Category Archives: Reviews

Where’s your head at? Oh, it’s over there on the floor

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BASEMENT JACK

3 Stars  2009/18/93m

“Evil has a new address…Yours!”

Director: Michael Shelton / Writer: Brian Patrick O’Toole / Cast: Eric Peter-Kaiser, Sam Skoryna, Michele Morrow, M. Steven Felty, Tiffany Shepis, Billy Morrison, Noel G, Lynn Lowry, Nathan Bexton.

Body Count: 23

Dire-logue: “The psychologist entered into evidence a bunch of slasher movies, claiming media saturation prejudiced his right to a fair trial.”

11 years ago, the cops caught young psycho slasher Jack Riley, who went from town to town hacking up families with a machete during thunderstorms, after he failed to get his last victim, Karen.

Now, he’s been released thanks to an easy sentence and is picking up where he left off, amid flashbacks to his troubled youth when his out-of-her-tree mom used to electrocute him for reasons the script doesn’t really go into much.

Karen teams up with luckless rookie cop Chris to try and suss out his next move, while his superiors bark orders and ignore what she knows about the case in favour of the usual errors cops make in these flicks.

Meanwhile, Jack hangs out in basements of various homes and offs the family members who wander around carelessly. In this film though, the victims are pretty much cameos, they’re rarely allotted more than a few lines of derivative dialogue before getting skewered with Jack’s blade.

Eventually, he winds his way to the cop shop to raise the body count significantly and what was acceptable slasher film stuff goes a bit CGI-crazy with an unlikely double-scalping with one swipe of a machete, the lopping off of an arm and a disembowelment. Is he after Karen, ticking off an outstanding name from his list? Who knows, but she keeps getting in the way.

With a higher than usual budget for this kind of fare, Basement Jack is a lot better than it looks, with decent production attributes to its name and an interesting angle for the killer to act more like a serial murderer than a cut-up-everything-in-sight 24-hour sorta guy. However, it gets a bit dumb the longer it goes on and there’s an annoying thing occurring with a background character.

A once over affair but not a bad one. Tiffany Shepis turns up as one of the cops in a marginal but effective role.

Blurbs-of-interest: Shepis was also in Home Sick, Bloody Murder 2, Dead Scared, Scarecrow, Victor Crowley, and has a cameo in Detour; Nathan Bexton was in Psycho Beach Party.

Trade-a-Life IV

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Thanks to those of you who made Trading suggestions; they’ve been added to the growing list of people we wish would die in place of someone we wish would live and will feature at some point… But for now, satisfy your fix with these…

As usual, spoilers abound!

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS

In a twisted way it makes sense that Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkampenschwartzenfusski) was killed off at the end of Elm Street 3 – it helped drive the series forward in the way it probably should’ve done. She couldn’t keep coming back over and over to help a new group of kids fight Freddy Krueger. Or could she?

She could’ve taken another film or so off and returned when the series started to flag again and been substituted in death for the horrible Dr Simms (Priscilla Pointer), who is almost as eeeevil in her ignorance of what her young patients are trying to tell her as Krueger is for killing them. Well, not really but she was a total bitch.

Apparently, she was scheduled to die in the original script, which would’ve been a cool scene to witness as all her core beliefs crumbled before her. Meh, I suppose it would go against the struggle the teens have convincing the adults and authority figures that they’re in danger and the actress played Maureen Prescott, cause of all the misery for her daughter in the Scream movies. Still, poor Nance.

CHRISTINA’S HOUSE

It’s rare for kids to die in films but Christina’s House begins with the murder of a girl scout selling cookies and so there’s absolutely no reason that Christina’s really annoying little brother Bobby – who’s about 13 anyway – not to have been killed with extreme prejudice.

It would be preferable to the death of Christina’s friend Karen, played by Michael Bublé’s sister Crystal, who’s all perky and free-spirited, just as every best-friend-of-final-girl is, which is usually a guarantee that she’ll die. But she’s about a gazillion times better than proto-Bieber-haired Bobby, who just hangs around playing video games, whining about things and hasn’t mastered the really quite simple method of sandwich making. He nearly dies but nearly isn’t solid enough, shoulda been more thorough, Mr Killer!

BLACK CHRISTMAS (2006)

As if the “remake” of Black Christmas wasn’t deranged enough in its total annihilation of everything that made the original so fucking scary, by the time enough of the cast members have had their eyes forcibly removed from their ocular cavities, it becomes clear that textbook bland girl Kelli (Katie Cassidy) is going to be the heroine. Snore.

Considering the impressive cast roster in the flick, which included several final girls from other slasher flicks, it would’ve been better if they’d plumped for Michelle Trachtenberg’s dark-humoured Melissa as the go-to girl for kicking ass. She was Buffy’s kid sister after all.

As it turns out though, Kelli’s practical and flair-less approach to survival wins out and she does alright… But given the choice of potential replacements around her, it’s a bit of a cop out she was made the supposed lead. But I guess Cassidy was murdered in both Harper’s Island and the remakes of both When a Stranger Calls and A Nightmare on Elm Street so I’ll cut her some slack…

Sample thoughts of an unoccupied mind

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So, if Stab is the film based on the events of Scream, in Stab 2 – assumedly based on Scream 2 – was a film made to represent the film that Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps were seeing and renamed as something else?

That’d give us a film-within-a-film-within-a-film.

Or maaaaybe, Scream is that film and Stab is the real thing!?

THEN… Assuming Stab 3 was resurrected and based on the events of Scream 3, what was the name of the film the murders on set took place on!?

Matrixey, huh?

Sub Prime Slash

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DREAM HOME

 3.5 Stars  2010/18/93m

“She’d kill for a harbour view…”

Director: Pang Ho-cheung / Writers: Pang Ho-cheung, Derek Tsang & Jimmy Wan / Cast: Josie Ho, Eason Chan, Michelle Ye, Paw Hee Ching, Chui Siu Keung Norman, Lam Yiu Sing, Derek Tsang, Lawrence Chou, Song Xiao Cheng, Zhou Chu Chu, Phat Chan, Felix Lok, Juno Mak.

Body Count: 13

A weird and gruesome satirical slasher flick which begins with a jolt as a sleeping security guard has a cable tie fastened around his throat. He struggles and tries to cut it off with a Stanley knife, jabbing his own throat instead. Slowly and agonisingly, he dies. Almost everyone dies slowly and agonisingly in Dream Home. “Fun” ahoy.

A non-linnear narrative tells the story of Cheng Lai Sheung, a young Hong Kong professional who is so desperate to buy a penthouse with a view of the admittedly stunning HK harbour, which even I was transfixed by when I visited a few years ago, that she intends to force down prices by killing the neighbours.

In between the time-coded murders, we learn about Sheung’s life: her crummy job cold-calling bank customers, flashbacks to her childhood on a friendly but downtrodden development which has been on the brink of bulldozing for some time. Her growing obsession with providing a prestigious pad for her family is amplified by her inability to get a mortgage and then re-complicated by her father’s illness, which is not covered by his health plan.

The murders in Dream Home are seemingly random and all of them gruesome; eyes are poked out, guts tumble across the floor, dicks hacked off and most uncomfortably, a heavily pregnant woman is suffocated with a vacuum bag. I questioned whether or not I wanted to continue watching but what is horror if not horrific? Elsewhere though, Pang Ho-cheung strives to make things darkly funny: a couple in the throes of sex are attacked by Sheung, who knifes the guy before lopping off his cock, sending a spray of blood over the girls back, which she assumes to be his man-paste while another guy, hanging in there after the contents of his torso have largely been emptied out over the charming laminate floors, decides there’s no better time to light up a joint.

Most of the victims are nameless, unsympathons: a quintet of drugs and sex-partying kids see their gathering go to hell, the cops who come to check on the noise don’t fare any better and, although sometimes seemingly ashamed of her actions, Sheung carries on with her project, more fortuitous a killer than a talented or invincible one: people tend to slip over or fall on sharp things and Sheung succeeds almost by accident.

Explicit nudity, drug-use, a helluva lot of the red stuff, Dream Home is a memorable flick, very nicely made and strangely poetic in its tale of materialism and status, especially when Sheung finally gets what she wants and learns that old lesson that you should be careful what you wish for – you might just get it all.

No friend of Dorothy

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NO PLACE LIKE HOME

0.5 Stars  2008/15/85m

Director/Writer: Steven James Creazzo / Cast: Vincent J. Mazella, Denise Filosa, Steven James Creazzo, Ronnie Petricevich, Jaimi Williams, Bob Fletcher.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “Just because he’s your husband doesn’t mean you know him.”

An experience akin to watching someone’s vacation footage where they got bored and decided to make a little film for laughs. If only I could’ve clicked my heels together to teleport out of this nightmare…

A man returns to his hometown several years after his parents were murdered. The killer was never found. Everyone thinks he did it. Some of the locals have knowledge of the facts and they find themselves eliminated by a loon in a rubber skull mask.

As if the camcorder footage isn’t painful enough, the acting, gore effects and even wardrobe all serve to magnify how horrible watching No Place Like Home is: one of the two cops in town wears a variety of sleeveless tops in pastel colours and with a huge pirate-style earring and Seagal-themed mini-ponytail.

There’s a great scene where one poor idiot gets his arm lopped off with your everyday saw (in one motion, no less) and just looks at it with absolutely no expression on his face. Later, once the true identity of the killer has been unveiled, he apologises for a previous crime like he’d reversed into the person’s car: “yeah sorry about that, killed your parents, didn’t mean to…”

And where the hell did the two children disappear to?

While credits outtakes show just how low budget this film was, it’s only worth watching if you like horrendously slow fist fights, girl fights, and the pinnacle of stunts is a guy jumping over the bonnet of a car.

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