Tag Haunted Setting

Dead Man’s Hand (2007)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , April 10th, 2013 @ 12:25 am
  • AKA: The Haunted Casino; Casino of the Damned

  • Director: Charles Band

  • Writer: August White

  • Starring: Wes Armstrong, Michael Berryman, Kristyn Green, Sid Haig

  • Run Time: 86 mins

Dead Man's Hand (2007)

Sheer Terror! Bet On It!

Mathew Dragna inherits an old run down casino from his deceased uncle and enlists the help of some of his friends to go and check the place out. It turns out that the casino is haunted by the ghosts of vicious Las Vegas mobster Roy ‘The Word’ Donahue and his henchmen. Dragna’s uncle owed Donahue a debt and he is here to collect it.

 

Charles Band has more of a reputation for producing low budget horror films based on ‘little things killing each other’ than he does anything else (see Puppet Master, Demonic Toys, Dollman, The Gingerdead Man, et al) so whenever you pick up one of his other horror films, it’s a bit hit-and-miss what you’re going to get. Well more so miss-and-miss-further! Unfortunately despite some earlier success in the low budget field, Band’s name has come to represent something of a benchmark of poor quality. With a motto of ‘shoot fast, don’t ask questions later’ it seems that his films have now come to rely on one or two gimmicks but with budgets that wouldn’t even cover the cost of a stamp, it’s hard to bring such gimmicks to life in such constrained shooting schedules (most of his films shoot in less than a week). The Band of old would at least make a go of it. It seems like now he’s just phoning it in.

Dead Man’s Hand is one such example of a gimmick story that doesn’t work very well despite the premise of a haunted casino sounding pretty cool. That being if you have seen any sort of teenagers-in-a-haunted-house type film of any kind then you’ll be familiar with how this will play out: main character and their girlfriend/boyfriend will be safe whilst his unfortunate friends will fall victim to the ghosts as they explore the haunting setting. Despite the lure of some decent casino-themed scares, the film is woefully short of any sort of boo moments. William Castle would be turning in his grave if he knew how ‘haunted house’ films have let themselves go.

The opening prologue involving an estate agent and an unlucky janitor going to check the place out gives hope that the rest of the film will be as gory and cheesy. But alas after the blood has dripped down the door frame and the title credits have hit, it’s another forty-fifty minutes before anything remotely exciting happens. It’s a real shame as the casino setting looks really good. The sets are full of cobwebs and dust and there is a nice antique feel to the place as though it really has been closed for some time. The lights are kept low to avoid revealing too much of the set and it all makes for a suitable place to throw in some ghosts and gore.

But whilst the setting is good, I don’t need to see the characters exploring it for nearly forty minutes before anything decent happens. It’s typical padding from Charles Band, a man who more or less invented the term for use in his films. If people are milling around talking, then it saves money on special effects, animatronics, latex effects or whatever else costs money. And the characters here do plenty of milling around and talking. As there is so little story to go on, there’s nothing else for the characters to do. It’s only with the introduction of the ghostly mobsters and their casino lackeys that the film finally looks like it has some meaning. Dead Man’s Hand could really have done with introducing them a lot earlier.

I don’t need to tell anyone that the presence of genre icons Sid Haig (House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects) and Michael Berryman (the original The Hills Have Eyes) is merely a catch to lure in potential horror fans. I’ve been around the block too long to know that slapping star names on the front of DVD covers is merely a cheap marketing tactic. I know how slyly these films work, teasing the viewer with the promise of ‘big names’ and then giving them little more than glorified cameos to play with. At least Haig and Berryman are on the screen a fair amount of time from the half way point, even if their resultant screen time just sees them standing around in suits looking sinister (and Berryman just repeats whatever people say in typical “hired goon/yes man” fashion, but they still get to do more than I expected.

Their eventual introduction into the film gives rise to the film’s best moments, of which you could count on one hand, as the group of friends are pitted off against the ghostly blackjack dealer and roulette croupier in a bid to win or lose their souls. For some reason both of the ghostly figures transform into weird CGI-effect apparitions with weird-shaped heads and big bulging eyes. But it’s a little too late and the big pay-offs are weak and rushed. The overall story is wrapped up to quickly and with little real conviction and that’s your lot. Band wheels out another quickie and they just get worse. If he actually combined the budgets for a few of these smaller films, he might be able to do something worthwhile. But it’s a big ask now.

 

Dead Man’s Hand is one awful hand that you really wouldn’t want to get stuck with. Time to fold my friends! You’ll just lose everything.

 

 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Furnace (2006)

0 comments By MovieBuff101 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , December 29th, 2012 @ 9:05 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: William Butler

  • Writer: Scott Aronson, William Butler, Aaron Strongoni

  • Starring: Michael Paré, Ja Rule, Jenny McShane, Danny Trejo, Tom Sizemore

  • Run Time: 90 mins

Furnace (2007)

Somewhere between prison and hell lies the furnace.

A sudden spate of suicides amongst inmates occurs when a long-closed section of Blackgate Prison is re-opened to house an overflow of prisoners. Detective Michael Turner is called in to investigate these tragedies and slowly uncovers the real supernatural story: that a vengeful spirit has been unearthed and is out to get revenge.

 

Furnace is every bit as dull and as predictable as it sounds, just another generic ghost film which throws in the same one or two frame close-ups of ghosts, lots of nauseating camera work and a general sense of been there, done that. The Asians have pretty much cornered the market in creepy ghost stories featuring child ghosts and there’s nothing that Furnace has in its arsenal that even comes close to matching its international supernatural competition.

In fact there’s not a large amount of the supernatural on show here. Most of Furnace is grounded in the traditional cop thriller mould and there are lots of scenes of our heroic detective piecing together bits of the puzzle by questioning, reading up on articles and generally being a nuisance around the prison. When the film stays inside the confines of the prison, Furnace isn’t too bad. It was shot inside an old Tennessee prison so the realistic setting gives it some added impact above anything some stage sets could handle. Some of the scenes inside do manage to kick start the film into life, particularly the early ‘suicide’ inside one of the cells and there are some solid special effects including crawling severed fingers. But these are too sporadic and the film never really gets going, opting to stay within its limited scope instead of trying anything adventurous.

Michael Pare plays Detective Turner completely by-the-book. He’s action man when he needs to be, he’s tender and romantic when he’s wooing the ladies and he’s good at his job during the “let’s play cop” scenes. Pare is solid enough to do what is expected of his character in the film but there’s not an awful lot of depth to his character despite some attempts at back story. Tom Sizemore co-stars as one of the prison guards who has history with Turner. Naturally this sub-plot goes virtually nowhere and is simply another obstruction for Turner to get past in his quest to solve the case. Sizemore phones the performance in and, save for an unintentionally-hilarious scene where he completely flips and starting shooting inmates, the role is very poorly written.

Spare a thought for Danny Trejo, a man so entrenched in stereotype that you just assume he’s going to be playing the same role in every film he’s in. Trejo stars as, you guessed it, a tough guy inmate. He’s joined by rapper Ja Rule but both characters are so insignificant to the main story that it would have been better to cut them out entirely and devote a bit more time to the main characters.

 

Furnace is a lifeless ghost flick, trapped between playing up the horror aspects and playing out the crime thriller aspects. Lumbering along a dull path, it manages to do neither aspect very well.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Lost Voyage (2001)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , October 24th, 2012 @ 2:51 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Christian McIntire

  • Writer: Christian McIntire (screenplay & story), Patrick Phillips (screenplay & story)

  • Starring: Judd Nelson, Janet Gunn, Jeff Kober, Lance Henriksen

  • Run Time: 96 mins

Lost Voyage (2001)

After 30 years in the Bermuda Triangle … a GHOST SHIP returns

Twenty-five years ago, the SS Corona Queen disappeared in the region known as the Bermuda Triangle. When it suddenly re-appears, a team of investigators head on board with a salvage team to find out what happened. But the ship didn’t return from the Bermuda Triangle alone.

 

Ghost Ship anyone? Incorrectly speaking to class it a rip-off, Lost Voyage was actually made first and manages to be better than the previously mentioned horror flick, opting not to go for the visual jugular with gore and special effects but instead trying to craft a more traditional and scary ghost flick. Actually Lost Voyage has more in common with 1997’s sci-fi horror Event Horizon. Comparing it to both bigger budget films is decent praise to kick off the review and Christian McIntire’s ambitious shocker is certainly punching above its own weight.

For a TV movie, Lost Voyage does relatively well for its budgetary limitations. The first thing that will strike you is how pedestrian it all looks though. There’s little life and energy to the cinematography and everything is glossed over with that typical TV-movie low budget sheen. This is a shame as the ship itself looks pretty spooky at times and the sets are quite atmospheric. But they lack that extra enhancement which the cinematography could have given them. Even though the film is set solely at night, the ship itself is too well lit. Dimming the lights a little to create dark and shadowy backgrounds is what the film should have done.

There are a couple of strong performances from Janet Gunn as the reporter and Judd Nelson as the researcher – they could have been just any other stereotypical cannon fodder characters but at least they bring a bit of depth and likeability to their roles. Nelson could have cut out his mumbling though as he sometimes drifts through his dialogue. Lance Henriksen pops up and manages to completely outshine his previous six or seven roles in low budget films to remind us that he was once a decent character actor before he was reduced to starring in trash such as Mangler 2: Graduation Day.

The characters are well-written for a change and it is refreshing to see. They do (for the most part) sensible things – Henriksen’s character tells the rest of the group that they have to get off the ship as soon as the first person is killed. He’s not bothered about the money on board and just wants to save his life. Characters do things that give them believability, not just provide opportunities to put them into set pieces.

Sadly little else makes sense in the film. The ghosts themselves are mean spirited in some occasions but are quite happy to let characters walk past other times without even batting an eyelid at them. There are a few small plot threads that aren’t explained very well (if at all) such as the ghosts using people’s fears against them. And of course, when you’re watching a ‘haunted place’ film you should expect to feel one or two shivers which this film greatly fails to produce. The special effects for the ghosts aren’t bad for CGI but you won’t actually care because they look quite graceful when floating around the ship. For once CGI has its appropriate uses and the ghosts aren’t overdone. They’re not scary though!

 

Lost Voyage is an ambitious film held down by its budget and lack of creativity. For a TV movie it’s impressive and looks and sounds good throughout. But it lacks the finishing touch and without any real chills or scares throughout, the film suffers from being too familiar with any other ghost ship film.

 

 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Ghost Rig (2003)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , October 24th, 2012 @ 10:51 am
  • AKA: The Devil's Tattoo (2001)

  • Director: Julian Kean

  • Writer: Sally Charlton, Graeme Clapperton , Bill Dale, Julian Kean

  • Starring: Jaason Simmons, Bryan Carney, Juliet Diamond, Kerry Norton

  • Run Time: 90 mins

Ghost Rig (2003)

Evil has found a new home

A team of environmentalists land on a remote oil rig in order to prevent it from being mothballed and demolished into the sea bed. They find the rig empty, even the maintenance crew who kept it running safely are nowhere to be found. But they also discover something far more sinister aboard.

 

British horror is seeing something of a revival over recent years and whether you like the films or not, it doesn’t really matter because what matters is that they are getting made after the industry’s virtual death in the 80s. Lighthouse, Long Time Dead, The Bunker, Dog Soldiers, 28 Days Later, Severance, The Cottage, Shaun of the Dead and many others have been made on these shores since the late 90s and the list keeps going on. You can now add Ghost Rig to that list, although it doesn’t really belong in the same company of the majority of those listed. Originally released in 2001 under the highly-random The Devil’s Tattoo moniker, the film has since been re-branded and re-released, no doubt to cash in on Ghost Ship. I prefer the re-titling to be perfectly frank as it’s less pretentious and more accurate about what the film is about. But under either name, the bottom line is the film isn’t very good.

Ghost Rig looks pretty cheap from the start and you can tell you’re in for a low budget ride by the use of digital video – it doesn’t look overly great when used in low brow productions like this. Given a better budget, the film would have looked a lot crisper and more polished from a technical standpoint. The sets are sparse and the oil rig setting isn’t really used to its full potential, for instance like the Alaskan base was in The Thing, a similar kind of film to which this film clearly models itself upon. Perhaps the budget wouldn’t stretch that far to allow some ‘bigger scope’ shots but it would have been good to give it more of an impressive scale instead of believing that this cast of characters are shuffling around the same couple of sets for the entire running time.

But whilst the limited sets may provide some atmosphere and eeriness, there’s not a great done with it. The possession plot could have been done so much better too but instead, surprise, surprise, we get another body swapping film in which different characters become possessed by the entity on the rig. It’s just an excuse for the actors to act ‘tough and a little crazy’ for a bit when they become possessed and it’s also a cheap way out of showing us the entity in its original form, even a spectre or something would have sufficed. I have a real hatred for body swapping films like this because in my opinion, it just shows a total lack of creativity to have one actor be a good guy one moment then become possessed and act evil the next.

Another problem in doing that type of film is that you have to have characters that you care about in the first place before they’re possessed and make sure that they aren’t just assholes most of the time. Unfortunately, the characters here aren’t likeable at all and they are always bitching and moaning at each other before they become possessed. So it’s sometimes hard to tell what is going on when one of them does turn as there’s little change in their character. They’re all eco-warriors but it seems like the usual array of cardboard characters has been wheeled out to place on board the oil rig. It doesn’t help that the script just has them wandering around the oil rig and then, later on, running around the rig without any real purpose. The repetition of the same sequence of events soon leaves the film going around in circles.

 

I’m not a big fan of Ghost Rig. It’s repetitive, boring at that, conjures up little in the way of excitement and doesn’t really get you invested in the film. There was potential and I can appreciate the psychological approach over the straight-out gore but films can’t really live off potential and it needs fulfilling at some point. The decent atmosphere and mood on board the oil rig is wasted with a lack of ideas on what to do with it.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Death Ship (1980)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , October 3rd, 2012 @ 5:55 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Alvin Rakoff

  • Writer: John Robins (screenplay), Jack Hill (story), David P. Lewis (story)

  • Starring: George Kennedy, Richard Crenna, Nick Mancuso, Sally Ann Howes

  • Run Time: 91 mins

Death Ship (1980)

Those who survive the ghost ship are better off dead!

Unbeknown to the passengers on board a cruise ship in the Caribbean, a mysterious vessel is approaching on a collision course. Despite the efforts of the crew to avert a disaster, the ship is lost with all hands, except for a handful of survivors. Drifting on a raft, they come across an apparently-deserted freighter and decide to go aboard and await rescue. However the fate that awaits them on board is worse than anything they could have imagined as the freighter used to be a Nazi torture ship and needs blood to keep running.

 

It’s great when obscure films get DVD releases. I said it in my review for Mountaintop Motel Massacre that I appreciate it when studios like Anchor Bay snap up the rights to this sort of film and release them on DV, even if they are not very good. It allows people like me the chance to find films that I’d never heard of. So I almost wet myself when I saw this being released on DVD. Here is a film that sounds a lot like the rather naff Ghost Ship (even closely ripping off the poster artwork) but was made in a time when cheese and low budgets were the order of the day as opposed to special effects and sound bursts. So how does it handle?

Death Ship’s low budget does show and it shows very early on. The footage of both the cruise ship and the freighter is clearly culled from other films – the cruiser is all lit up in night time footage whilst the freighter goes full steam ahead in the day. I guess you’re supposed to believe they’re on a collision course as the footage quickly cuts from one ship to the next with ominous music playing in the background. You don’t even see the collision, just a few extras throwing themselves around the set as the camera shakes. Again the footage of the sinking ship is ‘borrowed’ from other ocean disaster films. The funny thing is that when you see just who survived the collision, you’ll be amazed at how they did given that they’re all from different parts of the ship. It’s also very convenient that the only people who had speaking roles before the collision are the only ones who survive!

The Nazi freighter looks great it has to be said. I know that it’s only a normal freighter but the way in which its shot on camera, with long dimly-lit corridors and constantly creaking doors and windows really gives it that extra dimension. There are shaky hand-held POV angles galore, with each tilt of the lens adding another layer of madness and mayhem to the proceedings. Unfortunately there’s not a great deal that’s done with the setting and once the characters are aboard, the film just shifts into an ‘explore/death/explore/death’ cycle. The film has a few decent ideas but they’re all just thrown out there in the hope they’ll stick. Everything and anything happens on board the ship including a gramophone which keeps playing, the on-ship cinema which keeps playing Nazi rally footage and germ-warfare sweets which lay in the cupboards. You never see any ghosts or zombies or anything so those expecting the ship to be full of rotting Nazis best look elsewhere.

The set pieces are decent and not overly violent or gory. One guy is hoisted into the air by a crane and then dropped into the sea. Another is crushed to death in a pile of rotting corpses. The most famous scene from this flick, and probably the reason it was derived by the censors when it was released, is that of the blood shower. A naked chick gets a shower which runs blood. This mixture of nudity and blood has always been frowned upon in the UK (Hammer fell victim to many of the censors with some of their ‘blood on nipple’ scenes) but nowadays it just looks pretty timid.

There’s a decent cast here for such a B picture. George Kennedy (Leslie Nielsen’s hilariously deadpan partner from The Naked Gun films) stars as the captain of the cruise ship who starts to go crazy once he’s on the freighter. He hams it up to immense proportions as the voices in his head talk German to him and tell him to do nasty things. Richard Crenna (from the Rambo films) is also around and adds some believability to the proceedings. I was a bit annoyed to see no less than two children survive the collision meaning that although there were seven survivors, the two children were pretty much ‘untouchable’ by horror standards which greatly lowered the potential body count.

One other thing of note is the music, which is pretty sinister when coupled with the shots of the freighter steaming ahead through the seas unopposed. It all adds up to a very unsettling and uneasy ambiance to the film.

 

Death Ship is a classic example of B-movie making at its best and an even better example of the “they don’t make them like this anymore” school of filmmaking.  It shouldn’t work but it does and works very well – better than I guess anyone making it would have imagined. This is one voyage you won’t forget in a hurry.

 

 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 

 

 

Hellgate (1990)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , September 29th, 2012 @ 5:54 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: William A. Levey

  • Writer: Michael O'Rourke

  • Starring: Ron Palillo, Abigail Wolcott, Carel Trichardt, Petrea Curran

  • Run Time: 91 mins

Hellgate (1990)

Beyond the darkness terror lives forever.

A deserted mining town has become a shrine to the daughter of its only resident, Lucas. His daughter, Jessie, was brutally murdered years earlier and he became obsessed with her. Finding a powerful crystal which has the ability to bring the dead back to life, Lucas resurrected her and now uses her to lure people to their deaths in the town.

 

Hellgate is a film that’s so terrible that you’d really want to cry if you should waste your time watching it. It’s just so mind-numbingly shocking from start to finish and there’s not a shred of evidence on display to suggest that anyone had a clue what they were doing. Its silly 80s nonsense on the grandest scale with ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ thrown in for good measure. You can’t take it as a horror. You can’t take it as a comedy, despite my best efforts to laugh at everything stupid. It’s goofy and silly but unintentionally so and that’s a bad sign.

The plot is extremely confusing. In fact, too confusing to even try and go through as it hurts my brain just trying to work it all out. None of the characters in the film have a clue what is going on so what chance we have of piecing everything together I just don’t know. It’s as if the writers just watched a load of other films, thought that certain scenes would work well and decided to write them all into a script. As a result, there are no rules in Hellgate. So what causes instant death in one scene will then be pointless in the next. What happens to one character when they do something doesn’t happen the same way again when somebody else does it. It’s so hard to sit through because it’s bland and boring as well as confusing. Too much of it seems to be pointless as if the script was only half finished – the zombies wander around the ghost town of Hellgate doing little but make faces at the camera and there are a few characters in the film who seem geared up to do something worthwhile towards the finale but just end up being killed off before they have a chance to do anything.

The special effects look really dated and typically 80s. Expect lots of bright, multi-coloured beams of light when the crystal is used and lots of dry ice to blanket the town in fog. There’s just no atmosphere or tension at all and the effects just make the film look like some cheap 80s music video at times. The gore is tame and the body count is low. Lest we forget the mutated goldfish and killer turtle that both pop up later in the film or even the cheesy rubber bat that makes an appearance. Yes, despite going out of date back in the 1930s with Bela Lugosi and Dracula, the bat-on-a-string prop makes an appearance here.

Abigail Wolcott is the pick of the cast which is saying something as she’s a pretty terrible actress and delivers her lines like she’s reading them for the first time. But she only had to act with her chest and accomplished that quite well – the people concerned knew this and had her shed her clothes quite a lot. There’s a dude who looks like Gomez Addams, some pointless bikers and a 40 year old guy playing a college hero. Casting isn’t one of the film’s strengths. In fact there aren’t many strengths to be found at all here. There aren’t too many times when I really regret watching a film. Some films are at least watchable in a “so bad it’s good” way but Hellgate isn’t. It’s almost unwatchable and thankfully has been almost been forgotten about. It’s no surprise to see that most of the cast and crew haven’t had anything called a career both before and after this. If this were my only entry onto a film CV, I’d forget I ever wanted to be in the business and take up welding instead.

 

Hellgate isn’t just bad, it’s on the same ‘utterly terrible’ plane of existence as the likes of Troll and Raging Sharks. It’s not a film you can even watch if you’re curious about how awful it is. Just forget it ever existed.

 

 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Killing Birds (1987)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , , August 21st, 2012 @ 1:48 pm
  • AKA: Zombie 5; Raptors

  • Director: Claudio Lattanzi

  • Writer: Claudio Lattanzi (story), Daniele Stroppa (screenplay), Sheila Goldberg (story & dialogue)

  • Starring: Lara Wendel, Robert Vaughan, Timothy W. Watts, Leslie Cumming

  • Run Time: 90 mins

Killing Birds (1987)

…

After a soldier arrives home at his remote Louisiana house to find his wife in bed with another man, he promptly kills them both before he has his eyes pecked out by some birds-of-prey which were kept in cages on the porch. Years later a team of students arrive at the house of the blind soldier, now a bird specialist, to study a species of woodpecker in the nearby swamps. But the house is now haunted and strange things begin to happen.

 

This film, dubbed Zombie 5 in some quarters, is an appalling mess of a horror flick and features a distinct lack of both zombies and erm, well ‘killing birds’ too. I hate it when films that are clearly stand alone efforts are simply tagged with the name of a popular film series in a feeble attempt to cash in. They’ve done in with the later Hellraiser films which clearly had nothing to do with the original films so they simply inserted a few minutes of Pinhead to pretend they are part of the franchise. Some of the later Anaconda films seem like rubbish third-rate snake films which were slapped with the more famous title in an attempt to trick audiences into thinking Ice Cube or Jennifer Lopez were in it. But no evidence is more damning than that of the Italian Zombi films (usually referred to as Zombie Flesh Eaters in the UK) – five films that have about as much in common with each other as the Pope and myself. However all are billed as sequels to Fulci’s classic in a futile attempt to fool the audience and cash-in. Well anyone expecting Killing Birds to fool the audience must be in clear need of help – those looking for a zombie film will be grossly disappointed and those looking at the front cover and thinking “oh look, an Italian version of The Birds” will be in for even more of a shock.

Ripping off everything from Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond to Hitchcock’s previously mentioned classic and even John Carpenter’s The Fog, Killing Birds is just a loosely connected series of gore set pieces with a poor framing device. It’s just a nothing film in all honestly. There are no long explanations of what is going on. Things just seem to happen because they can. The film shifts from different sub-genres with abandon, going from zombie film to haunted house flick in an instant and then switching back whenever the need for another set piece arises. The deadly birds that feature so prominently on the front cover aren’t the main focus of the film and do very little except kill one person (and not as graphically as the front cover, I might add). And there’s only two zombies lurking around the house so they can’t be the main focus either. In fact I don’t even think they are zombies – more like horrible-looking ghosts.

Robert Vaughan’s blind character seemed to be a bit of a menace and perhaps the big instigator of the film at first but then he turns out OK in the end. I mean just what the hell is going on? What was Robert Vaughan doing when he signed on to this – he must have been playing his blind character in real life when he signed the contract! And think about it for a moment – his character is a BLIND BIRD WATCHER! How does he know whether he’s looking at a pigeon or a crow? Actually he’s not that bad in his role and it’s a pity that he isn’t in the film for longer than his five minutes of fame. The rest of the cast are absolutely atrocious and it’s never a good sign to be chalking off people you want to see die quickly. These teenagers act like complete morons for the bulk of the time and, given that not a lot else happens for around fifty minutes, you’re going to be looking at the clock with angst and waiting for the zombies or birds or just some random runaway car to take them all out.

Even the gore, usually the sole positive from Italian horror, is pretty bad. The same neck-slash effect is used too often and it seems like the only way these ghosts know how to kill people. The film itself looks pretty bad too, with a lot of scenes being too dark, too fuzzy or simply just not framed correctly. But then in some other scenes, the cinematography is excellent and the lighting is spot on – including a great scene in which an approaching zombie is back-lit. I think the copy I watched may have been victim of the BBFC and its unnecessary butchering but I doubt it. Killing Birds looks like two very poor films edited together in a nonsensical way to create an even worse mess. There’s not even a decent pay off at the end of the film and it all ends just so abruptly. Either they ran out of money by hiring Robert Vaughan or they simply gave up and called it a day. Maybe it was the wisest choice they ever made. Euro-horror and especially these Italian-made ones hold a very special place in my heart because at least they try their hardest, usually with the same disappointing results.

 

Killing Birds is a sorry mix of The Birds, The Beyond and The Fog. Surely with ripping off those films, then this film should at least have some half-decent moments? Nope. Don’t even waste ninety minutes of your life trying to prove me wrong.

 

 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Spookies (1986)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , August 19th, 2012 @ 10:18 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Genie Joseph, Thomas Doran (footage from "Twisted Souls"), Brendan Faulkner (footage from "Twisted Souls")

  • Writer: Ann Burgund (additional material), Thomas Doran (screenplay: "Twisted Souls" footage), Frank M. Farel (screenplay: "Twisted Souls" footage), Brendan Faulkner (screenplay: "Twisted Souls" footage)

  • Starring: Felix Ward, Maria Pechukas, Dan Scot, Alec Nemser

  • Run Time: 85 mins

Spookies (1986)

The ultimate in fright and fun

A group of teenagers looking for a party get trapped inside an old mansion by an evil sorcerer who needs human sacrifices to give eternal life to his bride. Inside, they are threatened by all manner of monsters and demons.

 

With the advent of home video and the successive increase in audiences during the 80s, perhaps no other genre came off better than that of the horror genre. In a manner of speaking, almost anyone with a camera and a bit of money could go out and make and film and then release it straight-to-video. It’s something we take for granted now and something to which the big studios have taken over once they adjusted to it. But back in the day there was an explosion of B-movie genre flicks, most of which have been consigned to the scrapheap of history. For avid horror buffs, this isn’t so much a scrapheap but a minefield. For every couple of hits you take, there’s always a little gem around the corner. Spookies can’t be considered such a gem but it’s a film which does more to personify the 80s B-movie market than most other films.

One of the most bizarre, disjointed horror films I’ve ever seen, Spookies is actually quite a hoot if you just sit back and see how much the makers of the film crammed into the house as ‘surprises.’ This one will leave you scratching your head in confusion, shaking your head in disgust and then nodding your head in delight. Think of it as walking through a haunted house ride at a fairground, taking you on a journey through the weird, the wonderful, the eerie and the scary. I actually prefer to think of Spookies as eighty five minutes of pure FX wizardry as opposed to an actual film. It’s like a tour-de-force of various monsters, demons, ghosts and ghouls as the cast of characters split up to explore the mansion with little structure to their adventure.

The characters are one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs. You know the type by now: joker, jock, slut, nerd, shy girl, bitch, etc. Spookies spends little time in letting us get to know them and even less time giving them worthwhile reasons to go to the mansion. As soon as they get to the mansion and split up, that’s where the fun begins. Trying to explain any form of plot would be pointless as nothing much makes sense from the opening scene right down to the ending. As I’ve said, it’s best to just sit back and take everything as it comes because as crazy as this is, you just never know what is around the next corner!

We’ve got zombies lurking in the graveyard outside, muck men who live in the basement, a spider woman, a possessed ouija board witch, statues of the Grim Reaper which come to life, imps and even more bizarre things which kill the cast one-by-one. Treading a fine line between being serious and being silly, Spookies mixes it up at every opportunity. So after one comedy scene in which the monsters are played for laughs, the next one will be deadly serious. The make-up effects for the monsters are exceptionally done. The transformation of the spider-woman is great, the Grim Reaper looks a bit comical but you won’t forget him in a hurry and the muck men, although flatulent creatures, are disgusting creations, aptly named after their revolting appearance. It’s clear where the budget for this one went. Literally anything and everything in the mansion is liable to come to life and try and harm the characters. And let me state one more time that there’s no point in trying to understand what and why – just let it happen and you’ll be better off for it.

*After writing this review, I did a little bit of research on the film and it turns out that it has a problematic history which explains many things. Spookies started life out as Twisted Souls in 1984 but for some reason it was shelved for a few years until a new director was brought in, new scenes were filmed and added to the existing footage and the result is what you see on the screen. No wonder the film is so disjointed! It’s not bad editing or a bad script when you’ve got three directors, each coming at the film from a completely different standpoint, each with different scripts, budgets, actors, etc. This explains why the film is such a continual contrast to itself and why nothing really seems to click together.

 

Spookies doesn’t hold up well as a proper feature film for obvious reasons. It seems too much of a patched together creation solely based around what make-up effects the FX team could come up with. But what FX! A tour-de-force of 80s horror at its most grandiose and most sublime, Spookies is as entertaining as it is infuriating!

 

 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 16th, 2012 @ 11:14 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Victor Garcia

  • Writer: Robb White (characters), William Massa

  • Starring: Amanda Righetti, Cerina Vincent, Erik Palladino, Tom Riley

  • Run Time: 81 mins

Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007)

…

It’s been six years since Sara Wolfe escaped from Hill House and no one believed her version of the events surrounding the massacre of the other guests. Even her own sister, Ariel, ignored her and refused to return her calls. But, when Sara seemingly commits suicide, Ariel heads over to her apartment to try and piece together what happened. Here she encounters Dr Hammer, a college professor who says Sara was working with him to locate the Baphomet Idol and they believed it to be located in the house. But the doctor is not the only person looking for the artefact and a rival and his armed gang kidnap Ariel and her boyfriend and force them to go the house to look for it. With the doctor and a party of his own already at the house, the groups soon discover that the house is alive and locks them all inside for a night they will never forget.

 

I’m got a bit of a soft spot for the remake of The House on Haunted Hill. It’s not a great film and is very much the living proof of style over substance. But there was a genuinely spooky atmosphere to it, a script full of twists and turns and a solid cast of actors (can’t go wrong with a bit of Geoffrey Rush hamming it up) to end up with a film that greatly blew away my meagre expectations. Fast forward a few years and it seems that no one has really learnt their lesson, offering up a sequel which is very much style over substance – only this time upping the gore and taking away the script and the solid cast of actors. What you get is the film that would have been made six to eight years ago had the audience of that time been as undemanding as today’s audience (get it?).

I guess there’s not a lot you can really do with a haunted house film. It’s not like the house can actually move so you’ve got to get the people into the house. The set up is mercifully brief. All you really need to know is that most of the main characters have some links/relationships with one another and the ones who don’t (i.e. the hired goons armed with guns) are there to make up the numbers and give us the early body count numbers. The script is lousy in all honesty but apart from some ear-splitting moments of dialogue and some ridiculous decision-making on behalf of the characters, there’s not a lot going to offend anyone. The whole story about the Baphomet Idol does more harm than good too. The ghosts could have remained as they were from the original – the tormented spirits of the victims of Dr Vannacutt. But the new take on the story is the only reason the characters have for going into the house so I guess that’s why it’s been put here.

Speaking of Dr Vannacutt, he does return here and he’s as malicious as ever. Credit should go to Jeffrey Combs as  he manages to convey so much hate, perversion and general sadism for a character who doesn’t say an awful lot (in fact I’m hard pressed to remember him speaking at all). The rest of the cast do alright I guess. Amanda Righetti struts around wearing a glorious white tank top and is frequently getting wet (being drenched in the rain, thrown into a hydrotherapy pool and culminating in a fight in the showers!) so no complaints there. Erik Palladino grates badly as the rival looking for the Idol but it’s down to the script giving him clunking speeches and “boo me, I’m the bad guy” lines aplenty.

The others in the cast round off the stock characters: slutty girl, comic relief and expert. And not forgetting the armed gang who consist of a black guy (see ya later), a lesbian (who gets seduced by naked ghosts to give us the T&A quota for the film) and some rough English-speaking guys who sound like they have wandered off the set of a new Guy Ritchie movie.

Visually, it’s almost identical to the remake. As well as using the same sets, the damp set of the basement and the badly lit underground corridors revamp the atmosphere and actually manages to crank up the tension and atmosphere way more than it has any right to do. Remember this is a sequel shot on a lower budget. Expect plenty of the usual indulgence of quick snappy editing and frenetic camerawork. The ghosts look as freaky as ever before. The instruments of torture strewn around the house look as uninviting as they did in the original. Even the gore quotient is high. A character has their face sliced off, another one has their brain removed and another is dragged thrown a hole in a wall. There’s plenty more in store and it’s a good splatter ride if you like that sort of thing. At a thin eighty-one minutes long, the action gets going early on and the pacing is decent enough to avoid spells of boredom.

 

Return to House on Haunted Hill is about a decent a sequel as you’d expect nowadays. Serving only as a pointless remake of a remake, it offers up genre goods to satisfy those with weaker demands. If you liked the remake then be sure to check this out because it doesn’t do a bad job of recreating the atmosphere. We’ve just we’ve been there, done that and put the house up for sale when we’ve finished.

 

 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Task, The (2011)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , July 26th, 2012 @ 12:57 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Alex Orwell

  • Writer: Kenny Yakkel

  • Starring: Alexandra Staden, Victor McGuire, Adam Rayner, Antonia Campbell-Hughes

  • Run Time: 95 mins

The Task (2011)

The audience isn’t the only one watching

‘The Task’ is a new reality TV show in which contestants must complete terrifying missions in an abandoned jail if they wish to claim the substantial prize on offer. Six young students are the first group to compete for the cash but they are unaware that the jail still harbours the spirit of the murderous warden who used to torture and kill the inmates before being executed.
Horror films set around reality TV are nothing new. Heck, they’ve been on the go for years since the dawn of Big Brother and these daft reality celebrity shows clogging up our televisions. But they’ve run their course, as the latest couple of series of Big Brother in the UK have shown with dwindling audiences and lack of mainstream media interest. So to see The Task released in 2011 (with a couple of reality-style horrors released in 2002 with Halloween: Resurrection and My Little Eye) seems to me to be the result of a distinct lack of originality and risk-taking in the genre at the moment. Why bother creating a new story when you can just wheel out some tried-and-tested plot?

This isn’t a knock directly at The Task – it’s a knock at the genre in general at the moment. The straight-to-DVD series of After Dark ‘Originals’ (of which The Task is a part of) have been largely forgettable teen horrors, pimped up a little with fancy covers and made to sound like the bees knees of cutting edge scare material when really they’ve been highly derivative and largely non-descript. I appreciate the sentiment behind giving new talent the chance to prove what they can do and get their product out there to a wider audience. But if these are the future of horror, we’re in for a barren couple of years.

The Task is competently made but is nothing more than by-the-numbers teen horror. Everything about it screams pedestrian from the plot, to the characters, to the setting, the lack of any sort of tension or atmosphere and modern-day reliance on flashy editing. It’s the embodiment of a film which will no doubt keep you interested for its running time but is immediately forgettable straight afterwards.

Director Alex Orwell is no doubt pleased that his film has made it onto DVD but he should at least learn how to build suspense or create some sort of an atmosphere. I mean, the setting is decent enough but how many times are we going to see horror films set inside abandoned jails, asylums or other kooky places with sinister histories? It’s just not fun to watch a group of twenty-somethings walk around dark corridors and jail cells for the umpteenth time, talking to each other and generally being irritating to the audience. Are we supposed to care for this bunch of self-obsessed idiots? After all, they’re all in it for the fame and the money. Forget doing hard work, let’s all just take the easy way out and do reality TV! The usual caricatures are here including the goth girl, the dumb blonde, etc. Throw in some expendable crew members from the company running the show and you’ve got the recipe for a predictable ride.

It’s a good hour into the proceedings by the time things start to get interesting and remotely exciting and that’s a bit of a overstatement. The idea of each character having to do tasks seems to have come straight out of the Saw films complete with a Jigsaw-style host (a guy in some clown make-up explains what the characters need to do). But then you’ve also got helpings of The House on Haunted Hill thrown in there too, with the TV crew having devised all manner of weird and wonderful surprises for the contestants in a bid to throw them off – there’s even a ghost walking around the corridors caught on camera. Only this time Jeffrey Combs is nowhere to be seen.

The first couple of tasks each character has to do are hardly nerve-shattering and I’m sure if I had been watching this TV show, I’d have turned over long before the better ones later on. Things do pick up slightly once the vengeful warden has made his presence felt but we’re never really sure of what he is or why he’s there. And if you think his arrival will signal the start of the gore, then you’ll be sorely disappointed too. I’m not quite sure why the film’s certificate is so high (it’s an 18 in the UK) because from what I remember, the film is bloodless. Problems are confounded with a script which messes around with too many ideas, all pulling in different directions and inevitably ends up tearing the film apart. The case in point being the overblown finale which makes no sense and comes right out of leftfield. Either the production ran out of cash or the writers ran out of ideas. You make the call.

 

The Task takes a long time to get where it’s supposed to be going and even then you’re not really sure where you’ve ended up. The only thing you realise is that you’ve been there before – many times. It’s deja vu all over again.

 

 ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆