Monthly Archives: October 2013

REVIEW: The Contractor (2013)

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The Contractor: F

Someone who loves Cape Fear but hates original ideas made this movie about a family of well-to-do white people, one of whom is a lawyer who looks like a malnourished Greg Kinear, who hire Danny Trejo to fix some stuff around their house. Trejo scowls a lot and so did I while watching this fucking excuse for a horror movie.

If you manage to maintain consciousness during the first fifteen minutes, you’ll figure out the entire conflict and “twist” of the movie and you can wave goodbye to any hope you had of being surprised/entertained. Trejo was wronged by Greg Kinear so he’s developed this crazy vendetta that inspires him to infiltrate the guy’s house with a plan to ruin his life.

You have to sit through several scenes of Trejo brooding over a computer creating counterfeit documents which he uses to incriminate Kinear and several scenes where literally nothing happens to further the plot.

The WASP’s figure out that something fishy is going on so they dismiss Trejo, who then starts aggressively stalking the family. I forget how many there were exactly, but I’m gonna guess there were five scenes where he hides in their bushes. There is a really out of place, really long scene where the family has some kind of fundraiser/party at their mansion which Trejo watches from afar.

Kinear sends some armed goons to rough up Trejo but, of course, he beats their asses.

Trejo is defeated; he gets no justice. There is some cartoonish running/hiding and the husband out-maneuvers and overpowers Trejo (who, again, dispatched two huge hired goons). I sincerely don’t remember how Trejo is stopped; I was looking at pictures on my phone of Mel Gibson all roided out.

The family of whites move from their mansion to another large home. Greg Kinear is wearing a sweater and he promises to spend more time with his family. The wife gets good news: That benefit dinner or whatever was really successful and some hospital is naming a wing after her. The daughter promises to use her asthma inhaler. They hug a lot and pose in front of their house/Lexus in a genuinely bizarre ending where the director mistakenly believes that the audience gives a modicum of a fuck about any of the characters.

REVIEW: You’re Next (2011)

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You’re Next: B-

I must admit that I got pretty hyped up for this movie. The trailers looked pretty cool, and it had that 70’s horror movie feel of the lone chick defying all odds and surviving against a pack of savage men ala I Spit on Your Grave.

The film starts off by introducing us too Erin and her lame fat boyfriend Krispin. They are traveling to Krispn’s family reunion in an isolated cabin to meet up with his two brothers, Mom, Dad and their significant others. The character development is predictably weak and forced as they all have to over act to get their character’s personalities across in a short amount of time.

At dinner a huge fight starts between the brothers and next thing you know dudes start getting picked off by crossbows. From here the movies pace picks up and moves well. The family is big, so their is plenty of fresh meat and the kills are relatively violent and creative. We have a women running throat first into strung up wire, a blender to the head and several viscous beatings with axes and hammers. The violence is very good with no CGI, and the kills are evenly spaced with very little down time.

My only complaints were that the “twist” was very predictable and could have been hidden better with a better “reveal” later. Also I can not put my finger on it, but the movie lacked a certain creepiness or edge to it that other movies of this genre have like The House of the Devil or The Last House on the Left. Sometimes it just felt like an adult Home Alone.

All in all You’re Next is far from a bad movie, but nothing really stood out about it either. Maybe it was my own fault for building the movie up too big, but the film played it too safe in my opinion. Still worth a watch for any true gore hound.

REVIEW: Carrie (1976)

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Carrie (1976) B+

So this chick gets her first period. Right in the shower at school. And then she starts screaming because she has no clue what a period is. Her weird religious mom never told her.

Then all the other girls start throwing these cotton balls and shit at her and yelling “plug it up” over and over again while the Period Girl screams and cries and gets hella traumatized. I think it’s kind of a commentary on mob mentality and the cruelty of crowds, because even the one who turns out to be the Nice Girl participates almost in like a trance. That is until Abby from “Eight is Enough”, who plays the PE Teacher, tears into the locker room and smacks her in the face. Ok, I said…I’m on board.

Then Abby tries to help the Period Girl by hugging her hot naked bloody body while she screams and then the light bulb explodes and everyone pretty much is like “Fuck!” Then they chill out and put on their clothes and wander away.

Also, Ed Rooney’s secretary is one of the Plug It Up Girls, which is also a band someone should start right now if any women read these reviews.

Then the PE teacher has to explain menstruation to Carrie (The Period Girl). Carrie…White. Heh. But it was good for the audience because apparently this happens to all women like several times each year. And not everyone knows that. Edu-tainment!

But Carrie is not like all women, and that’s when this movie goes from sexy to weird.

She apparently has menstrual-onset “tel-uh-kuh nee-sus”, which is how she pronounces it. It means she can move stuff with her mind.

All the Plug-it-Up Girls get punished and some of them can’t go to prom and that makes the Mean Girl want revenge on Carrie. But the Nice Girl inadvertently sets Carrie up for this revenge by getting her boyfriend, Greatest American Hero, to take Carrie to prom and to rig the voting so that Carrie can be Prom Queen.

Now leading up the climax at the prom, you got a few things going for you.

You got Danny Zuko bludgeoning some pigs. You got a music montage while the Greatest American Hero and his buddies guy try on tuxedoes and some of it’s in fast motion and funny. You got the “they’re all going to laugh at you” scene.

Then there’s prom and Carrie White wears a white dress. Then there’s blood, fire, fire hoses and explosions and crashing cars and crucifixions, and more fire.

It’s pretty scary.

It’s also funny how it’s called “menstrual” when men don’t get them.

 

REVIEW: Children of the Corn (1984)

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Children of the Corn: C-

I rented this when I was like thirteen and stopped watching after about thirteen boring minutes. After multiple attempts over several years, I’ve finally mustered up the attention span to finish it.

You already know what this is about; come on.

Linda Hamilton and her 80’s-as-fuck boyfriend decide to go on a road trip and make the mistake of driving through Nebraska. There’s nothing but corn and fundamentalist AM radio.

A dying kid stumbles out of a corn field in front of their car and they squish him. They make the genius decision to throw his corpse in their car and drive around with it. This leads them to a creepy adult-less town populated by a cult of murderous juveniles.

The movie is a fairly significant departure from the original Stephen King source material. In the short story, the kids all dress like Quakers and worship a demon who actually murders Linda Hamilton’s boyfriend. The kids execute the story-Linda Hamilton via sacrificial crucifixion. Some kids die too, through stabbing and sacrifice to the demon. The demon is the clear winner in the story. The adults are all dead and a flock of kids sacrifice themselves to it.

In the movie, there’s no badass murderous demon. There’s only something burrowing underground like a fucking tremor from Tremors. Linda Hamilton and her boyfriend survive thanks to the assistance of some rascally child cult dissenters. In the movie, the actual cult leader, Isaac, is sacrificed (as is his rebellious lieutenant). There is a huge build up that culminates in an 80’s CGI shit-fest and Issac is swallowed by a blob of orange saturation. Instead of the demon fucking everyone up, he just burrows underground like a fucking mole while Linda Hamilton’s boyfriend rigs the cornfield to blow.

There’s non-stop cardboard child acting and some seriously ugly child cult members who would benefit greatly by learning to breathe through their noses. I really dig the commentary on fundamentalism and the dangers of indoctrination. The story and movie both have a Lord of the Flies and Shirley Jackson vibe but the film execution is stale as fuck.

 

REVIEW: Silver Bullet (1985)

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Silver Bullet: C-

A crippled kid has to convince Gary Busey, his alcoholic uncle, that a werewolf is behind all the murders in their little redneck town. You can imagine how difficult this would be for the kid to accomplish since crippled kids probably want all sorts of special attention all the time and adults in his life, like Busey, are all but conditioned to drink more whenever he opens his crippled little mouth to tell his crippled little stories. Like all kids in horror movies who figure out who the monster is, he sounds like a raving dumbfuck every time he tries to explain his theories. Plus, all Busey wants to do is drink Wild Turkey 101 and sing anti-Union Civil War songs. It’s clear he loves his crippled nephew, but his monster obsession is a real buzz-kill.

This is a Stephen King movie, so if that matters to you, there you go. The werewolf looks pretty cool but he keeps slaughtering people in a disappointingly non-werewolf manner. Here’s what I mean:

1. When the sheriff (John Locke from Lost) gets wise to what’s going on, the werewolf… beats him with a baseball bat.

2. The werewolf breaks into a young girl’s bedroom and… throws her against the wall.

3. The werewolf hides in a redneck’s greenhouse and… impales the guy on a broken floorboard.

The movie is funny as hell and has basically every ugly thing from the 1980’s you could think of. The soundtrack is entirely horror synth stabs and 80’s butt-rock. At times, you’d swear you were watching The Goonies or Karate Kid. The cripple has a motorized wheelchair which he later swaps for a WHEELCHAIR/MOTORCYCLE HYBRID. He does wheelies and cheers during a four minute long butt-rock sequence.

Busey’s acting is cranked to level-11; you can almost see the coke dumping out of his pores and his neck veins look like fucking tree roots. So fun to watch. There’s also a priest with an eye-patch and unlimited expendable rednecks who drink Red Stripe with the labels ripped off.

There is a werewolf showdown at the end and, yes, there is a silver bullet involved.

REVIEW: Curse of Chucky (2013)

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Curse of Chucky: D-

FINALLY! What we’ve all been waiting for: an un-funny, un-scary installment in the Child’s Play series where Chucky’s facial expressions are computer generated and the writers are lazier than a baboon in an opium den.

Chucky is fucking FED-EXed to some cripple and her mom who live in a gloomy Victorian mansion. Cue: Child’s Play formula. The house fills with victims, a storm knocks out the power grid, and Chucky murders them one by one while pretending to be a harmless doll. You drown in predictable dramatic irony. Chucky tells horrible jokes as he kills people. Same old schtick. It’s like you’re watching a Leprechaun movie.

In horror movies, the protagonist can spend an hour in a library and, presto: They are vampire/werewolf/zombie/mummy/whatever experts. Even though there is no power, the cripple manages to use the internet and, in five measly minutes, she becomes a goddamn Child’s Play-ologist and deduces that Chucky is alive and really a serial killer. She even develops a psychological profile of Chucky based on the intricacies of his murders.

If she is so goddamn smart and resourceful, why is she still living with her mom?

This movie also includes some of the fucking laziest writing I’ve ever seen when it comes to kills. Here’s how Chucky kills one guy: He pushes the cripple’s wheelchair at him really hard. He apparently pushes it so hard that this full grown man does a forward-flip and is somehow immobilized long enough to watch Chucky wield a knife and tell a half dozen jokes in a row before cutting the guy’s jaw off.

At least it isn’t a prequel or a reboot. And Grima Wormtongue still does Chucky’s voice (he is even in the movie during a flash-back sequence). So, it’s got that going for it. Jennifer Tilly shows up and obnoxiously wags her breasts around. I’m going to say that 90% of her lines are puns.

If you’re like me, and you’ll watch anything, check this one out. You’ll see everything coming but maybe you’ll be nostalgic enough to stay awake.