Alienology – Tales From The Void

Well, my first book review outside of Midnight Showing. Head over to Sonar4 Landing Dock Reviews and check out my review of Alienology. It’s a pretty good book with aliens, gore and other assorted sickness.  :)

P.S. I love you guys  & gals.  Give mad props to the author of this on youtube if you dig it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61RJGQcG_sM&feature=player_embedded

Cool pumpkins bro.

The original Night of the Demons (review here by yours truly) is a cult classic from the good old 80′s that is often grabbed by horror fans in October when they are in need of some Demon possession fun.  While it is dated, and many of the gags that back in the day must have been quite cool fall flat or just look silly in 2010, it is still an atmosphere laden gem that has that unmistakable intangible that modern day horror movies seem to lack…fun.  Enter the inevitable remake which. despite a cast of either no names or B-list talent, and a release that seemed to have come from nowhere, does a great job of encapsulating the spirit of the 80′s classic and even manages to provide some legitimate tension, jolt-scares, and prosthetic gore.  It isn’t perfect a perfect translation (but then again, the original wasn’t perfect either), but after wading through the slog of Hollywood horror remakes for the better part of the last decade, I found NOTD 09′ to be a refreshing blast of sleazy, raunchy, gooey fun that has just enough tricks up its sleeve to ascend into a rare upper echelon of not only downright groovy horror remakes, but just plain fun and radical horror movies in general.

That is totally the kind of house where slutty, boozing, pot smoking 20 somethings bite the dust. Oops, spoilers.

Since NOTD 09′ (that’s my cool little shorthand name for it, deal with it) is the kind of movie that doesn’t beg for any real type of analysis or even that much explanation, I’ll keep this fairly brief.  Some entirely-too-good-looking-to-be-anyone-who-exists-in-the-real-world 20 somethings are invited by the resident creepy goth chick, Angela, to a house with a long history of bloodletting and gruesome happenings dating back 150 years.  Of course, this party is taking place on Halloween night, because if you’re going to tempt fate, go big right?  After dancing, and obligatory party shots of chicks making out and girls wearing “clothing” that is so tight and revealing you wonder if they painted them on, the party eventually gets busted up by those ASSHOLE COPS who are only around when they can kill your buzz but always seem to run off once you’re inundated with the demonic un-fucking-dead.  So after some “we need to get back into the building to find our drunk whore friend and get her home” shenanigans, demons, who are trying to possess enough people on Halloween night in order to screw up some biblical loophole business, show up and start slowly turning people and causing the ruckus that they are known to do in any horror movie they find themselves in.  Demon orgy?  Check.  Demon Sex? Check.  Demon gut munching? Check. Very creative substance/material that demons are “allergic” too? Check.  DEMON LESBIANS?  CHECKKKKKKKKKK.  Someone at the Halloween party dressed up like the Jigsaw puppet from the SAW MOVIES?  MOTHERFUCKING CHECK!!!!!!

GETTING JIGGY WITH IT!

All jokes aside, the film is pretty well acted, and it even stars the kid from Terminator 2, Edward Furlong.  Also Doira Baird and some other floozies I’ve seen in a bunch of these horror movies lately.  It isn’t quite a gorefest, but when the gore is present, it’s done quite beautifully with rubber, latex and Karo syrup.  The boo scares are very clever and well-timed to hit on the down or off beats and there are more than a few fake out scares that are teeth grinders because you’re just waiting for the shit to hit the fan.  The ending is also clever enough to gain praise and it doesn’t fall into the typical trappings of “OMG WE HAVE TO LEAVE ROOM FOR A SEQUEL” end of  movie bullshit.  Since going on any further would mean I would just start spoiling the best parts, I’ll leave you with a HEARTY recommendation and a 3.5 out of 5 star score.  If you’re a fan of the originals, this is a must.  I mentioned the demon lesbians right?

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Maybe she is born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline.

The original Piranha movie was hardly an Oscar contender so I really wasn’t expecting much from this or it’s 3D

*WOOT! WOOT! RANT ALERT, RANT ALERT

Dear Hollywood,

I appreciate that your films are making less and less money, even though you spend more and more on them, and need gimmicks now more than ever but would you just FUCK OFF with the 3D? It’s a pain in the ass and not new, there’s been ’3D’ films since the 50′s now dump the 3D and get some decent script writers maybe then people will watch your films.

Yours (downloading) faithfully,
Ronnie

So, I expect you want a plot synopsis then? OK, if you must:  Every year the population of sleepy Lake Victoria explodes from 5,000 to 50,000 for Spring Break, a riot of sun and drunken fun. But this year, there’s something more to worry about than hangovers and complaints from local old timers; a new type of terror is about to be cut loose on Lake Victoria. After a sudden underwater tremor sets free scores of the prehistoric man-eating fish, an unlikely group of strangers must band together to stop themselves from becoming fish food for the areas new razor-toothed residents. (IMDb.com)

First things first, you can sleep for the first 30mins of the film, nothing to see here. It’s all students-gone-wild and boring character introduction. Only after the 30min mark do you see any piranha. But, while waiting for the piranha you can always admire the boobage. Yes, there’s plenty of racks on display here! 40mins in is the first decent kill with gore. Some chick with big hooters and a parachute is being dragged behind a boat but, unfortunately for her, she ends up in the water and the next time she lifts up in to the sky… well, let’s just say that there’s a fair bit less of her to lift. The highlight of the film is at the 50min mark where the highly annoying students are told to leave the water, and the area, but no… they all continue to party and dive in to the water. And thank God they do. There’s a massacre, and it is good. One chick is hit by a high tension wire which slices through her diagonally, one selfish dude grabs a speedboat to make a get away. Not only is he mowing people down left right and center but his engine gets snagged. Snagged on some chick hair. When the propellers start up it rips her entire face off. Nice! There’s also a nice piranha-eating-its-way-out of a chick. The next scene of note is the bad-ass sheriff who slices and dices a few piranha with a speedboat motor. After the one hour mark though it’s all down hill again. I think there’s one gore scene for the next half hour then the crappy ending.

I expected worse, there is a good 30mins of blood, gore and action, but with 30mins on either side of it, it could have been planned out a bit better. The gore was pretty good and there were plenty of boobs so I’m giving it…

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (aka: Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl)

Just where does one begin with a film like this…

If you’ve seen either Meatball Machine or Tokyo Gore Police then you’ll know what to expect. If not? Well… put it this way, madness and insanity is putting it lightly!

Normally I start with an IMDb plot line, but IMDb doesn’t even have one for this one! Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl (VGFG from here on in, I’m too lazy to type long names) begins with some guy getting his ass kicked by three mutant chicks. But in steps a mysterious (hot!) young girl who ‘defuses’ the situation by grabbing the neck skin of one chick and peeling the skin off her head link someone peeling an orange. No, seriously… look:

Some Detol and a plaster and you'll be right as rain...

And that’s within the first five minutes!

After some school kids have their valentines gifts confiscated we see a young man being bullied. Only in Japan can a hot-as-fuck chick bully a guy in to being her boyfriend!

She can bully me ANYtime!

Then we’re introduced to the oddball girls competing in the 13th Student Wrist Cut Rally. Then the bullied guy has another hot-as-fuck chick after him!

I'll take your chocolate alright... (oh my, that sounds dirty!)

This time she gives him some chocolate, which he accepts, takes a bite from it only to discover that it contains the hot-as-fuck chicks blood. Her vampire blood! This sends him on a bizarre LSD-style trip which ends with him going to see the school (hot-as-fuck) nurse:

Shame about the Superman hair-do

So now the poor lad is part vampire and we get to see the brutality of his new vampire girlfriend as she bumps off several people with great glee and a gleaming smile. I don’t want to tell you everything about the movie, but from here on in it’s a bizarre love triangle with two mutants fighting over a half-mutant with limbs flying everywhere, thanks to a cordless screwdriver. No, seriously:

Never leave home without your cordless screwdriver.

There’s plenty of gore in VGFG and buckets of blood. The effects are very well done considering this isn’t some big Hollywood fuck-up blockbuster. My only gripe with VGFG is that some of the middle parts are slow. Introducing the wrist-cutters and the face-painted-black girls was kinda necessary for later in the story, but could have been a bit quicker.

VGFG is a top-notch film, not as good as Tokyo Gore Police (TGP) but still great fun and perfect for a brainless night in.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Behold its trailery goodness:

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

Midnightshowing.com Presents Alex’s Top 10 (+1) movies of 2009 (In no particular order except for the top 2!) from Alex S on Vimeo.

See prang (aka: 4bia/Phobia)

OK, so, technically I’ve reviewed these films in the wrong order. First, I reviewed Phobia 2 (don’t forget to check out my review of it) and now I’m reviewing the first one, but fear not loyal readers, there’s no connection between the two anthologies.

In its native Thailand, the movie is known as ‘See prang’, but to us Westerners it’s known as either ‘Phobia’, or ’4BIA’. No matter the name, the idea is the same; the movie is made up for four shorts all with a common theme; horror! Yay!

The first short, Happiness, is unusual in that it has no dialogue what-so-ever, all the information is conveyed through text messages sent to, and from, a girl who is alone, and bored, in her small apartment. Unable to leave due to having a broken leg which she sustained in a car accident. While the story to this one isn’t bad, it’s a bit boring since the first ten minutes is the girl sending and receiving texts with her making all sorts of happy/excited faces. Like I said though, the story aint bad, and while the end is scary, it’s a bit of a cheap shot.

Next up, Tit for Tat. This one is easily my favourite of the four. A gang of unruly youths are bullying a weak kid. They really give him a good going over and threaten to toss him from the back of their moving pick-up truck. His shirt tears and he falls from the truck. It seems he survives the ordeal, but appears to visit the gang in a last act of defiance. As they try and show him who’s boss a series of events happen and we see that the weak kid really isn’t all that weak after all. Revenge is the motto here. The story is a typical curse/revenge story, but the deaths and effects really shine in this one. There are a couple of very imaginative deaths, with good gore, and some scenes use CGI, some creatures are also CGI, but it’s all done in such a creepy way that you’re really not paying attention to the animation! Again, good ending, but don’t watch it if you’re superstitious!

Third in the series is In The Middle, which is a story about four guys out camping in the woods. One of them tells a ghost story and one of the guys promises that if he dies, he’ll haunt whoever is sleeping in the middle of the remaining three. Well, of course, there’s a white-water rafting accident and one of the quartet is missing. He eventually turns up, but doesn’t quite seem his old self. This is a funny story, and a good story too, nice twist ending to it. This story stars the same four guys who were in the last, very funny, story in Phobia 2.

And the final story is Last Fright. This one is the story of a Princess who is flying out of the country and requests the same air-crew as her last flight. The stewardess agrees and they take off. Mid-flight the stewardess brings the Princess coffee, which she spills on the stewardess scalding her arm, then comes the main meal… which the Princess refuses and wants the stewardesses meal instead. The Princess has an allergy to prawns, so the stewardess removes the prawns thinking that would be fine. Not so. As they land the Princess is whisked off to hospital where she later dies. Now the stewardess has to sit through the return flight, looking at the Princesses mummified body! This one was an OK story, good suspense, only let down by a really weak ending.

So, if I had to rate them from best to worst:

1. Tit For Tat
2. In The Middle
3. Last Fright
4. Happiness

Again, another good anthology, although if you want more bang for your buck, I reckon Phobia 2 is actually better!

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars <– if the ending for Last Fright had been better, it would have been a solid four.

Orgroff the Mad Mutilator (aka: Mad Mutilator) is a French film from 1983, although it looks more like 1973 if anything else. The story is off the archetypical hut-in-the-forest dwelling psycho who murders passersby who stop for a leek by the road side.

Gory murders? Check.

Hot chicks? (benefit of the doubt since it’s Christmas) check.

So far so good.

Yeah, well, that’s about as good as it gets. There’s low budget, then there’s Ogroff. I reckon the cast must have had a whip round to get their budget, with a couple of cheap bastards tossing in pennies.

Sound is pretty much non-existant, as are subtitles. There is some droning, God awful music playing, but I mean sound effects. That’s right… when Ogroff is smashing the living daylights out of an old VW Beetle, there’s some pings and clangs which were obviously added later, how do I know that? Because they’re not even in time with the movements! Cars driving off in to the distance – no sound. Car doors closing? No sound. Ogroff going schitzo on a group of kids, destroying their picnic furniture. No sound. Even the voices have been added later!

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas kid...

Continuity is also lacking. At one point some chick is being chased down a long straight road by Ogroff. One minute she’s close up and running like mad, next minute she’s far off from the camera and running rather pathetically. Only problem is: whenever we see her running down the road, there’s no Ogroff behind her, then it’ll cut to Ogroff who’s apparently still chasing her. Very odd. And zombies… zombies pop-up here too. No idea why/how, but they do.

Axe the end of him then...

One shot I did quite like was the guy getting the hatchet in the face. It’s not brilliant by any means, but the shots of the camera lens covered with blood and it being wiped away was pretty effective, kinda like what the poor victim could see.

I don't give a rats ASS what anyone else says, those letters are cardboard cut-outs, as they're flapping in the wind!

Speaking of poor victim… that’s me. My score for this *cough* ‘film’:

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars <– I’m only going as high as a two because I laughed my ass off at the scenes with Ogroff smashing things up in complete silence.

Coal is the least of your worries

In keeping with the seasonal theme, here is Tales From the Crypt and the quite festive episode they produced in 1989, I believe.  Keep a close eye on the credits, as Fred Dekker (Night of the Creeps, Monster Squad) wrote this episode, and Robert Zemeckis (Cast Away, Beowulf, dozens of other big budget Hollywood movies) directed it, with a who’s who list supplying the producing like Joel Silver and Richard Donner.  Also Larry Drake, the bad guy from the Darkman movies, plays Santa! Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

On with the show, thanks to scary4you who put this on youtube!

(Chopped into three parts…)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqyMUjOzLk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOgZk4ZH1LQ

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UeassKRlqE