The disemboweling of the American horror biz, the glut and bust of the Asian horror industries and the rise of the Euro-Horror machine was the big story written between the lines at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. America has dominated horror movies for a long time, but the Asian invasion sparked by the release of Japan's The Ring in 1998 wrested the crown away from us. We could have gotten it back -- after all, we reached the moon first -- but we were lazy and complacent, and so Hollywood churned out PG-13 mainstream multiplex horror and remakes of older, better horror movies. But over in Europe, directors were pushing boundaries, and what's happened now is that they're better at horror movies than we are.

Trying to come up with a list of horror movies that will be remembered in 20 years, I can't think of a single American horror movie from 2007 or 2008 that's a contender. The Mist? Rob Zombie's Halloween? 1408? But check out this list of foreign possibilities: Inside (France), Vinyan (Belgium/France), Rec (Spain), The Orphanage (Spain), Martyrs (France). Let the accounting go back a few years and it gets even worse: Severance (UK), Pan's Labyrinth (Spain), Shaun of the Dead (UK), 28 Days Later (UK), Haute Tension (France), Calvaire (Belgium), Nightwatch (Russia) and The Descent (UK). And with a fall schedule heavy with upcoming films like Let the Right One In (Sweden), Dark Floors (Finland), Trackman (Russia) and Dead Set (UK) there is only one thing to say: America, we eat shame cake.

Continue reading "Toronto Film Festival Found American Horror Producers Eating Shame Cake" »

Alright, I have to admit: Disaster Movie wasn't offensively bad. It didn't actually anger me. When the credits finally began to roll, my first thought was "Hmm. Well, that wasn't nearly as scatological as I thought it'd be." Whether that's a check mark in the pro or con column, dear reader, is for you to decide. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's plot, as such, is...err, what's thinner than wafer-thin? A bunch of asteroids hit Earth, a tornado hits, an earthquake hits, and Will (Matt Lanter) has to go get his girlfriend (Vanessa Minnillo), who's across town at the Natural History Museum. And...that's it. See, Disaster Movie isn't so much a movie as it is a video crazy quilt; the filmmakers have simply set out to stitch together as many pop culture references as possible in an hour and a half. It's like a year-in-review clip show from an entertainment show, but "funny".

Let me justify the quotes I used right there.

Continue reading "Disaster Movie Review - As Funny As Amy Winehouse With Saberteeth" »

Pass the cheese, please. Or just put on another screening of Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer. A throwback to the cinematic horror carnivals of the mid-'80s, Jack Brooks is a low key, amiable flick in the vein of Evil Dead, Phantasm 2 or Killer Klowns from Outer Space. These days, when "fun" has been surgically removed from horror movies, this amounts to sheer genius and, to its credit, Jack Brooks is as enjoyable to watch as Hellboy 2, for a fraction of the Hellboy production budget. People have been giving it a hard time because it's slow-moving, not very bright, and lumpy, but that's what people said about Sloth from The Goonies and he's everyone's best friend.

Produced by a pack of Canadians, Jack Brooks tells the tale of a rage-a-holic plumber, Jack Brooks. Life is tough for Jack: His high maintenance girlfriend is making him go to night school, his plumbing jobs are few and far between, and the jobs he does get, he usually loses -- due to his tendency to punch customers in the throat. Also, his parents were eaten by a monster when he was a kid. A human connection is forged when his chemistry teacher asks for a little after-school help with his new house's balky plumbing system. But in the course of fixing the clogs, Jack uncorks a grave containing a disgusting, demonic black heart that possesses his teacher and turns the mild-mannered night school instructor into a monster-spawning womb sack with a rapacious appetite, wallowing in its own vomit.

Continue reading "Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer Review - A Throwback to the Cinematic Horror Carnivals of the Mid-Eighties" »

Once upon a time Barbra Streisand taught the world that The Mirror Has Two Faces. Unfortunately, however, she didn't teach the world what to do when one of those faces turns out to be evil and murderous. If she had, she would have saved the characters in Mirrors a lot of time and heartache, but then I suppose that would take all the fun out of writer/director Alexandre Aja's latest effort.

Kiefer Sutherland is Ben Carson, a recovering alcoholic ex-detective who takes a job as a security guard at a burnt-out and abandoned department store in order to get back on his feet. Before Ben has even finished his first shift patrolling the charred insides of the massive Mayflower building, he has some eerie encounters with the countless mirrors stationed throughout the store: Handprints appear and disappear on the otherwise spotless glass, doors open and close on their own, and things are just plain hinky.

Ben has been staying with his sister Angela (Amy Smart) while he tries to patch up his marriage, and the hinkiness follows him home to Angela's apartment. Ben's reflection in the bathroom mirror is oddly distorted -- or is it all in his mind? Is it a hallucination brought on by the prescription pills he's been taking, or is it something eeeevil? Duh, it's evil... and Ben needs to figure out what's going on before it's too late and he loses his wife and children (not to mention himself) to the horrible forces lurking within the mirrors.

I'm just gonna say it: The first third of Mirrors kicks all sorts of ass.

Continue reading "Mirrors Review - Kiefer Sutherland Channels Jack Bauer, Alexandre Aja Lets the Blood Flow Liberally" »

It's about time someone made a movie starring Michael Madsen. While he isn't the lead in Hell Ride, he owns this picture the way Elvis Presley owns "Hound Dog." Sure, Big Mama Thornton sang it first, but Elvis is the one who wrestled it to the ground and beat it into submission, much the way that Michael Madsen takes his supporting actor part in this motorcycle flick and turns it into the best thing he's put on film since he played the ear-hating Mr. Blonde in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Madsen is too often cast as the Tough Guy, or the Psychopath, but he's got a gift for comedy, an ability to give giggle-inducing readings to the most straightforward lines (a trait he shares with Christopher Walken), and after years of appearing in Quentin Tarantino movies and Tarantino knock-off movies, he can take the most unwieldy chunks of text and make them seem like they just popped into his head. Playing the Gent in Hell Ride, right-hand man to director/writer Larry Bishop's gang boss, Pistolero, he lights up the screen every time he appears in his '60s, ruffle-front tuxedo, wielding a revolver like it's a laser pointer.

Continue reading "Hell Ride Review- A Movie That Could Have Easily Fit Into Tarantino's Grindhouse" »

How do you kill a mummy? Burning oil? Silver bullets? Decapitation? Hit it with a 2"x4" until it crumbles into dust? No, seriously, I want to know because someone needs to kill this one before it destroys Brendan Fraser's career. The mummy in question first came to life in 1999 in a movie named, appropriately enough, The Mummy which was a decent enough time-waster that mixed cut rate Indiana Jones shenanigans with nonstop action hijinks done up in Egyptian drag. Then it was resurrected in The Mummy Returns (2001) with an even bigger budget and enough jokes and well-staged action to make it the epitome of a the brainless, summer action adventure blockbuster. But seven years later, Stephen Sommers (the series' original mastermind) has been replaced by the dark wizard of hackdom, Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious). Cohen is an accomplished necromancer (or rather, necrophiliac) whose dream project was to make a martial arts film with a CGI-generated Bruce Lee who would appear as a ghostly Yoda-type teaching a white kid the true path of the warrior. Fortunately, Bruce Lee's widow, Linda Lee, came to her senses and withdrew her support for the project, driving a stake through its heart, hopefully, killing it once and for all. But who can stop Rob Cohen's mad plan to destroy Brendan Fraser's career with this new movie? Is it in the hands of the movie-going public to refuse to buy a ticket for this shambolic mess and bury it beneath the sands of failure, there to lie dormant for thousands of years?

Continue reading "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Review - A Movie That Should Have Been Left Buried Beneath the Sands" »

Having started out directing shot-on-video, self-financed action and supernatural projects, director Ryuhei Kitamura's big break came with 2000's zombies vs. martial artists hoedown, Versus. The style-drunk story of a man in the woods who fights an army of zombies and an evil wizard, it is undeniably one of the greatest debut films ever made. From there, Kitamura graduated to Azumi (samurai chick in short-shorts takes on a massive army and ninjas), and then, Godzilla: Final Wars (2004). Kitamura chose to stuff his flick with aliens, wrestlers, mutants, superheroes and guest appearances by Hedorah, Rodan, Minilla, Ebirah and Monster X. It was an expensive gamble and one that Toho lost big time -- their wacky, out-of-control pic became a monster-sized flop.

Enter Midnight Meat Train.

Continue reading "Midnight Meat Train Review - A Glowering Vinnie Jones Is the Best New Monster Since Pinhead" »

Baghead is being billed as the first mumblecore horror movie... but it's more mumblecore than horror. Even the distributor has realized that anyone going into this flick expecting chills is going to walk out severely disappointed and so they've changed their key art from horror-oriented shots of the titular Baghead to a sillier, but more accurate, Bob, and Carol, and Ted, and Alice... style poster that screams, "Sex comedy!" It's too bad, because the mumblecore aesthetic is particularly suited to horror and for 80 percent of their movie, the Duplass Brothers are dishing out maximum unease to the audience. But in the end, they're too ironic for something that requires the sincerity of a horror flick and things veer sharply into romance territory. Nothing wrong with that -- the romance they wind up making is perfectly good -- but it still feels like an opportunity lost.

Mumblecore, for those not up on their Indiewire reading, is basically America's version of Lars von Trier's Dogma 95 aesthetic that emphasized shooting on video, in available light, with little to no artifice (no murders, no period pieces, no score on the soundtrack). It's full of stern European commandments like "Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden." But Dogma 95 got too much critical flack and so when American kids wanted to make their own poverty cinema, they named it mumblecore, which basically means that everything is shot on digital video, the actors are usually non-pros, and things are done on the cheap. The Duplass Brothers first ventured into mumblecore territory with their debut feature, The Puffy Chair, and they go there again for Baghead.

Continue reading "Baghead Review - The Duplass Brothers Stock a Cabin in the Woods With Lots of Tension, but Not Enough Horror" »

I saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army with a friend who was a big fan of the first film and of all things Hellboy in general. When the movie ended, I looked over, expecting to see him bouncing in his seat. Instead, he was shaking his head sadly. "I don't know who they think is going to see this movie," he moaned. A few days later I bore witness to a similar scene, a bunch of fans holding a boozy post mortem, critiquing the marketing challenges awaiting this film.

What is it about Hellboy II that's turning people from rabid fans into depressed publicists? There is something sealed off and inert about the film: It is what it is and that's all there is to it. The movie starts with a prologue in which young master Hellboy is regaled with a bedtime story about elves who want to wipe out humanity with their golden, clockwork army... then the film proper begins and suddenly we're in a remake of Men in Black, only with Hellboy (Ron Perlman) playing both the Tommy Lee Jones and the Will Smith roles. At the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Hellboy is brawling with his pyrokinetic girlfriend, Liz (Selma Blair), while fishman, Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), and their boringly human boss, Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), stroll down the corridors as monster weirdness unfolds in the background. Hellboy and Co. soon discover that the elf in the bedtime story, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), is out to reassemble his crown and use it as the key to restart the Golden Army and wipe out humanity.

Unfortunately, not a single one of these plot points is delivered clearly or coherently in the movie: You're never quite sure what exactly it is that Hellboy and Liz are fighting about; Prince Nuada's quest to destroy humanity is one that most monster-loving fanboys can get behind, but here, he comes off as just one more evil genius out to destroy the world; Abe Sapien falls in love with Prince Nuada's sister, who has a creepy-close relationship with her pale brother that makes one think that maybe they're the Angelina Jolie and James Haven of Elf Land, but otherwise Abe just dithers about, waving his beautifully expressive fingers.

But what about the monsters?

Continue reading "Hellboy II: The Golden Army Review - Beyond the Monster Pageant, Things Aren't Quite So Pretty" »

You think you can handle Tokyo Gore Police: You think that it'll have some police, some gore and it'll be set in Tokyo and that's something you can deal with. Wrong. The poster makes it look like some kind of campy horror flick about a chick with a samurai sword, and you figure that's something you can handle. No. You read this paragraph and you think, "What's the big deal? I can do this." You can't. This movie is beyond you. I have watched people cheer this movie. I have seen people walk out of this movie. I have seen people cry in this movie. I have seen people explode during this movie. One of those people might have been you... because you couldn't handle this movie.

Directed by the special effects man on Machine Girl, Yoshihiro Nishimura, TGP is currently playing at film festivals and in limited engagements. (The DVD release from Media Blasters is in October.) The movie stars Eihi Shiina (the hell date in Takashi Miike's Audition) as Ruka, a cop in a future Tokyo, where the police have been privatized. She's tasked with tracking down and carving up engineers, biomechanical mutants whose flesh-morphing originated with the enigmatic Key Man. That is, when she's not carving up herself in furious, near-sexual bouts of self-mutilation. As more and more engineers show up with their chainsaw arms, fang-filled breasts and eyeball-studded tongues, the police force reaches meltdown and Tokyo descends into anarchy while Ruka battles the New Flesh.

Continue reading "Tokyo Gore Police Review - Can You Handle This Movie?" »