British slasher where the killer wears a panda mask. Get it? Panda-Monium? Ha! Hilarity! Anyways…
Law offices, bunch of asshole youngish guys in suits. After hours one day, they decide to hang out and have a party with booze and strippers. Certainly not the first time they’ve done this. Probably happens fairly regularly.
Masked killer gets in the building, starts picking people off, always has a witty one-liner as he stands over the body.
The rest of it is standard comedy-slasher, which is totally not my thing. And there sure is a marked lack of nudity for a solidly rated R horror flick where we have a whole team of strippers as main characters.
Technically, not impressive but not disastrous. Audio levels of dialog jump all over the place scene-to-scene. Kill shots are standard stuff. Acting is fine.
If you like comedy-slashers, go fo it. Not my cup of tea.
As I’ve probably admitted before here on the blog, I’m not really a fan of vampire movies. But, I heard this one is like an alt-vampire thing, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.
Wartime in mountainous, wintery Spain, late 1800s. A bunch of elementary school aged girls take refuge from the constant bombardment in a church, with some nuns doing their best to protect them. Alas, their prayers are no match against the bombs. All are killed except for one girl, who is rescued by a mysterious woman. We learn later that this woman is a vampire, and the only way to save that girl from dying was for that woman to convert her to vampirism herself.
This little girl soon finds herself alone in the cold wilderness, having no idea how to survive, and no idea what has happened to her.
Ten years pass. Not only has this girl found a way to survive, but in doing so has grown into herself a bit. And, unlike traditional vampires, has built up a tolerance to the sunlight, so she can now travel at will. She makes her way to a village, where things get complicated.
And now that I’ve just finished it, wow. It’s totally not a normal vampire movie. And also, wow, is it impressive. It’s a coming of age story. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted, very much an artsy Euro drama. It has absolutely nothing to do with biting people in the neck with fangs. Totally not a horror movie. It’s probably one of those movies that won all the awards at the big film festivals like Sundance and TIFF and wherever else. Really great one. Absolutely worth watching.
Any other Moroccan horror movies out there? This is one of the few.
A trio of females, late teens, doing normal teenager stuff- sneaking out of the house at night to go do stuff, smoking cigarettes on the sly, graffiti-ing abandoned buildings, etc. They don’t seem like bad kids or troublemakers necessarily. Just doing regular rebellious teenager stuff. (Although all three of them look to be at least 25 years old. But, they’re just actors in a movie…)
One night, one of them tells the other two the story of the ghost of Aicha Kandisha, a vengeful woman spirit who kills you if you run afoul of her graces. And she’s a feminist, so the idiot men in this flick don’t stand a chance.
Although it seems that the non-idiot men also don’t stand much of a chance, either, as her wrath seems to be indiscriminate. As long as you’re a male, you’re fucked.
But, it’s a really depressing movie. And I love the bleakness of it. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie this bleak since The Void in 2017. It’s really nice to see a movie go so far into that territory. If you’re into that sorta stuff, definitely go for it.
An elite team of SWAT officers capture a high-level drug trafficker in Los Angeles. But even in handcuffs and in custody, he’s still a powerful man with powerful and violent friends, so they go with the highest security and the highest precautions when transporting him to the highest security jail. But, actually at the time when they’re transporting him, bigger issues arise. Aliens from outer space attack the city and start blowing everything up.
Then we get something about a blood harvest, coo cooi, and a podcaster from Texas.
All the hallmarks of amateur hour here- bad acting, shaky cam, out of focus shots. The aliens look absolutely laughable. CGI is bad. Is this a Syfy production? Ya, that bad. Pacing is all over the place. None of the conversations sound like conversations; they sound like they’re all just reading lines from a script. The outdoor sunlit scenes are color graded badly. I actually don’t have anything bad to say about the lighting of the indoor scenes. But in any event, avoid this one.
Divorced(?) mother with teenaged daughter. The daughter has been off at some school camp or something, so once that concludes, they decide to drive out to their lake house for the weekend to hang out. The daughter has no idea that the mother has a new boyfriend, who is already at the lake house when they arrive. This revelation is quite a shock to the daughter. Things are really awkward at first, but things mellow out and they get to know each other a little bit.
Something is a bit off with this new boyfriend, though. The daughter senses it, but the mother doesn’t, because she’s way too much in love with him. He’s too perfect. Like, waaay too perfect. To a point where you think he’s an alien or a robot or something. Turns out, that’s not too far off the mark.
The daughter’s suspicions that this guy is a weirdo grow and grow. She sees him doing some super strange stuff. She doesn’t mention anything about it to her mom, though, because they are just suspicions. She has no proof. In her efforts to confirm her suspicions, that’s when the shit hits the fan.
Ah, but then there’s the ending. Nothing is explained. We’re left with all sorts of questions. Literally, the entire movie, nothing is explained. Hoodwinked again. It may have been a decent movie if we got anything of an ending, or if we had any idea what any of it is. But, nope.
Camera is good, lighting is very good, especially the outdoor night scenes, even the indoor dark scenes. Crushed blacks and no noise at all. They must’ve been using some super fancy camera. Actors are good, pacing is generally good. Could have been trimmed up in some parts, but it’s nothing egregious.
I guess one of the big soda companies must have funded this thing. Product placement is not so subtle.
Wow, so how many movie versions of H.P.Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space are there? Probably more than I know, but I know the great one from 1987, The Curse, with a young Wil Wheaton and with Claude Akins who plays a super great religious fanatic. And then the recent ones- a German one called Die Farbe (The Color) which not only is in German but is mostly in black and white, so it has a built-in artsiness to it. And of course the much ballyhooed Color Out of Space with Nicholas Cage which marked the return of director Richard Stanley in 2019.
This one is an indie, Italian production with English dialog, on the minimal side, feels almost like a stage play. Set in Italy, early 1940s, during World War 2.
Farming family- husband and wife, and the wife’s younger sister, about 20 years old, who they’re looking after because she has some behavioral issues. Things aren’t going great, but they’re getting by. Unexplained and coincidental, but one day, the vegetables grow to gargantuan size, nagging minor injuries disappear, and the daughter who hasn’t barely said a word in her entire life starts to speak again. All good news, right? Not entirely.
The water in the well and the trees start to have a weird glow to them. We start seeing some concerning behavior, particularly in the wife. Some violent nightmares that we’re not sure if they’re real or just nightmares. This one also has a religious angle to it, but it’s not as clear as the Claude Akins version. In this one, they just keep showing crucifixes. And the sister says ‘our god doesn’t love us, does he?’ And later someone spits on a crucifix. But none of those pieces are put together to mean anything in the movie.
Anyway, the wife becomes so erratic that the husband locks her in the attic. The husband has a young priest come over to check out the wife. After seeing the wife, the priest ends up hurriedly fleeing the farm in shocked horror. But the priest returns, and at this point, the movie tries to pick up some speed. But the movie just doesn’t have much edge to it. Ya, there are some bloody bits, but there’s no dramatic tension to go along with it. There’s just no fear in this movie. Even the cosmic / supernatural / interdimensional stuff doesn’t have any bite to it.
The actors are amateurs, but I’ve seen worse. In any event, not recommended.
Comedy with zombies, which I guess is called a zom-com these days.
An industrial accident at the factory mixes up the proportions of chemicals in a popular energy drink, and sends everybody who drinks it into a mindless, murderous rampage. That accident happens just as the factory is shutting down for good. Some people organize a rave, and weasel their way into the shuttered factory, where pallets-full of these tainted energy drinks are still just sitting around.
Our main character is a junior reporter or maybe an intern at a magazine or newspaper, learning the ropes, trying to get her articles published, but needs to work on her writing before that happens. She’s a total germ-o-phobe and a nerdy type. She’s never been to a rave, but she goes out on a limb and decides to check it out.
At the rave, things quickly go south. The few people who didn’t drink any of the energy drink quickly realize that something’s definitely not right with these people and that they’re in danger and need to scram immediately. Problem is all the doors are locked. They’re trapped in this big, industrial factory with a bunch of zombie ravers.
As far as comedies go, this one isn’t so intolerable. In the same vein as Dead Alive, but if Dead Alive gets a 10 on the sick-o gross-out meter, this one gets about a 5 or 6. Decent movie if you’re into zom-coms.
With Natasha Henstridge from the Species movies, although she has only a couple lines at the very beginning.
Two neighboring farming families, multi-generational, midwest / plains states, times are tough, economically things are looking really bad for everybody. Nobody is making ends meet. One family sells out to the big city fracking company, leases half their land to them to do as they will. Lifts their spirits for the time being at the prospect of getting some cash in their pockets, paying off some debts. The other family wants nothing to do with the company and continues their daily struggles as they have been.
Fast forward a year, and the family that sold out still doesn’t have any more money in their accounts, but they know that the first check will show up any day now, so they’re all smiles (at least until they get that first monthly check from the fracking company, which amounts to, how do you say, a little bit less than they were expecting). The other family is in really bad shape, economically and physically, with weird sinus infections, coughing, skin lesions. And of course, things go from bad to worse.
The first 85% of the movie is a drama. Nothing scary about it. In the last 15% we get some pretty icky stuff. Similar themes as the ‘there’s something in the water’ movies, especially the super great 80s ecological calamity movie The Curse, based on H.P.Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space. Especially with the mother who injures her hand, which gets infected, and then it’s all downhill from there.
Way too much time is spent on the economic hardships of it all, and all of the relationships between characters. The first hour 15 minutes of the movie should have taken 30 minutes.
With Adrienne Barbeau, who plays the curmudgeon-y grandmother. Some would say bitchy, but I think she’s just fighting for what she believes in, and she doesn’t care about not having any tact about it, or not making any effort to be diplomatic about it. She’s great. All the actors in this are pretty good. I think it’s the sort of thing where the writers were given free rein, and nobody bothered to say ‘hey, is there any way you could make this a little more succinct, or more direct, more to the point? Instead of all this dramatic meandering?’
Why do people keep saying this movie is underrated? I’ve seen nothing but positive reviews for it, very positive. I’ve seen more unanimously positive reviews for this one than any other movie in recent history. Sure, it flopped at the box office. Would it have done better if it had been released in non-pandemic times? I dunno. Maybe.
Maybe you could say this one is overlooked, because seemingly people aren’t all that interested in seeing Kristin Stewart in a deep sea ocean horror high tension drama monster movie. But ya, throw this review on to the big pile of positive reviews, too. Generally positive from me. Not overwhelmingly positive.
Mariana Trench, seven miles below the ocean surface, a research team is doing their research in some large, high-tech state-of-the-art facility. Some unknown catastrophic event (earthquake?) destroys most of the facility and kills the majority of the crew. A small handful of them survive, and they now must find a way to get to the surface alive. Which won’t be easy, as they really don’t have a way to get there, and also no way to communicate with anybody upstairs. Never mind that deep sea dragon monster trying to eat them.
Like I say, generally well done. That’s what you expect with a movie coming from one of the major studios and with millions upon millions of dollars in the budget.
I really could have done without the comedy relief guy. That’s the same actor that everybody hated in Cloverfield, yes? The cameraman who couldn’t stop yapping about stupid shit while everybody else was trying to not be killed? Ya, he plays the same guy in this one.
Other minor deductions- nothing all too unexpected happens. Woulda been nice if something super weird happened. Also, it seems like a rated R flick trapped inside a rated PG-13 movie. The reason for that is obvious- a giant swath of Kristin Stewart’s fans are younger than 18, so the studio would be cutting themselves off at the legs to the tune of millions of dollars if this had gone full blown rated R.
Ten year(?) high school reunion weekend, and the plan is drinks and catching up on Friday night, paintball on Saturday morning. One woman wasn’t planning on showing up at all, but then she’s there, and then she gets dragged into the paintball team.
The paintball tournament starts, and then the shit hits the fan. Up until that point, it’s a comedy. But even once dead people start turning up, it still hangs on to the comedy, which is stupid. We have dead people all over the place, people with their eyes gouged out, people exploding on landmines, and the rest of ’em are making jokes about all of it.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again- comedy/horrors aren’t horror movies. They’re comedies with a bunch of blood and guts. Because the horror of horror movies springs from the fear. These comedies might have blood and guts, but there is no fear in them.
This one tries to be clever. And I know it’s completely subjective, and I know many people do like comedy/horrors. But I have no use for them at all. As a comedy/horror, I guess this one is OK, if you like that sort of thing. For me, it would have been better as a straight slasher, in which case it would have had a similar theme to a couple Jamie Lee Curtis classics, Prom Night and Terror Train. Instead, we get to laugh it up while fishing through somebody else’s intestines with bare hands.
B-movie Roundup 