Category Archives: Reviews

Psycho Sisterhood

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BLOOD SISTERS

 2 Stars  1985/18/83m

“A haunted whorehouse of horror.”

Director/Writer: Roberta Findlay / Cast: Amy Brentano, Shannon McMahon, Dan Erickson, Marla Machart, Elizabeth Rose, Cjerste Thor, Patricia Finneran, Gretchen Kingsley, Brigette Cossu, Randall Walden.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “And now like any good horror film, the van won’t start.”

See that drop shadow effect on the word ‘Blood’ – how annoying is it that the insides of the O’s have been neglected?

Another college initiation in another creepy old house with a dodgy past. Garth Manor, the Fairchild Mall, that asylum in Happy Hell Night, we’ve been here before…

This time it’s an abandoned brothel where a double murder occurred THIRTEEN years ago. If it’s not one, five, ten or twenty – it’s always thirteen. Now – or rather 1985 – seven off-the-shelf sorority pledges (slutty one, sensible one, sarcastic one, bespectacled one who’s constantly in a state of terror and can’t see shit the moment her glasses fall off…) must go there on a scavenger hunt.

Why these kids fail to expect the arrival of the also off-the-shelf psycho murderer is a mystery as, according to the Dire-logue, they’re at least aware of horror movie cliches.

The loon dresses up as a hooker (but instead resembles a giant sheet in a strong breeze) and interrupts the fun by bumping them all off. Yeah that’s right, all of them. Nobody makes it out of Blood Sisters. Even that freaky-ass rocking horse probably got slashed to ribbons!

Despite almost nothing happening for the first hour, BS isn’t all BS; one girl with a knack for running legs it for help and returns in the morning with the cops in tow. When they find nothing, they tell her to do one and bugger off, culminating in an amusingly cruel twist.

Otherwise, the effects are bad – check the crappy doll that takes a tumble over the banister – and the acting talents of the young starlets could’ve been refined somewhat, but it fills a hole if you want a decent unintentional laugh, but for slashtastic thrills, go for The Initiation instead.

Blurb-of-interest: Shannon McMahon was later in this film’s male counterpart, Pledge Night.

Foresight not required

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FINAL DESTINATION 3

3.5 Stars  2006/15/89m

“This ride will be the death of you.”

Director: James Wong / Writers: Wong & Glen Morgan / Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Kris Lemche, Amanda Crew, Alexz Johnson, Texas Battle, Sam Easton, Crystal Lowe, Chelan Simmons, Jesse Moss, Gina Holden.

Body Count: 7 (+ 7 on the rollercoaster)

The prospect of Final Destination 3 was a good one: the first two films were awesome, a neat pair, original director and writer returning – what could go wrong besides, y’know, all manner of mechanisms, sunbeds, power tools and gym equipment?

Originally intended to be the 3D one, the project was deemed impossible given the opening disaster would be set aboard a doomed rollercoaster ride but, for all intents and purposes, the script still suffers from the familiar shortcomings that most 3D have, i.e. hardly any character development whatsoever.

FD3 is almost a remake of the first film with a new catastrophe shoved in place of that plane crash: high school graduates at an amusement park board a towering rollercoaster which, in the premonition of, once again, an insta-psychic teen (Winstead), suffers a crash that kills all aboard.

The idea is awesome, the effects work above par but the disaster plays out just that little bit too unbelievably: the train seemingly goes around once unscathed before hitting an on-track object that breaks the wheels, damages to hydraulics, disabling the safety harnesses before half the cars career off the tracks and the trailing carriages grind to a halt, upside down at the top of the 360 loop.

I mean…c’mon, exactly at the top of the loop? And where do the extra corkscrews come from? What’s more, the character who inadvertently causes the incident is among those who leave the ride once premonishee Wendy freaks out and manages to ‘save’ nine others from the accident.

After a nicely done aftermath scene where we witness Wendy’s misery at losing her boyfriend, FD3 boards a carousel of repetition: Death comes along to hoover up the survivors in the order they were supposed to blah blah blah… But unlike the previous films, there’s little else, each scene is punctuated by interchanges between Wendy and fellow survivor Kevin, the only two who find something hinky in what happened.

Nobody else shows any gratitude whatsoever for having their life saved and, furthermore, given the massive evidence that Wendy is, like, psychic or some shit, none of them even consider that there’s any truth to what she’s telling them, the urban legend that was Flight 180 and a variety of other weird coincidences mentioned.

Instead, they idle on with their soon-to-be-over lives and become victims in what’s presently the most sadistic film of the franchise. Wendy herself exclaims that the demise of a classmate she and Kevin witness is incredibly vicious.

While the level of suffering is amped, the IQ of the characters slumps: the first to go in a double-whammy are two airhead chicks who strip off for a tanning bed session and end up burnt to death. It’d be alright if the girls were nasty bitches but despite being as dumb as a box of hair, they were nice girls who reached out to comfort Wendy. So we see them topless before they’re horribly killed off. Titillate > exterminate.

Fortunately, the rest of the kills are less cruel and far more creative, all of them linked without explanation to photographs Wendy took before the rollercoaster crash. Once again, what force is providing these hints? What force ‘gave’ Wendy the premonition? And what force that seems keen on helping them out do they not bother to investigate at all? Life? Visit a spiritualist, you morons!

As it goes, there’s death-at-the-drive-thru, a jock who shouts cliches like “winning’s all I know how to do!” before getting clamped to death, a gruesome but very well done nailgun incident and some great stunts in the finale at a bicentennial fayre. A couple of the lesser characters provoke interest, the goth duo of Ian and Erin would’ve made more intriguing leads than the template all-American teens of Wendy and Kevin, especially as Ian is the only one to put forward some theories on mortality.

Strangely and in spite of the knowledge gained from researching Flight 180 et al, when the death of one survivor is ‘skipped’ thanks to an intervention and then loops back around to finish him off, the main characters don’t notice: they think the fact that they’ve been skipped means it’s all over despite being first-hand eyewitnesses to the demise of someone else who was skipped!

OK, it sounds like I hated it, but really, I enjoy this one: it’s got a great idea at its core and some awesome creative kills; Winstead makes for a functional heroine – spending most of the movie with her classmates’ blood spattering over her face (you think after the first two she’d learn to stand further away from who’s ‘next’) – though not as plucky as either Ali Larter or A.J. Cook, and things end with a downbeat but very well-realised second disaster.

Compared to 2009’s soggy “The” Final Destination it’s a masterpiece, sitting awkwardly between the higher quality first two films, production-wise it can’t be faulted (OK, there’s a bit of questionable CG work), awaiting the release of the fifth film this summer. It’s just that little bit too bloodthirsty and…unforgiving? The DVD extras reveal that test screenings found the original ending was unfavourable and New Line execs voted to kill all that characters, which is a bit of a depressing state of affairs that even the nice kids won’t be spared.

Entertaining but over-serious and emotionally void.

“Quick! Hide it – nobody wants to be seen dead wearing that!”

Blurbs-of-interest: Texas Battle and Crystal Lowe were in Wrong Turn 2: Dead End; Lowe was also in Children of the Corn: Revelation and the Black Christmas remake, along with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, directed and produced by Glen Morgan and James Wong respectively, and also featuring Kristen Cloke from the first FD; Ryan Merriman was Deckard in Halloween: Resurrection; Kris Lemche was in My Little Eye; Gina Holden was in Harper’s Island. Chelan Simmons and Jesse Moss (Wendy’s short-lived beau) were both in Tucker and Dale vs Evil.

Thrash n’ Slash

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SLASH

2.5 Stars  2002/15/90m

“All this farm needs is a little blood…”

Director: Neal Sundstrom / Writers: Stephen Ronald Francis & Gus Silber / Cast: Steve Railsback, James O’Shea, Zuleikha Robinson, Nick Boraine, Craig Kirkwood, David Dukas, Nina Wassung, Neels Claser, Brett Goldin, Danny Keogh.

Body Count: 12

Dire-logue: “You should’ve asked the wizard for some brains, asshole!”

I’m being made to watch a Twilight film. Approximately 10 minutes  in and the sonically boring essence of it all is making me want to throw myself into a woodchipper, so here’s a rundown of sub-par (but still about 227% better than Twilight) South African American-pretender Slash.

A rock band, who conveniently share their name with the film, are looking for a break. When the lead singer’s aunt dies, he is invited back to the farm he grew up on for her funeral. So happens that his grandpa, Jethro, was a notorious serial killer who scythed dozens of locals and donated their blood to the harvest in the belief it would improve their farming luck.

So it comes as little surprise that the band become stranded at the darm when their bus ‘breaks down’ and a scarecrow-costumed psycho starts picking off the group with a large sickle.

The identity of the killer is revealed, although in fairness there are only three suspects, and opens itself to much scrutiny concerning to obtuse plotting. Not that Slash is a bad film, it’s just flawed enough that is blocks any chance of becoming a better film.

Some witty one-liners and a strangely upbeat climax, which sees too many of the band members survive, push the standard expectations aside, which make it seems as though the ending might’ve been re-shot a couple of times to the audience’s preference. Twilight is still on… Someone mail me a woodchipper.

Blurbs-of-interest: Railsback was in Deadly Games. The IMDb lists Slash as a spin-off of Children of the Corn. Farm and sickles aside, I don’t know why…

Don’t go in the house. Or the basement. Or the cemetery. Just leave.

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THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY

2 Stars  1981/18/82m

Director: Lucio Fulci / Writers: Fulci, Elisa Livia Briganti, Dardano Sacchetti & Giorgio Mariuzzo / Cast: Katherine MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza, Silvia Collatina, Dagmar Lassander.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “Ann, mommy says you’re not dead… Is that true?”

Cooool title and cooool poster. For me though, that’s where the coooolness ends.

It’s Italian, it’s dubbed badly, it’s Fulci, it wants to be The Shining, it makes next to no sense. As far as I could tell, the Boyle family – professor dad, squealy jittery mom, and blond moppet Bob – are moved into the old Freudstein house. By a cemetery. Two teens were killed there in the prologue so we know more than the Boyle clan already.

Little Bob is friends with a girl, Mae, who it seems nobody else can see. She says cryptic things and tells him not to go in the house etc… Meanwhile, Realtors and babysitters drop by and whomever is loitering in the seemingly unlockable basement totters in and kills them horribly. There’s some weird shit going on with the childminder, who resembles a mannequin we see randomly decapitated earlier on, stares a lot, and cleans up massive pools of blood that nobody questions.

Much ado is made about the experiments of Dr Freudstein but it was both boring and incoherent, made worse by the absolutely atrocious dubbing, for which it seems that Bob was voiced by a thirtysomething woman whose scream could shatter all the glass in a church.

Being an Italian horror flick, the gory violence is almost exclusively angled at women and the end comes shackled to a twist that isn’t at all comprehensible. According to Fulci, it’s something to do with the relationship between the children, but I read theories on time travel, limbo n’ all sortsa crap. And the zombie-monster-killer thing regenerates his cells by killing folks. Or something. There was a vile poo-like substance dripping from him when he was stabbed.

There are comparisons with Amityville and The Shining (which Fulci thinks is crap) but it’s more of a crumbling slasher flick with supernatural factors. The fact that they go unexplained lends to the creepiness of the film, as it did in the likes of Ghosthouse and I’m probably the only viewer who didn’t hate the kid with a fiery passion from hell. I actually thought he was quite sweet – nothing like the obnoxious back-talking brats they’d put in the role these days.

Is it a classic? Shrug. I laughed at it a bit. A couple of sequences were well done – Bob trying to escape from the basement. But I’m not a fan of crazy, haphazard all-over-the-place horror (wait ’til we get around to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) so I won’t lose any sleep if I never see it again.

Blurb-of-interest: Frezza (the kid) had a bit part in A Blade in the Dark.

5 things I wish they’d stop doing in horror films

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Let’s enjoy a good old moan, shall we?

Asshole Characters

The most crucial problem in low-end horror films (and indeed some high-end ones) is the total inability of scribes to write people we actually give a damn about, save for maybe the ones who’re going to survive (but not always – read on).

Thinking back to the happy-go-lucky teens of the 80s set, there was usually a bitchy girl and a macho dickhead but, for the most part, they were fairly innocent, likeable kids who we feared for and were sometimes even sad when they were slashed to ribbons.

But now? Oh God, it’s just a parade of obnoxious, self-absorbed, hateful characters and the audience virtually cheers on the killer when they die. Is this how people are now? Surely, I can’t be the only one who sees the problem in that?

No Survivors

Sometimes it’s necessary to off everyone in a film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning for example, but more frequently, and the Final Destination franchise is to blame, as if Asshole Characters aren’t enough, even the survivors aren’t valuable enough to save.

What initially appealed to me about slasher films was the notion of one person escaping to tell the tale. Every now and then there was a last second twist where the killer would leap out from somewhere and grab the final girl and it’d be left to the audience to decide whether or not she got away but seeing the last survivor brutally offed is an overstep into cruelty, i.e. the plain mean end of the super-shitty Splatter University.

Token Lesbianism

It’d be progressive if gay characters were ushered into the genre every now and then but what’s happened instead is that ‘gay characters’ has been translated exclusively to “hot girls making out”, as homosexuality can seemingly only be represented in a way that titillates the presumed low-IQ straight male demographic and any gay male characters are camp, weak and unquestionably doomed and would never be allowed to kiss a guy on camera.

In the last few years, there’s been girl-on-girl action in ever increasing numbers. With the exception of French flick Deep in the Woods, gay girls are always killed off, as if it’s the only logical alternative to them being ‘cured’ with a good hard shag.

No Opening Credits

This is more of a complaint about film in general: Why do 50% of new films completely bypass the opening credits? I like to see who’s gonna be in it ‘cos sometimes there’ll be a recognisable face you weren’t aware was going to be there or a cool cameo. But now…well you’re lucky if you even get the title! Wes Craven’s New Nightmare I’m looking at you.

Torture Porn-Lite

Hostel was a good film; great idea for a horrible tale of grue and in spite of what it proposes is going to happen or has happened, it’s not that gross. The downside of Hostel (besides the fact it had Eli Roth attached to it) is that it caused all manner of slasher films to ramp up the grue.

Gone were the thrifty throat-slashings and quick, sharp skewerings, enter long drawn out sequences of people suffering for extensive periods of time. The ambiguous enjoyment of the kills in a slasher flick moves the audience into questioning if they want to continue watching as the likes of Seed, Carver and Turistas delight in dragging out the demises of (usually female) victims.

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OK, so I’ve seen too many, I’m getting old and cranky, but for fucks sake will the people who write and produce these films at least try to avoid the pitfalls of their predecessors? Who am I kidding, genre comes from generic. May as well just shut up and learn to live with it.

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