Tag Archives: gore o’clock

Full circle = 360 / 2 = 180 = Death!

2 comments

FINAL DESTINATION 5

3.5 Stars  2011/15/92m

“It’s not if. It’s when.”

Director: Steven Quale / Writer: Eric Heisserer / Cast: Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, Arlen Escarpeta, Tony Todd, P.J. Byrne, Courtney B. Vance, David Koechner, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, Ellen Wroe, Brent Stait.

Body Count: 10 (+86 other poor schmucks)

Hallelujah! A character finally acknowledges the force that provided the vision! It’s only taken 11 years for them to realise nobody’s ever mentioned that.

Will they ever stop? Crew and fans assumed they were stopping with 2009’s flaccid “The” Final Destination. But even though it was shit, it also made shit loads of money, prompting work on a fifth film – possibly something of an apology – which arrives a year earlier than the standard three-year gap between the other films.

The good news is that Final Destination 5 is shit loads better than the previous entry and maybe a little better than FD3 as well. Though the promise of a ‘back to basics’ approach is only half delivered, it appears that those behind the scenes took the project that little bit more seriously than before.

For the most part, the formula is un-fiddled with: a big disaster happens, which is foreseen by one of those about to perish whose hysterical reaction to his/her premonition saves a handful of people who are then hoovered up by the invisible force of Death in the following days and weeks.

fd5-4So we had a plane crash, a pile-up, a rollercoaster malfunction and a raceway crash (that one really sucked, didn’t it?), 2011 coughs up a suspension bridge collapse. Unfortunately for a bus full of office workers on a ‘team building retreat’, all round nice guy Sam (D’Agosto) sees it all seconds before it happens. People are impaled by almost anything imaginable, crushed by flying objects, and for one poor guy drenched in burning hot tar. Sam succeeds in creating a scene that saves eight people from the bus.

The last two films sorely missed the presence of Tony Todd as the riddle-speaking mortician Bludworth. Thankfully he’s brought back to hang around the aftermaths of the ensuing deaths and utter a few cryptic words about Death’s grand scheme to claim the souls they skipped out on their scheduled suspension bridge check-out date. Though this time he states that if those in the firing line take another life, places are switched and they get that person’s remaining years. Kill or be killed.

fd5-3

In the meantime, there’s death by gymnastical dismount, acupuncture, laser-eye surgery and the usual menagerie of flying implements which take people out with a nano-second’s notice. It’s as grisly as usual but just that little bit less sadistic than the last two films, which showed such disregard for their characters that they become virtual parodies of themselves.

Interesting, this is the first film since the 2000 original not to show any tits. Have they now decided the series is above that kind of sleazy exploitation on top of bloody deaths for all? Maybe. Or maybe the three female actors just didn’t want to get their jugs out. Who knows. It doesn’t make a difference to me anyway.

fd5-1

What it does leave is a little more room for characters who, although hardly drawn out beyond their roles, are on the whole more likeable than before. Sam fulfills his part as the psychic to standard while Emma Bell of Frozen is his on-off girlfriend. Sam’s best bud Peter has the biggest arc after his girlfriend goes early on, slowly driving him a bit insane and leading to the kind of guy-with-a-knife action you just don’t see in Final Destination movies. There’s also a little more evidence of the grieving process at play, with the office employees missing their lost colleagues and commercial repercussions that the disaster indirectly causes.

Quale attempts to keep things on a sort of overcast drizzle level of grim but the comedic off-sets still creep in, mostly from P.J. Byrne’s Isaac, who is listed as one of the dead by the slave-driving manager during a memorial service and then completely forgotten about when mentioned later.

There’s a good attempt to change it up a bit come the finale, which sees the kill or be killed theory being tested and then we get the twist. It’s a real downer in the internet age that big reveals can be so easily and quickly spoiled for those of us unlucky enough to read just that one sentence too much somewhere.

fd5-2

Various people on the IMDb boards ruined it by giving away the twist ending, which, to be fair, I may have also given away by calling this post Full Circle. To say Final Destination 5 could close off the series is a decent assessment given how things end. It will hopefully provide a great OMG! moment for those who have no idea it’s about to happen.

Even so, the scene in question is brilliantly executed (again!) and elevated this from an average rating to being a notch about the third movie, thanks almost exclusively to this development and the general feeling that someone somewhere just TRIED a bit harder to make a good horror sequel rather than a box-ticking exercise.

A big question mark will hang over the possibility of a sixth film. I imagine this one will have done well enough to generate interest and there’s no shortage of ways to keep offing people but at the very least, they should lay it to rest for a few years to let the dust settle.

fd5-5

Blurbs-of-interest: Arlen Escarpeta was Lawrence in the Friday the 13th reboot; Courtney B. Vance (underused!!) was in D-Tox. Tony Todd was also in both Hatchet and its sequel, Scarecrow Slayer, iMurders, Jack the Reaper, Candy Corn, and Hell Fest.

The Weakest Link

8 comments

CHAIN LETTER

3 Stars  2010/18/84m

“Pass it on – or die.”

Director: Deon Taylor / Writers: Deon Taylor & Michael J. Pagan / Cast: Nikki Reed, Michael J. Pagan, Keith David, Cody Kasch, Cherilyn Wilson, Michael Bailey Smith, Brad Dourif, Betsy Russell, Matt Cohen, Noah Segan, Eliot Benjamin, Charles Fleischer.

Body Count: 7

Laughter Lines: “What about the internet? What about MyTube, YourSpace?”

“Ch-ch-ch-chain letters…” – remember that crummy daytime TV quiz? Kinda wish the same fate befell the contestants that drops into the laps of a group high school kids who randomly receive a chain letter – which is, in fact, an email – that warns of a horrible, bloody death should they fail to send it to a specified number of people. Chain Email doesn’t sound quite so sparky. Chain Mail?

As is so often the case, they’re presently learning about the dangers of technological progression from their intense teacher Dourif, just like the kids in Urban Legend are taking a class in urban legends or the myriad of ‘experiments in fear’ that any number of doomed college kids are dabbling in when they start getting offed.

Chain Letter serves up a series of brutal slayings courtesy of the Chain Man, a mystery killer who hunts them down if they delete or fail to forward the email within 24 hours. Beginning with a girl whose legs are each chained to the back of her parents’ cars. When they pull out of the drive and go in different directions… well, you can guess what happens.

After a couple of the group die gruesomely – really gruesomely – cops Keith David and Betsy Russell (the latter wasted in a thankless role that anyone could’ve phoned emailed in) begin investigating ideas of an anti-technology terrorist group, y’know the kind that targets gormless teenagers to make their point.

‘Cause EVERYONE cares about teenagers. How many times have we heard ‘no harm must come to the precious, adorable teenagers’ etc?

As it goes on, Chain Letter makes less and less sense: is it a slasher flick? Torture porn? Cop-hunts-killer thriller? Seems like no one can really decide but it bears most in common with a Saw-influenced take on the former, with lots of squealing dead teenagers, a smart girl trying to hold it together and solve the mystery before the killer comes after her but, as usual, no parents around when you’d expect them to be – like, when one of their kids dies and the other is likely to go next… further underscoring the fact that the terrorist group really picked a heartwrenching target group that the world clearly cares about losing.

Eventually, it sort of collapses under its own weight. I’m not sure if I stopped listening or zoned into another, less confusing dimension for a couple of moments, but there wasn’t really an explanation provided. There are some flashbacks which are supposed to “reveal” something to us but we couldn’t have known what they were in the first place and it reeks of an idea not thought out or one that quite arrogantly assumed it was good enough to warrant a sequel.

However, this problem is partially forgivable thanks to the neat twist, which loops back around to the beginning but leaves things on a downbeat note and the idea that the whole script was constructed around the twist and other elements were left to…well, the elements. Who cares if the rest of it doesn’t tie up – Lost managed alright?

Blurbs-of-interest: Deon Taylor co-directed 7eventy 5ive; Pagan was in See No Evil; Michael Bailey Smith was in Monster Man; Betsy Russell was in a few of the Saw films and Cheerleader Camp; Matt Cohen was in Boogeyman 2; Charles Fleischer was in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Back Lot Murders; Brad Dourif is the voice of Chucky and was also in Color of Night, Dead Scared, Trauma, Urban Legend and the Halloween remakes; Keith David was later in Smiley.

Psycho Sisterhood

Leave a comment

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

2 comments

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.

More almost but not-quite slasher flicks

7 comments

Another handful of horrors that hang out by the dance floor where all the slasher flicks are partying and flirt with them, trying to blend even though they don’t really fit in… See the last lot here.

DEAD SILENCE 2007

“From the makers of Saw” came this seriously underrated and unsuccessful scare flick, in which young couple Ryan Kwanten (later in True Blood) and Laura Regan (from My Little Eye) receive a creepy ventriloquist’s doll in the mail that somehow kills her, sending him back to their hometown of Raven’s Faire, a town apparently cursed by the ghost of Mary Shaw, subject of an Elm Street-like nursery rhyme that states if you encounter her in your dreams, don’t scream or you’ll lose your tongue, just as Regan did.

Kwanten’s investigations, hampered by greasy detective – and ex-New Kid on the Block – Donnie Wahlberg, seem to generate a fresh wave of creepy deaths and there’s one helluva twist at the end that I was totally blind to!

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: it’s a ghost story with a body count really, shades of Darkness Falls as well as Krueger-town (there was an additional murder in the deleted scenes) creep in, but not enough to swap sub-genres and they’re not likely to make a sequel…

DONKEY PUNCH 2008

Three northern gals holidaying in Mallorca hook up with a quartet of private school guys crewing on a luxury yacht and decide to party on the boat. Sex and drugs dominate and one of the guys decides to test a sexual urban legend – the Donkey Punch – which backfires, killing one of the girls. The boys vote to throw her overboard and say she fell and when the girls refuse to go along with it, a series of intensified confronations and misunderstandings lead to a second accidental death, then escalate to murder…

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: most of the deaths are accidents (including a neat outboard demise) and one person commits suicide. There’s a final girl of sorts but this is totally a Brit-grit situation flick.

HOUSE OF 9 2005

Another UK export; in this cut-price Battle Royale, nine strangers are abducted and wake up in a locked down house and informed that when only one remains alive, they will exit with £5million. Dennis Hopper is an Irish priest with a dodgy accent, Kelly Brook a shy dancer, Chardonnay from Footballer’s Wives a socialite, a rapper, an American detective, married couple and so on…

They argue about the situation until it leads to accidental death and murder, whittling down numbers until only one remains and exits. Cue semi-clever twist.

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: as with Donkey Punch, it’s all situational, there’s no one killer offing everybody one by one.

THE LAMP 1987

I love this cheesecake 80s horror film about a killer genie – or Djinn – which inhabits ye olde lamp that dim-witted, dungaree-wearing heroine Alex rubs when it arrives at her father’s museum. A field trip, a dumb teen idea to spend the night there (in a fucking museum…), Djinn-possession and the teens, some staff members and a couple of meathead racists find themselves done in in a variety of proto-Final Destination ways, some of which are suitably gruesome and clever, let down only by bargain basement effects work and a Djinn that looks like a Kinder Egg toy.

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: it’s a close one: there’s a lot in common with the likes of The Initiation and any number of collegiate prank slasher flicks but in the end it varies itself out of the equation.

THE UGLY 1997

A defence psychologist appointed to reassess a murderer, who proceeds to fill her in on his traumatic childhood and the slayings that followed. Despite warnings from the creepy institution doctor the shrink is soon sucked into his tragic tale of a nasty mother, school bullies and his one friend. All the blood on show is like black motor oil from a bunch of extras who are slashed up with a straight razor. Things go all Se7en with a downbeat twist ending, but it’s typically arty in the Australasian way.

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: a serial killer flick with grisly murders peppered throughout; no busloads of dense teenangers here.

1 … 29 30 31 32 33 … 43