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.

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.

So here comes a sort-of remake of a 1974 classic, since the writers don’t have any ideas they decide to make another version of something, just adding modern day teens, cellphones and bad cgi. This is in fact the reason I rarely watch american movies and stay away from “remakes” of any kind. A couple of exceptions (halloween, the hills have eyes).

So let’s get over the facts :
The acting is worse. Well in this case it’s also true, but not entirely, since the acting is by no means terrible in the remake, it’s just slightly less engaging, but that might as well be the directors fault.

Computer graphics – sure computers have gone a long way since 1974, and we have plenty of “realistic” gore here, but gore gets boring after a while and stops being scary. What the original had was the suspense, the constant tension and fear, and here we just have the killing.

I have no idea why they still do that, this movie had only one good scene – the one with the cookies on the counter (not the meat ones) – that was actually good. But the rest is a typical remake that lacks any originality, and due to the lack of suspense is boring even if the killing has a larger scale.

I’d skip it.

What’s going on with the american movie industry? After countless bad original movies and so-so remakes they come up with new and new ideas, and all of them are more or less failures. The Familiar explores a genre not often present in horror which is “very psychological”. But there is no depth here, there’s a simple story that’s acted out ok (which is a good new thing) but there’s not much happening. The dialogues are pretty bad, unconvincing most of the time. I mean, come on, who really speaks like that? Unless you’re trying to act instead of being your character.

What the script fails at some actors actually make this a little bit better. Especially the father of the main character, or the girl.

Visually it’s shot like it’s the early 90’s again – a little oversaturated and bright. This visual side doesn’t really work anymore. The camera man was probably taking short naps while shooting, since here we have a camera operator 101 at present. It all looks a little bit unprofessional for a movie shot in 2009.

So basically, to sum it up, it’s not a good movie. It’s a 90’s style mediocre movie that in 2009 doesn’t quite do it. In the 90’s they sure had worse visuals and a little wooden acting, but at least the stories were great more often. Here we have a so-so story that’s delivered in a very so-so way. Only the ending gets a little better, but as they say, too little too late.

Spanish horror / thriller movies of late have all a couple of things in common. First of all – great attention and accentuating of visual details. Those movies are simply beautiful without plenty of SFX. They have unusual camera angles and creative ideas. So if we take that and match it with a compelling story like the one of “Pan’s Labirynth” or “Orphanage” (or even “REC” for that matter) we have an instant winner, that will have countless remakes in hollywood. Sometimes though, the story is a bit too simple, too stretched, and relying too much on the cheap “gotcha” elements. We have a mother and son duo, travelling on a ferry to an island called “Hierro” for their vacation. The latter disappears and the mother starts her search. What starts as very interesting piece, somewhere halfway through becomes extremely predictable and loses it’s charm.

It still has the visual flare that makes it stand out from many similar movies. And the acting is pretty good. The main problem is that this story has been done before and we can easily foresee what’s coming to us. Also it’s a little bit too long for my taste.

This is not a bad movie, don’t get me wrong, in fact it’s pretty good if you’re a fan of visual arts, and if you indulge in it and keep a blind eye to the how the story progresses, you’ll be entertained.
But there’s not much real depth in this one, especially comparing to what these guys did before.

Whoa, this is almost as bad as the Twilight series. I mean seriously this movie has only ONE good element and it’s the nuclear explosion. Funny thing is that Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson both made fun of how english people pronounce nuclear, and here we have it. Nu-qe-lar. Other than that – come on – if you want to do good mutants you don’t have to have a big budget. Look at “Dead Snow” and how they did the zombies. And that was a student-funded movie! Here the mutants look like ordinary people with some paint on them. That kinda sucks and actually makes it funny. Also there’s no actual gore so a bunch of mutants surrounding a person results in them sort of pushing, sort of groaning. Not really doing much.

So the atmosphere is not present, even though the bunker itself looks quite promising. The acting is “bad for a horror film” which should say it all. Sorry, but I didn’t find anyone convincing. It actually looks like a homemade movie with someone getting a couple thousand quid from their grandma or whatever, to make the bomb explode, and rent the bunker.

This movie is like a nuclear explosion. You better stay away. Oh and duck and cover!

This is a little bit better than the second part, mostly due to being new and a little bit more realistic at times. First of all the beginning is strong and disturbing, and then it only gets better. Since there are no men in the underground cave, and it’s only a little bit brighter than the second part, it creates a nice atmosphere of claustrophobia and helplessness. Sure it’s quite cliche to have female characters thrown at the face of danger and then become strong and predatory-like but hey, as long as it’s quite fresh in the genre we can put up with it. At least for a little while. It’s brutal, very brutal in fact, and very very intense. It slowly picks up the pace but when it gets to the “crawlers” it turns wicked.

So we have some added tensions between the characters, some old grudges, that aren’t overdrawn or destroyed with bad acting. Which is a good thing when a horror film has a backing story that puts things into perspective. And then there come the monsters. Sure it’s not really explained much why they’re there but seriously who cares, we’d expect monsters in underground caves right? Right! So the dames explore the caves trying to get over their old problems and then they get attacked and die. It takes some time for them to figure out what they’re dealing with and that’s also pretty typical. But the best thing about it is that most of it makes sense. There aren’t many plot-holes and stupid moments, so it’s worth a watch. Not really a classic, but british horror is actually gaining on the spaniards! Good, we love competition, especially since Americans are out of the way, doing mostly poor remakes of european classics.

The first descent was quite interesting so a follow-up was unevitable. The only survivor – Sarah – comes out of the caves and joins the search party for her friends. Since it’d be a bit dumb to go back, the director decided to give her amnesia, so her memory will eventually come back of course, but it’ll be too late then.

This is a “dark” movie, due to most action taking place deep underground. We only see bits and pieces of poorly lit rocks and the characters. This makes it easier to indulge and actually experience some fear since when it’s dark it’s far creepier when something jumps out at you suddenly.

The bad guys are the same ones we know and (love?) from descent 1, and there’s quite a lot of them this time. All in all it’s a typical american film made with some clever ideas and clever shooting (mostly darkness). If you’re claustrophobic and afraid of the dark this one will keep you interested until the very end. Sure it has some cliche elements, sure the blood looks like raspberry juice, sure the acting is barely “ok”, but come on, it’s a summer-slasher film. Don’t expect the caves to be THAT deep.

What started out as a bit of a mindless torture/disgusting thing with not-so-great special fx, eventually went up a little bit in the middle of the movie. Normally a movie like that would get 1.5 stars or even less, but here the director did a clever thing that messes with our heads and makes us think : hey, what’s going on? This is pure creativity, and although it might not make much sense (to me it does, there’s an explanation) it is a good to watch movie if you’re comfortable with pretty disgusting torture scenes sometimes (not too often though). I don’t really like hostel-like movies so I looked the other way a couple of times since my lunch was a bit too good for it to come back (yet ).

So without any spoilers, it’s a decent movie with a pretty main character, playing an american-psycho like sick killer that terrorizes a small neighborhood by torturing and then killing her victims. When she’s done with one house she moves on to the next. And of course she could’ve been caught / defeated a couple of times but by some odd luck she always ends up winning. Pretty typical so far. So after killing a couple of victims she finds a young guy who’s into music production and locks him in his studio/basement to have some sick and twisted fun.

And if not for the plot twists it would’ve been just a stupid movie with good acting by the psycho-killer – America Olivo – but nothing really fancy. I think it might have something to do with the recent british / spanish trend in horrors to think of a plot twist so original and wicked people will remember it. And then add another one. But the first few american movies done in this fashion we can certainly stand as opposed to the straightforward boring (and sick) torture flicks that Eli Roth makes.

So we have the Machette (Danny Trejo), the famous Pianist (Brody), Laurence Fishburne and a couple of other guys, plus a big name of Robert Rodriguez as a producer. Also a different approach to the whole Predator series as now it’s not the predators coming to earth, but the other way around. Is it really a horror of any kind? Well it has the thrills and the waiting for what’s going to happen so apparently so. So how was it?

Well not so good for a horror, not so bad for an action movie. Which is somewhat 50/50 and thus 2.5 stars. It could’ve been better and deeper instead of being only about mindless violence. Sure violence can be fun in a movie sometimes, but here it’s just a bunch of people shooting at everything. Doesn’t quite live up to the first two Predator movies. Good for a summer action flick that doesn’t make you think too much, just enjoy the views.