Shrooms

Director: Paddy Breathnach
Writer: Pearse Elliott
Released: 2006
Cast: Lindsey Haun, Jack Huston, Max Kasch, Maya Hazen, Alice Greczyn, Robert Hoffman

NIKKI says:
You know for a brief moment I forgot horro movies could be so shockingly awful. This one got points from me for doing something a tiny bit different with the whole horror visions and magic mushrooms premise. But the people behind this one don't know what scary means. And so they fucked it all up. The guys here come from that black pus looking like blood school of horror -- the more black pus we can squeeze into out movie, the more terrifying it will be!

Sorry guys -- we also need atmosphere and tension and, here's a thought -- A STORY. A story, of course, that's not semi-cribbed from every horror film in the land that features religious cults and orphanages.

Nope, I could barely stay awake this was so effing boring. Lame! (Although the poster is mildly rad.)

1/5

Timber Falls

Director: Tony Giglio
Writer: Dan Kay
Released: 2008
Cast: Brianna Brown, Josh Randall, Nick Searcy, Beth Broderick, Sacha Rosemann

Halloween: 20 Years Later (aka H20)

Director: Steve Miner
Writers: Robert Zappia, Matt Greenberg
Released: 1998
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Hartnett, Michelle Williams, Adam Arkin, Jodi Lynne O'Keefe, Adam Hann-Byrd, LL Cool J

Terror Train

Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Writer: TY Drake
Released: 1980
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Johnson, Hart Bochner, David Copperfield, Derek McKinnon,

STEVE says: Oh my. Watching it again, I can think of no earthly reason why I like this movie as much as I do. It follows the Halloween/Friday the 13th template of Evil Returning to Exact Revenge After Many Years, so it doesn't have originality going for it. The murders aren't that inventive, which seemed to be the sole excuse for making these movies after a while, although this one might have got in before they rounded that particular corner - either way, the kills are kinda boring. The editing pretty much excludes the person who turns out to be the killer from actually being the killer, and the red herring (David Copperfield) looks nothing like who we know the killer already to be.

And yet I rate it Good. Why?

I don't know. Might have something to do with it being one of the first slasher movies I saw as a kid, before even Friday the 13th or Halloween. I remember watching it over and over on HBO, this and RoadGames - both starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Coincidence? I think not.

It's a guilty pleasure, and I suspect we'll be viewing more than a couple before the month is out.

3/5

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Director: Joseph Zito
Writer: Barney Cohen
Released: 1984
Cast: Kimberly Beck, Erich Anderson, Corey Feldman, Barbara Howard, Peter Barton, Lawrence Monoson, Joan Freeman, Crispin Glover, Alan Hayes, Judie Aronson, Camilla More, Carey More

Friday the 13th Part II, dir. Steve Miner (1981)

NIKKI says:

It was a toss-up, but I think after watching Friday 1 and 2 back to back, Amy Steel has stepped out as the best Jason Girl. Man, she kicks some ass. And I know Adrienne King has the greatest villain-kill in cinematic history, but there's just something about her that screams innocence and naivete, whereas Amy has guts. And she has to actually kill big and scary Jason, not his aging mum. So, Amy wins.

I still love Part 2. I don't know if I like it more than the first one, because Mrs. Voorhees' head on the table, though, freaky and weird is not nearly as icky as the woman herself faking saving Alice in the first one only to throw her to the ground in the dirt paddock thing like the two of them are mud-wrestlers. Still, number two has some cool characters, fun situations, and no-one is running around in a headdress. Though Stu Charno comes close with his creepy monster outfit and speer.

There are some major plot issues with this one, too. Jason lies in wait for people that he can never know are actually going to go where he is waiting. Also, Amy, at the bar, comes up with the whole scenario for why Jason is out killing in the woods, but as far she knows it's all just a myth and the boy died at 12. How did she figure it all out with absolutely nothing to go on? Her child psychology course can't be that good.

Whatever it's faults, though, it's a good sequel. It and part one are awesome. Everything that follows is complete shite. And I still think Jason should have kept the hessian sack. It's just scarier.

2/5

Friday the 13th, dir. Sean S. Cunningham (1980)

NIKKI says:

Steve asked me while we were watching this: "Do we like it because it's good, or because of what it represents?"

It's a hard question to answer, because the truth is hard to admit. Yeah, it's not a great movie. People are underdeveloped, the timing is all over the place, the scares are few and far between, there's a problem with the logic of the killer stalking some and not others to no real end. But it's Top Five in the list of horror history-makers and genre-definers (with Texas Chain Saw, The Howling, Elm Street, and Halloween) and you can't fault that, regardless of how ultimately crap it kind of is.

Still, it's a fucking cool movie and way fun to revisit. I reckon I've seen it more than most other movies in the collection. I've definitely seen it more than any of those other classics I mentioned. Why? Is it Kevin Bacon in the tiny blue togs? Possibly. But I just think it's the most accessible, the easiest to escape to. Chain Saw creeps me out and makes me ill; Elm Street shits me with its cartoonishness at times, Halloween is too serious, and The Howling doesn't feature kids, so it wasn't so easy to relate to.

Friday just does the simplest thing -- takes some nice kids, puts them in paradise, and starts offing them one by one. It's not that complicated. And then it goes and twists at the end to feature one of the awesomest killers ever in film. It's like a good song -- you can just keep going back because it's familiar, it's fun, and you can chill out to it.

My only complaint? Too many A-cups. What's with all the tiny boobs? Were they trying to save on bikini material? Thank god we get Marta Kober in Part 2, or the early Friday series might have been entirely boobless.

3/5

Black Christmas, dir. Glen Morgan (2006)

NIKKI says:

Sigh. Someone eats an eyeball in this movie. It's fucking gross. That's so all I want to say about this movie, and even that was forced.

It's just another pointless remake that does nothing to enhance the story, further the genre, or make us want at all to look at its predecessor. It's just a sorry excuse for some bullshit writing, some bullshit effects, and some bullshit storytelling that could not have been less effective had the dialogue all been dubbed by chirping geese.

My god, Lacey Chabert. Go talk to the Playboy editors -- there's legitimate work out there.

Fucking hell.

But I have only myself to blame.

.5/5

A Nightmare on Elm Street, dir. Wes Craven (1984)

STEVE says:

Billy Bob Thornton is to take on the role of Freddy Kruger in the Nightmare remake. News of the remake was disturbing enough, but Billy Bob Thornton? That's so wrong, I don't even want to go into why.

Well, alright. Arguments can be made that he's too old - he's only eight years younger than Robert Englund, anyway - but that's less of a concern for me. On the Nightmare commentary, Wes Craven says he wanted to cast someone older, but that Englund was just right for the part. So even though Englund was only 37, I get the idea that Kruger is supposed to be much older. (And how can you really tell under all that latex?)

No, my problem with Thornton is, he's just too well-known. Robert Englund had been a working actor for 10 years when he first donned the glove, but I only knew him because I was a rabid V fan. He was a no-name, like Gunner Hansen, Warrington Gillette and Nick Castle were when they originated Leatherface, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. You didn't know what to expect because you didn't know who he was or what he was capable of. He was an enigma.

But Thornton comes with baggage. The hayseed accent. The whole Angelina Jolie thing. Bad Santa. I wonder how long it's going to take for an image of Freddy Kruger with Karl Childers face Photoshopped over Englund's to appear online. 

I've got some problems with the original - like it contradicts its premise halfway through when Kruger starts killing people in the real world instead of just their dreams; like Nancy's setting up a series of elaborate, Kevin McAllister type booby-traps in the time it takes John Saxon to climb a set of stairs; like the blow-up doll that stands in for Ronee Blakley when she's pulled through the tiny window in the final scene - but it still works on so many levels, I'm willing to overlook those problems. The remake is going to have to be fairly fucking impressive in order for me to overlook Mr. Woodcock.

4/5

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, dir. Danny Cannon (1998)

STEVE says:

This one sucked from the title on down. I'm wondering if "Last Summer" here refers to the events of the original summer, or the summer that followed. If it's to be taken literally, then "Last Summer" refers to the events that made up the bulk of the original film, and therefore "Still" doesn't really apply because it's a different incident altogether.

However, if it's referring to the events of the original summer, then this movie should be called I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago, which is really a mouthful. Still, "Still" doesn't work there, either because, what, you may have forgotten about being run over by four teens and left for dead? I'm thinking probably not.

Here, again, the killer does away with a bunch of people who had nothing to do with his plan for revenge, but does manage to set up an elaborate trap to kill Freddie Prinze which involves a mannequin, another rain slicker and a crashed BMW, yet decides - for reasons passing understanding - not to kill Prinze but his friend instead, and leaves Prinze on the side of the road, unconscious, to be revived and come back in the third act to save the day.

Amazing. Jaw-droppingly idiotic.

1/5

Nikki did not view.

I Know What You Did Last Summer, dir. Jim Gillespie (1997)

STEVE says:

Couple days ago we watched an episode of VH1's Super Secret Movie Rules featuring Slashers. While it tried to go through the "rules" of a slasher film - Sluts Must Die, Loners are Goners, etc. (most of which were covered in Scream, anyway) - it didn't work for me because it went movie by movie instead of rule by rule. You bring up one rule, you can talk about eight, ten movies and how each handled it. Instead, they focused on one movie and how it handled a specific rule. Kind of backwards, but no one asked me.

However, since the movies were presented in chronological order, we got to see an overview of the evolution of the Slasher flick, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974 to "the beginning of the end for the horror film" (as Joe Bob Briggs put it) with Scream in 1997 to the complete travesty that is the Scary Movie series in the present. It was kinda fascinating.

One of the movies covered in the chronology was, of course, I Know What You Did Last Summer. I saw it in the theatre, and I remembered not hating it. But once again, memory has used me hard and left me bleeding.

There's s plenty to hate about this movie. Kevin Williamson's script, for starters. It's not uber-smart like Dawson's Creek, and it's not clever like Scream. In fact, it's the opposite of both - ultra-dumb and derivative. How many times can the Killer predict where each of our Teen Stars is going to be in order to jump out at them? A lot, it seems. He can also pack a dead body and about a thousand crabs in the back of J. Love's car, and when she runs off for help, remove the body and the crabs in a matter of minutes - in broad daylight. Niiiice! There's also the matter of the Killer wearing this rain slicker all the way through the film, right up to the end where he pops out in Average Joe Wear because we're supposed to not know it's him. It should be noted, too, that Ryan Phillippe is just plain awful as the asshole boyfriend who's first instinct in a crisis is to yell incomprehensibly and grab people by the throat. Not that that's Williamson's fault, I guess, I'm just saying.

I'm left wondering what the moral of the story is, here. These four kids are involved in a hit-and-run, are stalked and killed (along with at least two people who had nothing to do with the hit-and-run whatsoever, but whatever), and don't cop to it in the end, anyway. Where's the acceptance of responsibility? I'm pretty sure that goes against one of the rules, yeah?

1.5/5

NIKKI says:

Wow, does it take me back. To the days of Dawson's Creek and Party of Five and afternoon-long talks on the phone with Deb about Dawson's Creek and Party of Five. Those were the days, too, when Love Hewitt's tight shirt was the height of contemporary sexy. Compared to 10 years later, she may as well be Amish in this.

So, that's about all this movie is needed for today. A flashback to times gone by. To new horror and Love on the music charts. The movie is not at all frightening -- it never really was. And it does very little to advance what appeared at the time to be an advancing genre. At least in a direction away from the norm pre-Scream. But as Kevin Williamson's follow-up to Scream, this needed to be far better than it was. 

I thought Williamson was up on horror, as demonstrated by Scream. But when you look at this, he appears to know very little. People die who needn't, there's very little suspense, and the killer, unlike Jason or Michael, alters his MO when it suits the mood. Faceless black slickered ghoul one minute, nice old man with no black slicker the next, for instance. It just didn't come together well enough to be any kind of memorable piece.

Still nostalgia value gives it a place in our collection. That and Love is hard to throw away. 

2/5

The Cottage, dir. Paul Andrew Williams (2008)

NIKKI says:
What a crazy little movie! Two-thirds in and I thought it had been packaged incorrectly. The blurb promised a horror movie in the Severance style, and yet here we were in a kidnap situation with crime bosses and ransoms.

And then it all changed. What was a movie about brothers trying to improve their lives through an impossibly crazy criminal act suddenly flipped into a Hills Have Eyes kinda thing where characters started losing heads via shovels.

They call it a horror comedy, but you won't laugh because there are jokes. You laugh because it makes you so damned uncomfortable. It's an absurd sort of funny, and you'll watch in near disbelief as the twists and turns play out. I'm wondering if the writer didn't get halfway through his kidnap script, get writer's block, and go, "fuck it, I'll just cut someone's head off".

It's good, it's creepy, it's scary, it's got bucket-loads of gore. I loved it. I especially enjoyed the finale. How fucking twisted?!

3/5

Lake Dead, dir. George Bessudo (2007)

STEVE says:
I'd have sworn there were Zombies in this movie. Go watch the trailer and see if you too aren't convinced it's a Zombie movie. I was thinking Zombie Lake, Oasis of the Zombies, Shock Waves, that sort of thing. Instead of Zombies, though, we were treated to a not-so-interesting tale of murder and incest that was strung together about as tightly as those candy bracelets you used to eat as a kid.

I won't bother to recount the plot, as I'd rather forget this whole exercise anyway. I'll say only that it wasn't as hilariously bad as Garden of Love, but it wasn't as boring and predictable as Prom Night, either. Somewhere in between lies Lake Dead.

Incidentally, this is from the After Dark Horrorfest of 2007. Most of the After Dark films we've seen have left us with the same impression: Nice effort, but way below the bar. It's like the Masters of Horror for beginners. I think we'll give them a miss after this.

1.5/5

NIKKI says:
Wow, what a let down. The trailer made this look like a genuinely scary movie reminiscent of classic slashers I Spit on Your Grave and Last House on the Left -- people getting ruthlessly tortured, while they shriek and cry in overgrown weeds.

It ended up just another bullshit knock-off that tried to take the horror that extra gruesome step, but ended up resorting to boring old hangings and gunshots for its kills. In a movie this silly, the kills need to be top-notch to keep me remotely interested. Garden of Love upped the ante with each kill, so did Mandy Lane. Here, though, right at the start, a girl gets hogtied -- a hollow metal tube inserted through her ankles which is then chained to a huge stone. After that, it all just gets boring. So boring, in fact, that some of the gunshots even have CGI blood-sprays.

As Steve might say: They just didn't care.

So... high points? The kids weren't all bad. The main couple was actually rather likable. Um... it was short -- that's a plus. The set-up was alright -- kids inherit a hotel from a grandfather they've never met. Their supposedly unloving father warns them against going to collect their inheritance, but they are feisty babes and will do whatever they like. So, that was okay.

Low points, though, were many -- aside form the boring kills, the suspense was terrible. The scene in which one character drops his wallet in the lake had the potential to be really scary -- he drops it right near the hogtied girl, now floating at the bottom -- but it's over quickly, and we have very little time to get even small goosebumps.

Then there are the baddies -- so cartoon, so stupid. There's a pair of raging twins going around offing everyone and they look like a couple of wrestlers wearing Fabio masks. Just horrid, with hair dangling in their faces presumably to hide the bad make-up.

And the plot veers off, beginning to make no kind of sense. How did this hotel exist out here for so long? Why did the grandfather decide to change his ways? What made them this way? Why is Fabio about to kill those kids at the end? Was it about the bloodline, or just a raging kill-need? I have no idea. But then, I was so bored I could barely pay attention after about halfway.

So, yeah -- the After Dark movies are nothing to scream about. This seemed to be a wannabe horror movie by a filmmaker who may only have watched horror movies made post-Cabin Fever. Boring, CGI-infused, all about the kills without tight plotting or subtext.

1/5

Hack!, dir. Matt Flynn (2007)

NIKKI says:
How is a film like this even allowed? It's mind-bogglingly stupid, puerile, lame, and boring. What the HELL is Winnie Cooper DOING? I can understand Adrienne Frantz -- post B&B careers are rarely that great. And Sean Kanan -- same as above, and he's only done one thing worth remembering, and if you forgot what that was, he'll remind you in this movie, only I'm probably the only one in the world to fully get it ("You're next LaRusso! I own you!"). And Gabrielle Richens isn't even an actor.

But WINNIE COOPER? Come on -- she doesn't need the paycheck from what I can ascertain. Winnie, I have lost all respect for you. And I had lots.

This is just a piece of shit, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It tries to be all cool with its movie references, but they're the kinds of references any jerkhole can make. Here's a Hack!-like movie reference:

Character A: So, Jaws was a movie.

And that's it.

Dumb.

.5/5

STEVE says:
I said as soon as this one started, "This is going to hurt." And it did.

Jesus, it did.

I kept thinking maybe it was meant to be a satire, but I couldn't entirely convince myself that it was true. Let's assume for a moment that it was, though: It even failed at that. Hack! used brute force to make you see how clever it was (the boat that carries the students to the island is called the Orca), then pushes your face in it and stands on your neck (the captain reveals that his favorite movie is Jaws). When it's done with such shameless bravado, the satirical element gets lost in the mix. (And what's the point of making Jaws references in a slasher movie, anyway?)

But Hack! wasn't clever, it wasn't funny, and it wasn't even so-bad-it's-good. It just made me want to swallow broken glass.

.5/5

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, dir. Jonathan Levine (2006)

NIKKI says:
Friday the 13th... you've got to watch a horror movie. This looked like the perfect kind of movie to celebrate the date: A teen slasher with a great title, that looked like it could actually be somewhat okay. That's the best you can hope for, I reckon, with horror movies these days: Please be somewhat okay. You're so shocked when that happen, you're all: Wow, it was somewhat okay! I'm giving it five stars!

This was... somewhat okay. The script was beat-perfect. Kills and scares all coming exactly when they needed to. So, we knew whoever was behind the movie had some sense of what they were doing. The kills were good, the effects were well done. The ending was interesting. The actors weren't bad. The only thing that let them down was poor writing -- they were all sex-obsessed, pot-smoking jerks. And while that might be a staple of these kinds of films, there's a way of writing characters like that so that they're likable. That was not the case here, and really let the film down.

Still, because the script was put together so well, I walked away respecting it. I was disappointed, though, that the final twist did not have ample set up. I can understand why certain characters acted the way they did, but I think a line here and there preceding the reveal would have helped to strengthen that aspect of the movie. I think the writers might have been so afraid of showing their hands, that they refused to give off any hints of what was going on. It worked on some levels and not on others -- which is to say, the final reveal is sensational, but we'd guessed it back at the 20-minute mark.

I'm giving this one the benefit of the doubt, though. In the sludge of offensive horror knock-offs, this one stands above as a movie that knows the rules, does its best to subvert them, and the genuinely shocks and thrills. If only its kids weren't so stupid -- I so wanted to care more when underwear girl was running from the car near the end. Still -- nice effort.

3/5

STEVE says:
Grading on a curve, as we have to these days, Mandy Lane was better than most slasher flicks. It was well-plotted and necessarily bloody without going overboard, and that scores it extra points. But looking at it in a vacuum, away from its progenitors and the rest of the copy-cats, it's really nothing special.

Mandy Lane plays with the conventions of the slasher genre, but doesn't do anything particularly interesting with them. I called the killer in the first scene, and Nikki called the twist - which was good, but not particularly surprising - about halfway through. The cast is pretty much the same group of reprehensible dickhead teens you've seen in a thousand other movies of this type (the stoner, the jock, the token black), and - as in those - you either want to see them dead, or couldn't care less, so there's no one to empathize with but the killer, who we can't really empathize with because we're not given a motive until the end.

Interesting but unexceptional, I thought Mandy Lane was going to raise the bar. As it is, it just cleared it.

3/5

April Fool's Day, dir. The Butcher Brothers (2008)

NIKKI says:
What can I say? I thought it would be fun. I thought there was no way it could be worse than the Prom Night remake. I thought we could have a few laughs at its expense.

Turns out, it was the one doing the laughing that we had wasted our limited time giving it the time of day. Oh well. I can not stop thinking that this is our job -- to watch any and all horror that crosses out paths. We are, I've decided, the International Horror Police. You think you've made a horror film? Not until we deem it so! I can no longer chide us for watching shit movies. We have to finally realise, accept and enjoy that it's JUST WHAT WE DO.

(Steve, stop shaking your head -- you know it's true and MUST ACCEPT IT!!)

I'll keep watching them, because one day -- one day -- I will be impressed. In fact, we've been impressed too much by potentially shit horror movies to stop giving them a go. We had the opportunity to turn this off at 27 minutes and we kept going. So, either we know our place in this world, or we're just gluttons for punishment.

I hate you April Fool's Day remake, and everything you stand for.

.5/5

STEVE says:
You see what happens? After watching one-too-many shitty horror flicks, we decide to swear them off, only to get sucked back in again. And again. And again.

This is another one of those modern remakes that bares only the slightest resemblance to the original, in that they share a plot element or two, and manages to suck in new and less exciting ways, a la Prom Night. The thing about April Fool's Day is, you already know the plot twist - it's all going to be a big trick in the end - so why are we bothering to sit through it? Can't we just fast-forward to that bit?

There was no excuse for watching this. (Or for making it, but that's not my watch.) No excuse. I refuse to allow my time to be wasted in this manner yet again. See, my argument isn't against watching shitty horror movies; it's against watching movies that we know are going to be shitty horror movies before we even bring them home. There's a subtle difference.

We've been surprised by a few of these low-rent horror flicks. The Dead Hate the Living, for example, was one we thought we'd just take home and make fun of for an hour and a half. Turned out to be a very funny movie that knew it wasn't high art and let the viewer know that it knew. April Fool's Day was never going to be that.

Nikki's argument that we had the opportunity to turn this off at 27 minutes holds no water with me. We had the opportunity not to watch it all.

.5/5

In 3 Tagen Bist Du Tot (aka. Dead in 3 Days), dir Andreas Prochaska (2006)

STEVE says:
One question, before I get into this: When the hell did Austria start making teen-slasher flicks? I like to think I've got my finger on the pulse of the teen-slasher flick market, but the Austrian contingent has apparently left me alone in the dark.

Makes me wonder what I've been missing all these years 'cos this one rates right up there with the best of the sub-genre.

If I'm being honest, though, it really wasn't all that original - kind of a re-telling of I Know What You Did Last Summer, but with a grisly twist - yet it felt like what that film wanted to be. Like this was the original and Last Summer was the pale American imitation. It was very tense, well-acted and beautifully shot... which already separates it from Last Summer by leaps and bounds. And our teen heroes weren't complete knobs, either, which scores the movie extra points in my book. For once I didn't want to see everyone killed in nasty ways.

The sad bit is, no one is going to rent this one because of the sub-titles. Yet shite the likes of Saw IV and Hostel 2 is leaping off the fucking shelves. Too bad.

Apparently there's a sequel on the way. Normally, that would bother me. But here, Prochaska is returning - not only as director, but also as writer this time around - as well as Sabrina Reiter as Nina, Julia Rosa Stöckl as Mona and Andreas Kiendl as Officer Kogler. I don't know how they're going to make it work - as in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel seems as implausible as it is inadvisable - but I, for one, am very interested to see what happens next.

4/5

NIKKI says:
We were supposed to watch a Spanish movie called Rec but the version we had didn't have any subtitles. Man, were we pissed. So, at was nearly midnight, my holidays are over (sigh) and we needed something stat -- somehow a Masters of Horror episode just doesn't feel, to me, like our daily movie quota filled.

I scrabbled through the preview tapes looking for something 80 minutes long that screamed HORROR and came up with Dead in 3 Days. We fretted, but went with it. Lately, the second-thought movies have been some of the best.

This was really good. We enjoyed it right from the start. The scenes with the kids finishing school were genuinely funny, and the classic slasher set-ups were in place -- happy kids who have no idea what's coming to them, a sneaky nerdy kid who seems to dislike them, and a scene involving roadkill that shifts our mood from jovial to wary. Stuff can turn on a dime. Ah, horror movies. How can you not love the art?

And then the kids start getting weird calls, and start disappearing, and it's all so tense and interesting. The film hits every mark. It throws us red herrings then proves they can't be responsible. It reveals possible reasons behind the slaughter at mid-point and by the middle of the movie, everything that needs to be set up is set up and so we're not scratching our heads, but nodding along because it makes perfect (inevitable) sense. And it reveals it's basic truth right at the very end, which is the classic tying of loose moral ends.

This is a smart, stylish horror movie that knows what it's doing. That's all we ask for in horror, right?

4/5

Prom Night, dir. Nelson McCormick (2008)

NIKKI says:
Free tickets. And even that didn't make me feel any better about seeing this pile of utter monkey-drivel. It was stupid, meaningless, and made no sense whatsoever.

So, there's a school teacher obsessed with the Main Girl. He loves her and kills her family who want to keep him away from her. Then he gets insanity, gets locked up, then he escapes. He comes to get Main Girl on the night of her prom. He manages to get into the same hotel in which the prom is being held and just goes about killing everyone around the place instead of heading straight for her, which he has many opportunities to do.

Why kill her friends? They weren't keeping him from her, standing in her way, or anything. All the time he spent chasing Big Boob Blue Dress Girl in the gym area, he could have been out finding his lady-love. Was her death so necessary?

The police investigation section of the film was just hilarious. They're trying to catch a guy who is hiding in the hotel. So what do they do? Send out a major red alert and evacuate everyone from the building. Not exactly stealthy police work, really.

The most embarrassing part of that? The Main Cop asks specifically for the locations of all exits in the building. There's a 30 second scene about him asking for those things. Every other movie would just have the guy say, "Exits are manned!" I'd believe that. Instead, they take the time to make it all known, and then after the evacuation, they can't find Main Girl. Well, all the exits are manned, the cop says. BUT NO ONE THOUGHT TO PLACE A COP AT HER HOTEL ROOM!

Oh my god. They're all, where's Main Girl? And some other guy goes, "She went back up to the room." And the cops and everyone just look at each other and go, "Of course!" Well, where the fuck else would she be, you idiots!?

And then the bad guy gets away anyway, kills more people, including Main Girl's boyfriend, in her room, right near where she is in the bathroom, with people vigilant all over the house, knifed in the throat without making a sound.

Oh god, this was just TORTURE.

1/5 (The added half-point ONLY because Big Boob Blue Dress Girl was nice to look at.)

STEVE says:
John Huston once said, "Don’t remake good movies, remake bad ones!"

A good point there. After all, he was the director of the third, definitive and - pray gods - the final version of The Maltese Falcon. But good points always get lost somewhere between the Hollywood sign and the dollar sign, and here we are today, threatened with unnecessary remakes of The Thing, Fame and The Birds, still feeling the sting of Rob Zombie's Halloween and reeling from the news of a Friday the 13th remake that eschews Mrs. Voorhees as the killer and moves straight on to Jason.

But then here comes Prom Night. It seems someone has taken Mr. Huston's philosophy to heart.

We hated the original Prom Night. Boring and predictable, not even one of the true classics like Halloween and Friday the 13th, but one of the many wannabes that rode their bloody wave of success all the way to the bank. From the ridiculous opening to the obvious conclusion, we sat through every disco-tinged moment, rolling our eyes, sighing, and crying Get On With It! It seemed like an excellent candidate for a remake. Surely this new one had to be an improvement.

Not so.

Of course my expectations weren't that high, and to say they plummeted would be a gross exaggeration, but they dropped as far as they could when I saw the name Johnathon Schaech in the opening credits - he of the abysmal The Foresaken and the curiously pointless 8MM 2. (I would later look up the film's writer, J.S. Cardone, and find that he directed both of those crimes against humanity, and that he and director McCormick will next be tackling - and, one assumes, beating to death - The Stepfather.) So once again, we're sitting there from ridiculous opening to obvious conclusion, rolling our eyes, sighing, and crying Get On With It! That is, when Dana Davis wasn't on screen. I found her very distracting. I'm talking Rosario Dawson in Josie and the Pussycats distracting. That blue dress, man...

And speaking of which - I know I mentioned this before in my Pumpkin Karver review, and I don't want to sound like one of those guys, you know, whose shelves are lined with the ever-popular Girls with Low Self-Esteem DVDs or anything, but - where's the fucking nudity? I was brought up in the 80s, dammit! Blood and sex went together like Hockey Mask and Machete back then. It was the age of gratuitous violence and gore in horror movies and, yes, that included people getting killed for no other reason than having sex. That was the very basic formula for slasher films, their raison d'être, if you will - or if you won't! But Mssrs. McCormick and Cardone apparently felt that formula was no longer relevant and decided instead to imply the slashing - seriously, there was more blood in Knocked Up than there was in Prom Night - and cut the carnality before it even gets started.

It's because of this lame-ass, ball-less, soul-less modern horror that we now have to contend with shite from the exact opposite end of the spectrum, shite like Saw and Hostel, and this new sub-genre of torture porn or "gornography" as someone so wittily called it. If horror hadn't been watered down since the early 90s, there would have been no such backlash, and we'd still have some decent R-rated (but admittedly probably still b-grade) horror.

Granted, Prom Night sucked for so many other reasons - poor plotting, lame character development, expository dialog, impossibly stupid police, etc. - but apart from all this, I maintain that it would have sucked anyway because PG-13 horror Does Not Work.

So it seems that Mr. Huston's philosophy only extends so far. Perhaps the next remake of Prom Night will get it right.

.5/5 (I can't even give it an extra .5 for Dana Davis - the .5 I'm giving it is for Dana Davis.)

Psycho Beach Party, dir. Robert Lee King (2000)

NIKKI says:
We're a good audience for this kind of movie. We're fans of crappy old horror films, and I don't think either of us would go past a bit of Beach Blanket Bingo on a Sunday afternoon. This movie pairs those concepts to create an overly satirical comedy that ends up feeling like a funny idea stretched to movie-length with no real purpose apart from reminding us how silly these films were.

We've got a killer, a girl with a split personality, surfers, and babes. Someone is knocking off people who lack in perfection -- a girl in a wheelchair, a guy with one testicle. There's no real development of this murder spree, and for much of the film we're led to believe the split-personality is involved. The reveal about who's doing what and why negates much of the story, and is really kind of boring.

There's lots of file footage and green screen -- stuff that's funny the first time we see it. There's lots of '50s lingo, but that was funnier in The Brady Bunch Movie and other films that understood that this kind of over-the-top satire still requires a decent plot.

I didn't enjoy this one much at all. But, really, how do you send-up something already inherently silly?

1.5/5

STEVE says:
I'm trying to imagine why - apart from the sheer absurdity of it, which I can respect on some level - someone would merge the Beach Movie and the Slasher Flick. Moreover, why make that movie a parody? Both genres have been parodied to death - Beach Movies by stuff like Back to the Beach and endless pop culture references, and Slasher Flicks by the Scary Movie franchise and by the fact that they've so over-stayed their welcome that their sequels have become parodies in themselves - so putting them together to create a hybrid Beach-Slasher parody seems like an exercise in redundancy.

Half a point to Lauren Ambrose for playing a range of characters. She'd get a whole point had any of these characters been more than a stereotype or caricature, but then that's all the movie really called for from anyone.

I maintain that clever, witty satire is not a thing of the past - though movies like Date Movie, Epic Movie, Scary Movie, and Meet the Spartans (all of which feature Carmen Electra - is that a rule, now?) would lead you to believe otherwise. But the material has to be relevant in order to work. Psycho Beach Party might have been clever and witty had it been written in the late 50s, but the material is so out of date now, there's no way it could work. Why do you think South Park doesn't riff on the Truman administration?

1.5/5

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, dir. Tobe Hooper (1986)

STEVE says:
Here's how it went down: Claude's over to watch a movie. Exactly what movie has yet to be decided, but he's standing there, looking at our collection, tossing titles out, trying them on for size, but nothing seemed to fit. Finally, he goes, "What's something you haven't seen in a while?"

Without even thinking, I go, "Texas Chain Saw Massacre", and Claude goes, "Okay, let's do it."

Now, I've been trying to get him to watch TCM for a year and a half, almost, and he's always vetoed it. He's not that into horror movies, so whether he went with it tonight just to shut me up, or generally wanted to try something out-of-the-ordinary, I don't know. Either way, I saw this sudden reversal as a clear opening for a TCM double-feature.

I gotta say, I have always loved this movie. My feelings about the first one aside, TCM2 has always been kind of a guilty pleasure for me. It's more of a carnival ride than a horror movie, completely unlike its predecessor in both tone and style. Where the original TCM was realistic, grim and near humorless, TCM2 is campy, brightly coloured and just plain frikkin' hilarious - due in large part to Bill Moseley's "Chop Top".

The first movie went over okay. Claude said later that he didn't hate it as much as he expected to, and that's more than I'd expected. But it's always this second movie that I'm nervous about showing people. It's so bizarre, and people usually fail to see the humour in it, that what I get in the end are lots of sideways glances. And it was no different this time, though likely because much of the politically satirical elements (Reaganomics, etc.) got lost in the translation, making it near-impossible for a 20-something Australian to make anything of them. I will say, though, that it warmed my heart to see Claude jump in his seat when Leatherface storms out of the record vault after Stretch. If nothing else, it woke him up.

Look, it's not a great movie, and it's never going to attain anywhere near the level of popularity or importance of the original, but TCM2, though the only direct sequel, isn't necessarily reliant on the first film, and can just as easily be watched by itself as a stand-alone movie. I think it's a classic in its own right, and it definitely deserves more attention than it generally gets.

3/5

Nikki did not view.