Blast Vegas - Mini Review

 Another Syfy produced film, like the movie, Scarecrow, that I just reviewed.  This is the better film between the two.

  A group of friends in Vegas, steal a sword and initiate an ancient Egyptian curse.  Soon, devastation is set upon Sin City.   This was a fun movie.  While not taking itself too seriously, it was a fairly good horror/disaster flick.

  Though not totally perfect, the visual effects / CGI was done well.  It was cool witnessing Vegas landmarks get annihilated time and time again.  The acting was great and the writing was intelligent.

 I would give the film 4 out of 5 stars.

Ticks - Mini Review

  From the pre-CGI early nineties, comes Ticks!

  This campy horror film is infested with a  good cast, with many familiar names, including a young Seth Green.

  The story is about a group of troubled teens who are sent to a wilderness camp (filmed in Big Bear, California), to confront their inner demons.  Little do they know, they are about to encounter real monsters, like mutated ticks and worse... crazy locals! 

  The movie is fairly good.  The practical effects are mostly well done.  There were some issues near the end, where there were jumps in the editing.  It was like they rushed through some of the ending shots. 

  I enjoyed the film.  I would give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Random Acts of Violence - Mini Review

This is a documentary style film about a British man who casually kills people in New York. His main motive for this murder spree is to drive out all the pretentious rich people, so the artsy, real people can return to New York City.

The film has a dry sense of humor.  I think it is inferior to similar films, like "Behind the Mask".  It has a few twists, but I found it hard to stay interested in the film.  Despite being listed on the cover, Kirsten Dunst only makes a very brief cameo, as herself.  I thought she was going to be one of his victims, but no.  A loss of a cool opportunity.

The DVD has no extras.  I would give the film 2.5 out of 5 stars.

House of Bad - Mini Review

 House of Bad... Acting?  Sound?  Filmmaking?  Yes, all that and more.

  This is a low budget movie about three sisters who steal from a drug dealer and hide out in an abandoned house where two of the sisters grew up.  Of course, it hides a dark secret from their past.  Can you guess what it is?

  The movie actually starts off somewhat promising, story wise, and then slowly goes off the deep end.  The movie gradually gets worse with continuity errors, absurd action scenes,  nonsensical plot twists, and wacky acting, until in the final 15 minutes, it gets so bad, it is good.

  I would give the film 1.5 stars out of 5.

We Are What We Are - Mini Review

   First, a warning about this movie - if you don't like seeing people brutally tortured and savagely put through hell, please remove all mirrors and any kind of reflective surface around you, before you watch this movie.

   We Are What We Are and what we are is a bad movie.  A film about a family of cannibals.  It is slow.  It is stupid.  It did have good lighting.  If all you all you want out of a movie is well lit scenes, then you may like this.

  The behind-the-scenes and interviews run a total of 75 minutes.  I didn't care to watch them.

  I would give it 1 out of 5 stars.

Die Monster Die! - Mini Review

  Die Monster Die was one of the earliest film adaptations from an H.P. Lovecraft story.  It was also one of Boris Karloff's last films.  Made in 1965, the film is very loosely based off of Lovecraft's story, "The Color out of Space".

  It is a decent horror film.   The two things that keep the movie interesting are the acting and the atmospheric film locations, particularly the cool mansion in which most of the story takes place.

  The Blu-ray was recently release from Scream Factory.  It is not a special edition release, the only extra is a trailer.  The trailer is made up of all the action scenes in the movie, including the ending.  It is kind of like fast-forwarding through the entire disk.

  I did enjoy the movie.  I would have preferred that the film had followed Lovecraft's story more faithfully, but I guess the special effect technology at the time wouldn't allow it.  I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Sanitarium - Mini Review

 This film is a horror anthology with tales based around some type of madness.  Malcolm McDowell plays a doctor at a sanitarium.  The movie involves him relating the stories of three of the residing patients.

  The acting is good.  There are many well-known actors in the cast.  The premise of all three tales are very promising, but how they all play out is disappointing.  The stories lose focus and tend to drag, especially the final one.

  The three stories involve:

•  An eccentric artist who creates these evil-looking clay figures straight out of a Tim Burton film.  He might be bringing these creations to life in more ways than one.   
•  A boy who suffers abuse at the hands of his father is suddenly stalked by a figure that may be even more savage than his old man.
•  A man who believes in the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012, builds a fallout shelter to survive it.

If only the film realized the potential of the three stories.  I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

You're Next - Mini Review

   I originally saw this film at its showing during last year's San Diego Comic Con.  After the film, there was a Q & A with actresses Barbara Crampton and Sharni Vinson, and the writer (Simon Barrett) and the director (Adam Wingard).  The pictures of the event are at the bottom of this review, including one in 3D.

  This movie takes place during a family reunion between a couple and their four adult children, who each bring their significant other.  The whole film takes place at a country house.  It is not long before they are attacked by men wearing pagan animal masks.

  The film is very good.  The story is not that great or very original.  What really makes the movie, is the acting, the dark humor in the interactions between the characters, and the execution of the action scenes.  They are all top notch.

  The only downsides to the film are one irritating shakey cam scene, which was done that way because the filmmakers were out of time to do it properly, and characters some times doing things they would never do in real life, to set up the story the way the writer wanted to, a la "The Purge".

  The Blu-ray is slim on extras: two commentary tracks and an eleven minute "making of" feature.

 I give the film 4.5 stars out of 5.

Barbara Crampton, Sharni Vinson, the writer (Simon Barrett) and the director (Adam Wingard)

The Picture on the right is an anaglyph 3D image.  You need the standard red/cyan glasses to see it in 3D.

Carrie 2013 - Mini Review

 I was looking forward to this movie, because I really like Chloe Grace Moretz as an actress.  I did have some trepidation about this remake, as Chloe was going against Sissy Spacek, who really nailed the character of Carrie as a sheltered outsider in the original.  It turns out my fears were realized as this turned out to be another soulless remake of a classic.

Despite the fact that the new Carrie is very similar to the original, with some aspects of the story being emphasized / de-emphasized, they just got it all wrong.  It's funny, because in the behind the scenes features on the disk, many times it is mentioned that the remake is going to be more realistic than the original.  This couldn't be farther from the truth. 

To start out with, Chloe is mis-cast as Carrie. Not just because she is pretty, like every critic of this movie has pointed out, she just doesn't have the emotion of a scarred individual that is oppressed by her mother, as Spacek had in the original.  Just observe how the line "You should have told me, Mama!" is delivered in both versions.  Sissy really made you feel the pain in her life with her performance and you felt for her.  The original was about a shattered girl trying to shake the mis-guided will of her mother and fit in with the rest of the world with tragic results.  In Carrie 2013, the title character is quite a bit less syphathetic.  This remake, in the words of the director in one of the featurettes on the blu-ray, "Is a superhero origin story".  Bleck! 

   I think Chloe has a great future as an actress, but I think doing this movie was a mistake for her.  I would have to give the movie 1 out of 5 stars.

Big Ass Spider! - Mini-Review

 This movie has a lot of buzz going on about it.  They did a pretty good job of promoting it.  Troma helped promote the movie at one of their panels at the last Comikazee convention in LA.  They passed out game cards from the movie.  Mine is pictured below, I didn't win anything.

  This is a fun, campy movie with some scares.  It doesn't take itself too seriously, but it is not too over the top where you don't care about what happens.  It fuses a 50's style giant insect movie with a modern day comedy. 

  The main star of the movie is the CGI spider and the CGI destruction it commits.  The CGI is fairly good for a low budget feature, and there is a lot of it.  The effects are not as believable as a big budget science fiction film, but for a film like this, they are adequate.

  My only critisism of the Blu-ray version of the film, is that the extras are lacking.  There are only some trailers and about 6 minutes of SXSW premiere footage / cast interviews.

  It was a fun, film, I would recommend it.  I don't think it quite lives up to its hype.  You can tell the filmmakers put a ton of effort into this production.  I would give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Nailbiter - Mini-Review

Nailbiter - Mini-Review

I watched this last night. I was orginally going to see this film at Shriekfest last year, but I didn’t go.

The film is about a woman on a car trip to pick up her husband from the airport. Accompanying her, are her three daughters. Along the way, they encounter a tornado and have to seek refuge in the cellar of a seemingly abandoned house. It turns out that the tornado is the least of their worries.

I had mixed feelings about the film. I like the premise and I thought the story was fairly good. It had some original aspects, I particularly like the old woman character. The creature effects and the way they were shot were impressive. On the negative side, some of the acting was sub-par. I also didn’t like the editing, many of the scene transitions were not smooth. It took me out of the movie and it made the story a little hard to follow.

Not a perfect film, but I enjoyed it. I would give it 3 stars out of 5.