Friday the 13th (1980)

Friday the 13th

-1980

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 9

Director: Sean S. Cunningham

Writer: Victor Miller, Ron Kurz

Cast: Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Jeanine Taylor, Robbi Morgan, Kevin Bacon

Run Time: 95 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Date Reviewed: March 30th, 2010

Plot: Camp counselors are stalked and murdered by an unknown assailant while trying to re-open a summer camp that was the site of a child’s drowning.

Comments: Friday the 13^th is two things.  Simple and effective.  There’s not a huge degree of plot involved.  There’s no real compelling story and there’s not even much mystery.  What there is, is a lot of young adults in a secluded location being picked off one by one by a psycho killer.  It doesn’t have the atmosphere of Halloween.  It doesn’t have the surrealism of A Nightmare on Elm Street.  But it does have a surplus of (mostly) innocent camp counselors getting brutally murdered.  And that really sums up not only the original Friday, but nearly the entire series.

What Friday lacks in substance it more than makes up for with style.  And while there’s not a whole lot of surprises, it does manage to keep things interesting.  More than once, characters you assume will be heroes/heroines wind up dead.  That’s really what Friday does best.  It takes a group of characters, all with their own issues and plot lines, and essentially renders whatever hopes/dreams/goals they have pointless since there’s the unforeseeable x-factor that gets in the way.  X-factor personified by psycho killer who doesn’t give a shit about what you want to do after your summer vacation.

While the first Friday is much less graphic than most of its sequels, it still manages to bump off its cast of victims in a variety of creative ways.  Kevin Bacon, in one of his first roles, has one of the most memorable deaths in horror movie history.  Although the majority of the killings happen off-screen, the blood and guts that are shown are fairly well done, courtesy of Tom Savini.  The hideously deformed Young Jason Voorhees is also plenty creepy.

Of the Big Three of 80’s slasher franchises (this, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street), Friday is probably the most imitated.  The ‘killer in the woods stalking teenagers’ concept has been done to death (pun intended) since Friday the 13^th came out.  And while a few have managed to craft decent movies out of the concept, they’re all measured against this flick.  As simple as it is, there’s a reason why it’s a horror classic.

Overall: The quintessential 80’s slasher flick. Required viewing for any aspiring horror nerd.

Bad Biology (2008)

Bad Biology

-2008

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 5

Director: Frank Henenlotter

Writer: Frank Henenlotter, R.A. Thorburn

Cast: Charlee Danielson, Anthony Sneed, Mark Wilson, Staff Sgt. John A. Thorburn, Remedy

Run Time: 85 minutes

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Date Reviewed: July 1st, 2009

Plot: Driven by biological excess, a young man and woman search for sexual fulfillment, unaware of each other’s existence. Unfortunately, they eventually meet, and the bonding of these two very unusual human beings ends in an explosive and ultimately over-the-top sexual experience, resulting in a truly god awful love story.

Comments: Despite having not made a movie in 16 years, Frank Henenlotter doesn’t seem to have lost a step.  Bad Biology is just as deranged, weird and funny as any of his other ‘B’ movies.  And by ‘B’ movies, I’m not talking about the quality of them.  I’m talking Basket Case and Brain Damage.  The guy definitely knows how to craft bizarre into a movie.  That also might not be the best thing, cuz if you’re familiar with his movies, you tend to expect the weirdness and how things’ll play out.

Bad Biology is classic Henenlotter, if Henenlotter decided to do a softcore late-night Cinemax porno.  The movie is FX lite and nudity heavy, although Frank, as usual, has no problem spreading the nudity around and making his male actors strip down along with his actresses, which tends to make things a nice, level playing ground.  From the very beginning, the movie proves that it isn’t gonna be traditional at all.  The female protagonist, Jennifer, is some kind of genetic mutant with multiple clitorises, causing her to be a total nympho.  She’s also occasionally homicidal and spews out deformed babies about two hours after having sex.  She carries a good portion of the story and also is responsible for the voice over narrative, which is actually filled with some brilliant bits of dialogue.  Unfortunately, the effectiveness of them is limited due to the rapid fire, dead-pan delivery.

Then there’s main character number two, Batz, who comes in about a third of the way through the movie.  He’s a classic Henenlotter character if there ever was one.  A tortured young man being forced to deal with some kind of personal monstrosity.  In this case, it’s his drug-addicted, massive dick with a mind of its own.  His story is really just a mixture of Brain Damage and Basket Case, and while it is sometimes fun to watch, it’s also a bit obvious recycling.

After a whole slew of weird scenes, the two main characters (who seem to be made for each other) wind up getting together.  Of course, this is just after Batz’s dick has decided to go renegade and detach itself.  This leads to a very silly montage where the rogue penis bashes its way through walls and floorboards and into pretty, young women’s apartments.  Apparently, it’s managed to find an apartment complex where all the girls are naked for no apparent reason.  Once it gets up to the fifth girl, in a row, things have stopped being amusing and just start to get boring and gratuitous.  The climax, again, is classic Henenlotter and, if you’re familiar with his flicks, pretty predictable.

Overall: If you like Henenlotter’s other flicks, you’ll prolly dig this one, but it might feel a bit familiar.

Alien Apocalypse (2005)

Alien Apocalypse

-2005

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 4

Director: Josh Becker

Writer: Josh Becker

Cast: Bruce Campbell, Renee O’Connor,

Remington Franklin, Michael Cory Davis,

Peter Jason

Run Time: 88 minutes

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Date Reviewed: July 30th, 2009

Plot: An astronaut doctor Ivan Hood and his fellow astronaut Kelly return from their mission in space to find the world has been taken over by aliens. Now Dr. Ivan Hood and Kelly must lead a revolution to free the human slaves from their alien masters.

Comments: Bad acting, silly plot and horrible fake beards fill this Sci-Fi Originals flick.  So why the hell would you even watch this?  Two words: Bruce Campbell.  If you know Bruce from his recent popularity on the awesome show Burn Notice, then you still might not be down for this flick.  If, on the other hand, you’ve known Bruce since the early days of Evil Dead and his guest spots on Hercules and Xena, then you might find this enjoyable in a very cheesy way.

This is really a case of a plot too epic for its budget.  A sci-fi apocalypse flick that involves giant insectoid aliens that have taken over the planet in order to harvest all of our trees and sell them to turn a profit.  Okay, even with a bigger budget, it still would’ve been pretty silly.  But gosh darn it, at least the beards would’ve looked more real!  Seriously, I think the rest of it could be forgiven if the fake beards didn’t look so… fake.  Add that to the overacting of most of the minor characters and it gets very silly, very fast.

So really, it’s best to ignore them all and focus your attention on Bruce Campbell.  His character can best be described as a more courageous version of his Ash character from the Evil Dead series.  Witty, goofy, full of himself and not afraid to grab a boom-stick and splatter some alien guts.  If you dig Bruce and feel like watching some of that… well, you’d probably do better by watching one of his other, better movies where he does that sort of thing.  But if you can get this cheap and you’re curious, it’s not completely unwatchable.

Overall: Really for hardcore Bruce Campbell fans only.

Necromentia (2009)

Necromentia

-2009

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 8

Director: Pearry Reginald Teo

Writer: Stephanie Joyce

Cast: Layton Matthews, Chad Grimes, Santiago Craig, Zelieann Rivera, Cole Braxton

Run Time: 81 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Date Reviewed: March 18th, 2010

Plot: An off-world look at the superstitious repercussions of tattooing an Ouija Board on your body. Hagen, who has a dead wife, believes that he can revive her from the dead. Travis, a man who lost his brother and wants to join him in the after life. Morbius, a bartender who is betrayed by those he loves comes back from the dead to take revenge. And a strange man only known as Mr. Skinny protects the secrets of the Ouija Board and how the stories weave and affect each other.

Comments: Necromentia is like Hellraiser without the puzzle box.  It’s probably one of the more demented horror stories NOT written by Clive Barker.  It’s a series of three stories involving different main characters that wind up linking together to make a complete story arc.  The fact that the stories are shown in reverse order keeps things pretty interesting.  And the never-ending barrage of fucked up visuals keeps things plenty disturbing in the meantime.

The first segment involves what appears to be a distraught husband who seems to be having a little trouble with the whole ‘till death does you part’ aspect of his relationship.  He lovingly bathes his dead significant other whilst whispering sweet nothings into her ear before dragging her out of the tub and onto a table where he does some less than wholesome things to her.  He soon meets up with a pair of villainous guys who know what he’s been up to and claim to know a way to bring his dead lover back.

Things don’t go according to plan however and this leads into the second segment which is both the longest and filled with the most bat-shit insane plot elements.  It follows the backstory of the apparent villain from the first segment.  You quickly discover that he’s really not much of a villain at all.  Despite being a heroin addict that tortures willing victims for money, he’s mostly just trying to take care of his handicapped younger brother.  The younger brother enjoys watching a busted TV which occasionally spews forth creepy carnival music while his imaginary friend, Mr. Skinny (a half-naked obese man wearing a pig mask), does fucked up dances and sings (in a little girl’s voice) about committing suicide and things being shoved up his rectum.  If for nothing else, Necromentia is worth watching for this middle segment alone.

The middle segment ends where the first segment began and then we travel further back in time as the third segment begins.  We meet Morbius, a deaf bartender who seems to be a nice enough guy aside from the fact that he’s in love with a cheating bitch of a girl who wants nothing to do with him.  Who’s she cheating on him with?  Why, it’s the main character from the first segment!  Things come full circle and even if the ending isn’t very climactic, it at least wraps up the story pretty nicely.

Technically speaking, the flick is well shot, well directed and well acted.  There’s enough creepy ambiance without things getting too dark to see what the hell’s going on.  The special effects, although looking a bit rubbery in a few parts, are well done and the monster effects look like a cross between Hellraiser and Silent Hill.  The plot, while not being entirely original, injects enough awesome twists to keep things interesting and, unlike other ‘You’re going to hell!’ flicks, doesn’t get too religiously heavy handed to get annoying.  On the contrary, Necromentia doesn’t really get very judgmental at all with its characters.  If anything, it does the opposite, by transforming supposed ‘hero’ characters into ‘villains’ and vice versa numerous times throughout the movie.  It basically says that there’s no such thing as true good and evil and, as one character says, “Does anyone really deserve to go to heaven?”

Overall: Awesomely demented flick.  Unique and fucked up.

Baby Blood (1990)

Baby Blood

-1990

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 5

Director: Alain Roback

Writer: Serge Cukier, Alain Roback

Cast: Emmanuelle Escourrou, Christian Sinniger, Jean-Francois Gallotte, Roselyne Geslot, Francois Frappier

Run Time: 82 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Date Reviewed: July 14th, 2009

Plot: When a strange creature crawls into a woman’s uterus she becomes a killer in order to feed the tiny terror growing within her.

Comments: Okay, if Sam Raimi and Frank Henenlotter had been spliced together to create some weird, mutant hybrid… it probably would’ve gone on to make Baby Blood.  Cuz, seriously, this flick has the bizarre, disturbing plot elements and dead-pan acting of a Henenlotter flick, mixed with the over-the-top gore and brilliant camera work of a Raimi flick.  That’d be great, except it never quite manages to get as good as either of those two’s movies.

Things start out in the jungle, where some unknown beast has been locked in a cage and sold to the white man.  The white man brings the beastie to a seedy carnival and it’s revealed that the mysterious ‘monster’ is really just an irate jaguar.  Really, the whole point if it is just to get the two main characters together.  Main Character 1 being Yanca, an abused carnival girl who doesn’t mind prancing around naked and Main Character 2 being the blood-hungry demon-baby-thing that’s hitched a ride inside the jaguar.  The thing immediately bursts free from said jaguar and hides inside Yanca via the easiest point of entry… yea.

From that point on, things take a bizarre course of action, with Yanca being told by the thing inside her to kill people and drink their blood.  Half the time, she resists but eventually succumbs to her ‘baby’s wishes.  The rest of the time, she’s eager and willing to go on violent kill crazy rampages.  Yanca just switches gears from wanting the thing inside her dead to wanting to care for it like a mother so many times that it really doesn’t pay to try and keep up with what her motivations are.  Just enjoy the massive bloodshed.

Which there’s plenty of, thankfully.  Really, if it weren’t for the excessive amounts of well-done gore effects, this movie would just be mind-numbingly boring.  The effects really are well done, with plenty of fake blood sprayed around.  Yanca spends most of the movie covered in the stuff, although no one else seems to notice.  There’s also a good bit of really nice film work.  If nothing else, the movie was shot beautifully.

Overall: Some good gore and camera work, but otherwise a bit boring.

The Butcher (2007)

The Butcher

-2007

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 4

Director: Kim Jin-Won

Cast: Kim Sung-Il, You Dong-Hun

Run Time: 75 minutes

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Date Reviewed: December 26th, 2009

Plot: Told entirely through two POV video cameras, THE BUTCHER throws viewers abruptly into the middle of chaos and death: a handful of people have been abducted and lie bloodied and bound on the floor of a rotting slaughterhouse. Nearby, a team of snuff film producers are discussing their gruesome handiwork: torturing their captives to death, one by one, and selling the tapes overseas to foreign audiences hungry for footage of Koreans murdering one another.

Comments: I really shouldn’t have liked this movie at all.  And for the first half hour, it was almost unwatchable between the lack of anything happening and the half-assed August Underground-ish style with the main twist being that the ‘snuff victims’ have cameras mounted to their heads.  At first, it’s just another installment in the quickly played out ‘torture porn’ sub-genre.

But then after about thirty minutes, something very strange happened.  The movie got surprisingly good.  I mean, in relation to other movies, it’s not great, but for torture porn this actually managed to elevate itself into a pretty brutal and intense flick.  And the POV perspective from the victim is a large part of that.  Once the movie moves beyond the bad-acting set-up and the thirty minutes of crying and screaming, it starts to actually play on some pretty good psychological horrors as well as throwing gore a plenty at you.

The main character has very little development and what’s revealed about him during the movie doesn’t exactly make him the most sympathetic character.  The fact that you see most of the movie via the camera mounted on top of his head helps with that, though.  By the end, as cowardly as he may be, you’re still rooting for him to survive.

What really hurts this flick from being really good, aside from the slow first third, is the deadpan acting.  The villains don’t really come across very convincingly, with the exception of the Leatherface-esque psycho who runs around with a pig mask and a chainsaw.  That guy’s actually pretty creepy.  The ‘director’ and his sidekick, though, don’t really come across as being too evil or psycho to really sell it enough to make the movie really disturbing.

Overall: It’s still stereotypical torture porn, but there’s some good intensity to it.

Carnosaur (1993)

Carnosaur

-1993

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 3

Director: Adam Simon, Darren Moloney

Writer: John Brosnan, Adam Simon

Cast: Diane Ladd, Raphael Sbarge, Jennifer Runyon, Harrison Page, Ned Bellamy

Run Time: 83 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Date Reviewed: December 25th, 2009

Plot: A brilliant geneticist, Diane Ladd, plans to expose a lethal virus to every human being on the planet. Her objective: to destroy humankind in favour of her new strain of prehistoric dinosaurs. Two people stand in the way of her diabolical plan, a cynical night watchman and a lovely idealistic environmentalist. The two must overcome their differences long enough to uncover the scientist’s scheme and fight her carnivorous creations in a desperate battle against the extinction of the human race.

Comments: When I was a kid, Carnosaur was kind of a big deal.  It was Jurassic Park for adults.  All the dinosaur action with twice the sex and violence.  And that is, more or less, what Carnosaur is.  It’s the Roger Corman answer to the dinosaur craze of the early 90′s.  And while an R-rated dino-fest actually isn’t a bad idea, this whole movie makes too little sense and has too many plot holes to really hold up very well.

Things get off to a fast start, involving some shady genetics company who strip-mines mountains when they’re not genetically fusing cows with vegetables for no apparent reason.  There’s a whole lot of cutting edge science going on that makes no sense and is completely sidestepped by not really mentioning too much about it.  Just accept that it all works and let the movie do what it wants.

What the movie wants is for a town full of people to contract some fever-based sickness that climaxes with the women birthing dinosaur eggs before dying.  The fevers seem to max out at about 115 degrees, which if you’re playing by real medical rules, means your brain has fried and you’re dead.  In the realm of Carnosaur, it just means you’re about to deliver a beautiful baby velociraptor.  Beautiful is stretching it pretty far, actually.  The dinosaur effects are beyond cheesy.  They look about as menacing as a stuffed iguana.  The T-Rex head actually looks alright from certain angles, but when they cut to full-body shots, the illusion crumbles fast.

If you can convince your brain to set aside the silly science of the movie for the near 90-minute running time, there’s still quite a few other plot problems to contend with.  The pacing is stilted and at times it feels like they’re running the beginning, middle and end of the movie concurrently and just jumping back and forth between them.  If the lack of actual explanation and character development weren’t bad enough, the insane pacing makes the movie almost impossible to decipher.   And the lack of decent dinosaur effects make even viewing it as a cheesy monster movie hard to do.

Overall: Mildly entertaining at best. Mostly just confusing.

Saw VI (2009)

Saw VI

-2009

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 7

Director: Kevin Greutert

Writer: Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton

Cast: Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Mark Rolston, Betsy Russell, Shawnee Smith

Run Time: 90 minutes

MPAA Rating: R for sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, and language

Date Reviewed: December 22nd, 2009

Plot: Special Agent Strahm is dead, and Detective Hoffman has emerged as the unchallenged successor to Jigsaw’s legacy. However, when the FBI draws closer to Hoffman, he is forced to set a game into motion, and Jigsaw’s grand scheme is finally understood.

Comments: I’ve been a Saw fan since the first one came out and for the most part, I’ve enjoyed the sequels as they’ve come out.  The only time I can really say one of them has disappointed me was part five.  It really felt forced and just thrown together.  Still, I looked forward to the next installment and hoped for the best.  As it is, I think part six is a good deal better than five and it definitely has me looking forward to seven.

Taking advantage of the usual Saw elements, this one finally settles a lot of the open plot elements from the previous flicks.  There’s really a good deal less mystery involved this time around, too.  Even the limited number of twists are pretty obvious, but the movie still works pretty good without them.  It seems like instead of hinging the entire movie on a brilliant shock ending, they’re more crafting the story as it goes along and revealing things along the way.  It seems like the Saw series has a lot more in common with a TV series than any traditional movie series.  Each year, we get a new episode.

In this episode, Hoffman is in the process of taking over as Jigsaw.  There’s a lot of development into his character this time around and how he’s different from John, the original Jigsaw, in dealing with things.  It’s clear that he’s going to be a good deal more brutal, if that’s possible.  But the biggest problem with his character is how he’s a veteran detective and yet seems to be completely clueless about crime scene investigation.  John’s wife, Jill, also seems to be jumping on the Jigsaw bandwagon and she definitely seems to have the chops to give Hoffman a run for his money.

Gore and atmosphere are at the usual level of quality expected from the series.  The traps are as clever as they are brutal.  The main ‘player’s’ storyline is ironic, given the huge debate over health insurance providers lately, and makes for a pretty intense side plot.  And unlike the previous movies, there’s actually quite a few people left alive which I’m sure will add to the plot of forthcoming Saw flicks.

Overall: Way more interesting and entertaining than Saw 5. Bring on Saw 7 in 3-D.

The Grudge: Old Lady in White (2009)

The Grudge: Old Lady in White

-2009

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 4

Director: Ryuta Miyake

Writer: Ryuta Miyake, Takashi Shimizu

Cast: Hiroki Suzuki, Ichirota Miyakawa, Natsuki Kasa, Akina Minami, Marika Fukunaga

Run Time: 61 minutes

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Date Reviewed: October 13th, 2009

Plot: Akane begins seeing visions of a female ghost wearing the same yellow hat and red satchel she wore as a school child.

Comments: The Grudge movies all seem to follow a pretty specific routine.  String together a series of scenes that all kind of have to do with the main plot, but make sure they’re all out of order.  Each segment focuses on one main character who, more often than not, is going to have an encounter with a pale, dark-haired, pissed off ghost that makes creepy noises.  That’s pretty much every single Grudge movie.

The crazy thing is, for a series that’s so formulaic and predictable, the movies can still generate a good level of creepy atmosphere.  And the ghosts can still be scary.  Most of that has to do with the way the movies are filmed.  The ghosts always just pop out of the most unexpected, unnatural places.  And the unnaturalness helps generate the scare factor.

The ‘lead’ ghost in this installment, the Old Lady in White, is no different.  She’s incredibly creepy, even in the segments before she becomes a ghost.  The little girl ghost is less creepy, since mostly she just stands in a corner.  There’s a brief appearance by the meowing kid from earlier Grudge flicks.  I remember when he used to be creepy.  In the one brief scene he was in this time, though, he was more amusing than anything.

In the end, the reason why the movie ultimately fails is the disjointed presentation typical of the Grudge movies, which is feeling a bit played out, and even more so due to the ending.  The jumbled story-segment style would’ve actually been fine if the ending hadn’t been such a sudden, anti-climactic suck-fest.  Clocking in at just over an hour, it really does feel like the movie’s missing the last third, even though everything in the plot is actually more or less explained.  Still, it just feels like a complete let down after some decent build up.

Overall: The movie does manage to get creepy, but the ending completely ruins it.

Meat Grinder (2009)

Meat Grinder

-2009

Reviewer: Indy McDaniel

Rating: 3

Director: Tiwa Moeithaisong

Writer:

Cast: Mai Charoenpura, Duangta Tungkamanee, Ratanabanlung Toesawat, Anuwat Niwatwong, Weeradit Srimalai

Run Time: 88 minutes

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Date Reviewed: October 10th, 2009

Plot: A noodle shop owner starts to use the most unexpected of ingredients to drum up business.

Comments: The premise of someone grinding up and using people to feed to other people has been around for a long time now.  There’s been a few really good stories told from this premise, and even more that have just flat out sucked.  This is one of the latter.  Take the general idea of feeding humans to humans and put an art house spin on it along with some style theft from the Saw movies.  Add in a hard-if-not-impossible to follow plot with some elements stolen from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saw and Chan-wook Park’s brilliant Vengeance Trilogy (he’s the guy who did Oldboy), and you’ve got Meat Grinder.

Probably one of the more annoying aspects of the flick, and one of the main reasons it’s damn near impossible to follow, is that it has no sense of linear thought.  I like stories that jump around in the timeline, but if you do it in a way that makes no sense, it’s just confusing and annoying.  This flick has flashbacks, and then flashbacks inside of flashbacks and then flashforwards with intermittent jumps back to the flashback before…  You eventually get all the information you need to figure out what’s going on, but by that time you’re probably already too annoyed or too bored to care.

Things start out promising, but what could’ve been a pretty effective character piece about the lengths a mother is willing to go to support her daughter is instead just one arty shot after another for the next hour and a half.  There’s little to no character development and that, paired with all the jumps in timeline, just make it difficult to keep track of who’s who and what it is they’re doing.

When all else fails, you can just sit back and enjoy the visuals.  Admittedly, the movie does have some very nice visuals.  But they’re interspersed with a whole bunch of shaky, out-of-focus shots that are grating at best.  The music is a similar bag.  Some of it is brilliantly done, but it can also get grating and a lot of times it doesn’t seem to fit the mood of the scene it’s placed in.  The majority of the movie could probably be best described as a poorly constructed music video.

Overall: Mostly boring art-house cannibal flick with really little emphasis on the cannibal aspect at all.