Dread

Every time I review one of the Eight Films to Die For/AfterDark HorrorFest films, I mention how they are uneven in quality, which is true. Today’s movie is Dread, which has a better pedigree than most, being adapted from a short story by horror master Clive Barker.

Stephen (Jackson Rathbone) is a film student at an unnamed university. He seems to float aimlessly through life, modeling his personal style on Robert Smith of the Cure. He laments about his inability to get laid, although if you re-read the preceding sentence, you might uncover the secret. He has a chance meeting with Quaid (Shaun Evans) who is obviously a psychopath. Quaid shares his childhood trauma with Stephen, namely that an axe-wielding madman slaughtered his family while he watched, and suggests they collaborate on a student film that will explore what people dread. Stephen, who seems to be a little thick, agrees.

The film project consists of getting student volunteers to sit in front of the camera and talk about what their fears, making it just like every other student film ever produced. No faculty member seems involved in this in any way. Stephen gets his friend Cheryl (Hanne Steen) involved to edit the film, although editing should be easy, and his other friend Abby (Laura Donnelly) also gets caught up in the project. Abby has a birthmark which covers most of the right side of her body, which makes her especially vulnerable. Both girls seem attracted to Stephen for no discernable reason.

The project goes well enough, but there is a hitch. What could it be? Oh, yeah, Quaid is a psychopath. Predictably, he begins to use the subjects’ fears against them.

Judging by its rating on imdb.com, this is one of the more popular films in the series, and judging by the comments, there are a lot of people who really love it. As usual, I am a contrarian. I found it hard to believe the gang would lack the awareness to realize they were spending time in a secluded house in the woods with a sociopath, and that would not end well. The Stephen character is entirely too passive, and he’s one of those who gets a chance to stop the madman, and just can’t bring himself to do anything.

A lot of those who liked the film mentioned they liked how disturbing it is, and, with a nihilistic ending, it certainly is. So, however, is a video of a slaughterhouse, and I wouldn’t enjoy that either. I’m afraid this is thumbs down for me, although I should point out most disagree with me. It might also be enjoyed if you are a fan of The Cure.
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Zombies of Mass Destruction

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not much of a zombie fan, which puts me out of step with at least 90% of those who watch horror movies or read horror fiction. Nothing against it, it simply seems the sub-genre is exhausted. I always try to watch the After Dark Horrorfest movies though, and with Halloween approaching, decided to give Zombies of Mass Destruction a try. Zombies of Mass Destruction is a member of a sub-sub-genre, the zombedy, or zombie –comedy, best exemplified by Shaun of the Dead, with other successful examples being Zombieland and Hide and Creep.

Port Gamble is a fairly typical small town, albeit one that is fairly isolated by being on an island. Its politics run fairly red-state conservative, and most of the jokes made in the film are political in nature. Don’t worry about watching it if you’re a conservative, since liberals don’t come across all that well, either. As the story starts, a couple of former residents are returning to the island, Frida Abbas, the daughter of a local Iranian-American restaurateur (A running gag is that everyone thinks she’s Iraqi. It isn’t that funny), and Tom, who is accompanied by his boyfriend Lance, coming home to come out as gay to his mother. The outsiderness of the Arab-American Frida and the gay Tom are the source of most of the humor.

Once everyone is on the island, there is a zombie outbreak. Why this happens is never explained, although some think it is a terrorist attack, but an explanation really isn’t necessary. The movie becomes a the usual story of our protagonists trying to escape the cannibalistic walking dead, with the added sideplots of Frida dealing with her survivalist neighbors, who assume she’s responsible, and Tom and Lance having to hole up at a local church that definitely isn’t gay-friendly. This is also for the best, since the zombies here are not just the slow variety, they are ultra slow, and it seems if you pay attention and don’t let them get too close, they don’t pose that much of a threat.

The movie isn’t hilarious, but has some decently funny moments. It’s probably a little too long, since the jokes seem to wear a bit by then, and it didn’t seem the creators could make up their minds as to whether they wanted to descend into complete slapstick or not (it isn’t really that easy to pull someone’s arm off with a yank, for instance). Ever sense Romero did it so well; zombie film makers have tried to use the sub-genre to make social statements, with most of them falling on their faces. This movie does it well enough, though.

It certainly isn’t a terrible movie though, even to a zombie-phobe like me. The script is solid, the direction is good, production values are decent, especially considering the very low budget, and I could find no fault with the acting of the cast of unknowns. If you are the zombie enthusiast type, I imagine you would enjoy it quite well, and it works well enough even if you are not. I think my favorite line was the son asking his father if he was aware of what a zombie bite means, hasn’t he seen zombie movies? The father replies his son should know he’s a vampire man.
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The Reeds

Another one of the After Dark Film Festival/Eight Films to Die For movies, The Reeds, a UK production directed by Nick Cohen, is probably one of the weaker in the series.

A group of young Londoners decide to rent a boat for a weekend excursion, for reasons that are never really explained. They don’t seem to have much boating expertise, and their only goal once they get the boat is to get to the pub before it closes. I’m no expert on England, but I’ll bet there is a pub somewhere in London, which would have been a simpler proposition. They are the typical set-up group for a slasher flick, the arrogant jock, the dependable guy, the pretty girl, the token black guy. In keeping with current vogue, none of them are really that likeable, and none demonstrate much intelligence or competence (At one point, one of the girls thinks there’s someone at the cabin door, and reacts by firing a flare gun at the navigation map, setting the boat on fire.). Once they are on the boat, they start off through a more-or-less swamp, quickly getting lost in thick reeds. Hence the name. They soon encounter some sinister children, and realize they are being stalked and are in danger. One by one, they die.

But. For the most part, they aren’t killed by the enemy, but by each other. They run their boat aground, they set each other on fire, they mistake one of their party for the Bad Guy and hack the person to death. They are the Three (six, actually) Stooges of horror victims. I was hoping the end was going to be no one was really after them the whole time, but no luck. Towards the finale, the film goes supernatural on us, plays with a muddled timeline, and features a “twist” you can see coming from a mile away.

The acting is reasonably good, although the script calls for the characters to do stupid things. Photography is a bit of a mess, as the camera occasionally bobs up and down, to give it that “amateur” feel, I suppose (although it isn’t presented as “found” footage, so why bother), but I kept wishing they’d hold the damn camera still.

I’d recommend you give this one a pass, but it’s a free country (depending on where you are, of course) and you can make your own decisions (unless you’re nine, in which case you’re too young to see someone shot in the face with a shotgun, and should watch Hannah Montana instead – although that might scar you worse).
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Kill Theory

Here’s another film from the After Dark Film Festival package, 2009’s Kill Theory. As has been mentioned many times before, the films in this series have been a mixed bag, more potential than payoff, but I can give Kill Theory a very cautious thumbs-up, with a few criticisms.

The plot is very simple. A group of college seniors (who all look a few years too old) take one last trip together before graduation at an isolated lake house belonging to the father of one of the group. The outing goes bad when a psychopath targets the group on the first night. They are a part of his macabre experiment, and are given the choice to survive. All they have to do is kill all their friends, and they can live. If only one is alive at dawn, that one goes free; if more than one, all the survivors die. Anyone trying to leave dies at the hands of the psycho. As you can imagine in a movie of this type, paranoia sets in, and the body count rises.

It’s a variation on the slasher model, with the victims forced to perform some of the slashing themselves, but it works fairly well. The cast, which includes genre stalwart Agnes Bruckner and Teddy Dunn from Veronica Mars, ranges from professionally competent to pretty good. The plot is decent, and the pace is fast enough you can skim over the bigger inconsistencies. They are, in my opinion, two big problems which keep this from being a great film.

The first one is the now familiar one of having a completely unlikeable cast of characters. These are obnoxious people, none of whom you would want to know in real life (remember, I’m referring to the characters, not the actors, so no angry comments from their fans). The only tolerable character is as painfully stupid as the rest of them. The problem with this is if you hate everyone in the movie, it’s hard to get invested in whether they get cut in half by one of the killer’s traps or not. When one of them meets death-by-shovel, I imagine most viewers are fine with his fate. Interestingly, in the 8 minute “making of” feature, one of the actors says what attracted him to the role was his character’s “arc.” What makes this interesting is the arc in question runs from being an asshole to being an asshole. Less an arc than a straight line.

The other problem is the entirely irrational response the group has to the threat. They must go to a college with low standards, because they either come completely apart or behave as stupidly as possible in order to get killed. Obviously, the correct response is to band together, work to harden their defenses, and wait for the killer to attack so they can confront him en masse. The killer has a rifle and a funky knife that looks cool but is probably ineffective. The victims have two pistols, assorted knives, blunt objects, and improvised projectiles to throw at the bad guy. I’d say the miscreant would have a hard time taking the group, since he starts out out-numbered eight-to-one.

Even with it’s problems, I was reasonably entertained, and Kill Theory compares favorably with most of the slashers turned out, with the plot somewhat more original. The twist was not what I thought it would be, but the second most likely instead.
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Perkins 14

There are a few DVDs from last year’s 8 Films To Die For /After Dark set still in my To Be Watched pile. I attribute this to the generally low quality of the previous releases under the imprint, but maybe I shouldn’t have judged these by past results, as Perkins 14 isn’t a bad little movie at all. Although the other thing they kept it down, fairly meh cover art is still pretty much meh, although you can look at it in this post and judge for yourself.

Stone Cove, Maine is a fairly somber little town. Ten years earlier, 14 children were kidnapped, and no trace of them was ever found, and the only clue authorities had was the final abductee bit off the finger of the kidnapper during his kidnapping. The disappearances have haunted the surviving parents of the children, including Deputy Sheriff Dwayne Hopper (Patrick O’Kane), whose son Kyle was the last victim. His obsession with finding his son nearly wrecked his life, and left him with a wife who is cheating on him and a daughter who is a walking talking ad for birth control. But after a decade, he has done his best to put it all behind him and go on. That is, until one fateful night when he’s working the graveyard shift at the jail.

It seems a local pharmacist named Ronald Perkins (Richard Brake) is being held overnight after being arrested for being belligerent during a traffic stop. This doesn’t seem to be important – until Hopper notices Perkins is missing a finger. Hopper is convinced that Perkins is the one who abducted his son, and the first half of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game between Hopper and Perkins, with Hopper trying to prove Perkins is the kidnapper before he must be released, and everyone else thinking Hopper has become obsessed again.

[SPOILER] It turns out Perkins was indeed the kidnapper. And rather than kill the children, he has kept them in cages in his home, torturing them and dosing them with drugs (Mostly PCP, it seems) to turn them into mindless killing machines. The movie abruptly changes tone when the now-grown children escape and go on a murderous rampage. Deputy Hopper has to find and protect his wife and daughter, and at the same time, figure out a way to free his son from insanity.

It isn’t a perfect movie. The first half, which is a quieter, psychological struggle, is much more effective than the more action-oriented second half, which seems very zombie-ish, and the transition between the two paces is a bit jarring. And, though the actors are all good in their roles, the character of the deputy’s daughter is written with a common irritating flaw: She is a kid so stupid she can’t get killed early enough to suit you. You know the type. If she is told to wait in safety and be quiet, you can be sure she will secretly tag along and scream “What’s happening?” at the worst possible time.

Still, a couple of minor flaws aren’t enough to keep Perkins 14 to be a scarily effective low-budget film. The acting and production values seem much better than most of its brethren, and the second half should please the zombie-loving crowd.
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Dying Breed

It’s that time of the year: The Eight Films To Die For have been released. Or as I like to call it: Masochism Theater!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A group of callow young people journey into a wilderness for some half-baked purpose, and run into inbred cannibals. If you are a huge fan of the Twilight series, this might be a new one to you, but if you watch the sort of mind-corrupting stuff featured on this site, you’re probably tired of the concept. But that is the plot of Dying Breed. It is the first horror movie I can think of set in Tasmania.

Two young men and their two girlfriends go to one of the more isolated parts of Tasmania in search of the allegedly extinct Tasmanian Tiger. The sister of one of the girls previously came to the same location to look for the beast, and ended up drowned after being missing for a year. It ultimately turns out she was kidnapped, gang-raped, forced to give birth, and had her teeth forcibly extracted, none of which is discovered by the authorities, which makes me think there probably isn’t a show called CSI: Tasmania. Anyway, they are determined to find the TT so sis’ life won’t have been in vain.

Problem is, the portion of Tasmania they explore exploring was the old stalking grounds of Alexander Pearce, an escaped convict and cannibal from the early 19th century. The current residents of the area are all descended from him, and have inherited a taste for human meat. Pretty soon, the expected happens.

The first big problem is the potential victims just aren’t likeable enough to make us root for their survival. One of the quartet (Jack) is one of those characters that only occur in fiction, and we’ve talked about his type before: the character so obnoxious he couldn’t exist in real life. Yet here he is, and soon after we meet him, we’re looking forward to his horrible death. The others are almost as bad, being completely useless in a crisis. They go to pieces when things go bad. One of them, Matt, finally weapons up with an axe (after the axe has already been the hero prop in a couple of scenes) but manages to drop the damn thing four times before finally losing it without putting it to use. The basic strategy for the victims is to immediately split up in the face of danger, so they can be picked off one by one. The ending is supposed to be a shock, but I mainly found it goofy.

Australia has produced some good horror movies in the last few years: Wolf Creek (which this seems to be inspired by), the underrated Rogue, the quirky Undead, and so on. This isn’t one of them.

Frontière(s)

Here’s a movie that had sat on my shelf for a while, chiefly because of the “Eight Films to Die For” on the box cover. Not that all of the 8FTDF are terrible, but the quality is low enough that the odds aren’t in your favor. Having said that, I wish I hadn’t waited, because Frontière(s) is the best movie I’ve seen in the series.

It begins with the Paris riots of 2005. A group of four young men and one young woman have used the confusion to pull off a heist, and head for Amsterdam, leaving a mortally wounded gang member behind. Their plan hits a snag when they stop at a rural hostel (!) near the border. It seems the hostel is run by a family of unreconstructed Nazis, who also happen to be cannibals. Instead of making the big score, it becomes a struggle to survive.

The movie’s plot will remind many watchers of movies like The Hills Have Eyes, Tourist Trap, and Motel Hell, while the graphic torture scenes call to mind Hostel and the Saw series. While the gory scenes do place it within the recent “torture porn” sub-genre, there is a heart to this movie that serves to elevate it above the others. The characters are well-drawn, and the film does a good job of taking the robbers, who are initially seen as fairly unlikeable, and showing us sides of them that allow us to root them on, a vital part of hooking the viewer into feeling an interest in the outcome.

It is probably not necessary to understand the subtext of Xavier Gens’ movie, but it is trying to say something about the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in France, even if showing Nazi cannibals is pushing that pretty far. It also uses the ordeal of the multi-ethnic group against the “racially pure” cannibals to exaggerate and thus illuminate some of the problems France is facing with race and religion today.

For those who want the gore, the movie delivers, with a graphic hamstringing, a young man literally melting in a steam bath, another bisected with a table saw, and so on. It would be a pity if the movie is judged just by its gore, however.

The cast is excellent, particularly Karina Testa, Aurélien Wiik, and the always good Samuel Le Bihan (Le Pacte des loups). The German pronunciations do kind of come and go, with one of the family members even having his name pronounced two different ways, but that is a small thing. Gens makes effective use of what I believe is a Frazier lens in the final confrontation to give it a sense of hyper-realism.

There are a couple of the usual plot nit-picks. One of the victims makes the usual error of incapacitating one of the bad guys, and then doesn’t grab his gun. I’ve said it before: No matter what your feelings about gun control are, make an exception when being chased by murderous cannibals! In the same scene, one of the villains is felled by a blow to the head from a sledge-hammer, and is shortly up and around without any ill effects. Here’s your science tip for the day: If you are struck a hard blow in the head by a sledge-hammer, you probably won’t ever get back up, and if you do, your eggs will be severely scrambled.

For some reason, it also bugged me slightly when one of the murderers sees his dead brother and makes the sign of the cross. I realize that religious fanatics are often used in these things, but how can a devout Catholic ever find absolution for all this? (Father, forgive me for I have sinned. This week I killed and ate three people…)

The DVD presentation has French audio with English and Spanish subtitles, so if you don’t speak French and hate subtitles, this may be a problem. I speak a little French, but kept having to back up to get things I missed, so I finally turned the subtitles on for good.

The Abandoned

One of the “8 Films To Die For” After Dark Horrorfest movies (from the first series), The Abandoned is considered to be the best of the bunch. I’ve seen seven of the eight (I need a life) and I have found them to be just okay, in a sort of generic horror film way. The Abandoned probably is the best of the ones I've seen.

An American woman who was born in Russia and adopted away as an infant journeys back to Russia to claim some property, namely the house where her mother and father were killed 40 years previously. Once she arrives, she finds herself trapped in a haunted with a man who may be her twin brother. They are haunted by apparitions of themselves dead.

If you need a strong plot to enjoy a movie, you should stay away from this one. There are a lot of things that just don’t make sense, a couple of contradictions, and the resolution is a bit messy. What it does have going for it is it’s genuinely creepy, and has a nice, ominous atmosphere. If you are looking for a couple of chills and a generally unsettled feeling, this might work for you.

Crazy Eights

The final film that I watched in this year’s Eight Films To Die For series, Crazy Eights is accurately described on the packaging as a horror version of The Big Chill. In a flashback, we see that eight children were submitted by their parents to an institution to undergo experimentation of some sort (We know this at the outset, but it takes the characters most of the movie to figure it out). Years later, one of the original eight dies, and the surviving six (this is not evidence of my poor math skills) gather to see him off, a la The Big Chill. But in this case, instead of promoting Motown’s Greatest Hits, they find a treasure map of sorts that leads to a box left by the dearly departed. The six of them , which includes Traci Lords, the lovely Dina Meyer, Frank Whalley, Gabrielle Anwar, and George Newburn, set off to find the box, not realizing they are going to the site of their childhood institution, which they don’t remember anyway. When they find the box, they discover toys from their childhood – and the skeleton of the girl who was the eighth of the Crazy Eights. They are soon locked in the old asylum, where they are stalked by the ghost of the dead girl, who apparently resents being left to die. Or something. Bloodshed ensues.

This movie has a cast that belies its b-movie origins, and it is quite well acted. But that’s where my praise ends. It’s hard to imagine a movie could be only 80 minutes long, and in which practically everybody dies horribly, and still be dull and slowly paced, but this movie pulls it off. The direction never manages to convey any urgency or suspense, and it becomes lethally boring long before it ends. We never really develop any empathy for any of the characters. It’s a shame, because the idea had some possibilities, and the actors acquit themselves well.

Nightmare Man

Nightmare Man is the Eight Films To Die For flick aimed most squarely at a specific target audience – 13-year-old boys with raging libidos. It is a collection of breast shots with the occasional grisly murder thrown in for pacing.

A young couple (Bill and Ellen) is having trouble conceiving, so the wife does what every woman does in this situation – Ellen buys a possessed African fertility mask. That always goes well. Before she can get in the family way, she starts having nightmares about being attacked by a man wearing the mask, who kills her. She calls this man from her nightmares – Nightmare Man. Ellen isn’t big on creativity. These dreams go on a while, and Ellen begins to crack under the strain. Bill does what any concerned, loving young husband would do – he makes arrangements to have her institutionalized. Ellen seems okay with this. They are driving late at night on the way to the happy farm when there car breaks down, and Bill leaves Ellen to go for help. Before you know it, Ellen is under attack from the Nightmare Man (NM), now made flesh, possibly because Ellen hasn’t been taking enough of her meds. Ellen flees into the woods.

Nearby, five friends are spending the night at an old, isolated house. One couple is about to be married. Considerable effort is spent trying to keep a secret from the soon-to-be husband: His prospective bride once made out with one of the other hot chicks. Presumably, if he learned this, he would be so repulsed he would call the wedding off (Just an aside from real life: the only way the prospective groom would be turned off if she was marrying Fred Phelps (of Westover Baptist Church), which would mean much worse problems anyway. More likely, he would ask the other girl if she wanted to go on the honeymoon with them). Right in the middle of a variety of activities that require the actresses to take off their tops, Ellen bursts in, and soon the NM is after everyone.

A good part of the suspense of the movie is trying to figure out what is going on. Is the NM real or has Ellen just wigged out to the point where she’s turned homicidal? Or is someone else up to no good? Anyway, everyone is soon battling for their lives, including Tiffany Shepis, the last of the B-movie Queens, who does battle with the creature with a crossbow while wearing lingerie. It’s that kind of a movie.

It’s difficult to recommend this one, but it does have a certain low-rent charm. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t, and it doesn’t take itself very seriously. Shepis also has a good deal of personality, and it’s a pity most of her movies are drek. If this appeals to you, and you need to occupy yourself for a night, give it a try, but most would be better off missing it.

The Deaths Of Ian Stone

The Deaths of Ian Stone is not quite a successful movie, falling flat at the end, but does have some interesting ideas, and the first half is not bad at all. Ian (Mike Vogel, last seen running from Cthulhu Jr. in Cloverfield) is a student at university in Great Britain, and the movie opens with him playing for the college hockey team in a heated match. (This is a quibble, but do they even have university ice hockey teams in Britain? If anyone knows the answer to this, I’m curious.) After he blows the game by hogging the puck, he drives home, but stops when he sees someone lying motionless in the middle of the road. Getting out to help, he learns to regret the Good Samaritan impulse when the guy in the road turns into a monster, grabs him, and throws him in front of an oncoming train, killing him. (There is something cruelly Darwinish about horror movies. Characters who show compassion usually bite it.)

Wow, what a short movie. Still it was kinda cool…Oh, yeah, wait, the title says Deaths not Death. Ian wakes up in a strange apartment, remembering his abrupt intro to fuel-efficient transportation only as a dream. This starts a cycle, in which Ian is repeatedly killed, and then goes to a steadily drearier new existence, remembering only bits and pieces of what happened. What the heck is happening? Fortunately, our old friend Exposition Guy shows up to tell Ian (and us). Sadly for Ian, Exposition Guy follows movie convention, and instead of explaining to poor Ian everything at once as he should, he gives him a bit at a time before disappearing. “You must protect the girl!” EG yells, vanishing before Ian can ask “What girl?” and then Ian is crushed by a falling anvil.

This continues until gradually Ian, whose character was obviously stolen from Kenny in South Park, gets the whole story. The creatures that kakk him over and over are pretty neat. They can look like ordinary humans, but their appendages turn insect-like when they need to skewer someone. They can also appear as a dark, ghostly presence when they’re in the mood. Since monster-maker Stan Winston produced this, it’s no surprise they look pretty good.

The early part of the movie is good entertainment as we try to figure out why Ian is so spectacularly screwed. It does have problems. First of all, the viewer figures things out about fifteen minutes before Ian, and you get pretty impatient with him for not thinking faster. Secondly, every existence Ian experiences gets worse, so for about twenty minutes he is immobilized in a hospital bed, which throws things down considerably. (During his final incarnation, the creatures resort to dressing like Sprockets, but maybe that’s only a problem to me.) It also has major third act problems, and the ending is pretty flat.

Still, not the worst time waster I’ve seen, and miles ahead of most of the other Eight Films To Die For offerings.

Tooth & Nail

Everyone, I think, wants to do some good for the world. While my job generally takes me the opposite way, I’ve found satisfaction as a humanitarian here, by reviewing bad movies so you won’t make the mistake of watching them. With this in mind, if you were planning to buy or rent Tooth and Nail, please send me half of what you’re going to spend. I earned the money with this turkey.

The movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic milieu. Apparently in 2012, the world ran out of gas. Literally. Rather than gradual diminishing supplies and rising prices, this happened suddenly, so fast that cars were left stranded on the motorways. There was no alternative power because, as explained in an annoying voice-over, “People asked what about coal? You have to have gas to transport coal. Nuclear power.” This is priceless, since it gives a goofy explanation why coal can’t be used, and the explanation of why nuclear power wasn’t used is “Nuclear power.” If I were more Zen I would understand that. Anyway, loss of gasoline leads to world-wide conflict, and two-thirds of the world’s population dies. Most of the survivors move South, ignoring that population density was low as you approached the equator in pre-industrial times, and the Eastern seaboard, which was the most heavily populated portion of the country before and after cars, is practically depopulated.

In Philadelphia, the setting for this epic, the population has been reduced improbably to eight survivors, living in a hospital. They are worried about starvation, since their foraging skills seem limited, they haven’t planted any food despite being there for at least a year, and no one can fish. Of the eight stalwarts, there are two who serve a purpose. Darwin makes speeches about rebuilding the world (he doesn’t do anything but talk about it) and Viper can fight with his handy bow n’ arrow. Everyone else just mopes their day away. Oh, and everyone is named after a car except Darwin. Viper, Torino, Neon, Ford, etc. I guess the writer was aiming for irony, but fell short and landed in stupidity.

The group’s peaceful moping is interrupted by the arrival of the Rovers, a nomadic group dedicated to reviving the traditional cowboy song, singing classics like Water and Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds. Let me check my notes. Scratch that. The Rovers are actually a group of cannibals who dress like Vikings, who stalk mopers, picking them off one by one and eating them. The Rovers all have animal names, although at this point, I thought it would be cool if they were all named after Ford models and the mopers named after GM cars, which would have extended the original metaphor. Included among the Rovers are Michael Madsen, whose agent must hate him like cancer, and Juggernaut from the X-men, who probably doesn’t have an agent.

Soon the mopers realize their numbers are in decline, and they are under siege by the Rovers. It doesn’t help them that they have guns, while the Rovers use axes and spears. “There’s too many to fight with guns,” it is explained. Excuse me, I saw Zulu. Afficionados of edged weapons usually take a lot of casualties against carbines. Too many, by the way, is fourteen. The mopers are so demoralized that, when the Rovers line up in the parking lot so the mopers can see them, the moper with the rifle doesn’t even bother to pick any off. Faced with becoming an entrée, the mopers also don’t bother to fortify their position, or try to create booby-traps or anything. They just hole up until nightfall, when they require to their individual quarters, even though they know the Rovers are getting them one at a time, at night.

Eventually, we have the final confrontation and the movie ends. You may be fooled into reading this and thinking “at least it’s action-packed.” It isn’t. The bulk of the movie is the mopers sitting around, talking about how awful everything is, though they never feel compelled to doing anything. Even in the rare scenes of carnage, the Rovers just seem to go through listless motions. If you’re going to be a murderous cannibal, at least find some joy in your work. The movie-makers also shot a lot of second unit footage of buildings and sky and so on, and we get to look at a lot of that.

We now have a new worst film from the Eight Films To Die For set.

Lake Dead

Another of the After Dark Festival’s Eight Films To Die For, Lake Dead is an unimaginative take on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Two sisters inherit a hotel in a rural area from their grandfather, so they gather a group of friends, journey to the hotel and…go camping. I didn’t understand that either. The two sisters are blondes, reminded me of the Hilton Sisters. They are prettier, and probably smarter, though Lord, they are as dumb as posts. Their companions seem bright only by comparison.

It seems the folks running the hotel kill everyone who stays there. I don’t know why, it would seem this would be terrible for business. (In an amusing footnote that probably illustrates how depraved I am, I got the boxcover description mixed up with another movie, and thought they were supposed to be cannibals. So all through the flick, while they were dumping bodies into the lake and whatnot, all I could think was “Gee, they sure are wasting a lot of meat.”). They want to keep their bloodlines pure, so they kill everyone not related to them, and want to keep the sisters (who are the blondes, hope I didn’t spoil anything for you) for breeding purposes. There has been a great deal of incest (one of the scenes includes a sloppy French kiss between a man and his elderly mother, which elicits an eeeew and indicates the screenwriter may be from Arkansas) and this sort of thing is why no one in the family has cured cancer or invented cold fusion.

For what it is, I guess the movie is okay. It features a number of nubile young folks killed in grotesque ways, and if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll find it. It has way too many examples of one of my pet peeves: When the victims are fleeing the inbred killer mutants, they immediately drop any weapons they acquire, including a shotgun and pistol. I know a shotgun is heavy, but if I’ve got one and the guy chasing me has an axe, I won’t feel the urgency to run so fast. More of a saunter, really.

One other thing that slightly bugs me: although the movie is not set in the South, all the characters have pronounced Southron accents, which is typical of movies. If it has a rural setting, whether it’s upstate New York or northern Canada, everyone talks like they were from Slapout, Alabama (a real place, and a town I’ve been to). That’s just weird.

Unearthed

Of all of this current batch of 8 Films To Die For, the one I was most looking forward to after reading the initial description was Unearthed. It’s the kind of creature feature I usually go for (how many participles will dangle in this piece?), with an underground critter run amok, and a group of individuals thrown together, trying to survive. It has Emmanuelle Vaugier, one of the truly smokin’ hot actresses of the day, hot enough to get me to watch House of the Dead II. Twice. And I liked Matthew Leutwyler, first effort, Dead & Breakfast, well enough, as it was a flawed but generally entertaining zombedy. So, couldn’t wait.

Sometimes life just disappoints you. Unearthed is a good contender to be the worst of the 8 movies in the set. It was poorly lit, poorly filmed, poorly acted and poorly written.

It starts in semi-classic style. Vaugier is the sheriff of a small town somewhere in the mostly barren West. She is one week from losing her job. It is slowly revealed in incoherent, fuzzy flashbacks that she killed a child. Due to the difficult-to-follow aspects of the flashbacks, it is hard to tell if she killed the kid as an accident while trying to shoot the girl’s father instead, or if the kid just pissed her off. Anyway, Vaugier is now drinking heavily, either from guilt or reading the final script. This has divided the townspeople into those who still support her, and those who want her gone. Sometimes characters switch sides on this is mid-scene. There are several Native Americans in the community, and they support Vaugier, despite the possibility the kakked kid was herself NA, because they are one with the Great Spirit, and know Vaugier is one hot mama. Or that her soul is pure.

Luke Goss, who played the creepy, face-splitting vampire in Blade II, is also on hand. He is either an archaeologist, Indian sympathizer, grave robber or professional monster killer, it’s a bit vague. Whatever he is, he has tattoos all over his face, so if he’s an archaeologist, I hope he got tenure first. He is an asshole beyond the bounds of ordinary assholery, even shooting someone at one point because they tried to sensibly run away. As the movie starts, a truck driver is attacked by something, causing his rig to jackknife and block the road out of town. This is trouble because that’s a one way road, baby, and everyone in town is now trapped. Also, as is usually the case when there’s a wreck, the entire town, including the pumps, instantly runs out of gas. Right as this happens, the last characters drive into the now-useless gas station. They are Token Black and Two Hot Chicks. If you watch horror movies, you get the feeling these three won’t be laughing through the credits.

Anyway, our stereotypical band is soon under attack from the creature. A few characters so minor as to not even be types get killed, then Tattoo Face shows up to snarl some exposition. It seems that long ago, the Native Americans in the area encountered a strange creature that was either a monster from deep in the earth, an alien, or a robot. Seriously, this was all discussed, but it was unclear as to which was the explanation. The monster/alien/robot was at first friendly, but then got pissed and ran amok. The Native Americans sent it into hibernation using ancient Native American Technology, and it has been buried ever since. Tattoo Face is dedicated to destroying or re-imprisoning the monster, so he digs it up and sets it free so he can try to put it back. That doesn’t make any sense to me, either. The monster may have been held inside a jar, as several cast members stare at a piece of pottery for quite a while. After this, the narrative becomes disjointed, because I picked up a guitar and practiced the transition from D to D7 for the rest of the movie.

Leutwyler understands that darkness is scary, which accounts for his decision to shoot 90% of the movie in near-pitch darkness. He does not understand, that when you film in darkness, the audience can’t see anything, which made it impossible to tell what was happening. Sample audience dialogue:

WIFE: Is the creature attacking?
ME: No, it’s the two guys fighting over the gun.

A momentary flash of light reveals it’s Vaugier trying to start a truck.

I can’t remember how it ends, but I can tell you one of the cast (guess who) has to make a redemptive sacrifice. This is all done to a nu-metal soundtrack.

I think I would recommend avoiding this one.

Borderland

For those of us who enjoy horror films, the Eight Films To Die For series has been a mixed blessing. It has increased the amount of product available, so we have more movies on DVD to pass our lonely nights. On the other hand, the quality of the movies has been, to put it charitably, low. Still, we horror freaks are an optimistic lot, and since I have already seen the worst movie ever made with The Invisible, there’s nowhere to go but up, and so I plopped down my $70 to buy this year’s set. First up is Borderland.

Set in Mexico, the movie is based on the Matamoros ritual killings of the late 80s, in which a drug smuggler killed a large number of people in human sacrifices so the gods would protect his product from customs officials, although most of the details are fictionalized. It starts off with the slow torture and murder of a Mexican policeman, shown in loving detail. This was not an auspicious beginning, as it looked like another torture porn Hostel-type movie. I have nothing against gore, and don’t have a weak stomach, but it has to be in service to the story, or its pointless.

The scene then shifts to South Texas, where best pals Ed (bound for Stanford), Henry (for Wharton. We know he’s weak of character because he wants to make money) and Phil (a religious virgin) are getting ready for a last blow-out before leaving for school. They are headed to Mexico for some drinkin’ and fornicatin’, apparently unaware that’s what you do at college anyway. Things look bad for Phil since, in a type of gender bias, female virgins tend to be the survivors of horror flicks, while male virgins inevitably get kakked.

Once in Mexico, they drink a little, make some lame attempts to get busy, buy an $80 hooker for Phil (Eliot Spitzer, you got gypped) and try some awkward male bonding. An evil fate is in store for them, however. It seems the local drug lord has been sacrificing the citizenry to get mystical protection for his shipments, and the last one was intercepted. Hmmm, he thinks, in what would be blatant racism if he weren’t Mexican himself, maybe it’s the cheap Mexican sacrifices that have been the problem. A nice gringo would work better. Bad news for one of our trio.

In due course, one of them is kidnapped after taking an innocent midnight stroll alone through the bad section of Matamoros, and the other two began to try to rescue him. There is an intriguing scene where one of the superstitious henchmen of the drug lord tries to execute one of the pair, but fails when his gun mysteriously will not fire. This screams Plot Point! But ultimately amounts to nothing.

Ultimately with the aid of a beautiful bartender from a strip joint, the forces of righteousness achieve a sort of closure.

Despite my snarky tone, the movie isn’t half bad. It’s a decent Americans-in-a-foreign-land suspense piece, and a solid way to pass an evening. It suffers a bit from forced moral reconsideration of the characters, as when the surviving gringo asks if he could shoot someone. “I think so,” he says slowly. “If I had to.” At this point, his two best friends have been tortured to death, and the drug psychos are trying to kill him and his girlfriend. In that situation, Ghandi would have capped their asses, and I found it a bit irritating that he wouldn’t get with the program. The movie also loses one point for casting a hobbit (Sean Astin), but gets it back through the disposition of said hobbit. (I hate hobbits. Call me racist if you like.) There is also a nice documentary on the real Matamoros slayings, if you like that sort of thing, and a useless one where everyone tells the director how great he is. The video transfer is adequate, although the sound is so muddy I occasionally had to turn on subtitles to be sure what the characters were saying. If this sounds good to you, give it a try.