Horror Part 12

Within the Woods - A

Finally after years of searching I have located a copy of Within the Woods, the original Super 8 movie that Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell showed to investors so they could get enough money to make the original Evil Dead. A lot of what is found in this movie would be later reused in both Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. But in the movie the roles are flipped it is Bruce Campbell who is a the possessed monster and Ellen Sandweiss as the poor victim. The film quality is awful, lord knows how many generation bootleg this is but amazingly the sound, especially the sound effects are very crisp and clear. Most people won't like this movie, it is a half an hour long, the film quality is awful, the acting is so-so but I am such a huge fan of the Evil Dead movies to finally see the movie that started it all, the fabled Within the Woods that has never been released and screened only a few times. The magic of the movie was enough for me to give it an A but you can see the seeds of great filmmakers in Sam Raimi and company. A true rare gem that probably very few will ever see.

I Am The Ripper - C-

A group of friends get together at one of the friend's apartment, watch action movies, argue about who would win in a fight between Aliens and the Predator and look at comic books. Yes this isn't exactly the most hip party but a guy dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and wearing a mask that look a lot like Manny Calvera from the Lucasarts adventure game Grim Fandango. He starts slicing and dicing up the guests until the host, Peter tries to stop him. He manages to get in a few good blows. So the killer says in 24 hours he will come back to face Peter once again. Now Peter has 24 hours to formulate a plan or at least go shopping for a casket to be buried in. I thought at first this was going to be some sort of horror version of Snatch, the opening credits really alluded to that, but instead we get some sort of Matrix Demon movie, lots of overly fast cutting, ridiculous action scenes with long winded overly complicated explanations inbetween. The movie has some good style to it but all the Matrix crap ruined it. I did like the look of the Death Angel, that was a cool look true it was stolen from Grim Fandango but hey it is a cool look but the whole movie was cut too fast, the entire movie felt like it was spinning and I wound up missing a couple of moments due to their fast pace. Definitely unique but ultimately flawed.

The Mutilator - D

Group of college friends go to Ed's father's beach condo to close it up for the season. Ed's father just so happens to be completely crazy and a trophy hunter, now he wants to hunt the ultimate prey, squirrels, no no wait, the ultimate prey, man. This was a very boring slasher, I don't know exactly why it seemed to hit all the required slasher bases but it never really hooked me. I think the whole premise is strange, kid kills his mother, albeit accidentally but seems to have no problem with doing it. I would have understood of Ed was the crazy guy for blowing his mother away but it is the dad. The characters were all rather flat, the gore was okay but didn't hook me enough. I think it was giving away the killer too early, it lacked the mystery that other slashers had. This movie just didn't do it for me which is odd because normally I love slasher movies but this one was missing something that I can't exactly put my finger on.

The Wax Mask - B+

Paris, New Year's Eve 1900: A couple are horribly murdered by a masked man with a metal claw who rips their hearts out. The sole survivor and witness to the massacre is a young girl. Twelve years later in Rome a new wax museum is opened, whose main attractions are lifelike recreations of gruesome murder scenes. A young man bets that he will spend the night in the museum but is found dead the morning after. Soon, people start disappearing from the streets of Rome and the wax museum halls begin filling with new figures. This is delicious gothic fun, lots of lavish sets, ghoulish people, and beautiful women in distress. Yes this is basically a remake of Vincent Price's House of Wax but it is a very good remake, better than the big budget 2005 House of Wax. This was Lucio Fulci's last film, he and Dario Argento had finished writing it and were about to start pre-production when he died. The movie still has the touch of Fulci in it if not his hand at the wheel. The biggest problem was the awful, horrible dub that accompanied the movie. Ouch it sounded like four people did every role in the movie. I am use to bad dubbing but this was the worst of them all. If you want some good gothic horror and can stomach bad dubbing give this one a try.

Nude For Satan - B

When a doctor and a young lady (women drivers) are involved in a car crash, the doctor seeks medical aid at a nearby gothic castle which he finds inhabited by both his and her darker halves. When the two meet their doppelgangers, they also discover that the castle is full of ghouls and monsters led by Satan himself. This is one of those gothic devil possessed the castle and screws with people movies. Lots of trippy scenes, crazy lighting, and really great music. I probably shouldn't have liked this movie as much as I did but there was a certain flair to everything that made watching it actually fun. Plus Rita Calderoni is very easy on the eyes which makes watching it that much easier. This movie is schlocky, maybe even sleazy but it doesn't make watching it any less fun. Don't go in expecting a lot it is Redemption Films release but if you can shut your logical mind off an enjoy the weirdness you will enjoy this film.

Doll Graveyard - D

Full Moon Pictures returns to familiar territory of killer dolls but this time with disasterous results. 100 years ago Sophie is killed by her abusive father for breaking a vase while playing with her dolls, now in modern times hopeless loser Guy, that is his name his real name, happens to dig up one of her dolls which just so happens to be possessed by her spirit. While his sister is having a party the dolls come back and go on a killing spree. I'm not totally sure if this even counts as a movie, it was barely an hour long, less if you remove all the credits. The movie was weak, so very weak. The acting, especially of the teens was awful at best. The dolls looked cool, they didn't use CG and stuck with stop motion which always worked for them. I was really disappointed with this movie, Charles Band should know better than to put crap like this out.

Ju-On: The Curse - B

Jealous of his wifes love for another man, a man brutally kills his wife and young son. Searching for the son who has missed a lot of school, the teacher enters their house, only to find the dead ghost of his mother, and consequently has a heart attack and becomes a ghost himself. The story goes on to tell of the new tenants of the house and what they experience, and an investigation by two police officers into why so many people are dissapearing. This was a made for cable movie made in Japan back in 2000 and gets almost no coverage due to the high profile of its much bigger budget off spring, Ju-On the Grudge and the American Grudge. This one isn't as polished as the bigger theatrical versions, the big special effect they hit you with may have looked state of the art in 2000 for a made for TV movie but it looks pretty cheap by today's standards. Don't get me wrong the concept is really creepy, but the execution was flawed. But I really did like the naked albino boy that meows that is good old nightmare fuel. A couple of the little stories in this didn't link together as well as I was hoping, I had to do some assuming due to a couple of minor gaps which I think were explained but because they were on paper it didn't get translated. For a made for TV movie this was really good but I still like the bigger budget versions, they pack a punch more polished punch.

Witches of the Caribbean - C-

A group of troubled teens come together on an island so a therapist can cure them of their problems. Once on the island they learn they are all having the same dream about a witch being burned on the beach of this very island. What is there connection to this witch burning and the subsequent disappearence of everyone on the island. Is the new girl the key to it all or the key to their doom? Not really as bad as I was expecting, I was expecting this to be brutal. Don't get me wrong it wasn't great but not the ordeal I was expecting. The acting is pretty fair, some better than others but nothing too bad. The plot was a little too predictable, but then again so are many witchcraft movies, the only surprise was that they weren't immediately hostile to the new girl like so many of these kind of movies are. At times this left like the witchcraft episode of the OC but it never annoyed me to the degree other movies like this have. So the final verdict is, not great, not great by a longshot but not horrible either which rather surprised me.

Unknown Beyond - F

This movie claims to be based on the work of HP Lovecraft, what it really should have said was it stole the terms, Necronomicon and Anicent Ones to stick into a completel nonsensical film about a tunnel that has evil in it. There is some talk in the beginning and the end of the Ancient Ones taking over with their army of undead but this movie doesn't sweat details, it doesn't sweat at all, it is DOA. I watched the first forty minutes or so before I knew what was going on aside from what I could see with my own eyes and this movie is only 69 minutes. The movie is ridiculously fague on story points which usually are vital to a movie, it is about storytelling. Well not all the time. The acting wasn't too bad although the actors looked about as lost and confused. The direction wasn't all the great but what can you do with three pages worth of script? I'm very sorry I watched this movie it seems you don't always get what is advertised. I thought I was watching a movie, how wrong I was.

Happy Birthday To Me - B-

Virginia is proud that she belongs to a clique whose activities involve harassing shriners, engaging in drunken daredevil racing and being all around jackasses. The best students at a private school. But before her 18th birthday, a grueling set of murders take place and her friends are the ones who are falling prey. Could it be her? She suffers from blackouts due to a freak accident one year earlier. We soon learn the truth behind her accident and what is going on to all her friends. This certainly does win the award for some of the most creative ways of killing snotty rich kids in a slasher movie. It doesn't resort to the old killer with a knife style, in this one they use a dirt bike, a really nasty killing involving weight lifting equipment, a lengthy strangulation scene where the girl just won't stay down. The movie was hurt by all the red herrings, every guy in the movie is a red herring at one point or another in the movie which if you are paying attention really gives away the killer well before the end. I also didn't like all the weird pseudo-science, it was all totally phony and just got in the way of the slashing. This was a pretty good entry in the Canadian Slasher category but the movie's urge to stray away from slashing into weird pseudo-science took away from the overall tone of the film. I really liked the bulldog in the movie, any movie that has a bulldog can't be all bad in my book.

Rasen (Spiral) - C+

This is the lost first sequel to the Japanese mega hit Ringu. Shortly after Ringu raked in tons of money at the box office, the company behind the series decided to put out a sequel as fast as possible. This was not the smartest decision to make, the movie was a complete, utter, and total bomb at the box office. So thorough was the bomb the company shelved it and has tried very hard to make everyone forget the movie ever existed. The movie starts the day after the end of the first Ringu where Dr Andou who is depressed over the loss of his son is called in to do the autospy on his friend Ryuji Takayama, the ex-husband of Reiko, the heroine of the first Ringu. He is approached by a reporter who wants an expert to investigate this mysterious killer videotape and just so happens to have one. Dr Andou, having nothing to live for, watches the tape and encounters Sayaka, in a rather personal way. But afterwards he realizes he wants to live so with the help of Mai, Ryuji's girlfriend he tries to find a way out of his predicament. This wasn't nearly as bad as everyone says it is but then again it really can't compare to the original movie at all. I think the biggest flaw of the movie was to try to explain how the videotape kills you in a scientific way, that violates one of the major rules of horror movies, you can't put science to extraordinary things, it never works, that is why they never say exactly why the dead come back to life in Night of the Living Dead. When your horror movie spends more time focusing on scientific explantions rather than horror you stop having a horror movie and some weird science fiction story.

Girl Slaves of Morgana La Fey - B+

Is this not a cool name for a movie? Two friends, Francoise and Anna are driving in the remote French countryside when their car dies on a remote road. They spend the night in a barn and the next morning Francoise wakes up to find Anna had disappeared. She goes to look for her missing friend and instead of finding her friend she finds a dwarf named Gurth. Gurth takes her to a castle filled with pretty young things and their mistress Morganna. We soon learn Morganna and her gals are spirits who survive by obtaining the souls of pretty young girls, but unlike most horror movies losing your soul doesn't kill you, it makes you immortal but forced to live in Morganna's castle forever. Anna accept the offer but Francoise doesn't. Morganna's interest in Francoise angers her three companions and Gurth our jealous dwarf so the three scheme to help Francoise escape before Morganna can take her soul and teach her all their secrets. This movie was very inspired by the work of Jean Rollin whose sensual vampire tales were very popular in France at this time. The movie has lots of naked beauties, deep philsophical ponderings, and a gloomy castle but unlike Rollin's films this one has an actual plot and follows it very well. This is almost a fantasy tale if you think of Morganna and her girls as fairies and the castle as the fairy kingdom. This was a sensual movie, it isn't like phony softcore movies of today that no matter how they try the nudity always feels hammered into the plot like spikes into soft flesh. Truly this movie could have only been made in the 70s, today it would be too easily hijacked by modern urges to have sex scenes every fifteen minutes for fear of the audience growing bored. This movie was a haunting and enjoyable tale of magic and temptation French style.

Meat Market 2 - B+

The surviving three members from the first Meat Market, Argenta, Ferrigan, and Nemesis are trying to stay alive in the city but it is getting harder they are all but out of bullets and Nemesis, who is a vampire is running low on blood. They end up captured by the up and coming New World Order run by a guy in a white shirt and big glasses who is called Bill. Gee can we say Bill Gates? Good I thought you could. This movie runs a lot like Day of the Dead but where George Romero used his social satire subtly, this movie rips your arm off and beats you with their message but oddly enough it fits the mood and tone of the movie. Like Day of the Dead the medical experiments the mad scientists are running on the ravaging undead go horribly awry and they get loose on a gut eating rampage. I liked this movie a lot more than the first Meat Market, this one had a much more focused story, it didn't waste time with pointless zombie attacks in the beginning like the first film. Don't get me wrong there is a lot of zombie guts eating in this splatter flick but it comes at the right time. My favorite part in this movie is the beginning which is totally stolen from Lucio Fulci's Zombie, even down to the opening line which made me howl with laughter. My favorite has to be Argenta played by Claire Westby, she is spunky yet still vulnerable. This movie felt much more put together than the first which shows the filmmakers had learned some good lesson and put them to good use making an over the top zombie splatter flick.

Spooks and Creeps - B

This is a collection of 6 horror shorts brought together in one anthology. First up we have Freakshow where a brother and sister venture into a freakshow on Halloween and the brother learns a valuable lesson about eating too much candy. Not a bad short movie, a little too short running a grand total of 6 minutes. If anyone remembers the old show Are You Afraid of the Dark, if you do this felt a lot like a short version of one of those stories. Not the best way to start your anthology out. Freakshow: C-. Next up we have Desserts, a Scottish short staring Ewan McGregor who is walking along the beach who finds a chocolate pastry laying on the beach. He eats it and learns too late you shouldn't eat strange food laying on the beach. This was incredibly short, but it was very funny and it had a great 'hook'. Dessert: A. Doppleganger tells the story of an ad exec who is having strange dreams about another him living a humdrum life. Then one night he has another dream this time the other him is coming for a visit. This is the most polished of all but I didn't like it nearly as much as Desserts. In the middle it actual felt like it was dragging, and it was 12 minutes long. Doppleganger: B. A Fate Fortold a world class bitch Laura meets a fortune teller who knows too much about her. This was the worst of them all so far, not just because the main character was a horrid human, but because the plot wandered and the important part we get three minutes of weird photography which made everything impossible to understand. Rather disappointing after the first three had been good. A Fate Fortold: D. Reducing Stanley, Stanley's father wants nothing more than his son to be a pro baseball player but Stanley will do anything to get out of practice. Dad of course is psycho and after way, way too much time gets his due. God this was long, boring, and horrible. This single short is longer than all the others put together and it was by far the worst. I don't even want to talk about it, god it sucked. Reducing Stanley: F. The final episode is Holiday on the Moon, a very bizarre tale that looks drawn straight from David Lynch's brain. A wife leaves her husband and the next ten minutes is the husband wandering through a weird, weird world looking for answers. I like this one, then again after watching Reducing Stanley watching I would have liked watching a test pattern. This would never have worked in anything longer than ten minutes, after that the novelty of the entire thing would have worn off. Holiday on the Moon: B. All in all this wasn't a bad anthology, with the exception of Reducting Stanley they were all decent enough. Desserts made me like the disc but the rest weren't all that bad. I like short films, although you can really watch some true crap many are clever and good. They usually don't have great big budgets and thus rely on intelligence and twists to make their horror rather than gore and CG ghosts. If you watch this remember to fast forward through the black and white episdoe, it will steal your sanity but not in a good way.

Slaughter Disc - D+

Mike loves his porn, so much so that it totally consumes his life. His entire day revolves around porn. One day in the mail he recieves a strange DVD that leads him into a world of Bondage, Murder, Self-Mutilation, Cannibalism, Necrophilia, and that is just the beginning of his journey into kinky hell. This an ambitious movie but ultimately flawed. Problem lies in the fact that it is hardcore porn and trying to combine anything with hardcore porn is difficult because it is like oil and water. In this movie they try to combine horror and porn, something they did in the 70s. But the problem is that one or the other totally dominates the movie, either you get too much porn and too little story like this movie or too much story and too little porn to make it a worthwhile porno movie. This movie is nothing but a guy watching Andromeda Strange, who despite being good looking that punk rock rooster kind of way, having sex and killing guys and Mike watching there is really nothing else until the end. For this kind of synthesis to really work you need like a three hour long movie which can devote equal time to both horror and porno. I did like Andromeda Strange, she did seem to be enjoying herself and had that Elivra style of horror hostess thing going except unlike Elvira she gets naked and frequently. Other than her the rest of the movie is hopelessly lost, it is a porn movie with horror taped on to try and make it more legit. A brave move to try and remarry horror and porn but it failed.

Suicide Dolls - B

Trying to explain this movie is really, really difficult but I will try to explain what I have seen. This 60 minute long movie is made up of three vignittes each ending in a suicide. The first shoots herself, the second hangs herself, and the third commits harikari at the end of each we cut to a doll, a suicide doll. Now I think what that means is that each person was really a doll or maybe because they killed themselves they turned into those dolls. This is Japanese, if the whole harikari thing didn't give it away and there are no subtitles so what little dialogue there is ends up totally being lost. Each vignitte is rather bleak and slow but the slow pace is meant to show the bored and despair of the people. The harikari part is the longest and has the most camera work, the other two the camera never moves, like you are some sort of creepy video camera voyeur watching them in their final hours. All of this is shot on handle held video cameras giving it another rather unsettling realism to it. This movies are a lot like the 2 Red Room movies and Kyoko vs Yuki movies, that are distrubted on video like real snuff films being passed from person to person. There is something incredibly weird, and unsettling about this movie from the quality to the acts depicted. I applaud the movie for unsettling me, it takes a lot and when it does, I have to give it the proper respect it deserves. While it didn't freak me out like Audition did, it is still really weird and not for the average viewer, I doubt any of these movies in this category are but for those with a taste of the macabre or truly odd, try and find this you will not be the same afterwards.

Cannibal Holocaust - C

So much as been written and said about this movie that it has grown into something much more than a movie. This 70s version of the Blair Witch Project covers an Italian Documentary Crew that goes to the Amazon to study a primitive tribe of reputed cannibals and end up being lunch. This movie is famous for being banned in 60 countries and until only a few years ago the only copies that existed where heavily editted bootlegs. The first time I first saw this I didn't like it. Now that I am older and have seen a lot of grotesque stuff but this movie is still too grotesque to be really enjoyable. This really isn't a good movie, all the animals slaughtered in this movie were really slaughtered, it is this reason why it was banned in many countries, the in movie documentary Living in Hell shows several real executions reportly from Uganda. This movie is so uncomfortable you feel like you need a bath afterward. But when a movie becomes more myth than movie it makes it hard to call it crap, I really wanted to but there is so much built around this movie it seems unfair. I didn't like this movie, I'm willing to bet 99 percent of the people will find this movie too intense to watch, hell it was almost too intense for me plus the fact that it is just meant to be a meat movie, a movie that is designed to show as much blood, guts, and carnage with as little plot as possible. But this is one of those movies that a movie reviewer must endure to make a complete collection of horror, exploitation and general weirdness.

Fatal Games - C-

A mad javelin thrower is killing off Olympic hopefuls at training camp, yes these teens are all killed by javelin. This movie alternated between slasher movie and after school special. The slasher parts were fairly good if not fairly generic. The after school special parts were almost too hard to watch. Being a child of the 80s I think I will always associate the style of atheletic wear of the 80s with those awful after school specials, the short shorts, the feathered hair, bad colour styles, guys wearing belly shirts all that will always be part of those specials that taught you not to do drugs, have premartial sex or other moralistic life lessons that always came across a preachy and rather ridiculous. The 1984 Olympics are totally to blame for this movie, all the events were event that the US dominated during that year, mainly because all Soviet Bloc countries were boycotting the olympics that year. We get lots of gymnastics, way too much time spent on watching people roll around on gymnastic equipment in this movie, swimming, and of course track and field, you can't have a psycho javelin thrower without track and field. There are a fair number of locker room scenes but I swear they were all shot at the exact same time because the same three girls are in the showers doing the exact same thing over and over. The other plot line in this movie aside from slasher killing everybody is the mad doctor who runs the training camp giving the kids hormone injections, again thank you 1984 Olympics. The Soviet Bloc injected their atheletes with hormones to give them the edge, this of course made the female atheletes very, very masculine. Back in the day whenever my friends and I saw a particularly ugly women we would say, 'And For The East Germany'. The movie would have been a decent enough slasher if it wasn't for all the atheletic related side stories they filled the movie with, remember this is a slasher we slash first talk about side plots a distant second.

Castle of the Walking Dead - B

35 years ago Count Fredric Regula was drawn and quartered for sacrificing 12 virgins to Satan. Now the descendants of his 13th intended victim and the man who had him drawn and quartered are mysteriously called back to the castle so he can exact his revenge from beyond the grave. This is an interesting if not short gothic creeper where Christopher Lee doesn't steal the show, the crazied highwayman who disguises himself as a Preacher, Pater Fabian is a hoot. He really dug into the material and played it to the hilt. Karin Dor also played a good role as the daughter of the last intended victim. Christopher Lee has actually very little screen time which makes me think this was a week worth of work for him so he could pad his world record for most performances in films. I wished they had done more with one of the best sets in the movie, the forest of hung men but most of the movie like all gothic creepers takes place inside a castle, this one not being the most lavish, the entire castle looks like a dungeon which may or may not have been the inteded idea. Not the best gothic creeper but the energy of the cast certainly made up for the lack of a healthy body count. The drawing and quatering scene was more ambitious than I imagined still it didn't go all the way. One of Christopher Lee's more weird roles, and for an actor's whose career was made of weird roles that really is saying something.

A Night to Dismember - F

This is it, the famous lost Doris Wishman movie. In 1979 due to a mislabeling accident at the processing lab the final print of this movie was lost. Doris Wishman cannibalized a few prints and cobbled them together possible the most incomprehensible collection of scenes and pieced together with some terrible voice overs. The plot, if it can really be called that, revolves around the crazied Kent Family who has a history of murdering family members. The psycho in question is Vicki Kent, played by 80s porno star Samantha Fox. She has come back from the asylum which angers her two siblings because her parents are nice to crazy Vicki than them, so they decide to drive her crazy. At the same time relatives of the Kent family keep getting dismembered and this bumbling cop is trying to solve it. The voice overs are beyond awful, when the women are dying in the movie it sounds like they are having sex, it is a lot of heavy breathing and moaning. There is very little actual dialogue in the movie and all of it is straight up New Jersey accented whining. I didn't believe there could be anything worse than the voice over, but then I heard the actual movie dialogue. This is my first Doris Wishman movie, probably not the place to start but so little of her work is widely available. Doris Wishman is credited as the first female exploitation director who was making nudist camp movies back in the early 60s. She and Roberta Findley made it big in the roughie style of exploitation movie in the late 60s early 70s which are viewed by some as excellent exploitation movies, other see them as 90 minutes of no plot, cheap girls and lots of sex. I can't really throw my hat into this ring with this movie, it is extremely rough and really shoudln't not have been put out because it is barely pieced together. I use to think the Last Slumber Party was the only unfinished horror movie ever to actually make it to the public but this gets to stand shoulder to shoulder with that world class turkey. I need to remind people out there, these aren't symphonies, watching an unfinished movie is a crappy experience and this is no different no matter how 'legendary' the director is.

Contamination - B+

An abandoned freighter is boarded by a police lieutenant, and a team from the city's health board. They find these strange looking football sized eggs that when handled by the men a strange thing happens. Their guts exploded out of their bodies like gory silly string. Of course something like brings in the government, most important a secret government agency that handles this kind of stuff. Yah right the government knows how to handle alien eggs that make people's guts spray from their bodies, these twits can't even run this country. Well the secret government agency is led by a female Colonel who enlists the only surviving member from the mission to Mars two years ago, played by Zombi star Ian McCulloch. With the NYPD lieutenant in tow they travel to South America from where the freighter came from. They stumble on a plantation that is farming these alien gut exploder eggs to accomplish their plan of world domination. This is a ridiculously gory movie, the gut explosions are really gore and goofy. This movie isn't high art by any stretch of the imagination but it is lots of fun. This movie was very inspired or ripped off depending on how much you like this movie from the movie Alien, probably one of the best sci-fi and horror movies of all time. This movie did terrible at the box office mainly because most of the gut explosions are taken out. But it did fair business on video which inspired an American filmmaker to make Aliens. Yes James Cameron was inspired to Aliens after watching this movie. This is an Italian splatter movie that if hadn't had good actors would have been a disaster but the three main actors did a good job attacking this rather ridiculous material with straight faces, especiall McCulloch, who does a good job fighting creature be they zombies or exploding alien eggs. I did want some more gut explosions in the middle of the movie but I guess you couldn't just inner cut the movie with guys exploding. Not the best alien movie out there but there are a lot worse that don't have guts flying all over the place.

Snapped - F

Awful, horrible, utterly pretenious total waste of time. Amy, an ambitious young photographer with a junkie boyfriend who is in trouble with a fat butch loan shark, lands the opportunity she has been waiting for. The assignment: to create a dark collection of works based around the theme of death. Her employer: the mysterious art curator and the gallery's faceless benefactor simply known as Astrum. Striving to find her artistic voice and inspired by a local serial killer, Amy discovers that the easiest way to capture death is to kill her subjects. And as the body count rises, Amy's decent into madness grows. Soon, those closest to her will discover just how far Amy is willing to go for her art. There is nothing technically wrong with this movie, they did at least a decent job photographing this movie that is the only thing that saved being the worst movie ever made, they at least did a passable job shooting the movie. The rest unfortunantly sucked hard. I hate pretenious movies, I especially hate pretenious movies about pretenious artists who think that their work is the most important thing in the universe and they are the only ones gifted enough to do this kind of work like God shoved his conduit up their ass to make them do their art. I was actually rather pissed when I finished watching this movie, the utter stupidity of the writing and the acting made me just grind my teeth and when it was all over I wanted to strangle somebody, probably the filmmakers and their cavalcade of horrid actors. There was probably some high minded message about art and artists but I didn't even care, I just wanted this ordeal to end. I put a curse on the filmmakers, the film, the actors, even the interns may none of you ever work in film again.

Eko Eko Azarak 2: Birth of a Wizard - A

In this prequel to the original of Eko Eko Azarak here we learn how Misa learned to use her amazing magical powers. During the Meiji Era there was a massacre in a small village where a group of witches died to seal up a powerful witch named Kirie. Now fast forward to the present to an archeologist who digs up the evil the entire village died to seal up. This of course brings it back from the dead and searches out the last living descedant of the village. This of course is Misa who is hosting a party which gets crashed by one of the zombie flunkies of Kirie. These flunkies' prefered method of killing is skull crushing which always gives you a great geyser of blood. She is thankfully saved at the last moment by another witch but a good witch who takes her on the run after a shootout at a police station. The middle of the movie reminded me a lot of Terminator with the the guy giving Misa all the information about the villain that is chasing her and that she is the one. I am willing to bet there is an outtake reel out there somewhere that in one scene the guy accidentally calls Misa Sarah Conner, it struck me as so similar. While this isn't as good as the first Eko Eko Azarak, it has been a lot better than many of the movies I have been watching lately so while they may not exactly be world class it was good enough to make me happy. I mean come on trying to top the first Eko Eko Azarak is a mighty task that is probably impossible but at least they tried and dished up enough splatter and witchcraft fun to make it into an enjoyable, if not rather dark, movie. This has enough gore and witchcraft to keep most horror fans pleased but don't expect the same level of insanity of the first Eko Eko Azarak but it is still better than the last ten movies I have watched.

Witchcraft 4: The Virgin Heart - C+

Recovering warlock, Will Spanner, has gone from one evil profession to another, now he is a lawyer. He is called to defend a 17 year old who is accused of killing his girlfriend and cutting her heart out in a strange Satanic rite. Will investigates the crime and finds the girl's death is tied to a satanic cult led by radio personality Santara. His only way into the cult is Belladonna, the sensual black magic stripper played by B-Movie dame Julia Strain. Willie the Warlock has to use his powers once again to defeat Santara the radio DJ Cult leader and save Busty Belladonna and win the day. This is one of the better entries in the Witchcraft series that being said doesn't make this a world class movie. The first half is pretty good, the movie is more supernatural murder mystery rather than witches and warlock duels. The second half doesn't fare as well but still manages to hold itself up on shakey legs. This movie came out a fairly bleak point in horror history, the early 90s. In the early 90s horror was all but dead, the slasher movie was gone, and we were still several years away from Scream and the post-modern (god I hate that word) slashers. Filling this void as bravely as it could was the Witchcraft series, a series of movies that really is reviled today by basically everyone. Now I am not saying these are great horror classics but they aren't nearly as awful as everyone says they are. The problem is that they haven't aged enough, in another five or ten years somebody is going to rediscover these movies and they are going to be retro enough to become a cult hit, they will never be mainstream, I don't really think horror should be mainsteam, mainstreaming anything always delutes it into fodder for the mindless herd which ruins its magic, just look at slashers they became mainstream and went to hell. This series I remember from back in the day of renting movies from the video store, they supplied enough gore and T&A to entertain but lacked any real story or novel concepts concerning witches to make them anything more than just late night entertainment. This probably won't appeal to most viewers, you need the ability to ingest large amounts of movie cheese and most people are rather lactous intolerant when it comes to movie cheese. But if you like over acting, boobs, rather absurd plotlines and if you can find it watch a few of the Witchcraft movies and remember the early 90s fondly.

The Day They Came Back - D-

A generic disjointed zombie short film so disjointed I honestly can't say waht it was about. There is this secret facility, cough Resident Evil cough, that a military platoon was sent to investigate, cough RESIDENT EVIL! cough. They get whiped out except for 2 at the same time zombies are roaming free in the suburbs so a group of people run to the secret facility. Oh yah this is a real secret facility being within running distance of suburbia. There they play Night of the Living Dead, and one by one get eaten by zombies. I really need to stop listening to anyone about horror movies, nobody has a damn clue about what makes a good horror movie. I had heard a great deal about Scott Goldberg who was supposed to be this big up and coming horror director and this short was his ticket to stardom. Maybe people saw something different, what I saw was little snippets of scenes that other than having the same actors in them had almost nothing to do with one another. Massive amounts of plot are simply missing. Imagine taking a 2 hour long movie and cutting it down to 15 minutes that was the entire feel of this film. Why people are impressed with this is totally beyond me. Okay yes I can agree that Scott Goldberg did a good job making a movie on 3,000 dollars, you can't buy much with that kind of money in film land, but that fact alone doesn't make the movie good, you can't say look at El Marachi, it was made for 7,000 dollars and was great. That movie was the exception, not the rule. Barring the fact that nothing in this movie was explained, there is no plot to speak of, the actors were strictly amateur, and the special effects were totally laughable there is one little fact that saved this from getting an F, there are a lot of filmmakers with vastly bigger budgets, better casts and actual special effects who have made more disjointed crap. This is another shining example of people heaping praise on crap that doesn't deserve and me watching it and being utterly confused why anyone thought this was any good in the first place.