Rating: (mostly for the second episode of this movie)

Ok, I’m seriously confused. This movie is actually three movies (or it’s divided into three episodes) and each is distinctively different than the rest. The first one – a dark, twisted view of the world going mad from looking at the tv. Ok, not just at the tv, but at the audio-visual signal somebody is broadcasting that messes up people’s minds. Pretty standard and suddenly it turns gore. The second part – which is my favorite is somewhat comedic. Three people stuck in an apartment, all of them psycho in a different way and the outcome is just hilarious. The shot where they’re sitting on the couch next to each other drinking some soda or whatever is just priceless. Too bad it gets spoiled in the third part which is some sort of pseudo philisophical bullshit that is supposed to make it look mysterious. Too be honest it doesn’t make much sense and it’s not really fun to watch. Oh and the movie is practicaly stolen by one character, you’ll know which one, the only good part here. The others act unconvincingly and not too good even for a horror flick. Watch just the middle part, you don’t need the plot and you’ll save yourself a lot of time.

Rating:

Children had always played an important part in horror movies. Watching kids be scared by ghosts, mutants or nazi-zombies brings back the memories of when we were kids and were scared by exactly the same things. That usually works quite well. Even better if the child is the evil one. We remember Omen, Exorcist, and recently Orphan and other movies in which a sinister look on a kids face is enough to have a scary poster. This movie received so much praise after the release that it should be a masterpiece of horror. And the fact that it’s spanish, and they recently know how to make good movies (Rec and Rec2 for example) we should all run and get that dvd. Right? Wrong…

The beginning is promising, hands of small children tearing down the wallpaper to reveal some horrible secret (they don’t show much though). So a happy family decides to use an old orphanage (in which the woman grew up so she knew the place) and open a foster home for mentally handicapped children. Their adopted son – Simon – has a disease that cannot be cured, but supposedly new medication can slow down the illness.
So it all seems to be working out fine, well until the boy starts playing with invisible friends and a creepy old lady roams the premises. Then the boy disappears and all the horror begins. Well at least it should.
The director tries to add many levels of tension and psycho-babble to the story so we’ll all think that it’s deep and inspiring. In my opinion it fails miserably and just makes the movie plain boring. There’s no real evil here, instead we have some sad thoughts of some children that make the ghosts appear. Or stuff like that. While it could’ve been a refreshment in the genre oversaturated by blood, gore and evil demons, it is just a boring movie that tries too hard to be something better.

And good movies without evil can be made, even with scary moments and horror elements + children. Go see “Pan’s labirynth” to see what I’m talking about.

Rating:

The setting? Pretty standard. A house in the middle of nowhere. A couple (or two) with some problems and past traumas, and an evil/weird family of rednecks that let them stay for the night. Oh and a psycho killer that worships the devil and wants to get inside of the house to get the ones inside for some crimes that they supposedly committed. Yeah, we’ve seen it. So should we skip this one and go watch twilight again? Not exactly.

This is a cliche-ridden movie – that’s true – but it has some moments that are pretty well done, and some odd atmospheric moments without real threat to the characters but pretty scary nonetheless. Of course if you watch it alone in the house with your lights out. But that’s the setting all horror movies are supposed to be watched, right? Sure the ending is a mix of endings from some other movies (won’t tell you which ones because that’d lead you right to what will happen) and some elements are obvious. But it’s seriously not a bad movie, and I think that people are bashing it online because they were expecting something else. More gore or whatever. This is a scary movie in which there’s not a lot of death, mutilation and blood. It’s more about building the tension between the characters and the killer (played by Michael Madsen!) and thinking what the weird family of the house will do next. (Here Bill Moseley at his finest, playing a very, very odd steward). Those two actors actually bring the level of acting up, and even the two Polish actors that don’t really play a big part in the movie (time-wise) do a pretty good job of delivering their lines convincingly. Not bad, not great. Decent enough for a watch though. And for Bill Moseley fans it’s a must!

Rating:

This is a television movie made by SyFy channel so don’t expect a fancy high budget thing. Instead we have a house, 6 characters and some cheesy CGI effects. But how does it hold as a movie?

Pretty good actually. It’s entertaining and scary sometimes but it’s mostly about the plot and the terror of people trapped inside a haunted house than scary monsters. They avoided being bland with clever angles and a lot of dark areas, plus the acting is actually not bad for totally unknown tv actors. All of them do a pretty good job. There’s also a nice Stephen King like touch at the end. Generally for a tv movie this is better than a lot of “real movies” that I’ve seen this year. Watch it in the dark and you might get scared from time to time. And cheesy CGI aside it’s just a normal, typical horror movie that’s fun to watch and fun to forget about afterwards. Which is something that can’t be said about a lot of recent movies.

Rating:

Imagine hostel. You see it? Now imagine hostel on wheels. Why? Doesn’t really matter. What for? That’s not important. Who? Young people (well fairly young, in their twenties). To top it all off – athletes – or rather wrestlers. But if you’re thinking about a Hulk Hogan type than no. They’re the no-show wrestlers with tight costumes and ear protecting “headphones”. You know, the ones that are in the olympics. You never seen WWF in the olympics now did you? Ok so now you know which kind of wrestlers. Still it doesn’t really help much, sure they’re fit and sure they’re pretty strong. And a train is a pretty small place. This was meant to be a remake of Jamie Lee Curtis’ 1981 slasher “Terror Train”. They dropped the “Terror” out of the name (and out of the movie) and had some better special effects. But no terror, no horror, just disgusting stuff like skinning people. If some people call that horror I don’t know what a horror is anymore.

This is – just like the Hostel series – another movie where nobody thought about the plot, the story, the characters and anything interesting to tell in a movie. They just want to violently kill and dismember young people. There’s no story to justify it, and the acting is pretty bad as well. I wonder why do they still make these kinds of movies. I’m pretty sure that outdoing SAW (which in fact has some sort of a story for better or worse) is right now a trendy thing to do for horror filmmakers. Too bad they don’t really stop and think and they make unoriginal disgust-fests over and over again. That’s really too bad because they make lots of “normal” people associate “The Train” or “Hostel” with the term “typical horrors” and in the end they look at us horror fans as if we’re totally messed up for liking stuff like that. We don’t. Skip it. Unless you want to be in a hell of a ride of sneezing / puking.

Rating:

Ok, here’s the deal. A psycho chick falls in love with a guy and gets so obsessed that she kills and tortures all those around him to get to him. Sureeeee…. This is of course possible and stuff like that probably happened a couple of times before, but come on! And this one is so badly written and directed that it’s more of a comedy than a serious scary movie. The acting is pretty wooden, some scenes don’t make much sense. Sometimes it’s best not to make some movies. This is completely not convincing, and even the psycho girl isn’t really that scary – it seems like she doesn’t believe in what she’s doing herself. That makes it a bit hard to follow the story… Skip it.

Rating:

There are a couple of movies by this name. The one I want to talk about here is the one that takes place at a desolate gas station and three people are hiding from some weird, splintery parasite. It was a debut of the director and it got a couple of awards + good reviews so I decided to give it a shot. So ok, 95% of the action is in one place – the gas station building. An escaped convict and a couple wanting to go camping are locked together while some evil thing is trying to get to them. Of course this is pretty low budget but they went around it nicely with quick angle changes and shaky camera shots (and darkness) in some of the scary scenes. The parasite , even though nothing quite new was really well made and interesting. Sure there were some “The Adams family” kinda moments (you’ll know) but if we try not to focus on the acting and try to jump into the atmosphere both feet it actually is pretty good. Entertaining for sure. Scary ? Well a little from time to time, but it’s mostly the typical kind of scary – something jumping out at you with a loud noise.

Still it’s not bad and especially for a first movie. That guy should make some more and with a bigger budget and he should be allright. Worth a watch, nothing fancy but if you expect fancy then go watch “avatar” ;p

Rating:
There’s only one thing wrong with this movie. That being the fact that it’s not longer. The ending of course promises a part three. So this one starts only seconds after the previous one ended. A SWAT team bursts into the house in a search for the blood of the source of the contamination. We also learn a bit about what was really going on and were the zombies really zombies, or something much, much different and more evil.

And this time we see the movie divided into three parts. Of course the swat team with the “scientist” accompanying them need to record everything, so we have a cameraman plus a camera on the helmets of each one of the goons. But later some kids break into the house and of course they want to film what’s going on too, so their views are also documented. Then at the end another camera gets introduced and the action picks up even more.

This is much more intense than the original REC, and as it progresses it only gets better. The ending is almost a masterpiece, really impressive. And it keeps me waiting for part three and at the same time hoping there will be no “Quarantine 2″ because that would suck a lot.

Rating:
Ok, this is the game Doom3. Well at least it’s supposed to be doom3. While doom3 as a game was fun for at least 1/3 of it and it was pretty scary for at least 1/3 of it, this movie unfortunately doesn’t live up to it’s name fully. Let’s for a second imagine this : A desolate base on mars, with evil demonic creatures killing everyone and a small group of marines sent there to “search and destroy”. Pretty basic but plenty of potential. Still where the game had the heads up because it was interactive and thus it was easier to “be there”, now we see a bunch of guys being killed by demons but it doesn’t work.

The characters are of course cliche. There’s an older pervert, a noble sarge, a guy with some history and a kid. And a funny black guy because this is of course not cliche at all So the deal is similar to the game – the monsters come through some sort of portal in the UAC mars base and kill whoever doesn’t escape and hide. Marines are sent to do something about it and this is where the story begins.

Cool thing : the doctor speaking at the beginning is named “Carmack”. That’s also the name of the guy who had made the game Doom, Quake and all the other ones and revolutionized the 3d shooter genre. Kinda nice touch.

But it’s basically so cliche and typical that it’s frustrating to look at most of the time. There’s that hyped scene of the first person perspective look (like in the game) with a chainsaw and that scene is of course top notch. But for a couple of references and one nice action scene it’s not enough to be happy with this movie. Like “pinky”, a guy in a wheelchair who later turns into the beloved “pinky monster” from the game. Don’t worry those aren’t spoilers, it’s hard to spoil anything in this movie, it’s a super-linear dark scenery action shooting movie with demons as targets. Or the other way around.

Ok, so the characters are cliche. That happens right ? Yeah, it does but how often does an action-horror movie bore you to death during the action scenes? What worked in the game (darkness, inability to tell where the enemy is) worked mostly because you were the character. When you’re just a spectator it gets boring. It’s not terrible but it doesn’t do justice to the game. And I loved that game.

Rating:
As a big H.P.Lovecraft fan I was thrilled to hear they made a movie called “Cthulhu”. And after watching it I have some mixed thoughts, but one thing is certain. Lovecraft is a master of a very different kind of horror. Not really the type of “something jumps out of the dark at us”. He’s more into planting seeds in the readers head of how horrible the situation is as a whole and how alone he is in all of it. So there’s not a lot of really “scary” stuff, but people are scared anyway with just the thought. One against all. And all that stuff. And along comes the movie. First of all – no well known actors (at least to me) except for Tori Spelling. Second of all it’s not really “high budget” if you know what I mean. And lastly – they did a pretty cool twist that makes the movie a bit more psychological – the main character (as usual a professor) is gay. That of course contradicts a bit with what Lovecraft would probably want, but who knows. It adds some nice twists to the plot.

The story is pretty much Lovecraft’ish – a guy comes back for a funeral of his Mother to a small town at the sea where he had lived during his youth but moved away. Of course the town at the sea is a bit weird. People are odd, there’s no people from out of town living there. And there are stories of people missing. Plus our professor wakes up in his motel with a weird sacrificial stone on his bed. He starts to investigate what’s going on and that leads him to the conclusion that a weird occult has taken almost the entire town and it had been that way for generations. Of course the cult worships Cthulhu and they all believe they can go “to the sea” and live there forever with their beloved, tentacly master.

So any flaws? Not really. If you’re a lovecraft fan you should get why is this movie made the way it is. If not it might be a little boring at some points, and some points may be hard to understand since they assume you’ve read his books. There are some cliches left out fortunately – like they don’t mention the Necronomicon at all here. Sure they talk about some old books, but the name which was omnipresent in the prose is not present at all in the movie. The main character turns out to be a bit more complicated than what we’ve thought at first and that all progresses gradually to an ending that is …
… a type of ending that I hate. Because knowing their budgets and how little this movie earned (but it was in the top 25 though) they’re probably not gonna make part 2. Sadly.

Only for the fans, because there’s literally a couple of scary moments there and a lof of weird, dark and twisted atmosphere that’s hard to explain and that makes it scary overall. I loved it. And by the way I know it gets bashed by horror fans worldwide because they think it sucks. Well, I don’t have to agree with the popular voice all the time, do I ?