Horror Part 08

Blood and Black Lace - A

A masked fiend is killing fashion models at a Rome House of Fashion and that is all I am going to say about the plot because any more would give it away. This is possibly Mario Bava's best film and it is certainly my favorite. The two themes of this film are beauty and violence, all the beauties are killed in violent ways and creative ways too, but their deaths is a morbid way are also beautiful in their own right, they are colourful, well shot, well written through and the actress as she is dying is almost in some sort of sublime ecstacy. You can tell that Dario Argento who always makes his murders every elaborate and well made got a lot of influence from Bava. This is really the first giallo movie, it was made in 1964 and is the first to have all the noticable characteristics, a masked killer, beautiful women, grisly murder and a whodoneit plot. One of the best strengths of the entire film is the amazing use to colour throughout the film. Colour is everywhere and every colour is vibrant and often in constrast to the other colours around it. It works well with the film being set in a House of Fashion. Every set in this movie is memorable, this comes from the fact that Bava started his career in film making as a set designer. My favorite set was the antique store and how he shot the death of Nicole in it, all the camera movements were so fluid and the store perfectly arranged to work perfectly with the actress, it is stunning. The deaths in this film are long and brutal. In a normal horror film Jason stabs the victim with a machete and that is that, in this film the victims struggle, the take more than one blow, in one case the killer really beats the stuffing out of the girl before burning her face off with a red hot stove. Everyone should watch this movie, not just for the death and gore but for the amazing twisting and turning plot and for the simple estetics of a nearly perfectly shot film. One of my favorite giallo movies and one of my favorite horror movies.

Satan's Cheerleaders - D

A Satanic Cult has their eyes on the young, peppy, and incredibly brainless cheerleaders for virgin sacrifices. You already know this is a bad movie when the Satanic Cult actually believes these cheerleaders are virgins. The cult uses the school janitor as their scout and he setups up so the cheerleaders and their coach have car trouble out by their Satanic Club House. Now they are ready to be sacrificed, only there is one thing they weren't expecting, one of the cheerleaders is a witch. Yah this movie is bad, it is almost painful to watch but the whole cheerleader witch twist they put in the movie really saved it from F city. The first twenty minutes of the movie make use feel like we are watching a brainless 70s sex comedy in the vein of all the other cheerleader movies of the era but then Patti, the witch girl, is sitting alone and her friends asked what's wrong, then she says she has a bad feeling, like something evil is going to happen. Finally they remind the film makers this is yes a horror movie. The rest of the movie is filled up with cheerleaders running around in mini-skirts and tight white t-shirts with their names on them. That is actually a really good idea because there isn't one ounce of character development and the names on the shirts help me keep straight who is who. Look for poor John Carradine in one of his last film roles as the bum. The music, the clothing, the moronic acting, everything makes this movie an example of really bad 70s film making.

Castle of the Creeping Flesh - C-

A mad baron wants to bring his daughter back from the dead with the heart of a swinging 60s party girl. I really wanted to like this movie, it had good visuals, the acting was good, the English dub was rough but the actors body movement and facial expressions were very good, but the movie just didn't have the writing down. The plot moves in a jerky fashion, you are thrown from the party scene, to the horse back riding, to the castle with almost no transition inbetween. I think it is the editing, it feels really choppy like they cut out dialogue and a few scenes here and there to make the movie shorter for the American release. None of the gore, or sex was removed, just dialogue and transitional scenes, yep that makes sense. The characters, especially the main character Vera is a decent enough swinging 60s idle rich girl but then we are supposed to believe she is the living embodiment of the evil mistress of the castle 300 odd years ago. It would have worked if she was a bitch but she really doesn't do bitch like stuff until she is possibly possessed by the castle. The characters aren't well established but I think they are supposed to be idle rich European Nobility from the lofty names but again the writing never establishes it. I really loved the look of the castle it was very creepy and looked like it had very little set dressing done to it to make it creepy. There is a lot of sex in the movie, but it never goes into softcore country, it stays pretty revelant to the plot, especially when with the swinging 60s character they have. This movie is a bit of an oddity, it is from Germany. Now the other western European Nations, Britian, France, and Italy, made hundreds of horror movies in the 60s and 70s but Germany never really got into it. In recent years Germany has seemed determined to make the sickest horror movies ever made but in the Euro-Horror Heyday they never really participated so see a horror movie from 1968 and from Germany is a bit of an oddity.

One Missed Call - A

College kids are getting voicemail from their future selves, in the form of the sound of them reacting to their own violent deaths, along with the exact date and time of their future death, listed on the message log. As each person in the group dies the survivors desperately try to uncover the dark secret. This is a movie by Japanese Horror God Takashi Miike, so you know the deaths are gory. This movie really had me when the first girl dies by being flung onto a moving train. After that we see her hand dialing her cell phone which slowly pulls back until we see that her arm has been severed from her body. Now that is Takashi Miike. The killer is like that found in the Grudge and the Ring, a pissed off ghost looking for vengenace from beyond the grave as well as being dressed all in white and her long black hair hangs down over her face. This is a great movie, in my opinion better than Ringu because in this one death travels from cell phone to cell phone, in Ringu you had to watch the tape, in this all you have to do is have a cell phone, it makes the victim pool much wider and it also adhers to the number 1 rule of horror movies, 'Anybody Can Die At Anytime.' I also love how in the movie after the first two deaths the girl who recieves the third turns into a morbid media star eventually staring on a TV show that is seen all across Japan on the eve of her death with a clock counting it down. This is a real juicy twist and in my opinion a very realistic twist. This is something you don't see much in horror movies but would easily happen in the 24 Hour News Hungry World. This movie ends with a dozen twists and turns and mysterious ending that has me both puzzled and delighted. Takashi Miike does a great job once again, he really is the Japanese Hitchcock.

House With Windows That Laugh - C

I love Italian Titled movies, they always seem to be a little stranger than most, maybe it is the translation or maybe it was the filmmakers in any case. An Artist comes to a remote town to refurbish a fresco on a church wall of St Sebastian that was originally painted by the local artist who was a little insane. As he restores the painting he get threats from an anonymous voice on the phone. His friend tries to warn him of the danger but dies as well. As the artist starts to investigate the mystery of the artist people who seem to have pieces of the puzzle die off. The secret is within the house with the windows that laugh, actually the windows have big smiles painted over them, they don't actually laugh. This movie really, really drags it feet. There was so much room for so many good deaths while he was restoring the painting which takes up the first hour. Nothing really happens until he has finished which doesn't make any sense if they didn't want him to restore the painting why allow him to before trying to kill him? This is an amazingly restrained Italian horror movie, very little of everything, suspense, gore, sex and nudity are all rationed very strictly in this film, which kinda dulls the movie a bit. The movie was too slow for a horror movie, you can't just have 1 murder an hour, not when you are expecting 1 every ten minutes. Not bad, the ending really helps the movie it was a good twist at the end but the first hour and twenty minutes moves way too slow.

Romasanta - A-

This is based on the true and bizarre tale of Manuel Romasanta who confessed to killing at least 15 people in Northern Spain in the 1850s and to avoid being hung for his crimes he claimed he was a werewolf. This is a fictionalized account of his crimes and how a woman lead the hunt to finally track him down. Manuel Romasanta, played by horror vet Julian Sands, is a traveling sales man who is killing people he meets in order to make soap. He is so well known and trusted by the people of this rural area that nobody ever suspect him of doing these horrible acts and believe it is werewolves. Much like in Brotherhood of the Wolf there are some great wolf hunting scenes as the locals hunt down what they believe to be werewolves. Our heroine Barbara Garcia is living with her two sisters. Romasanta is woeing the older sister and says he is going to take the youngest sister, who is a mute, to a special school in the big city. They leave for the city and are both killed by Romasanta but he hides it from Barbara who falls in love with him. Then she starts to learn that Romasanta is not the great guy he makes everyone believes he is. Now with Antonio, a bandit and Romasanta's accomplice, they hunt Romasanta down to bring him to justice. This is a good movie but not as good as Brotherhood of the Wolf. Julian Sands has one of the most amazing transformation scenes in any werewolf movie since American Werewolf in London. But this is the problem, I am not totally sure if Romasanta was a real werewolf or just a real slick serial killer. Elsa Pataky is excellent as Barbara who goes from loving Romasanta to hunting him down with rage in her heart. Excellent gothic film, Julian Sands is so wonderfully creepy in this role, and the fact that it is based in fact is also really creepy. Good werewolf movie, or a good serial killer movie I was never totally sure.

Howling 5: The Rebirth - B

A group of ten strangers are gathered together to take part in the reopening of an ancient Transylvanian Castle that no one has set foot in for 500 years. They come to the castle and start to explore but one by one they are killed by an unseen force until the man who organized the trip admits that these ten strangers were chosen at random, they were all chosen because they all share the same birthmark, a mark which says one of the ten is a werewolf. They have to figure out who is the werewolf while the werewolf keeps eating people. After 2, 3, and 4 being, well shall we say less than spectacular this one is a real surprise. It is a werewolf version of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. The castle looks great, but then again they filmed this in Hungary, like Czechoslovakia and Romania these countries were designed to shoot gothic horror movies in so it really isn't that big of a surprise to have lots of great moody gothic scenery. This is actually the first Howling Movie I ever saw. Years ago my best friend was a huge fan of werewolves, he perferred them over vampires so we try to watch all the werewolf movies we could find, which there aren't too many werewolf movies out there and we went to the video store and by pure chance picked this one. It is a good moody werewolf tale, not much actual werewolf but it is so hard to make a convincing werewolf on a small budget it is better not to really show it than have a guy in a really mangy wookie suit. Good werewolf flick and worth a watch.

Gowi (Nightmare) - B

A Korean tale half I Know What You Did Last Summer half Vengence Ghost Ringu/Ju-on/One Missed Call Style. Six college friends meet up after two years, they are no longer the happy go lucky group that was once called A Few Good Men, yet two of them were women? Well they are being pursued by the seventh member whom they drove to suicide. The movie is very creepy, lots of ghost scenes as the ghost stalks the group, but the group has problems of their own and with the ghost on the scene all of these problems are coming to the surface. The only problem with the story is that you have to pay a lot of attention, the movie is told through several flashbacks that really come without warning. This is a good creepy movie that may have the avenging ghost in it but it isn't just another Ringu knock-off.

Haute Tension - A

This is one of the best horror movies I have ever seen. Recent years have seen lots of great horror from Japan and lots of bad horror from America, and now France is throwing their hat into the ring and what a hat it is. Two college friends, Alex and Marie are heading to Marie's home out in the country for a little time away from college. When night falls Hell rolls up to the front door in the form of a wicked maniac. He ties Alex up and carries her off, but Marie is able to escape the killer's clutches. Now it is up to her to save her friend and to do that she must face the maniac on his own terms. This is a fantastic, tense, gore streak movie that is so refreshing to see in a world of PG-13 horror. This movie is not toned down for the kiddies at all, there is a severed hand on a telephone, trust me you are in for a ride. There is a twist at the end that even had me in utter shock but then going, yah that is cool. This is a modern day Halloween, it really has revolutionized the genre which is in dire need of a shot in the ass. This movie was released in the US in the summer of 2005 with some cuts in order to keep the film from getting an NC-17, yes it is that gory. I saw the original French version last year so I am blessed to have been able to see the true form of this film. Even with the edits I bet the big screen would be a great place for this film although I still had the crap scared out of me in the comfort and safety of my own room. I have been sitting on this review for some time, this is a very special review to me, it is my 250th Horror Movie Review. That is a lot of opinion and a lot of horror. I saw this movie some time ago and was so impressed I wanted to keep it for something special, so it was held for my milestone, I am 1/4 of the way to my goal of reviewing 1000 horror movies and with gems like these it will make the process only that much more enjoyable.

Jaws - A

No other movie has made water so frightening, no matter if it is the vast and deep ocean or your toliet, after watching Jaws you always wonder what is lurking just below the placid surface. It is the tale of a sleepy seaside community that is terrorized by a killer great white shark and the tale of the three men that go out to kill it. I often believe this is Steven Spielburg's greatest movie, everything is done almost to absolute perfection. The mechanical shark still is as terrifying to me as the first time I saw this movie when I was a kid even though I know it was mechanical and the damn thing never worked right for 80 percent of the movie. It was that little mishap, the mechanical shark not working was the greatest mishap in history because for most of the movie you never see the thing that is eating people. The shark is an amazing creature it is graceful as it glides through the water, almost a sublime creature and then it attacks and the ferocity of it attacks makes it terrifying. The real star of this film is Robert Shaw as Quint, my love for his character comes directly from the speech he gives about the USS Indianaplis, it gives me chills everytime I hear just from how it is said. This movie also has one of my favorite lines ever in a movie it is when Roy Scheider is throwing chum into the water and says, 'Slow Ahead, sheesh, I Can Go Slow Ahead, Come Down Here and Chum Some Of This Shit.' It is simply put a movie without flaw, a timeless tale of man and the ocean and one mean fucking fish that likes the taste of man.

Eyes of the Werewolf - F

First off werewolves are usually only found in the realm of low budget film making, which usually leaves the werewolf a pathetic man in a furry suit with a cheap rubber mask. When you have no budget the werewolf becomes even more sorry looking, especially when he is wearing a Halloween Mask that looks too cheap to be bought from a Spencer's Gifts store and rubber gloves that are an extra six inches beyond where the hands normally are. Add to that a horribly cobbled together story that steals the idea that transplated organs can contain the evil of their original owner. This was done several times over the years but usually involves serial killers. The change from serial killer to werewolf is the only orignal thin in the entire movie. The main character is blinded in a chemical accident so this evil doctor who uses a crazied cracker hilbilly whose kills people for organs, real sterile, real scientific. Well the blind guy who gets werewolf eyes screws his nurse but gets pissed because his wife is screwing his best friend so he turns into a werewolf kills them and then runs to his friend who is a crippled midget. Yes crippled midget who apparently is an expert on the occult. The movie is barely 73 minutes but at least twenty minutes of it is really bad softcore porn. This movie is so cheaply made they really should have just gone with serial killer because the werewolf is so incredibly awful it is hard to watch but then again the writing, acting, and quality of the video were also incredibly bad.

Dr. Giggles - C

Larry Drake plays the insane son of an insane doctor who was trying heart transplates on unwilling doners but he is the one in the loony bin, well until he escapes. We meet up with Holly Marie Combs, who is best known from the WB series Charmed, but at this time was best known for Picket Fences which premerie the same year, well she is the good girl with a heart problem. Dr Giggles goes about town killing people with basically no rhyme or reason just because it looks cool. The movie breaks a big rule of slasher movies it has two slasher playing fields, a creepy old house were daddy doctor cut up all the people and the carnival. You can't split the carnage between two locations unless you have two killers. The story rambles and plods, it really almost seems to lack direction which is the biggest flaw of the film. Larry Drake does a great job playing the psycho Dr. Giggles, he has some cheap one liners like a bad Freddy Kreuger but he delivers them with glee which makes up for them somewhat. Holly Marie Combs does a good job as the angst filled teen which she perfected in Picket Fences. This was one of the few slasher to come out in the early 90s when slashers were all but dead, there were a couple Nightmare on Elm Streets and Friday the 13ths but they too were suffering. Best part of the movie involves a kid playing Dr Mario, the Mario Tetris game that was the last big hit for the Nintendo which came out the same years as the Super Nintendo came out.

Shredder - B

As a snowboarder, or formerly a snowboard I have not strapped myself to one of those fiberglass slingshots of death in many years, I easily understood the concept of the film. Snowboarders go to a remote and abandoned Idaho ski resort where some snowboards ran a little girl into a tree years before. Well now a snowboard hating skiier in all black is offing these shredders one by one in a variety of wintery ways. I liked this movie, it is a basic slasher with a different setting. Best death in the film by far is death by mountain snow plow. If you have never seen one of these think snowblower but the size of a dump truck. I saw them several times in the mountains, they are truly frightening and I always had this weird thought that I would get gobbled up by one if I ever got too close even when turned off. The setting of Idaho doesn't really go the snowboarding justice but you really couldn't set it in Colorado or Utah, there is no way in hell you could have an abandoned ski resort, even if Mason and Hilter had an orgy of killing nuns and school children somebody would be at the door the next day with a mop and a briefcase full of cash to buy the place up. The cast was good but all unknown. The characters really filled out most of the snowboard archetypes including the stoner, the chick boarder who everybody thinks is a dyke, the preppy boarder, the geek camera boarder, and the average dude boarder, the only character I didn't like was our hero, he got pushed around way too much in the beginning by the blonde bitch slut rich girl character. This was a good snowboarding horror movie, we need more of these.

Tintorera - C-

A Tiger Shark is eating people in Cancun Mexico, it is up to an exhausted factory worker, a beach bum, and a shark fisherman to hunt it down. Only problem it takes for bloody ever for them to go after the shark. The movie was made in Mexico, how can I tell this? In other shark movies the shark is mechainical like Bruce in Jaws, in this movie they use real sharks, to simulate the eating of people they filled dummies with real animal guts and let the shark have at it. It really makes the shark attack more real, mainly because they are real. The movie is long, two hours and 6 minutes worth of movie, but the first shark attack doesn't happen until 40 minutes in the film. The rest of the time is devoted to a group of romantic plotlines which other than giving ample opportunity for all the women in the movie to get naked, really doen't help the main plot about a killer shark, especially when the cast is the size of a herd of buffalo. The stuff with the real shark underwater is rather dangerous, probably why the movie was made in Mexico, they are the only people who could get away with this stuff. Another odd feature of the movie, it is bilingal, yes half Spanish, Half English so the subtitles are split 50/50 which gets confusing. The women come and go thorough the movie, the guys seem to fall in and out of love amazingly fast. The movie is too bogged down with the subplots and the romance, this is a shark movie, the main character really should be the shark. This is not a movie for animal lovers, I think they really killed a mess of sharks during the filming, no way they spent all that money on special effects for the twenty or so sharks they killed. An interesting movie that really doesn't deliver in anywhere, the numerous love plots all get jumbled together, the hunting of the shark isn't all that great, it needed to stay focused on the fish. Supposedly there is an even longer version out there, bet that is just as jumbled.

Edison's Frankenstein - B

A very loose interpretation of Mary Shelly's classica tale which has been made into a dozen different movies, well this is the first. Thomas Edison had this movie made way back in 1910. It is short, all of twelve minutes long, it covers making of the monster and the monster realizing he is a monster so he vanishes into a mirror. Not exactly a good interperation but the movie beats what is considered the first horror movies, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, by ten years to be the first horror movie. The creation of the monster is very good even today, they set a life sized puppet on fire and filmed it in reverse giving it an extra weird feel to it. This movie was considered lost for decades all we had were production stills and descriptions of the famous monster creation scene. A few years ago they managed to piece the movie back together from several different sources to preserve it for history. The quality is very bad but you must understand the movie was made 80 years before film preservation was even thought of so having it at all is a big accomplishment. It really isn't all that great but because it is so old you have to give a B to your elderes no matter what.

Dario Argento's Opera - B-

Dario Argento's first telling of Gaston Laroux's Phantom of the Opera in modern times. It has his signature inventive deaths but it also has a rather annoying flaw where the opera music vastly over powers the conversations for the first half an hour of the movie which becomes very annoying very fast. The deaths are signature Argento, death by coat hook, death by frenzied dagger attack, death by gunshot through a peephole, attack by many ravens. Then there are some rather atypical Argento issues, namely the pacing it is totally off. It is a frantic pace, it barely allows you to catch your breath inbetween scenes. Argento is at his best when he slowly builds the tension then ruthlessly assaults you with it. Another problem is the ridiculous heavy metal music during each attack. When the Goblyns made the music it always fit, this stuff seems totally out of place. The gory deaths really make up for many of the pacing and music arrangement faults but when it says Dario Argento you have a level of expectation and it was not met in this film.

Bikini Party Massacre - D

What happens when you combine the Blair Witch Project, Slumber Party Massacre, and the weird styling of David Lynch and completely screw everything up? You get Bikini Party Massacre. A group of friends go out to the boonies where a couple of them have some weird dreams or visions or something that is never explained which would really help because one of the visions are this weird looking guy in a suit. They party, the girls take their tops off, two have a threesome with one of the guys, they die, whoopie doo. One little problem is this is a micro budget and I guess the actors came and went because for the big campfire scene one of the guys is missing and never explained why. I guess for having no money, no talent, or really anything they did a decent job but that doesn't help the movie at all.

Lisa and the Devil - B-

Weakest of all of Mario Bava's movies I have seen so far, but it is still a decent film. Elke Sommers plays Lisa Ryder an American Tourist who while touring a village in Spain get seperated from the tour group and bumps into a man who looks suspiciously like the devil in the village's famous painting played by Telly Savalas. She ends up spending the night at a creep chateau where Telly is the butler to a blind woman and her amorous son. She is joined by a millionaire, his trophy wife and their chauffer, they are there really just to kill off. The only interesting thing about this film aside from the atmospheric chateau is the way Telly terrorizes the people, he animates these life sized dolls. The movie was recut three years later to capitalize on the success of the Exorcist and called it House of Excorism. This movie lacks one of Bava's best featues, creative killing, everybody dies in rather mundane ways with the exception of death by Rolls Royce Fan. The cast is too small for a good Bava film, not enough people to die to make it good.

School Night Massacre - C-

This is the second Swedish Horror Movie I have seen, Camp Slaughter being the other, while I did like it more than Camp Slaughter it still left a lot to be desired. Ten years ago four students were killed in this school, not sure if it is a high school or college, never really said, but four students decide to investigate the killings because Elin's sister Erika is dating the guy accused of killing the original 4 students, can we say unhealthy fixation? One of the interesting side notes, Erika, Elin's sister and dater of mass murdere Niklas, is Swedish Singing Sensation Bjork, who is in her 40s not exactly a believable sister to a high schooler, maybe mother, but not sister. Well the Swedish Scooby Gang, minus talking Great Dane, break into the school where they have a fight with the principle, who is believed to be the real killer. They beat on him like he is a Puerto Rican in the hands of the NYPD and finally toss acid in his face but after they dispatch him, the real killer pops up and we spend forty five minutes running all across the school until we have a twist ending that isn't all that great. What really keeps this movie afloat is the gore, nowhere do they skimp on the gore, from fire extinguisher to the face, blade to the throat, to decapitation, the gore is there and in bucket loads. The movie lacked common sense in several scenes, people did things that even under the most intense circumstances they wouldn't do. It wasn't Camp Slaughter but it hasn't convinced me that Swedes can make scary movies.

The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave - C-

Lord Allen Cunningham lost his wife Evelyn and now brings redhead women back to his rundown castle, whips them and kills them and yet he is supposedly our hero. His doctor says the best thing for him to do is to get married. So he goes to a swinging 60s party and finds a blonde named Gladys, that is a switch. So he marries her and they start to rebuild the castle which brings, guess what, Evelyn out of the grave. The ending is morally confused, I will give it away because nobody will see this, okay Gladys and Lord Allen's brother are plotting to drive Allen insane to get his money and his title, but Allen brings home redheaded hookers and after whipping them kill them? There are no morally redeeming characters anywhere in this entire movie and yet we are supposedly siding with Allen, the hooker killer because he kills for love as compared to Gladys who kills for money? Can't Mason swing by he kills to start a race war, maybe Hitler he kills because he has a little moustache. This movie is so morally confused it left my head spinning. To make matters worse the aspect ratio on the movie is totally screwed up, you can tell this was converted from a European PAL disc because the edges of the credits are chopped off on both sides, and if that wasn't enough the film quality is miserable, its washed out or extremely dark, there is a period of about twenty minutes that have a whole bunch of scratches, and I mean like novelty scratches the kind you have when you want to have a flashback all washed out and scratched. Aside from all the technical jackassery the movie itself needed direction and an actual hero to cheer for.

Malevolence - D-

A movie killed by poor planning and poor execution. The acting is a little above average especially for a film such as this. The story is four bank robbers screw up a bank robbery and one gets killed. Another of the robbers carjacks a mother and her daughter on their way home from a softball game. They all, minus the guy killed in the robbery, end up at this farm house next to a creepy rundown factory that we learn in the last five minutes was once a slaughter house. They fight they yell at each other, the daughter runss off, and one of the robbers chases her. Finally 40 minutes into the movie the horror movie starts. If I hadn't known better I would have thought this was a real bad knock-off on Reservoir Dogs until the killer finally appears. Then it is a lot of running and screaming, the movie doesn't setup the plot until the last five minutes when everything is over. If you are doing to do it that way put the end at the beginning and show the rest of the movie in flashbacks. The only good thing in the entire movie is the FBI guy reading the diary of the first psycho in the slaughterhouse and how he raises the psycho we meet and he kills the first psycho. Is this probably one of the few horror movies that doesn't have a single horror element until 40 minutes into the movie, unless you were told ahead of time you would think you were watching the worst bank robbery movie in history, this is a horror movie, shouldn't you establish the horror in the first five minutes, well apparently not. I had this movie pinned with a solid F the entire way until they read that diary and then I kinda liked it for the last 5 minutes but 5 out of 85 doesn't make it worthwhile.

Jolly Roger: Massacre At Cutter's Cove - B

Partying teens find a treasure chest washed up on shore after a hurricane and accidentally wake up the dead pirate who was stuffed in the box. The pirate is out looking for revenege against the mutinous crew that put him in that box, well he has been dead three hundred years so he can only go after their descendants who still live in the quiet little seaside town. He kills with a vengence, hacking heads off left and right as he goes. I like this madman pacing the movie has, many slasher movies don't get to the slashing until the last twenty minutes this one starts off with the killing and keeps it up throughout the movie. The best scene hands down is when Jolly Roger, the undead vengeance seeking pirate goes to the titty bar and gets a lap dance, I was laughing my ass off, Jason never gets any, neither goes Michael Myers, probably why those poor guys keep killing the sexy teens, nobody ever took them to a titty bar to get some action. The movie follows two teens with different goals in life, he wants to be a seaferring man, she wants to go to college. Their first couple of scenes are really rough but then when he takes her bra to pick a lock with you start to like them. This movie will never win any awards but it will get lots of hateful criticism from IMDb people, but I liked it, it was a simple fun slasher movie that knows its place in the world of movies and does the best job within the slasher genre. The movie reminded me a lot of Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill, both are undead critters seeking vengence and both have oddly similar titles but Jolly Roger does it right when Death Valley failed. One nitpicky problem I had was I think this was supposed to be set in North or South Carolina because they talk about pirates, especially Blackbeard and talk about a Hurricane, but then you see California license plates and the marina where a lot of the action takes place is the El Segundo Marina in LA and there were no pirates or Hurricans in LA but that is just a nitpicky problem, undead pirate lap dance made up for it. Arrgh.

Urban Legend - C-

This movie really felt like the Halloween episode of Dawson's Creek. We have a girl with a deep dark secret going to a nice New England private college where murders are occuring and the college officials are desperately trying to cover up. This movie feels bland, really bland, even at the end I felt basically nothing, usually I feel something whether it is joy or blind burning rage, but this movie left me flat. The movie has a lot of flavour of the moment stars, Alicia Witt, Joshua Jackson, Rebecca Gayheart, and Jared Leto. The only genre stars that a horror fan would recognize would be Robert Englund, who plays the red herring professor, and John Neville playing the Dean, best known as Baron Munchausen. There are a lot better slashers out there, even better post modern (god I hate that term) slashers, if the barrell is running dry look to this but there are a lot better ones out there.

Urban Legends II: Final Cut - D

It takes real directorial talent to make a movie within a movie actually work, but when the job is given to a composer, John Ottman, it feel awkward and stubmles about. College kids are at film school making horror movies with really elaborate, too elaborate to be real, sets and a killer is recreating urban legends because he is crazy. He dones the fencing mask, a touch I actually liked, and goes about killing people. Too many characters, that was one of the bigger problems you have a cast the size of a buffalo herd and half of them get lost in the movie. The acting is a little lower than the first Urban Legend but more pretenious and if I call this one pretenious you know its bad. One of the better scenes involves a lot of stage guns and one real gun somewhere among them. At least I didn't like this movie, I think it is a little worse when I have no emotion one way or another. While Urban Legend got a higher grade I was left flat, at least this movie made me bored and angry at times. I think it is a bigger failure to evoke nothing from me than it is to evoke boredom or anger but anger gets a lower grade.

Slaughterhouse Massacre - D

Four friends go into an old slaughterhouse and guess what, they get massacred. This is about as uninspiring a slasher as I have seen in a while. It starts off almost like a softcore porno flick, I half thought that the movie would turn into some kind of Cinemax slasher movie, but after two scenes that were just tacted on to titilate the male audience, complete with dull lesbian scene we get stuck with four of the worst actors ever in a slasher movie, and that is saying a lot. The movie is so disjointed in the first twenty minutes and so stock in the last sixty that I wanted to turn it off a couple of times, at first for seeing the same fucking party scene four times, and then because I knew every step that was made by the killer and his stupid victims. The killer was creep looking enough but just looking creepy doesn't make him a worthwhile killer. The slow, too slow, stripping of the final girl made little or no sense other than to tease the male auidence into believing there would be more nudity. This movie was a rather big disaster and gets the D only because I like shooting the slasher with a shotgun and he laughs with two holes in him. I really am on a bad streak here, it has been 15 movies since the last A and only 3 of those 15 had been Bs. I really need to turn this around soon.

The Hollow - B

Modern telling of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow which turns the Headless Horseman into more of a slasher style killer than the old school horseman. Ian Cranston, the descendant of Ichabod Crane has come to town, woos the head cheerleader, the modern version of Katrina Van Tassel, which angers her boyfriend, the captain of the football team, the modern version of Brom Bones. On Halloween night the town hosts a haunted hayride where the Headless Horseman, who has a head although it is a pumpkin, comes out to play. Ian is schooled in the legend by Stacy Keach who plays the caretaker of the graveyard and has to fight the horseman to save the town. Not bad, a little hokey but it was made by the Family Channel so it is a little light on the scares and a little heavy on the teenie romance. I liked how they cover the rules about the Horseman and the Horseman looked pretty cool, not as cool as Tim Burton's Horseman but only the 1949 Disney Version can compete with that version. I am always a little biased towards Sleepy Hollow movies, so while others may not enjoy this movie as much as I did, but it is a Sleepy Hollow Story so basically aside from completely screwing it up I will like.

Halloween 6: Curse of Michael Myers - D+

This was the last film of famed character actor Donald Pleasences. He made 189 movies over 40 years but is probably best known for playing Dr Sam Loomis in 5 Halloween movies. It is kinda sad to see this as his last film, but going out as Dr Sam Loomis isn't all that bad a way to go. This film isn't as bad as Halloween 5 but it is very weak. The problem is they try to hard to give Michael Myers a creepy and unholy backstory, that doesn't work with a slasher. You never learn Jason's backstory, you don't care, you just want to see him hack up sexy teens. Halloween always try to make him into more than just an unkillable demon but that destroy a lot of the menace and magic of the slasher. I liked how they brought Tommy Doyle back but Kara Strode is like 45 and we are supposed to believe that she is a college student with a 6 year old kid. For those who forgot the Strodes were Laurie's foster parents in the first movie, but now they are these weird yonkel white trash family of the month, guess the old real estate business went south. I didn't like this one, it wasn't as bad as 5 but it is still so overshadowed by the first 2. There are many stories around this movie, most of them bad. Apparently the director Joe Chapelle hated Donal Pleasence and cut most of his scenes from the movie, the crew and the producers hated the director so badly they all swore never to make another Halloween movie after this. There is a producer's cut, yes producers cut, of the film out there that is supposedly how the film should have been before the director hacked it all to hell. I am looking for it and hopefully one day will find it and see what this movie could have been.

Halloween H20 - C-

Twenty Years have passed since Michael Myers originally tore up Haddonfield Illinois, Laurie Strode is now Keri Tate the head of a private school up in Northern California but Michael Myers isn't dead and he is heading to get her. Michael chases after Laurie's son and his friends who convientently are having a party on campus on Halloween Night. This is one of the bigger flaws of this movie it has way too many conincidences, too many things get rammed together for the sake of making the standard slasher a 'Halloween' movie. The movie is very artificial because they tried too hard to work all the little Halloween gags into the film. The actors are a little better than the average slasher movie but they too feel forced and artificial. This is the first movie for Josh Harnett, who is from Minnesota, so critics from the state will fall over each other lauding praise upon him even if he was in a snuff film. He does play a good smart ass teenager, but most actors are smart ass teenagers so it really isn't a stretch. LL Cool J is really tacted on, in a normal slasher he would be dead in the first reel but he is a name so he had to live. Not all that bad but is a pale shadow of the first two Halloween Movies. The one part I really, really liked is the credit sequence in the beginning of the film