by ·Comments Off on As The Gods Will (2014, Takashi Miike)

Finally, Live-action Teen Cartoon Miike gets mixed-up with Bloody Horror Miike. Starts off in a Battle Royale classroom, a fake-looking CG toy playing a game of freeze-or-die with the terrified suit-wearing students, until sole survivor Shun (Sôta Fukushi of Blade of the Immortal) pushes the button on its back. He meets up with the survivors from other classes for the next challenge, basketball vs. a giant cat in the gym, where we meet ruthless brown-haired Amaya (The Great Yokai War star Ryûnosuke Kamiki), then Shun is paired with his ex Takase for a round-robin guessing game, then she’s killed in the next round, in which a truth-obsessed polar bear gets them to turn on each other. Finally a rooftop-sunset game of kick-the-can pits Shun against the transparently evil Amaya. All this is taking place inside a giant alien cube hovering over major cities, which has kidnapped and murdered all the country’s children in order to teach a valuable lesson spoken by a wise old dude at the very end, which I spaced out and didn’t pay attention to.

by ·Comments Off on Split (2016, M. Night Shyamalan)

“The broken are the more evolved.”

Three girls get kidnapped by Kraftwerk James McAvoy, who turns out to be one of many James McAvoys, collectively calling themselves The Horde. Light-haired Haley Lu Richardson (Columbus) wants to fight, dark-haired Jessica Sula (The Lovers) is freaking out, and Anya Taylor-Joy (The VVitch) had a hunter or survivalist father, stays cool and follows orders. Horde’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley of Carrie, Frantic) seems to admire him, and knows more than she lets on. I had my doubts about watching a multiple-personality McAvoy thriller but M. Night knows how to put a movie together, and now that he’s lost The Visit handheld camera gimmick, this was a damned good time, with a hell of a surprise cameo at the end.

by ·Comments Off on The Lure (2015, Agnieszka Smoczynska)

A very silly mermaid comedy-horror. It’s got songs, but I’m not sure I’d call it a musical… and the songs aren’t great, so I wouldn’t want to. A couple of hot young mermaids, Silver and Golden, get a job at a nightclub and things get increasingly complicated. Silver (Marta Mazurek of recent nun-drama The Innocents) falls in love with a human (blonde Jakub Gierszal of Dracula Untold) while Golden (Michalina Olszanska of Christopher Lambert concentration camp drama Sobibor) kills and eats local humans. I maybe lost track of some of the characters, but Silver gets a legs/fins transplant and fails to make Jakub love her, so turns into seafoam, then Golden takes swift revenge.

Golden is the dark-haired one and Silver the golden-haired, of course, here surrounding Kinga Preis, title star of Four Years With Anna:

Legs/fins surgery:

by ·Comments Off on The Void (2016, Gillespie & Kostanski)

Cop brings injured dude to near-abandoned rural hospital, bringing to mind that Southbound episode from last year’s SHOCKtober, or Attack on Hospital 13. Then hooded cultists appear outside and they discover a portal to hell in the basement, and things get interesting. The pre-credits scene has rural folks setting a dude on fire, and we’ve been at the hospital only six minutes before a possessed nurse murders a patient, so there’s not much time for setup – I’d barely get a handle on any particular character before they’d be killed in some horrible way.

As Filipe Furtado said more eloquently on Letterboxd, Stuart Gordon it ain’t, but Lovecraftian horror and blatant Hellraiser ripoffs (as opposed to bland official Hellraiser sequels) are always welcome.

The codirectors have done art and effects for Guillermo del Toro films and are buddies with the guys who made The Editor. Our cast includes Art Hindle (The Brood), the BBC interviewer from Pontypool, at least two people from Survival of the Dead, and Knives Chau from Scott Pilgrim.

by ·Comments Off on Nosferatu (1922, FW Murnau)

A few of the most beautiful shadow-moments and one of the greatest monsters in all silent cinema hung around a flabby retelling of Dracula – it’s maybe my fifth-favorite Murnau film, but I was happy to watch it on the big screen with an excellent, tightly synchronized live band, Invincible Czars.

by ·Comments Off on Monkey Shines (1988, George Romero)

Part of a Late Horror Masters’ Lesser Works double-feature. Opens with a disclaimer about the treatment of the movie’s monkeys, but they never appeared to be in any convincing danger, except maybe in the final scene. No mention of the treatment of the movie’s parakeets. Monkey tricks are the primary reason to watch this movie, except for George Romero and/or Stanley Tucci completists.

Allan’s car accident:

Allan and monkey giving the same steely expression:

Moody Allan (Jason Beghe of One Missed Call Remake) is badly crippled, so his monkey-researcher friend Geoffrey (John Pankow of Talk Radio) donates a brain-eating monkey to service-animal trainer Melanie (Kate McNeil of The House on Sorority Row) to get Allan a furry helper buddy. Brain-eating monkey in a George Romero movie – what could go wrong?

Mad scientist Geoffrey:

Geoffrey’s boss Stephen Root:

Moody Allan is a bad influence on the monkey, who starts to murder everyone who she perceives as a threat – first setting fire to Allan’s ex (Lincoln NE’s Janine Turner of Northern Exposure) who has run off with his doctor (Stanley Tucci), then electrocuting Allan’s annoying mom (Joyce Van Patten of Bone), killing Geoffrey via drug injection, and most horribly, murdering the parakeet of Allan’s hateful catetaker (Christine Forrest, Romero’s wife). After she threatens Melanie in a rage, Allan manages to dispatch the monkey using only his neck and mouth. We also get a monkey-surgery dream sequence and blurry monkey-POV shots. Mostly dullsville compared to the space vampires. My birds reacted to the monkey chatter, but not to the parakeet.

by ·Comments Off on Train to Busan (2016, Sang-ho Yeon)

Spoiler: there are zombies on the train to Busan. But there are suddenly zombies everywhere, and the train survivors aren’t sure whether it’s more dangerous in the zombie-infested train, or out in the zombie-infested world. The heart of the story, which doesn’t work nearly as well as The Host, to take another Korean family/supernatural-disaster movie as an example, is that workaholic dad Gong Yoo (The Age of Shadows) is a professional asshole and a shitty father to his daughter. During the course of the invasion, not only does he step up and learn to help people and work together, but we get a real panicky villain who needlessly kills others trying to save himself, making dad look even better in comparison.

L-R: Baseballer, Tough Guy, Hero Dad

There’s also a big tough dude and his pregnant wife, a high school baseballer and his girl Jin-Hee, the bedraggled survivor from outside, two older sisters, and one extremely dedicated train conductor. Once you get bit, the zombification escalates very quickly, so it’s all panic and chaos. The action is kinda poor, but the tension is great – especially when the group pictured above fights their way through to a car with the other survivors, then Panicky Villain Guy convinces the others that the newcomers can’t be allowed to stay.

Zombies can see better than they can hear:

The two sisters:

One train crash later, our Hero Dad finally gets zombie’d fighting off the villain, and the daughter makes it to Busan with the Tough Guy’s pregnant wife. I didn’t love the director’s animated The Fake – he bridged the two films with an animated zombie train movie called Seoul Station. He’s joined here by the cowriter of Hwayi: A Monster Boy.

by ·Comments Off on Prevenge (2016, Alice Lowe)

“Who cut the cord?” Pregnant woman is a psycho knife murderer, apparently speaking with her unborn child but actually just kinda schizo ever since her guy died in a climbing accident.

She is director Alice Lowe of Sightseers and Darkplace. First to die is a reptile salesman, then cheesy DJ Dan, a couple mustache dudes who I get mixed up, girl with boxing gloves, then post-spree Alice has an identity crisis when her baby is born seemingly normal. Formally speaking it’s no Sightseers, just a bit of bloody fun.

by ·Comments Off on Evil Dead (2013, Fede Alvarez)

Okay, we’re at a crisis point with the movie blog. I fell about two months behind, only taking basic plot and character notes on the last 25 movies, so I need to admit the next few posts are going to be very bad and just rush through them. Jumping back and forth between some recent SHOCKtober films and the Aug/Sept backlog for a while…

I’m not a huge fan of remakes of beloved classics, so ignored this when it came out, then I heard it was actually good, so took a chance. It’s actually good! An intense little horror film, splitting the difference between adding new details (prologue with a demonic-possessed girl being burned to death by her father), following the same old story with fan-service references (“does that sound… fine?”), and trying to top the original (*two* people cut their own arms off).

After the prologue we meet the doomed new gang. Eric (Lou Pucci of Spring and Southland Tales) is the glasses nerd who will discover the Book of the Dead and read the cursed passages. Olivia (Jessica Lucas of Cloverfield and Gotham) is a dark-haired nurse who is probably the first to die, though it’s hard to tell when anyone in this movie actually dies. City Boy David (Shiloh Fernandez of We Are Your Friends) is our lead cool dude who we assume will be the new Ash, but won’t be. His blonde girlfriend Natalie (Liz Blackmore of TV’s Vampire Diaries) gets bitten on the hand, tries to take care of the problem with the electric carving knife but still goes full demon.

And that leaves Mia (Jane Levy of Don’t Breathe and Castle Rock), City Boy David’s sister who was lured to the cabin as an intervention to help her get off drugs. She’s the first victim of demonic possession (of all the details from the original, they kept the tree-rape scene), then vomits demon blood onto Nurse Olivia, is locked in the basement, but I guess Mia recovers, cuts off her own hand, and chainsaws a Demon Mia to death in the apocalyptic blood rain as the cabin burns down. Some fun with camera and focus, as in the original.