Author Archives: Big Z

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: Barrio Tales (2012)

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Barrio Tales: F

More like Barrio Fails. Hey oh! But seriously I am a pretty big fan of horror anthologies mainly because if you are watching a shitty story, it is only like 25 minutes from being over instead of 75, but this movie had 2 awful stories and 1 average one, so it left much to be desired.

The first story, “Maria,” looked like it was made just so the guys in it can show how much they party, as only like 4 minutes of the story involved a ghost and actual kills.

The second story was about a fat guy named Tio who made the best tacos in town out of human flesh. Of the three stories this was the only one that was entertaining on even an average level.

The third story was about some rednecks who kidnap some Mexicans to torture them, only to have the Mexicans fight back in one of the worst gun battles of all time. The story was titled “El Monsturo” and was allegedly about some monster but the monster did basically nothing cool, and at the end he was shot.

Overall this is the second worst anthology horror film I have seen next to Death 4 Told (I googled Death 4 Told and it has one of the lowest IMDB rankings I have ever seen).

REVIEW: Unlucky Charms (2013)

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Unlucky Charms: F-

Charles Band is the founder, director and lead writer for film production company Full Moon Features. After viewing Unlucky Charms he is also very high on my list of people to punch in the face. This cinematic crap fest sets special effects back about 20 years, while simultaneously bringing us a a jumbled mess of a story and the lesser of the O’Connell brothers, Charlie O’Connell.

The movie starts off with some midget with a fake beard named Farr Darrig sitting in front a green screen consoling a small child. Soon he is joined by 3 other midgets all wearing terrible masks, and we learn that they are 4 mythical creatures that can be called upon to do the deeds of whomever holds the ancient “4 charms”. Well it turns out that the person currently holding these 4 charms is some bitch named Deville who is deathly afraid of getting old. To solve this problem she holds a fake reality TV casting, where 3 strippers and a fat chick get to battle it out to see who becomes the model of Deville’s newest fashion line. However the reality show is just a front for her actual intentions which are to use the 4 demons to steal the girls’ souls so she can stay young.

Once these shitty plot points are established, the demons go around killing the poor strippers with special effects that looked like rejected scenes from the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. All of this is pretty ho-hum until the director pulls a fast one and enacts one of the worst plot twists in history when the demons suddenly gain a sense of morality and decide that killing the strippers is wrong and they should instead kill Deville.

Now not only is it stupid that evil entities all of the sudden become moral beings, but it also limits the amount of kills in the movie to 1, and it means that I did not get to see Charlie O’Connell killed either, which is 90% of the reason I kept the movie on past 11 minutes.

On the plus side the chicks are hot, even the fat one in a chubby way, and we see some boobs and get the pleasure of watching another O’Connell embarrass themselves on the silver screen.

Overall do not watch unless you are under 12 and can somehow not access porn on the internet.

REVIEW: Brain Dead (1990)

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Brain Dead: C

Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton star in this bizarre, poorly written but somehow mildly entertaining horror movie about a doctor that slowly descends into madness. Bill Pullman is a star experimental neurosurgeon who has developed a method that can alter a person’s personality, and/or their memories. Bill Paxton is his former college roommate who is now a corporate slime ball, and he needs Pullman’s help to recover the missing portion of an equation from a former employee named Hallsey.

Despite Pullman’s initial rejections of the idea, he eventually succumbs to Paxton’s charms and agrees to do surgery on Hallsey to get him to remember the equation. During the course of the surgery Pullman fixes Hallsey, but he soon begins to develop paranoid delusions of his own that send his world spiraling out of control.

From here the movie picks up steam but starts moving in so many different directions it is very hard to keep up. First Pullman starts seeing a blood covered doctor everywhere he turns and he keeps having visions of his wife and Bill Paxton banging in all sorts of odd places. Once you think you get the idea that Pullman is a nut bag, the film shifts again as Pullman is now being portrayed as a life long mental patient who created a false reality about him being a neurosurgeon, and he and Hallsey are actually the same person. Well once you accept that portion of the film it shifts again and Pullman just starts waking up from dream sequences over and over again until the viewer eventually gets frustrated and kind of tunes out.

Overall the director did a good job of keeping the audience guessing about what is real and what is not, and as far as a philosophical allegory for what the true nature of reality is, it shits on The Matrix. However the movie got a little jumbled and to hard to follow at points. Worth a viewing if you have always wanted to see the two Bills share the silver screen together.

REVIEW: Dark Harvest 2: The Maize (2004)

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Dark Harvest 2 – The Maize: F-

I must first preface this review by saying that this is the most impressive movie I have ever seen. Now I do not mean impressive in the sense that the story was incredibly well written, or that cinematically it was magnificent, or the use of lighting was superb, or that it was expertly acted. I mean that I was incredibly impressed that someone had the audacity to film this garbage and put it on screen.

The biggest tool in low budget cinema, Bill Cowell, stars as the self proclaimed “benevolent Shy Walker” a slightly out of shape, divorced father of two hideous children who starts having crappy prophetic visions about some demon in a cornfield. Unperturbed by these Microsoft Paint level dream sequences, he decides it would be an awesome idea to take his daughters to the local corn maze on Halloween and let them wander around alone. Well as dark approaches and his kids are not yet back, he goes deep into the corn maze himself to confront the horrors that lie within, while searching for his children.

Well after this stupid and unbelievable set up the rest of the movie consists of Cowell walking through a cornfield yelling “Girls!” “Girls!”while looking for his missing daughters. That’s it. Literally almost nothing else happens At one point he escapes the maze only to be arrested, then he punches the cop and escapes arrest band runs back into the maze where he continues to meander about aimlessly. Throughout the course of his shitty adventure he falls over like 11 times and at least 3 of them were not on purpose, and there is an 8 minute scene of him digging into the dirt with a gardening tool. And as if it was not dumb enough already, at it’s merciful end, Cowell outsmarts the local killer by having a running handheld camera trained on him as if it were some kind of magic spell.

I cannot believe I watched this whole thing, as it is truly one of the worst movies ever and is in my elite pantheon of awful

REVIEW: Stay Alive (2006)

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Stay Alive: F

Released in the mid 2000’s to try and hitch on to the popularity of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill train, Stay Alive presents a premise that is both boring, unoriginal, flawed, and basically awful. The movie begins with some hardcore gamer who is beta testing a new game called “Stay Alive.” While playing the game his character dies by being hung from a chandelier, and about six minutes later, fuckin surprise, he dies in real life by being hung from a chandelier.

Soon we meet the main character “Hutch” and his GF “October” who is the hot video game playing emo chick designed to suck in all the lonely Everquest players who have never seen a pair of tits, and 12 year kids. Hutch’s crew also consists of a drug ravaged Frankie Muniz and another hot blonde whose name I have already forgotten. While sitting around one day, Hutch receives a copy of “Stay Alive” in the mail so he and his crew start gaming and soon they are trapped in the video game world of Count Elizabeth Bathory, and they learn the awful truth that if you die in the game, you die in real life.

From here the internal logic of the movie is shattered repeatedly as characters that do not die in the game, do die in real life and characters that do die in the game do not die in real life. Other ridiculous flaws include Hutch being investigated by the city police force, and despite the fact that he is around all of the victims as they perish and he has no legitimate alibis he is not once even brought in for questioning let alone marked as the prime suspect.

Eventually Hutch and the nameless Blonde chick somehow find out that the origin of the game is the home of Liz Bathory in Louisiana, so they go there to solve the mystery yet all we get to do is watch Frankie Muniz’s video game character run around in PS2 quality graphics while Hutch digs through old dressers.

About 1/8 of the movie is video game screen shots that look outdated for 1996 let alone 2006. The PG-13 rating also means that we get a lot more digital gore then actual gore as most kills are either implied or done off screen. Overall this movie is absolute garbage.

REVIEW: Season of the Witch (2011)

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Season of the Witch: B+

I originally wanted to give this movie an F-, but after thinking it over, I realized I was entertained and was basically laughing the whole time.

Nic Cage looks awful; every scene literally looks like they roused him from an overnight coke binge, threw him in a costume, and had him deliver his lines. Perlmen looks better but clearly cares so little about the movie it looks like he is having sexual fantasies the whole time while acting.

Needless to say the story was predictable, lame, full of plot holes, and uninteresting. Its sad attempt at political and religious commentary was so weak and transparent that the few lines that were delivered in this vain fell on deaf ears. The CGI was abysmal, lurking in Spawn level indecipherability, and in the end, Cage beats up a CGI Satan. Pretty whack but see it anyway; it will not disappoint.

REVIEW: Big Bad Wolf (2006)

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Big Bad Wolf: B-

Surprisingly non terrible werewolf movie that actually had a semi interesting mystery, and a somewhat different take on the classic horror beast. Trevor is kind of a nerd who for some reason hangs out with the cool kids. One weekend Trevor tries to impress the dudes he is hanging out with and steals the keys to his mean stepdad’s cabin so they can party there. However once the party gets rolling, a lewd, surprisingly well done werewolf appears and kills everybody except Trevor and his punk rock girlfriend. Once they are back in town Trevor and his chick start to suspect that Trevor’s stepdad may be responsible for the killings by realizing that he is “on a business meeting” every full moon.

From here the mystery unfolds as the stepdad continues to transform into a werewolf once every 12 minutes or so, to tear off a head or gash open a neck. The kills in this movie were surprisingly well done as decapitations of limbs and heads is the main vehicle for demise. We also get several shots of very nice boobs and some hilarity as the werewolf spews one liners such as “Are you ready for some bestiality!?!”

Overall a solid horror film as the piss-poor acting was thankfully over shadowed by a good pace, and some good gore.