The Horror Geek - News, Rants and Reviews From The Horror Geek!

It’s been a pretty good week for horror comedy flicks. Last Tuesday, genre fans finally got a chance to check out Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer (which was well worth the wait). This week sees the release of the equally anticipated (albeit slightly less funny) Dance of the Dead. It’s a good time to be a fan of horror films-particularly if you like some humor mixed in with your blood and guts.

Deftly combining elements from Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps, and, oddly enough, John Hughes’ ‘80s teen flicks, Dance of the Dead is at both once intimately familiar and totally unique. A film that gives us just what we expect from the premise, but does so with enough characterization, heart, and attention to detail to make it seem fresher than it should.

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The hardest part of the horror movie reviewing gig is invariably trying to put scores on movies. Numbers are arbitrary to begin with, and trying to assign one to an experience like viewing a movie is a tricky thing. This becomes even more dangerous when you consider we live in an ADD-addled society where no one spends more than about 15 seconds reading anything. People click the review, read for a few seconds, then invariably scroll to the bottom to check the score before clicking off to something else. The problem is, how do you score something like Zombies Zombies Zombies? On one hand, it’s clearly a piece of crap movie that looks like it was made for about $500, features some really bad acting, and doesn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of zombie cinema. On the other, it’s kind of fun if you just want to kick back and watch a bunch of strippers take on an army of crack-whore zombies and their Johns. Giving it a 1 (which it deserves if you’re comparing it to Hollywood productions) isn’t fair, but a 4 is pretty damn misleading in its own right. Basically, you’re screwed no matter what you rate it.

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The original Feast is a deeply flawed yet thoroughly entertaining monster movie that I probably like more than I should (which is mostly attributable to the film’s development being featured in the third season of Project Greenlight. Seeing what Jon Gulager and crew went through to make the movie had me rooting for the guy to succeed). I felt the film’s greatest failing was that the script (penned by first time screenwriters Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton) could have certainly used a little more polish (despite being inventive in its subversion of genre film expectations). Despite all that, I was still really excited when Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds hit DVD this week.

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Sheitan (which is Persian for Satan) is one of those odd duck films that almost defies classification. Made by a group of guys under the age of thirty, it reflects a sort of new world order of cinema. Rather than go the traditional Hollywood route (which is how more and more of the world patterns their movies as mainstream American cinema continues to overwhelm homegrown product in any number of countries), which dictates that films pick one genre and stick to it, director Kim Chapiron has crafted a film that is part twenty-something drama, dark comedy, cautionary tale about the evils of backwoods folks, and straight out horror flick. Amazingly enough, the film still manages to work despite all its diverse ambitions. Sheitan is like a Gallic Deliverance crossed with Rosemary’s Baby with just a touch of Eli Roth’s Hostel thrown in to spice it all up. It is almost assuredly destined to become a cult classic film-taking its rightful place alongside the other recent French horror flicks as proof that the French can still make good movies.

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To tell you the truth, there’s a part of me that wanted to just cut and paste my review of [Rec] here, change the actor and director names, and leave it at that. Quarantine is that most heinous kind of remake-the nearly shot-for-shot variety that screams “if it was good enough to imitate frame for frame, then why didn’t you just release the original instead?” I’ve no doubt that there will be two very different schools of thought when it comes to John Erick Dowdle’s (co-written with his brother Drew-if you can call remaking a movie in this fashion “re-writing”) updating of [Rec]-there will be those who never saw the original (thanks to Sony making it impossible to find domestically) and find the film suitably chilling and well crafted. Then there will be the rest of us, who managed to see the original despite the effort involved, who find it to be an entirely unnecessary retelling of a movie made way back in 2007. There’s probably no real right or wrong here-at least not on the part of filmgoers. You can’t blame people for not being able to see a film that wasn’t ever released in this country, nor can you blame the people who did see it for feeling that Quarantine is that most typical of Hollywood creations-the cash grab. No, if anyone’s at fault here, it’s Sony (who promised a DVD release of [Rec] prior to Quarantine but never followed through on it). It’s hard to even blame the Dowdle brothers-they’re hired guns, and reportedly Sony has told them the fate of their debut film, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, depends on how well Quarantine does (the options for that film include full theatrical release, limited release, or direct to DVD). Truthfully, Sony looks even slimier than Lions Gate at this point (no small feat given the way Lions Gate has bought films and butchered them for domestic release-and let’s not even talk about the whole Midnight Meat Train fiasco…)

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Being a film critic is a pretty cool job-even moreso when you get to write about a specific genre that you love (which is horror cinema in my case). Yeah, the pay stinks and the jobs writing about film are disappearing faster than an untended plate of cookies set in front of Kirstie Alley, but the positives generally outweigh the negatives. Hell, a day spent watching bad horror movies is still better than a fantastic day spent behind a register or sitting in a cubicle. I understand this, and I feel pretty lucky most days. I’d love to make more (or in the current economy, any) money and find a bigger audience, but all things considered I’m in a good place. Even on the days when I’m ready to pack it in and go find a real job, something comes along and reminds me of why I do this in the first place. The latest film to do that for me is Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer.

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Even now, two days after initially viewing Adam Mason and Simon Boyes’ film, Broken, I’m not really sure what to think of it. I have at least come to the conclusion that while it was certainly well made from a technical standpoint, I didn’t really like it.

This was based on a number of different factors-each one troubling when taken by itself, but absolutely lethal when combined with the others. Broken is a film that has most of the components of good genre cinema, but it just never manages to put them together in a way that makes a satisfying whole. It often feels like it’s simply going through the motions, as if Boyes and Mason had one or two good ideas then tried to build an entire narrative around them. It flirts with being a “torture porn” film (which is a phrase I despise), but doesn’t seem to have any genuine interest doing what’s required of those types of movies. Because of this, it lures an audience in with a well defined set of expectations and then offers up something entirely different (and less satisfying) instead. It’s a classic example of a cinematic bait and switch.

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With Quarantine set to premiere in American theaters this Friday, it seemed like a good time to take a look at the film that inspired it–2007’s Spanish chiller, [Rec]

Back in 1999, when The Blair Witch Project became something of a cultural touchstone, I remember thinking that it was all but inevitable that we’d see a flood of similar shot-on-DV, shaky-cam first person narrative horror films. Everything was there for it to happen: technology had reached a point where almost anyone could afford a good camera, movie editing software was available to the masses, and most importantly, there was a bonafide blockbuster film for every other wannabe filmmaker out there to use as a blueprint. If ever there was a time for the DIY aesthetic to take over filmmaking, it was that fall. Oddly enough, it never came to pass. BWP came and went (spawning a bit of a backlash from non-horror fans who simply “didn’t get it” and the gore contingent who felt the subtle machinations of the film were something of a cheat). It spawned a sequel, but that movie was shot like a typical Hollywood production (and retained none of the original’s magic) and was terrible to boot.

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After sitting on a shelf in the Weinstein’s impenetrable film vault, director Greg McLean’s killer crocodile flick, Rogue, finally hits DVD (with a brief stopover in a few theaters for posterity’s sake). Is this newest entry in the ever-burgeoning monster crocodile/alligator subgenre (which has seen the release of this film, Primeval, Lake Placid 2, and Black Water all in the very recent past) the one predator to rule them all or is Rogue just another pretender to the throne?

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Back before the start of the 1987 television season, many magazines and newspapers ran their annual checklist of what new shows were appearing on what nights, what was worth watching, and more cynically, what was worth missing. Invariably, Frank Mancuso’s syndicated hour-long horror series, Friday the 13^th: The Series would wind up on the “skip it” list. The common early critical complaint (before people had actually seen the show) was “why would anyone want to see a show centered around a series of derivative slasher films on television?” In essence, Mancuso’s show was already being categorized and denigrated-before critics had even seen it.

The humor of the situation is that while critics were quick to condemn the show on the grounds of its title (which really was a double-edged sword for the series during its initial broadcast run) Mancuso and company never had any intention of making a show based on the films. Instead, in a typical business-style move, he borrowed the Friday the 13^th moniker so that his show would draw attention to itself and stick out in the crowded syndicated television market (original rejected titles included The 13^th Hour)-and it worked.

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