Beleaguered parents of the world, take heart: If Legion is to be believed, even God Almighty has His hands full with kids. And if He can't keep his squabbling children in line then really, how are you supposed to do better? Yes, that's irreverent, but we're talking about a movie that arms the studly, tattooed Michael with more machine guns than the Chechnyan army and pits him against trash-talking demon grannies, exploding corpses and an ice-cream seller who mutates into a spider-limbed acid nightmare -- all because some trampy, chain-smoking hash-slinger is carrying a bastard who's supposedly the last, best home of the human race. Reverence is so not the issue.

December 23, Los Angeles. As the street scum brawl, booze, screw and shoot up, a buff, heavily-inked stranger picks himself up off the mean streets and makes tracks for the shuttered Happy Toy Company, which traffics in more lucrative merchandise than squeaky Santas, if the hidden room crammed with machine guns is anything by which to judge. After painfully stitching up his bleeding shoulders -- the ones that can't help but conjure the shadow of giant wings -- the stranger kills a pair of cops, steals a police car and hits the road, lights sparking in his wake.

Continue reading "Legion Review - A Wingless Angel, Paul Bettany Is God's Problem Child" »

Set in a world where the vampire-to-human ratio skews heavily towards the bloodthirsty undead, Australian writer-director team Peter and Michael Spierig's scifi horror tale Daybreakers is filled with clever details, but falters as a satirical allegory about top-of-the-food-chain hubris.

The year is 2019, one decade after the onset of a plague that turned its victims into vampires; they in turn infected others, rapidly swelling the ranks of the undead exponentially. Now vampires run everything from the corner coffee kiosk to multi-national corporations. They live in suburban tract houses, take the subway to work and watch pretty newscasters on flat-screen TVs; sullen clusters of delinquent teens hang out on street corners and homeless beggars look for handouts. This facade of ordinary civilization rests on the foundation of blood farming: Mega-corporations like Bromley-Mark extract blood from comatose humans and sell it like any other commodity. There's no carnage in the streets or unbridled bloodlust in the air, and corporate fat bats like CEO Charles Bromley (Sam Neill) are raking it in.

Continue reading "Daybreakers Review - Corporate Vampires, Disgusting Decapitations and Elvis Presley" »

Transylmania, which reunites the creative team and principal cast (and characters) of National Lampoon Presents Dorm Daze and Dorm Daze 2, is a better horror spoof than all the installments in the Scary Movie franchise combined. Granted, that's a sign of how low the bar has been set for contemporary movie parodies, since Transylmania is vulgar, juvenile, gross and not particularly funny. But it at least tells a story rooted in bona fide horror movie cliches rather than stringing together a random series of witless pop-culture gags.

Continue reading "Transylmania Review - A Grosser, Bawdier, Better Scary Movie" »

The Twilight Saga: New Moon hits the ground running, secure in the knowledge that Twi-hard fans are in the house and don't need to be brought up to speed.

It's moody high school senior Bella Swan's (Kristen Stewart) 18th birthday, and she's in a funk. Where other girls would be kicking up their heels at having achieved legal majority, Bella is torturing herself with dreams in which she's a withered old hag, standing hand in hand with her preternaturally beautiful boyfriend, Edward (Robert Pattinson). After all, she's a now officially a whole year older than he is. In Bella's defense, a morbid preoccupation with aging comes with dating a 109-year-old vampire who's forever 17, the age at which Edward died and was reborn into undeath.

Continue reading "The Twilight Saga: New Moon Review - Sexy Werewolves, Sparkly Vampires and Sub-Par CGI" »

Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button" is just the jumping off point for Richard Kelly's The Box, a convoluted moral thriller that gets off to a terrifically eerie start but collapses beneath the weight of its Big Ideas.

December 1976, Richmond, Virginia. The Lewises appear to be living the American dream: They're young and attractive; they have a lovely home and a bright, inquisitive teenaged son named Walter (Sam Oz Stone). Arthur (James Marsden) works at NASA's Langley Research Center, where he helped design the cameras used in the Viking Mars missions, Norma (Cameron Diaz), teaches literature at the exclusive Libby Hill Academy. They're liked and admired by their family, neighbors and colleagues.

Continue reading "The Box Review - The Creepiest Things Come in Small Packages" »

Ti West's slow-burn House of the Devil pays homage to low-budget horror of the 1970s and early '80s, and it's not a spoof or a tongue-in-cheek pastiche. It's the real deal, a low tech chiller that gradually ratchets up the suspense to knuckle-whitening proportions.

Quiet, serious college student Samantha Hughes (Jocelin Donahue) is desperate to escape the dorm room she shares with slovenly, hard-partying Heather. When she finds an off-campus apartment she can (barely) afford, Samantha's determined not to let it get away. If only she weren't flat broke. A peculiar, last-minute babysitting gig comes up, so of course, Samantha takes it. And make no mistake, the gig is a symphony of bad vibes.

Continue reading "The House of the Devil Review - Blame It on Mom, the Babysitter's Dead" »

The franchise continues its descent into an insanely complicated backstory with Saw VI, again written by the team of Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, who took up screenwriting duties with Saw IV. Here principled serial killer Jigsaw -- aka John Kramer (Tobin Bell) -- targets a selection of especially timely victims: Predatory loan officers and avaricious insurance-company executives doing their damnedest to deny coverage and lobby against health-care reform. This timeliness is especially impressive in light of the fact that Jigsaw has been dead since Saw III, and picked his subjects long before the current economic meltdown. In any event, let the games begin...

Continue reading "Saw VI - When Torture Porn Feels Like Homework" »

U.K. novelist Darren Shan's hugely popular, twelve-book series about an ordinary adolescent who discovers his extraordinary destiny at a macabre traveling show makes its first (and probably last) screen appearance in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a colossal bore of a teen fantasy movie.

Polite, blandly attractive Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia) is that kid everyone knew in high school: Smart but not too smart, nice without being a wimp, pleasant company in the cafeteria and totally forgettable. He's the kid whose yearbook photo scarcely registers a year after graduation. His best friend, Steve (Josh Hutcherson), is a whole different story: Petty troublemaker par excellence, "future underachiever of America" is just about tattooed on his forehead. Darren's straight-arrow parents naturally think Steve's a bad influence and ground Darren after he and Steve get caught in an act of minor vandalism. But when the Cirque du Freak comes to town for a one-night-only engagement, Darren has to choose: Stay in his room, or sneak out and join Steve for a night of forbidden delights.

Continue reading "Cirque du Freak Review - Is a Bearded Salma Hayek Scary? Well, That Depends..." »

Veteran TV director Nelson McCormick's The Stepfather is a serviceable remake of the 1987 thriller about a would-be family man whose dreams are repeatedly crushed by willful women and wayward children who just won't act right.

Carefully scrubbed of all but the most sanitized violence in the name of securing a PG-13 rating, the movie begins as Grady Edwards (Dylan Walsh, of TV's Nip/Tuck) meticulously alters his appearance before gathering his luggage and leaving the suburban Salt Lake City home where a woman and three children lie dead among the festive Christmas decorations and never-to-be unwrapped packages.

Continue reading "The Stepfather Review - A Cleaner, Creepier Killer Surrogate Dad" »

In an age when CGI ghosts, stuttering jump cuts and endless remakes dominate the fright flick field, first-time writer-director Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity embraces spooky simplicity.

Made for less than the cost of a new car, Paranormal Activity reiterates what The Blair Witch Project proved a decade ago: The bump-in-the-night things we can't see are still the most frightening. Though not as deeply disturbing as its predecessor in hand-held horror, Paranormal Activity is terrifying enough to keep hardened horror fans awake at night. Here's the setup this time around...

Continue reading "Paranormal Activity Review - Your Chance to See Something Really Scary" »