Archive for September, 2010

Movie : Resident Evil : Afterlife 3D

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

reaft
Rating: ★★☆☆☆

I hate 3d movies. They don’t make me vomit like they do to some of my friends but seriously I’m not gonna be wow’ed by glasses being thrown at me. And why did that guy throw his glasses in the first place? Since it’s after the apocalypse nobody makes new glasses, so what, he wants to walk in the sun without his glasses? Stupid.
The worst part about this movie is that it’s made mostly in slow motion. So it’s about 90 minutes or so, but if we played all the slow-mo footage the normal speed we’d have a 30 minute “short film”. And that wouldn’t sell even in 3d. Next time they should really shoot more footage.

Story? There’s no story. It’s just a set of 3 or 4 locations between which the characters travel and fights in every one of them. Think of it as a filmed mortal kombat without Christopher Lambert. The characters? Well there’s Alice and she’s always charming – most people watch these films for her alone – but the others? What others?
Ah right we had that guy who escaped from a prison once, and that guy that looked like Agent Smith from the Matrix. What? Well the only cool thing about it is that it’s sometimes so stupid that we are sure they had that in mind. Like making fun of Wentworth Miller as an escape-artist from prison. And poking some at the matrix. And slow-mo bullets. It’s so 1999, but can be funny.

The main problem is that it’s actually a short movie, with no plot, no story, and nothing to look forward to. It’s just a bunch of fight scenes pieced together with no explanation of what’s going on. Well maybe the 3d era people like that. I don’t.

2 for Milla.

Movie : Carrie 1976

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

carrie1
Rating: ★★★★☆

Whoa! I’ve read the book a long time ago (as with most of King’s books) and forgot about the fact that there was a movie at all. This was the movie that made Brian Depalma a great director, and it even introduced an “actor” – John Travolta. It’s funny to see how he looked like when he was young. Thankfully he wasn’t a main character so he didn’t spoil much as he acts exactly the same in every movie. But the main duo of Carrie and Tom were amazing. Seriously this is great acting and too bad it’s not present in scary movies anymore like it was.
Sure there’s this slightly annoying way the people were speaking back then (very “precise” speech, which makes every word sound a bit unnatural) but still. Carrie has a truly scary / great moment near the end and it’s not due to cheesy special effects (no computers then, sorry). It’s all because of the great acting of one Sissy Spacek. She delivered a performance that’s astonishing. Seriously, you see that she IS that character and not just pretends to be. And it really makes it scary / breathtaking to see the final scenes with Carrie.

This is not a typical scary movie with graphically depicted killings and blood everywhere. This one’s scary for a whole lot of other reasons and if you haven’t seen it you should be planning it for this weekend.

Movie : Dawn of the Dead

Monday, September 20th, 2010

dawnofthedead
Rating: ★★★☆☆

This was actually pretty entertaining. The zombies are fast and run fast (but still hilarious) and the idea for the survivors to live at a mall gives us quite a lot of diversity. This is a pretty fast paced zombie film which is hard to do for a movie that takes part mostly in one place. But it does work. The characters are good enough so they don’t annoy us. There’s “Dave” across the street and a group of refugees in the mall. They try to survive but of course human instinct in such situations is not necessarily the best advisor. Which leads them to trouble.

Long story short – out of the zombie genre this is a keeper. It might not be scary (actually it’s not scary at all except for the cheap loud noise and something jumping out scenarios, but show me a horror that doesn’t have those). Try it if you haven’t already. Not bad, not bad.

Movie : 30 days of night

Friday, September 17th, 2010

30daysofnight
Rating: ★★★½☆

It is quite rare to see a decent vampire horror nowadays with all the pieceofshit twilight ruining the vampire genre, but a couple of years ago this movie was a spark of hope. Too bad nothing really followed and there hasn’t been a half-decent vampire movie since. But ok, no time to complain.

30 days of night featured one Josh Hartnett who’s mostly known from cheesy-dramas and cheesy-comedy. In general he’s sailing the seas of cheese. It was a big surprise here to see him act (and quite well) here instead of showing off. The rest of the cast also did good which isn’t easy in a vampire movie.

The plot is simple. Ha! You were expecting me to say that since it’s a standsrd for most horrors but here it ain’t simple. In fact it’s pretty clever. In a town in alaska the polar nights are approaching – meaning no sun for 30 days. And who doesn’t like sun? Yeah you’ve guessed it – vampires. But here they’re not classy duke-types with a funny accent. They’re evil and they speak their own language. This is extremely cool because they’re not supposed to be nice. And nice they are not. So they start hunting people of this cut-off from the world town. The sheriff (Hartnett) tries to save as many people as he can which leads to the main upside of the movie – it has a great atmosphere of fear and angst that really works.

Not great maybe but good enough to recommend. And don’t mind Josh. It was probablyba one time thing for him anyway (even though he did really good)

Go watch it. Especially for vampire fans – this is how it’s done.

Movie : Piranha 3d

Monday, September 13th, 2010

piranha3d
Rating: ★½☆☆☆

Ok, the 3d technology can be pretty fun in horror movies. I get that. Seriously. But isn’t it mostly used to draw more people to the theaters to watch crappy movies? I think so. You should think so. If not than you’ll probably waiting for the Twilight Saga in 3d, where Edward could be a 3d-douchebag onscreen. Cool!

Seriously – mutated angry animals killing people is a thing that can be done right. Look at the “Jaws” series for example. It can also suck ultra-hard – look at “anaconda” and some other swamp shit films that only made it to VHS. Having distinguished those strict categories it’s quite easy to put Pirahna (3d or not) in the latter.

There’s nothing right with this movie, really. It’s boring. It’s repetitive. It has a lot of “american youth” partying which is so boring in horror movies I only wished the piranhas to eat them quick and swim away.
The main characters are not likeable in any way either. But in such a case there should be at least a likeable “killer”. Here the piranhas look like retarded fish with outside skeletons. It does have quite a lot of gore but it’s gore mostly for the sake of 3d blood and “yuck” remarks inside the theater. A story? Naah, there’s no story here. And if a story can get summed up in one sentence so easily it can only mean one thing. It sucks. So here’s the story for you : Kids at spring break are being eaten by piranhas from the dinosaur era.

Clearly stay away from this movie, as it does more damage to your head than any piranha would. If you want a better (not saying “good”) 3d experience go see the new resident evil.

Movie : Män som hatar kvinnor

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

mansomhattarkvinnor
Rating: ★★★½☆

Since there weren’t any good horror movies out recently, I decided to add some more of the Thriller genre to this website as well. So here’s a swedish movie based on the bestseller book by Stieg Larsson. This is the first part of a Trilogy and you can be sure the other ones will be reviewed as well. So let’s start shall we?

First of all I’ve read the book before approaching this movie so I knew the whole plot and storyline. What was interesting is that the choice of characters was almost perfect. Both Mikael and Lisbeth looked exactly like I imagined them in the book. The only person that looked different was Erika which I thought looked a little younger and “healthier”. But the characters and the acting was refreshingly good. And that’s a big plus if you don’t have a bunch of zombies coming after them. They need to act good enough for the story to be convincing.

There’s of course some computer hacking and it’s actually quite funny since all it takes to hack is to write “access someone’s_computer” and hit enter. Luckily it doesn’t quite work that way or we’d all be hacked before I stop writing that sentence. Which is now. But aside from that – there were a couple of changes made to the story (won’t reveal them, don’t worry). Personally I think the book’s version was a little bit better, but maybe because the book is so well known they had to change it a bit in the movie or the viewers would get bored.

The story is quite simple – an economy-journalist Mikael writes a story about some rich dude and it turns out he got his facts wrong so he gets sued and loses. Since as a journalist he’s not as trustworthy as he used to be before the incident, he gets contacted by a rich old man who gives him a mission to find his dead niece that died 40 years before. The money is good so he goes for it, meets a crazy goth-hacker that’s not really friendly and together they dig for clues about the Vanger family.

It’s worth a watch mainly because it’s so different. There aren’t any special fx, just good acting and swedish landscapes (ie. cold and snowy). But the story is interesting enough so time passes quickly. It’s not a masterpiece but a good enough movie for a cold autumn night.

Movie : Splice (2010)

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

splice
Rating: ★★★☆☆

This is more of a horrorish drama than a typical horror movie. There isn’t any gore and guts spilling on the screen and there’s no real tension and fear throughout the film. The fear here is mainly of the fact that maybe in some underground lab an experiment like that had already been done. Or worse.
The guy who brought us “The Cube” comes back with a horror movie that’s actually not set in a cube. Refreshing!

Summarizing the plot quickly : Two scientists and lovers (that must be a boring life to see each other constantly at both home and work) create a human-animal hybrid as an illegal cloning/splicing experiment. Of course their “baby” starts to grow up and becomes a little bit more unpredictable. This isn’t ET go home. DREN as the creature is called, can be pretty mean, especially with her poison ridden stinger on the tip of her tail.

So as we all know, in a case like that the situation gets out of control, the experiment turns out unexpected. People get killed. Blah blah blah. Well here we have a sort of similar scenario, but the film tries to be deeper, more engaging for the mind than for the eyes and trying to make the viewer think about that whole cloning/splicing thing. And thinking has already very few followers on facebook, so it’s probably good that this movie helps out a bit in that field.

But jokes aside, what’s good about the movie is the general atmosphere and mood of it, important questions about human nature and science are asked and the acting is pretty good too. Considering how Adrien Brody sucked in the recent “Predators” movie here he delivers and shows that he’s a versatile and talented actor. Good for him!

What’s bad is mostly about the ending, and it’s not really “how” it turns out but mostly how it gets there. And the very ending broke most of the atmosphere and made me laugh a little. But despite that it’s worth a watch, and Frankenstein/revived monsters movies aren’t very popular so it’s nice to see a newbie in the family.