Child's Play (HEAVY SPOILERS)

Imagine my surprise when I jumped on here and saw that my last review was for Cult of Chucky. Ironic!

Alright, been another rough couple of years and not a lot of time to watch scary movies, but I'm working on a podcast project that I'm eventually going to transfer all of my attention to, so 'scuse me for not updating.

In that time it was announced that a Child's Play remake was finally moving forward. I allowed myself to be a little excited, because I love the Chuckster and Don Mancini has such a vice grip on the franchise (and I mean that in a positive way) that I was interested to see what someone else would do to the Child's Play elements if given a chance. Well, fast forward a little bit to when they revealed that Chucky was not going to be Charles Lee Ray, but a rogue AI. Cue complete and utter disappointment.

Then a few things happened to get me interested again. One was the advertising campaign, which was a lot of fun with a Kaslan Corp website and an interactive Buddi doll AMA on Reddit. Hey, the marketing people know how to get a buzz going. Cool! Also an announcement that Mark Hamill was going to be the voice of Chucky replacing the brilliant Brad Dourif (my man!) What a casting! I was wondering--if Brad isn't coming back, what brilliant VO could take on the mantle? But I will get to gushing about Mark's performance soon.

I guess in spite of my disappointment the ad campaign was enough to get me back on board the hype train, and I dragged my wife kicking and screaming to see the film yesterday. We both had so much fun. My wife, who is an admitted Not-Fan-of-Chucky-Films, seemed to really enjoy herself a lot.

So, what is going to make you go see this film, if you are a fan of the original and you find the idea of no-Charles disgusting? Well, I dunno. Maybe you should work on getting over your own prejudice and just try to have a fun time? But that's counter-intuitive. This movie is a lot of fun and it has a lot of fun with itself and the audience. The core characters--Andy, his mom, Andy's two friends, the detective who isn't Chris Sarandon but a black guy who is actually a really funny, down-to-earth character--all of them are great and a lot of fun. But the crowning achievement here goes to Mark Hamill.

Mark's Chucky is innocent, I tell ya. He is programmed to learn, but those programs have inhibiting functions that are disabled by a disgruntled factory worker (who goes on to commit suicide afterward). He's not evil in the sense that a sadist like Charles Lee Ray is evil. He's more of a Frankenstein's monster misguided evil. All he wants to do is be Andy's buddy, but what Andy and his friends teach him bad behaviors and he learns and applies his programming in the worst ways. And damn, Mark Hamill pulls the opposite performance of Brad Dourif and makes you SAD FOR CHUCKY. What the hell is this? And why is it working so well!? The performance Mark gives as a misunderstanding AI just trying to please its new best friend is...kinda heartwrenching for such a silly flick.

It gives a surprising depth to the proceedings, and Chucky's plight as a rogue AI reflects on all the characters he affects as well, giving them all a little blood drop's worth of depth as well. Through Chucky, Andy meets new friends--something he has been struggling with from the beginning of the film. But also through Chucky's manipulating later in the film, Andy almost loses everything. Through Chucky, Andy's mom learns of what an asshole her would-be boyfriend is. But also through Chucky, she is put through the ringer as a mother when he is murdered and she has to deal with her son who she believes is going nutters. Through Chucky, Andy and Detective Norris begin developing their own sweet relationship. But also through Chucky, that relationship becomes strained when a jealous Chucky murders Norris's mom, leading Norris on a trail back to Andy himself.

Chucky, it turns out, is a complicated character, and he complicates the story in the best possible ways. The best part about this new doll is that he is an Amazon Echo-like toy, and he is able to connect to other Kaslan products to help make playtime with kids a better experience for them. This means that when he goes rogue in the second half of the film, he's able to do all sorts of mean and nasty things like heat up the temperature of a room, turn off and on lights, control televisions, record video, etc.

The most fun thing that happens in the movie, however, is in the climax when Chucky is able to gain control of a Zed Mart's stock of Buddi 2 dolls--the latest iteration of the Buddi product. Chucky and his army of dolls go on a killing spree throughout the shopping center during the unveiling. Unfortunately, the army carnage doesn't last too long and we are back down to the one doll for a final showdown.

I loved this movie. It was just a lot of fun, just like the original and the rest of the movies in the series. It's not too scary (like an Ari Aster flick) and its...fun. That's all I can say about it. Just go and have fun. Forget about Charles Lee Ray for an instant and enjoy the Buddi doll iteration of Chucky. Besides, Don Mancini is still working on a Chucky series set in the original universe. What can you lose?

I give Child's Play 2019 an A-. Somebody buy me a Buddi doll please.

Cult of Chucky (SPOILERS AHEAD)

I have long had a love/love relationship with the Child's Play series (or the Chucky series, depending on whether or not you are a pleb--just kidding). I have watched and love every movie in the series, including Seed--because I know your first thought upon reading that sentence goes to that movie. The personality of Charles Lee Ray and the aesthetics of the Good Guy dolls are the perfect formula for good scary fun.

I don't think I ever gave a review for Curse of Chucky, and I should have when it first came out. I thought it was a good movie. Not a great movie, but a good step back in a direction I wanted the series to be in. While I do love the two "fun" Chucky films (Bride, Seed) I felt like if Chuck was going to come back, it needed to be big. And while Curse of Chucky was a good film to re-introduce a Chucky doll that could be intimidating and scary once again, I feel like Cult better represents a celebration of the series nearly thirty years on.

I mean, gawrsh. This film has so many cool ideas in it, and the surprising element to me was Andy Barclay. When he had a special post-credits scene in the last film I was ecstatic. It's cool to see the original character/victim/actor return to the franchise, but Cult goes out of its way in a good way to show just how much of a badass Andy has become. This is no longer a victim, no longer a guy willing to let the world get him down. No, he's putting himself out there, trying to meet women and live life--and when that doesn't work out he gets his rocks off torturing the original Chucky doll which is now just a severed head.

That's just the opening of the film. Throughout the rest of the film we follow Nica (the protagonist of Curse) as she lives her life at a psychiatric hospital getting therapy from the worst doctor you could ever have and dealing with the worst assortment of patients you could ever be forced to deal with.

This isn't a knock against any of these elements. This series succeeds by throwing our poor main victim/character into the fray with a bunch of snobby, snotty assholes and crazies that will eventually become Chucky fodder. These new characters do a fine job of making you sympathetic to their plights (some of them) and also at the same time wish they were dead.

But moreover the best thing--and possibly the worst thing--about this movie was the build-up throughout the entire film. Though Cult follows the standard trajectory of a Child's Play plot (doll kills a bunch of people and it is blamed on the main character who insists that they didn't kill anyone) you get a good sense that Chucky is up to something bigger this time around, especially when you learn that

THERE ARE MULTIPLE LIVING CHUCKY DOLLS.

As the film reaches its ending and the mayhem gets cranked up to the top, this film takes you on a wild ride until its strange ending comes out of nowhere.

Chucky wins. Wholeheartedly. It's, I think, the first movie in the series (maybe Seed takes that reward, but that is debatable) where Chucky gets everything that he wants in the end.

How crazy is that? While its a great twist, a part of me can't help but be disappointed. Chucky is so despicable in this movie and he gets away with it? At the end, Andy sees the reports of deaths at the hospital and decides its time to go out and take care of business, and he brings a Chucky doll with him (why? Oh don't worry, that'll be revealed and it's a pretty badass secret). He arrives at the hospital and checks himself in because he's going to try to rescue Nica and get out of there (or maybe finish off Chucky while he is at it). So when one of three revived Chucky dolls comes to kill him (the one he brought with him) he STICKS HIS HAND INTO ITS STOMACH AND PULLS OUT A GUN TO KILL THE DOLL WITH.

What a badass sequence. I cheered, I'll be honest. That was the highlight of the whole film for me. Unfortunately, I was expecting Andy to get a couple more great moments in before the end of the film, but by that point the "Cult" was doing some last minute clean up and the movie was drawing to a close. Andy gets trapped in his cell, Nica is now possessed by the doll, and she and Tiffany ride away into the sunset together to commit more devious acts together.

While I was hoping for an Andy cleans house ending, I feel like perhaps this film is building up to maybe one more movie, especially with the post-credits tease at the end with Kyle from Child's Play 2. I can only hope this is the case, because with Andy back in a big, BIG way I'm hoping they bring back Ronald Tyler from Child's Play 3 and then all of Chucky's original victims can join forces and fight the new ARMY of dolls. Who knows, maybe Nica can regain herself and join in too. I like her character and I don't think she deserves to die as Charles.

I give Cult of Chucky a B+. A great film, especially if it's building up to something even better in the next film (Please for the love of God, Mancini!)

Hell House LLC./Lake Mungo and the problem of found footage movies

It's been a rough year for me. Don't worry, I'm not about to use a horror blog to soap box at you about the problems of a 20-something millenial in the big scary world. I know I post here extremely infrequently, but I've always been the type of person who only says something when they have something to say. I've had plenty I could say in the last year, but I went through a lot of drastic life changes every month it seemed, and my life is finally getting back to semi-normal.

One of these changes is that I have a fantastic career on a graveyard shift...somewhere. I'm really hesitant to break out details because I don't trust anyone with any information about where I am and what I'm doing. Super sorry. But I basically don't do shit all night and it affords me time to devote to doing what I love to do best: watching horror movies. I've watched some greats (The Devil's Candy, which is now on Netflix--please watch it, its very refreshing) and I've watched some just okays (We Are Still Here, which came highly recommended but it didn't do much for me).

I have JUST finished watching Hell House LLC. It also came highly recommended (guess which subreddit I frequent). Having finished the film all the way through, I have some concerns. That's right, you won't hear me soap box about life's ills but it is extremely important to voice my opinion on horror films in the hope that perhaps they will change.

Hell House LLC is a well made film for the most part. The found footage is found footage-y--actually the film serves as a found footage/mockumentary hybrid. You know what kind of camera work you will get for these movies, so I won't comment on that. It was decently acted, the suspense was properly managed throughout most of the film...but the story and some of the scares just disappointed me more than anything.

Well, what do I like from found footage movies? I guess one word I would use to sum up my feelings is "plausibility", but to go more in depth, maybe its best that I do a comparison review and compare Hell House LLC with a film I think may be the best mockumentary/found footage movie I've ever seen--Lake Mungo.

Lake Mungo is also a home footage/mockumentary hybrid. It is extremely well acted, surprisingly heart felt, extremely creepy and ridiculously depressing. In short, it's a roller coaster ride of a film in how it plays the viewers emotions. But let's get back to Hell House LLC so I can properly highlight what works in Lake Mungo that doesn't work in the former film.

Hell House LLC is about a company (the titular Hell House LLC.) who run a haunted house walk through attraction every year. They go around the country and set themselves up in well known locations and come Halloween time they scare the pants off people by jumping out at them and throwing blood everywhere.

I was very intrigued by this concept because walk-through scary experiences are a ripe setting for a horror movie and yet I haven't seen anyone do the concept any justice--including Hell House LLC. So what is the problem, then? It's not the characters, who act like I would expect they would act in this situation. It's not the story, which is vague--that's not a criticism. I like that the film makers didn't spell out everything for the viewer. They introduced issues between the leads that they never spelled out in any detail and I was fine with that because if this found footage were real, we wouldn't have characters who have a story arc--we'd have a snapshot of something horrible and we don't have any idea what the bigger picture would be. This aspect of Hell House LLC is highly commendable. Like The Blair Witch Project, there seems to be a lot of ideas that aren't elaborated on and go nowhere, and the mystery of it all contributes to the unease that the viewer is supposed to leave the experience feeling.

Lake Mungo's central mystery is much the same--what is "found" on the found footage is cleverly used as the climactic event of the film, where the viewer simultaneously learns what is going on and then gets really confused about what is going on and why it happened. There is "footage" sprinkled throughout the film and the more you see, the deeper you go into a puzzle and when the answer is flung into your face, you're still left wondering "why?"

But where Hell House LLC fails is where most other found footage movies fail--including the Blair Witch Project sequel that came out last year:

Things just get way too explicit. The mystery of the movie is revealed in the climax, but unlike Lake Mungo where that image will haunt you for the rest of your life after you see it, Hell House LLC just disappoints you because it spells too much out.

There's something creepy about watching a video that is sold to you as something real, and what you see is never very explicit. It's grainy, its hard to tell what is going on, you're not sure where to look to see what you're supposed to see--and then you see something. And your heart skips a beat. It's freaky, because its subtle. You see the split second as the camera turns and there is a mysterious shape or a face that quickly flashes by. It's subtlety makes it more likely to be real somehow.

Hell House LLC spells out all of its scares, to the point where I was wondering if all along it was going to be a set up. It wasn't. Things are so in your face in this movie that I had a hard time buying into what I was seeing, and with a found footage movie selling this story to your audience is the most important thing you can do. Its a found footage movie's job to trick the audience into thinking what they are seeing is real. It's not just having someone hold a camera and you put shit in the cameras view.

With Lake Mungo, everything is so subtle that sometimes you actually have to rewind the film to see what the hell people are talking about. That kind of interactivity actually goes a long way with getting your audience into the film. Once you get them actively watching, then they are engaged. Some people may like the more explicit kind of scare, but in my opinion that isn't what a found footage movie should be about.

When you're dealing with the supernatural in a film, make it subtle. Make it not pop out. Make people look for it. It's a good way to get them involved in your story, and its a great way to put in a nice, deep scare for when their eyes are searching for the story.

Now, there were moments of subtlety in Hell House LLC and I will give them credit--however, those moments of subtlety are immediately trampled upon by the film going back immediately and showing you explicitly what was supposed to be hidden. It's a cop out.

To be fair, Lake Mungo does this too, but with how that movie is written, how it moves--it's a lot more organic. Those moments of review when they give you a second chance to see the creepy things serve the story in a very real, plausible way. A lot of the pay off of Lake Mungo happens during its CREDITS--AFTER the film has already run its course. And boy, what a creepy pay off it is. I will never be able to scrub its imagery out of my head.

Hell House LLC, sadly, suffers from a lot of what other found footage movies suffer from. Making a movie is a difficult task, I'm sure, but found footage movies are constantly breaking the rules of plausibility, and I think that that affects how effective they can be with their story telling. Jump scares are fine if you build them up well enough.

But like Randy in Scream, there need to at least be some ground rules you should establish when you get out there to make a found footage movie.

1. If there is something supernatural going on, don't make it explicit. Subtlety is key. How often do you as an audience member hear about how a person experienced something so drastic like a person entering a haunted house and jumping through weird time loops, while at the same time dodging moving furniture and getting chased by a very visual in your face demon? No one, right?

2. If you're dealing with a human threat, you can break a few more rules, because human evils love to break rules. Subtlety is nice at first, but if the problem is an evil stalker, those things do realistically tend to escalate.

3. Keep your audience in the dark as much as possible, no matter the threat. Let the mystery of the events haunt them for the rest of their lives. No conveniences to conjure up scary imagery. The more you let your footage speak for itself, the better--and that means not giving the audience any sort of in your face idea of what is going on. The Blair Witch Project gave us several different nuggets of "backstory" but those ideas never really came back for pay off in any really big way (save for one strange detail).

4. Steadicam is for losers. Make people sick. No one in their right mind is going to keep a camera so ridiculously steady when they are running from a perceived danger. Hell, no one may even keep a camera around when there is danger. The footage of that poor gentleman lost in the catacombs of Paris is a good, (maybe) real life example.

Actually, that's a perfect example of how to do a good found footage film overall. That dude in the catacombs got so scared he said "fuck this" to his camera and ran off into the dark, never to be seen again. What was he running from? Did he ever get out? Those questions tend to stay with you long after you see that video. They haunt you. They engage you long after you're done watching.

To an extent, the ending of Hell House LLC leaves you in the dark about what actually happened, but its what the viewer sees that is the big problem. When you can clearly see what is endangering your players, it gets more and more implausible as long as your dealing with a supernatural threat.

Your found footage film's final moments are the pay off to the rest of your film. Don't fuck it up and ruin the immersion. That's dumb. Think of Ghostwatch. It's so effective because its haunt is barely noticeable throughout the film, and only on playback can you find all of its appearances. That's creepy. It makes you feel unsafe. It violates that rule of safety that you think you have in the real world, because now you're going to be looking around wondering what you're missing.

Lake Mungo's final moments are the summation of the sad mystery behind a girl's death, and though the revelation resolves everything that came before it, it still leaves the viewer haunted and wondering why. It helps that what you see is almost indiscernible, because it makes you look closer to see the details. That is plausibility.

To make a long story short (a summary introduction that my dear father loves to use frequently, and so I take a page from his vernacular) Lake Mungo works by having everything Hell House LLC has, but uses those elements to greater effect by virtually hiding them from the audience, like dangling a carrot above their heads. Hell House LLC ruins its build up by trying to make its hauntings flashy and intense. And that ruins the movie for good.

In the future, I hope found footage movies can move from fantastical, immersion ruining experiences and back into more unsure territory.

Lake Mungo gets a hard A+ for me, but Hell House LLC. recieves a C. It had some fantastic build up at times, but its payoff drags the rest of the film down into its haunted basement.

I'm sorry that got a little ramble-y, but when my brain vomits out shit I have to write it down, and I want to remain pretty unfiltered and unedited. Once again, if that's not your bag, my bad.

So, I just finished the Scream TV Series

It's been a little while since our last outing. I know there is a little bit of continuity error since our last chat, but I tried my darndest to find the words to pen for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, 5, and 6, so let me just sum up my thoughts for you before we continue:

I didn't like them. On one hand I was simultaneously impressed and appalled by the writing in the three movies. The plots and weak excuses to bring Freddy back were awful. Absolutely awful. But the dialogue, especially Freddy's, was great. The imagery was also fantastic. But I wouldn't watch them again.

OKAY! On to Scream!

So way back when when they first announced the series and its concept everyone was angry. Not just skeptical, mind you, because its the internet. They were fuming. Which I thought was strange, because most horror fans I know hate Scream and consider it the end of classic horror instead of it being a revitalizing of the slasher genre. But people were mad, all the same. And why were they mad? Because Scream: The TV Series was announced to have nothing to do with the films from which it borrows its namesake.

The TV series doesn't have Ghostface or Sidney or Dewey or even connections through characters as small as Randy's distant distant distant relative. No, everything about the series is original. Original killer, original mask. Original heroine, original movie geek. Original original original--which makes people mad.

Don't get me wrong, I think they had a little right to be mad. Everything fans loved about the movies was being discarded to bring in something new, and its hard for people to accept that sort of change sometimes. But Scream The TV Series has managed to be something new while successfully translating what made the movies fun to a TV audience.

Because it's a TV Series it's going to take longer to establish who characters are. It's not like a movie where they have to cram character development quickly and you get that immediate satisfaction of knowing who these characters are. Scream takes its time, but unfortunately at first you have to be subjected to MTV levels of drama while you wait to learn the big stuff. That is pretty much the only big adjustment you will have to make as a member of the audience.

The rest of the show is good solid Scream fun. It's actually kind of like a remake of the first film, with the second season bringing in elements from the second film.

You have Emma--new Sidney--Noah--new Randy--Brooke--new Tatum--Will and Jake--Billy and Stu, though with a twist, and then there's Piper, the new Gale...it's all very familiar, but different. Consequently there is a new Ghostface character: Branden James. James has a very Ghostface-esque mask, and the killer who comes to Lakewood wearing that same mask borrows a lot of familiar elements from the old Ghostface character: creepy Munch-esque mask, creepy voice to make phone calls with, etc.

I was surprised when I was watching just how well they put the movie concept into the TV show, and despite having no familiar characters the show manages to follow the beats of the first movie really well. And then its even more fun when you're following those beats and the show does something to go against what you thought you knew.

Give Scream: The TV Series a shot, if you're a fan of the movies. Just have more patience for a ten episode show. You should already be a patient person anyways.

I give Scream a B+. Solidly entertaining. Don't expect a masterpiece.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

I haven't watched this movie since I was a younger lad in my middle school years. Back then my friends and I would stay at each others houses and rent scary movies to watch, since my parents would never allow that sort of thing. But around every Halloween time we always played Freddy vs Jason or Freddy vs Michael Myers or a combination of every big slasher villain that was well known versus each other in battle, and this was before the actual film Freddy vs Jason came out. Ironically, even though that film has a hell of a lot to do with Freddy it is not included in the nice blu ray box set, but I guess that is for good reason.

Having seen a lot of the later movies in the Nightmare series before watching the other ones, I found this one on re-watch to be a really joyful experience. It had the best of everything I loved about the series, from the fun to the scares, and the plot was pretty atypical for a slasher for that time period.

The film begins with our heroine, Kristen, mid-dream outside of the Thompson house which has served--and will continue to serve--as the series' anchor. She chases a girl into the home and meets Freddy. Ol' Fred is after the last of the Elm Street Children, a specific group of kids who are kin to the townsfolk that burned Freddy alive, and he's managed to lure them to a psychiatric facility.

This is a smart script, folks. For a horror movie with such a concept as dream slaying to put kids into a psychiatric facility that will try to administer them sleeping pills to help them conquer their anxiety is fucking smart. The adults who run this facility don't give a damn about the ramblings of a scary man haunting their dreams. They take the naturalist approach to try and explain this in as down-to-earth fashion as possible. These kids aren't actually being dream-stalked, they just need to be medicated and put to sleep! Fucking gold, Wes Craven. I know you helped write this. The brilliant writing in this movie heightens the tension, because as a viewer you understand what is going on and these kids are all likable enough to where you really don't want them to meet their eventual deaths.

Of course, the film's plot gets even more interesting when it is discovered that each of these children can manipulate their dreams in order to fight Freddy off. So basically they are like super-humans in their sleep with interesting abilities. This might sound stupid to some people, but they really made it work in the movie. 

And the kills? The premise of this series once again shines out its genius, as it ensures that each kill is ridiculously interesting and gory. What the audience sees is what the kids and Freddy are dreaming, and in a dream, anything can happen. This means that you don't have to rely on more tits or overkill-gore to make these movies interesting. Their very premise allows them more freedoms, and that's why the Nightmare series comes out as the ultimate champ of the eighties/early-nineties slasher arms race.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Nancy and her dad are back! Fantastic performers Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon reprise their roles from the first film and work out all the issues that were left hanging. As a matter of fact, this film wraps up the original trilogy of films quite nicely until the fourth kind of destroys that little support structure and brings the house down.

This movie is well worth a watch if you are a fan of the original. Hell, its fair to give them all a watch, because everyone is different and has different tastes, but still. This one is a lot of fun. It gets flack from online reviewers as the first film to make Freddy silly, but I didn't see that as much. Freddy is more terrifying than ever, and the Freddy worm scene is one of his scariest moments for me. He does have what people call one-liners, but they are not really "haha, he said THAT!?" sort of lines like they are in the next couple of films. And they're not really funny. It's like the devil making fun of all your worst traits kind of humor.

I give A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors an A-. It's very nature as a sequel gets it knocked down from an A+, but that doesn't mean anything towards the actual quality of the movie. Peace out.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

This movie was weird. It was weird in a way that when it was good, it was pretty good, and when it was bad, it was pretty bad.

I don't really have too many tiny commentary to make about his film. This was the first time I'd seen it besides bits and pieces on television, and while I had fun when the movie is good, towards the end there were some choices made that I thought were kind of odd.

For one, let's talk about how this film ties into the first. It being a sequel it has to connect back to the first in some fashion. For starters, the main character, Jesse, and his family have moved into the Thompson house on Elm Street. I can't recall off the top of my head if the film gives reference to the fates of the characters from the first, Nancy included, but it makes reference to some aspects of the first film.

Freddy is still around of course, but apparently he can't kill people on his own power anymore. Presumably, we can connect this to the fact that Nancy weakened him in the last movie (defeated him as well) by turning her back on him and not giving into her fear. So Freddy decides to target Jesse, not to kill him, but to corral him into killing people for him. Now, as to how this helps Freddy at all isn't really elaborated upon. Since the series hasn't introduced the remaining Elm Street kids into the picture, we can assume that at this point that Freddy wasn't trying to get Jesse to eliminate them for him. There is kind of an answer to this question, but that will come a little later into the movie. First, let's get back to the set up.

So poor, unfortunate Jesse has just moved into a new town and a new school, and right off the bat he has to deal with a nice girl who has a crush on him, and a dead serial killer dream manipulator who wants him to kill people.

The Temptation of Jesse moments are where this film really shines. The kills are effective enough to keep audience interest, but its the moments that Freddy is mind fucking Jesse that the movie REALLY shines. There's a fantastic scene wherein Freddy literally rips himself out of Jesse's body in order to kill Jesse's new best friend Grady. The SFX are fantastically done, and the nightmarish imagery immersive.

Jesse has the unfortunate luck to keep discovering himself near the site of murder crimes that he has dreamed about, wearing Freddy's glove that he found in the basement. This is where Freddy's motives become clear. He doesn't want Jesse to just kill for him. He wants Jesse to surrender him his body so that he (Freddy) can continue his legacy of killing kids and teens. I guess people like to think that this was dumb, but given the fact that the extent of Freddy's powers at this point hadn't been elaborated upon and the fact of all the shit he can do in the later sequels, this shouldn't be a point against the movie like I always see it is on message boards and the like.

Where the film ultimately fails is the ending. So far, it had done a decent enough job as a Nightmare sequel, and you really feel sorry for Jesse as he is psychologically tormented. But when Freddy takes control of Jesse's body near the end of the movie, its not just Jesse running around with the glove on and a crazy expression on his face. No. It's literally just Freddy.

This is why this is a bad thing: why would taking over someones body make them look like Freddy? It doesn't REALLY make a whole lot of sense, but above all Freddy just running around a pool of screaming idiotic teenagers like he is some spooky mascot at a Halloween event is just the movie going out of its way to ruin the terrifying monster its been building up this whole time. And the fact that SO many people see Freddy who don't get killed off? You'd think the whole town ought to know by the next few films (and I actually partly also blame the next few films for not elaborating on this. I mean, even adults see him, for goodness sakes).

After this, the movie settles back down and is okay. Lisa rescues Jesse from inside Freddy by appealing to Jesse's heart, and he's able to regain control of his body as Freddy disintegrates from all the love. There's a happy en--oh, no wait. Girl was stabbed through the chest on the bus at the end. Well, maybe next time.

This film was decent. But the climax really undermines the rest of the film in a bad way. Apparently there's some homosexual subtext as well. I guess I could see where they are coming from but it kind of seems like they are demonizing it in a way. So Jesse is struggling with his own sexuality, trying not to let it bubble to the surface? Are you saying homosexuality is a bad thing? I'm sure that would offend someone who is openly gay, or maybe not. Maybe the point is not that its bad, but that the movie is trying to give its audience a look into the mind of someone struggling to out themselves. Maybe the movie accurately reflects what it is like for someone who is unsure of just how to express what is inside of them. Regardless, the movie could have done better with a few of its elements. Freddy is still terrifying here until the end, and the nightmare imagery is still fantastic, so that's that.

I give A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge a C+. Better luck next time, Fred. 

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Thinking back on it, it's kind of ironic how the first Nightmare on Elm Street film I watched was technically the last. I grew up in a Christian home, and I still profess to be a Christian, but my mother was the kind of person who didn't really allow the stuff of the occult into our home. One day I was watching Psycho III on television and my mother wouldn't let me watch anymore after she caught me pretending to be Norman Bates, stabbing people left and right. So I never got the opportunity to rent horror movies and enjoy them in that manner.

Another point of irony is that I always caught horror movies on the television during AMC's Halloween run. One night, I was lucky enough to catch Freddy's Dead playing on the channel, and I got a chance to watch it from beginning to end, edited for TV of course.  I remember it being a lot of fun back then, but even know it was my first time seeing an actual Nightmare film, I've known all about Freddy from when I was a kid.

Years later, I nabbed the opportunity to see the original, and I was dazzled by how great it actually was. Regardless of what horror fans of old think, these films really do have a place in the pantheon, next to the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s and the atomic creations of the '50s, to the more down to earth, frightening next door neighbor types of the '60s, including Peeping Tom, Psycho, and Night of the Hunter. Freddy is a horror icon, and his terror will survive for years to come.

But lets REALLY dig in. A Nightmare on Elm Street concerns Tina--oh wait she's dead, never mind. I forget this is a Craven film. He always makes you think that the main character is Person A, but then that person dies early and you're left with Person B. In this case, Person B is Nancy. Nancy is an all around nice girl. Maybe she's as promiscuous as Tina, but she's never really given a chance to let her sexuality shine when she is pushed into such stressful circumstances. You see, her friends are dying one by one, killed in their sleep by a man they've all seen in their dreams. And they don't really know why its happening.

And of course, they all die in horribly painful, brutal ways. You see, Freddy gets his powers from their fear, so instead of just killing them out right, he stalks them in their dreams, much like how Jason or Michael would spend the first 45 minutes of each film stalking their films in real life (Craven taking the tried and true formula and evolving it to suit his needs.) He gives them little slashes of pain now and then, and then when he makes them feel absolutely powerless to stop him, he kills them in the most bloody way imaginable. He guts Tina and drags her across the ceiling, he suffocates and breaks the neck of Rod while he is in jail for Tina's murder. He sucks Glenn into his bed, does God knows what to him in there and spits out ALL of his blood...

It's hard to technically "review" a film I've seen before, many times. I was tempted to go off the beaten path and talk about some deep ass shit, but this is a review, and I am planning on going deeper into the films as a whole after I review them all individually.

I give A Nightmare on Elm Street an A+. It's a classic. If you haven't seen it and you enjoy horror movies you've got issues.

I've been having Nightmares

From the moment I opened my wife's Christmas present this past Christmas Eve, I realized I was dreaming. We decided to open up our gifts on the evening of Christmas Eve instead of the next morning, because I had to be at work early. The gift was wrapped in gold, if I recall correctly, and was shaped like a blu-ray. I just couldn't quite figure out what it was.

It turns out that my wife is a frickin' evil genius. The gift was something I wasn't really expecting, but which I could appreciate very much: My wife had bought for me the complete Nightmare on Elm Street Collection. I'd practically watched the whole series before, more or less. I've seen the first film many times, and I'd seen the third, Freddy's Dead, and New Nightmare, and bits and pieces of Freddy's Revenge, but to have them all to watch and enjoy at any moment was almost a child hood dream come true.

I know I always go into great detail about those precious moments, when, as a kid, I would accompany my mother to the grocery store where they had a movie rental in the center. While she shopped for her food I always rushed to the rentals to look at horror movies. It was almost like pornography for me, because I had to make sure for some reason no one in my family knew what I was looking at, lest I get into trouble. Looking around making sure I'm not watched, I would peruse the different horror movies on the shelf, seeing movies that would actually haunt me for the rest of my days until fairly recently: Return to Horror High, the many Friday the 13th movies, Night of the Living Dead and its two sequels (since Land hadn't been released yet) and of course, Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

The three movie series that made up the biggest parts of my horror movie Muse were the Halloween series, the Nightmare series, and the Friday the 13th series. I was fascinated with the different movies, and in my head I always imagined that they got scarier and scarier and more mind-bogglingly terrifying as they went along. Of course, what I realize now is that some movies can actually be quite hard to swallow in terms of their subpar quality, and indeed past a certain point these series kind of fell from their high mountains.

However, the one that is the most consisten in terms of actual good quality are the Nightmare films. Their sequences of dreams and Freddy's nightmare land that makes an appearance in almost every installment is still kind of terrifying despite the fact that the movies get a little bit cheesier as they go along. It's the imagery, and not Freddy's countenance that carry the sequels as they continue. Despite his character becoming less frightening, his mind is still a terrifying place where he puts each of his victims, and the moments where he shares with the horrified characters the souls of those he has imprisoned in torment forever are still very frightening.

Jesus, this is just an introduction and its gone on far too long. Anyway, the point of all this is that I have committed to sitting down and watching the series in order over the next couple of nights. I've watched through the third installment, so I'm going to try to write up some thoughts on the films for now and then continue my watch, but I'm having a blast so far, and when I get to talking about each movie individually I'll be able to better bring up some key talking points I want to discuss.

I hope that you'll look forward to: Inception: The Horror Series.

Adapting A Critically Acclaimed, Classic Horror Novel Into A Movie, And Why It Seems So Difficult.

Hey guys. Or Rebecca. Whoever is reading this. I'm back from another hiatus. I don't really call them hiatuses. I just haven't had much to talk about lately. I've been getting most of my horror fill through watching The Walking Dead on television, and that's been a journey. I've just bought all four seasons on Blu Ray, and I'm going to try to run through them all in the period leading up to Season 5. I've been getting into the mood of reading horror literature for the fall season. The weather is starting to change, the days are becoming shorter, gloomier. What perfect time to pick up your favorite horror novels, put on your favorite mood music, and read a bit!

I will tell you, as a fan of the horror genre in general, I've done my reading. I've read the classics and the not so classics, and the should be classics (seriously, House of Leaves. Poor Tom Navidson). But maybe sometimes I don't want to read these novels. Maybe sometimes I want to experience these stories that I love through another medium: Film!

Ah, but there begins a knot that apparently no human hand can untangle. There have been countless adaptations of horror classics to the screen, from the silent film era to the modern day, and yet, of the thousands of Dracula movies that have been made, almost all of them fail at adapting the novel to the screen. And don't you dare throw Coppola's 1992 film at me. I like it. I like the actors in it. I love Hopkins's portrayal of Professor Van Helsing (HE IS LITERALLY JUST AN OLD, WISE, WORLD WEARY MAN. HE IS NOT A PROFESSIONAL VAMPIRE HUNTER, YOU SODS) as almost insane. But I absolutely hate that Coppola tried to make his own vision of Dracula instead of respecting the nature and vision of Stoker's original classic novel.

I'm sure Leroux would rip his hair out if he had to sit through another adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera that makes Erik more likable and handsome than he should be. The original Phantom is sympathetic, to be sure, but there is never any moment in the story that Christine Daae is utterly infatuated with him and consumed by his sexiness. He's a skeleton man. She is afraid of him. Despite this, I still find myself singing Point of No Return because  it's actually a good song, and I absolutely HATE musicals.

(And okay, I will throw a bone. Lon Chaney's silent film version is probably one of the greatest adaptations of a horror novel, or any novel in general. It's so perfect it hurts. I just wish someone could replicate that for the new age, so new kids can appreciate the horrific real story.)

Why can't we get a fantastic adaptation of Frankenstein? Why is the brilliant Aaron Eckhart choosing to take part in horrific movies with the Frankenstein name? I feel like Shelley has gotten the worst treatment out of all these classics, because most adaptations of her novel in the early days of film always depicted the Monster as some big, speechless brute. Kenneth Branagh did an okay job with his 1994 flick. It told most of the real story, and De Niro was a FANTASTIC monster. His portrayal of Victor's creation inspired both terror and sadness. It was the perfect range of emotion one needed to feel for Shelley's flawed antagonist. Yet, even the respectful Kenneth Branagh takes some missteps in his film.

Is it so hard for movie directors to humble themselves before the novelists and say, "I want to respect your vision. I want every last letter to be emulated on screen so that your already near perfect vision can be brought to a whole new generation of people." These stories are fantastic enough on their own without superfluous changes to the story that change it just a teeny bit. Directors make the excuse that. "most everyone knows the story of X book or movie. We want to show a DIFFERENT side." Except, this is becoming less true as time goes on. No one I grew up with has even tried to read or seriously study Bram Stoker's Dracula. No one has tried to subject themselves to a devotional of Frankenstein, or tried to solve the mystery of Gaston Leroux's Opera House. No one has tried to stay a few days in Shirley Jackson's Hill House, or turn the Governess's screws.

Maybe I'm just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but our intimate knowledge of classic literature is fading. Why aren't kids being encouraged to read more? This is why I feel it is important for respectful, deep adaptations of not only the greatest horror novels, but the greatest novels of literature in general to be created for the public, to restore the entertainment and ethical value of these works. If people begin to make such films, maybe we can point the audiences back to how it all started, and bring about a resurgence in reading the very books that our modern films are deriving themselves from.

Rants aside, I do want to pay my respects to the adaptations we have had of these classic books. Despite their poor undertaking of lifting the characters off the page, they have endeared themselves into the hearts of many, myself included, for the duration of their existence. The Universal Monster movies are indeed the poorest adaptations of the novels on which they are based, but no one can deny the lasting impact they continue to make in the world of cinema. Bela Lugosi's Dracula:  the suave, charming but ruthless vampire. Karloff's Monster, who with his unpredictable nature keeps you on the edge of your seat as you wait for something to go horrifically wrong. Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man--Lawrence Talbot--who battles his animalistic nature as it slowly consumes his life, and his loved ones. Karloff once again as Imhotep, a 3000 year old mummy determined to prove that love conquers all, including death. Claude Rains playing the scarred and often times invisible monsters of that era, including Erik the Phantom and Dr. Griffin.

Because of the memorable performances of their actors, and the otherworldly set pieces, these movies are what caused me to be interested in the horror genre. I have my father to thank for providing such culture to me, his son. I don't know what I would do without my monsters.

The point, however, still stands. I do not call for the destruction of the old and unfaithful, but rather, I say there should be unshakable respect for the novels that people committed themselves to write, so that they may thrive beside the classics of old. Let's hope we can soon live in THAT world.

A Quick Word on The Walking Dead

As someone who grew up being absolutely obsessed with Romero's Holy Trilogy (later a saga, I guess. Land of the Dead was awesome, I don't care what anyone says), I am naturally inclined to like and enjoy The Walking Dead. When the comics first debuted in the early 2000s, I skimmed through them. At the time, Kirkman was just a guy to me riding the coat tails of the greater genius, George-y Boy. But I eventually grew to respect Robert for keeping the zombie dream alive (and Danny Boyle, whose 28 Days Later pretty much kickstarted the modern zombie craze that still hasn't ended yet.)

Then, when they announced The Walking Dead tv series, naturally, I was ecstatic. I can't help it, I love zombies. And it's been a hell of a ride these four seasons, with tonight's "No Sanctuary" beginning a fifth season. But I'm not just in it for the zombies, or killing them. I actually think zombie slaying is the weakest part of any zombie movie/game.

From when I was young, I ALWAYS understood that zombie movies weren't just about fighting off hordes of Returners. That was just a tertiary part of The Zombie Movie. The MEAT of these movies is all about the characters--what they go through, how living through a zombie apocalypse changes them.

I don't think people who watch The Walking Dead understand this. Everywhere I go on the internet, I see people criticizing The Walking Dead for being such a slow burn at times. The episodes with a lot of zombie killing action are given high reviews, while the episodes with characters talking and doing less exciting things are criticized for not having zombie killing action.

I think this is a byproduct of the modern zombie movie-making machine. Every zombie film you find on Netflix is about a character who eventually becomes a Badass Zombie Killing Machine, slaying the undead left and right with a variety of clever weaponry. It's like taking the formula for a successful slasher series sequel like Friday the 13th where the focus is not on the creeps or the scare factor but the cleverness of how Jason can kill his random stupid victim with a piece of cardboard and applying that sort of scenario to zombies, and while its fun and preposterous, zombie movies throughout their history have been anything but fun.

I just don't understand criticism of a work of fiction for focusing more on serious drama. Not like East Los High drama where it's just a bunch of "teenagers" talking behind each others backs, I'm talking real drama. The moral dilemma of whether or not a group of people needs to kill a character because they may or may not be a danger to their survival. That shit is real. By the way, if you want true horror, try to sit through an episode of East Los High. It's phenomenal how shows like that get made. Absolutely phenomenal. I actually haven't sat through an episode of East Los High, but I would never force anyone else to do so.

I think there is a huge rift developing between the outside world and their likes and opinions and me. I love the Star Wars movies. All six of them. And I like the Clone Wars television show that just recently ended. I hated Frozen. With a passion. Tangled was a much better Disney Princess movie AND experience. Yet everyone else just ate up that fucking movie. Seriously, it was a movie predicated on the fact that every character is dumb and makes dumb decisions but never suffers any serious consequences for their actions.

I am majorly digressing, so I apologize, but do you understand where I am coming from? How can a movie like Prometheus or Man of Steel get made and everyone trash it for being horrible and making absolutely no sense? What cut of these films did these people watch to jump to that conclusion? And why is it not okay for characters to explore deep issues in the middle of a zombie apocalypse without being criticized for being boring? Why is the world so backwards and whyamIsoalone idon'tunderstand.

To really wrap this mess of a post up with a nice pretty bow, I want to apologize and thank Robert Kirkman and the other contributors to the Walking Dead machine for ensuring the survival of zombies and respecting the legacy of that genre and George A. Romero. I may have misjudged you all those years ago when I was a young dumb teenager, and for that I am sorry. Keep doing what you're doing, carry on the legacy and make it more of your own.

The Conjuring (Review)

I can't believe people haven't figured out by now that "Based on a true story" means, "not actually based on a true story". Yes, there was a family that was supposedly tormented by a demonic force. Yes, Ed and Lorraine Warren are real people, but the veracity of their profession is up for opinion. The devil is literally in the details, here, because with cases like these its hard to withdraw facts, and I'm not speaking as a skeptic. I believe in the supernatural to a certain degree, and I believe that the horrors that the Perron family were subjected to in this film could actually happen (despite, apparently, none of the events of the film actually happening according to one of the daughters of said family.) Yet people still buy into this stuff and they don't bother to do any research to identify the truth. And this isn't with just horror movies, but politics. But that's a horror story for another day. Right now, we're discussing The Conjuring.

Right from the get go, this movie convinces you that it should belong to the Holy-Canon-of-'70s-Horror-Movies, to which The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, and Halloween belong. Even the font lettering when the title rises up on screen looks like a horror font you'd find in '70s titles.

The plot is your typical "family moves into haunted house" affair that we've been introduced to in films like:

The Amityville Horror
Poltergeist
The Haunting in Connecticut
The Haunting of Molly Hartley
The Haunting of Helena
The Haunting The Haunting blah blah blah why the hell are there so many movies that begin with the words "The Haunting of..."?

Anyway, despite its typicality, the filmmakers take the plot in interesting, atypical directions. Much of the focus is on the investigation by Ed and Lorraine Warren, who the Perrons call to help them with their particularly frightening haint. The characters all act very realistically, too, and I always imagined people in real life would act and react to events like these characters did in the movie.

And lets talk about the haunts themselves. The reason I despise a lot of these movies is because they are so unsubtle about their ghosts and demons. I'm pretty sure it's a direct result of filmmakers trying to emulate the very visual nature of spirits in Asian horror movies, but I feel like hauntings need to be subtle and move subtly to truly spark fear in the imagination. Immediately, the spirits of The Innocents come to mind, as although you see one of them up close, you see so little of him that it retains its creep factor. You are unsure of what you are seeing, and that in turn makes you freaked out more. Hell, the woman spirit in the Innocents is one of the most frightening ghosts I've seen committed to celluloid and it's because she's always seen at such a distance her facial features are either hidden in shadow or distorted. But today, it's all about indulging in a fantasy. This is problematic for a horror movie, because the established rule that has driven all great scare experiences is that the less you see, the more you fear.

This film indulges in fantasy and un-subtlety a little too much for my taste, but the scares are still terribly effective. It's saying something that I can get scared by a horror movie, and I found myself to be terrified of the ride this movie will take you on.

Having said all that, is this movie good? Like, is it good enough to join the Holy Canon forever and ever? Well, no. I have too many problems with this movie to try to elevate it to any status it doesn't deserve. It's frightening, but unsubtle. It's melodramatic, but most of the time in a bad way. I wish it was a more honest movie. The filmmakers don't want us to form bonds with these characters (the family or the Warrens). Their main goal is to frighten us. So why then are you guys trying to stick in some little sappy moment that is so minor it doesn't deserve to have the big payoff it does at the end? If you're going to make a character driven film with emotions and such, make that movie. You can't just awkwardly stick in a moment just so you can say, "well, we have met our emotion goal, lets get back to the scariness". Either do that movie and do it proper or don't do it at all.

The best "haunt" movies have been character driven. The Changeling and Jacob's Ladder come to mind, as well as The Haunting (1963) and The Sixth Sense (1999). These are movies that examine haunts through the eyes and the mind of a certain character, and you get to witness their highs and lows in a realistic manner. This movie is not that. It is just a thrill ride and it should be treated as such, and it should allow the audience to form its own emotions regarding the characters and the situation.


I'm totally giving this film a B+, because it deserves it, but it could've been better. It could've stuck to the "facts" that the family actually reported rather than embellish in scary things that don't actually happen, it could have been more character driven. But it wasn't. However, what it was despite my complaints was a truly frightening experience, and it really doesn't need to conform to the "truth", since The Exorcist and Amityville don't exactly follow the true stories they are supposedly based on either.

A lot has happened since last we met.

I have graduated from college with a history degree. I received a writing award from my university for my paper on zombies in the modern day pop culture perception in comparison to the Christian Tradition of resurrection. Lengthy, I know, and that's just a paraphrase of the title. So as you can see, I have not lost my horror spirit.

I just feel like horror is on another downturn. This happened in the early 1990s after the film industry had over-saturated its media with formulaic slasher films, and newer ideas were becoming less prominent. Fortunately for horror fans, even though we weren't seeing a whole lot of good, scary movies in the theater, we had shows like Tales of the Crypt and Tales from the Darkside on television to give us good, scary fun. But those shows could only do so much for horror.

I feel like horror has taken another downturn. I have not lost interest in horror or its impact on the lives of its captive audience, but I feel that no new avenues are being explored. Nothing is being said that can bring new perspectives to those who baptize themselves in horror fiction. That isn't to say that there aren't still movies and books being created by passionate, horror loving people that aren't doing these things. They are just very, VERY hard to find. Especially for someone with my tastes.

Even beloved horror sites are failing to share good movies with their followers. I concur with the assessment by blogger Dorian Dawes that horror media is rapidly decaying, (indeed, reading their article is really what inspired me to write this one.)

But when I have something to say to you, you damn well better believe I am going to come on here and speak my mind. I am still a believer in good horror fiction. It's still out there, and I still appreciate it.

Return of the Living Dead review

I apologize, as this one may be a little long:

I think its surprising that not a whole lot of people are aware of classic horror movies. And I'm not talking about the Universal Monster movies from the 1930s, although those are practically obscure now. I'm talking about recent classics. As much as there is a culture surrounding horror films, not a whole lot of people know what Return of the Living Dead is, or even the original Night of the Living Dead.

Maybe that's why I don't feel bad when I review "the usual suspect" horror films, the ones that always appear on top 25 lists of horror movies you need to watch before you die. I've wanted this blog to be a place where an average person could go and perhaps gain an interest in new horror movies.

With that said, I had a Halloween party the other night and for our movie, I chose to watch Return of the Living Dead. ROTLD came out in 1985, the same year Romero's Day of the Dead came out, and despite the reputation that George carries with his name alone, ROTLD knocked Romero's DAY out of the water. And it really should, its a fantastic horror film.

However, when faced with the scrutiny of modern film goers, ones who aren't massive horror film geeks like myself, how does this movie hold up? Well, I was hoping that everyone was enjoying it, but I feel like they enjoyed it for the wrong reasons. They laughed a little too much for my taste, and all at the wrong moments.

Don't get me wrong, laughter is good. The movie is a horror comedy after all. However, comedy is only half of it. The other half of it is surprisingly tense, and scary. But all in the name of fun.

When I first watched the movie I was very aware of how funny the movie was. However, it's also very horrifying. These are characters you absolutely fall in love with, and then you get to see them lose control of an already volatile situation, and as much as you want them to live, you know there is a chance that they wont make it. So as the movie goes on and things continue to get worse and worse, the movie raises the tension because of it.

I guess I can't forget to plot it out for you before I talk about it more. The movie concerns two groups: Bert, Frank, and Freddy, who work at the Uneeda Medical Supply in Louisville, Kentucky (Kentucky represent) and a group of Freddy's teenage friends who are busy trying to party hardy.. When Freddy, the new guy at the job, inquires about the scariest thing that Frank has ever seen at the Supply Warehouse, Frank shows him these strange canisters filled with Trioxin, which is a reanimating agent. The two hapless heroes accidentally unleash the toxin all over the warehouse, reviving a body that was stored in the Warehouse freezer.

Okay, relatively simple situation. There's only one dead body running around, right? Well, Frank and Freddy are scared stiff by the thing, and decide to call in their boss Bert, who tries to cover his and his company's ass for the rest of the film. The trio discover that the body cannot be killed in the usual zombie fashion of head bludgeoning, so they ship the body to Bert's friend, Ernie, who runs a mortuary/crematorium, with the intention of using Ernie's crematorium to completely burn the body.

So you're thinking to yourself, how in the hell could four guys completely mess up this situation and make everything worse? Well, when they cremate the body they aren't aware that the smoke from the fire and the ashes of the body mix to form an entire new batch of Trioxin, which in turn transforms into acid rain and rains down on the nearby cemetary, thereby reanimating the dead. Whoops.

The rest of the film concerns the two groups of characters trying to survive the onslaught of the living dead.

If you're not aware, these zombies are not your typical Romero zombies. They run, they talk, and they tackle. And they cannot die. So you can imagine how the already terrible situation has the potential to get much worse.

The reason this film works for me is that instead of being a zombie action kill movie, its a movie about a zombie siege. It directly follows Night of the Living Dead's winning formula of putting a group of different individuals into a location together and have them try to survive against an army of the living dead. So characters don't unrealistically become zombie killing badasses and they don't come out of a Juno movie.

No, instead they do their best and die trying. And as the situation gets worse, everything becomes more hopeless. THAT is tension building, because you really end up liking the four guys Bert, Ernie, Frank, and Freddy and you don't want anything to happen to them. I also love that one guy who yelled "Get in here honky!"

Naturally, the scares are supposed to eventually override the fun funny stuff, but I don't think my friends really got into it that much to allow themselves to give in to the suspense and the terror. Plus, it was made in 1985, so by modern audiences the movie is dated. However, the movie has that great 80s atmosphere that modern horror films significantly lack. My favorite shot of the entire film is during the opening credits when you see the trioxin revive the dead body for the first time, and the camera pans in as you see the body shake.

Please watch this film. I'm terribly sorry I talked about it in great length, but I don't think I've spoiled too much. Its an A+ film, and I cannot recommend it enough. Watch this film and know just how you're supposed to do a zombie comedy.

Blogging hiatus/Announcement/Zombie review

This is going to be a very simple post to explain my absence and the future of this blog:

1. I forgot my log in information. So...yeah. It was that simple.

2. I am still going to write to this. Tomorrow I am going to be hosting a Halloween party and the movie that I am forcing everyone to watch is Return of the Living Dead, which currently is my favorite zombie film of all time. That movie just gets so much right, but more on that later.

Right now, I want to take a brief moment to talk about Zombie. In fact, I'm going to review Zombie.

I recently got a chance to pick up a copy of Zombie from the mall on a trip to visit my extended family. Now, when I shop, I'm more of a window shopper. I always try to conserve my money, which mostly goes towards food and gas (and my gas gets eaten up really fast, as I commute to college.) So by chance whilst my fiancee and I were perusing the rows of horror films in the F.Y.E. I happened upon the Blue Underground DVD of Zombie. Needless to say, I was immediately smitten. However, when I happen upon something that I would like to purchase I tend to get somewhat of a guilty conscience. There was also a bit of confusion as to whether or not the box I was holding in my hands was a Blu-Ray edition or DVD. I'm not kidding, it wasn't giving us any indication which one it was.

But, I gave in and I bought it, and a few days later we popped it in to watch it.

Now, it wasn't my first time seeing it. I managed to watch it online a long time ago back when I had more time to fulfill my desire to watch horror films. I loved it back then, and I loved it the second time watching it as well.

The story begins with a boat that pulls into a New York harbor. The boat is abandoned, so the Coast Guard thinks. The two members investigating the boat get chewed up by a stowaway zombie, whom they don't properly deal with. The zombie disappears, and they walk away with some bites and scratches.

The boat, it turns out, belongs to the father of the main character, a girl named Anne. She becomes involved because she wants to know where her missing father is, and she entangles herself with reporter Peter West, who thinks there's an interesting story to tell with the boat.

Immediately starting the movie the average viewer will take note that a lot of the actors have been overdubbed. This kinda took me out of the movie a bit, as I wasn't used to it, but once I allowed myself to get lost in the story I eventually forgot about it. I'm not going to really go into too much detail about this movie. It's pretty famous in the horror world. Yadda yadda Lucio Fulci (props) yadda yadda special effects, yadda yadda beautiful cinematography.

The main characters' search eventually brings them to an island where the dead are mysteriously rising. Dr. Menard and a few others are investigating the phenomena, and he is Anne's connection to her missing father. But when the main characters arrive on the island, all hell breaks loose and things heat up pretty quickly.

Now, I'm afraid I'll have to go against the grain here and say that I'm totally not a fan of the zombie vs. shark thing. And no, it's not because the idea is completely silly, because I can deal with that. It's just that...the sequence goes on for far too long and its not too integral to the main story. Yadda yadda, the cinematography is impressive and beautiful, but come on, it's a film where people are being ripped apart and having their arteries severed by zombies. However, I'm not going to knock someone by saying that they can't appreciate how beautiful the cinematography is. When they aren't spending fifteen minutes pondering the scenery, this movie is gorgeous.

So what do I think of this film? I'm giving it a well deserved B. And please, if you are reading this blog and have anything you want to say, please say it. I want you to, really. I wanna hear what you think.

Why I hate modern zombie movies

As much as I adore Shaun of the Dead, I can't help but think of how much bullshit it has spawned. As far as Shaun goes, the movie was perfect. It was a Romero zombie movie that poked fun at Romero zombie movies, but not in a stupid way. As far as humor went, it was the characters and their situation and interactions that were funny (and often dramatic) instead of relying on zombie sight gags.

Unfortunately, Shaun of the Dead sparked a whole new interest in zom coms. And none have been particularly good. Zom coms (as they are called) have pretty much existed since the inception of the Romero zombie (I mean, how is Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things not a comedy?) Back then they were done well, emphasizing comedic situations interspersed with true moments of horror.

The movie that has done this best (besides Shaun) is Return of the Living Dead. Sure, there are a few moments in the film that are completely, ridiculously silly ("Send more cops") but the movie gets the actual zombie onslaught stuff right. The best zombie films always put characters in a nearly impossible situation, and then proceed to make that situation increasingly worse. In Return, the characters find themselves trapped in a morgue that has barely any defensive capability against hordes of invincible zombies that are trying to find their way in. To make matters worse, two of their number are already dying and slowly becoming Returners themselves. Added to that is the fact that every ounce of help that seems to come their way is torn apart by the zombie horde, and as each moment passes the characters options are running out.

Theses are the zombie movies I love to watch, because it creates such a great terror and suspense in the viewer that, in my opinion, is unrivaled in the horror movie genre community. It's so satisfying to watch the characters succeed in escape (and even destroying) the zombies and its so heart-wrenching and terrifying to see them fail.

Zombie movies these days follow a different rule. Throw in some quirky characters, put them in amusing situations, and watch them turn into complete zombie killing badass machines at the end that are capable of dealing out many headshots (even while they are running) despite the fact that they've had no prior experience or practice with a gun.

Modern zombie movies are fixated on delivering zombie killing action, to the point of making their human characters into Robocop, and its so ridiculous that I can't stand watching these films. In Night of the Living Dead, our heroes struggled to even hit their targets at all because they were all people who had never previously dealt with firearms.

Where is the tension that used to come from watching a zombie movie? Why does that tension suddenly get ignored in the modern day?

What follows are several minor nitpicks regarding the depictions of zombies themselves:

I am a fan of old school slow zombies. However, I like the fast Olympic medalist zombies that have been introduced in recent times. To be fair, if the dead ever rose up out of their graves in real life, they would be running to after the effects of rigor mortis wore off (which they will). They won't be Olympic medalist fast, but they won't be tree-swaying-in-the-wind slow. However, I feel like my slow zombie palos are beginning to become ignored. I'm not asking that fast zombies go away. I'm asking for more equal representation.

Another big thing I dislike is how zombies look these days. I'm not sure how well I'll be able to articulate this thought, but...zombies now have a "look". Whenever you think of zombies, you think of that look. Compare this:

to this:

What is with with this zombie snarl face that so many extras do these days? All their zombies have that same damn look. When I think of a zombie I think of a reanimated CORPSE. Meaning whatever you're seeing is a shell that is just walking around and eating humans. I hate (and this is just my personal opinion) zombies that have very varied expressions. To me, the only expression a zombie should have is the expression they had when they died. It makes them so much creepier. A zombie snarling at me like a dog doesn't make them scary.

Zombie movies need to emphasize the fact that what we are looking at is literally a dead person. Instead of a director saying, "Act like a zombie", they should be telling them, "Act like a walking dead shell, a corpse." We need to get away from the zombie stereotype and go back to thinking of zombies as a dead body that gets up and and wanders around.

I say these things because I assume that there is such a thing as objective fear, and such things that I suggest can only improve zombies so that they can get back to that objective fear and all of us can be scared again.

Other than that, that's about all I have to say about it. I would love for anyone reading to send their thoughts.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011 Remake)

I have a sort of love/hate relationship when it comes to modern supernatural horror movies. On one hand, the films are getting better when it comes to delivering atmosphere. On the other hand, how many times can you watch the same movie over and over?

-Couple moves into house, may or may not have kids.

-emotional/mental baggage comes with being the main character.

-spooky jump scares and brief glimpses of creepy demonic things.

-creepy child drawing creepy pictures of a creepy place that acts as foreshadowing of something creepy that will creepily creep up later creep.

-one of the protagonists becomes an investigative journalist in the last half of the movie to find out what's REALLY GOING ON.

-Movie has a bittersweet ending.

This movie is in a middle ground of these kinds of films. It surprised me that the filmmakers didn't take the easy way out with its scares and set ups, but then again Guillermo had a huge hand in writing and making this movie, and he was responsible for the excellent The Devil's Backbone. Each time I thought this movie was going to do something predictable, I was surprised when that ended up not being the case.

I guess I should give a plot. A family moves into a creepy house that they are renovating for some architectural or historical society deal. The girl of the family, Sally, was  given up by her mother to live with her father, who is renovating the building with his girlfriend. Soon, Sally comes across this odd heater/fire place thing in the basement of the house where she can hear voices whispering her name.

It turns out that there are strange, ancient little creatures living deep below their house in the earth that feed on children, and they've chosen Sally as their next target. Besides scaring her by their presence alone, the little monsters choose to whisper bad and hurtful words to Sally to deceive her already fragile mind. When it came to it, I found these moments more disturbing than the usual "stalk and attack" moments, and I felt you could only have those "stalk and attack" moments so many times before I stopped caring what the outcome of them was.

In terms of scariness, I was a bit let down. The beginning portions of the movie were terrifying, but as the movie went on I felt that the threat factor of these little gremlins was decreasing. Maybe it was due to their actual appearance. In the first half of the film you don't get to see much of what they look like, following the rules of Jaws where the less you see of it, the more terrifying it is.

As much as I nitpick, overall this movie was top notch, a step above films of its type that suffer from doing nothing new for its audience. The actors were all great (Guy Pearce--and here I'd been complaining that he wasn't doing much lately--Katie Holmes, Bailee Madison--great performance from someone so young) and the atmosphere was perfect, but as much as the film plays against audience expectation, it also falls into the tropes that one comes to expect from these kinds of films.

I give Don't Be Afraid of the Dark a B.

I Am Very Angry

In an earlier post I celebrated the fact that every Friday the 13th film was on Netflix for your viewing pleasure. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I don't remember seeing two entries on there: The New Beginning (or Part V) and Jason X.

I was anticipating The New Beginning because it's possibly the most notorious Friday the 13th movie. It has the stigma of being polarizing to F13 fans, so you either love it or you hate it. Me being extremely laid back and easy going, I have no problem liking films that other people write seething fanboy hate speech for, (i.e. The Star Wars prequels and the Special Edition Star Wars Original Trilogy, not to mention the other movie, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) so I didn't think I would have a hard time watching this one. It apparently has the biggest body count in any of the Friday films, which is nice, but as per my review of Part IV, having more characters than you can have characterization for is a bad thing.

However, I didn't get a chance to watch this film because Netflix skips over it and goes on to Part VI, which I am not going to watch until I see Part V(if I watch it at all since I don't like the idea of Jason coming back to life). I don't want to spend money on a rental because in this stupid small ass town people abuse rental disks to the point that they are unwatchable, and I don't want to buy a movie that I haven't seen that could potentially suck. I also don't want to watch a poor quality online bootleg, so I'm kind of stuck until I can find a copy to borrow, or UNTIL NETFLIX GETS SMART AND PUTS THIS DAMN MOVIE BACK ON THERE WITH THE OTHERS. I mean, how could you just skip over a movie in a series like this? It would be like skipping The Dark Knight after watching Batman Begins, or Empire Strikes Back after watching Star Wars and going to Return of the Jedi.

That's why instead of watching The New Beginning, I reviewed Deep Red, and I ended up being completely frustrated with that piece of fuck. So now I am angry. I guess I should try to look for someone in this town who could possibly have a copy of this movie, because I don't want to wait for Netflix to get it. I'm still waiting for them to put The Living Daylights back on.

By the by, I don't do the whole Netflix-by-mail thing, so that's out of the question.

My Issue With Deep Red (With Spoilers)

Well, this may be a knife in the back for me as far as my reviewing career goes, but this movie's plot is completely nonsensical. This is a review of the movie Deep Red, the version which appears on Netflix. Whether other versions of the film are better is not a matter of dispute, as I have no seen those versions and am only reviewing this one.

The film in question is by a very well respected horror/giallo guru, Dario Argento. The name may sound familiar to more-than-casual horror fans as the man who helped Romero finance his famous Dawn of the Dead.

Argento, however, was well known before his connection to the Zombie King, having made several well received giallo/suspense films during the early-to-mid 1970s (Bird With The Crystal Plumage, 1970; Suspiria, 1977).

To people who don't know, Giallo films are whodunit mysteries, typically made by Italian film makers, that accentuate the violence of the murders. Giallo films are very closely connected to the slasher films of the '80s, as directors of eighties slashers took inspiration from these predecessors. Deep Red is a giallo, a murder mystery whodunit slasher, and that is precisely what the film gets wrong.

Diving into the film is a mystery in and of itself. There are three versions of the film. One that is 128 minutes long that was originally released in Italy (with dubbing on some scenes incomplete) one that Argento edited himself, which was 105 minutes long, and a US version that is 98 minutes long. The 105 minute version is supposedly the director's "definitive" version, and I'm pretty sure that's the version that's on Netflix.

Before I get into an angry rant, I wanted to make something clear. Let it not be said that this film isn't beautiful. It is wonderfully shot with a good budget and it looks better than most of the '80s films that it would inspire. The set locations are beautiful as well, and the lighting is pitch perfect. The suspense the film offers is pitch perfect as well, and the combination of suspense and lighting makes things even better.

Unfortunately, the backbone of the film, it's plot, suffers from being nonsensical. The main character, Marcus, is witness to the murder of a psychic who, earlier in the night, had a vision of the murderer at her show panel. She freaks out, which upsets the murderer, and she is murdered that night. Before she's completely dead, the murderer shoves her body through the window of her apartment, and Marcus witnesses the event in the street below. Running up to help her, he enters her apartment and finds her dead corpse. However, he is struck by a strange painting he saw in her apartment which now seems to be missing. He realizes that the painting is the key to solving the murder.

Also, whilst he was exploring the apartment before the police arrive, he looks out the window and manages to catch a glimpse of the killer, and he sees his friend Carlo below. Carlo, however, is unable to identify the murderer.

However, he then forgets about pursuing any leads about the painting even when he decides to do his own off-the-record investigation. You may argue that he forgets about the painting and that one of the themes of the film is memory. However, he wont stop talking about the damn painting to the characters he interacts with. He then proceeds to spend the entire film breaking into and destroying houses and schools, without regard of getting caught by the police. He demonstrates that he has no qualms of breaking and entering a property but he chooses not to return to the apartment where the psychic was murdered to get a closer look at her paintings again, choosing only to do so at the end of the film after we've sat through a convoluted mess of clues he chooses to follow that are also completely nonsensical.

All the time he is chasing leads, the murderer is killing more people, and each kill is preceded by a creepy children's song--the murderers calling card.

This song is the first clue, and that makes perfect sense that he should follow that lead. Then he is told by one of the psyhic's friends of a book that he had read by an author that said that sometimes in haunted houses you hear children singing and that usually indicates that there was a murder in that place. Or something. So Marcus decides he wants to read that book himself. The book tells of a folk legend about a house in Rome that someone heard screaming in, but when they investigated no one was there.

Marcus then decides that the person who wrote the book must KNOW SOMETHING about the murderer, even though that's a stupid conclusion at which one could arrive. Then all of a sudden, the book's author is killed by the murderer. For the rest of the film, we are given no explanation as to how these things are connected. As a matter of fact, with each of the clues we are given no explanation as to how they go back to the murderer in question.

So Marcus pursues another lead: visiting the house from the book that he read. He gets a key to the property by some guy, and proceeds to explore the house, where he defaces a wall and discovers a weird and creepy drawing of a child holding hands with some bleeding lunatic. He decides to come back that night, where glass from the window above falls down on his head. Why he is back at the house again, I'm not sure. Whether or not this drawing is connected to the murderer, also left pretty vague. He comes back a few nights later after he realizes that in the picture of the house that he tore from the author's book there's a window missing, he proceeds to deface the outside wall of the house. He then falls off the second story, concludes that's probably a bad idea, and then enters the house to try and get in this hidden room from the other side.

So already our hero has destroyed the inside wall of the house where the creepy painting was, he's destroyed the outside wall of the house before giving up on it, and then he destroys the inside wall of the house wherein he discovers a hidden room with a dead body.

This is a huge clue. Perhaps it means the killer is highly skilled in building houses, because they managed to seal off this room pretty nicely.

No, actually, the fact that the killer had the room sealed of course, is not mentioned or brought up ever again. Add to the fact that the killer would have had to find someone to come and seal the CREEPY DEAD BODY in the room without question and without turning the killer in...le sigh. This movie's plot is a mess.

The final clue is that the daughter of the house's caretaker has taken a liking to a grotesque drawing that looks similar to the painting on the wall of the house. She reveals that she found it at her school while being punished for doing something bad. So Marcus FUCKING BREAKS INTO THE SCHOOL. Is this school abandoned? Why are these details not given to us? This guy literally has no problems breaking and entering and destroying property that is not his, and yet he doesn't have the sense to go back to the psychic's apartment to look around.

They go through the archives of the school and Marcus figures out the mystery: the child who drew the pictures is his friend Carlo (remember him from way back?) Carlo tries to kill Marcus but fails, and he escapes before the police can catch him, only for him to have the silliest death scene I've ever witnessed in a film. Whilst running away, he hits a big truck and he foot is caught on some thing that is hanging off the truck's back end. He is dragged all over the road screaming and the drivers don't notice. This goes on for literally half a minute until the truck makes a turn and he bangs his head on the side of the road, knocking him out. Finally, to add insult to injury, a speeding car runs over and crushes his head, finally killing him. Tell me that is not the dumbest thing you've ever heard. It was more dumb to witness, trust me.

So Marcus concludes that the killer is his friend Carlo, even THOUGH HE KNEW THAT CARLO WASN'T THE KILLER BECAUSE HE SAW CARLO DOWN ON THE STREET AS THE KILLER WAS WALKING AWAY. What. The FUCK. So at this point Marcus is a complete idiot. Then he has...A REVELATION! The killer couldn't have been Carlo, because of THE REASONS I MENTIONED ABOVE.

So Marcus decides to do that thing that I've wanted him to do for the entire movie that he was way too stupid to do: he finally goes back to the psychic's apartment to look around. It is only here that he realizes how dumb he was. The odd painting he saw earlier in the film wasn't a painting at all. It was a mirror, and he realizes that he's seen the killer's face.

Wow, Marcus. You probably could have figured that one out if you just went back here earlier in the fucking film, because none of the clues you were given led you to that conclusion. It was only when you went back to the apartment did you figure it out, and the clues don't fucking matter. It isn't clear why the murderer does what they do anyway. This film's plot is a fucking joke. The movie is beautifully shot and the tension and suspense are there, but when the plot revolves around a complete idiot trying to solve a crime it falls apart.

The reason I'm so irate is that when it comes to a murder mystery, a movie/story that demands audience participation, you want to make everything absolutely clear to the audience and not have things be muddled up and characters who the audience can trust will not be illogical or unreasonable in their actions, UNLESS THAT'S THE POINT OF THE STORY.

If that was the whole point of the movie, that he was too dumb to solve the crime, the film makers didn't make much of an effort to confirm that to the audience. We are left to conclude that our main character, the mystery solver, is a complete idiot and a reckless lawbreaker.

I give this film a C-. For a mystery murder, this film does a horrible job with the mystery, and that kinda ruins the entire point of the film. The plot is frustrating as fuck but the visuals, creepiness, atmosphere and what not slightly make up for it.