We love our privacy. Privacy provides us with safety and protection from the outside world, but when given the opportunity to look into sneak a look at the private lives of others -- especially as filmgoers -- we are more then willing to watch. 

In movies, voyeurism draws form different motivations. In Rear Window and Disturbia, the voyeurs are spying on neighbors to satisfy curiosity and to break the boredom of being confined in their homes. We see what Jimmy Stewart and Shia LaBeouf see, and connect with their characters and the experience, particularly when it involves something like... possibly bearing witness to murder. But that's nothing compared to the tension you feel when you're watching the action from the killer's point of view, whether it's Peeping Tom or Violent Midnight.

Continue reading "Violent Midnight Lets You Watch From the Killer's Point of View" »

Next week, the world will witness the release of Postal, the latest film by Germany's Uwe Boll, that country's greatest cinematic export since Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wolfgang Petersen. And Tom Tykwer. And Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Wim Wenders... and well, most of the graduating class of the Munich Academy for Television and Film. The point is not that you can throw a rock and hit at least three other better directors than Uwe Boll, but that only Uwe Boll has received the singular tag, "World's Worst Director." There are petitions to bring a halt to his career; each of his films is greeted with howls of derision.

When Wired writer Chris Kohler described Postal, a 9/11 satire, as "90 minutes of flat jokes,"  Boll responded with an email reading, "your review shows me only that you dont understand anything about movies and that you are a untalented wanna bee filmmaker with no balls and no understanding what Postal is...people like you are the reason that independent movies have no chance anymore." This gave me pause. Had we all, indeed, underestimated Dr. Boll? (He holds a doctorate in literature.) Were we responsible for destroying independent cinema? Had we overlooked the spark of genius in his work? To try to understand him better, I watched his oeuvre -- House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and Bloodrayne -- to see what I had missed.

Writing "oeuvre" and "Uwe Boll" in the same sentence is like saying "McDonald's" and "cuisine" in the same breath, but watching Boll's oeuvre you do instantly see the hallmark of an auteur: repeated motifs, an all-encompassing world view and an obsession with neck breaking. Boll is a big fan of neck breaking and in House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark, angry zombies break so many necks that you wonder if Boll experienced some kind of chiropractic accident as a child. But his hatred of the neck is nothing compared to his hatred of the head, and all of his movies feature heads exploding in close-up.

House of the Dead
His first American movie, House of the Dead was seen as a sub-par knock-off of a sub-par video game but it is actually Boll's case against God. "It all started when we came here for a rave," one character moans. "And now all that remains is the stink of death." Indeed there is a stink, but is it of death? The overclass get to the rave... and everyone is dead! That has to be a metaphor: In an Uwe Boll film, everything must serve both as itself, and as a critique of itself. His special effects are not only deployed to show half-invisible scorpion dogs, but to show how pathetic special effects really look. His actors are not just playing characters, but their wooden performances reveal the limits of acting. 

And the unblinking camera is constantly watching. Boll's camera sees all, usually from a God-like viewpoint high up in the sky. The camera is a voyeur, peeking out from behind bushes, ogling actresses as they strip off their tops and drooling over their perky bottoms. In Uwe's universe, God is a creepy pervert. But while House of the Dead is concerned with the death of God, Alone in the Dark is about the futility of knowledge and the limits of knowing.

Alone in the Dark
With his doctorate in literature, Boll understands academia more than any other filmmaker. While some directors portray the world of archeology and museums as dusty places full of books and science, Boll shows us that it is actually a land of scary monsters, heavily armed researchers and girls who wear tight pants. There is a direct link in Boll's universe between the tightness of a woman's pants and her IQ, with Tara Reid, who plays a museum curator, wearing the tightest pants of all. Boll also likes actresses who show their breasts. Tara Reid does not show her breasts for his omnipotent camera and so he lamented her performance saying, "Perhaps this is not the genre for her." But he has nothing but praise for Kristanna Loken who obligingly doffed her top in Bloodrayne; real Romanian prostitutes were also used as extras.

Continue reading "Taking a Close Look at Uwe Boll's Universe" »

Novelist Scott Sigler's horror column appears every Thursday.

I'm a big fan of monster movies, and I'm a big fan of DVDs with tons of extra goodies you didn't get to see in the theaters. So, you would think that the DVD for the monster movie Cloverfield, which came out April 22, would be a must-buy for my collection... Not so fast.

At this point in his career, producer J.J. Abrams has the keys to the city (that city being Hollywood). You know the name: He's the producer of huge TV hits like Lost, Alias and Felicity, director of MI:3 and soon, Star Trek (2009) and The Invisible Woman (2010). The man can do just about anything he wants. So when the guy who blatantly ripped off the USA Network series La Femme Nikita with Alias, and who made the chick-flick schlock known as Felicity wanted to make a giant monster movie, Hollywood royalty may have scratched their heads in confusion, but they sure as hell gave it the green light.

That green light paid off, to the tune of $80 million at the box office and a sequel slated for a 2009 release. Now keep in mind, that $55 million in profit is before the DVD moolah, which should be significant. Yep, we're back on the subject of the DVD, so let's break that baby down.

Is Cloverfield Worth the Rental?
• If you've haven't seen this movie, absolutely rent it. King Kong (2005) and the excellent Korean flick The Host (2006) have brought the creature feature back to the big screen, and Cloverfield keeps the ball rolling.
• If you've already seen Cloverfield in the theaters, and are a huge fan of "how they did that" special effects segments, the DVD is pure gold.
• If you've already seen Cloverfield, and you don't really care about FX geekery, skip it. On the small screen it's really not worth a second take, and the non-FX special features of this DVD are pure crap. Did I say "pure crap?" Well, that might not be completely true, they are 90 percent crap cut with 10 percent secretions from marketing scumbags. While I call 'em like I see 'em, I'll also back this statement up with a list of the special features in the Cloverfield DVD.

"Alternate" Endings
Yeah, I put this in quotes, but only because you can't see me make air quotes when I say it. You know, air quotes, that thing you do with your fingers to convey sarcasm? There are no alternate endings. The DVD makers have the gall to market two "alternate" endings, when both endings just take the theatrical version and end it before the final monster scene. That's right, it's the same thing you saw in theaters. This is like taking a 350-page novel, ripping out the last 10 pages, then putting a new cover on it and selling it as an "alternate" ending.

Deleted Scenes
Cloverfield is a monster movie... I don't know about you, but I assumed the deleted scenes would have something to do with the monster. Wrong-Oh, Fish Breath. It's four worthless vignettes from the party that opens the movie, people telling Rob to have a grand-ol' time in Japan. There isn't a single shred of entertainment to be had in these scenes. A total waste, and more B.S. marketing.

Continue reading "Should You Add Cloverfield to Your DVD Collection?" »

Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns appear every Wednesday.

As you may recall, this past Sunday was Mother's Day, a holiday in which we buy cards, make phone calls, and go out to eat to celebrate the women who brought us into the world. My mom did much more than simply, you know, have me: She's the one who got me into horror movies when I was young, and it's still something we share today.

So as a horror fan and writer, how could I let Mother's Day pass without mentioning...uh...Mother's Day? Or Pamela Voorhees of Friday the 13th? Or the Mommy of...Mommy? But in my never-ending quest to be different and to stand out, I've decided to shine the spotlight on the other moms of horror, the ones who are all about saving rather than killing. These women are all about their kids. And as this concerns horror movies -- and not movies where Julia Roberts is the second wife who loves her stepkids and tries so hard to be loved back -- not all good-intentioned moms meet happy endings.

Rachel Keller: The Ring (2002)
One of the things I like about Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) in Gore Verbinski's The Ring is that she wasn't the best mom in the world. She didn't neglect her weirdo kid, Aidan (David Dorfman), but she was concerned first and foremost with her own life and her own career. This self-centeredness, of course, led her to the evil videotape, the wet-haired dead girl in the well, a horse that flips out and commits suicide, and a questionable sequel. If only she'd joined the PTA or stayed home to make cookies for that weirdo son!

Amanda Shepard: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
In order to help her daughter Tina (Lar Park Lincoln) overcome some extreme psychic-power-induced emotional trauma, Mrs Shepard (Susan Blu) enlists the help of Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser). Little does she know that Dr Crews doesn't want to help Tina -- he wants to exploit her telekinetic abilities in a mad quest for fame and fortune! If you think that alone makes him a jerk, then, honey, you don't know Dr. Crews. Not satisfied with simply manipulating the Shepards and bilking them of money, Crews actually pulls Tina's mom between himself and the pointy end of a garden implement wielded by Jason Voorhees. Dr. Crews is bad news!

Laura Baxter: Don't Look Now (1973)
The fact that Laura (Julie Christie) just couldn't get over the death of her daughter Christine (Sharon Williams) led the remaining Baxters on a nightmarish trip through Venice. Creepy psychic sisters, a serial killer on the loose, Donald Sutherland's butt... and one of the most shocking endings in horror film history are but a few highlights of Nicolas Roeg's cerebral exercise in terrifying atmosphere.

Chris MacNeil: The Exorcist (1973)
Man, Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) really has it all: A fabulous career as a famous actress, spiffy sunglasses, an obscenity-and-pea-soup-spewing daughter who's been possessed by Pazuzu... wait, that last thing sucks. But Chris is a great mom who soldiers on, seeking help and answers in both science and religion in her quest to help her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) overcome her demon-flavored difficulties. And in the end, she bears no grudge against Regan for all the bad behavior -- not for the swearing, the punching, the killing of her friend and director, not even for peeing on the floor during a party. Moms rule!

Continue reading "In Praise of Horror Movie Moms" »

Breathless updates about Twilight are already flying around the web like Euros in a Jay-Z video. If you are old and used up like me -- by which I mean you are old enough to legally consume alcohol and remember life before TMZ -- then you were probably just as confused as I was when jabber about this movie began to trickle into horror blogs. Turning to trusty Wikipedia, I learned that "Twilight" is "the time before sunrise, or after sunset." Thank goodness for that disambiguation page: Twilight is also the bestselling series of vampire novels by Stephenie Meyer, and its (inevitably bloodless) PG-13 movie adaptation. As the horror genre is besieged by a new generation of gore-mongering little rascals, is there any hope that an actual red-blooded horror fan can enjoy participating in the clamor around this epic vampire soap? Or is slowly drowning in sexually-repressed tween-frenzy all I have to look forward to in 2008?

The Hype
In the last two weeks I counted numerous Twilight link-fests on Cinematical and MTV is all in your face with a video introducing the lissome cast and some early special effects. Is this horror? I confess to being too blinded by abs to tell. I needed the help of an expert, so I called on Laura Cristiano, co-owner of the Twilight Lexicon blog, the epicenter of the Twilight fan universe which after just two years, gathers 30,000 unique hits a day.

Continue reading "Can the Twilight Movie Capture Red-Blooded Horror Fans?" »

Tracy Letts may have just won a Pulitzer Prize but in the hearts of horror fans, his play August: Osage County will never dethrone his nasty little paranoid creepshow Bug. Unfortunately, misleading blood-and-guts promos plagued William Friedkin's 2006 movie adaptation. "People who would have enjoyed the film didn't go see it, because they were put off by the marketing campaign," says Letts, "And kids who were enthusiastic to see the movie were furious -- 'Why are these people talking?' They didn't understand that there would be these long scenes of dialogue, so they felt cheated. Because they were cheated!" 

Letts himself is quite democratic in his love of horror. "It's tough to identify what it is I like about it. But I like pretty much everything about it!" he says. "I was into J-horror when that started to appear, but then they all got remade and watered down." The last movie that really got under his skin? "The remake of The Hills Have Eyes of all things!" admits Letts. "I don't know that here's acres of social commentary, but it was a pretty good scare."

Tracy Letts' Top 10 Horror Movies

Continue reading "Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy Letts on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, "Poorly Acted, Poorly Directed .... Genius."" »

Between Twilight and Prom Night, it seems like the way to set up a successful horror movie is to end the title with "-ight." Or maybe not: Cloverfield manages to hang on the list, despite no actual news. Hey, Clover is one powerful fish-monster, what can we say?

Actually, what can you say? Think we got something horribly wrong? Or missed the biggest horror news of the week? Then talk back in the comments, and let us know what you think. This week's topic of discussion: Come up with a horror movie song parody title! As an example, "Jason's Mom," a parody of Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom." Go to it, Monsterfesters.

Horror Power Rankings
Rank	LW		Movie (or Comic, etc.)
1	1		Twilight The Twilight trailer gets released on MySpace, and quickly works it's way to become the second most downloaded trailer of all time; the number one spot isn't too far out of its sights. Hey, it's Twilight's world, we just live in it.
2	-		Poultrygeist Sorry non-New Yorkers, but we're the only people who get to see a theatrical "screaming" of the latest Troma masterpiece. Ron Jeremy. Lipstick lesbians. And hundreds of undead chickens. We're so there.
3	-		Bioshock Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) signs on to direct the film adaptation of the mega-selling video game. Can't wait to see the Little Sisters betray each other, then form alliances, then betray each other again. Then form another alliance.
4	5		Cloverfield Pics from the Cloverfield 2 viral campaign turn out to be from the end of first Cloverfield viral campaign. Still, for a few hours, the Internet was all aflutter, which is good news for the monster sequel.
5	-		Deal With The Devil Lionsgate picks up the Alias Enterprises comic book series about a cop who teams up with a serial killer to stop a series of copycat killings. If it's anything like Rush Hour, sign us up.
6	-		Igor Not so much horror as horror parody, next summer's big budget, animated mad scientists vs. assistants movie gets a trailer. Who knew John Cusack had gotten so short, and fat?
7	-		The X-Files: I Want To Believe Mulder & Scully walk through the snow, followed by helicopters, with a big, bloody "X," in the Polish version of the X-Files 2 poster. And we still have no clue what the movie is about.
8	-		Frontier(s) Our reviewer thought it was a slick technical package that feels dead inside. Dead inside is just how we like our horror, isn't it?
9	10		Prom Night Thanks a lot for making liars of us, Prom Night. Last week we said that not only would the movie be out of the top 10, but $50mil was out of it's reach. Now, both things look to be false. Stay tuned...
10	-		The Strangers The Liv Tyler home invasion flick starts gearing up its marketing with some creepy TV clips. The buzz around it has been good, and whether or not it's based on true events, this might be the one to watch.

In 1990, readers thrilled at Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's send-up of both the '70's horror classic The Omen and the entire biblical Apocalypse in their collaborative novel Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. A bungled switch-at-birth results in the Antichrist and his pet hell-hound being raised in a modest country home, while another, totally normal, child gets the diplomat mansion, the Satanic nanny and the whole bit -- thus, the end of the world winds up being a little more disorganized than you'd expect. Demand for a film adaptation piqued, and in 2002, Terry Gilliam announced that a script had been written; rumors that Johnny Depp and Robin Williams had been cast as the book's respective demonic and angelic presences spread like wildfire. So what happened?

Continue reading "Will The Omen Ever Get the Terry Gilliam Spoof It Deserves?" »

Over the past few years, horror has been outsourced. If foreigners can run our call centers then surely they can make something as simple as a horror movie, right? In fact, they've turned out to be better at it than we are. After a run of J-horror (The Ring, The Grudge, any number of movies featuring dead wet girls with long black hair), there was a run on K-horror (A Tale of Two Sisters, The Host), and now there are the French imports: Haute Tension, Inside and the regrettably titled Frontier(s). It sound(s) like the title of a grad school paper(s), but is, instead, another reminder that people who live in the country are creepy and should be destroyed. 

In Paris, the banlieus are burning and four street kids use the riots as cover for a bank robbery. The criminal foursome are young, multi-ethnic and attractive, like a United Colors of Benetton ad. The designated group hottie, Yasmine, is pregnant and is planning on getting an abortion ASAP, while the guys like to smoke pot and video themselves having a lot of sex. It's like watching a Gus Van Sant movie dubbed into French. Très sexy. Très disaffected. Très hip.

Hiding out in a quaint country inn, the four soon discover that its rustic charm is undermined by the fact that it's run by a family of neo-Nazi cannibals, whose flesh-eating, inbred mutant zombie babies nest in an abandoned nearby mine. One by one, the criminals come to a bad end via hook, hot steam and chopper until only a traumatized Yasmine is left, because the Nazi family needs her womb to brew the master race.

By the time one of the sexy young thugs is impaled on twin meat hooks by an enormously fat, leather-apron-clad Nazi cannibal, you could be forgiven for thinking to yourself, "Mon dieu, it is Le Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and you wouldn't be too far off. If you ordered a horror movie pizza and said "give me everything on top," then what arrived at your door would look a lot like Frontier(s). If it's been in a horror movie, it's in this flick -- and we're not talking tips of the hat, but straight-up steals and samples from Psycho, Hostel, The Descent, Hannibal, Motel Hell, House of a Thousand Corpses, Haute Tension, Sheitan... and that's just in the first 30 minutes. After that my brain got tired.

Continue reading "Frontier(s) Review - Like a Horror Movie Pizza With Everything on Top" »

Novelist Scott Sigler's horror column appears every Thursday.

There's one thing built into any story involving the undead: They can't really die, because, well, they are already dead. That means their decomposing posteriors always come back for more, and in Hollywood, "coming back for more" means sequels. A first sequel is no big whoop. It's mandatory, and you can still evaluate each movie on its own merits. But when you hit that all-important second sequel, then you've got yourself a trilogy, and that brings on the opinionated analysis of the entire franchise as a single entity.

Case in point: The third installment in the Brendan Fraser Mummy series, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which hits theaters in August. We're out of Egypt and into China, moving from the Pharos to the well-preserved remains of a Han Dynasty emperor (played by Jet Li). 

So, welcome to Uncle Scotty's Highly Scientific School of Franchise Measurement™. Here at Uncle Scotty's, we score a franchise on an 10-point index based on:
• Actors
• Overall Story Continuity
• Monster Factor
• Special Effects
• Movie Plots
Give each element a 10-point rating, average it out, and you've got your index score. This was developed by people at NASA, using computers and other advanced technologies. There might be some alloys and biotech involved as well -- it's technical -- you wouldn't understand... so just trust Uncle Scotty.

We will need to re-calibrate this score after Part Three hits the screens, but let's take a look at a pre-emptive rating of The Mummy franchise.

Actors: 9
Fraser (as Rick O'Connell) is pretty kick-ass at his version of Indiana Jones. Arnold Vosloo was absolute perfection as the High Priest Imhotep in the first two movies. For the third movie, can we give an early score? The baddie is Jet Li. Jet Li. Mummies are bad-ass enough as is. Now throw in a spin kick and you're queuing up potential greatness. Now, could a spin-kicking mummy also be totally retarded? Sure. We'll have to wait and see, but did I mention, it's Jet Li?

Continue reading "With a New Setting and a New Director, Will The Mummy Franchise Hold Up?" »