Tag Archives: Horror

Review: The Hills Have Eyes (dir. by Alexandre Aja)

Posted on by Arleigh

Many people have issues about remakes and reboots. They see it as unnecessary and a proof that the film industry has run out of ideas. I can’t say that either points have no validity to them, but I disagree with both.While all genres of film have had it’s share of remakes and reboots its the horror section of the film aisle which has seen the most. This shouldn’t come as a shock since horror has always been ripe for remakes. The stories in horror films have always been quite simple and producers take advantage of this by remaking them for a new generation. Take the simple set-up, change the time and setting with a new cast of cheap, unknown actors and you got yourself a horror flick which should make back its budget and make its filmmakers a profit.

While most horror remakes usually range from average to truly dreadful there comes a time when one comes out of the horror remake heap to actually show promise and quality not seen in its remake brethren. One such film is in the Alexandre Aja directed and Wes Craven produced The Hills Have Eyes. Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes is the rare horror remake in that its more than a match to Wes Craven’s original and, at times, surpasses it.

Alexandre Aja first burst onto the horror-cinema scene with his ambitious and grisly homage to grindhouse horror: Haute Tension. Haute Tension was one nasty piece of horror filmmaking which brought to mind 70’s and early 80’s horror exploitation and grindhouse mentality. Aja’s directorial debut was a no-hold-s-barred punch and kick to the stomach that was overtly violent and sublimely painful for the audience to watch. Aja was soon tapped by Wes Craven to lead the remake project of his own The Hills Have Eyes and to Aja’s growing reputation as a rising star of horror, he grew as a filmmaker and more than earned this reputation.

Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes follows pretty much the very same story and characters as the original. This remake has abit more of a political sense to its storytelling in that it doesn’t just pit the basic premise of civilized humans versus the primal inbred, mutant hill dweller, but also the different demographics of red state versus blue state. This theme was hammered through to the audience through the subsurface conflict between Big Bob Carter’s (well-played by industry veteran Ted Levine) red state gung-ho ex-detective and his son-in-law Doug’s (X2‘s Aaron Stafford) pacifist mentality. I think this new wrinkle in the original’s sparse and tight story was unnecessary and unsubtly done. I really didn’t want to know what political leanings and motivations the Carter family members followed. What I did care about was how they would react to the outside forces that was soon to menace and attack them.

The first half of the film was very deliberate in its set-up as it slowly built up the tension and dread as the Carter family’s journey through a supposedly short-cut through the desert put them closer and closer to the dangerous people who dwelt amongst the hills bordering the desert road. Once the family becomes stranded in the middle of nowhere the fun begins for horror-aficionados. For those who have seen the original this remake doesn’t deviate from the main story. The hill people who, up until now have only been glimpsed through quick shadowy movements across the screen, were the true cause of the family’s predicament attack in a brutal and grisly fashion. None of the Carter family members were spared from this attack. From Big Bob Carter, his wife Ethel, their three children, son-in-law and young granddaughter they all suffer in one form or another. The night attack on the camper is the main highlight of the film and shows that Aja hasn’t lost his touch for creating a horror setpiece that doesn’t hold back. From the brutal rape of the Carter’s youngest daughter Brenda to the sudden deaths of several Carter family members. This sequence was both fast-paced and chaotic in nature. It also helped push the definition of what constitute a very hard R-rating. Just like Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects and Roth’s Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes pushed the limits and boundaries of what the MPAA has allowed so far in terms of on-screen violence when it was first released in 2006. I’m very surprised that some of the violence and deaths in this film made the final cut. This film definitely brings back the 70’s style horror.

The cast for this remake was one high point that the original didn’t have. Where Craven had a very inexperienced cast for the original film. Aja had the luxury of a bigger budget to hire a more competent and able group of actors. A cast that was led by Ted Levine who shined in his role as the patriarch of the civilized Carters. Kathleen Quinlan as the mother of the bunch soldiers on even though its almost predestined in films such as this that she would be one of the doomed. The two daughters as played by Vinessa Shaw and Lost’s Emilie De Ravin were quite good in roles that involved some very graphic rape sequences. Much kudos must go to De Ravin for having to perform through her scene during the trailer-camper attack. But the two actors who excelled in the film has to be pacifist turned avenging angel Doug as played by Aaron Stafford. We see in his character Doug the lengths a civilized human being would go through to survive and protect those he cares for. Even if this means resorting to becoming more brutal and primal than the inbred, mutant hill dwellers. It’s in Doug’s character where the basic premise of the clash of the modern with the primitive comes close to matching the same theme in the original. To a smaller degree this was also echoed in the Carter’s teenage son Bobby. Dan Byrd of Entourage plays Bobby Carter and its in him we see the level-headedness of the family. Despite all the horror and carnage he has seen the hill dwellers have inflicted on his family, Bobby remains somewhat calm and even-keeled to protect what is left of his family. The only drawback as to the cast itself was that the opposing family seemed to have been shortchanged. In the original we actually got to understand some of the motivations that drove the hill dwellers to prey on unsuspecting travelers through their area. In this remake the hill dwellers seem more like superhuman monsters and boogeymen. It didn’t bother me as much, but then it also lessened the impact of the story’s basic premise of civilization versus primitives.

Lastly, the look of the film helps add to the grindhouse nature of Aja’s remake. The film has an oversaturated look and feel that took advantage of the desert location and the high-sun overhead. This oversaturation of the film’s look also lends some credence to its grindhouse sensibilities. It looked, felt and acted like something made during the late 70’s and early 80’s. For most fans of horror it would really come down to the special-effects used to show the death and violence’s impact on the audience. Once again, Greg Nicotero and his crew at KNB EFX house show that they’re the premiere effects house. The make-up used to show the mutant effects on the survivors of the original inhabitants of the hills was excellently done. The same goes for the gags used to show the many brutal and messy deaths of both families.

There’s no denying that The Hills Have Eyes was all about pain when boiled down to its most basic denominator. This film is all about pushing the boundaries and piling on violence upon violence. The Hills Have Eyes is not a film that tells us violence solves nothing. Here it does solve the problem for the Carter clan and is also the only avenue of survival of the remaining Carters. The same goes for the nuclear survivors and their offspring who stayed in the irradiated zones that was their home. This film is all about survival and the levels and heights individuals would take to achieve it.

The Hills Have Eyes might not be the original second helping some have expected from Aja after his brilliant, if somewhat flawed first major film with Haute Tension, but it does show his growth as a filmmaker and his clean grasp of what makes horror cinema truly terrifying and uncomfortable. Two ingredients that makes for making a genre exploitation fare into something of a classic. I’m sure that outside of the horror-aficionado circles this film will either be met with indifference or disgust, but for those who revel in this type of filmmaking then it’s a glorious continuation of the grindhouse horror revival that began with Aja’s own Haute Tension, continued by Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, Roth’s Hostel  and continues to live each and every year with the many direct-to-video releases of cheap, but very good horror films. It truly is a great time to be a fan of horror and Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes more than holds its own against Craven’s original.

Review: Piranha 3-D (directed by Alexandre Aja)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Yesterday, I had two concerns about going to see the new horror film, Piranha 3-D.

First off, I know that 3-D has been hailed as “the future of movies” and that apparently, Webster’s is considering whether to recognize 3Dgasm (which is the response that certain film goers have to 3-D regardless of whether the movie itself is actually good or if it’s just Avatar) for inclusion in the next edition of the dictionary.  However, 3-D often makes me sick to my stomach and I mean that literally.  3-D makes me feel car sick.  Considering that I love movies, if 3-D is the “future” than I’m probably being punished for something.  That’s right.  Avatar was just a result of my bad karma. 

As for the second concern, I can’t swim and I am terrified of being underwater.  Hanging onto the edge while wading in the shallow side of my uncle’s swimming pool is about as submerged as I can get without having a major freak out.  It’s not just drowning that scares me.   When I was 17, my family spent the summer in Hawaii and my sisters (being the meanies that they are) had a lot of fun with the fact that I’d spend hours lying out on the beach but I refused to even step into the ocean.  It made sense to me.  There were jellyfish and sharks and those weird little black coil things just floating around in the ocean.  Thanks to seeing Piranha 3-D, I now know that there are also cute little fish that will eat you.

I dealt with my fear of the water by asking my sister Erin (who can actually swim because she’s cool and I’m not) to see the movie with me and to keep me calm if I started to have a panic attack.  She agreed and she did an admirable job.  She also helped me deal with my fear of 3-D when, during the coming attractions, she said, “Why don’t you take a Dramamine?”  Now, according to Erin, the only reason she said this was because apparently I was “going on and on” about it.  That’s not how I remember it but I just happened to have some Dramamine in my purse and I quickly popped a few.

If you’ve ever taken Dramamine then you know the way that it works is by basically kicking your ass until you pass out for a few hours.  (I occasionally resort to using it whenever I’m getting hit with insomnia.)  Within minutes of taking it, the Dramamine was saying, “Sleep, Lisa…”  “But I want to see the movie,” I replied.  “That wasn’t a request,” the pill responded.  “Dammit, will you two shut up!?” Erin snapped.  (That may have not actually happened.) 

The point of all this is that I stayed awake through the entire movie, despite having taken the most powerful sleeping pill in existence.  True, my mind did go a little bit goofy (Erin says I was “babbling” through the entire film) but it never shut down.  That’s the type of movie Piranha 3-D is.  The story moves so quickly and the mayhem is so over-the-top and excessive that the brain never gets a chance to relax enough to check out.

Piranha 3-D begins with an earthquake in Arizona.  The earthquake opens up a passageway to an underground lake.  As look would have it, the underground lake is full of a bunch of prehistoric piranha.  These piranha quickly move up to an above-ground lake where they promptly eat Richard Dreyfuss.  Having gotten a taste of Dreyfuss, they apparently decide to eat every other human being they come across and who can blame them?

Actually, the bloody and graphic demise of Richard Dreyfuss was the first clue I had that this film was going to work.  Needless to say, Dreyfuss is the last surviving star of the original killer fish movie, Jaws.  In Jaws, Dreyfuss is plays a character named Matt Hooper.  In Piranha, he’s just named Matt.  By introducing him and then promptly killing him off, Piranha lets us know that it understands the legacy of previous horror blockbusters (like Jaws) but that it has no intention of respecting it.  In other words, this scene lets us know early on that the film is on the side of the fish.

Anyway, it turns out that its spring break and as a result, Lake Victoria, Arizona is full of stupid, drunken college students who are determined to hang out in the water no matter how many people get eaten.  Sheriff Julie Forrester (Elisabeth Shue) struggles to maintain order on the streets with the help of her loyal deputy (a very likeable Ving Rhames).  Julie is also a single mother and, the morning after ol’ Richard Dreyfuss gets devoured, her oldest son Jake (Steven R. McQueen, grandson of the star of Enemy of the People) blows off his baby-sitting duties and agrees to help sleazy Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell) film the latest installment of Girls Gone Wild on the lake.  Sleazy, speedo-clad Derrick (and the fact that O’Connell looks really good in it doesn’t make that red speedo any less ludicrous) attempts to initiate Kelly (Jessica Szhor), the “good” girl who Jake likes into the world of straight-to-video, jailbait porn.  Kelly, by the way, kinda has a boyfriend, a guy named Todd who will eventually end up killing a lot of people with a motorboat.  Even before this, we know he’s a bad guy because he’s named Todd.  Nobody named Todd or Tad is ever good in a horror movie.

Director Alexandre Aja doesn’t take much time introducing his cast of characters and he takes even less time in letting the fish devour them.  So, no, the characters aren’t exactly all that developed.  But it doesn’t matter really.  With what little they have to work with, the cast works wonders.  They know exactly what type of film that they’re in and they know why they are there and they embrace their roles as piranha fodder with an impressive sense of commitment.  Best of all is O’Connell who turns sleazy, coke-fueled egomania into some sort of art form.

The real star of the film, of course, is director Alexandra Aja who takes a mainstream genre piece and who, much like his fellow French director, Jean Rollin, transforms it into a piece of pure grindhouse exploitation.  Aja may use the clichés of the genre but he never blindly embraces them.  Instead, he uses them to comment on both the genre and the audiences expectations of what those cliches mean.  Aja takes everything we’ve come to expect — the blood and gore, the standard plot device of Shue’s children being stranded out on the lake, and the sudden death of nameless extras — and he then pushes them just a little further than the audience is expecting,  As a result, he not only comments on those expectations but he forces the audience to question them as well.

This is never more apparent than in the film’s climatic piranha attack.  This is when the piranha finally get around to attacking all of the swimmers at once.  This is the scene that we all know is coming and that we’ve all been expecting and Aja does not disappoint.  Things start out as you might expect.  Close-up of bikinis.  Drunk idiots in the water.  A wet t-shirt contest.  Rhamas and Shue come up in a boat and start yelling, “Everybody out of the water!”  Because they’re a bunch of drunk dumbfugs, everyone responds by jumping into the water.  Cut to an ominous piranha point-of-view shot.  Suddenly, one woman — floating out in an inntertube — shouts, “Something bit me!”  And suddenly, all Hell breaks loose.

This is the scene you knew was coming and you’ve seen it a hundred times before.  What makes it memorable here is just how far director Aja takes things.  These fish don’t just bite their victims.  They literally devour them while the camera lingers over every piece of flesh that floats through the ocean.  As everyone struggles to get out of the water, they get their skulls split open by passing boats.  In the background, we see various feet, hands, and other body parts randomly floating in the water.  One older man pulls his friend’s torso onto the beach and cradles it while screaming, “I love you, man!  I love you!”  As Shue tries to pull people out of the water, we see a teenager that’s already on the boat start to shake as his life expires.  As I mentioned before, Todd tries to escape by forcing his motorboat through the crowd of terrified swimmers and graphically dismembers a lot of people in the process.  It’s an incredibly graphic sequence, one that starts out as fun but which just keeps going and going,  Director Aja understands that the audiences is expecting — probably even looking forward to — seeing a little blood.  So, instead he assaults us with a lot of blood and he does so in such a way that the audience is forced to question why a little blood is fun but a lot of blood is disturbing.  It’s as if Aja is saying, “You wanted to see people die, well — here they are, dead.  You feel better now?”

As for the 3-D, Aja proves himself to be one of the few filmmakers to understand that 3-D is not the future of movies.  It’s just another gimmick to be exploited and exploit it he does.  However, he does so brilliantly and he is so shameless about it that watching Piranha 3-D simply serves to reiterate just how silly the whole 3-D craze really is.  Every short is a tracking shot.  The CGI piranha float across the screen, stopping momentarily to stare straight out at the audience and almost wink.  The men in the audience seemed to be especially happy about all the boobs that literally seem to swing out of the screen and across the theater but they were a bit less enthused when a disembodied penis came floating out of the screen.  By not only fully embracing the ludicrous possibilities of 3-D but by also doing so without any shamefaced attempts to justify its use, Piranha 3-D is perhaps the greatest 3-D movie ever made.

Scenes I Love: Two Orphan Vampires

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Sometimes, I feel that there are only two types of people in the world.  There’s the minority who appreciate the dreamlike atmosphere and sensual obsessions that dominate the vampire films of French director (and genius) Jean Rollin.

And then there’s the majority who don’t.  We refer to this majority as being “the idiots.”

As for me, Jean Rollin is one of my favorite directors.  I’ve previously reviewed his low-budget masterpiece, Night of the Hunted, on this site.  I hope, in the future, to review even more of his films.

For now, I’d just like to share a scene from one of his later films, the hauntingly beautiful and elegiac Two Orphan Vampires. 

Rollin is a director best known for spending the past five decades making films in which he continually and obsessively returns to a few key themes: the importance of memory, a nostalgia for the innocence of youth mixed with the knowledge that youthful innocence could also be destructive, a fascination with the beach, an obvious love of architecture (Rollin films old castles the way that an American director might film an action sequence), and — most notoriously — the use of two female protagonists who are usually portrayed as possessing a very strong, sister-like bond even though it’s rare that they actually are blood-related. 

A good deal of Rollin’s current following comes from men who feel that there’s an erotic element to Rollin’s portrayal of female friendship.  And to an extent, they’re right.  But to an even greater extent, it doesn’t matter.  Regardless of why the relationships between Rollin’s protagonists exists, the important thing is that they are portrayed as sharing an unbreakable bond.  Whether they’re linked by lust, friendship, or just memory, Rollin’s women are bonded by a very true, very real love and that’s what makes his movies special to me.

This is what the scene below is all about.  The two orphan vampires of the title are two teenage sisters.  During the day, they are blind but when the sun goes down, they can not only see but they become vampires as well.  Two Orphan Vampires is a surprisingly sad and haunting look at their attempts to survive in a world that has no place for them.  In the scene below, after failing in several attempts to get the blood they need to continue to live, each sister resorts to drinking the blood of the other.  To me, every thing that Rollin had directed before was leading up to this scene.

(This scene is also prototypical Rollin in that the budget is obviously low, the actors are more than adequate but, at the same time, are obviously not professionals, and the English dubbing is poorly done.  And yet the scene itself — especially when seen in the larger context of both the entire film and Rollin’s movies as a whole — is actually more sincere and memorable than the majority of what is produced by the mainstream.  In short, this is pure Rollin in that you either get it or you don’t.)

 

A Quickie With Lisa Marie: Holocaust 2000 (dir. by Alberto De Martino)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Earlier this morning, while suffering from an annoyingly persistent case of insomnia, I decided to spend 2 hours watching a classic Italian exploitation film, Alberto De Martino’s oddly effective Omen rip-off, Holocaust 2000.

In Holocaust 2000, Kirk Douglas plays a businessman who wants to build a gigantic nuclear power plant in the Middle East.  There are a few problems with this plan.  First off, the site that Douglas selects just happens to be right next to a cave that is full of religious artifacts.  Secondly, there’s a handful of angry environmentalists picketing his London office.  And, perhaps the biggest problem, Douglas’ son happens to be the Antichrist.  This fact is obvious to the viewer because not only is his son named Angel (yes, we’re in the land of irony) but he also looks and acts nothing like Douglas.  Not only does Angel have a noticeably weak chin (no cleft to be seen at all) and speak with a rather posh accent but he’s also so extremely English that he’s even played by an actor named Simon Ward.

In other words, the viewer is pretty much in on the game from the beginning.  What makes the movie work is that director De Martino understands that everyone’s going to know that Angel’s the antichrist from the minute he first appears so, as opposed to the Omen films, he doesn’t waste a lot of time playing any “is-he-or-isn’t-he” games.  Instead, in the great tradition of Italian exploitation, De Martino jumps straight into the apocalypse without worrying about things like narrative cohesion and the end result is an enjoyably chaotic film that rarely makes sense but is never boring.  Whereas the Omen films are almost tedious in their attempts to provide theological justification for all the blood that’s spilled on-screen, Holocaust 2000 has a cheerful, let’s-make-it-up-as-we-go-along feel to it that, at times, almost makes the whole thing feel like some long lost Lucio Fulci film.

Holocaust 2000 is probably best known for two sequences.  The first features a helicopter blade very graphically chopping off the top of a man’s head.  If seeing the original Dawn of the Dead made me nervous around helicopters, seeing Holocaust 2000 has ensured that I will never ever step anywhere near one of those things.  Seriously, I’ve seen a lot of gore over the past few years but the decapitation scene in this movie …. well, perhaps it’s best to just shudder and move on.  (For the record, Holocaust 2000 came out before Dawn of the Dead so the helicopter decapitation scene here was not stolen from that film.  If anything, it was simply a more graphic version of David Warner losing his head in the Omen.)

The second sequence is a scene in which a very nude Kirk Douglas (who, it must be admitted, looked a lot better at 61 than most 20 year-olds do today) has a nightmare in which he watches the world literally come to an end.  Set to Ennio Morricone’s intense and memorable score, this sequence manages to be surreal, disturbing, and entertaining all at the same time.  It epitomizes everything that makes Holocaust 2000 such a surprisingly effective work of pure cinematic exploitation.

Like many of the great Italian exploitation films, Holocaust 2000 was released under several titles.  It is currently available on DVD under the title Rain of Fire and a big bleh to Lionsgate for choosing to go with such a boring name.  Admittedly, I can see their logic.  Though the movie was first released in theaters in 1977, it took 31 years for it to show up on DVD.  During that time, 2000 came and went and the world didn’t end (or maybe it did and the last 10 years have just been an extended hallucination, the choice is yours).  But still, Rain of Fire sounds like a substandard country song about a nasty divorce that ends in murder.  On the other hand, a title like Holocaust 2000 — nakedly exploitive and borderline offensive — represents everything that we’ve come to so love about Italian exploitation films.

Film Review: Drag Me To Hell (directed by Sam Raimi)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

There are exactly two things that keep Sam Raimi’s otherwise entertaining 2009 horror romp Drag Me To Hell from being a classic.

The first is that, about halfway through the movie, Alison Lohman murders her pet kitten.  Admittedly, Lohman’s character is trying to thwart a gypsy curse at the time and the action does show just how terrified she’s become.  But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a cute kitten and quite frankly, I’m getting sick of seeing cats being killed in horror films.  There’s something truly hypocritical about how far most filmmakers are willing to go to assure an audience that a dog has somehow survived the end of the world while cats are continually killed on-screen without a second thought.

Am I saying that the film would have been better is Lohman had murdered a cute puppy instead?  Yes, I am.  At least that would have been unexpected.  That would have let the audience know that all the rules no longer applied.  Quite frankly, whenever you see a cat in a horror film, you know that cat is going to end up either pinned to a door or hanging in the closet.  Dogs, however, always make it to the end.

I imagine this is because there’s more “dog people” than “cat people” in the world.  People — especially men of a certain age — just love dogs and I’ve never really understood why.  I guess there’s a charm to a loud, smelly, slobbering beast eating its own fecal matter that I’ve never been able to pick up on.

The second thing that keeps Drag Me To Hell from reaching classic status is the fact that Bruce Campbell is nowhere to be found, making this the 1st Raimi film not to feature Bruce in at least a cameo.  Regardless of how well-made or entertaining the movie may have been, I sat through the entire thing waiting for Bruce to show up and, when he didn’t, it was hard not to feel as if perhaps an era in filmmaking had come to an end.

However, despite these two issues, Drag Me To Hell is probably one of the best horror movies to have been released in the past few years.  If nothing else, it proves that, even after directing three Spiderman films, Raimi is still a B-movie director at heart and a brilliant one at that.

In Drag Me To Hell, Alison Lohman plays Christine, a young bank loan officer who, attempting to impress her boss and win a promotion, refuses to give a loan to a decrepit old gypsy woman (played, wonderfully, by Lorna Raver as the type of grotesque character who could only appear in a Raimi film).  The gypsy woman responds by promptly dying but before doing so, she puts a curse on Christine.  In three days, Christine will be dragged to Hell.

What makes this is so effective is that Raimi, as opposed to a less adventurous director, sets the film up to suggest that perhaps Christine deserves to be dragged to Hell.  As disgusting as the old woman is, she clearly doesn’t deserve to be treated as badly as she is by Christine and Christine herself (even before she kills that poor kitten) is a bit of a fake, a former “fat girl” who, when she lets her guard down, reverts back to a country hick accent that she’s obviously spent a lot of time trying to lose. 

Lohman does an excellent job in the lead role, giving a likeable performance as an unlikeable character.  Speaking as a former country girl who still occasionally feels a twinge of shame when I hear myself say “git” instead of “get,” one of my pet peeves is when an actor or actress trots out an unconvincing, patronizing attempt at a rural accent.  However, Lohman captures the accent perfectly and, unlike most actors who try to play country, never allows her performance to just be about doing dialect.  Instead, both she and Raimi show how Christine’s insecurities lead to her actions without ever suggesting that they excuse them.

Though absence of Bruce Campbell is painfully obvious, Raimi still surrounds Lohman with a very strong supporting cast who all bring just the right amount of B-movie seriousness to their roles.  As Raver’s daughter, Bojana Novakovic appears in one the film’s best scenes in which she tauntingly explains the cure to Lohman.  Dileep Rao (who would be wasted later that year in Avatar) steals almost every scene he’s in as a friendly psychic who tries to help Lohman.  Lohman’s boyfriend is played by Justin Long (of the “I’m a Mac” fame) and he’s perfect as a somewhat nerdy guy who, quite frankly, seems like he might be a little bit too nice for his own good.  Plus, the film’s final scene proves that Long can shed a tear with the best of them.  Bruce Campbell would have been ideally cast as Lohman’s boss but, in Campbell’s absence, David Paymer fills the role well enough.

When Drag Me To Hell was first released in 2009, the majority of reviews described it as being an entertaining throwback to the old school horror films of the 50s and 60s.  And, in many ways, this is a totally correct assessment.  What wasn’t often mentioned was that Drag Me To Hell is one of the very few Hollywood horror films to capture the chaotic spirit of H.P. Lovecraft.  Countless filmmakers have attempted to bring Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos to the screen and they’ve failed because they could never translate to the screen Lovecraft’s theme of mankind as a bunch of powerless pawns, existing and dying at the whims of a bunch of “demons” whose motivations could never be understood or questioned.  Though Drag Me To Hell is not based on Lovecraft’s work, it perfectly captures the feeling of helplessness in the face of metaphysical chaos that runs through Lovecraft’s best stories.  As the movie progresses, it becomes apparent that Christine isn’t going to be dragged to Hell so much because of the gypsy curse as much as just because the movie’s demon has decided to drag her to Hell.  It’s this theme (and the way that Raimi relentlessly develops it) that takes Drag Me To Hell to a whole other level and which makes its final scene so powerful and effective.

When first released, Drag Me To Hell’s special effects were criticized by some and it is true that the film’s demon, when he does show up, is an obvious CGI creation but who cares?  If anything, the obvious fakeness of the demon adds to the film’s exploitation charm (though the demon is probably another role that Bruce Campbell could have done wonders with).  If you want perfect CGI devoid of subtext or originality, Avatar’s out on DVD.  Me, I’ll take Drag Me To Hell any day.

Paranormal Activity 2: Too Scary For Texas

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

According to Variety, Cinemark has pulled the trailer for Paranormal Activity 2 from several theaters in my homestate of Texas because, apparently, filmgoers (the majority of whom were apparently in the theater to see Twilight: Eclipse) complained that it was too frightening.

Uhmmm….right.

I’ve seen the trailer for Paranormal Activity 2 online and, to be honest, the scariest thing about it is that it confirms that a sequel was actually made to Paranormal Activity One. 

(As a sidenote, the PA 2 trailer recycles the old footage of viewers supposedly jumping in fright while watching the first film.  I always wondered just who exactly these idiots were and whether or not they’d ever actually seen a movie before.)

This whole thing seems to be an old-fashioned publicity stunt designed to create word-of-mouth among the type of people who probably think that the obnoxious filmmakers in Cannibal Holocaust actually were eaten by cannibals at the end of the movie.

It’s especially interesting that these complaints supposedly came from Texas.  I suppose that’s going to be the new advertising angle — Paranormal Activity 2: The Movie So Scary That Even Texans Are Afraid To Watch.  I imagine that now filmgoers are supposed to say, “Wow, it’s got to be scary!  I mean, we expect that sort of cowardly behavior from those new age hippies in Vermont but these are cowboys here!”

(By the way, I’m from Texas and I’ve never worn a cowboy hat and I don’t own a horse.  I do say “y’all” on occasion.  Seriously though, FUCK VERMONT.  Sorry, I’ve always wanted to say that.)

I have to be honest, as much as I disliked the first Paranormal Activity, this publicity stunt has won the filmmakers a very small place in my heart.  This is the type of shameless, silly stunt that would make the grindhouse proud.  Hopefully, they’ll have a nurse present at all screenings of Paranormal Activity 3.

Anyway, if you think you can handle it, here’s the trailer that’s apparently too scary for Texas:

Review: Orphan (dir. by Jaume Collet-Serra)

Posted on by Arleigh

There has been a complaint which has been getting louder and louder for the past several years from both horror and mainstream film fans. The complaint is that horror films of late have either been remakes or another sequel. While this complaint is not exclusive to the horror genre (non-horror genres have had the same problem) it is more prevalent and happens more often. Once in awhile a film will come out that tries to be different and put out an original story. Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra has done just that with his second foray into feature filmmaking with Orphan. While the film won’t win many awards and become the critical darling the way Let the Right One In did Collet-Serra’s Orphan does bring a fresh new take on the evil child subgenre. Despite some of the flaws and script problems the film does entertain throughout most of its running time until it loses steam in the final 15 minutes.

Jaume Collet-Serra first got his start directing the 2005 remake of House of Wax. A film more famous (infamous in some people’s eye) for being the first major film of socialite Paris Hilton. A film that deservedly got panned by critics, but still did well enough in the box-office to put horror fans on notice that Collet-Serra might be a filmmaker to keep an eye on. Orphan marks his second full-lenght feature and using the screenplay by David Leslie Johnson, Collet-Serra tries a hand in the evil child subgenre which has more than it’s share of classic titles like The Omen, The Bad Seed and The Good Son. While this subgenre of horror usually means some sort of demonic-possession or some sort of mental or genetic abnormality causing for their psychotic or sociopathic behavior, in Orphan an interesting reason was given to the nature of it’s titual character.

The film begins with a harrowing and quite disturbing scene of the Vera Farmiga’s character pregnant and in labor, but also starting to miscarriage her child. The graphic nature of the scene quickly lays down the hammer that Orphan will not hold things back just because childen will be involved throughout most of it’s running time. We then see Farmiga’s Kate and her husband John (played by Peter Sarsgaard) at the local orphanage as they attempt to fix their family and ease Kate’s emotional turmoil over the miscarriage by adopting a child. They meet Esther a 9-year-old Russian orphan girl who seem to be the perfect child at first glance. Esther’s well-spoken and well-mannered at such a young age. Esther soon becomes part of John and Kate’s young family which consists of a younger deaf daughter named Max and a son named Daniel. While Max accepts Esther as a new older sister Daniel senses something just off-putting about Esther and reacts much more coldly towards his new dopted sister.

The majority of Orphan‘s second and first half of the third and final reel shows Esther’s true nature peek through the facade of Old World genteel and proper behavior. 12-year-old Isabelle Fuhrmann does an excellent job portraying the sociopathic and manipulative Esther. It is difficult to believe that a child actor of her age able to tackle such a dark role and actually pull it off without making the character too over-the-top or campy. In fact, no matter how one thinks of the performances of the rest of the film’s cast (Farmiga does a good job in the Cassandra-role with Sarsgaard an average performance as the hapless and clueless husband) this film is totally Fuhrmann’s and she sticks the landing.

While the film tries to make something original (and most of it is to a point) out of a tried-and-true model of the evil child storyline the script doesn’t hold up through the length of the film. The story itself is quite interesting when one really steps back to look at it, but there’s several leaps in logic the Kate character makes which will illicit more than a few confused reactions (running away from incoming help and into the dark, unknown being a major one). The dialogue itself is serviceable with none of it wince-inducing. There’s just a sense that the film’s reveal in the end of the film as to Esther’s true nature was just handled in a very clumsy manner. The twist is very original but the execution of that reveal after the tense and very brutal 40-50 minutes before it comes off quite flat. Orphan definitely looked like a script which was in need of several more rewrites to reconcile the first 3/4’s of the film with the final part. Yet, despite the ridiculous manner in which the final 10-15 minutes unfolds Collet-Serra manages to keep the film from dragging along through two hours. It actually plays much faster for a film with such a long running time.

In the end, Orphan marks a decidedly better effort from Jaume Collet-Serra, but one which still shows that he has some polishing to do to join the ranks of better horror directors of his generation. The film is enjoyable enough if given a chance. Most horror fans will enjoy the film and some may even embrace it because of the silly ending. Mainstream audiences looking for a change of pace from the strum und drang of the summer blockbuster season could do no worse than Orphan. It is not a perfect film and not even an above-average one, but it is a good horror film that tried to add something new to the genre, but hampered by a storyline that cannot sustain the tension it built-up and the brutality it showcased. In the hands of a much more seasoned filmmaker with a better hashed out screenplay Orphan could’ve become an instant classic.

Review: Sole Survivor (Dir. by Thom Eberhardt)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In my “which movie should I review poll” 1983’s Sole Survivor came in dead last, receiving a total of 3 votes out of the 234 cast.  I really wasn’t surprised to see that because Sole Survivor, along with having a dreadfully generic title, isn’t really that well-known.  I found the DVD at Half-Price Books where it was being sold for a dollar in the clearance section.  If not for the fact that I can’t resist a bargain, I would never have heard of this movie either.  Which is a shame because, taken on its own low-budget terms, Sole Survivor is actually a pretty effective horror film.

Written and directed by Thom Eberhardt, Sole Survivor has a plot that should be familiar with anyone who has ever seen any of the Final Destination films.  Denise (played by an actress named Anita Skinner) is a neurotic commercial producer who, as the film opens, is the sole survivor of a horrendous airplane crash.  (When we first see Denise, she’s still sitting in her seat, surrounded by the remains of her fellow passengers.)  Against the advice of just about everyone, Denise insists on dealing with the trauma of the accident by trying to return to her normal life.  This is complicated, however, by the fact that she’s still having dreams about the plane crash.  Everywhere she looks, she sees mysterious and menacing strangers watching her.  And, on top of everything else, she is now being stalked by a mentally unstable former actress who claims to be having nightmarish visions of Denise’s future.  Is Denise suffering from survivor’s guilt (as her doctor boyfriend insists) or is she instead being pursued by Death?  If you’ve ever seen a horror film, you can probably guess the answer.

As I mentioned previously, its easy to compare Sole Survivor with the Final Destination films.  However, a more appropriate comparison would be to the 1962 black-and-white classic Carnival of Souls.  Whereas the Final Destination films are largely about coming up with ludicrously convoluted ways for Death to get what he or she wants, Sole Survivor (like Carnival of Souls)  is less concerned with how Death gets the job done and more concerned with building and maintaining a growing sense of dread and hopelessness.  For the most part, director Eberhardt disdains easy shock effects in order to concentrate on building up a palpable atmosphere of doom.  As a result, the film can occasionally seem to be a little slow but it stays with you even after the final credit. 

Also, much like Carnival of Souls, Sole Survivor features an excellent lead performance from an actress who, more or less, disappeared from movie screens after the film’s release.  Carnival had Candace Hilligoss.  Sole Survivor has Anita Skinner.  Skinner gives an excellent lead performance, always remaining a sympathetic.  According to an interview with the film’s producers, Skinner was uncomfortable with the more excessive side of Hollywood and retired from acting shortly after making Sole Survivor.

Sole Survivor was released on DVD by Code Red, so now people like me can appreciate this neglected movie.  The transfer looks great.  Unfortunately, the DVD is pretty thin when it comes to extras.  Neither Eberhadt nor Skinner are interviewed nor do they contribute to the film’s commentary track.  Instead, we have to make due with the film’s producers.  In general, producers usually provide the worst DVD commentary tracks with typical insights running along the lines of “We had the same lawyer” and “So, after that, we brought in another screenwriter.”  The producers of Sole Survivor aren’t quite that bad but their commentary is still definitely lacking in insight. 

But that’s a minor complaint.  In the end, what matters is the movie and not the commentary track.  And as a movie, Sole Survivor is a an overlooked classic of the horror genre.

The Daily Grindhouse: Tomb of the Blind Dead (dir. by Amando de Ossorio)

Posted on by Arleigh

TombsoftheBlindDeadIt is once again time for another offering of The Daily Grindhouse. This time around our latest grindhouse flick comes straight from Spain. I speak of the classic zombie flick, Tombs of the Blind Dead.

The film was shot and filmed wholly in Spain in 1971 by one of Spain’s foremost horror directors, Armando de Ossorio. His film became part of what he became famous for in the horror circles and that is his Blind Dead Tetralogy. This first film in the series I still consider the best of the bunch. While it helped bring about the renaissance of the European zombie cinema craze of the 1970’s this film by Ossorio takes on a different tack from its more gross-out and gore-laden Italian cousins.

Ossorio’s film was all about supernatural and less about zombie apocalypse. His zombies were the ressurected Templars (evil in the way the film portrays them) whose eyes were plucked out by birds during their executions by way of the gallows. The film described them as demon-worshipping knights who performed Satanic rituals to gain power and immortality (propaganda pushed by the French king of the 13th Century and the Catholic Church in Rome to paint the knightly order in a bad light). These zombie knights never did get a full explanation why they rose from their tombs during the film, but for films such as these the scant explanations were always part of their charms. One either bought into the premise in the first 10 minutes or they didn’t. I, for one, bought into it hook, line and sinker the moment the first zombie knight rose.

The film was gory but not in the flesh-eating variety most zombie flicks tended to be. Tombs of the Blind Dead in its international version also showed a lot of sexuality in some of the scenes with nudity part of the norm. The film also was quite good in establishing dread and horror by the use of a creep atmosphere not just from the dark Spanish countryside but from the way the zombies hunted. Being blind they hunted by the sound of the living victims’ breathing and heartbeat. This premise led to some very tense moments as those trying to escape the zombie knights would try to stay silent as the zombies approached their hiding places.

It’s a shame that Ossorio never got the budget to truly pull of what he envisioned with this film and the rest of the tetralogy, but for having as low-budget that he had to make them he definitely created some of the higher-quality grindhouse flicks of the 1970’s.

Review: The Descent (dir. by Neil Marshall)

Posted on by Arleigh

Neil Marshall’s follow-up to his cult-favorite werewolf film Dog Soldiers does not disappoint. Marshall’s filmmaking has improved dramatically since his debut—the film not only cements his skill as a director but also signals the horror genre’s return to a darker, meaner, and more exploitative spirit, reminiscent of a time when filmmakers weren’t afraid to push limits.

The Descent begins with tragedy: Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) suffers devastating losses that form the emotional and psychological foundation of the film. Her grief gives the story a weight that elevates it beyond a typical survival-horror narrative, grounding it in raw emotion and human fragility. Surrounding Sarah are her close friends—Beth (Alex Reid), who travels with her to the U.S. at the invitation of their American friend Juno (Natalie Mendoza)—and newcomers to the group: Holly (Nora Jane-Noone), Sam (MyAnna Buring), and Becca (Saskia Mulder). What begins as a healing adventure for six women soon transforms into a descent not only into the depths of a cave system but into the recesses of fear, betrayal, and survival.

Led by Juno, the group embarks on a spelunking expedition in the Appalachian Mountains—Marshall’s deliberate nod to Deliverance. Though the forest scenes were filmed in Scotland, their authenticity never falters. Yet Marshall doesn’t linger long in the open air; safety and sunlight give way to shadow and claustrophobia as the women push deeper underground. The descent itself is drawn out just enough to build tension until the film snaps into full horror mode. When the inevitable cave-in comes, the sequence is nerve-shredding—an expertly shot, suffocating nightmare that will have claustrophobic viewers flinching and gasping for space.

After the collapse, the women find themselves trapped, nerves fraying and panic growing. Juno, initially portrayed as the group’s confident alpha, begins to reveal a brash, reckless streak masking her deeper insecurities. What started as a confident façade becomes a fragile disguise for fear and guilt, and Marshall uses this shift to explore how leadership and trust erode under extreme pressure.

From this point forward, The Descent becomes a masterclass in oppressive atmosphere. Gone is any trace of daylight—the cave becomes an abyss of darkness, amplifying a universal fear of entrapment and the unknown. Marshall layers internal conflict onto external terror, exposing lies, betrayals, and fragilities within the group. The result is as psychological as it is visceral; survival becomes both a physical and moral test. This is no Steel Magnolias—it’s a blood-soaked exploration of human endurance under primal duress.

Marshall, alongside cinematographer Sam McCurdy, crafts a sensory experience that manipulates both light and sound to devastating effect. The pitch-black sequences—where nothing is visible, yet everything is heard—are among the film’s most frightening moments. Every drop of water, every panting breath, every unseen shuffle echoes with menace. The sound design alone makes viewers feel trapped within the cave alongside the characters, scanning the darkness for unseen horrors.

The titular descent takes on a new layer once the film’s monsters, the Crawlers, make their appearance halfway through. Marshall wisely delays their reveal, letting claustrophobia and suggestion torment the audience first. When these pale, feral creatures finally emerge, their raw physicality and relentless hunger confirm every imagined dread. Their attacks are fast, brutal, and chaotic—filmed with a balance of restraint and brutality that gives the violence a strangely poetic rhythm. Fans of gore will be thrilled, but even skeptics of splatter cinema will find the violence purposeful, anchored by the audience’s genuine investment in the characters’ fates.

The Descent succeeds as a terrifying, pulse-pounding revival of hard-R horror. It straddles the line between primal terror and visceral gore without losing its emotional core. Marshall doesn’t reinvent the genre—the DNA of Alien and Predator is evident—but he honors it with craft and vision. The interplay of light and shadow even recalls Argento’s dreamlike intensity, while the cave setting feels nightmarishly tactile.

In an era where horror films trend toward PG-13 softness, The Descent proudly reclaims the genre’s raw, adult intensity. This is horror meant to unsettle, to overwhelm, and to make you feel the walls closing in. Neil Marshall, once known only for Dog Soldiers, proves here that he’s no fluke. The Descent solidifies him as one of the most promising horror filmmakers of his generation—a director unafraid to go deep into the dark.