Piranha 3D

"I don't pole-dance for nothing." That's what one of "Piranha 3D's" many frequently topless beauties says before climbing onto a rope that hovers four-feet above the surface of water teeming with frenzied prehistoric toothy fishes. It also expresses the irreverent tone for one of the most gleefully gory horror movies of all time. Director Alexandre Aja's update of Joe Dante's notorious 1978 film (written by John Sayles) packs in exposed boobies and dismembered bodies like a 50-gallon aquarium stuffed with maraschino cherries. The plot mirrors "Jaws" with an opening-scene watery death that presages torment for a Spring Break vacation hot spot. Lake Victoria, Arizona (a.k.a. Lake Havasu) is the partying ground for a slew of horny college students whose busty females can't get enough of sharing their boobs with every male in site. Jerry O'Connell is a "Girls-Gone-Wild"-inspired pornographer who entices Jake Forester (Steven McQueen), the son of the local sheriff (Elisabeth Shue), to work as a location scout for the day's filming of nude-beauty shenanigans. The film's centerpiece is a shallow-water attack by thousands of hungry piranhas on hundreds of unsuspecting revelers. Aja ("High Tension") ramps up the tension and gore to a fever pitch before sprinkling in a hearty dose of gross-out humor involving a severed penis. "Piranha 3D" is a tongue-in-cheek gore fest that's not for the faint-of-heart or for the easily-offended.

Rated R. 89 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

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August 20, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Peeping Tom - Classic Film Pick

Released just three months before Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," Michael Powell's similarly themed 1960 horror film about a psychologically damaged young man with a proclivity for murdering women, was equally trashed by critics. But for Powell, who was admired for family films like "The Thief of Baghdad (1940) that he co-directed with Emeric Pressburger, "Peeping Tom" seemed to cross a line of inexcusably prurient exploitation. The effect negated Michael Powell's considerable accomplishments as a filmmaker that began in 1926. Powell had worked with Hitchcock on several of his films. He was an uncredited writer on Hitchcock's "Blackmail" (1929), and the two remained friends through their lives.

Although "Peeping Tom" barely lasted a week in theaters, Powell's directing career was irreparably damaged. It wasn't until Martin Scorsese championed the film in 1978, when he financed a re-release for "Peeping Tom" out of his own pocket, that the film would be appreciated by a mass audience. The primary conceit of "Peeping Tom" is to engage the audience as a voyeuristic accomplice to its anti-hero protagonist. Austrian actor Carl Boehm plays Mark Lewis, a well-dressed blond filmmaker who's never without his trusty camera. By day Mark works as a focus-puller at a London film studio. By night he works as a pornographic photographer with an eye for the fetishistic. Later at night, Mark indulges in his prized hobby of killing women with a knife-pointed-tripod while filming his victim, who witnesses their own terror at the moment of their death thanks to a mirror that surrounds the camera's lens.

Part of what makes "Peeping Tom" so unforgettable is the same Technicolor process that Powell famously used on "The Red Shoes" (1948). A gloriously saturated-color opening sequence begins with a close-up of a victim's eye in the throws of abject terror as discordant music plays. The killer whistles as he approaches his prey. He holds his camera hidden inside his overcoat so that the peeking lens substitutes as an introduction for his face. This is post-modern filmmaking disguised in a formalist approach that's further camouflaged behind a glossy style traditionally reserved for big budget spectacle. Screenwriter Leo Marks includes satirical grace notes about things like psychology and parental abuse that enables the audience to empathize more than we want with the killer, and with his camera's particular fascination with fear.

August 11, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Splice

What starts out as a promising sci-fi thriller loses vital steam in an underwhelming third-act climax evidently affected by budgetary limits. Co-writer/director Vincenzo Natali ("Cube" - 1997) leisurely develops the characters of romantically-linked biochemists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), whose DNA-splicing experiments are under threat of losing funding. Elsa's desire to have a child for whom Clive isn't ready seems to inform her decision to go rogue. Elsa inserts some of her own DNA into the hybrid animal/monster they've created--think "Eraserhead." The filmmaker's inability to deepen suspense comes to the fore as the duo hides their creepy experiment in a disused basement room of their company N.E.R.D.'s industrial facility without much interference--except from Clive's blank-slate brother Gavin (Brandon McGibbon). Once born, the bald female creature assumes the name Dren (NERD spelled backwards), and the real fun begins. Visually, the film is under-designed to a fault. From a script perspective, glaring plot holes open up with annoying regularity. Still, Delphine Chanéac is mesmerizing as the adult creature whose surprising physical abilities provide the story with some intriguing, if not fully realized, plot twists. There's a dash of "Rosemary's Baby" in a film that wants to present more of a horrifying scientific moral dilemma than it is able to deliver.

Rated R. 107 mins. (B-) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

May 30, 2010 in Horror, Sci-Fi | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Survival of the Dead

Sometimes nothing is better than something. George A. Romero's latest zombie retread demotes the 70-year-old filmmaker to a pale imitation of the groundbreaking director who invented zombie satire in 1968 with "Night of the Living Dead," and then went on to full-on postmodern hilarity with "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) and "Day of the Dead" (1985). This time around, anachronisms abound. On the Delaware island of Plum rival Irish families feud about how to handle their kith and kin after they've been infected by the ever-approaching rampaging zombies. A rogue military squad led by Guardsman Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) learns about the island refuge from a hipster boy (portrayed weakly by Devon Bostick) they capture along with an armored truck filled with three million bucks. The team ends up embroiled in the crossfire of a family squabble after making their way onto the idyllic island. Strident patriarch Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) has no hesitation about killing anyone infected by a zombie bite, while his rival Shamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) would rather keep his zombie relatives on a short chain. Muldoon hopes to train them to eat animal flesh rather than human meat. Athena Karkanis plays Tomboy, the unit's token lesbian, whose chances of finding love are zero. Zombie blood gets gratuitously splattered, but there's nothing at stake in a movie that should never have been made. "Survival of the Dead" doesn't even qualify as a guilty pleasure.

Rated R. 90 mins. (D+) (One Star - out of five/no halves)

May 22, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Carnival of Souls - Classic Film Pick

A spontaneous stoplight drag race between three young women and a couple of daredevil boys ends in the watery death of the girls. Inexplicably the film's ghostly protagonist Mary Henry (Candace Hillgoss) later emerges from the river and takes on a job as a church organist (this in spite of her lack of religious affiliation). Director Herk Harvey utilized his experience making hundreds of documentary, educational, industrial films to create this low budget 1962 achievement in gothic surrealism, which draws on elements of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960). Inspired by Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," the eerie story (written by screenwriter John Clifford) follows Mary through a daily life of social alienation and dread. Mary's grip on reality slips over a period of days as she is drawn away from the boarding house where she lives to an abandoned amusement park (Salt Lake City's "Saltair") where she meets the promised "carnival of souls" with whom she rightly belongs. It's easy to see how "Carnival of Souls" influenced George A. Romero's seminal "Night of the Living Dead" (made six years later). Mary represents a deeply troubled waking corpse whose induction to death must occur through a danse macabre amid a carnival setting with a party of ghastly human figures. The film's subdued black and white photography contributes considerably to its poetic palate of physical and emotional coldness.

May 22, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Nightmare on Elm Street

More contemplative and thematically muscular than Wes Craven's 1984 original slasher flick, Samuel Bayer's updated version has a quieter surreal edge rooted more in suspense than in the former film's regular bloodletting. That's not to say plenty of quarts of the red liquid don't flow freely from a group of teens who had the misfortune to have been molested by Freddie Kruger when he worked as a nursery school janitor a dozen years earlier. Jackie Earle Haley breathes fearsome life into the horribly disfigured monster that lives in the dream-lives of his victims. The movie has a sustained sense of morbid dread that's abetted by the narrative's adult characters who conspire against the truth of their own complicity in their children's sustained terror. Subtle nods to films like "Psycho," "The Exorcist," and "The Shining" work to create a grotesque universe of the sleep deprived where nightmares nestle like Russian Dolls. Where Craven's film was campy, Bayer's movie is just plain dark.

Rated R. 95 mins. (B-) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

April 30, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Shining - Classic Film Pick

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel is a post-modern waking nightmare interspersed with surrealistic touches, ambiguous subtexts, and jabs of dark humor. As with all of Kubrick's work, the film is so visually hyper composed that it burns its formally stylized imagery into your memory banks forever. Billed as a psychological horror film, the story follows author Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) who takes on a wintertime caretaker position at a remote and empty Colorado hotel called the Overlook to work on his next book. His boring wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and telepathically receptive eight-year-old son Danny (Danny Lloyd) entertain themselves by his side. Built on an Indian burial ground, the Overlook has its share of ghosts--the previous caretaker killed his family and himself. Strange paranormal influences appear and speak directly to Jack and his young son. For much of the story it remains unclear whether the father or boy will be the instrument of evil that the story threatens to unleash. Complete with a giant outdoor hedge maze and vast empty interior spaces, the hotel comes to queasy life in places like its Gold Room bar where chatty Jack talks about problems with his wife to an all too empathetic bartender of abstract origin. Moments of sheer comic expression, like Jack's axe-wielding rendition of "Heeeere's Johnny" when he attacks his wife, buttress against disturbing revelations, like the insanely repetitive text of Jack's manuscript. These illogical events work to layer the film with strangely effective brushstrokes of dread and horror. Although widely panned by critics who didn't get the film's complex play with tone and thematic import upon its release, "The Shining" has come to be rightly regarded as a tour de force of contemporary cinema.

April 26, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Human Centipede

High concept meets sustained graphic horror in Tom Six's satirically challenged thriller that succeeds if only by the realistic treatment of its gross-out premise via the best mad scientist performance in recent memory. Deiter Lasser plays Dr. Heiter, a renowned surgeon whose expertise for separating Siamese twins has turned into an obsession with creating a "human centipede," i.e. a chain of humans connected anus-to-mouth by carefully cut and stitched skin flaps. Amateur performances, by the three newcomers who signed on to parade around a chic German home on hands-and-knees, barely diminish Lasser's diabolically dead-eyed incarnation of pure evil. American best-friends Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) and Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) get a flat tire in the rain while on vacation in Germany. The girls make the time honored genre mistake of venturing into the dark woods to what turns out to be Dr. Heiter's lab-equipped home--complete with indoor swimming pool. A couple of drugged-glasses-of-water later and the clueless girls find themselves strapped to beds in a fluorescent-lit basement lab where a third "patient" also awaits. Blood type problems mean that the good doctor has to go out to procure a replacement for his experiment--in this case a Japanese male named Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura). Dr. Heiter's diagramed explanation of his planned procedure, for the benefit of the doomed trio, is the stuff of a very witty nightmare. With Katsuro in the lead position, the girls are left to eat poo while desperately trying to escape from an intimate kind of hell from which there can be no painless getaway.

Rated R. 90 mins. (B+) (Three Stars - out of five/no stars)

April 18, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

After.Life

Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo has taken the motto "Die Young, Stay Pretty" to its illogical extreme in a textbook video nasty where Christina Ricci's exposed nipples are a secondary character. During a dinner date with her would-be fiancé Paul (Justin Long), Anna (Ricci) storms out of the restaurant into the rainy night where her car tragically collides with a tractor trailer. It's good news for funeral director Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson) who collects Polaroid photos of corpses tacked neatly on his bedroom wall, because it's that kind of movie. Dressed in a very short candy-apple-red teddy, Anna lies awake on Deacon's prep table sporting a gash in her forehead that does little to dissuade her from the fact of her death. Deacon informs her that, in spite of her conscious state, she is indeed dead. Deacon has a gift that allows him to communicate with the deceased during the three-day interim period before their burial. The filmmaker gloats on Anna's nubility with a necrophile glee made comprehensible primarily by Ricci's cool commitment to her dead-but-perky roll. "After.Life" may not be much of a pleasure, but it leaves you with plenty to feel guilty about. 

Rated R. 97 mins. (D) (One Star - out of five/no halves)

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April 4, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cemetery Man - Classic Film Pick

"Cemetery Man" (1994) is a quirky blend of romance, lust, surrealism, horror, and black comedy which transcends the work of better-known Italian horror maestros like Dario Argento thanks to its grotesquely humorous bent. Based on a novel and comic book by Tiziano Sclavi , director Michele Soavi's avant-garde gothic film relies upon romantic theme of macabre sexual desire. Central to the film's postmodern tone is Rupert Everett's inspired performance as Francesco Dellamorte ("St. Francis of Death"), a cemetery caretaker in Buffalora, Italy whose daily duties include dealing with killing "returners" (zombies) that perpetually rise from their graves. The charismatic Everett is at the height of his powers playing a reputed "impotent" man who hasn't got "time for the living." Francesco is aided in his graveyard work by constant sidekick Gnaghi (Francios Hadji-Lazaro), a socially inept character dedicated to his emotionally confused master. The voluptuous Anna Falchi plays a recent widow who appears to Francesco to be the most beautiful living woman he's ever seen--a fact that Ms. Falchi's scenes bear out. A bite from a zombie transforms her into a magnificent corpse able to seduce Francesco in a most painful manner. Falchi returns later as a platonically obsessed girl whose romantic mixed messages eventually send Francesco on a quest to forever eradicate "love" from his vocabulary. Marked by a clever series of escalating reversals including murder, "Cemetery Man" is a dark and thought-provoking allegory about friendship and romantic deception. The outside world beyond the cemetery is nothing.    

Watch the Video Review Here

March 16, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Frankenstein (Classic Film Pick)

Mary Shelley wrote her legendary gothic novel "Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus" to make good on a wager she made with the poet Lord Byron, while spending the summer of 1816 at his Swiss villa with her husband. Informed by the industrial revolution and scientific experiments of her day, Shelley drew upon the myth of Prometheus and various literary sources to create a shocking horror story that later became the template for the "mad scientist" genre. In 1931 director James Whale made his universally admired film version, which differed considerably from Shelley's novel in that it dealt specifically with the life-infusing process that his considerably more deranged Dr. Frankenstein (brilliantly played by Colin Clive) implemented to bring the monster to life. Whale set a heavy dramatic tone of stark menace with an iconic laboratory set design filled with alluring mechanical devices. Colin Clive's blood curdling reading of the line, "It's alive, it's alive," set against a musically bare soundtrack, instilled in audiences a new type of cinematic fear. Boris Karloff was a 44-year-old stage and film actor who had successfully made the transition from silent movies to the talkies when he was chosen to play the assemblage of corpses made human. "Frankenstein" afforded Karloff a breakout performance, thanks to the humane sensitivity he brought to the oversized character despite Jack Pierce's gruesome make-up design. The film also incorporated an open-ended tableau to allow for one of the first horror franchises in history. Absolutely essential.

March 5, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Crazies

George A. Romero produced this update of his own 1973 social satire horror flick, and his guiding influence as a master of the genre shows. Timothy Dutton is convincing as small town Sheriff David Dutton, whose pregnant wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) works as a doctor in their once happy community. What seems like a spree of murder-suicides among its zombie-turning citizens is revealed to be caused by an accident with a biological weapon designed by the government. Carefully placed satellite-view imagery hints at unseen military officials orchestrating a genocidal attack on the area that traps David and Judy, along with deputy Russell (Joe Anderson) and medical assistant Becca (Daniell Penabaker, between military violence and the bloodthirsty zombies. Director Breck Eisner ("Sahara") compresses the suspense into tightly edited set pieces that balance thematic import with shocks of gory confrontation. While not on a par with "Night of the Living Dead," "The Crazies" hits the zombie on the head with good reason.

(Overture Films) Rated R. 101 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of 5/no halves)

February 26, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Wolfman

In the face of this why-did-they-bother update of the original 1941 "Wolfman" that stared Lon Cheney Jr. as the monster, John Landis's 1981 film "An American Werewolf In London" still retains its title as the best werewolf movie ever made. Joe Johnson, the director of such underwhelming children's fair as "Jumanji" and "Hidalgo," proves himself incapable of handling horror. With a script that updates the 1941 version inasmuch as it casts the wolfman's father Sir John Talbot (played by Anthony Hopkins) in a villainous light, the filmmakers struggle for any sense of rhythm, timing, romance, humor or symbolic meaning. Benicio del Toro is more misdirected than miscast as Lawrence Talbot, who returns to his father's mansion in Blackmoor, England--circa 1891--after his brother Ben is killed by a werewolf. Still, del Toro's utter lack of chemistry with Emily Blunt as Gwen Conliffe--Ben's former fiancée--further inhibits the film's ability to connect on the primal amorous level essential to the werewolf story. Hugo Weaving brings some welcome credibility as Scotland Yard Inspector Abberline, who arrives in Blackmoor to investigate the brutal attacks that plague the area. But even Weaving's best efforts are squandered in an ill-written role that paints Abberline as more of a mystified witness than an active participant in a mystery with no twist.

Rated R. 102 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)
 

February 10, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Night of the Living Dead (Classic Film Pick)

In the context of a social revolution boiling around the ongoing war in Viet Nam, George A. Romero made an independent horror film that shocked audiences to their core in 1968. Filmed on a budget of $114,000, Romero used black-and-white film stock to create a verite masterpiece of revolutionary filmmaking. "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) introduced zombies as a literal metaphor for blood-hungry soldiers of every stripe. Romero's "zombie" device would become a narrative touchstone of universal appeal. Siblings Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbara (Judith O'Dea) visit their father's grave in Pennsylvania where they are attacked by a zombie in a textbook chase scene that bristles with fear and suspense. Barbara escapes to a farmhouse where she teams up with Ben (Duane Jones). A small group of refugees hiding in the home's cellar afford the film with its inner motor of conflict that must be turned against the zombies. Romero handles the violence with a Gothic sense of dread. Before it's over, family members will have to kill their one of their own who's been bitten by a zombie. Romero was inspired by Richard Matheson's 1954 sci-fi novel "I Am Legend," but expanded on the doomsday logic to combine commentary with satire in concrete terms of ideological conflict. George Romero went onto to expand on his original concept with a biting attack on consumerist culture ("Dawn of the Dead" - 1978) that once again flipped the horror genre on its head. Romero saw the enemy, and they are the zombie masses among us. There is nowhere safe to hide.

February 6, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Daybreakers

Sibling Australian filmmakers Michael and Peter Spierig flip the teen-friendly vampire trend on its mushy head with a sci-fi take on a world run by greedy bloodsuckers. By 2019 vampires outnumber humans; blood is running out. Taking a page from HBO's "True Blood," Sam Neil plays a sharp-toothed corporate villain (Charles Bromley) who runs a monopoly that harvests blood from human bodies connected chockablock to a vast milking system. Hematologist vampire Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is working on a vampire cure. Naturally—or preternaturally-- Bromley and his armed minions want to stop him at all costs…even though they face extinction. The satirical parallel between blood and oil is obvious as war breaks out between the vampires and a group of survivalist humans led by Willem Dafoe in full badass mode. The pacing misses a few beats and the satire never pops, but "Daybreakers" arrives as a welcome retort to the bubblegum vampire genre.

Rated R. 98 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

January 3, 2010 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Fourth Kind

Neglecting cinema's compulsory three-act structure, writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi ventures into shallow narrative waters that puddle around the foundation of his unbalanced shock docudrama, set in the remote corners of Nome, Alaska.  Redundant split-screen compositions compare grainy "actual" interview footage of spaced-out-looking psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler, and her better-looking movie twin, played by Milla Jovovich. A reenactment of the unsolved stabbing murder of Dr. Tyler's husband as he lay in the bed next to her, casts some doubt on the mental faculties of our would-be heroine in an alien abduction story that comes with more than a few UFO-sized plot holes. The perpetually miscast Elias Koteas tries visibly to infuse some realism into his marginal character, Dr. Tyler's psychologist peer Dr. Abel Campos, but serves only as a nagging distraction. It doesn't help matters that "The Fourth Kind" follows so closely the other recent surveillance-camera-enabled fright fest "Paranormal Activity." Both films reflect an attempt by their filmmakers to play off the wobbly verite formula that "The Blair Witch Project" utilized to impressive box office results. The "actual" footage clips, that include Dr. Tyler's patients levitating and screaming, all frizz out in an analog corruption of images not possible with modern-day digital cameras. However, even if "The Fourth Kind" came out ten years ago it still wouldn't stand up to overrated "Blair Witch Project."

Rated PG. 98 mins. (D+) (One Star)

November 11, 2009 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Saw VI

Headache-inducing, and featuring one of the worst D-movie performances of the aughts from Costas Mandylor as Detective Hoffman, the latest "Saw"  franchise addition is more of the same torture-punishment-rehab-porn audiences have come to expect. The filmmakers make a pathetic stab at political poignancy with an anti-health-insurance-company--cartel theme, but do little to tweak the series' chambers-of-horrors formula that regularly digresses to grainy flashback sequences an dares to dip its toe into a parallel subplot. Yes, my friends, this is a crash-course in acting, directing, editing , and screenwriting mistakes to never make. Ribs pop, necks choke, and blood splatters, all in a orgiastic humping of gears and flesh that expel the red liquid of life, all in the interest of proving the significance of life by testing the limits of a cannibalistic instinct for survival. Forget that the series gave up all continuity with Tobin Bell's alternately dead villain Jigsaw long ago. The funniest thing about this edition of the Saw crapfest--I do, however, like the poster you see here--is that it comes out during an outstanding year for great Halloween-timed horror films to run out and see. If you are a horror movie fan--full disclosure, I am a rabid horror fan myself--then, do not pass go, do not collect $200, but go see "The House of the Devil" as an opening act to Lars von Trier's "Antichrist." I can't imaging a better way to spend Halloween, 2009 than to take in that double-feature before going to costume party with friends. Juicy.
Rated R. 91 mins. (D) (One Star)

October 24, 2009 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The House of the Devil

The House of the Devil
Ti West's "The House of the Devil" sent chills down my spine. The film is a perfectly pitched old-school horror homage to a '70s/'80s-era of cinema that should have been. Jocelin Donahue plays Sam, a college sophomore who takes on a high-paying babysitting job in a creepy mansion on the night of a full lunar eclipse. Former Warhol Superstar Mary Woronov is wonderfully sinister as the matron of a cult of Satan worshipers who have special plans for Sam. An unintended cousin to Scott Sanders' lovingly executed Blaxploitation homage "Black Dynamite," "House of the Devil" is an entertaining work of disciplined filmmaking where emotion, period, style, social conventions, and fear squeeze together in a knockout punch. Between Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" and "House of the Devil," Halloween at the movies is looking especially good this year.
Rated R. 93 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

October 22, 2009 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

Scattershot and comically unbalanced, "Cirque du Freak" is a wannabe horror film that feels like it was filmed underwater. Teenage best friends Steve (Josh Hutcherson) and Darren (Chris Massoglia) buy their way into a troop of freaks performing at their local small-town theater. Mr. Ribs is so named because his internal organs are exposed. There's also a monkey girl--a tribute to her simian tail. Miscast as the show is John C. Reilly as the show's vampire-about-town Larten Crepsley. Steve recognizes Crepsley as an immortal bloodsucker from a book that Steve values because he aspires to undead status. A visit from the nefarious Mr. Tiny and one misplaced psychedelic-colored giant tarantula later, and the boys choose mutually-exclusive paths into evil. Darren suffers the ultimate insult in order to become a vampire--death--to save Steve from a coma induced by the spider's bite. Steve teams up with Mr. Tiny, whose close ties to a less sophisticated tribe of vampires known as the "Vampaneze" play into his plot to provoke a long-simmering war between the Vampires and the Vampaneze. A pot-shot subplot romance between Rebecca (Jessica Carlson) and Darren turns out to be the most redeeming aspect of this woefully misguided film, based on a series of books by Darren Shan.
Rated PG-13. 108 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

October 22, 2009 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Stepfather

Sad evidence of the perennial appeal of square-jawed men who talk nice (in this case he's a serial family killer played by Dylan Walsh), this update of the 1987 cult horror classic is a stone cold dud. With little back-story, no psychological context, and gaping plot holes screenwriter J.S. Cardone ("Prom Night" - 2008) mucks up his own paint-by-numbers-formula. After murdering his picture-perfect family, chameleon-psycho David Harris finds easy-pickings in divorcee Susan Harding (Sela Ward), whose reformed bad boy son Michael (Penn Badgley) returns home from a private military school to find his new would-be step dad calling the shots. That's right, David is not really even a "stepfather" because he and Susan are just shacking up inside her fabulous Portland home. After a couple of obvious murders it's time for Michael and his teen-dream girlfriend Kelly (Amber Heard) to confront the papa poseur with a dose of his own violent medicine. Shallow and inert, "The Stepfather" goes through the motions of a suspense film without ever broaching the horror genre that director Joseph Ruben employed in the original. Talk about "unclear on the concept," this remake doesn't even get the genre right.
Rated PG-13. 101 mins. (D-) (Zero Stars)

October 18, 2009 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Paranormal Activity

For a low-fidelity spooky house movie involving only a boyfriend and girlfriend, "Paranormal Activity" does a lot with a little. However, that's not to say that debut writer/director Oren Peli goes far enough in his shallow transition from squeaky doors to full-on demonic possession of twentysomething monster-bait Katie Featherston. College English major Katie and her day-trader guy Micah (Micah Sloat) have been living in their comfy San Diego house long enough for the demon that's been following Katie since she was eight to catch up with her again. New to the enigmatic horror that follows Katie, Micah purchases a video camera to digitally capture evidence of the apparition that makes noises, turns lights off and on, opens and shuts doors, and gets under the sheets with Katie. In the same family of low-budget suspense movies as "Open Water" and "Blair Witch Project," "Paranormal Activity" musters roughly the same level of 8th grade audience torment as those films. Compared with a precision horror film like Lars von Trier's terrifying upcoming shocker "Antichrist," "Paranormal Activity" is just kid's stuff. 
Rated R. 86 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

October 10, 2009 in Horror | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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