Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews of horror movies.

REVIEW: Friday the 13th (2009)

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Friday the 13th (2009): D-

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always thought the purpose of movie reboots was to do a “fresh” retelling of a familiar story/franchise. You take the mythology and characters and tweak or “reboot” them using up-to-date special effects, relevant actors, and modern filmmaking conventions. The product is a re-imagined take on an old favorite, right?

Wrong.

The 2009 turd titled Friday the 13th did not do this. It’s a reboot for the sake of making a reboot and selling products. Nothing “fresh” is really brought to the story. Jason is in the woods and he kills teenagers who are just trying to have unprotected sex, swear, and drink beer (only the brand-partners for the movie, of course). No Mrs. Voorhees. No exploration of supernatural origins/powers. The movie sucks out anything unique about Jason and leaves us with a hollow murder machine you could find in any slasher-in-the-woods movie.

I love Jason mindlessly murdering people, but why reboot the franchise to show ONLY that? There’s the same ol’ gang of teens humping and drinking light beer right up until Jason hacks them up one by one. This film has a cast of physically flawless androgynous teens (and some of the most ridiculous hair I have ever seen). They don’t bother making them camp counselors which would, you know, make sense. They’re just dipshits who go to one of the kid’s parents’ lake house. I wonder how long the parents have owned the house and if Jason has ever attacked it before or if he’s just doing this on a whim. Seems like quite a coincidence.

Every “actress” is totally gorgeous even after getting a machete to the neck or harpoon in the face which, I guess is an achievement in the film? I don’t know.

The product placement in the film is off the hook! This happened:
BRO 1: Hey bro did you bring the Heineken?
BRO 2: What Heineken?
BRO 1: I told you to bring the Heineken! Where’s my Heineken?
BRO 2: Sorry bro.
BRO 1: What’s this: Pabst Blue Ribbon?
BRO 2: Have you never had a Pabst Blue Ribbon?
BRO 1: What the fuck is Pabst Blue Ribbon?
BRO 2: Dude, you can drink all the Pabst Blue Ribbon that you want!

And, this seriously happened:
BRO 1: Crystal Lake? Sounds like a water bottle. Like ‘Crystal Geyser.’ Every water bottle has ‘crystal’ in the name. Bet you can’t name one that doesn’t.
BRO 2: Aquafina. I win.

No one wins with this movie. Avoid it if possible.

REVIEW: Village of the Damned (1995)

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Village of the Damned: C-

This is a variation of The Brood and Children of the Corn that features telepathic blonde kids who have long-term plans for world domination and short-term plans for hurting/terrifying rednecks.

There’s this little town with a population of 2,000. One day, everyone in the city limits passes out for a few hours. There’s a real Under the Dome vibe as law enforcement even paints a border around the coma zone, marking lines that, once crossed, cause people to faint. When everyone wakes up, ten women are pregnant, several of whom have legitimate excuses for how they couldn’t have gotten pregnant.

Some weirdly autonomous, chain-smoking government agent, Kirstie Alley, shows up and takes a creepy interest in the immaculate coma-conceptions. She convinces the women to carry the mystery kids to term and then even personally helps in the delivery room (all the births happen at once), punctuating the ordeal with her nihilistic wise-cracks and power-smirk. You can tell she isn’t to be trusted because she smokes, wears sunglasses indoors, and always wears black.

Nine kids are born and one is still-born. SPOILER: The dead baby looks like an alien fetus and Kirstie Alley keeps it in a pickle jar in her basement so she can look at it and, I think, ponder her own cosmic insignificance.

Then something stranger than any of the coma-pregnancy alien fetus stuff happens: the film flashes forward several years to show the nine kids, all Aryan looking toddlers, existing as acknowledged telepaths with a dominant choke-hold on the town. No one openly fucks with the kids because they will telepathically make you jump off of a cliff or telepathically stick your arm in boiling water. Why wouldn’t they show us the townsfolk realizing that they have creepy telepaths on their hands? Why wouldn’t they show the power-plays the kids must have used to take control? THAT sounds like an interesting story. Instead, the rest of the movie is the kids being mean to / killing people and fucking Kirstie Alley smirking.

Christopher Reeve is the only one who has any success blocking the kids’ mind-reading so the town nominates him as the kids’ special tutor and he decides the best course of action would be to suicide bomb them. Mark Hamill is a priest who is bothered by everything.

The kids reveal they are aliens with similar telepathic colonies set up elsewhere on Earth. Kirstie Alley reveals that the government knows all about it and that she has a little alien fetus in her basement. John Carpenter reveals that he is a badass with belligerent synth music but inept as fuck with an acoustic guitar.

Not horrible, I guess.

REVIEW: Zombie Hunter (2013)

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Zombie Hunter: F

In a near-future post-apocalyptic wasteland, zombies with varying degrees of intelligence roam the earth feasting on the flesh of the living. Unfortunately, they don’t feast on our rugged anti-hero protagonist, Hunter, a guy with a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow and forced-as-fuck gritty voice. He must have gone to Michael Biehn’s Acting Academy.

If you like voice-overs where some loser is trying as hard as he can to sound tough, maybe you should stop reading this now and just go buy this movie. Hunter can’t stop talking about himself. For every fact he narrates about zombies, he has to follow it up with an annoying fact about himself to remind the audience of what an anti-hero nomad he is. “Some of the zombies are smart” is followed by “I love tequila.” “It all started with this street drug called Natas” is followed by “I can’t let go of the past.” You are expected to sit through this while he mashes along dirt roads in a Camero, squinting like Paul Walker, while a soundtrack of emotional alt-rock blares.

I swear to God I’m not making this up: The fucking alt-rock and dirt roads actually go away for a minute… so he can run over a zombie with his Camero and… as he hits the windshield wipers… the alt-rock blares and he peels out on another dirt road.

While I could write a fucking thesis about why Hunter sucks as a character, and the over-use of dirt roads and alt-rock, I need to focus on the movie’s style/aesthetic as a whole. This film tries SO HARD to emulate a neo-Grindhouse (like from Death-Proof and Machete) feel and it fails SO FUCKING BADLY. There’s artificial grit and blips arbitrarily added to a bunch of the cinematography. Sometimes a whip sound-effect happens and large block letters pop up on the screen to show the name of a character to the audience. “CRACK! – HUNTER.”  “CRACK! – FAST LANE DEBBIE.” There are two-dimensional female characters in jean shorts. All the contrast is cranked like your ex-girlfriend’s Instagram filter. The execution of EVERY EVENT is so fucking corny; the whole film has the timing of a kid’s cereal commercial.

They got Trejo to show up in the movie, and they feature him prominently on the cover art, but their budget only allowed him to deliver a handful of sentences and do some disappointing slow-motion shirtless axe-wielding.

I recommend this movie for dirt road enthusiasts.

REVIEW: Terror Tract (2000)

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Terror Tract: B

This day will go down in history as the day you learned that you can watch a horror anthology movie where John Ritter tells a story about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey.

I’ll let that sink in….

And one more time: John Ritter tells a story about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey.

What are you waiting for? Go watch this.

Terror Tract liberally borrows from the Creepshow playbook (even to the point where there is a Water-Zombie story) and the result is a goofy and enjoyable anthology movie about a shitload of unfortunate events that occur in the homes that jittery real estate agent J-Ritt is trying to slang to some hesitant suburbanites. “Full Disclosure” laws prompt Ritter to reveal the sinister history of each house and these histories give us our stories in the anthology.

There’s a story about a cheating wife who has a crazy husband. Put them together and apparently you get Water-Zombies. There’s another story about a dude with uncontrollable psychic powers that force him to unwillingly endure 1st person slayings committed by a serial killer who wears a granny mask and says “COME TO GRANNY!” while he stabs people. The killer is called the “Granny Killer.”

These stories are all fun enough but there’s one that eclipses them: the one about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey. Before he was the one who knocks, Cranston was the one who gets upset about his daughter’s pets. It’s the same story as Tina the Talking Doll; Cranston’s daughter finds an adorable monkey and brings it into the house and only Cranston realizes the monkey’s secret homicidal intentions. He knows that monkey is up to something but his fucking wife and daughter just won’t listen! Cartoonish violence escalates at Roadrunner pace; you half expect Cranston to blow up his own house with a missile from Acme. Did I mention that Buff Bagwell shows up out of nowhere and Cranston pays him to fight the monkey? There are dead animals, corpses dissolving in barrels, a monkey throwing knives and shooting guns, Cranston channeling Heisenberg against the monkey (and his whimpering daughter), and some of the most high-brow comedy there is: a monkey in a baby carriage.

REVIEW: Gacy (2003)

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Gacy: F

Who would have thought that the homoerotic killing spree of an overweight clown would be so un-fun? The guy who plays Francis in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure plays Gacy, an overweight clown who goes on a homoerotic and un-fun killing spree. If reading those two sentences back-to-back annoyed you, don’t watch this movie because you obviously have a low threshold for annoying shit.

Gacy appears to be a model citizen. He hosts BBQ’s, drinks scotch with everyone, dresses up like a clown and does magic, and playfully wrestles with the misguided young boys he hires at his construction business. His favorite thing to do it not the stuff of model citizens; the guy loves to lure male drifters and other unfortunate boys to his house so he can rape/choke them to death. His basement starts to stink really bad because of all the raped/choked boy corpses he hides down there.

That’s what the whole movie is about. Gacy pretends to be a swell guy in the public eye but when no one is watching, he gets his rape/choke on. He just does this until he gets caught. The end.

Oddly, the actual movie isn’t made up of a bunch of murder scenes; it’s mostly scenes of Gacy being frustrated because he isn’t raping/choking people. I’d say a good 90% of the movie is him huffing and puffing because a dozen bystanders at his BBQ are keeping him from strangling some cute blonde boy. The film is also punctuated with uninteresting flashbacks of his dad being really mean to him.

Watching this was an overall unpleasant experience. Maybe they were trying to make this a sort of character study instead of a gore-fest but who wants to watch a 90 minute study of a guy who gets high blood pressure because he can’t murder-molest dudes?

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.