Horror Movie Review: Scourge (2008)

Overall: D

Acting: C

Writing: D

Story: D

Technical aspects: C

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Jonas Quastel

Starring:

Russell Ferrier

Robyn Ledoux

Nic Rhind

Particular trigger warnings: nothing I can really remember

Passes the Bechdel test: also not that I remember

            This whole thing has a “the worst of Syfy original movie” all over it. But maybe I just have a difficult time taking “Ultimate Evil” seriously when it expresses itself in belches and farts. Also, this is a bit more of a synopsis than a summary, because you should not feel at all compelled to watch this movie, so I feel no guilt in telling you exactly why it sucks.

            So basically the plot is that an ancient evil called “The Scourge” was locked up by priests a long time ago in the foundation of a church. In a fire, said evil is released, and possesses a fireman. We get some gross-out scenes as the young fireman suddenly begins eating everything he can – sticks of butter, cartons of expired milk, mayonnaise, etc. He goes to shower, starts belching and gurgling, and acting somewhat zombie-ish.

            Meanwhile, our main character Jesse (Robyn Ledoux) runs into our other main character Scott (Nic Rhind.) Apparently, the two were friends at once point, but Scott got in trouble with the law and with Jesse’s uncle, the sheriff. He was in prison for a while, but has since gotten out, and he was of course never a bad guy, but had simply taken the fall for someone else, now just wants to move on, etc. Jesse is a bit interested in him, but Scott already has a girlfriend.

            Later, the zombie-ish belching firefighter shows up at Scott’s hockey game and causes some chaos. He ends up wandering into the locker room, where Scott’s girlfriend joins him. Naturally she’s been cheating on Scott with the fireman, and is planning on a quicky in the locker room. (At her boyfriend’s hockey game… obviously.) So the fireman kneels down, and belches up a badly CGI’d evil squid bug thing that invades her bellybutton and possesses her. She goes through the same zombie-changes as the fireman, but presumably because she’s a hot chick there’s less eating and belching.

            She winds up going to a club and passing on the evil infection thing to a new guy in the bathroom. Scott has followed her, and he confronts her just in time to watch her spontaneously hemorrhage and die. Scott is assumed to have killed her, and since the fireman’s body turned up at his hockey match, the sheriff is after him.

            Blah blah, they figure out how to kill it, though I’m not sure why they need to do what they do (it involves electricity and alcohol.) Meanwhile the evil keeps getting passed from person to person, before it eventually gets passed to an obese photographer guy. Jesse sets out to seduce him and bring him back to a motel room where she and Scott can try to get the evil out of him. They attempt this, and it jumps to Scott. And because he’s the hero, he’s immediately aware of this, and rather than making him do unsexy things like belch and ravenously eat, he just tries to kill Jesse.

            A secret order priest type shows up at the end to conquer the evil and save Scott and Jesse, and the obese photographer is taken to the hospital. The priest man explains that they’ve gotten rid of most of the Scourge, but he’s always hunting down any remaining ones.

            Then insert one of those stupid “the end… or is it?” endings, letting us know that the horror isn’t really over!

            What a stupid movie. The acting is average, and is probably what can be complained about least. And don’t get me wrong, because the acting isn’t good. It’s just not as bad as everything else. The story itself isn’t unforgiveably awful, the idea of an ancient evil parasite jumping host to host, but it’s hard to find a way it could be more poorly executed. The most obvious thing wrong is the belching, farting, zombie-hosts. It’s just stupid. It’s consistently stupid. And if this were supposed to be a horror-comedy or a parody of some kind, it’d still be stupid, but understandable. But no, it’s played straight. And it’s clear that the writers realize that it’s stupid, as the hot girl that gets possessed and the hero both are spared the gross/stupid bits of the possession. The effects look awful – it’s bad CGI, and when it’s bad, it’s bad. And a maybe petty complaint when there’s already so much wrong – but the bellybutton is not an orifice! It doesn’t stretch to accommodate something entering the body through it and then return to normal immediately! It’s just… stupid.

            There’s really no serious gore in their violence, minus the girl bleeding out in once scene and the pretty non-explicit electrocuting of the guy in an attempt to draw out the Scourge. There’s only moderate sexuality when a girl showers and the fact that the parasite being passed from mouth to belly button usually is accomplished by implying oral sex is going to happen. It gets an R rating mostly due to language, meaning the younger pre-teen male audience that would probably appreciate the bodily humor couldn’t actually see it. It seems like it would have been better cut to PG or PG-13 and left to cable television and late night timeslots on SyFy, because it certainly didn’t deserve a DVD release.

Horror Movie Review: Forget Me Not (2009)

Overall: C

Acting: C

Writing: C-

Story: C+

Technical aspects: C

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Tyler Oliver

Starring:

Carly Schroeder

Cody Linley

Micha Alberti

Brie Gabrielle

Jillian Murray

Zachary Abel

Sean Wing

Chloe Bridges

Brittany Renee Finamore

Passes the Bechdel test? Yes

Particular triggers: nothing I can really think of

In this review, the summary and my reactions and opinions are all lumped together. So spoilers abound through it all.

Forget Me Not jumps right in, showing us our cast of 20-and-30-somethings playing unlikable teens doing unlikable things. This movie suffers incredibly from the problem of having too many characters introduced that are more or less physically and characteristically indistinguishable from each other. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took me almost to the halfway mark to even learn all of their names.

So we have Sandy (Carly Schroeder) the class president, who is dating supposedly bad-boy Jake (Micha Alberti), though he’s never shown to do anything more “bad” than the rest of them. There’s Sandy’s brother Eli (Cody Linley), the valedictorian who just wants to be a pirate. There’s Jake’s sister Lex (Jillian Murray) the supposedly bad-girl who is dating TJ (Sean Wing). There’s Chad (Zachary Abel) who is stringing along two women, cheating on both because he is our Even More Unlikable Douche character. The two women he’s screwing are Layla (Chloe Bridges) and Hannah (Brie Gabrielle). For additional drama, Eli also has a thing for Hannah. And our whole group has just graduated high school, and are planning on going on a vacation together.

The strain on my suspension of disbelief starts in right away. A) None of these people look even remotely like recent high school graduates. That’s not uncommon in horror, or even film in general, but this is pretty egregious. B) None of these people act like high schoolers either, and not just because of the truly endless alcohol, weed, and sex they seem to have available. C) I know this is nit-picky, but how many people do you know that have had the identical large friend group since they were young kids? For that matter, how many friend groups have not one, but two sets of siblings that have the exact same social circle? And how many people do you know that maintain childhood friendships, and then only manage to date within that same circle? One or two of these issues could be pretty easily ignored, but there was just nothing about this batch of people that made me believe they were their characters, or that those characters could be real people.

So our group is hanging out and they decide to go to the local graveyard to play a game they played there as kids. It’s a “ghost in the graveyard” game like hide and seek, where the “ghost” has to find the other players and turns them into ghosts until only one person is left “alive.” As they get ready to play, a mysterious girl shows up and asks if she can play too. This is Angela (Brittany Renee Finamore.) At the end of the game, she jumps off a cliff (who builds a graveyard next to a cliff? Erosion is a real thing, people), claiming that soon Sandy will remember her. The police can’t find a body when they investigate.

As the friend group goes about their business the following day, Sandy remembers her childhood friend Angela, the girl who taught her the ghost in the graveyard game. Then people start getting offed… and Sandy suddenly realizes that she’s the only one who remembers the people who’ve been killed. The others don’t have any memory of them at all. And reality seems to be changing around them, as if they didn’t ever exist. (For instance someone’s tattoo of a now-dead character’s name disappears, their plans to go to the beach have changed to plans to go to the mountains, etc.)

In some ways I liked this. It sort of subverts the usual plotline, where everyone realizes that their group is being killed off, and is aware that they’re in danger, but then acts stupidly anyway. At least this time, they don’t even realize that their friends are missing. If you cared about the characters, it could even be psychologically hard-hitting to realize that they won’t even remember their significant others or siblings. Honestly, I like this as a plot line, and think it could have been really well utilized in a more suspenseful movie, but unfortunately it seemed to be somewhat wasted in this film.

The plot goes on, more of them are offed, everyone assumes Sandy is crazy, blah blah. Sandy tries to find out what Angela has to do with the murders, while no one will help her. The resolution isn’t really surprising… the motivations are pretty standard for this kind of “pick a group off one by one” deal, though that’s usually a slasher trope, and this doesn’t really feel like a slasher. I suppose you could argue that it is one, but without an actual physical slasher-who-does-the-slashing.

I had so many problems with the believability of this movie that I feel kind of bad even giving it a C. In terms of tech it’s okay – the sound and cinematography are nothing special, but they’re fine. The effects are laughable. I DID literally laugh at the ghosts several times. A mix of bad Halloween costume masks and bad CGI. But ugh… the unbelievable characters. Not that badly acted, all things considered, just horribly miscast and poorly written. The plot isn’t outstandingly original, but I mentioned that I liked this take on it, at least to some extent. Sadly, it’s the characters themselves really ruin it for me. One saving grace may be turning it around and viewing the villain as the protagonist, which could reframe the story in an interesting way. I didn’t really want to watch the film again with this in mind just to find out, though. Despite my issues, I did find the movie to be very watchable, and I enjoyed it at times. It just has too many glaring flaws for me to consider it “good.”

Horror Movie Quick Review: Shadow Puppets (2007)

Overall: C-

IMDB

Directed by:

Michael Winnick

Starring:

James Marsters

Tony Todd

Marc Winnick

Jolene Blalock

Shadow Puppets is the story of eight seemingly random people who wake up in an abandoned asylum, none of them with any memory of how they got there. As they meet up with each other, they begin to search for a way out. But there’s some kind of sentient shadow monster lurking, which is hunting them and picking them off. They find a machine apparently used in experiments on erasing memories, and they rightly figure that since the machine was used eight times, it must have been used on them. [Reasonably minor spoilers] But when they find a ninth stranger in a coma, they realize that one of them has not had their memories erased, and that person must be the one behind everything. And so the traitor in the group is discovered and begins trying to kill everyone. [End spoilers]

This movie suffered the most from having way too many characters introduced in way too short a period of time. And because they don’t learn their names until halfway or more through the film, I was just giving them insulting nicknames the entire film, because otherwise I had no way to tell who was who.

The story starts off somewhat intriguing, with the strangers in the asylum, wondering what their pasts hold and why the building seems abandoned… but as soon as the (poorly animated) Shadow shows up, it just gets somewhat… silly. Its presence is never really explained (or rather, the explanation makes no sense.) If the pseudo-monster had been removed in favor of focusing just on the idea of the science experiment on their memories, it would have been an improvement. And anyway, most of the characters get little individual screentime outside of our mains, so when they’re killed and in danger it didn’t resonate any with me.

There are also several small but silly inconsistencies (things as simple as the characters constantly complaining that they’re freezing, but never wrapping themselves in the sheets they all have from the beds they awoke in.)

The movie was okay, but it started far better than it finished, and had more than a few moments that were unintentionally funny out of sheer ridiculousness.

Horror Movie Review: The Tenement (2003)

Overall: D

Acting: D

Writing: D-

Story: D+

Technical aspects: D+

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Glen Baisley

Starring:

Joe Lauria

Michael Gingold

C. J. DiMarsico

John Studol

Mike Lane
Ed Shelinsky

Danielle Russo

Particular trigger warnings: sexual assault, animal cruelty, prostitution, hard drug use

Passes the Bechdel test? I don’t think so

I basically give a synopsis below, because it’s hard to pick apart otherwise. Beware of spoilers all the way through.

The Tenement is a series of four loosely related stories about different occupants of the same tenement house.

The movie starts with a man named Ethan (Pete Barker) speaking to the owner of the building (Jude Pucillo.) Ethan says that he used to live there forty years ago, and he wants to know if the new owner has seen the building do anything strange to the people living there. Ethan begins to reminisce about the time he lived there.

We suddenly cut to a scene of a girl being kidnapped and crucified as part of a cultic ritual, but we soon find out that this is just a crappy movie within our crappy movie, as this is part of Ethan’s memory. It’s 1980 and Ethan (Joe Lauria) lives in his apartment with his bedridden mother (Doreen Valdati) and spends his time either at work or at home watching horror films by director Winston Korman (Michael Gingold), whom he idolizes. Well, Korman is in town casting for a new film, and Ethan is paid to deliver black roses to him. He gets mistaken for a prospective actor, but when he can’t act and freezes up, Korman laughs at him and mocks him until he runs away. Ethan goes home, kills his cat, and then leaves his overbearing mother. He dresses all in black, and goes to Korman’s house. Korman is outside, doing all he possibly can to prove even further that he is a caricature of a douchebag and we Should Not Like Him. After an awkward chase scene, Ethan kills Korman with a shovel, dropping a black rose on the body, becoming the “black rose killer.”

            The second story happens in 1990, and focuses on a young mute girl (mute apparently due to something traumatic in her past, though this isn’t expanded on) named Sarah Weston (C.J. DiMarsico). She spends her time waltzing alone to music from her radio. A neighbor named Henry Wallace (John Studol) keeps watching her, prompting her parents to take her away on a vacation for a while. They leave her alone for a while, and Wallace breaks in and sexually assaults her. She fights back, but he keeps overpowering her. In the midst of the rape, he suddenly blacks out and appears to be hallucinating and recalling trauma from his own childhood. He wakes back up in the living room, with Sarah gone. He finds her in the bedroom, and approaches her, but she turns up her radio, he starts screaming and holding his head, and then he disappears. Later on, with the Weston family back at home, Sarah is seen dancing in her room, but the shadows and mirror show that she’s dancing with some sort of creature.

            The third story jumps forward nine years to 1999, and is about Jimmy (Mike Lane), who has begun attending a therapy group to help him deal with his relatively unspecified issues. He appears to mostly just be a shut-in. On his way home, he’s attacked by a wild animal (and by wild animal, I mean a husky that just kind of happily trotted behind him for about three seconds.) He’s bitten on the arm, and he slowly starts becoming convinced that he’s turning into a werewolf. He thinks the symptoms are obvious, though no one else sees the transformation. He kills his friendly neighbor who apparently had a thing for him, he kills a male prostitute, and then he kills a female dancer in a strip club. Here he’s apprehended, and sentenced to life in a mental hospital. But then he’s attacked by some apparently “real” werewolves, who want to kill him for bringing too much attention to them.

            The fourth story happens in 2000 and is about another serial killer (Ed Shelinsky) living in the tenement, who pretends to be a taxi driver to pick up women and then torture and murder them. We see him capture and kill a prostitute, and then go out “hunting” again. This time he picks up a girl (who I can’t remember being named, but I believe is being played by Danielle Russo.) She has him take her out to the place where Winston Korman, the horror director from before, used to film his movies. She has to give him directions, but she says she’ll just go in for a second to get money for the cab fare. When the taxi killer follows her in and attacks her, she says she “likes it rough” and attacks him back, saying it was obvious he wasn’t a real taxi driver because he didn’t know the place she wanted him to take her, and the two fight some more. Apparently they realize that they’re soul mates or something, and the two make out. Then we see that they’ve joined forces and are killing people together. Aww.

            The movie closes with the elderly Ethan and the owner discussing that they have seen the house do strange things to people. Ethan lays a black rose on a nearby bench. The owner (who by this point I was calling “goth Fabio”) confronts Simon (Chris Alo) the local pimp and drug dealer, telling him to stop hanging around and selling all he sells in front of the building. Simon pretty much blows him off before hallucinating madly about drug use and overdosing and what the fuck ever, while the owner stands nearby, leering at him, obviously the cause. The end.

This movie was pretty bad. One of the reviews on the case says that it “certainly shows an affinity for the genre” and we remarked that that seemed like a backhanded compliment. And that really feels like the nicest thing I can say about it, too. It’s clear that the makers really like horror films, and it seems like they probably even really enjoyed making this movie, but I certainly can’t say that it was very good. According to something else I found online, the director, Glen Baisley, was a sexploitation film director in the 60s and 70s, and then filmed porn for a while, before coming back to horror films, and I guess I wouldn’t have a hard time believing it. (And the “Walter Korman” film we get to see a brief snippet of during the first story is a perfect sexploitation/horror, to the point I wonder if it was a clip from something the director did in the past.)

My problems with the movie are varied. The acting was generally really substandard. Some actors were fine, but some side characters delivered their lines so badly it sounded like they were reading them off for the first time, and at other times it was obvious they couldn’t remember their lines correctly.

The stories themselves just weren’t that well-told in my opinion either. The first one, it sounds like all the dialogue between Ethan and his mother was lifted from Willard (which is a much better film.) They refuse to show the mother for a while, and I wondered if it was going for the Psycho-style twist, though apparently that was just a deliberate allusion. It reminded me more of Willard, anyway, down to the tone and pitch of the mother’s voice. Plus there were the weird dangling plot threads like Ethan's hallucination-girlfriend. The fourth story just bored me more than anything else; it was too bloodless to really be shocking the way it seemed to be aiming for, and it just managed to leave no real impression. The second and third had at least glimmers of interest for me. I want to know more about Sarah and the thing she was dancing with. Does she have strange powers? Is she allied to some kind of demon that killed her attacker? Is the creature a personification of the “monster” she killed? And the third story, while (probably deliberately) ridiculously silly, at least has a twist that could be interesting in a better film; the idea that someone who pretends to be some kind of monster is killed by the real thing.

As far as the anthology goes, judging from the title and the prologue/epilogue frame story, we’re apparently supposed to think that the building is somehow compelling people to become violent or is giving them delusions and apparently occasionally psychic powers. But without the occasional exterior shots of the tenement house, there’s nothing that tells me that these people supposedly live in the same building; none of them meet each other, there aren’t any other ties between the characters or stories (aside from Gordon Korman being mentioned in two stories, and Ethan being a character in one story and the frame,) there aren’t any other clues to the setting. There’s also never any reason given for why the building would have this effect on people. It really comes off as just being the most tenuous possible way to connect four ideas that couldn’t quite be films on their own. And despite all the stories being relatively short, averaging in the 20-30 minute range each, the film drags.

The entire time we’re skipping around from the 80s onward never felt convincing to me either – there was never anything that made me believe we’d changed time periods. Hairstyles, clothing, technology, etc. all remained so constant that it was hard to feel that this was somewhere in the past, or that years were passing between the stories. And Ethan, supposedly our “tie” between the past and the present of the building, appears to have aged about fifty years since 1980, so either their math is bad, or the frame story is set in the future.

The effects are nothing great. Fights don’t look at all convincing, with it often being incredibly obvious that there’s no force behind any of the blows. The movie doesn’t overly rely on gore effects and the like, which to me is a point in its favor, since the blood effects they have aren’t that good. Some of the scenes ended up prompting laughter when it wasn’t intentionally funny.

Pretty much everything from the acting to the effects to the scenarios just feel completely unconvincing. And allegedly this is part one of a trilogy… I’m not sure how to justify continuing this through two more films.

Horror Movie Review: Side Sho (2007)

Overall: B-

Acting: C

Writing: C-

Story: C

Technical aspects: B+

Effects: B+

IMDB

Directed by:

Michael D’Anna

Starring:

J.D. Hart

Toni Robider

Dana Poulson

Elizabeth Bailey

Hunter Ballard

J.R. Reynolds           

This movie starts off with a pretty awesome opening credits sequence, using vintage photos and advertisements for actual freakshows and side shows that were popular in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, that was probably my favorite part of the movie.

            The basic plot is that a typical suburban American family (plus a friend) is on vacation, heading home on their roadtrip. The father, John (J.D. Hart), is stopping at old roadside amusement parks and side shows in order to take photographs for a book he’s putting together. At a gas station somewhere in Florida, he finds out about a supposedly abandoned freak show just down the road, so the family takes a slight detour, despite the complaints of the daughter, Christy (Toni Robider), and her friend Steffi (Elizabeth Bailey.)

            Turns out that “Side Sho” is not actually abandoned, and the barker (J.R. Reynolds) offers to give them a tour. The family splits up, the girls and the mother, Gwen (Dana Poulson), going one way, the son, Cory (Hunter Ballard) going around the grounds to take pictures, and the father heading with the barker to the “real” freak show. Turns out that it’s full of twisted things like malformed human fetuses, so John freaks out and intends to get the family out of there. Meanwhile Cory has an after school special “we can all be friends despite our differences” moment with a young boy with a facial deformity.

            The family decides to leave, and they rush out of there, but not before a mysterious someone puts water in their gas tank! So the car conveniently dies in front of a group of creepy cabins, and the man there says that it was an old fishing camp. He’ll let them stay the night, since it’s getting dark. But shock! awe! horror! This used to be a prison camp! And the man letting them stay there is part of an extended family of deformed freaks descended from the prisoners, as are the barker and the woman from the gas station, and they intend to kill the father and the son, while keeping the women as “new breeding stock” since they’re getting so inbred!

            What follows for the last two thirds of the movie is your basic slasher run-and-escape-and-fight-and-die-and-kill-and-run-some-more, until the end when two of our heroes escape, to be picked up by a police officer… but as the scene ends, we see that HE IS ONE OF THE DEFORMED FREAK FAMILY.

            The movie is pretty average, which in some ways is a shame because the tech is great. The cinematography is fantastic, and the sound direction is good as well. Set design and such is also great. Leonard Wolf provides the soundtrack, which has more presence than I’m used to (by which I mean I noticed it pretty constantly, rather than it fading into the background) but it was well done and has some pretty good tracks. It’s actually kind of sad that such good tech went to a film that’s so average in many regards.

            The acting is middle of the road. It’s not unwatchable, but particularly at the beginning, the dialogue is horribly stilted. Very “you have said your line, therefore I will now respond with my line,” not flowing like anything resembling an actual conversation. It sounded almost like sitcom dialogue where they pause for the laugh-track or other audience reaction. This seemed to be less of an issue later in the movie, though probably because it was more running and screaming and less “conversation.” The woman from the gas station they meet at the beginning bothered me the most as far as acting – she looked like a kid doing an impression of a crotchety old woman, scrunching up her face to talk out the side of her mouth (if you ever watched the 90s kid show “The Amanda Show” on Nickelodeon… it looked like Amanda Bynes’ old woman impression)… It was distractingly awkward looking.

            The story itself is pretty basic slasher fare, without really adding anything new. The effects are pretty good, from the makeup of the freak family to the blood. And while the plot is standard, and you can pretty well guess which characters are going to be offed, the death scenes are pretty creative. I don’t think I’ve ever seen two reptile-related deaths in the same non-reptile-horror film – one person having their face crushed in with a turtle, one getting a terrarium with a poisonous snake smashed on his head. Lots of killing of the innocents, lots of return killings of the villains. But it’s not aided by having the predictable “twist” ending of the escape-but-not-really-because-it-was-a-trap. That just shoved it into eye-rolling territory for me.

Horror Movie Review: Razor's Ring (2008)

Overall: D-

Acting: D+

Writing: D

Story: D

Technical aspects: D

Effects: F

IMDB

Directed by:

Morgan Hampton

Starring:

Wayne Casey

AnnieScott Rogers

Paul Schilens

Lisa Wharton

Nate Duncan

            The basic plot of this one is that an innocent guy named Scott (Wayne Casey) is just out for a jog, when he’s suddenly kidnapped by the couple Razor (Paul Schilens) and Julie (Lisa Wharton.) Their motives for this are never really explained… they’re both wanted by the police, but they’re driving around running over people and animals as a game, and for some reason they grab Scott and take him with.

            They aim to run over a little girl, and Scott attempts to get control of the car, and they end up hitting an old man. The man’s family members attack the three, capturing them and taking them to see “Red.” The three are kept in a shed, where they’re tormented in various ways (Razor has a finger cut off, Julie is forced to stand naked on their dinner table, Scott gets stabbed…) And Red (AnnieScott Rogers,) the apparent matriarch of the group insists that she’ll slowly let each of them go over the next few weeks, so her family will think they’ve been justly taken care of.

            Blah blah, stuff happens, Julie and Razor are supposedly let go, Scott is allowed to come live in the house rather than the shed, and he’s taken to a big party they’re putting on. As he’s eating, he finds Razor’s ring (clever title!) in his food, and he realizes that OMG THEY’VE BEEN EATING PEOPLE. AND HE’S NEXT. Either a Soylent Green or a Troll 2 joke would be appropriate here.

            Spoilers! He escapes, there’s the fakest explosion ever, and he returns to society. But then he realizes that he’s now addicted to eating human flesh! He then buys the land the cannibals were living on, and is apparently planning to eat his girlfriend? Or something. (End spoilers.)

            Anyway, not a good film. The characterization was very inconsistent – Razor and Julie plan to pin the death of the old man on Scott, Scott plans to tell the truth about his non-involvement, so they’re fighting with each other most of the time. But then suddenly they’ll be acting like great friends, trying to work together, or just talking to each other. And what’s ostensibly a couple days later (though we’re told that it’s been weeks, sometimes; there’s no real sense of time passing) Razor and Scott sit talking about how wonderful the food is, and how great things are. (It’s funny because they’re EATING JULIE, GET IT?)

            The acting is pretty poor, though not the worst out there. Some is likely more budget than anything, but in a couple scenes it appears an actor screws up a line and then just has to roll with it. None of the characters strike me as very believable in their roles, though. The one exception is probably AnnieScott Rogers as Red, as she’s pretty entertaining. She falls into the “watch my extreme mood shifts to show I’m evil” acting camp, and could be considered the low-budget Kathy Bates-as-Annie Wilkes, but she’s pretty good as both a violent psychopath and as the kindly grandmother-type.

            The sound direction was all right, but the filming was not. It appears to be done almost exclusively with a handheld camera, sometimes going out of focus, always unsteady, using clumsy zooms to focus on things. Scenes are terribly edited together, in some cases making it painfully clear that the two people or events that are being cut between aren’t happening even remotely near each other.

            The effects are laughable. Most of the gory scenes aren’t shown, probably for the better, because the blood effects are pretty sub-standard. And the explosion at the end… we both literally started laughing at how silly it looked.

            This movie definitely felt like a waste of time. But it gets a D simply because my bar for an F has been set so incredibly low.

(Happy October, everyone!)

Horror Movie Review: 100 Feet (2008)

Overall: B

Acting: B

Writing: B

Story: B

Technical aspects: B

Effects: C

IMDB

Directed by:

Eric Red

Starring:

Famke Janssen

Bobby Cannavale

Ed Westwick

Michael Pare

Particular triggers: domestic violence

Passes the Bechdel test? yes, but barely

            100 Feet is the story of a woman named Marnie Watson (Famke Janssen), who is placed under house arrest after being found guilty of the murder of her husband, Mike (Michael Pare). Mike was abusive, and the murder was in self-defense; Marnie had reported him several times to the police, but as Mike himself was a cop, little was done and the investigations were generally dropped. Complicating things, the cop in charge of Marnie, named Shanks (Bobby Cannavale), was Mike’s partner.

            “100 Feet” refers to the distance that Marnie is allowed to travel – any farther, and the anklet she wears will send a signal to the police, and she’ll be sent back to prison.

            It quickly becomes clear that Mike’s ghost is haunting the house, and he continues to attack her. Unwilling to leave or be sent back to prison, Marnie attempts exorcisms, attempts to force Mike’s spirit out of the house by getting rid of his possessions, etc. but nothing works. Some of the assaults against her are investigated by Shanks, who is beginning to believe that someone else is beating Marnie, and that this other person may be the one actually responsible for killing Mike.

            It’s hard to say much else without being too spoiler-heavy.

I actually really like this movie. I find Marnie’s character interesting and sympathetic, not quite the same as the average female horror movie protagonist. She seems genuinely conflicted, not feeling guilty for killing her husband because of the circumstances, but regretting that it happened. She’s imperfect, but her actions are consistent with her character.

The small cast helps the film feel very self-contained, and emphasizes the feeling of isolation that Marnie experiences in the house.

I enjoy the premise of being literally trapped in a house with something malevolent, and by something more than a broken-down car or a silly dare. (And yes, I remember that Disturbia also used the “house arrest” premise, but I like its use in this movie far more, and that’s about the only way the films are at all comparable.) Also in the category of at least kind of subverting common tropes, while she does refuse to seek outside help, this also makes sense for her character. After her experiences, of course she’s not going to ask Shanks or any other cops for help.

The biggest detractor in my opinion is the ending, which is tied together a little too neatly and rapidly. The ultimate way they get rid of Mike’s ghost works, I suppose, but seems like something that would have occurred to her earlier. The effects are also a bit hit-or-miss. They aren’t the most ridiculous, but a few times the ghost modeling is quite fake looking (when he’s heavily active) and one scene in particular has pretty laughable blood effects.

Occasionally this one runs on Syfy, and I’d certainly recommend the watch if it does come up. It’s also had a DVD release, and it’s one that I enjoyed enough that I’m considering purchasing it.

Horror Movie Quick Review: Case 39 (2009)

Overall: B

IMDB

Directed by:

Christian Alvart

Starring:

Renee Zellweger

Jodelle Ferland

Case 39 is about a social worker named Emily Jenkins (Renee Zellweger) who is beyond overworked, but takes on the case of a girl named Lilith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland.) There seems to be a severe case of abuse towards the girl, seemingly confirmed when Lilith’s parents try to murder her. The parents are found not guilty by reason of insanity as they claim that Lilith is a demon and they had no choice but to kill her. Emily ends up taking Lilith in until a better foster home can be found, but then as people in Emily’s life begin to die under mysterious circumstances, she realizes that Lilith’s parents may have been right.

I’m a fan of evil child movies, so I liked Case 39. It does a pretty good job of setting Lilith up as the innocent victim (though somewhat unfortunately because of the expectations of it being a horror movie, and especially after reading a summary of it, the audience will still realize that she’s evil, so there’s not much opportunity for surprise.) It’s well-acted (and I really like Jodelle Ferland, as far as child actresses go) and the characters are pretty good as well. Emily’s conflict over proper professional behavior vs. legitimate worry for Lilith is believably handled. In a few ways it felt like the ending and resolution were a little bit rushed, and I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to not realize that Emily is probably going to wind up spending a good chunk of her life in prison after the credits roll. The film isn’t the most groundbreaking or original offering, and it felt to me like there was just something kind of missing, but it’s a well put together film that is largely successful in telling its story.

Horror Movie Reviews: Intermedio (2005)

Overall: F

Acting: D

Writing: F

Story: D

Technical aspects: F

Effects: F

IMDB

Directed by:

Andrew Lauer

Starring:

Edward Furlong

Steve Railsback

Cerina Vincent

Amber Benson

Callard Harris

Paul Cram

Alejandro Samaniego

Dean M. Arevalo

What the ass, man? This sucks.

This was a bad movie. Like… in some ways just bafflingly bad. Also, I give basically an entire synopsis of the film below, so it’s super heavy on spoilers.

            Okay, so we’ve got four main characters. Malik (Edward Furlong) lives out in California with his girlfriend Barbie (Amber Benson). His childhood friend Gen (Cerina Vincent) and her boyfriend Wes (Callard Harris) come by to visit, and Wes has a super-awesome plan for them to meet some Mexican drug dealers, spend all their money on some super-awesome marijuana that’s apparently the best weed in the history of weed, and sell it for a super-awesome profit back in the US. As you do.

            But… the tunnel they have to go through turns out to be the very tunnel that Malik and Gen’s respective fathers disappeared down when the two were kids! But the four decide to go down these tunnels, even though the Mexican drug dealers insist on not going all the way to the halfway point due to the fear of “intermedios.” The intermedios are supposedly ghosts trapped in between the realm of the living and the dead. There’s also some other story that’s tied in somehow about how someone who catches the blood of a dead man before it hits the ground will become immortal or something. It’s a little vague.

            As they go through the tunnels, some weird stuff happens, though it’s pretty disjointed. A guy appears to be following them, knocking out the lights and the like. After the four kids meet up with the drug dealers Jorge (Alejandro Samaniego) and Al (Dean M. Arevalo), whoever is stalking them uses a mysterious amulet apparently filled with blood to summon ghosts to attack them. One kills Al, and the others run away. They get separated, with Wes running around alone and yelling for quite a while. (Giving us the wonderful line “What the ass?”) Barbie gets cut in half while they try to run away, and Jorge’s fingers also get cut off. They all get lost in the tunnels, but end up in a safehouse that’s blockaded from the inside. They keep running into a ghost-like boy named Zee (Paul Cram), who seems mostly to want to help them. Wes semi-sacrifices himself so that Gen and Malik can get away, and they crawl through a tunnel to a room filled with bodies. They end up escaping, and ask for a ride from a local (Steve Railsback). He says he’ll drive them to the nearest town, though the viewer knows that he’s the creepy guy who was summoning ghosts before! He starts going on a rant about how his son died in those tunnels, and how the papers made him out to be a terrible person, but the only ones to blame are the drug dealers and people like Malik, Gen, and their friends. He gives Gen some beer (from a sealed can) and she passes out, he drives nails into Malik’s legs before knocking him out with chloroform. The pair wakes up back in the room with the dead bodies, but they find another tunnel to escape out of. They come up into a bedroom that’s covered in news clippings about the boy, Zee, who was killed presumably because he was a drug runner. They realize that the creepy old guy must be Zee’s father.

            The old guy comes back and we get a flashback of sorts explaining how he actually murdered Zee. The old guy tries again to kill Malik and Gen, but the previously-silent Zee tells him to stop. Gen grabs the old man’s amulet, which takes away his powers over the ghosts, who then kill him.

            Malik and Gen get out of the tunnels and get a ride. They then get a hotel room, and the two appear to have decided to become romantically involved. The camera pans out their window, where the ghosts of Barbie and Wes are staring at them.

            This movie was just… badly done. The plot isn’t anything special, but could have been an average or above average movie if done correctly. They even have some real actors! But no, it’s presumably poorly directed or something, because the acting is pretty shoddy, and Edward Furlong pretty much just yells all of his lines.

            The story also is just absolutely rife with plot holes. There’s little reason for them all to go down there, particularly since Barbie is on crutches the whole time. (Trivia tells me that this is because Amber Benson actually was injured, so the crutches were written in for the character, but going into a tunnel with someone who can’t walk is still a stupid idea in-film.) Even down to simple stuff like the old guy kidnapping and knocking Gen and Malik out, leaving them in a room, and then coming back later to kill them. Why did he leave them at all?

The ghost effects are always bad, but additionally are inconsistent. Sometimes they’re bad CG blurs, sometimes they appear to be guys in bad skeleton costumes. The other effects such as the blood and gore stuff is also poorly done.

Some stuff strays between plot hole, inconsistency, and plain incompetence. Several scenes have had the film flipped, so text on people’s shirts appears backwards. Some scenes are entirely reused, just with the film flipped, like when they crawl through the tunnels. When Wes is running through the tunnels he alternately is carrying his backpack and not carrying anything, and eventually inexplicably loses his shirt. Zee is alternately called Zeke and Zack and I think something else throughout the movie. It’s shown that his father killed him by strangling him, but we got a “shocking” scene earlier where you could see him from behind and it appeared he’d been shot in the head. When Gen steals the old man’s amulet and he’s shown frantically trying to get it back, he’s STILL WEARING THE DAMN THING. Gen’s tank top starts out at a reasonable length, and gets progressively shorter through the film (presumably whenever they figured people’s attention was waning) until we start to get some gratuitous underboob shots.

This movie pretty much had no saving points. It’s kind of funny in an unintentionally-bad-movie way, but really isn’t worth seeing unless you want it for that reason. (And while I think the actors realized how bad it was, I don’t think it was truly intended to be as awful as it was… I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem quite self-aware enough for that. If I AM wrong, then I still think the film fails to achieve its goal.) Even if you’re watching it for the “hey, this is a bad movie, let’s laugh at it” reason, it’s more obnoxious than entertaining a lot of the time. Though at least we now have knowledge of the phrase “what the ass, man?” which has entered into near-daily use in our household.

Horror Movie Reviews: House of Fears (2007)

Overall: C

Acting: C

Writing: C

Story: C

Technical aspects: C

Effects: C+

IMDB

Directed by:

Ryan Little

Starring:

Corri English

Sandra McCoy

Michael J. Pagan

Corey Sevier

Alice Greczyn

Eliot Benjamin

The best way to describe this movie is probably just “average.” It’s a pretty basic curses-killing-teens-type movie. We start off in Africa, where a woman is apparently intending to make a purchase from an archaeological dig. They arrive, her guide discovers that everyone has been killed, she grabs the Mysterious Evil Statue they unearthed, and in the interest of getting out, the guide says she can keep it.

Then back in America, we see a security guard doing a patrol of “The House of Fears”, a haunted house attraction. His dog companion freaks out about something, and they go to investigate. Of course, it’s the Mysterious Evil Statue, which proceeds to cause the dog to attack him.

Meanwhile, six high school kids are at a party dealing with some stock teenage drama. Hailey (Sandra McCoy) is angry that her father has remarried and hates her new stepsister Samantha (Corri English,) and is interested in Carter (Corey Sevier) who only has an on-and-off relationship with her, and… oh man, it is so hard to care much about any of these people and their stock teenage drama… But okay, Carter’s friend Zane (Eliot Benjamin) is into a girl named Candice (Alice Greczyn) and intends to invite her to the haunted house where he works. But she only wants to go with her boyfriend Devon (Michael J. Pagan.) (Can’t keep all the characters straight? That’s okay, most of the audience can’t either!)

Well, the six of them sneak into “House of Fears” where Zane works, and start their way through the “nine fears” that the house is supposedly built around – things like ghosts, death, spiders, the dark, etc. I’ll admit that the house itself looks pretty cool – it’s a haunted house I’d probably enjoy going through in real life.

But of course, because it’s a horror movie, the Mysterious Evil Statue exerts its power to literally bring individual’s worst fears to life, and starts killing off the teens one by one, as they’re forced to go progressively deeper into the house in hopes of escape.

It’s really hard to say anything about the movie except that it is just so painfully average. It isn’t bad, but it’s not especially good either. The acting is nothing special, but it’s all right. The story itself is basic, and it works to the extent that it has to. It’s a silly premise for sure, but doesn't require much more suspension of disbelief than half the horror films out there. The setting is nice enough, and like I said above, I can see this haunted house being fun to go through. But watching other people go through it? Eh, not as exciting, even if we do get to watch them die.

The effects are pretty good; again not spectacular, but not relying solely on CGI. That’s what pushes the effects category into C+ territory for me - I have pretty low tolerance for bad computer generated effects, but I love seeing more “traditional” effects with props and makeup and the like. 

It’s lacking in the sexuality and gore that a lot of teen scream type movies have, which may be either a deterrent or a draw depending on your position.

I can say that this could be a fun movie to watch around Halloween or with a group of friends, but it certainly isn’t particularly stand-out.

Horror Movie Reviews: The Descent Part 2 (2009)

Overall: C

Acting: B

Writing: C

Story: C

Technical aspects: B

Effects: B-

IMDB

Directed by:

Jon Harris

Starring:

Shauna Macdonald

Gavan O’Herlihy

Natalie Jackson Mendoza

Krysten Cummings

Particular trigger warnings: none I recall

Passes the Bechdel test? Yes.

This movie felt pretty “meh” to me. In all honesty, I was pretty bored through most of it.

            The Descent Part 2 is a sequel to the 2005 film The Descent. HEAVY SPOILERS FOR THE DESCENT FOLLOW: The basic plot of the first film is that six friends (all female) go on a caving trip together in the Appalachian mountains. There’s a cave-in, trapping them in the unexplored cave system where there’s no hope of rescue. Turns out that the cave system is occupied by a humanoid species referred to as “crawlers” who violently kill the girls one by one. Finally, two girls remain, Juno and Sarah. Some drama has happened, with Juno being responsible for one of the other girls’ deaths, plus being the one at fault for tricking them into going to an unexplored cave system, and it’s also been revealed that Juno had an affair with Sarah’s late husband, so Sarah attacks and wounds her and leaves. It’s implied that Juno dies off-camera, with an abruptly silenced scream, and we see Sarah escape. But then her escape is revealed to have been a hallucination, and the movie ends with her sitting oblivious below ground and the crawlers getting closer. I actually liked the first movie pretty well, and it's been on my re-watch list for some time.

            The sequel picks up with it being revealed that actually Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) has somehow made it out, and she stumbles into the road and is picked up by a motorist who takes her to a hospital. Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O’Herlihy) has the blood on her clothing tested. Upon finding that some of it belonged to Juno (Natalie Jackson Mendoza) he insists that Sarah take them back through the caves to find the other girls.

            The sheriff puts together a team consisting of himself, his deputy Elen Rios (Krysten Cummings), and three (pretty non-descript) “specialists” – Dan (Douglas Hodge), Greg (Joshua Dallas), and Cath (Anna Skellern). They go through a newly discovered entrance to the cave system through a mineshaft operated by a man named Ed Oswald (Michael J. Reynolds).

            Once down in the caves, Sarah has a flashback and strikes out at the others before fleeing. Sheriff Vaines chases after her, but encounters a crawler, which he fires at, and he causes a cave-in. Cath is separated from the rest. The three still together – Elen, Dan, and Greg – find a video camera from one of the girls in the first movie, and they see that the girls really were attacked by the crawler creatures. Then they themselves are attacked by crawlers, and are separated.

            Sarah and Elen meet up, and witness a crawler killing Dan. Cath and Greg reunite elsewhere and keep going, but are both eventually offed. Vaines is still going deeper into the caves, and he is almost killed before he is rescued by Juno, who somehow has survived, and in the few days since the previous movie has become particularly skilled in killing the crawlers. The four survivors meet up, and while Juno and Sarah start fighting, then they decide that maybe they should save it for later and just try to escape now. Juno says she can lead them to the exit, and Vaines handcuffs himself to Sarah so she can’t abandon them like he claims she did Juno. On their journey, he falls over a cliff, and Elen cuts off his hand letting him fall and die in order to save Sarah.

            Finally, the three remaining women are within reach of the exit, but as they try to sneak past a group of crawlers, Greg is revealed to be barely alive and he grabs Juno. She screams, he dies, the crawlers attack. Juno ends up wounded, and dies in Sarah’s arms. Elen and Sarah are horribly outnumbered, but Sarah sacrifices herself so Elen can escape.

            Elen gets out, but then Ed, the man who was operating the mineshaft elevator, attacks her and drags her back to be food for the crawlers. The movie ends with a crawler leaping at her.

            It’s hard to really pick out what exactly was BAD about this movie, except that I found it boring and it didn’t really hold my interest at all. I had to keep forcing myself to stay awake. The acting is all right, but the story was just dull. The three “specialist” characters felt unnecessary, and like they were only there for padding the length of the movie with their respective death scenes. I don’t have any lasting impression of their characters or any development they got, and can’t really think of anything that made them necessary to the story. I guess it’s better that this is called “part 2” rather than being billed as a real sequel. It seems to be trying to repeat the success of the first film by doing the same things, but that really is just more repetitive than anything else; predictable death scenes spaced out by boring stretches of travel devoid of tension because we’ve already been here and done this.

I also had a hard time getting past how clumsily it fits with the original. Both Juno and Sarah die in the end of the first movie, and it’s never explained how either of them actually escaped and survived. Despite the fact that Sarah was shown to be hallucinating images of her dead daughter, too far into the cave to possibly get out, while she was being surrounded by crawlers, she still managed to escape? Somehow, despite being horribly wounded and constantly hunted by creatures that hunt partially by scenting blood, Juno has survived for days and in that short time has become an expert at hunting and killing the crawlers? And she knows where the exit is, but hasn’t tried to get out herself? This didn’t feel well explained at all. (I realize that there were apparently alternate endings to the first film, and my review is based on the ending that I saw, which was the standard version on the DVD I watched.)

            The cinematography is good, and it feels dark and closed in like being in the caves. The effects weren’t bad, but the creature design of the crawlers was changed from the first movie. The change wasn’t good, in my opinion. The first movie had them looking like creepy, pale, slimy, eyeless things that had evolved underground… exactly what they were supposed to be. For the sequel, according to the designer, “Jon [the director] wanted them more viciously feral, inbred, scarred and deformed, with rows of sharklike teeth for ripping flesh.” The result to me looks… gargoyle-like. Less like a real species that could exist (and is therefore creepy or scary,) and more like a Halloween monster mask (which is not so creepy.) Their faces are wrinkled with broad noses and pointed ears. They have eyes and can clearly see. The wikipedia article on the first movie has a good comparison of the two designs, which I’ll copy-paste here: 

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent#Creature_design.)

            I would definitely recommend the first film (which wasn’t perfect, but probably would get a B+ from me) more than the second. If you really like the first one, and find yourself desperately wanting more, the second may provide that. But in my opinion it does so clumsily, and doesn’t add anything new to an interesting scenario.

Horror Movie Reviews: CrossBones (2005)

Overall: F

Acting: D

Writing: F

Story: F

Technical aspects: D

Effects: F

IMDB

Directed by:

Daniel Zirilli

Starring:

Joseph Jones

Maria Santos

Joseph Marino

Jessie Camacho

Mayra Soto

Hardy Hill

J-Shin Kinshu

Merlynne Williams

Particular trigger warnings: rampant racism

This was… not a good movie. And my reaction is in with the summary, so spoilers abound throughout the whole writeup, to a greater extent than usual.

            Basic plot… A producer for reality TV has started a new show on an island where six contestants will compete for $100,000. In addition to the six contestants, there’s one camera guy, the producer, and the producer’s high-maintenance bitchy girlfriend. But naturally the island is CURSED. Because centuries before, the dreaded pirate Redblood was cursed by some (oddly English-speaking) Savage Native Voodoo-types, so he’s still around and going to get his revenge. Or something.

            I get the feeling the movie is intending self-parody, but it just comes off as stupid. The majority of the characters are one-dimensional reality TV stereotypes: the Black gansta rapper “Greedy G”, the bitchy made-of-attitude-and-promiscuity Black girl, the ditzy blonde who probably doesn’t have a coherent thought through the whole film, and the dumbass guy who is only “there for the ladies” and whose every line consists of wanting everyone to be naked, or referring to his penis as “The Monster.” And the two biggest “stars,” the two characters we’re apparently supposed to like and who show shallow attempts at character development, are played by actual reality TV stars! Hardy Hill was in “Big Brother” and “Miami Social,” and Jessie Camacho was on “Survivor.”

            Fabulous racism and sexism abound. Again, I’m sure it’s striving for witty self-parody, but it fails pretty astoundingly. All the women except for one are shallow and materialistic, as well as being portrayed as sluts who sleep around solely to feed the materialism, and every shot of the women is obviously for tits and ass. If you enjoy that, this movie may be for you, but this went beyond even much of the usual fanservicey pandering. The Black woman is nasty to everyone, the Black man is shown as unintelligent and violent, and immediately starts in with how if he was the black woman’s pimp, she’d be missing teeth. The obvious racism is probably meant to be tempered by a line between the “producer” and the cameraman, in which the producer tells him that “angry Black people make good television” and the cameraman protests that “they aren’t really like that.” But the movie definitely doesn’t fall under “clever social commentary” so much as “really fucking stupid and offensive.”

            And Redblood is not anything near a convincing pirate. He looks like he should be stumbling around a Renaissance Faire at best. His rather unplaceable accent comes and goes, his dialogue sounds like a high schooler on talk-like-a-pirate-day, and it’s just poorly acted in general.

            The beginning of the film where we get scenes of Redblood on his piratey ship doing piratey things appears to have been filmed on a boat that they weren’t allowed to take away from the dock. When he makes his daring escape from prison, it’s done on a bright blue rowboat (with an obvious hookup for a motor) on what appears to be a mid-sized lake rather than the ocean blue.

            The deaths are predictable and not especially satisfying, even considering how much I hated all the characters. The gore is unconvincing, so even if that’s all you’re there for, it’ll likely still be disappointing. It’s badly filmed and the sound sometimes gets annoyingly quiet, only to be back to full volume mid-conversation. The acting is awful, with only a slight excuse that it’s supposed to be “reality TV,” the characters are ridiculously horrible, it’s badly written… I wavered between giving this a D- just for the fact that I was entertained by how bad it was, and a full-on F. But I have to go with F.

Horror Movie Review: Biophage (2010)

Overall: B-

Acting: C

Writing: C

Story: B

Technical aspects: B-

Effects: C

IMDB

Directed by:

Mark Rapp

Starring:

Aaron Jackson

Ron Marnich

This one is better than a lot of zombie movies I’ve seen lately - it doesn’t fall into a lot of the clichés of the genre, and I had fun watching it - though it has its share of flaws.

It’s a pretty basic viral-style zombie movie, where the world has been taken over by “Biophages.” A team made up of Sgt. Cain (Aaron Jackson) and Dr. Bell (Ron Marnich) are on a mission for a military lab to try and find data on the outbreak from the CDC. We join them on their journey after they’ve found the CDC deserted, and they’re just trying to get back to their military lab. It’s a bit refreshing that we join them after the zombie apocalypse is already underway. Rather than go through the motions of the characters having to “discover” that the undead have turned into flesh-hungry monsters (a fact that the audience generally already knows) we’re essentially already on the same page with our mains.

As the movie continues, and the pair try to get back to the scientists working on a cure in their lab, they primarily find themselves coming up against human survivors that are far more dangerous than the ‘phages have ever been, including a Vietnam vet who has turned to cannibalism, a preacher who has gone mad thinking he can save the biophages’ souls, and the doctor they’re working for who wants to get rid of Cain because Cain had an affair with his wife. It is nice to see some focus on the humans rather than exclusively on scene after scene of repetitive zombie attacks, but coupled with the “What has humanity become?” tagline on the box comes off as a bit pretentious, as if it’s a novel concept to try and examine the dark side of humanity.

I also think the end was a bit of a let-down in that it felt like it was trying to be shocking, but to me at least came off more as “well, that happened.”

While the cover and the still shots on the back of the DVD case are in color, the movie itself is shot in black and white. This was unexpected at first, but I think works in the movie’s favor. Considering the obviously low budget of the film, it may have saved them from sub-par effects or lighting issues, and honestly keeps the movie looking pretty clean in terms of tech, as well as giving it a bit of an “old war movie” vibe. The cinematography was pretty good too. Not anything revolutionary, but the shots were framed well, and gave it a much more professional feel than most movies in this budget range.

My biggest complaint was probably the sound. The acting of our mains is all right, though a lot of the side characters leave something to be desired. But the dialogue is clearly dubbed in later (or it's been heavily altered in post-production.) The dubbing is synched well, but it means that all the voices are at the same level, and tend to be devoid of much volume-related inflection. This is preferable to some crappy films where you can’t hear what’s going on, but I don’t think I was ever able to forget that I was watching a movie. The sound was jarring the entire time, and so I was never able to be entirely absorbed in the film.

Overall, I think the movie was good. Not the best I’ve seen, but it looked professional and clean, was pretty enjoyable to watch, and was different (and better) than the majority of straight-to-video zombie films out there.