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Monthly Archives: August 2013
Diagnosis terminal
BEYOND REMEDY
2008/18/91m
“Don’t worry… You won’t feel a thing.”
Director: Gerhard Hross / Writers: Jorge F. Peterson & Soren Hoffmann / Cast: Marie Zielcke, Daniel Krauss, Edward Piccin, David Gant, Rick Yune, Annalena Duken, Tobias Kasimirowicz, Jacqueline Burgschat.
Body Count: 5
Six young physicians volunteer to participate in a radical form of confronting therapy to rid them of the fears and phobias that obstruct their career paths. Pretty Julia is scared of blades (handy in a slasher film) after failing to give her dying brother a tracheotomy. There’s also the dark, claustrophobia, vertigo, and mirrors.
Professor Gingrich’s (cheapo Christopher Lee clone, Gant) methods are harsh enough but there’s also a scrubs-and-chainmail-clad killer who starts to do away with the youngsters one by one.
This German film has English audio, some decent setups and creepy imagery from time to time – the apples and blood work quite well when they appear – but suffers from characters who choose split up at the most unlikely time and a budget that means gunshots are presented as feeble clicks rather than big bangs.
Better than some of the other experiment-based slashers and the killer is interesting, if not entirely obvious, but too little in the way of scares or tension and some of the murders are damp squibs – despite what the cover says about ‘strong bloody violence’.
Shitty Sequels IV: Shit Floats
SYT – Shitty Young Thing. Shitty in Pink. Sex and the Shitty… There are too many puns.
Last time – here, here, and here – the shittiest of shitty sequels were named and shamed for all to mock. Or protest in the name of. Or avoid. Whatever. Now, we’re back again, but will it be the end? Will the sequels ever be stopped!?
No.
Boogeyman 3 (2008) 
First up is an odd one, for the original Boogeyman – barely a slasher film, barely a HORROR film when you think about it – was dire. Really, really bad. The stuff of CG-coated nightmares. Then came that sequel and almost everything about it was right. Thus, high(ish) hopes were set on the third outing, in which the Boogeyman invades a college dorm and the hysteria created by the deaths of collegiate teens amplifies his presence blah blah… Nice idea, cheap ass outcome. One of those films where hardly anything occurs outside of the studio set, so it’s rendered boring as hell. Miles ahead of the original, but this is one college course it will surely flunk.
*
ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 (2011)
Tie this one with The Collection for heinous back-pedaling and re-branding, as the straight up killer-chases-girl shenanigans of the entertaining first film are tossed aft and replaced with some franchise-hungry conspiracy of bloodthirsty rich people nonsense that was already done and dusted in Hostel. And Turistas. And Paintball. And any number of other films where those wish means pay to watch young hotties cut up for their perverse pleasure. Danielle Harris’ cameo and a couple of familiar faces notwithstanding, just an ugly, depressing outing.
*
Wrong Turn 5 (2012)
Wrong Turn 3 featured on an earlier edition of Shitty Sequels; the fourth film was a marginal improvement and I guess we all naively hoped that with the announcement of a sequel-to-the-prequel would continue to claw back the credibility of the original 2003 film.
No. Wrong Turn 5 makes the Child’s Play franchise look like a mature observation of a childhood disrupted by unfortunate external circumstances. Ludicrous situations, film sets that resemble dolls’ houses, high-pitched giggling killers, Pinhead! Just get a SatNav.
*
The Graveyard (2006)
Unofficially, the third film in the Bloody Murder ‘series’, this one starts anew to some degree, with a past-event trauma that sees Puck from Glee impaled on a rusty piece of railing. X years later, the surviving friends reunite at Camp Placid Pines where they are picked off one by one by a vengeful killer.
As with Boogeyman, this was a ‘series’ where the first one sucked harder than a meth-starved hooker, but was saved in part by a vastly superior and fun sequel, only for it all to go to shit all over again with this inspid third, and so far final, entry. Bury it and salt the ground so it can never grow back.
*
Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013)
And we save the most laughable for last… News that Kim Henkel was going to breathe life back into his keepsake series was met with hope. Hope that was dashed, and then sawn to pieces by the arrival of this truly horrific excuse for a reboot, that incorporates apparent time-travel, characters who fail to age, blink-quick empathy, and no trace of irony as characters make all the mistakes we thought they’d quit making back in 1988.
You’ve been framed. And skewered. And slashed.
EVIL DEAD TRAP
1988/18/100m
Director: Toshiharu Ikeda / Writer: Takashi Ishii / Cast: Miyuki Ono, Aya Katsuragi, Hitomi Kobayashi, Eriko Nakagawa, Masahiko Abe, Yuji Honma.
Body Count: 7
Contrary to the implications of that title, this oddball Japanese film has more in common with Saw than Sam Raimi’s splatstick classic, and was something of a collectible outside of its home territory after release.
Nami is the presenter of one of those late night TV shows that screen weird and wacky videos sent in by the public. One day she receives a tape containing the torture of a young woman, who eventually gets a blade through the eye (its gruesomeness shown in extreme closeup).
Due to the falling ratings, Nami asks if she can take a film crew to the location of the video as she thinks it will make good television. She is denied permission and so goes anyway, taking four colleagues and a still camera.
The film pads comfortably through derivative stalk n’ slash territory, with a pair splitting off from the group for sex before the victims start to wander into traps, which include a multitude of blades skewering one woman, and a rigged crossbow ambush. There’s a also a brilliant flash-strobe attack in the dark, which, along with some ambitious set pieces drew comparisons to Argento’s visual flourishes. With all the slaying done with in the first half, events take a detour down the weird path with one of the most bizarre twists occurring once the (obvious) killer is unmasked.
The film’s leanings towards violence against shrieking young women makes for some uncomfortable moments, while the fewer male victims are either killed all too quickly or entirely off-screen, a motif common in the staple ‘J-horror’ exports of the 90’s and 00’s, which commonly center around young women in distress.
Fundamentally, the photography and inventive demises make the film, which is otherwise your common-or-garden stalker with a particularly surreal what-the-fuck!? final forty minutes in a flick that essentially runs about twenty minutes too long.
The sequel is an entirely different affair, a dreamy, wannabe avant garde horror film that I’m not even sure I made it all the way through.