Originally posted on 1/5/17
It has one of those annoying double titles separated by a colon, as though they couldn't make up their minds, and a cover that more than whispers "direct to DVD junk." But make no mistake--BATTLE FOR INCHEON: OPERATION CHROMITE (2016) is the real thing: a lavish, impressively-produced Korean War film that begins with a suspenseful espionage mission and ends with a full-scale invasion.
Based on true events, the story concerns a group of South Korean soldiers led by special forces captain Jang Hak-soo (Lee Jung-jae) who pose as a North Korean inspection unit in order to try and locate the placement of mines in Incheon Harbor before the invasion which is to be led by General Douglas MacArthur (Liam Neeson).
Their chief obstacle in this attempt is Commander Lim Gye-jin (Lee Beom-soo), a protege' of supreme leader Kim Il-sung who's in charge of fortifying the harbor against an impending attack. Not only is Lim Gye-jin tight-lipped about where those mines are, but he's also one of those arrogant, sadistic, and supremely suspicious little bastards who always sizes you up with a sideways leer and a hand poised over his holster.
Originally posted on 12/16/11
I'm not sure how the average H.P. Lovecraft fan will react to it, so my impressions of BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP (2006) were based solely on the movie itself and not on how well or how badly screenwriter Barrett J. Leigh adapted it from Lovecraft's short story. As such, I found it to be one of the creepiest and most over-the-top horror films I've seen in recent years.
The story takes place in one of those nightmarish insane asylums (circa 1911) in which the grievously abused and neglected patients serve as guinea pigs in the mad experiments of crazed doctors. Young Dr. Eischel (Fountain Yount) is conducting his own really interesting experiment on a catatonic, cadaverous-looking woman named Ardelia--strapped to a chair, her skull has been sawed through for easy pop-top access to her brain, into which Dr. Eischel sticks electrodes that are hooked up to a device he uses to stimulate various nerve centers. I was never really sure what his goal was (something about harnessing the enery of thought), but it didn't really matter because the whole thing was wonderfully weird and horrific.
Meanwhile, Dr. Wardlow (Kurt Hargan), a profoundly cruel, power-mad alienist (okay, I had to look it up--"alienist: n. 'A physician who has been accepted by a court of law as an expert on the mental competence of principals or witnesses appearing before it'", according to www.answers.com) is presiding over the hearing of a wretched piece of human flotsam named Joe Slaader (William Sanderson, BLADE RUNNER, "Newhart"), who has been caught butchering a bunch of his fellow inbred hillbillies and running around in the woods with one of the severed heads. Dr. Wardlow delights in pointing out Joe's myriad less-appealing qualities, including a large hump in his back that resembles a human face--the result of a fetal twin that didn't quite successfully make it through the gestation process.
Wardlow, who can't wait to get this guy on an operating table for some good old surgical fun, applies leeches to Joe's body to "suck out the madness" and suggests cutting out the malformed twin, but Dr. Eischel contemptuously derides him as an idiot, initiating an intensely confrontational relationship between the two. When Dr. Eischel later finds the chance to examine Joe on his own, he discovers that the fetal twin is alive and conscious--in fact, it is the dominant consciousness within the shared body, coming to the fore whenever Joe goes to sleep and telekinetically ripping people to bloody shreds (one of the few coherent things Joe ever says is the chant, "I kiss my loved ones...I go to sleep...I wake up with bad things"). Giddy with anticipation, Eischel vows to circumvent Dr. Wardlow's surgical plans and get Joe hooked up to his brain machine.
And that's just for starters. Believe me, this is one weird movie, and it gets weirder by the minute, eventually culminating in a grand, blood-drenched finale in which skulls are drilled, electrodes are implanted into living brains and the brains of several severed heads on spikes, and a terrifying Netherworld creature named Amducious claws its way into our dimension (via some not-so-great CGI).
Along the way, some of the patients in the asylum find themselves hanging upside-down in their cells by some unseen force as all the flesh is ripped from their bones, and the lovely Ardelia, her body reanimated by Amducious' will, pries the head off of the recently-ousted asylum director who has discovered her in the basement, just as he is about to gleefully rape her. One thing you have to say about this movie--it's pretty eventful.
It's also very deliberately stylish, and stylized--filmed in black-and-white, with color appearing only in the scenes in which Amducious' presence is felt, BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP is a dizzying collage of wild camerawork and sometimes rapid-fire editing, especially in the deeply unsettling dream sequences. The most unique thing about it, though, which is also the thing that will turn off many viewers, is the highly stylized acting. Everyone in the cast attacks their characters as though they were performing in a silent movie or perhaps the most melodramatic Grand Guignol theater presentation imaginable, manically emoting for the people in the back row, and this effect is even carried over into the stagelike makeup, costumes, and set design.
It's purely intentional on the part of directors Barrett J. Leigh and Thom Maurer, and contributes to the heavy layer of black humor that permeates the entire movie, as well as its oppressive sense of unenlightened antiquity. I'm sure a lot of people will simply regard this as horrible acting, which, in some cases, it may be. But it worked for me.
Will Lovecraft fans like this movie? I have no idea, but judging from their reactions to most of the previous cinematic adaptations of the author's works, probably not. On its own terms, however, I found it to be a wildly inventive, nightmarish, shocking, funny, and unabashedly bizarre experience that was enough fun for me to disregard its faults. Plus, it's a visual feast for gorehounds, who will also be pleased to see Tom Savini in an all-too-brief role early on.
BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP is a film that is definitely not for everyone, but if you get hooked into it just right, you may have almost as much fun as Ardelia does when Dr. Eischel sticks an electrode into the pleasure center of her brain and turns up the dial.
Originally posted on 10/14/17
It seems as though ghost stories are one of the hardest kinds of movies to make, or at least make scary. Most are lucky if they manage to be scary half the time, usually starting out strong before fizzling out toward the end.
In these cases, a bunch of spooky peripheral glimpses and some nerve-jangling jump scares keep us on edge until the story gets in the way and things start being a little too literal and on-the-nose expository.
THE FORLORNED (2017) suffers from this problem, but fortunately it doesn't suffer too terribly much. Why? Because it's such a likable effort and builds up so much goodwill in the first half that we're willing to go along with it to the end even when it isn't creeping us out. That first half, while not exactly heart-attack-inducing, is all goosebumpy, Halloween-style fun.
Originally posted on 1/29/18
One of the most suspenseful plots I can think of is the straight-arrow cop going undercover as a bad guy and having to live the lifestyle 24 hours a day, with imminent discovery and death always a hair's breadth away.
It's what made "Donnie Brasco" (the non-fiction book and the movie) so harrowing, and it's what gives the Hong Kong action extravaganza EXTRAORDINARY MISSION (Cinedigm, 2017) such a visceral and emotional charge.
Directors Alan Mak and Anthony Pun and writer Felix Chong (THE DEPARTED, INFERNAL AFFAIRS) wring all the nerve-stretching tension they can from the concept before blasting the doors off with a final act that's pure rocket-fueled action.
Originally posted on 12/8/11
Having just watched the 5-DVD set SLEDGE HAMMER!: THE COMPLETE SERIES, I find that, once again, I dislike something at first and then end up liking it after further consideration. This proves either one of two things: (a) I'm wishy-washy, or (b) you can't always go by first impressions. I'm going to go with the second alternative, since it's less uncomplimentary toward me.
I have a vague memory of seeing an episode of this show during its first run (1986-88) and dismissing it as a crappy "Police Squad!" wannabe. That criminally brief 1982 series (six big episodes and out) by the Zucker brothers, which introduced Leslie Nielsen's celebrated "Frank Drebin" character and inspired the NAKED GUN movie trilogy, continued the same outlandishly farcical yet totally deadpan vibe of the Zuckers' AIRPLANE! on a smaller scale.
Naturally, I was disappointed when I approached "Sledge Hammer!" expecting it to be more of the same. What I finally realized after watching several episodes, however, is that this show is its own addlebrained entity--it's still a lightheaded farce that often resembles something out of MAD Magazine and celebrates silliness for its own sake, but the deadpan humor is shot through (pun alert!) with heaps of pure, giddy goofiness. In fact, "Sledge Hammer!" works both when it's aping the bone-dry "Police Squad!" comedy style and when it's making funny faces at us.
It takes awhile to get its groove on, though. The first episode is a bit of a mess--production values are murky, the direction and editing are flabby, and, worst of all, there's a laugh track pointing out the funny parts to us. Still, it has John Vernon (ANIMAL HOUSE) as the mayor, who demands that Sledge be let loose on the case when his daughter is kidnapped by terrorists.
There are some funny bits and Hammer's character, who is a cross between Dirty Harry and his watered-down TV equivalent "Hunter" (also a likable fascist cop with a female partner), is well established when he uses a bazooka to demolish an entire building in order to stop a sniper ("Trust me, I know what I'm doing" is his oft-heard motto). Overall, though, it's pretty limp.
We get to watch the show get its bearings and start firing on more cylinders as the season progresses, with the scripts getting funnier and more daring, and the direction improving (Bill Bixby eventually helmed eight of the series' best episodes, with Dick Martin of "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" contributing a couple of good ones). Despite its lesser moments, there's a relentless quality to the hot-and-cold-running gags and a sort of earnestness from the stars that makes the first season somehow likable. And some of the gags actually score big laughs, as when Hammer and an informant (guest star Dennis Fimple) conduct a secret conversation via adjoining pay phones.
Before long, the chemistry between Hammer and his female partner Det. Dori Doreau starts to click. RUNAWAY's Anne-Marie Martin (who, incidentally, co-wrote TWISTER with Michael Crichton) is an appealing foil for Hammer even though her comedic skills take awhile to develop, and their relationship has a certain charm--Doreau sees the good behind Hammer's fascist, violence-loving, ultra-right-wing exterior and eventually finds herself falling for him even though Hammer's first love is his gun, which he talks to and sleeps with.
As Hammer, David Rasche (BURN AFTER READING, UNITED 93) has a firm grasp on the character from the start but also gets better as he goes along. Rasche has a field day in the role, with his trigger-happy detective shooting first and asking questions later while gleefully roughing up everyone from jaywalkers to the mayor's wife. He reels off one-liners like nobody's business--when a nagging reporter asks if he has any predictions, Hammer's deadpan response is, "Yes...scientists will perform the first brain transplant, and you'll be the recipient." We eventually learn that Hammer thinks the death penalty is too lenient, his favorite song is "Taps", and the only thing he fears is world peace.
As season one comes to a close, just about the time Patrick Wayne does a delightful guest shot as Hammer's long-lost brother, the show really starts getting serious about being funny. The season-one cliffhanger is insane, opening with a introduction by Robin Leach in which he announces that the series is making a bid for renewal by packing more sex and violence into the upcoming episode and ending with Hammer frantically trying to disarm a nuclear warhead that could annihilate the entire city. Cult star Mary Woronov plays the mad villainess in this one, which actually does end with a nuclear explosion.
How they resolve this open-ended situation at the start of season two is undoubtedly one of network television's nuttiest moments, with the show even changing its name temporarily as part of the joke! And this is just the beginning of a series of episodes that get progressively more willing to be weird, while cast and crew all seem to be on the same page at last and making funny things happen. Movie spoofs dominate, with films such as SHAMPOO, JAGGED EDGE, and VERTIGO getting the treatment (with the occasional misfire such as a weak parody of PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM).
"Hammeroid" finds Hammer seriously wounded by a juggernaut robot (which is reminiscent of a similar character on the cult series "The Avengers") and turned into a cyborg a la ROBOCOP. Fans of that movie should love this affectionate spoof, while Bela Lugosi fans are in for a treat with "Last of the Red Hot Vampires", in which "Love Boat" alumnus Bernie Kopel does a surprisingly good Lugosi imitation. (The episode is "dedicated to Mr. Blasko", the actor's real last name.)
In "Jagged Sledge", Rasche gives a tour-de-force performance when Hammer must defend himself while on trial for the murder of a mob boss (the great Tige Andrews of "Mod Squad" fame). Another episode, which finds Hammer going undercover as a prison convict involved in a breakout attempt, actually beats NAKED GUN 33 1/3 (1994) to the punch with a strangely similar premise.
Harrison Page (CARNOSAUR) is undoubtedly the funniest supporting actor in the role of Captain Trunk, a dead-on spoof of the perpetually screaming squad captain whose blood pressure is always sky-high thanks to Hammer's destructive hijinks. Avoiding what could've been a one-note performance, Page is one of the best things about the show and is a constant delight. In addition to those already mentioned, a sterling roster of guest stars includes Ronnie Schell, Bill Dana, Nicholas Guest, Ray Walston, David Clennon, Armin Shimerman, Richard Moll, Adam Ant, Brion James, Bud Cort, Mark Blankfield, and Russ Meyer regular Edy Williams. Directors Bixby and Martin pop up in cameos.
The 5-disc DVD (22 episodes) from Image Entertainment is in 1.33:1 widescreen with Dolby Digital mono. No subtitles or extras.
It's interesting watching a show go from blah to good as we see with SLEDGE HAMMER!: THE COMPLETE SERIES. It may not be perfect but it's just plain fun, and by the time the last few episodes rolled around, I didn't want it to stop being Hammer Time.
Originally posted on 11/19/10
I have to go to the bathroom real bad, damn it. But the bathroom is at the end of a dark hallway which is behind a closed door, and it's late, and I'm by myself.
Watching scary movies by myself at night isn't the same as it was when I was a kid; rarely do I see one that cuts right through my adult sensibilities and makes me afraid to go down a dark hallway because there might be something creeping up behind me or because when I turn on the bathroom light that same something will be standing in there ready to lunge at me. THE ABANDONED (2006), however, is one of those movies.
The story begins as Marie (Anastasia Hille) arrives in Moscow to track down her origins, having been adopted as an infant after her Russian mother was found brutally murdered. She discovers that she has inherited the old home place, a sprawling, dilapidated farmhouse in the middle of the deep, dark woods between nothing and nowhere, and hires a farmer to take her there in his truck. Before they leave, an old Russian woman pleads with her not to go, while other bystanders regard her with fear and sorrow. It's very similar to the scene at the beginning of DRACULA in which the villagers beseech Renfield not to travel to the evil Count's castle, and we all know what happened to him.
After what seems like hours of travel, the driver leaves Marie alone in the woods at night, within walking distance of the house. Out of the corner of her eye, Marie thinks she sees a ghostly figure glide across the path up ahead. She reaches the really, really spooky old house and goes inside, peering into the deep darkness with her flashlight and making her way slowly through shadowy, cobwebbed rooms and corridors. She hears noises. And maybe a voice or two. I'm thinking, "Would I be in that house at that time? No, I would not." I'm also thinking that there's gonna be a "jump" shock any second now, and I'm right--there is. But expecting it doesn't help. In fact, it just makes it worse.
A lot of horror flicks these days depend on jump shocks, which can startle the crap out of you for a few seconds but are soon forgotten. This film is filled with them, but they're often only the beginning of a long sequence of sustained fear that doesn't subside after you've been soundly goosed. The interplay of the various cinematic elements is masterful in these scenes--direction, photography, special effects, and acting are all outstanding--creating the sort of sustained terror that usually comes along only in your worst nightmares. This movie, in fact, is like one long nightmare that you don't even fully wake up from when the end credits start rolling.
But back to Marie. After the first really scary stuff happens, she discovers that there's someone else in the house with her. That is, another living, flesh-and-blood someone. He turns out to be her twin brother, Nicolai (Karel Roden of BLADE II and HELLBOY), who has also been drawn to the house trying to find out what awful thing happened to their mother there, forty years ago. After suffering through one hellishly terrifying ordeal after another, they finally find out. I'm not going to tell you any more of what happens, but when Nicolai has a sudden realization and says ominously to Marie, "We're haunting ourselves...", you just might be thinking: "No sh*t!" One thing's for sure--the old "blank white eyeballs" thing has rarely looked scarier.
The last haunted house movie that tried to scare me was THE MARSH. But it tried to do this with a bunch of obvious CGI and noisy, flashy effects. THE ABANDONED has some CGI, too, but it's the best kind--the kind that tries not to look like CGI. Both of these films contain a similar scene in which a decrepit old room goes backward in time to its original state, but the difference is stunning. One scene seems to say "Look at this cool CGI!", while the other is more interested in maintaining your level of involvement in the scene itself.
THE ABANDONED looks great, with beautiful photography and imaginative editing worthy of an art film, always establishing and maintaining the right mood without being merely for show. The sound design and haunting score also contribute substantially to the ominous atmosphere, making even the scenes of Marie arriving in Moscow seem forboding and pulsing with bad tidings for what's to come.
The house itself is a marvel of production design, a labyrinth of dingy rooms, spooky corridors, and ominous passageways that constantly had me muttering "Don't go in there!" And with it, the stage is set for Spanish director Nacho Cerdà to do his stuff. To paraphrase a line from POLTERGEIST, he knows what scares you. His handling of this type of material is masterful compared to the ham-fisted direction often seen in similar films. And the two leads, Anastasia Hille and Karel Roden, are so good that they put the whole thing across with utter conviction. It didn't even bother me that the last few minutes didn't really seem to make total sense, because the worst nightmares rarely do.
I've seen a lot of horror films, especially of the haunted house variety, that tried their best to be scary but just didn't know how to do it, or how to sustain it all the way through to the end. But THE ABANDONED knows how. Boy, does it ever. It left me feeling drained, stunned, entertained yet uncomfortably uneasy and disturbed; and most of all, really, really creeped out. And I still have to go to the bathroom real bad, damn it.
Originally posted on 9/28/16
Some horror movies seem to be able to look right into our minds and find exactly what flat-out scares us, and then they use that to turn us into shivering, quivering, gibbering blobs of giddy terror. Others, unfortunately, don't seem to have a clue and simply throw everything but the kitchen sink at us in hopes that something scary will stick.
And then there are those fright flicks that traverse the middle ground between the two, occasionally causing a tingly chill up and down the spine but never quite hitting that elusive terror sweet spot within our delicate psyches. THE CARETAKER (2016, Level 33) is like that, although not for lack of trying. It's a respectable effort.
Sondra Blake, a familiar face for those of us who grew up watching TV in the 70s (in addition to being married to Robert Blake, she played Susan Atkins' cellmate in the TV-movie "Helter Skelter" among many other things), is a welcome presence as dotty old hag Birdy, who lives in a huge antique of a house and drives away every caretaker hired to watch over her.
Originally posted on 6/27/16
If you ever got tired of actually playing a videogame and starting fooling around with it--that is, making up your own storylines and dialogue, having the characters engage in activities that they weren't originally designed for, etc.--then you'll most likely understand the appeal of the web series from Rooster Teeth entitled "Red vs. Blue."
In this rollicking sci-fi/action adventure, the characters and settings from the popular HALO games are repurposed in a sweeping saga about heavily-armored soldiers in an interplanetary civil war who overcome their initial mistrust of one another in order to join forces against a common enemy.
Rooster Teeth's 3-disc limited edition steelbook Blu-ray collection RED VS. BLUE: THE CHORUS TRILOGY contains seasons 11 through 13 of the long-running series, following the events that occur after the Reds and Blues crash-land on the planet Chorus and struggle to convince two warring factions there to unite against their true enemy, a power-mad political leader known as "The Chairman" whose deadly army of mercenaries threatens to destroy them all.
Originally posted on 2/18/11
As Ted Raimi states in one of the DVD's bonus featurettes, you don't see that many low-budget independent sci-fi flicks that are much more than talking heads in rooms, yakking a lot of dialogue at each other. The makers of MILLENNIUM CRISIS (2007) have attempted to sidestep this problem by filling their shot-on-video space opera with plenty of really cheap-looking special effects and hoping we'll like the story enough to play along and really, really suspend our disbelief.
Fortunately, they did a pretty good job of this. The effects shots range from tolerable all the way down to the level of Monty Python-style animation, but I have to give them an A for effort. If you use your imagination, you might get into the cheapo atmosphere after awhile. The sets are minimal--some are even, well, subliminal--but much is done with a little sleight-of-hand and lots of weird lighting effects, with the help of a good ambient musical score by Aaron Paul Low which adds to the dreamlike quality of certain scenes. And yes, the story is interesting enough to have kept all of this from making me switch to hibernation mode.
I had trouble following some of it, but the main gist I got was that in the distant future, the warring Terrans and Andromedeans are enjoying a fragile period of truce. But a race of space vampires known as the Kluduthu are scheming to get everybody at each other's throats again so that they can enslave the survivors and feed off them. Which, I think we can all agree, isn't very nice.
A woman named Aurora (Clare Stevenson), who doesn't know where she came from or exactly what race she belongs to, is kidnapped by Kluduthu leader Harkness (a quietly effective Ato Essandoh of BLOOD DIAMOND) and his android cohort Lucretia (Olja Hrustic, who played one of the "Werewolf Women of the S.S." in GRINDHOUSE) because they suspect her to be the last of a species of aliens known as Bloodmasks, who can mimic the physical characteristics of any other species they come in contact with. Harkness and Lucretia plan to use Aurora to infiltrate a peace conference between the Terrans and Andromedeans and assassinate an important ambassador, thus sparking interplanetary war.
Clare Stevenson is a capable actress who makes Aurora a very likable character. She's a bit like Alice in Wonderland, wandering through one mind-boggling situation after another as she tries to find out who and what she is while doing her best to avoid being used as a secret weapon by the bad guys.
One particularly fun sequence aboard a space freighter has Aurora accidentally awakening some sentient androids, which then automatically awakens a Nosferatu-Class Neuronecromotron (really just an ugly bald guy who scowls and growls a lot) who is programmed to kill anything that moves in order to prevent any of the androids from escaping. I like the way the actors play these wide-eyed, innocent androids, and how Lucretia, the ancient android who's been around the galaxy a few times, sardonically informs them of the fruitlessness of their gosh-a-rootie plan to run away and live in freedom.
Ted Raimi appears in a few sequences as a flaky archeologist named Professor Keene, who gets mixed up in the whole thing and helps Aurora. Ted is probably the most experienced actor in the cast, but he gets barely enough screen time to justify giving him pole position on the DVD cover.
Lindsey Roberts (HUSTLE & FLOW) plays a Kluduthu assassin named Fiona, and if you like coldblooded warrior women she'll probably float your boat. There's a cool swordfight between her and Andromedean agent Murnau (Daryl Boling), in which Fiona just happens to accidentally be topless (oops!) for some reason. It's shot in what comes closest to being an actual honest-to-gosh set, is well-lit and nicely-choreographed, and makes this look a bit more like a real movie for a couple of minutes.
The best part of the movie for me is the Lucretia character. Olja Hrustic is a looker who plays the ages-old android with a cool, cynical detachment and air of mystery and superiority over everyone else. Lucretia's most startling feature is a long, metallic tentacle that springs from I-don't-know-where and can either mess you up, suck your life force, or just screw around with you. That, in addition to a cool chain-mail headdress and tight green bodysuit, helps to make Lucretia one of the most enjoyable visual aspects of the film.
On the negative side, the harsh lighting gets to be irritating from time to time, as does a frequent tendency of the editors to connect a sequence's shots together with an unnecessary white flashing light effect. There's a lot of imagination at work, though, in many of the futuristic elements of the different environments. And some of the images director/co-scripter Andrew Bellware has come up with are rather stunning--there's a reclining shot of Lucretia at about the halfway point that I swear I'd kill to have framed on the wall of my livingroom. Shortly before that, there's another shot of Aurora in repose inside her small living cubicle that would accompany it nicely.
The DVD from Shock-O-Rama cinema is in widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. Bonus features include a director/producer commentary, interviews with Raimi and other castmembers, a visual FX documentary, and a Shock-O-Rama trailer vault.
It's all unmistakably cheap but hardly amateurish. There's a lot of talent evident here, making the best of severely limited resources in imaginative ways, which I will always find just as much fun to watch in its own way as most of the big-budget razzle-dazzle stuff. With an intriguing sci-fi story, a good cast playing interesting characters, and some resourceful talent behind the camera, MILLENNIUM CRISIS manages to rise above its barely-existent budget to become somewhat more than the sum of its parts.
Originally posted on 5/22/16
The weird thing about a movie like ZAPPED! is that if I'd seen it in 1982 when it came out, I would've immediately dismissed it as lightweight teenybopper trash. Now, however, the glorious gift of hindsight reveals what it truly is--a priceless treasure trove of nostalgic "I Love the 80s" wonderfulness.
Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a tad. But seen today, this goofy little candy-coated cross between PORKY'S and CARRIE (with a dash of MERLIN JONES and ZOTZ! thrown in) is the sort of perversely entertaining time capsule that reminds me why I now look back on that much-maligned decade with such fondness.
ZAPPED! was the genesis of that dynamic duo of Scott "Chachi" Baio and Willie "Eight is Enough" Aames, who would go on to five full seasons in the 1984-1990 hit sitcom "Charles in Charge."
Originally posted on 10/28/10
The DVD cover blurb for DAMNED BY DAWN (2009) states "Sick of waiting for EVIL DEAD 4? Check out Damned by Dawn." Well, not quite. But it is about half of the spookiest movie I've seen in quite a while.
Not that director and co-writer Brett Anstey, along with his filmmaking co-horts who call themselves The Amazing Krypto Bros., aren't going for a Sam Raimi vibe here, because they are. It's just that they aren't quite capable of delivering the kind of balls-out gut-wrenching terror fest that the original EVIL DEAD was when it first came out. Not for the entire running time anyway. What they do manage to achieve to a certain degree, however, are the kind of good old-fashioned ghostly chills that get under your skin and give you goosebumps.
Though shot in Australia, the isolated setting of DAMNED BY DAWN has the fog-shrouded feel of the English countryside. It's here that Claire O'Neill (Renee Willner) and her boyfriend Paul (Danny Alder) arrive at the old family estate where she grew up to visit her dying grandmother. Paul meets Claire's dubious dad, Bill (Peter Stratford), and her bouncy younger sister, Jen (Taryn Eva), before setting off for the nearby village for some pizza. He almost runs into a ditch at the sight of a spectral figure standing in the road.
Meanwhile, Claire is at Nana's bedside when the old woman begins to tell her a disturbing tale of a banshee who will come for her when she dies. Claire awakens in the middle of the night to frightening far-off screams, and before long the entire family is beset by the Banshee herself and a host of other undead figures who have risen from the grave. During a night of terror, Nana is taken away and their efforts to find her result in some grisly deaths. The survivors attempt to escape the next day but are confronted by an army of the dead at every turn.
An atmosphere of unease begins to build from the very start and sets us up for the kind of scares that used to have us peeking through our fingers when we were kids. An early shot of the Banshee appearing in an old family photograph during a flash of lightning is just the beginning of a series of chilling jump scares that are truly frightening. Earlier, when Paul is standing on that dark road after his fleeting vision, a brief glimpse of the white-shrouded spectre floating by in the background should raise a few hackles.
Director Anstey places her off-center in several shots and lets us discover her slowly approaching figure ourselves as she emerges out of the fog, along with the terrified Claire who watches from a window during the initial siege. The front door slowly swings open in a swirl of mist, the Banshee enters, and Claire hides in a closet as the ghostly apparition moves through the house. It's like something out of a child's nightmare, recalling some of our earliest irrational fears and giving us that old familiar shivery feeling.
The film succeeds in doing so only sporadically from that point forward. There are some nice shots of zombie-like wraiths floating through the air, one of them wielding a scythe in Grim Reaper fashion as he inexorably pursues his living victims. These figures begin to lose their effectiveness, however, as the film's reliance on less-than-convincing CGI steadily increases. Rarely are computer-generated ghosts scary, and DAMNED BY DAWN is no exception.
The mood is further diminished as the film makes the same mistake that ruined the finale of POLTERGEIST along with many other supernatural films--namely, the belief that ratcheting up the noise level and adding a bunch of flashy effects and frantic activity will increase the scare factor, when, in fact, it has the opposite effect. Having the Banshee repeatedly break out in prolonged, supersonic screams is also less than terrifying. As the story goes on, long stretches in which a character creeps around waiting for something to jump out at her tend to further drag the pace of the film's second half.
Still, there are some good moments throughout. When a shotgun-wielding Claire warily enters an old barn in search of her missing sister, last seen being yanked away from a window by an unseen force, the sequence generates jittery suspense. The gross-out factor takes front and center with a Raimi-inspired episode in which a character previously hanged by his own intestines shows up in the kitchen the next day, spilling entrails from his gaping stomach and vomiting cockroaches. Kindly old Nana gets into the act herself later on when she returns as one of the hostile undead in the film's frenetic climax.
For a low-budget effort, DAMNED BY DAWN looks great and is clearly the work of a talented and enthusiastic bunch of filmmakers. The cast is uniformly good, especially Renee Willner as Claire and Dawn Klingberg as Nana. Bridget Neval does her best as the Banshee, though the character's effectiveness varies depending mostly on the director and the script. She's never better than in those early scenes in which her unnerving presence is fleetingly seen. (Call me weird, but I think she's pretty hot, too.)
The DVD from Image Entertainment is in 1.78:1 widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. No subtitles this time. Along with the trailer there's a 55-minute behind-the-scenes documentary that is quite engaging. A crew commentary provides more information on the making of the film, while the cast commentary (most of them are seeing it for the first time) is lively and fun.
Although DAMNED BY DAWN isn't entirely successful and can't maintain its ability to scare us past those chilling early scenes, it's still a worthwhile effort that should please horror fans. Definitely the sort of thing to liven up your Halloween viewing experience.
Originally posted on 10/15/09
A sampler of scares from around the world, Palisades Tartan's TERROR PACK VOL. 1 offers a tasty assortment of horrors with an international flavor. These may not be the most utterly nightmare-inducing films you'll ever see, but they're definitely kooky, spooky, and very entertaining.
Much of Japan's creepiest film horror is derived from their popular ghost stories and urban legends. CARVED: THE SLIT-MOUTHED WOMAN (2007) is a prime example, beginning with the rumor of the titular ghost being passed from child to child at school until the entire populace is on edge. Before long, kids start disappearing as the terrifying slit-mouthed woman, a trench-coated apparition with long black hair and a hideous visage, appears with her long, razor-sharp scissors. "Am I pretty?" she asks cryptically before snatching them away.
Two young elementary school teachers end up on the ghost's trail for various reasons--Ms. Yamashita (Eriko Satô) seeks to make amends for abusing her own daughter, while Mr. Matsuzaki (Haruhiko Katô) has a terrible personal connection that enables him to sense the ghost's next attack before it happens. They encounter her several times before a final battle in her hidden cellar of death becomes an ordeal of unspeakable horror.
CARVED isn't nearly as blood-curdlingly terrifying as some of the Asian ghost stories I've seen, but it's the kind of macabre tale that brings back that childhood feeling of walking home in the twilight after trading too many scary stories with your friends. With her staring snake eyes and gaping ear-to-ear gash of a mouth (the makeup is great), the slit-mouthed woman is an imposing presence. The acting by the kids is very good, but if seeing children getting wasted is too much for you, you might want to skip this one. Because of this factor, much of the film is more disturbing than scary.
The DVD is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 surround sound. The soundtrack is in Japanese with English and Spanish subtitles. Extras include "The Making of Carved", cast interviews, and original theatrical trailer and TV spots.
Kôji Shiraishi's direction is smooth and unobtrusive, with some cleverly executed shots. He stages the fright scenes well and maintains an unsettling aura of fear without relying solely on jump scares. The finale is tense and suspenseful, and the movie fades out on a disturbing open-ended note.
The Dutch horror film SLAUGHTER NIGHT, aka SL8N8 (2007) seems at first to be your typical "teens getting stalked and slaughtered" bore, but it turns into one killer spookhouse ride as soon as our stereotypical group of good kids and party animals find themselves trapped in an abandoned mine and terrorized by the vengeful ghost of a maniacal serial killer.
A prologue detailing the gruesome murder spree of one Andries Martiens (Robert Eleveld) centuries ago gets the movie off to a shocking start as he captures several children, then lops off their heads and mounts them on poles (another warning to those who find child murders hard to watch). Killing eight people in this way will allow Martiens to enter Hell and return, for reasons made clear later on. His plan is thwarted as he is captured and put to death.
Switch to present day, as our fun-loving youngsters take a tour of a vast system of mine tunnels that is haunted by Martiens' ghost. After the elevator goes on the fritz and they're trapped underground, Martiens begins to possess them one by one and resumes his headhunting expedition that was interrupted centuries before. The result is a series of extremely unnerving stalk-and-kill sequences with some gruesome and very inventive deaths (the shovel beheading is truly memorable).
Victoria Koblenko stars as Kristel, the level-headed girl whose father was recently killed in a (spectacularly staged) car crash and who is now helping them from the other world via a Ouija board. Kurt Rogiers is also good as her would-be boyfriend Mark, and Linda van der Steen is quite convincing as the spoiled bratty girl, Estrild, who becomes one hot monster later on. The EXORCIST-style makeup on the possessed characters is chilling and the actors do a great job as either terrified victims or crazed psycho-killers.
The DVD is in anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 surround sound. Soundtrack is the original Dutch with English and Spanish subtitles. Extras include "The Making of Slaughter Night", outtakes, and the theatrical trailer.
The movie looks great and directors Frank van Geloven and Edwin Visser stage everything beautifully. Even the Shaky-Cam is used to good effect most of the time. SLAUGHTER NIGHT is one of the best movies of its kind that I've seen in a long time, maintaining a high level of fear and suspense with a pace that never lets up.
While the DVD cover of SHEITAN (2006) is clearly a ripoff of Anthony Hopkins' leering visage as HANNIBAL, I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything that the film itself could be compared to. This French "WTF?"-fest is one seriously, and I mean seriously, deranged movie.
Three unlikable, perpetually-horny party boys--Bart, Ladj, and Thai--get thrown out of a hip-hop club and follow a mysterious girl named Eve (Roxane Mesquida) home to her large family mansion in the country. The club's bartender, a nice Middle Eastern girl named Yasmine (Leïla Bekhti) tags along. The guys lust after the girls and compete for their attentions while Eve goads and teases them.
Into this scene blusters Eve's groundskeeper, Joseph (Vincent Cassel), a garrulous, overbearing, invasive force of nature who's always grinning like a loon. With his bulging eyes, handlebar moustache, and freakish demeanor, Joseph is a nerve-wracking presence whom the youngsters find alternately fascinating and disturbing. Bart is especially put off when Joseph keeps inviting him to go skinny dipping in a nearly hot spring.
Like a French version of DELIVERANCE or TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, the film places a bunch of city kids in the middle of inbred hillbilly hell and then ratchets up the "weird" factor with each new character and situation. We know something strange is going on between Joseph and his pregnant sister, whom we never see until later on, and a wild story he tells during their feast of a freshly-slaughtered goat--something about a man who makes a deal with the Devil ("Sheitan") in order to become invincible and then impregnates his sister to create a Devil child--has an uncomfortable ring of truth. By the time our protagonists finally discover the real reason why they've been invited to the house, all hell has already broken loose and there's nothing left to do but scream.
Much of SEITAN is sneaky build-up, with Joseph and the other locals being weird and the boys vying for the girls' affections (with Eve deviously egging them on). It's intriguing enough that the promise of what's to come sustains interest until a point about three-quarters through when I finally thought to myself, "This is really starting to drag." It's right about that time, however, that the Sheitan hits the fan and all that build-up suddenly starts paying off like a bank of slot machines.
The last fifteen or twenty minutes of this film are an explosion of mind-bending bizarreness that had me shaking my head in giddy disbelief. I don't want to ruin it by describing it in too much detail, but we finally get to see Joseph at his full power, and we find out what eyeballs have to do with everything, and, last but definitely not least, we meet Joseph's sister. In a word, "yikes."
First-time director Kim Chapiron does a beautiful job of putting all of this on the screen in interesting and dynamic ways, and the highly-capable cast does a convincing job with the characters. Cassell, of course, is the standout as Joseph, having a field day with the role and instantly becoming one of the most fascinating maniacs in genre history.
Like the other DVDs in this set, SHEITAN is 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 surround sound. The soundtrack is in French with English and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features include "The Making of Sheitan" and the original trailer.
Alternately shocking, funny, sexy, gory, and incredibly perverse--with a final shot that will be seared into your memory--SHEITAN is one of those movies that seems relatively harmless at first and then knocks you right on your ass.
If you're in the mood for a ghastly good time with some well-made, effective, and genuinely creepy flicks, TERROR PACK VOL. 1 from Palisades Tartan Video is the right stuff. I'll be looking forward to more in this series.