Reviews

Until the last five minutes of this movie, I was prepared to walk out and say that was one of the best movies ever born out of a Stephen King story/book. The Mist is one of my favorite stories because it does what horror is supposed to do - make the unknown scary. The story and the movie do this well, giving us only a glimpse of the true horrors out in the mist and never giving anyone a sense of what kind of world was out there.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER The story and the movie move along together, with the small group of survivors setting out in a car, but the story ends with the giant thing crossing their path on the road and the characters realizing that, oh no, this is it - it is a whole new world and nothing is going to be the same again.

To me, that was the magic of the story. That OH NO moment right at the end.

But the movie completely changes it and makes the whole thing much more bleak ... and even depressing. I mean, I get the point of the ending, but one of the best things about a King story or novel is that the horrors don't always get resolved. We are left to wonder what might be. To resolve the matter in the movie, and in the very depressing way Darabont did, upset me.

I will say this, if I had never read the story I would give this movie a solid 7, at least (I still would think the ending is just too bleak). But seeing one of my favorite stories butchered with that ending was depressing.

With a few hours to kill, I stopped in to see this movie fully expecting it to be another typical Hollywood horror remake - in other words, garbage. I did have a problem with the setup, the way the Hitcher was introduced and the implausibility of the couple to then be willing to give him a ride, and if the movie let on why the Hitcher was going on this maniacal murder spree, I missed it. On top of that, the tractor-trailer killing - how it could have been pulled off - was illogical. No, it is certainly not a great movie and not even a very good movie, but I would watch it again at some point ... which is good enough for me.

Is Jigsaw going to be another one of those maniacs - aka, Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers - who simply cannot be killed? I don't know, but he makes another appearance in Saw III, which - to me - is far more gruesome than the first two but oddly less satisfying. It starts with the opening of the movie and a couple of people caught in Jigsaw traps, sequences which seemed to serve little purpose for the movie except to make the audience squeamish right away. There were also quite a few flashbacks which ended up being a little confusing in relation to the timeline. And the ending was decidedly un-Hollywood, but so gut-churning and made me so uncomfortable (and I'm not talking about the gore, but the ultimate way the events unfolded) I'm not sure I can watch this movie again. All in all, though, it was a solid horror/suspense movie - albeit the lesser of the three Saw movies (No. 2 was probably the best one, though the ending for No. 1 was pretty darn cool). And the door was clearly left open for at least another installment, which won't be such a bad thing ...

The memories of the nightmare this movie gave me 36 years ago when I first saw it were still fresh last week when I had a chance to revisit it on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Although not as frightening as I remember it (I was eight the first time, however) it is a nicely lurid, Gothic chiller based on the popular soap opera series about the vampire, Barnabas Collins, and his clan. In this movie, Barnabas is resurrected by a handyman intent on some measure of revenge against the Collins clan; Barnabas passes himself off as a long-lost relative and soon finds himself falling in love and teaming up with a doctor intent on "curing" his vampirism. The movie is quite bloody and I can see what was so frightening about it (for 1970), but it definitely has held up well and is still a worthy addition to anyone's horror collection.

I have to admit I was intrigued by this new look at the Frankenstein ideal, but despite the number of times Adam (Christian Oliver) died and was resurrected and Vick (Dean Stapleton) battled with the complexities of his formula and its side effects, the story never seemed to go anywhere. How about a insight into death and what may lie on the other side? How about some moral or ethical message? I will say this, the acting was quite good and I liked all the performances even though Stapleton bore an uncanny resemblance to Jack Nicholson (probably intended) but this was one of those movies I was waiting to end so I could put something else in.

I am a huge fan of Stephen King, but I await with much trepidation any movie based on a Stephen King novel after the horrific jobs done on The Shining, Maximum Overdrive, The Lawnmower man for God's sake, and The Tommyknockers just to name four. I know there have been solid movies, like Needful Things, Misery and The Green Mile but the misses far out-weigh the hits. In the first installment of the Nightsmares & Dreamscapes television series, "Battleground" was a great hour-long movie based on the short story that appears in "Graveyard Shift." In it, a hit man kills a toy maker and is later besieged in his high-rise apartment by a box of toy army men ... which are much more than toys and come equipped with rifles, helicopters and one little surprise at the end. Seemingly influenced by (or at least similar to) an old Twilight Zone episode, this movie puts a reverse spin on the giant monster movies of the 1950s ... telling the story from the monster's point a view. In that regard, a nice little twist in this show was that not a single line a dialog is spoken. "Crouch End" was also a solid chiller, with a Lovecraft feel to it and a twist at the end that I didn't quite understand and didn't quite like.

One of the joys of picking up the recent Bela Lugosi collection is getting to see delightful movies like The Invisible Ray. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi team up in a movie that delves into meteorites and radiation and while the science is all perfectly absurd (especially the camera technique Karloff, as Janos Rukh, uses to determine the site of a certain meteorite) and downright laughable, I didn't care in the lease because the movie is thoroughly enjoyable. The effects are done well for the time, the acting is great, and the finish is particularly strong. It reminds me of the pulp sci-fi comics and novels of the 1940s and '50s, complete with ray guns and ridiculous science. You must watch this movie!

Deer Woman takes a Native American legend (an actual legend, as it turns out) and gives it some tongue-in-cheek treatment. In the movie, a Native American spirit - part woman, part deer - comes out of the wilderness and begins seducing locals - first a trucker, then a business traveler, a pawnshop owner, and a cop. After seducing the men, the Deer Woman basically tramples them to death. Pretty gory, too. Now, the premise is right on the verge of being too ridiculous for a movie and the humor is a little flat, but the movie itself is a pretty enjoyable piece of horror. Not the best of the Masters of Horror series (so far, my vote for that goes to Don Coscarelli's Incident On and Off A Mountain Road and John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns), but pretty good nevertheless.

I never hold out much hope for these low budget horror flicks that kind of get hidden on the shelves at Blockbuster, but Cemetery Gates was a pleasant surprise. Activists release a mutated beast from a laboratory, only to have that beast - nicknamed "Precious" - escape from them and start killing people all over the place. The monster runs into a group of young people filming their own zombie movie at a local cemetery, which is the real "meat" of Cemetery Gates, so to speak. From top to bottom, the acting is strictly amateurish and close to that line between passable and barely watchable and though the movie is billed as being humorous, I think that's the by-product of a clumsy script. The story itself is not half bad, except the early situations where people are placed in harm's way for the purposes of being messily devoured seem to come utterly out of the blue. I think if less time was spent on designing the gory sequences and more on the script, this movie could have been even better.

If you watched this movie while half asleep, it would appear to be a thrilling adventure movie. But if you are too focused, the numerous flaws and problems with the script become readily apparent. This is the story of a luxury cruise ship capsized by a gigantic rogue wave and thus begins a fight for survival as a small band of people try to climb "up" to the bottom of the ship to escape before the whole thing sinks. Typical Hollywood blockbuster fare, but the problems begin right away when the script telegraphs who is going to die and then contrives rescue situations (come on - a little boy is going to wander away on a capsized ship? And then get stuck inside a metal cage? While the water is quickly rising? Jeepers!). The Kurt Russell character then has to become a hero by swimming 150 feet (or was it yards) on one breath to turn off the ship propellers, an operation he would not be able to do if the ship was upright, everything was dry, and he had all the time in the world. But, lucky for him, it was so simply marked. And then, as the group is running out of time, the seams of the ship burst and water begins shooting through the bulkhead ... even though that portion of the ship is ABOVE the water level and, even if it were submerged, pressure would be high enough to burst bulkhead seams designed to be hundreds of feet underwater. This whole movie left me feeling like I got ripped off. Pick up the original and watch that instead. Watching this would be a big mistake.

Hostel is one of the more gruesome movies you will ever see, but it is one of the most effective at displaying a sickening and horrifying desire (fetish? need?) that is more than likely buried deep within a LOT of people. Being 43 myself, these young guys kind of ticked me off at their behavior near the beginning of the movie - backpacking across Europe with only one purpose: hooking up with women. There is a lot of nudity in the movie, but it never felt gratuitous to me. And with all the naked women traipsing around the hostels and spas, it makes this Slovakian city seem like a GREAT place to visit ... until you find out what some of these women are up to. Near the end I was a little bothered that there seemed to be no point to what was happened, but when the shoe dropped I was shocked and horrified. The ending to the film is brutal and shocking. Cabin Fever was a decent movie, but Hostel - I think - vaults director Eli Roth in the category of directors to watch out for. I can't wait to see how his prospective movies The Box, The Bad Seed and Scavenger Hunt turn out.

At its center, this movie has a pretty good story - a viral outbreak at a prison turns the inmates and guards into flesh-eating zombies. The problem is (besides the dreadful acting and jumbled script) the viewer is immediately thrust into the epidemic without any build up or any context to figure out what is happening. The believability of the circumstances is pretty shaky, too - (1) no matter what, a prisoner showing such dramatic signs of illness is not going to be escorted nonchalantly to his cell, especially if he continues vomiting blood over everyone; (2) the "prison" is a poor excuse for an abandoned building (windows are missing for crying out loud) and the gate of this "maximum-security" facility can be busted by a kid on his tricycle; (3) it would stand to reason that with the cells and the various security gates, a lock down would be very effective at keeping all the zombies from running rampant throughout the prison ... yet that is not the case. I didn't care for the overacting and the excessive scenes of inmates vomiting blood or zombies pulling intestines out of their victims - do it once and then try something else for god's sake. I will say this, I made it an hour into the movie before I finally had enough. Get a film editor on this movie, clean things up a bit, and it could be halfway decent. As it is, it's a mess and amazingly dull.

For anyone who loved the Vincent Price version of "The House of Wax" - or even the earlier 1933 Lionel Atwill version, "Mystery of the Wax Museum" - this will be a disappointment because it is a remake in name only. It will also be a disappointment because the director spent the first 50 minutes of the movie attempting to "flesh-out" his characters with some mundane trip to a football game and then when the killing finally gets started, eliminates all but two of the characters in a very short period of time. The story itself is not bad - two sons of a former (insane) wax artist go insane themselves and basically create a town out of wax, filling it with people they have abducted and then coated in wax. The climax in the actual House of Wax is pretty cool, too. All in all, the movie gets off to a very slow start, heats up quickly, and finishes strong. It's generally kind of creepy (and gruesome in some spots), but overall is kind of weak. The twist at the end (which I won't reveal here) is not only unnecessary (unless the producers are keeping the door open for a sequel), but it provides little or no jolt. So what, is what I said to myself. Measured up against some of the garbage that has been released this year, "The House of Wax" deserves an Academy Award. But, to me, it is only mediocre.

I have rented so many bad zombie movies (i.e, The Wickeds and Hide And Creep) that I expected Undead to be similarly bad. But I enjoyed it a lot. In small town in Australia, a rain of meteors brings about a plague of zombies and a small group of people try to fight their way through it. There is certainly a sense of humor to the movie (the male cop is great), but not quite as keen as Shaun Of The Dead or Tremors and quite a lot of nifty gore. But I found the movie to be confusing (it may be just me) because (SPOILERS AHEAD!) I couldn't figure out what it was the aliens were attempting to accomplish and why they needed to zombifie people and to what end. If I watch it again I should be able to figure it out and - this is a true test of a movie - it is certainly worth watching again.

Paul Lavond is wrongly accused of robbery and murder and is sent to Devil's Island; he escapes and using the machines and potions of a scientist who escaped with him, Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) is able to exact revenge on those who are to blame for framing him. It seems like a simple (even silly) story, but director Tod Browning creates an chilling atmosphere that, coupled with solid trick photography, makes The Devil Doll into an effective, spooky horror movie. What makes it even better are the performances of Barrymore (who dresses in, uh, a dress for much of the movie) and Maureen O'Sullivan as the mad-as-a-hatter Lorraine Lavond. Browning directed the spectacular Dracula and the spectacularly weird Freaks, but unfortunately The Devil Doll was his next-to-last film and any horror fan should make it a point to watch it.

The much-hyped remake of THE FOG was disappointingly mediocre. The original was genuinely creepy with its one-note soundtrack and the wonderful tack-on prologue with John Houseman. There was a sense that something was imminent - something scary. That doesn't seem to be the case at all with the re-make, which is soulless, not in the least bit creepy, and totally miscast. Hollywood horror movies have this fascination with young, hip people getting involved in something scary but, I'm sorry, I just couldn't believe Nick Castle as a charter boat captain or Selma Blair as Stevie Wayne (she looks like she's 21, yet has a 10-year-old son), the owner of a radio station. It wasn't bad enough to walk out of the theater, but a few hours later it was forgettable. Completely mediocre.

The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart is one of my all-time favorite movies largely because of Bogart's portrayal of Sam Spade. Bogart played Spade as a tough guy with some obvious character flaws, but a guy who seemed to be a good man. In this version, The Dangerous Female, Ricardo Cortez portrays Spade a little bit sleezier, a guy you can't really trust. When he comes back to the office after his partner is killed, he seems almost too happy to ask his secretary to have Archer's name removed from the office door. The Dangerous Female is an interesting piece (not bad, either), but The Maltese Falcon with Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Elisha Cook Jr. ("keep on riding me and they're going to be picking iron out of your liver") is a classic.

I can forgive a couple of guys trying to cash in and ride on the coattails of a "funny" zombie movie like Shaun of the Dead and the Hartsells were heading in the right direction, but lack of money, lack of writing talent, and lack of any real directorial ability dooms them from the start. HIDE AND CREEP takes place in a Southern redneck town, where a zombie plague has suddenly sprung up. And when I mean "sprung up" I mean "sprung up" because zombies appear almost out of thin air - in the church, in the video store and in a living room (where one zombie comes right through the door without any of the five people in the house seeing it and one zombie comes up from the basement where one man had said was empty not five seconds before). The ultimate reason why the zombies have started appearing (aliens) is stupid, the makeup is poor and the acting is dismal. But I'll tell you what - put some more money into the project, some better writers for the dialogue, and a new director and an idea like HIDE AND CREEP has real funny possibilities.

The main problem with THE SKELETON KEY has nothing to do with the movie itself. Billing it as one of the scariest horror movies ever brings people into the theater expecting one thing ... although they end of getting something else. THE SKELETON KEY is a very good suspense movie with some supernatural undertones which don't become full blown until the very end. A woman takes on a job as nurse to an old man who suffered a debilitating heart attack at an old Louisiana plantation home - a home where there have been some bad goings-on since a lynching about 80 years before. The woman (Kate Hudson) discovers the secret of the attic room and soon suspects there is something sinister (although not necessarily supernatural) going on in the house and fights to get the old man to safety. There is that undercurrent of the supernatural and voodoo, but to this point the movie plays as a Southern Gothic version of PSYCHO. But then the true secret of what is going on (although I said there are spoilers, I don't want to give it away), what has been planned for Hudson's character, and what really happened in the house all those years ago comes out. My only regret is that the ending is not as chilling as I would have hoped, but the movie is well-crafted, very suspenseful but not full blown horror like the trailers would have you believe. It is definitely worth a couple of hours of your time.

Let me say this right off the bat - I liked The Devil's Rejects. The hit-and-run scene was done well enough I was cringing in my seat (and I don't often cringe at gore). I really did like this movie. But I almost can't recommend because it is so unspeakably vile and depraved. Rob Zombie shows us the absolute worst kind of human beings who kill with no moral conscience whatsoever, who revel in the blood and filth of death, and it is so unsettling (there ARE people out there just like this) and revolting you might wish a movie like this had never been made. Myself, I can't see any redeeming value to this movie - but some of the performances were good (not by Sherry Moon Zombie, though, who is a terrible actress) and it WAS entertaining and sometimes that's all I can ask for in a movie.

'Land of the Dead' is a welcome return to the 'traditional' zombie genre perfected by George Romero in his Dead trilogy (now a quadrilogy). The original 'Dawn of the Dead' was a wonderful mixture of social satire and gut-wrenching horror but Romero got away from that for the most part in 'Day of the Dead'. Except for the re-training of Bud, 'Day' was just a gore-splashed finale to what had been a terrific series. But 'Land' takes this whole thing in a new direction, mixing in the social satire with excessive gore and an interesting and oddly sad conclusion (only George Romero could turn a zombie into a sympathetic creature). It was scary (and not just in those 'jump-out-at-you' scenes) and it was gory (Romero found new ways to have zombies attack and devour people) and it was fun. I like how the city took on the traditional look of the old medieval castle - with the upper caste living in luxury inside the inner wall and the poor living in squalor inside the outer wall. And the fact that these zombies are beginning to think brings up something I had wondered about during 'Dawn of the Dead' - namely, if radiation had reactivated their brains, why wouldn't some activity be reactivated in the cerebral cortex as well? I liked the remake of 'Dawn of the Dead,' but 'Land of the Dead' was a better movie.