Dans ton sommeil (aka: In Their Sleep) - 2010

Dear peoples of France-land,

Maybe it’s something to do with all the frogs legs and snails you lot eat, but can you please stop making such depressing films!

That will be all,
Ronnie

Dans ton sommeil (English title: In Their Sleep) is a French film and, after my last Frenchy film (Martyrs), I was nervous to say the least. But, there was no need, this film isn’t overly aggressive or gory. It’s just sad and depressing.

The film begins with an angst ridden teen who’s a bit pissed at his parents. Pissed enough it seems to toss himself out of the window and on to some spikes below. Cue camera zoom to his face so that we can see he’s still barely alive on the spikes. Cut and we see the mother in the hospital, but doing her rounds (coz she’s a nurse), when the Matron summons her and tells her that she nearly overdosed a patient. Obviously this nurse must have trained here in the UK. Anyway, it’s here the Matron effectively fills in the missing piece telling her that it’s been a year since the teen died. So, now we know what happened to the hormonally enraged teen.

As she’s driving home we find out that there’s been house break ins nearby and the cops tell her to keep an eye out for anything suspect. On her way home again she knocks down a stranger who’s out in the middle of the road. Now, this is what got my attention; she’s knocked the guy off his feet, is panicking, doesn’t want to touch the guy, runs back to the car to find her phone… now, correct me if I’m wrong, but surely a nurse should be right out there to help the guy, give him some basic first aid and get him comfortable at least! Anyhoo, she gets him into her car with the intention to drive him back to her place (no, there’s no sex/nudie bits! Well, apart from a bit of semi-covered bush) but a madman in a car drives beside them, shining a torch into the car! WTF?! The man she knocked down explains that he saw the burglars breaking into his parents’ house. So, he’s on the run from them.

I’m saying nothing else on the plot as there’s a few twists and turns in it which are good, yet bad.

My main complaint with the film is that it starts off OK, then it heats up a bit (which is good), then it goes all romance-like before deploying it’s twist, but even then, the twist is revealed a good bit before the end and the end end is kinda odd. The story is good, but it’s badly put together. The twist should have been shown right near the end with the end end being the current near-end. You’ll see what I mean if/when you watch it.

This is one film that would benefit from a remake where the story is re-jigged. But, on the bright side, it’s not as depressing as Martyrs… just.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Skeleton Farm's Halloween Horrorshow

As we head in to September it’s not long until that holiday of holiday’s makes an appearance, Halloween. Skeleton Farm have already turned out a new Halloween DVD, like the shopping channels who start showing Christmas decorations in July, but not as bad.

The DVD (yes, it’s a DVD, not just a bog standard AVI mixtape) has a nice menu with several options (trailer etc.) but the mixtape its self starts with a mad doctor (it says so on his lab coat) who tries to sound scary, but just sounds creepy, in a pedo way. Speaking of mad and creepy, we get to some Alice Cooper audio with some cool zombie artwork and animation. Not only that, but within two minutes we get some jiggly boobies! Yay!

White Zombie (Boogie Man) provides the audio for the next part of the tape which is more jiggly boobs, oh and some gore clips mixed in with the video for aforementioned audio track.

I particularly liked the clip from Tales from the Crypt with the Crypt Keeper dressed as Elvis. Couldn’t resist taking a screenshot of that!

Well, there's something you don't see every day...

Next, more groovy Halloween themed audio with a video of dancing skeletons wearing fez hats. Nice! I had no idea there was a rap song about Nightmare on Elm Street which has a video starting three largely overweight men running from Freddy Krueger. Thanks (I think!) to this mixtape I now have that memory engraved in my brain…

The Monster Mash is next with a cool stop-motion video! Yay for stop-motion! The half-way mark gives us a another groovy tune with some classic 50′s animation of skeletons trying to dice up a little dog (or something like that). Next is a horribly cheesy and embarrassing music video from the 80′s, fluffy man hair and gay dance moves aplenty.

Much kudos goes to Skeleton Farm for including some Groovy Ghoulies in here too, it’s not the cartoon’s intro, but it reminded me of my Saturday morning cartoon marathons. Another reminder was just how disco Alice Cooper sounded at times. He’s Back (The Man Behind The Mask)… I remembered it as such a cool song, but the Halloween Horrorshow has reminded me that it is in fact incredibly non-rock/metal sounding. Shame… but it does have some cool shots of Jason.

The last five minutes is a gore-a-thon and ends with a clip of Vincent Price making a simple poem sound creepy as hell, as only he can.

Halloween Horrorshow is top notch stuff. It has good quality videos, groovy Halloween sounds, it’s free and even comes with free DVD covers for you to print out! Yay!

It’s the perfect background audio/video for your Halloween party 2010.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I’d love to post a link to the torrent, but I couldn’t possibly go… http://tracker.zaerc.com/torrents-details.php?id=15138 OOPS! how did that happen?…

While hanging out at makeout point in their small college town, even though they have apartments, Debbie (Suzanne Snyder) and  Mike (Grant Cramer) see a UFO land. Debbie convinces Mike to go looking for it, and it’s a giant freaking  red and yellow circus tent that has landed in a clearing. Bad tripping ensues as they get into the ship and find some people they know dead and coccooned in pink cotton candy.

They rush off to get the cops. One cop, Mooney, is the requisite asshole ( played by John “Dean Wormer” Vernon) and the other, Dave (John Allen Nelson), is conveniently Debbie’s ex-flame.  Mooney thinks the clown story is a hoax and doesn’t believe it until he gets killed by some clowns. Later the ghost of his head pops out of a clown’s ass in a classic scene.

Dave knows Debbie wouldn’t make something like alien clowns up and agrees to check it out. Dave and Mike  insist on taking Debbie home for safety but in her bathroom some popcorn the clowns back at the ship shot at her from their giant trippy guns turns into more monsters. Most of the movie involves Mike trying to get back to Debbie while people all over town get turned into clown coccoon milkshakes; the clowns hang them up ’til they’re ready and then drink their liquefied remains with a huge twisty straw. Obviously.

Later we get some stop-motion animation, which is inherently creepy while being fun to look at, and deadly shadow puppets. The clowns never break from their running gag of being playfully evil. Another high point is the late night parade of clowns. The kills that don’t involve the major characters move along in a stream of consciousness fashion making the movie a relaxing mindless pleasure. Typical of movies of the time, the filmmakers don’t waste time with an explanation of each scene or set of characters.

The most 80s deluxe part to me is the characters of the two bumbling brothers (Michael Siegel and Peter Licassi) who drive an ice cream truck in a scheme to get laid. Only in an 80s comedy! It does get them laid,  but not in the way you expect, but that small victory ends up saving everyone’s lives when Debbie, Mike and Dave get stuck on one of the clown spaceships yet again. I miss those types of characters like the brothers, those two dimensional jerks who move the plot along and wrap it up as conveniently as the now-overused twist ending.

I’d like to bottle this movie and spray its essence onto a few modern original screenplays. It has elements I didn’t recognize (but miss now they’ve gone) when I was watching movies like this in the 80s, like the absurdly rough biker bar, the story that takes place all in one night, the fact that even though the movie is completely stupid the director doesn’t assume we are, the actors who were good looking but didn’t look like they had been experimented on by evil surgeons, and the clowns that the general public didn’t have a damn phobia of yet.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space might be the rare 80s movie that won’t get remade since so many people claim to have a clown phobia. I mean, I’m sure if I met these clowns I’d become coulrophobic with a quickness, but the movie isn’t scary. Since an alien clown invasion isn’t likely, I can enjoy this as a good ol’ dumb comedy. 3.5 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.

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…)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqyMUjOzLk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOgZk4ZH1LQ

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

The only screencap I could give without spoiling the surprise!

Sometimes the children aren’t the only ones who get what they want for Christmas…

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOqhqpBj5GE

A fantastic slice of years gone by when TV could be relied on to give us wonderful holiday treats like this one.  Well worth a watch and perfectly suited for both adults and children.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NqgidFIHw8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDpglhIhb5M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLtGkyNGNuw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTNrH2-q_kY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM0ejr2PFDU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnfs7qm2KdI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj6rqnb-K1w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNRYBpRjWJU

Didn't really help me out.

Satan’s little helper is a relatively new (2004 ) film that takes place on Halloween and looks to combine its own brand of irreverence and humor while working within the vague confines of a slasher picture.  The only problem is that it jumps around from idea to idea so much that the narrative becomes so muddled and disjointed the film is barely watchable a majority of the time.  Satan (who may actually be Satan or just a ruthless serial killer in disguise) is befriended by a young naive boy who is under the impression that his addictive video game, aptly titled Satan’s Little Helper, is something of a tutorial for how he should behave on Halloween.  Instead of going down the obvious path of a troubled and properly bullied young boy who uses his new monstrous friend to exact revenge, we get an hour and a half of scenes that all seem like they are ripped out of different movies with each of them just as out of place and incomprehensible as the last.  For all its tragic flaws, the spirit of the season and moments of pleasure do rise to the surface at times, but it feels more like an accident when this happens, instead of an intentional result.

If he was a pirate for Halloween, he wouldn't have this ninja problem.

Besides the plodding, meandering pace that drags everything about Satan’s Little Helper down, the acting is probably the number one culprit when pointing the finger of blame as to why this movie is, at times, completely insufferable.  Dougie, the little kid around which the story revolves is painfully annoying, and not in that charming, youthful way that countless other movies had gotten away with.  His big sister is also way to uneven and over the top and barely serves the basic of purpose of being the “attractive girl” in the movie.  The mother of those two children is just about the only one in the movie I didn’t want to see get run over by a truck, but that was more by default than anything.  Satan (see below) doesn’t speak at all, and his mime-like moves are novel at first, but quickly become just as awkward and played out as almost everything else the movie offers up by the 45 minute mark.  From a production standpoint, the film is more than serviceable with nice lighting and video quality, but that seems like a moot point when you factor in how little it does to elevate the watch-ability of this turdburger.  It is strange at times, and delightfully so, but just making a movie to be weird isn’t enough unless it has a traditional or time-tested narrative backbone to prop it up once the gimmicks wear off.  The villain is creepy enough, but seeing as how the highlights of any good slasher-esque film should be the eventual deaths, it is shocking to find that there are only something like 2 or 3 on screen deaths, and all of them are absolutely abysmal in quality, creativity, and execution.  I’m ok with some off screen and implied slayings, but when you do finally pull the trigger on showing us a murder, it should at least be mildly impressive, even if you have to copy the idea from another flick.

Satan has a sense of humor. Too bad this movie didn't.

It’s a shame that I decided to re-watch this film before I reviewed, because that is truly 95 minutes of my life I will never get back.  I have certainly seen worse films, and I reiterate the fact that there are moments where it all comes together for Satan’s Little helper and you see what could have been, but those moments are so few and far between that most won’t get to see them because they will be switching dvds to another, better film.  It doesn’t feel amateurish, or overly self-indulgent and self-important.  It just feels like a bad film that isn’t quite bad enough to be fun on a “this is so shitty it’s genius” level and it absolutely isn’t good enough to be recommendable to anyone but the bravest souls who want to say they have seen it all when it comes to Halloween framed pictures.  There just aren’t enough tricks up Satan’s sleeve to make this a treat, and there are times where I’d rather be biting into an apple with a razor blade in it instead of  sitting through the second and third acts.  You’ve been warned.

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Oh, hey Jesus. Yeah I know, even you couldn't save this flick.

Ghostwatch