This new trailer has some new scenes, no full facial shots of Freddy yet, but some iconic scenes from previous films such as Freddy’s hand in the bath (which was in the first trailer) but in trailer 2 we also see the scene where Freddy is pressing through the wall which was also in a previous NoES movie.

Freddy’s voice has also changed, thankfully, in the first trailer it was quite emotionless and robotic, in trailer two is sounds more like Haley did in The Watchmen.

Anyway… go have a looksy!

Tantei Monogatari (2007) aka: Detective Story

As soon as I see Takashi Miike on something I know that it’ll be a wild ride, and to expect something that will encompass the  weird and bizarre,  have horror and gore, yet also be thought provoking and funny. Something no other director can do, especially not in Hollywood!

Tantei Monogatari (aka: Detective Story) starts with a crazy artist painting with ground up body parts. Then we cut to some perv (with far too many video cameras!) who’s pretty much jacking off to photo’s of a girl he’s been stalking. And that’s all within the first five minutes! Then we’re introduced to our two main characters, both named Raita, opposites of each other. Raita the office worker and computer specialist is the well dressed gentleman. Raita the private dick is the scruffy, slightly mad, and persuasive of the two. Raita the private dick introduces himself to Raita the businessman as they are now neighbours. No sooner has the introduction finished than Raita the private dick is in his neighbours house with a bottle of booze and just sitting there acting weird, while the gentleman Raita sits and puts up with it… for hours. Manami appears at the private dicks door looking for help, Raita turns her away and off she goes. Next morning she’s found dead with an item of Raita’s beside her. And so it goes on that more girls are found dead with items of Raita’s beside them, so obviously Raita is being framed for the deaths.

Along the way Raita (detective) consults a former killer for advice, I’m glad they explained that bit quickly as otherwise I’d have thought I was suddenly watching a different film:

No, he's not a gimp!

It sounds like your average Dick Van Dyke afternoon crime stuff, but it’s very well done with an excellent twist at the end. The two Raita’s are excellent, especially detective Raita, he’s hilarious. Action is pretty much non-existant, apart from the odd (on foot) chase here and there, but there is gore, and that’s the main thing. The hanging discovery isn’t much, the toilet discovery is pretty gory (see below and in the clip at the bottom of this page) and Raita’s big fight near the end has plenty of purposely funny gore, which only Miike can really do properly.

One strange thing though… the subtitled DVD (*ahem* rip) that I watched had some gore blurred out. I’m not sure if that was intentional (expect the unexpected with Miike!), or only blurred out in the US/UK/Japanese release, but it only happened about twice in the whole film, so it’s no big deal, but it did catch me off guard.

The gore blurring - it's more noticable on my TV than on computer

Another cracking Miike film I say. It’s not Ichi the Killer and it’s not too surreal (*cough* Visitor Q) but in that middle ground where it has a bit of everything. Hurrah for Miike!

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Scene – this is where timid Raita is trying to get into the knickers of detective Raita’s assistant:

The Crazies (1973)

George Romero will, forever, be remembered as the Godfather of zombie movies but he has done other non-zombie stuff, and The Crazies is one of them.

The plot is quite simple:

A biological weapon gone awry is only the start of problems in the little town of Evan’s City, Pennsylvania. Bouts of insanity in the populace are leading to murder and rioting, until the US Army turns up – and things really start going to hell. (IMDb.com)

The plot has two main themes running through it which intertwine, one is the army trying to contain the infection, with the other being the citizens trying to stay alive. Several  folks are on the run from the army, a resistance movement if you will, which consists of one man, his pregnant other half, his friend and a father and daughter.

With most of Romero’s movies it can be read in several ways, I see it as a movie which shows that when the army comes in, it just makes things ten times worse, that and the fact that they’ve no respect for human life as several times the ‘head honchos’ speak of ‘dropping the bomb’ on the village and calling it an accident, all this is to cover up the situation and to wipe out the virus. So, I think it’s a bit of an anti-army movie, which I do have to agree with.

There’s not much gore in the movie, there are several (tame) head shots, stabbings and what-not, but nothing to write home about. Not even any boobs, well, unless you count one behind-and-slightly-to-the-side shot, which I don’t. What did tickle my fancy with this movie is that because the people are driven crazy by the virus several dark humour scenes arise. My favourite being the ’sweeper’, as I’ll call her, which is while a mass revolt is happening, one woman, with a broom, is out sweeping the lawn. Yes, sweeping the lawn…

Whilst a small rebellion is taking place, she want's to sweep the lawn! Typical woman, tch!

But the best character has to be Dr. Brookmyer who is continually pissed off and has about a three second fuse on his patience. Also, most of the people in the movie were never in many other movies, if any at all! But, hey, I suppose that’s what you’ve got to do when you want to come in under budget. In saying that… even if any of the troops were well known you never see their faces, there’s more gas masks in this film than in Alex’s porn collection.

One thing that film excels in is wigs, that’s right, wigs. It has, quite possibly the worst collection of wigs ever committed to celluloid, here’s a couple of examples:

Wig? What wig...

oh... THAT wig...

But The Crazies isn’t all that bad, story-wise that is, but it’s certainly made on the cheap, that’s quite evident, but like I said at the start with Romero films, it becomes whatever you want to make it, and I make it to be pretty good for 1973.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

And you’ll no doubt be aware that the remake of The Crazies has, as I write this, just been released. Apparently it’s quite good… but I’ll be the judge of that. Watch this space…

Alexander "Sawney" Bean at the entrance to his cave.

And now, we take a moment from our ‘normal’ programming schedule to bring you something a little different, yet still related to horror movies. Several movies have been based upon the tale of Sawney Bean and his cannibalistic family, The Hills Have Eyes being one such movie.

Our tale begins in the 16th century, in East Lothian (near Edinburgh), Scotland. Alexander “Sawney” Bean (sometimes called Beane) grew up working hard labour with his father and quickly realised that honest labour wasn’t for him and fled with a woman, a reputed witch, by the name of Agnes.

The couple ended up living in a coastal cave in Bannane Head near Galloway (now South Aryshire) where they lived undetected for over 25 years rearing several children. The cave was several hundred yards deep and when the tide rose the entrance was blocked by water and inaccessible.

After many years grandchildren appeared. The product of an incestuous, lawless, family. The family included eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters. Since Bean had tried and disliked honest labour, the family would lay careful ambushes at night to rob and murder passers-by. The dead were taken back to the cave, dismembered, and cannibalised. It is said they even took to robbing fresh graves for ‘food’.

As more and more people began to vanish in the area several searches were done of the area, one search passed by their cave since the men refused to believe anyone could live in such conditions.

Bannane Cave where it's alleged Bean and his family lived.

One night, the Bean family attacked a couple riding from a fair on horse back, but the man fought them off with sword and pistol but not before the clan had mauled his wife to death. A large group of fairgoers appeared and the Bean family fled in fear.

It’s said that King James VI of Scotland personally led a manhunt with a team of  over 400 men and several bloodhounds. It was the bloodhounds who lured the men to the coastal cave where the family were finally captured. Taken, in chains, to the Tollbooth in Edinburgh, where they were executed without trial. The men had their hands and feet cut off and left to bleed to death. The women were to watch the men bleed to death then be burned at the stake.

Fact of Fiction?

No one knows for sure whether the tale of Sawney Bean is a myth, several investigators have found no evidence of disappearances in the area at the reputed time of the Bean family, but one theory is that the story was political propaganda from the English to make the Scots seem more barbaric and animalistic.

But the tale of Sawney Bean also closely resembles the story of Christie Cleek which was in the 1400’s, earlier than Sawney Bean.

Christie Cleek

Andrew Christie was a butcher, by trade, in Perth.During a great famine in the mid-1400’s Christie joined a group of scavengers in the Grampian mountains. When one of the party died of starvation, Christie put his butcher skills to work on the corpse and fed himself and the group. They now began to ambush travellers as food. Christie used a hook on a pole to haul his victims from their horse, this device was a ‘cleke’, a hook or crook, hence his nickname, Cleek. Eventually an armed force from Perth defeated the group but not before Christie fled. He was never heard from again.

But the name, and story, of Christie Cleek was used in a bogeyman-like fashion to silence even the most unruly of kids, so maybe Christie Cleek is a myth too.

Of course, no one knows for sure whether Sawney Bean, or Christie Cleek are fact or fiction, but they’ve given rise to some more well known stories such as Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977), which has a family of cannibals in a more modern setting. Several bands have written songs about Sawney Bean but, sadly, no one has yet made a decent movie on the tale of the incestuous Bean family. Maybe one day, when some rich benefactor gives me the budget…

—-

YouTube has a video which gives a tour of the reputed Sawney Bean cave in South West Scotland:

Gama Bomb - Tales from the Grave in Space

I’m not going to review it as I’ve only just downloaded it myself, but I thought I’d pass along the link to download this album, legitimately, for free!

http://www.earache.com/gamabomb/

TRACKLISTING:

Slam Anthem
New Eliminators of Atlantis B.C.
Three Witches
Last Ninjas Unite
Escape From Scarecrow Mountain
Mussolini Mosh
We Respect You
Apocalypse 1997
Return To Blood Castle
Polterghost
Skeletron
Mummy Invasion

Head over to Earache Records and enter any old email address where you’ll then be given the Rapidshare link to download the full album.

I’ve only listened to snippets from the album but it sounds loud, fast, and reminds me of good old fashioned Anthrax.

Full credit for the find goes to the Manchester Morgue

REC 2 (2009)

If you haven’t read my review of [REC] (aka: REC 1, or Quarantine in the case of the US ‘remake’) then do so. It’s a cracking film.

[REC] 2 picks up the very second [REC] ended, I shant spoil the end of either film in this review, but [REC] 2 begins with a SWAT team heading toward the building we saw in [REC]. They’re briefed before entering the building that they must clear the building, but also escort the Doctor who will go in with them. One member of the team is the main camera man but each SWAT team member has their own helmet-mounted camera.

Quarter way in to the movie we’re given an explanation for the virus which started in [REC] and it’s really quite a novel idea. Obviously, I’m not going to give that away in this review as that’d screw everything up and you’d hate me. No, seriously, you would. In fact it might even make you not watch [REC] 2 and I can’t have that.

Around the half-way mark the SWAT team, and Doctor, realise that somehow some kids have gotten in to the building and must be found.

Now, rather than just have one camera for the whole film, the writers neatly overlap several different cameras. So, for example (again, without giving anything away) the SWAT team (via their camera man) spot the kids downstairs and race down to try and get them. Later on in the movie we switch to a camera of kids goofing around on a rooftop/balcony. They end up in the [REC] building and we see some SWAT team guys running down stairs to get them, the kids run and hide. So, that one scene is seen from two cameras and that neatly ties things together, and that happens several times. Nice!

The end of [REC] was quite unexpected, and a nice twist, [REC]2 is the same, a twist ending without being tacky.

The effects are more than adequate, plenty of head-shots (one with a decap no less!) and lots of blood on the infected folk. The story is excellent as, like I said above, it ties in several camera views to one story overlapping them and explaining the virus. Visually there’s the usual battery meters on screen, crackling pictures but this time we have the addition of picture-in-picture views from some of the SWAT team cameras never is the shaky-cam too much to bear.

Make no mistakes about it, [REC] 3 is confirmed for 2011. This could well be my favourite new movie franchise!

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

[REC]2 trailer:

The Wolfman (2010)

Sigh, another remake of a golden oldie classic. But wait, this one is actually pretty good!

First, let’s start with the obligatory plot line. As you can imagine, it’s nothing brain wracking:

Lawrence Talbot, a haunted nobleman, is lured back to his family estate after his brother vanishes. Reunited with his estranged father, Talbot sets out to find his brother… and discovers a horrifying destiny for himself. Talbot’s childhood ended the night his mother died. After he left the sleepy Victorian hamlet of Blackmoor, he spent decades recovering and trying to forget. But when his brother’s fiancée, Gwen Conliffe, tracks him down to help find her missing love, Talbot returns home to join the search. He learns that something with brute strength and insatiable bloodlust has been killing the villagers, and that a suspicious Scotland Yard inspector named Aberline has come to investigate. (from IMDb.com)

The movie begins with Lawrence Talbot being asked to return home to help find his missing brother. The brother is then found dead, mutilated by ‘a beast’, but some theorise that it’s a killer hiding his tracks. Lawrence eventually has a run in with this ‘beast’ and is bitten in the fracas. Then begins his werewolf curse. Now, while the plot isn’t full of twists and turns, it does have some nice parts which I didn’t expect. And it’s there I’ll stop with the plot line stuff, as I really don’t want to give anything away.

Anthony Hopkins plays Lawrence Talbot’s father and is excellent in his acting here, I’d easily put it up there with his Hannibal Lecter. The other actors are good, but in The Wolfman none can hold a candle to Hopkins.

Special effects, done by Rick Baker (American Werewolf in London), are what you’d expect, top notch. Initially we don’t see much of the transformation sequence, but later on in the movie we’re treated to a full on transformation in an asylum (part of which is shown in the trailer below) which is awesome. There’s plenty of blood in this too, it seems that Hollywood is finally realising that having some good gore in a film will actually help it. There’s an impaling, a couple of limb chops, plenty of slicing and the obligatory decap or two.

There’s plenty of action although possibly a bit too much of the roof-hopping super-hero-type stuff in the middle, but that’s excusable. So, to sum up: this is actually a pretty good remake! There’s action, gore and werewolf transformations, ya can’t ask for more than that!

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Trailer (in HD no less!):

Futuristic blood harvesting at its finest

Daybreakers is the latest movie to hit theaters that is looking to stake a claim in the vampire media frenzy that has taken over both the big and small screens.  From Twilight (I need an acid bath every time I so much as type that name) to True Blood, the bloodsucking freaks have been a big hit with audiences looking for dark, but ultimately romance driven narratives injected with some supernatural herbs and spices.  Out of this pit of shallow pandering to the adolescent and deeply delusional, Daybreakers has come forth to deliver a vampire movie with a fairly metallic set of testicles with some brains to boot.  Extracted from the minds of the The Spierig Brothers (who made one of the best and funniest zombie flicks of  the oo’s called UNDEAD, a film I should definitely review for y’all!  Or fuck it, grab it now and watch it, it’s worth it!), Daybreakers throws us into the year 2019 (inferred from that fact that in the film they refer to 2009 as being 10 years ago) where vampires have become to dominant species on planet Earth, and the few pockets of humans who are left are on the run from the vampires military who hunt them down for sustenance.  The humans aren’t the only ones who are fighting for survival however, as it is made clear early on that without blood or a blood substitute, vampires devolve into these hideous, almost zombie like bat humanoid creatures who will feast on anyone or anything that they come across.  This is where Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) comes into play, as he is a brilliant hematologist tasked creating a blood substitute that will eliminate the need for widespread human re-population.  Sprinkle into this mess some interesting, albeit subdued, statements about the Big Pharma culture that is currently present in the United States as well as our military industrial complex and you have a nice little self-contained flick that doesn’t require you to completely shut down your higher brain functions in order to enjoy it in full.  Not to mention, it has a pretty nifty cast too.  Did I mention Willem Dafoe is in it?

Holy shit, they are arming Willem Dafoe. GET THE FUCK DOWN, NOW!

And while I your attention squarely on Mr. Dafoe’s general creepiness (read: AWESOMENESS), let’s take a moment to expand on how the acting helps to make this ride a bit more pleasurable.  Dafoe doesn’t get nearly enough screen time for my liking (although if I had it my way, it would be a one man movie starring Willem Dafoe), but what he does with him time is captivating, especially when you come to realize he ISN’T the bad guy for once.  His character is a southern man, nicknamed Elvis, and I’ll leave it at that.  Trust me, he just about makes it worth the price of admission.  Ethan Hawk, as mentioned earlier, plays Edward Dalton, a man torn by his sympathies towards humans and his obligation to his company and boss to find a solution to the blood scarcity.  Sam Neill is Charles Bromley, the hot shit head cheese of a major corporation that service specific vampire needs.  He also happens to be Dalton’s boss and is quite the motherfucker.  The rest of the cast is relative nobodies, but I found all the performances to be pretty on target in finding a balance between playing it straight enough to make this universe believable, but not overselling it to the point where it gets melodramatic and overly weighty.  There are even moments where some fun is had, and it seems like the Spierig Brothers haven’t lost that goofy and sharp sense of humor that is so evident in UNDEAD.  One thing that seemed to compress the acting was that 93 minute length of the flick, which meant that once the film really got its proverbial engines revved and red-lined, the sprint to the finish felt a bit too fast, and some of the richness of the characters was lost in the mad dash towards the endgame.  This most likely falls into the lap of the producers, studio, and editor however, not the actors and the Spierig Brothers.

Stuff bleeds real good in this movie.

Inside that hour and a half however, the Spierigs flex the muscles only people who have seen UNDEAD know they have.  Not only do they write and direct their movies together, they are also seasoned special effects creators, both of the practical and computer generated disciplines.  Often times, they will combine prosthetic effects and CGI (like in the scene pictures above) to create fairly convincing visuals that don’t look like too phony in either direction.  That being said, this film isn’t quite the gore show that UNDEAD allowed itself to be, but let it be known that there are some downright nasty scenes in this one, and when the blood does flow, it flows liberally.  Shifting from effects to lenses, the Spierigs also craft themselves a nice looking film, complete with lots of sterile looking scenes which paint the vampires, at least initially, as a much more organized and civil spin-off of humanity.  There is a lot of white and blue lighting and tidy organization to the environments the vampires have erected and furnished for themselves over the years, as if being orderly and docile in appearance and demeanor can make up for their savagery and nearly cannibalistic impulses they need indulge in for mere survival.  The film is paced pretty well, with my major grievance being that the finale is just a bit too rapid for my liking.  Some clever camera angles and flashy shots help to round out what otherwise is a pretty straightforward and smartly captured film.  Kudos to the Spierig for finding a middle-ground between the unabashed fun they had with UNDEAD, and the undoubtedly more restrictive world of “Hollywood” film making.

And you thought cocaine was expensive.

When Daybreakers came to a close, I felt like I wanted to see more from that vision, and that is normally a good thing in my book.  The world the Spierigs have shaped for themselves in Daybreakers is a really interesting one which I wouldn’t hesitate to dive into for a second time.  Granted, the story ends in a way where enough safe assumptions could be made and the book could be shut on the plight of the vampires, but there is enough stuff going on behind the scenes that it made want to see how far the Brothers Spierig could stretch out this idea.  As it stand now though, it is a find piece of quality mainstream horror/action/thriller fare that is very deserving of having genre vets and indie hounds sink their teeth into.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Retard-o-Tron II

It’s big, it’s bad, and it’s BACK! ZXQL3000 and Cinema Sewer return to give us a second helping of video madness.

If you’ve been living under a rock, on Mars, for the past while and never heard of Retard-o-Tron then you should head over to here, and read my review of the first Retard-o-Tron mixtape, and while you’re at it, read my interview with ZXQL3000, one of the masterminds behind the tapes.

Retard-o-Tron II begins with a rather hilarious take on Donald Duck, but with porn. How so? Well, I’m sure you’ve heard the odd sounds those chicks make when they’re gag reflex is not quite in order, well for the first few minutes were treated to pornified Donald Duck impersonations.

Several clips later we’re introduced to one of the strangest looking characters in a long time, some black dude that looks like a reject from Tod Browning’s Freaks (reviewed here incidentally). I wouldn’t like to meet him in dark alley!

Umm, it's OK, he doesn't normally have bleached hair...

Next were treated to a pilot episode of a TV programme which, thankfully, never made it past being a pilot: The Man With The Power. In short, it’s a guy who can move objects with his mind. Whoop-dee-do. After a few clips of evangelists, re-dubbed anime and chicks fighting, we get some mighty gay looking dancing and some clips of the chick that holds/crushes things with her ginormous boobs. Some violent wrestling is next, which is something I need to start downloading *ahem* buying. That’s then followed by several porn clips of chicks completely over acting… as they do. Then there’s some bull fighting, this type I’m all for as in these clips the bull kicks ass and the gay matador is fleeing for his life. Go bull!

For several minutes we get ‘The Retard-o-Tron, Oh Yeah-a-Thon’ which is several porn clips but with a counter on the side of the screen, counting how many times the chick says ‘ooh yeah’. Needless to say, it’s a high number. Several clips from Tourettes Guy feature here too, and that’s no bad thing. Fake or not, they’re still hilarious.

We’re after the half way mark now and it’s getting in to some backyard wrestling. Obviously these poor souls have been hit on the head once too many with a spectators chair. Still… it’s funny to see them accept such brutality. Speaking of brutality – EXOman… another series that (I hope) didn’t make it past pilot. It’s basically a guy wearing some chainmail.

EXOman! Fear his chainmail!

Calamari Wrestler makes an appearance too, and rightly so. It’s a very bizarre/surreal film that everyone should see. After some more porn clips we get some more backyard wrestling followed by, my favourite, dumbass skateboarders who fall off and get cracked in the nuts/head. Yay!

1hr 45mins later the madness comes to an end… awwwwww! But I feel better for having seen such madness, it makes me all fuzzy inside. Sure, some of the clips are a bit blurry and/or grainy, but that’s because they’re from the VHS era and are quite rare, but the majority of the clips are of excellent quality, probably DVD quality, and all squished in to a DIVX file.

You can download both mixtapes from ZXQL3000’s homepage, but do consider buying a physical, real-world, DVD copy to persuade him to make a third mixtape. And don’t forget to check out his ‘Fans’ page for free boobage!

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Some clips from Retard-o-Tron II (does that make it a mixtape, of a mixtape?):

Frogs (1972)

With a poster that awesome, I just HAD to watch Frogs!

Now, I wish I hadn’t.

The basic premise of Frogs is as thus: Rich playboy is out in his new speedboat and runs down a freelance photographer who’s out taking photos of the local wildlife. The guy, and his hot girlfriend, take the poor victim back to their place to dry off. There he meets the entire family and is given the job of investigating the influx of frogs on the old mans estate.

Now, technically (for a B-movie) it’s a great idea. I imagined giant mutant frogs with people’s legs dangling from their googly eyed mouths, but no.

The film is obviously made on a low budget and I feel the utmost pity for Ray Milland, a talented actor who obviously made a bad choice here, but several things popped in to my mind whilst watching this ‘movie’. First and foremost, what’s the difference between a frog, and a toad? Well, according to Answers.com:

Frogs have slimy, slippery and delicate skin, but toads have drier skin with warts

Which is what I thought, so:

That, good Sir, is in fact a toad. Identifiable by the warts upon its skin...

… the entire FROGS film is in fact filled with TOADS. Well that’s a stroke of genius. Secondly, I didn’t count one death in the film that involved a frog. All the deaths were caused by various non-frog-like creatures. There’s everything from day geckos, tokay geckos, crocodiles (more about them later), toads, snakes, in fact I think the only reptile missing from the film was a komodo dragon. Having a komodo dragon in the film (preferably attacking someone) would have instantly made it kick ass.

Several glaring errors also made me face palm and shake my head in shame at this movie. Number one is the crocodile wrestling scene. Well that seems quite dangerous you’d think, as I too thought, until I saw this one part where the crocodile is upside down and you can clearly see the tape holding is mouth shut! Behold:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that looks suspiciously like a foreign object sealing that crocodiles mouth shut...

Second was the dead-man-lying-face-down-in-the-swamp who was clearly breathing as the photographer approached him! Third was the man who shoots a bird (which posed no danger what-so-ever), trips over a branch and proceeds to shoot himself in the leg, is then attacked by ferociously growing moss and finished off by a couple of big spiders.

Now I’m more than willing to suspend ALL belief while watching movies – hell, look at some of the movies on here that I’ve watched! – but Frogs just has too many mistakes to ignore, especially the lack of giant frogs eating people.

So, if someone out there (with too much money) wants to give me a budget, I’ll make a PROPER version of Frogs with giant mutant frogs (not toads) attacking people, it’d have hot chicks, boobs and women fainting. Not enough women faint in movies now a days, they’re too busy trying to be manly. I have to say, If this film had been called ‘Attack of Nature’ or ‘When Reptiles Attack’ it might have been cool, but putting out that poster of the frog with the hand dangling from its mouth made me expect mutant frogs. I don’t like being deceived by posters, hence why I’m being hard with this film…

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

The trailer (which tries to make it look cool):