Tag Archives: Horror

Film Review: Insidious (dir. by James Wan)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I wasn’t expecting much from Insidious, the new horror film that’s recieved a surprising amount of critical acclaim over the past month.  After all, the film is the product of a collaboration between the makers of Saw and Parnormal Activity, two of the most overrated horror films ever.  Add to that, the movie is rated PG-13 and the lesson I took away from seeing The Roommate earlier this year was that PG-13 dooms horror.  Insidious might be the proverbial exception that proves the rule.

As with all good horror films, Insidious starts with a deceptively simple premise.  Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne play a married couple whose marriage is thrown into choas when their oldest son slips into what appears to be a coma.  After three months of being in the hosptial, their son is moved back into their house where he spends his days lying in bed, hooked up to ominous medical equipment. 

(Speaking for myself, there is no more disturbing sound than the sound of heart monitor, because for every beep, there’s that moment of deafening silence between beeps.  The film’s director James Wan knows this too because he makes brilliant use of sound in this film.)

While Wilson deals with things by finding excuses to stay late at work, Byrne is soon seeing shadowy figures running through the house and hearing voices coming from empty rooms.  Even as Wilson continues to insist that its just her imagination (that’s something all men seem to have in common — they never ask for direction and they always refuse to accept that the house is haunted), Byrne becomes more and more convinced that its not.  Eventually, with a help of an eccentric psychic (well-played by Lin Shaye), Wilson and Byrne are forced to confront the evil forces that have taken control of their lives.

Let’s get the most important thing out of the way first.

Insidious is one scary movie.  It’s scarier than any movie rated PG-13 has any right to be.  It scared me when I was sitting in the theater watching it and, even more importantly, it’s still scary a day later.

Let me set the scene for you.  As I sit here writing this, it is nearly 3 in the morning.  I live in a two-story house that is full of random cold spot and which, for some reason, never seems to be totally lit even with all the lights on.  My friends are with their families for Easter.  My sister Erin is currently in Arlington, visiting with our other sister, Melissa.  I’m in this house alone with only my overactive imagination keeping me company.  Oh, did I mention that, because of some foundation issues, this house tends to randomly creak?

About two hours ago, I had just taken a shower and I was sitting, wrapped in a towel and a blow dryer, on the edge of my bed.  I have this antique floor  mirror that sits a few feet in front of my bed and I was about to start drying my hair when it suddenly occured to me — what if I looked at the mirror and I suddenly saw a dark shadow — like the ones in Insidious — sitting on the bed directly behind me?

And yes, I knew that was a silly thought just like I know, despite what the Insidious might tell us, there’s no such thing as ghosts and demons.  I knew that if I rasied my head, I would not see anything but isolated, vulnerable little me reflected in the mirror.

But, God help me, I could not bring myself to look.  Because, even though I knew that there was 99.9% chance that nothing would be sitting behind me, I knew that there was 0.1.% chance that something would be.  I sat there, almost paralyzed with my heart pounding so hard I could almost hear it.  I realized I was starting to breathe faster, knowing that if there was something there, it was there with me at that exact moment, siting behind me, waiting to strike…

Finally, realizing that I was on the verge of giving myself a very real panic attack over a very unreal possibility, I forced myself to look up at the reflection in the mirror.

A dark shadow was sitting directly behind me.

And I screamed and jumped off that bed so quickly that I’m amazed I actually managed to stay on my feet.  I swung around, cluthing that blow dryer like a weapon, prepared to do whatever…

Nobody was sitting on the bed. 

Slowly, I creeped across the room.  Cautiously, I stuck a foot underneath my bed to feel if anything was hiding underneath it.  I opened the closests and pushed my clothes to the side to confirm that nobody was hiding behind them. 

Finally, after I somehow found the courage to sit back down on the bed, I realized that there had indeed been a shadow behind me and that shadow, because of the angle of the lights in my room, had been mine.

That’s the type of film Insidious is.  It’s the type of film that uses the simple things that scare us — the unexplainable noises, the things that you sometimes think you see out of the corner of your eye — to creates a truly macabre experience that sicks with you.  At its best, its a truly creepy film that works its way into your imagination through a perfect combination of atmosphere and paranoia.  One reason why the haunted house genre has remained such a dependable horror set up is because it perfectly reflects one of our most basic fears — the fear of having no control, of knowing that there is no place to hide, that the forces of chaos and evil can even get to us in the sanctuary of our own homes.  Especially during its first half, Insidious exploits this fear perfectly.  James Wan’s camera prowls through the otherwise unremarkable suburban home like a creature possessed and you find yourself spotting shadowy figures and sudden movements in every frame that flickers before your eyes.  Wan makes remarkably good use of sound here.  I realize that sound of silence may be an oxymoron but if silence can make a sound, then director Wan manages to capture it in Insidious.

A lot of critics and filmgoers have been rather critical of the film’s second half and it is true that the second half if remarkably different from the first.  If the first half finds Wan concentrating on atmopshere then the second half concentrates on shock and, as a result, it feels a lot more conventional. During the 2nd half of them, we learn just what exactly is happening and why and unfortunately, no possible solution could hope to compete with the sense of dread that the first part of the movie generated.  That doesn’t mean that the second half of the movie isn’t well-executed.  It is.  It’s just not as surprising as the first half.

(However, there is one scene in that 2nd half — a red-skinned demon cheerfully sharpening his finger nails — that is just so bizarre and disturbing that it borders on genius.)

Now, I will admit (POSSIBLE SPOILER COMING UP DEPENDING ON HOW ANAL YOU ARE) that I was not a huge fan of the film’s ending.  It’s not that the ending didn’t work or that it wasn’t well-exectued.  It’s just that it’s the same type of ending that we’ve come to expect from all horror films, the type of thing that used to be considered a twist but now is just a cliche.

Still, ending aside, Insidious is an effective, little horror film.  While it is true that the film rather liberally borrows from a lot of previous horror films (most blatantly from Poltergiest, Mario Bava’s Shock, an Australian film called Patrick, and an excellent Canadian shocker called The Changeling), Wan still takes all of those familiar elements and molds them into a genuinely scary experience.

Scenes I Love: Seven

Posted on by Arleigh

[MAJOR SPOILERS!!!!!]

My weekend was full of sleep, coughing and just vegetating in front of my bedroom tv as I tried to get better from my bout of the cold and flu. For some reason or another AMC channel decided to hold a mini-marathon of David Fincher’s classic neo-noir thriller, Seven, and I must say that I probably saw all three straight showings before sleep finally took over. It surely made for some very unusual, drug-induced dreams.

I’ve always seen Seven as Fincher at his most exploitative best. If there was ever a modern grindhouse exploitation film of the past twenty years I would have to consider Seven as one of them. From start to finish the film just felt grimy and made one feel dirty just for having seen it. Take away all the gloss and veneer afforded Fincher due to modern film technology and techniques this film was grindhouse to its core. No better scene exemplifies and solidifies Seven as a grindhouse exploitation film than it’s shocking, nihilistic ending which bucked traditional Hollywood happy ending (or at least and ambiguous one).

It’s been made famous due to the powerful performances from the three leads who dominate the scene. It is almost played off like a stage play with some gorgeous camera work from cinematographer Darius Khondji switching from Morgan Freeman to Kevin Spacey to Brad Pitt with mathematical precision as the scene unfolds through very strong dialogue by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker.

The performances shown by Spacey is both chilling and otherworldly as the sociopathic John Doe urging Pitt’s Det. Mills to become wrath and punish him for his sin of envy. Looking helpless and desperate is Freeman’s Det. Somerset trying to talk some sense and decency to the rapidly unraveling Mills who has just learned that what is inside the box he’s been screaming for is his wife’s head.

The fact that the unfolded and ended the way it did honors the grindhouse sensibilities of past exploitation films where the good guys never always win and even when they do it’s at a very heavy cost to the victor. This climactic ending to Seven is so nihilistic that when the film was first shown in 1995 many walked out grumbling at such a dark and heavy ending. Where was the Hollywood happy ending everyone was so used to. There was no cavalry charging last second to save the day. No deus ex machina intervening to show that Mill’s wife was still alive. No, Fincher and crew knew they had something special in their hands and went full tilt to see it through.

It’s no wonder I still consider Seven to be David Fincher’s best film to date.

Supernatural: The Anime Series to be Released on DVD/Blu-Ray

Posted on by Arleigh

Ever since it was announced in around Fall of 2010 that an anime series was going to be made based on the first two seasons of the popular CW drama series, Supernatural, I knew I had to get the DVD and/or Blu-Ray release of this series.

Like most Japanese anime series they rarely got shown in the US unless it was part of a video set. It’s rare to find newly shown episodes in Japan shown in the US at the same time. Lately, a new practice of streaming new episodes on-line through official anime streaming sites has given American anime fans the same access to new episodes as their Japanese counterparts. A fine example of this recent practice was the simultaneous airing of each new episode for the horror-ecchi series, Highschool of the Dead. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for the Supernatural anime series.

So, it was a relief to read the news release earlier this week about the anime series being released in the US through DVD and Blu-Ray sets of Supernatural the Animation season 1.

The DVD and Blu-Ray Season 1 sets will be released by Warner Home Video on July 26, 2011.

If there was ever a series that belongs to be redone in anime fashion it was, and is, Eric Kripke’s Supernatural. As I joked with people about this news once it was confirmed, the Supernatural slashfic community will now have to deal with an equally rabid yaoi community which has already sprouted since Supernatural the Animation premiered on Japanese TV earlier this year.

One thing that should please both subbed and dubbed warring camps is that the DVD and Blu-Ray release should have both original Japanese voice cast (which includes the very Japanese voice actors who dub the Dean and Sam Winchester characters in the live-action showing of the series in Japan) and the stars of the series itself, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki dubbing the anime series in English (though it would seem Padelecki will be voicing all 22-episodes while Ackles only select episodes).

People I know who have seen the series while it aired in Japan have spoken nothing but positive things about the first season. So, far the announcement hasn’t been followed up with the items being put up for pre-orders on Amazon.com or any of the online video retailers. I’m sure that will change once more details about the DVD and Blu-Ray release come down in the coming weeks.

Source: Anime News Network

What Lisa Watched Last Night: Basement Jack (dir. by Michael Shelton)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s several very good films that I need to review over the next few days but, at the moment, I really need to write about Basement Jack, a low-budget 2009 slasher film that I watched on Chiller.  Why do I need to write about Basement Jack?  Well, I’m already hesitant to go to sleep because I know I’m going to have nightmares about this film.  So, consider this to be my attempt at a quickie exorcism.  Indulge me because I need to get this film out of my system.

Why Was I Watching This:

I love horror movies and, even though they always seem to end up giving me nightmares, these old school slasher films are like catnip to me.  I can’t resist watching them, if just to see if they can keep the inherently predictable conventions of genre interesting.

What’s The Movie About:

Basement Jack (Eric Peter Kaiser) is a serial killer because when you’ve got a name like Basement Jack, it’s not like you’re going to become an accountant.  Anyway, Jack’s thing is that he goes from town-to-town, selects a family  to kill, and then secretly moves into their basement until there’s a thunder-storm.  Once it starts raining, Jack proceeds to brutally kill the family.

Karen (Michelle Marrow) is only person to have ever survived being attacked by Jack.  Now, Jack is obsessed with Karen and follows her from town to town.  So, Karen decides to turn the tables and she starts following Jack.  Except, of course, Jack was already following her so it would seem like for her to follow him, all she would really have to do would be turn around.  But anyway, I guess the important thing is that Karen-and-Jack have one of those hunter/hunted connections.

Jack and Karen both end up in a new small town where Jack sets off on another murder spree while Karen hunts for him.  She does this by teaming up with a seriously incompetent cop named Chris (Sam Skoryna).  Unfortunately, all of Chris’s fellow officers are 1) convinced that Karen is the murderer and 2) kinda stupid.  Will Karen be able to convince the cops that Jack is real?  Will Jack continually manage to stand back up after taking more damage than anyone should, realistically, be able to take?  And most importantly, will Lisa be able to sleep tonight?

What Worked?

Oh my God, this film should not have disturbed me as much as it did.  Seriously, I’ve seen thousands of horror movies that all had better production values, better gore effects, and better acting.  And yet, Basement Jack really made me paranoid.  I think that’s because director Shelton does manage to create a legitimate feeling of dread that saturates every ludicrous frame of this movie.  There is remarkably little humor in this film and, as opposed to a lot of slasher films, all of the victims here just come across as normal, likable people (as opposed to being slasher movie stereotypes).

Kaiser is a genuinely scary killer and Morrow makes for a sympathetic protagonist.  She brings a lot of conviction to her role.  Exploitation vet Lynn Lowry (remember her from the original Crazies and I Drink Your Blood?) plays Basement Jack’s domineering mother and wow, she is scary.

Now, I’m going to admit there’s one image in this film that I know is going to give me nightmares tonight.  It’s of a policewoman who, after being gutted by Jack, is seen lying on the floor, trying to stuff her intestines back into her body and oh my God, I wish I hadn’t seen that because it really got to me.  I’ve read several other reviews that have all criticized the CGI gore effects as looking fake.  Maybe they do, I’m not really an expert on anatomy.  All I know is that image of those intestines sprouting out across a twitching body; that image is trapped in my head.  It’s something that I truly wish I hadn’t seen but I still have to list it as something that worked because film horror is supposed to leave the viewer uncomfortable.

What Didn’t Work:

Oh, trust me, a lot didn’t work.  Like most slasher films, this one was riddled with a combination of plot holes and characters just acting as stupid as can be.

As our male lead, Sam Skoryna displayed all the charisma of a spilled intestine and, to be honest, most of the other actors gave performances that were fairly atrocious.  For some reason, one of the film’s detectives is played by musician Billy Morrison and his English accent is just so jarringly out-of-place in the film’s middle American setting.  (What makes the situation especially odd is that no one in the film ever comments on his accent.  Trust me — I live in middle America.  Hell, I’ll be really pretentious — I mean like Sasha Stone pretentious — and say that I am Middle America.  No, actually, forget I said that.  That sounds really stupid.  Anyway, my point is that if you’re the only Englishman in town, people are going to remind you of that every chance they get.)

An attempt was made to give Basement Jack some backstory and to explain why he does what he does.  And by that, I mean that this is one of those movies where the action comes to a sudden halt every few minutes juts so we can be told that a man,who hides in people’s basements and only kills when it’s raining, is mentally ill.  Gee, filmmakers, thanks for clearing that up.

And finally (SPOILER!), I am so sick of seeing slasher movies that end with a close-up of the killer’s signature killing tool just so we can suddenly see the killer’s hand come out of nowhere and grab the weapon.  I mean, is anyone ever surprised by this anymore?  I guess, at one time, this seemed like a twist ending but today, it just comes across as being lazy. (END OF SPOILER!)

“Oh my God!  Just like me!” Moments:

Just like our heroine Karen, I usually try to flirt my way out of traffic tickets as well.

Lessons Learned:

It doesn’t take much to give me nightmares.

The Daily Grindhouse: Inseminoid (dir. by Norman J. Warren)

Posted on by Arleigh

The latest daily grindhouse comes straight out of the UK from the early 80’s. It’s a sci-fi horror flick which came about as part of the exploitation wave of Alien rip-offs and imitation of the past several years since Ridley Scott’s scifi-horror masterpiece stormed through Hollywood. While it’s director, Norman J. Warren and it’s producers do not think it’s grindhouse or an exploitation film of any stripe I beg to differ.

Inseminoid (renamed for a U.S. release as Horror Planet) screams grindhouse right from that title alone. It’s a film about a group of scientists landing on an unknown and desolate planet in search of evidence that an alien civilization existed once upon a time on the planet. The whole thing was either filmed inside a studio-built spacecraft set or in a cavern complex near the studio in the UK. It’s once one of the scientists (as always with grindhouse horror it happened to be a female scientists) has become impregnated by a remnant of the planet’s long-dead civilization that the horror truly begins.

It’s that very scene of rape and alien impregnation which got this film labeled as a “video nasty” in the UK which made it’s release on video near-impossible to make without editing out that pivotal scene early in the film. That scene also got the flick compared to another grindhouse scifi-horror released the same year by low-budget auteur Roger Corman called Galaxy of Terror. Outside of both films using a rape scene by alien means the two films really had nothing in common plot-wise so I think the filmmakers of Inseminoid and Galaxy of Terror just happened to think of a similar idea at the same time.

This film is not great or even good, but like all true grindhouse the people involved in the film took their roles and task seriously to try and make the best film their budget allowed them to. It’s not a horrible film and when seen now it’s actually quite a fun little scifi-horror flick that showed a glimpse into an era of cheap, exploitation films that would last well into the late 80’s.

Black Death: Trailer

Posted on by Arleigh

There’s a film called Black Death that came out sometime around 2010 that seems to have fallen below the radar of most everyone. It’s a British historical horror film from upcoming genre filmmaker Christopher Smith. The film stars Sean Bean in the role of a knight during the Black Death era of Europe.

From what I’ve seen of the trailer and read about the film it seems to be a horror film that looks at the Black Death era of history with a slightly supernatural bent to it. Even the trailer gives gives the film a certain Wicker Man vibe to it. Holy warriors of the Christian faith coming into a village untouched by the Black Death. A village whose inhabitants might be dabbling with powers from a much older and earthy religion to keep the village safe. It definitely sounds like this film might have been influenced by that classic horror film starring Edward Woodward.

I like the look of the film as seen through the trailer. It almost looks black and white with splashes of vibrant colors here and there. Black Death hasn’t been announced as having a North American theatrical release date so this film looks like it will be a blu-ray release for me to finally see it.

Rubber: Red Band Trailer

Posted on by Arleigh

This film called Rubber has been on the periphery of my radar for quite some time now. I’ve first heard of it when word trickled out of the After Dark Film Festival in 2010 where it was shown. From what I’ve heard of it the film wasn’t well-received when it was shown at 2010’s Cannes Film Festival. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t seen in a positive light over there. This film seems to be not the usual fare to get the applause and accolades.

Rubber seems to have gotten a more positive response outside of Cannes. This is especially true with the genre festival circuits.

From the looks of the trailer and synopsis of it on wiki I will hazard a guess and say that the tire is alive and looks to go on some sort of killing spree. The scene in the beginning of the trailer reminded me of the short film Treevenge! especially when the tire watched as a pile of rubber tires were being burned.

The film has been called a horror comedy and the trailer definitely gives it a dark comedy look to it. It comes out from Magnet Releases this April Fools Day.

Quickie Review: 30 Days of Night (dir. by David Slade)

Posted on by Arleigh

30 Days of Night is pretty much a siege movie with heavy elements of horror and gore. Siege movies always succeed and fail depending on whether the tension and dread built up from the beginning of the film suspends the audience’s disbelief. Siege films like The Thing and Romero’s Living Dead trilogy works well because right from the get-go we see the tension build not just on the location the cast are put in but within the besieged survivors as well. Survival becomes that much more difficult due to human frailties and an inability to work together bringing the whole group down. The monsters outside are bad enough, but sometimes it’s the survivors themselves who must share the blame.

David Slade’s (director of the excellent Hard Candy) movie does a very good job of bringing the initial tension and dread the comic brought to life in its first chapter. The story takes place in Barrow, Alaska which happens to be located within the Arctic Circle. This location allows it a very peculiar yearly event of having pitch-black night which lasts for a period of an entire month. The movie begins just as the town of Barrow prepares for this month-long prolonged night. Most of the town decide to move down south for the month where the night doesn’t last as long, but enough stay in Barrow to give it a semblance of life and activity.

The build-up of the characters in 30 Days of Night marks one of the weaknesses in the film. There’s barely much characterization in distinguishing one Barrow, Alaskan from another. The lack in character development from all the characters whether human or vampire doesn’t invest the film with anyone we want to see make it out through the night and into dawn. Even Danny Huston, a very underrated and overly capable actor in past films fails to elevate his lead vampire character Marlowe beyond it’s genre trappings. Known only as The Stranger in the credits, Ben Foster’s Renfield-like character edges between caricature and genuine creepiness in his performance. Foster knows he’s in a genre movie and has fun with the character. He’s the only one to truly take on his character and roll with it.

I now get to the subject of the vampires themselves. Most vampire movies seem enamored in portraying the vampire as some sort of seductive, fashion-obsessed, or in the case of the Anne Rice-type anachronistic in their dress, with an unnatural immortality they either live as hedonistically as possible or bemoan their cursed existence. Then there’s the more recent trend that Twilight has brought into the vampire mythology and it’s not good.  There’s never been a true portrayal of the vampire as a pure, hunger-driven monster with an appetite to match their status as one of folklore and legend’s top-tier boogeymen. Slade goes for speed and agility in his vampires instead of hypnotizing and mesmerizing their victims. The vampires in this movie owes much to the frenetic and over-amped infecteds of 28 Days Later.

The attack itself and the subsequent siege worked well enough in the early going. There were some great overhead shots of the town’s people losing it’s fight during the initial feeding frenzy as the camera shoots the scene high overhead. The only thing Slade had a misstep in terms of the siege itself was after those first couple of nights. The rest of the 30 days didn’t seem to show enough desperation on the faces and bodies of the last few survivors. Really, the only way the audience even knew a couple weeks have passed were the caption telling them how many days into the month-long night has passed. I think with some better editing and a better sense of structure in the middle section of the movie to show time actually progressing the movie would’ve been better on so many levels.

All in all, 30 Days of Night was just good enough to be a fun watch. The premise itself was original and put a new spin on the vampire genre that has rarely been tapped. The performances were pretty average with no one bringing the whole film down with a misstep performance or raising the bar with a great one. The final product had a chance to be something great, but just ends up being a good and original take on the vampire story with elements of Night of the Living Dead.

Film Review: Black Demons (directed by Umberto Lenzi)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Hi!  This is actually a review that I wrote a while ago for an anthology of B-movie reviews that a “friend” of mine was planning on self-publishing.  Much like this site, the book would be made up of different reviewers giving each film their own individual spin.  We were going to call it Dinner and a Cannibal Movie.  I came up with that title, by the way.  Unfortunately, the project was eventually abandoned but not before I’d written a handful of reviews.  Here’s one of the shorter ones, for Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons.  Oh, and be warned: Because of the nature of the project it was written for, this review is full of spoilers.)

Black Demons.

My ex-roommate Kim and I have a long-standing argument concerning this film.  I claim that it’s an Umberto Lenzi zombie film that was made in 1991, long after Italian zombie cinema had run its course.  It is also my contention that we saw this movie in October of 2004.  Admittedly, we were performing our own private pagan ritual during most of the film’s 90-minute running time but we still paid enough attention to not be impressed by it.  Kim, on the other hand, argues that we never watched Black Demons and that, furthermore, there is no such film as Black Demons.  I suspect that a combination of her own rather prodigious liberal guilt and the film’s own utter banality has led her to repress the memory of it in much the same way as the protagonist of a Dario Argento thriller will often forget a key detail of a murder he has witnessed.

            Black Demons tells the story of five young people who find themselves on the bad end of some black magic.  For reasons that are never really made all that clear (largely because the entire cast has a bad habit of mumbling their dialogue), English Kevin is in Brazil with his American girlfriend, Jessica.  Tagging along with them is Jessica’s half-brother, a morose young man who is recovering from a nervous breakdown and who has the rather unfortunate name of Dick.  Along with having a vaguely incestuous relationship with Jessica (whether this was intentional on Lenzi’s part or just a case of bad acting is up for debate), Dick is also fascinated by black magic and has a tendency to wander off by himself a lot.  This leads to a lot of scenes of Kevin and Jessica repeatedly shouting, “Dick!  Dick!” as they search for him.  This provided both me and Kim a lot of giggly amusement if nothing else.

            Anyway, Dick attends a black magic ceremony that he records on audio tape and then proceeds to obsessively listen to whenever the movie needs an excuse to bring on a few zombies.  The morning after the ceremony, our threesome’s jeep breaks down out in the middle of nowhere.  Luckily, two hikers – Jose and his girlfriend, Sonya – come along and invite everyone to spend the night at Jose’s villa.  As luck would have it, there’s a big cemetery located right behind the villa and idiot Dick decides to play his little audio tape right in the middle of it. 

            (I think Kim may have exclaimed, “God, what a dick,” at this point but she denies it along with the movie itself.)

            Needless to say, this causes six zombies to rise from their graves and the usual hilarity follows.  It turns out that these zombies were, in life, African slaves who rebelled against their white masters and were put to death as a result.  Their eyes were plucked out as they died, though this doesn’t seem to keep them from being able to see once they come back to life.  It turns out that the mission of these six black zombies is to kill six white people to even the score.  Unfortunately, most of this is explained by Jose who has such an incredibly thick accent that it is next to impossible to understand a word he says.  Therefore, the plot may actually be a bit more complex than I realize.

            Though, I doubt it.

            As Kim and I immediately realized, the zombies need to kill six white people.  Yet there are only five white people in the film.  Whether this was a case of lazy writing or maybe an actor walked off the film at the last minute, I do not know.  However, Lenzi ingeniously handles this problem by killing an anonymous, never-seen white guy offscreen and then having our heroes hear about it on the radio.  Still, you have to wonder why these zombies, seeking vengeance for being slaves in their past life, would only feel the need to kill six white people.  Sure, it works out in the sense that there are six zombies and this way they only have to kill one person apiece.  But still, it seems like they’re letting the white race off a little bit easily here.  Indeed, if the solution to all of the world’s racial strife is simply to kill off the five, uninteresting losers in this film, then I have to side with the zombies on this one.

            Unfortunately, Kevin and Jessica aren’t willing to sacrifice themselves for world harmony and insist on surviving until the end of the movie.  Kevin eventually figures out that the zombies can be stopped by a well-thrown Molotov cocktail.  How exactly he figured this out isn’t really clear.  Perhaps he saw it in another, better zombie film.  (Like Lucio Fulci’s Zombie 2, for instance.  Unfortunately, beyond the Molotovs, the bad acting of the female lead, and a grisly fetish for showing eyeballs getting damaged, these two films have little in common.)  Kevin’s plan works though not before the tragic ends of Sonya, Jose, the phantom sixth white guy, and yes, even Dick.  Leaving behind a bunch of smoldering slaves, Jessica and Kevin flee the villa for a world still torn apart with racial strife and anger.  Thanks a lot, guys!

            Almost all good horror is to be found in subtext.  Such as, Dracula may be pretty intimidating with his fangs and his blood drinking and all, but it’s as a symbol of unbridled lust and secret fantasies that he’s been able to become and remain an icon for over a century.  And while Frankenstein might be frightening to look at, his true power comes from being a sign of what happens when man attempts to play God.  In an admittedly less literary vein, what else is a truly scary slasher but proof positive over how little control we truly have over our own future?  Strictly on paper, Black Demons should be a film awash in powerful subtext.  After all, these zombies wouldn’t even exist if they hadn’t been enslaved and treated like property by the ancestors of the film’s heroes.  In a world that is still struggling (and failing) to deal with the legacy of racism, a film in which a bunch of slaves come back to life and seek vengeance on only whites should have quite a bit to say.   Perhaps if Black Demons had been directed by Fulci or Deodato, it would have done just that.  However, this film was directed by Umberto Lenzi which means that it ends with Kevin assuring Jessica that their nightmare is over with the camera ominously (and, quite frankly, obscenely) pans over to a bunch of black children playing on the side of the road, basically equating those living children with a bunch of bloodthirsty, vengeful zombies on the basis of the color of their skin.  Whether Lenzi realized what he was doing or not, this one camera movement manages to be a hundred times more offensive than anything found in Cannibal Apocalypse.

Perhaps, in this case, Kim had the right idea.

Dead Island: Official Announcement Trailer

Posted on by Arleigh

The zombie fps survival game that seem to be blowing up the interwebs with it’s “official announcement” trailer was a title that was initially talked about several years ago when Valve’s Left 4 Dead first came out and become a massive hit. Zombies were back in force in gaming (not that it really left) and every no-name studio was announcing a zombie title to try and take advantage of the sudden craze for the walking dead in games.

Techland was one such studio and their title was to be called, Dead Island. It was to be a first-person shooter for the Xbox 360 and PC. Set in an unnamed resort island, the game was received by the gaming community who followed such news with some interest. That interest soon waned when nothing new and concrete about the game came out in the last couple years. It’s now 2011 and, after a couple brief tidbits about the title in 2010, it looks like the game is going to be a reality (fingers crossed).

The trailer has been getting major praises since IGN first premiered it. People were soon hyped to see the game become a reality. Those who still were guarded with their reactions still thought the trailer was well-done and, some even said, it was artfully done. One thing that seem to have everyone in agreement is how heartbreaking the trailer ends up being once the whole sequence plays out. It’s true what some have said. Children always seem to be taboo as zombie chow in films and most games (novels have been more ahead of the game when it comes to children becoming zombie food) and it looks like Techland decided no one will be safe in this game.

I, for one, have been one of those who have been following this title since it was first talked about years back and if this announcement trailer really means the game will be made then my faith in the title has been rewarded.

I sure hop it doesn’t suck….

Source: IGN