Author Archives: BloodCrypt Keeper

REVIEW: Devil (2010)

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Devil: D-

The old lady is the Devil. There. Now you don’t have to watch this movie.

This long stupid monotonous movie is about a group of people trapped in an elevator. One of the people in there (it’s the old lady) is the Devil and everyone is wondering who it is. The premise isn’t awful; if this movie was distilled down to  Twilight Zone episode or a chapter in an anthology movie, it would probably be good, but as it is, it is too drawn-out and repetitive. At times, it reminded me of Cube, what with all the claustrophobia and paranoia, but those were only flashes in a very boring pan; weirdly, this premise/atmosphere is never developed. The movie relies on jump-scares instead of any actual story or horror.

The suspense is spread too thin and it just doesn’t work. Once this thing gets rolling, you are literally just waiting for the next jump-scare. Look, I really want to stress this: it’s the old lady. She’s behind all the killing. She’s the Devil. That’s the whole twist. I wish someone would have just told me that before I watched it.

I’m trying very hard to think of a movie version of the Devil that I liked less than this one who hangs out in an elevator (disguised as the old lady) killing people when the lights go out, but I’m having a rough time. All that comes to mind is Elizabeth Hurley in Bedazzled, but I think she was probably better. George Burns was better.

There’s this part where the “wise elder” character points out to the audience that “sometimes [the Devil] tortures the damned on Earth before claiming them.” For some reason, there are also about a dozen other arbitrary rules that the Devil must operate under like only attacking in the darkness. This is a pretty painful 80 minutes of exposition interrupted by jump-scares. I’m just glad they didn’t find any ancient scrolls or whatever.

The token Shyamalanian “twist” at the end is there, but I doubt you’ll care (not just because you know that old lady is the Devil; I didn’t, and I did not care one fucking bit).

REVIEW: Haunted High aka Ghostquake (2012)

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Haunted High aka Ghostquake: D-

Jesus what the fucking fuck-fuck?

The ghost of an evil teacher and his demonic minions haunt a high school full of stereotypical horror movie teens who are trapped on campus. Their only hope is janitor Danny Trejo who, I shit you not, is trapped in the broom closet for 90% of the movie. There are heinously low budget kills (this is a Sci-fi channel original production, I think) involving CGI that makes Garfield 2 look like real life.

There are deaths in the weight room, home ec. room, locker room etc. Plenty of great one liners; one character is getting electrocuted by possessed defibrillators while MC Gainey laughs and shouts “I really get a CHARGE out of this!” and “You are quite a SHOCK, gal!” So many cop-out deaths and off-screen implied kills, though. One guy gets his soul ripped from his body and trapped inside the trophy case. Another chick’s head explodes, but you only know this because you watch her CGI shadow in the wall. All in all horrible, but would be fun to watch with friends; it’s one of those bad-good movies that is so terrible it is good.

REVIEW: The Traveler (2010)

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The Traveler: F

This movie has a Twilight Zoney premise in which a mysterious, well groomed stranger appears in a police station on X-mas eve ready to confess to a series of murders he committed. The stranger is Kilmer and the murders actually haven’t happened yet, but Kilmer confesses to them one-by-one as he commits them throughout the film using some unexplained supernatural powers. He looks like Pitt from Meet Joe Black on a cupcake diet wearing a Mighty Thor wig and a Robert Davi mask. We must have been about 20 minutes into the movie when we figured out that the killings were revenge for Kilmer’s own death in which he was beaten/tortured by the cops in the police station. The acting was terrible, the plot was predictable. There were two incidents of decent gore but that’s about all.

I want to go on to discuss an interesting phenomenon regarding Kilmer’s deterioration into obesity and a yet unidentified ailment that seems to be accelerating his aging (I’m thinking binge drinking/eating, though this is speculation). His role in straight to DVD films mirrors that of Steven Seagal so closely that it corresponds to a simple set of rules:
1. Kilmer must wear the same outfit which hides his flabby body shape throughout the film. Dark colors and baggy coats are used often.
2. Mediocre actors must carry most of the film and Kilmer gets a combined 8-20 minutes of screen time total, mostly from a stationary position, delivering one-liners.
3. Whenever action is involved, camera tricks or stunt actors cover for Kilmer.
4. Despite appearing blatantly physically useless, Kilmer is given almost superhuman prowess throughout the film, delivering unwarranted intimidation and terror despite the fact that he is laughably chubby and in all probability on a cocktail of stimulants.

I feel like this should have a name. Seagal Syndrome?

REVIEW: Werewolf: The Beast Among Us (2012)

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Werewolf: The Beast Among Us: UV

When a little boy survives a werewolf attack that kills his parents, he devotes his life to being a nomadic Brisco County JR. wanna-be know-it-all werewolf hunter. He is like a Safeway Select version of an already shitty monster hunter like Jackman’s Van Helsing; imagine Antonio Sabato Jr. trying to play Walker Texas Ranger. The setting is some ambiguous Carpathian-like village where people either speak with American, Russian, or English accents. Anticlimactic kills, cheap CGI, predictable everything. If, after twenty minutes into the movie, you can’t guess everything else that happens, I will shit my pants from shock.

REVIEW: Day of the Dead (2008)

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Day of the Dead (2008): C-

I have seen worse remakes and worse zombie flicks in general.

This one had the model premise of a sudden viral outbreak and a group of ragtag survivors banding together. They keep the idea of a domesticated zombie, but he is super-annoying and just makes “the most annoying sound in the world” from Dumb & Dumber for a long time.

Maybe this is the first time I have seen zombies devour one of their own in a zombie flick. That was new. Everything else is super-tired or lame. The other new thing they try in this movie is really fast zombies. You have seen slow zombies and you have seen fast zombies. Now there are really fast zombies who climb on the wall like Jeepers Creepers and when they run, they look like seizure victims with carp in their trousers.

There is some entertaining low-budget gore, but cardboard acting and a plot that could have been written by throwing darts at a flow chart keep this movie dead in the dirt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdWhcQkb_r8

 

REVIEW: Silent Hill 2: Revelation (2012)

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Silent Hill 2: Revelation: F

Take a cheap, rejected Hellraiser script and tweak the characters to fit in line with the mythology of a Resident Evil wanna-be video game then project that your audience will be a mixture of 16 year old males who jack off too much and desperately nostalgic late-20’s gamers, and you basically have this movie. Throw in some dark, ambient electronica that sounds like loops from Underworld.

A young girl is stalked by leather-clad cenobite-esque demons who seek to trap humans in a perpetual state of ongoing inter-dimensional torture. Her “real” world is broken into sporadically by the monsters who attempt to lure her to a ghost town called Silent Hill where they plan to ritually execute her and steal her secret witchcraft-destruction powers to usher in doomsday. Consequently, the audience is expected to sit through elementary CGI from like three eras ago as she journeys through the caverns of monster-world while this “story” unfolds. John Snow is a dreamy asshole who helps her. Jesus Christ.

The film culminates in what can only be described as a fusion of Soul Caliber and something you’d expect to see on t-shirts at Hot Topic. Sean Bean, Carrie Anne Moss, and Malcolm McDowel all shame themselves during their combined 11 minutes of screen time in this “film.”

REVIEW: Dark Skies (2013)

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Dark Skies: UV

Worst piece of garbage I have seen in theaters in a long time. From the genius that brought you Priest and Legion: A middle class family of four is harassed by three invisible aliens who are “studying” them. For an unexplained reason, inducing minor and major terror is a part of alien protocol, so they do everything from playing mysterious pranks to implanting brain transmitters. The family, of course does some “research” and gets wise to what’s happening, so then it’s (anti-climactic) confrontation time.

So many reasons to hate this film.

First of all: no scares! There are not even jump-scares much less anything gruesome or twisted. There are barely any attempts at fright; the few “scary” moments are laughable and saturated with Boogeyman-esque CGI that seriously looks like XBOX-360 graphics. Forget about gore/nudity; this turd is a calculated PG-13.

Secondly: ANYTHING entertaining is in the trailer IN ITS ENTIRETY. You know how there is a 2 second snippet of the kid having a grand mal seizure? Well, he has a 2 second long seizure in the film. Everything from the effeminate dad’s mouth gaping to the alien brooding over the child’s bed, the stuff you see in the trailer is all the “interesting” stuff you can expect to see in the film. J Jonah Jameson (the “wise elder” of the film) never makes a single joke or has a Jameson style outburst. He just sadly front-loads exposition, explaining brain transmitters before walking off-set and collecting a paycheck.

Also, they did something I NEVER thought anyone would have the balls to do in a film. You know the old horror movie cop out where things start to get crazy and then a character wakes up and the audience is like “oh, it was just a dream!”? Well, they did that THREE TIMES. But that’s not the worst part; the third time was A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM! The character woke up, more crazy shit started happening, so they WOKE UP AGAIN! There are more layers here than Inception and In the Mouth of Madness put together. If you played a drinking game where you took a shot for every time a dream sequence was broken, you would have to go to the hospital.

In a climax that would give M Night Shyamalan a seizure, the parents find out that the aliens had been in their lives all along. But by this time, you’ll probably be unconscious from bashing your head into the wall over and over and over and over.

Roger Ebert puts it best when he says the movie ends in a way “as if designed specifically to enrage the hardy viewers who actually make it all the way to the end.”