Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews of horror movies.

REVIEW: eXistenZ (1999)

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eXistenZ: C

This is a Cronenberg movie set in a videogame-obsessed future where reality and the virtual reality of games have become indistinguishable from one another.

Game consoles look like deflated breasts with umbilical cords which you can use to connect your nervous system and consciousness to the virtual world of the game. You actually play the breasts like a controller. Imagine an Alien face-hugger with tits that plugs into your back. Multiple scenes of Jude Law groping a melted mannequin torso.

I do it at Macy’s, and I get banned from the mall. Jude Law does it in this movie, and it’s “art.”

eXistenZ came out a couple of weeks after The Matrix and they share the philosophical theme of mankind’s struggle to define reality while our relationship with technology becomes more singular. Both films have us winding up in manufactured realities, but where they differ is their imagining of how we get there.

In The Matrix, sentient robots plug humans into a virtual reality against their will. In eXistenZ, we are so bored with reality that we plug ourselves into virtual worlds for entertainment. Both movies explore our increasingly intimate relationship with technology and our hubris from believing that we are on the dominant end of this relationship.

I think eXistenZ got overlooked because there are no stars from Point Break firing handguns in slow-motion. The movie is less sensational than The Matrix. It’s also way grosser; it has the aesthetic of Naked Lunch and Videodrome. Lots of slimy creatures and inappropriate tonguing of techno-organic private parts. Jude Law makes a working pistol out of the skeleton of a mutated salamander.

The overall look is a little clunky. You’ll immediately think to yourself, “Yep. That’s what people in the 90’s thought the future would be like.”

What about the plot? It’s a lot like Inception; multiple people can “plug in” to these machines and share the “game play,” much like the dream-sharing machine in Inception. Once in the game world, you can plug into another machine, taking you to another game world within the game world, from which you can plug into another machine, etc. just like the layered “dreams within dreams” in Inception. As a matter of fact, Inception ripped this movie off big time. What the hell, Inception?!

Get ready for you head to explode: A game designer is almost assassinated and Jude Law has to go into game land with her via a controller-port installed in his spinal cord by Willem Dafoe the gas station mechanic. Then they have to go a few layers further into game worlds and old Bilbo Baggins with a Russian accent has to perform bootleg surgery on the Lombard region of a game system. And there is an anti-gaming cult that commits homicides. Jude Law licks mysterious holes and guts lots of fish. It all works out.

REVIEW: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)

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All the Boys Love Mandy Lane: D

 

This movie is so fucking boring and unlikable, I can only write about it in short sentences, so let’s get this over with: It’s a slasher movie. There are teenagers who go to a secluded cabin that exists for them to abuse drugs and fornicate in. They are systematically killed. There are red herrings and an obvious conclusion.

Let’s talk aesthetics. The film comes off as wannabe 90s slasher flick meets wannabe grindhouse. It’s I Know What You Did Last Summer run through all your girlfriend’s gritty Instagram filters. There are long, agonizing montages of teens frolicking in meadows that remind me of Levis commercials. People who think the Texas Chainsaw reboots are the only horror movies ever made will call these scenes “stylish,” but they seemed like disjointed filler to me.

I seriously felt like an elderly curmudgeon wishing swift deaths on every character. Sometimes, horror movies will make the expendable teenagers especially unlikable/obnoxious so that you cheer when they get butchered. This movie went the other way with that strategy and it was infuriating: they tried to make the teens stylish and rebellious at the same time and they just came off as contrived advertisements.

Here’s what the film has going for it: The kills are sort of a mystery. I don’t mean in a “who done it” kind of way (I think my dog figured out the “twists” by the second act). I mean I couldn’t tell if the kills were satirizing horror movies or paying homage to them. I went back and forth trying to determine artistic intent, so I’ll give the movie props for some consistent ambiguity.

This is not really a compliment when you think about it. How do you think the director would feel if I told him that his movie’s greatest achievement is the detective work it put me through to understand what exactly he was fucking up? The kill scenes weren’t silly enough to be satire and too shitty to be actual tributes to other slasher flicks.

That was my experience with this film: trying to deduce the meaning/intent of every instance of violence with riotous teens frolicking in a pestilent Coca-cola commercial sepia lens-flare back-drop. No one wants to watch 90 minutes of Mandy and her friends Snapchatting each other in a rye field at dusk. GET A JOB.

The gore was alright. There is some crunchy skull mashing and some spraying wounds that were entertaining enough.

REVIEW: Transcendence (2014)

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TRANSCENDENCE

 

Transcendence: D-

I don’t know about you, but I love a sci-fi thriller with philosophical undertones. A movie that asks some deep, even terrifying questions about our future as a species. Transcendence asks its share of questions like: What if a sentient machine bent on world domination really illogically liked this one girl? Also: How about Morgan Freeman in a fisherman’s hat? What does that look like? And: How much money did Johnny Depp get paid to talk into a web cam for a whole movie and is he capable of feeling shame?

Doctor Johnny Depp makes a near-self aware AI which becomes fully self-aware once Depp uploads his stupid consciousness into a room full of stupid computer servers to fill in the gaps in the AI’s programming. The AI then manifests as Depp on a screen. Fucking Johnny Depp. 90% of his screen-time in the film is via-webcam as the personified rendering of the sinister AI. You KNOW he wasn’t wearing pants, either.

The AI Johnny Depp tries to take over the world, assimilating a few people, turning them into techno-organic zombies, manipulating humans like pawns and all that. Lots of scenes of stressed out people studying screens full of computer code (Imagine “Ah, ah ah! You didn’t say the magic word!” for 88 minutes). There are plot holes galore and insultingly fake Mummy Returns-esque CGI.

The movie is mechanical and anti-climactic. If this is what the singularity will be like, don’t worry; you’ll be able to sleep through it. It’ll actually make you WANT to watch Evolver.

Talk about devoid of originality. The movie plays out like it was written by an AI that writes movies about AI, but on a really bad day when the writer AI’s ideas about movies about AI just weren’t there. Maybe there was a deadline or the writer AI’s micromanaging boss won’t quit breathing down its neck, so at the last minute, it generated a god-awful shitty algorithm from which this movie was produced.

It’s one of those movies with invincible bad guys that can only be stopped by this one magic MacGuffiny computer virus. So Luke has to shoot one torpedo down this one special shaft in the Death Star. I mean Will Smith has to sneak onto the alien ship and upload a computer virus. I mean… you get the idea.

I’ve played more exciting games of The Oregon Trail. At least then, when someone got dysentery, it was sort of unexpected. During Transcendence, you’ll wish you contracted dysentery instead of a ticket for the film.

 

REVIEW: We Are What We Are (2013)

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We Are What We Are: A

This is an engrossing story about a family of rural cannibals who, once a year, ritualistically eat someone from their small town. The family has been devouring folks for centuries, passing the cannibal-torch through the generations, ever since the 1700’s when Ma and Pa ate Uncle Cletus and then eventually ate Ma in a flashback scene that’s like the Donner Party meets House of 1,000 Corpses.

There is not a comfortable scene in the movie; the tension is excruciating. I originally turned it on in order to mock it with some friends, but within minutes, we were mesmerized, leaning toward the TV where we remained for the entire film.

The minimalism and subtly made the movie really special. You see some carnage but there is plenty off-screen that gives you chills. The stuff that doesn’t happen, and the things that this film isn’t are what make it uniquely fucked up. This isn’t your mother’s redneck cannibal clan. This isn’t the cannibal family from Texas Chainsaw. Dennis Hopper doesn’t attack them with chainsaws. It isn’t funny. At all.

The music is quiet and evil as fuck. The sound irked something inside of me, especially during a scene where they cook some lady into what looks like burnt Denison’s chili and sit around their candle-lit shack slurping and staring at each other.

After hundreds of years of smooth-operating, the family’s dirty laundry starts to stink up the town. Mom and Dad exhibit visible symptoms of a disease you get from eating human flesh. A flood inconveniently exhumes some skeletons belonging to past Dennison’s chili cook-off victims. The teenage daughters start to reevaluate the ethical consequences of their extreme Atkins Diet.

Fans of Southern Gothic like True Detective will love this movie. There’s no shortage of swampy shanties and creepy evangelists with beards. There’s a forensics cop and a deputy who start sniffing around. The mingling of murderous religious-cult fanatics, and the detective work that might destroy them, creates some consistent and gritty suspense that all kinds of horror fans can enjoy.

Warm yourself up a bowl of chili and scramble some runny eggs before pressing play on this one. Trust me…

 

 

REVIEW: Plus 1 (2013)

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Plus One: D+

Some typical party-teens attend a typical teen house party when they are suddenly zapped back in time by about an hour or two. They are still at the party, but now they’re watching their past selves arrive and do all the typical teen house party shenanigans which they themselves did only hours before!

Every few minutes, the past house party zaps forward in time, so the zapped-forward teens watch their past selves “catch up” with them. With every flash-forward, additional guests from the party are duplicated and displaced in time. This gets the teens worried that once time “catches up,” they will merge with their past selves or maybe cease to exist.

The past doubles of the teens also act a little fishy and get the time-displaced teens worried that these might not be past versions of themselves, but alien doppelgangers who are bending space-time in order to steal their lives.

Here are some of the existential conundrums the movie presents:

  1. If you could get back with your girlfriend by murdering your past self and then murdering her future self, would you?
  2. If you had the chance, would you do that Bill Murray shit from Groundhog’s Day where you use your knowledge from the past to manipulate women?
  3. Who would win in a fight: you right now, or you one hour ago?
  4. If you stand near the place where your past self will be zapped forward through space-time, will the two of you become a fucking DUMB LOOKING conjoined twin thing?
  5. What happens if you pour vodka in your eye? Will it get you laid?
  6. What would happen if you ran into a tool shed to hide from a rift in space-time?
  7. Would you eat sushi off of a stranger’s genitals? What if there was time travel involved?
  8. Would you make out with your past self?
  9. Would you make out with your future self?
  10. If you made out with yourself from a different dimension, would the result be the two of you harmoniously merging into a smirking version of yourself?

Fucking boring!

If you hate annoying teen house party movies, imagine watching one where THE SAME SCENES HAPPEN TWICE with the only difference being someone LOOKING UPSET while it happens. It’s like some annoying bro took a philosophy class and made this movie.

There’s this one scene where a bunch of people hide in a shed, but the past gets zapped into the shed and there’s a bunch of fights to the death. Then you don’t know who’s left standing: past versions or present versions of annoying teens.

REVIEW: Jeepers Creepers (2001)

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Jeepers Creepers - Es ist angerichtet!   Jeepers Creepers: C

A flesh-eating man-bat hybrid ritualistically slaughters people and consumes their body parts in Jeepers Creepers. Justin Long and his sister are driving home from Spring Break when they unknowingly drive through the portion of isolated countryside which the monster uses as his killing fields. You can see how this would lead to trouble. We don’t have to sit through an origin story for the man-bat but the “wise elder” character, a crazy old cat lady, tells us that the “Creeper” eats body parts which are then absorbed into the creature’s own body. Once the Creeper gets a whiff of a body part he wants to eat, he’ll stop at nothing to get it. He smells Justin Long and targets him for consumption. I’ve watched way less original stuff.

Justin Long gets worried a lot and he keeps making this face that looks like someone stuck his dick in a waffle iron.

The whole movie is Long and his sister trying to out-run the Creeper. There is a car chase and the song “Jeepers Creepers” plays. Imagine there’s an axe-wielding carnivorous man-bat out to get you and you actually manage to run him over with your car and immobilize him. From here, which things would you not fucking do? Whatever you thought of not doing, Justin Long does it. He loiters around town, asks a psychic for help, and tries to logically explain the phenomena of man-bat attacks to redneck police officers. Stop sitting in a fucking diner cringing like someone stuck your penis in a waffle iron! Get the fuck out of there!

Justin Long winds up at the police station and the Creeper breaks in. It’s nothing like the awesome police station scene in Terminator. The song “Jeepers Creepers” plays for the second time and the Creeper walks on the ceiling. The Creeper gets Justin Long and takes him to his hideout so he can mutilate him and the song “Jeepers Creepers” plays again. The credits roll and “Jeepers Creepers” plays for the fourth time.

SPOILER: You get to see Long’s dead body and, I swear, that fucking waffle iron look is on his dead face. I think they did a great job titling the movie Jeepers Creepers because of all the “Jeepers Creepers” in the movie but they could have totally called it “Ow, My Dick is Stuck in the Waffle Iron!” if they wanted.

REVIEW: 30 Days of Night (2007)

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30 Days of Night: C+

Based on a fantastic comic book series of the same name, this film follows a small band of human survivors trying desperately to avoid being eaten by really mean vampires in Alaska.

The really mean vampires come to this little town in Alaska at a time of year when winter plunges the town into 30 days of darkness so they can just walk around like OMG IDGAF #nighttime. They execute a coordinated assault that effectively strands the fuck out of a bunch of regular people in town and cuts off their lines of communication to the outside world.

I thought all this was really clever. No matter how powerful vampires are, they have always had two huge problems: they have to be careful whom they kill so as to avoid detection, and they are only active at night. This movie circumvents these traditional vulnerabilities which means big trouble for all non-undead characters.

The vampires move really fast, wear all black, and speak in a mean sounding vampire language. They look pretty cool, sort of a cross between Ukrainian mobsters and feral gremlins. They all wear peacoats but still look tough (unlike some vampires).

The movie doesn’t get very “deep” but there’s this one scene where the vampire leader puts his nasty fingernail on a record that’s spinning on a phonograph and the distorted sound that comes out makes all the surrounding vampires orgasm and giggle and I guess it symbolizes how they don’t have to hide and be quiet anymore. The leader’s name is Marlow who is probably based on Barlow from Salem’s Lot, who was for sure based on Dracula.

Once the vampires establish their dominance and strand themselves some humans, the movie turns into Diary of Anne Frank meets Dawn of the Dead. All the people have to hide for their lives and the vampires patrol around killing everyone. It is a cat-and-mouse movie with jump scares and a fresh fatality sacrificed to every new predicament.

The color palette of the movie echoes that of Underworld; it’s all grays and one shade of bright red. There is snow everywhere, so the gore that sprays from various characters’ arteries stands out that much more.

Josh Hartnett is in it and he spends the whole movie hiding in attics, running, and being really upset about the mean vampire onslaught. Some people turn into vampires and there is a cool scene where someone is fed into this industrial machinery and they get ground up like hamburger. The make-up is well done and there is some decent gore.

It’s a cool enough vampire flick that lets the vampires go wild if you are in the mood for that sort of thing.

REVIEW: Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

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Humanoids from the Deep: C-

This isn’t the first movie I’ve seen where disgusting monsters mate with gorgeous, terrified girls, and, if my addiction to horror movies continues, it probably won’t be the last.

Horny, amphibious, carnivorous, sea monsters slaughter, molest, and mate with the teen populace of a run-down beach town in this 1980’s gore-fest. Everyone in the town is either a flannel-wearing Indian-hating mustached redneck or a nubile teen, so the movie has nothing but disposable lives/boobs to feed to the monsters.

The whole Indian-hating thing exists so we can have this subplot where the Indian character rescues some racist rednecks from Humanoids and then they learn that maybe Indians aren’t so bad after all. They’re way better than murderous Humanoids and maybe we can all get along.

The Humanoids themselves suffer from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers syndrome and all look like dudes in moss covered rubber Godzilla suits. They lumber around slowly and made perfunctory monster noises. The carnage is decent, though. There are a half dozen dog corpses and some gnarled up boyfriends/fathers-of-nubile-teen-girls that actually look pretty gruesome.

I didn’t feel too much sympathy for the people who get killed. One guy’s cut-off jean shorts made me pretty glad he met with a painful death. Another few fatalities are Indian-hating bigots for whom you are incapable of feeling pity.

I really felt bad for the girls. How would you like to be rebelling against your Indian-hating redneck dock worker father by frolicking around a deserted beach with some pale dude who wears daisy-dukes only to have your afternoon ruined by a biped sea-creature who holds you down and does bad, bad things to you?

This movie is like the deformed twin of Species, where a sexy female alien seduces willing human men in a gripping thriller with an all-star cast. In Humanoids, un-sexy male monsters rape human women in a schlocky actor-less creature feature.

If you have a room full of friends and don’t feel like using your brain, this movie is worth a peripheral watch.