t have worked with a straight-laced approach (not that it works that much better as it stands). There’s a decent idea waiting to come out of this but the muddled manner in which the characters have to go from watery location to watery location is a bit flimsy at best, all the while the motivation for their entrapment is a feeble revenge plot. The constant need to get the characters into the water just reeks of a one-note idea being stretched for all its worth over eighty-six minutes. In the end, you really get the sense that this idea, as absurd as it may seem in this one, would have worked with a bigger budget, better writers – well generally away from The Asylum’s grasp! Or it could have worked with other ‘creature feature’ whipping boys like crocodiles or tigers which would have made the situations seem less forced with the characters being based on land and thus the script needing less reasons to throw them into danger.

Once again The Asylum don’t quite ‘get’ what effectively works in killer shark film – namely the sharks. I was expecting lousy CGI effects and even lousier integration with the natural environment and human actors and that’s what I got. No surprises because my expectations were that low to begin with. Aside from the hammerhead attack, the rest of the attack scenes consist of the same thing: badly illuminated shots, dreadful CGI sharks, characters struggling and thrashing around in the water before they start stabbing at the shark with whatever sharp objects they have and all in the midst of some rapid-fire editing so that you haven’t got the foggiest clue what is going on. It might work once but the repetitive nature of the attacks soon get boring. They’re meant to be the selling point of the film but each encounter with a shark is virtually the same thing despite the novelty of different sharks being used.

I will give Shark Week some credit in that it’s got a decent pace. It seems like The Asylum are learning their lessons and not constantly bombarding the viewer with scenes that last a maximum of a minute before rapidly moving on to the next one. The film tries to draw itself out a little bit, introducing the overall problem quickly but then settling down a little to try and flesh out the characters and develop some sort of story. Whilst the attempts at characterisation and the story being a little ‘deeper’ than normal miss most of the time, it’s nice to see the studio actually trying for a change and they’ll only learn from this in future.

The token ‘names’ amongst the cast come from Patrick Bergin and Yancy Butler as the two antagonists of the piece. Bergin (Patriot Games) does his most-blatant Jigsaw-like impression as wealthy Tiburon – well I’m guessing that’s who he’s supposed to be modelled on, preaching to his victims before their next shark encounter and letting them know of ways out. Bergin chews the scenery well so it’s a shame he has little screen time with anyone else apart from his assistant. Yancy Butler co-stars as said assistant and seems to have the exact same expression on her face throughout the entire film, looking bored and in desperate need of some sleep.

 

Having read the above review, you’d assume that I hated Shark Week and you’d be more or less right. The idea itself isn’t awful, just the execution. But there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on which makes it stand out more than the other Asylum films. It’s not the cast. It’s not the effects, that’s for sure! It’s not even the script. There’s just something here which promises a brighter future for the company. I’ll give the folks over at The Asylum a little bit of credit. Their films are getting better, little-by-little, but getting better nonetheless.

 

 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Nazis at the Centre of the Earth (2012)

0 comments By MovieBuff101 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews, ScI-Fi Movie Reviews Tagged with , , December 18th, 2012 @ 8:44 pm
  • AKA: Bloodstorm

  • Director: Joseph J. Lawson

  • Writer: Paul Bales

  • Starring: Dominique Swain, Jake Busey, Josh Allen, Christopher Karl Johnson

  • Run Time: 89 mins

Nazis at the Centre of the Earth (2012)

Dead…But Not Gone.

A team of researchers at an Antarctica station are abducted by a mysterious squad of masked storm troopers and taken hostage deep into a lost continent at the centre of the Earth. They find that, in the dying days of the Second World War, infamous Auschwitz butcher Dr Joseph Mengele fled Nazi Germany and set up a secret base. Here, they have been planning for the return of the Third Reich, developing highly advanced weapons and prolonging their lives through grotesque skin grafting techniques. With the addition of the knowledge of the research team to perfect the invasion plans, the Nazis hope to conquer the Earth.

 

The Asylum have done it again! With the recent release of Iron Sky, about a secret Nazi colony on the moon which plans to conquer Earth, the studio famous for its ‘mockbusters’ comes up with Nazis at the Centre of the Earth, a $200,000 cheapie about a secret Nazi colony in the centre of the Earth which plans to conquer the planet. Who said creativity in Hollywood was dead?

I’ve been hard on The Asylum for their ridiculous cashing in of higher profile films like Transmorphers and their never-ending slew of truly awful monsters films like Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus. Reality, logic, common sense and physics all get thrown out of the window with a ‘rapidly throw everything at the screen’ motto. They attempt to make their films look big budget but end up doing the exact opposite. But is the tide turning? For the first time, I can honestly say that I enjoyed an Asylum mockbuster better than the film it was supposed to be ripping off. Iron Sky promised a lot and looked fantastic, with some amazing set design for the advanced Nazi moon base and the simple fact that it had Nazis – from the moon! But it was all too daft to fully enjoy and it would have worked far better as a more serious sci-fi-horror film (if you could buy into the premise, which isn’t all as daft as it sounds).

Nazis at the Centre of the Earth takes the idea of a hidden colony of Nazis and runs with the ball like Iron Sky should have done. After a bit of a sluggish start to set characters up, once the group are captured by the Nazis and taken underground the film turns into one of those trashy Nazi Euro-horror sleaze fests of the 70s. In mean-spirited scenes, there are forced abortions, shower gang-rapes and un-anaesthetised surgery to name a few instances of brutality. Its unpleasant stuff, kind of out of character for The Asylum’s usual ‘cheap and cheerful’ approach but completely in synch with the character of the Nazis and what they did in real life. This is exactly the sort of perverse sadism that Iron Sky should have been revelling in: playing upon the Nazis’ reputation instead of turning them into clowns.

Nazis at the Centre of the Earth is still dogged by The Asylum’s usual cheap special effects. Outdoor scenes in the snow are in fact shot in studios in front of green screens which will convince no one watching of their authenticity. Vehicles, planes, spaceships and buildings look like computer game effects. Think of how much CGI George Lucas used in the Star Wars prequels and multiply that by ten (but subtract loads of points for the quality) and you’ll get the gist of how overworked the special effects guys must have been for this film. Pretty much everything you see except the human actors is computer-generated. Usually these effects have been to the detriment of the film but because everything that happens here is so completely off-beat and insane, there’s little time to even stop and think about how terrible everything looks.

The worst special effect is saved for one very special moment which happens two-thirds of the way in. I honestly can’t reveal anything else here except that this part comes out of nowhere and its one of the most brilliantly bonkers things I’ve ever seen. Words alone can’t explain how ridiculously amazing this moment is. It’s so crazy that it’s worth watching the film for on its own. It’s at this point where the film jumps the shark. Up until this point, it had all been dark and depressing but the gear shift around thirty-five minutes from the end is just totally out of the blue. Laser beams, robots that look like Autobots and Decepticons, flying Nazi spaceships and more all going hurtling around the screen.

Out of the cast, Jake Busey is the only real notable star and he looks almost bewildered as to what is going on, like he wondered in off another set. It’s the performance of Christopher Karl Johnson as Joseph Mengele which really menaces the screen. Though it seems like everything else around him is turning into a nightmarish acid trip, Johnson keeps the genuine fear factor throughout as the chilling Auschwitz butcher. Don’t get too attached to the rest of the cast either – the Nazis take good care of the majority of them.

 

Nazis at the Centre of the Earth is arguably The Asylum’s best film to date. By any criteria, it’s one of the worst films ever made. Ultra-camp, ultra-silly, utterly insane and completely unmissable. The last thirty-five minutes feature some of the most mind-bending low budget movie moments of all time. Stop reading and go and watch it. Love it or hate it, you’ll never forget it!

 

Frost Giant (2010)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , December 16th, 2012 @ 8:14 pm
  • AKA: Arctic Predator

  • Director: Víctor García

  • Writer: Rafael Jordan

  • Starring: Dean Cain, Steven Waddington, Erbi Argo, Lucy Brown

  • Run Time: 88 mins

Frost Giant (2010)

…

In 1825, the HMS Fury went missing during a disastrous expedition to the Arctic Circle. The modern-day descendant of one of the explorers has devoted his career to finding the sunken remains of the ship. So when he and his team finally excavate the wrecked hull from the ice, they discover that the ship was sunk deliberately to act as a frosty tomb for an alien which could threaten the planet. Now they have released the monster to bring terror to the world once again.

 

Sy-Fy drum up their usual clichés in abandon with a new monster in the form of Frost Giant, the same sort of monster-on-the-loose film that they’ve almost cornered the market for. It’s really hard to get motivated to write a review for this, such was the lethargic nature of the film and the nondescript plot. Even trying to write this review literally moments after finishing watching, it is hard to remember anything of note to talk about. Frost Giant isn’t so much a film that will kill you with its icy grasp but more likely to bore you into oblivion.

For those who have seen any previous Sy-Fy creature feature flicks or if you’ve seen The Thing or any other polar-based horror film, Frost Giant will be all-too-familiar and all the script has done has work the elements of the two together. There’s the team of researchers at the polar station. An icy menace is unearthed. Cue lots of “there’s a snow storm coming so we can’t be evacuated” and “the temperature will drop to such and such degrees so we’ll all freeze to death” moments. Couple all of this with Sy-Fy’s ridiculous attempts to generate tension, the uber-low budget vibe that everything emits, one or two ‘named’ actors simply milling around for an easy pay day and the less-than-stellar CGI monster which never once looks like it exists in the same dimensional plane as the rest of the cast. With a structure that runs like clockwork, the only real danger in Frost Giant is just how repetitive everything gets.

There’s little urgency. There’s little excitement. Nothing more than a series of identikit kills, the film just trudges through the snow from dull set piece to dull set piece. You get the impression at times that everyone was too cold to put any effort into the film, not least Dean Cain who must have fallen foul of some dodgy contract somewhere because he makes a habit of popping up in these tedious monster movies. There are some really over-exaggerated English accents in the film too most notably from English actor Steven Waddington who spouts off his scientific jargon with all of the verve of a Shakesperian thespian. Just because someone talks in a posh accent doesn’t make the dialogue any more sophisticated or intelligent. Waddington is a decent actor but this over-the-top approach makes him look daft. Between him and Cain, the two men try their best to make wine of water with the script but it’s just not to be. When characters appear dead-on-arrival thanks to the script, there’s nothing that can save them.

Even the introduction of a different monster isn’t enough to rescue this frost-bitten flick from breaking apart. The ‘frost giant’ in question is hardly a giant and is little bigger than an ordinary man. Rendered with CGI, the monster is about as good or as poor as you’d expect it to look in something like this. Not a lot of thought has gone into creating it – the creature exists solely to live off heat so that it can return to its original form. There’s no other reason or logic behind it. Coupled with the CGI, the alien never once comes across as some sort of serious threat, just a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. Though not content with animating the alien with poor CGI, the effects team also see fit to give us CGI snow and a laughable climax involving a CGI digger.

 

Frost Giant is the type of film you’ll put on in the background and do something infinitely more exciting because even if you had the best intentions in the world and attentively sat down to watch, you’d still be drawn to doing other things, glancing up every so often whenever the monster killed someone. By-the-numbers nonsense which no doubt will be forgotten about once the next cookie-cutter Sy-Fy flick is made.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Iron Invader (2011)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Movie Reviews, ScI-Fi Movie Reviews Tagged with , , December 14th, 2012 @ 12:06 am
  • AKA: Metal Shifters

  • Director: Paul Ziller

  • Writer: Paul Ziller (screenplay & story), Gary Hawes (screenplay)

  • Starring: Kavan Smith, Colby Johannson, Nicole de Boer, Merritt Patterson

  • Run Time: 87 mins

Iron Invader (2011)

One man’s junk is another town’s nightmare

A Russian satellite infected with some form of space bacteria crash lands in the small American town of Redeemer. Two local brothers take the scrap metal to a local junk dealer who plans to use the material to finish off his seventeen foot tall ‘Golem’ that he has been building for the town’s centenary. The Golem comes to life when it is exposed to the bacteria and it proceeds to wreak havoc around town, sapping its victims of their life.

 

Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man gets a big aggressive Sy-Fy makeover in this middling offering which is about on par for the channel’s usual produce. Fresh out of flesh-and-blood monsters, the writing team have come up with an unusual and rather unique threat in the form of the metal monster but saddle it in an enclosure of lame genre clichés. But hey, those of you familiar enough with Sy-Fy Originals should know by now that their name is not a seal of quality – more so a death certificate.

It would be pretty easy to substitute the iron monster for any other creature: a dragon, a snake, a tiger, a crocodile, etc. The plot runs exactly the same way that any other creature-on-the-loose film does which is a shame as the concept, though slightly off-beat, could have worked properly had it been given more of a free reign instead of having to stick to type. But there’s not really much to the wafer-thin plot anyway – all bases are covered within the opening fifteen minutes and then it’s just waiting for the Golem to start doing it’s intergalactic robot thing. The trouble with Iron Invader is that it’s played too straight. Right from the moment the Golem comes to life and starts plodding around town, this film needed a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek. The film knows how over-the-top it is yet never really plays upon this in the script.

The Golem looks like a low budget Transformer though the special effects to bring it to life aren’t too shabby, certainly better than they deserved to be. I guess it is easier to animate metal than it is flesh and so the monster looks shiny, smooth and inorganic but I guess that’s the idea – it is just a cobbled together bunch of metal and the animators don’t have to bring to life flesh, blood and spontaneous movements of an animal. Apart from it is look, the monster isn’t well-thought out. No consideration is given to how it moves, why it’s got eyes and why it has an uncanny ability to sneak up on people despite being huge and metallic. The script points out how big it is so why doesn’t it leave footprints in the mud or cause minor tremors when it’s pounding down the road? It kills people by grabbing hold of them and draining their life which is kind of weird the first time but gets repetitive very quickly as the same thing happens over and over again.

Nicole de Boer is the token ‘name’ in this, more famous for her role as Ezra Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She plays a biology teacher who not only provides the token knowledge and explanation scenes for the existence of the creature but also the love interest. Coincidentally, her character was a childhood sweetheart with one of the brothers but left town marrying someone else. Now she’s back and looking down the barrel of a divorce. What do you reckon the odds are that facing nightmarish scenario like facing a giant metal monster will allow her to reconcile with her sweetheart and make everything perfect by the end of the film? De Boer is way too lovely to be relegated to Sy-Fy junk like this and is way better than the material on display.

 

Iron Invader is marginally better than its Sy-Fy counterparts but that’s more down to the fact that a giant Transformer-wannabe is the star of the show here, not a giant snake or crocodile. It came from the scrap yard and it should be sent back there pronto.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

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