Nov 042011
 

Theatrical Poster

Watching Alex Chandon’s new movie Inbred starts out as a very familiar experience. Let’s see if you’ve heard any of this before: Two social workers are taking a group of teens with different problems out on a trip north. North here means a rundown little town full of people with strange teeth and staying at an old house that hasn’t been lived in for decades. We all know where this will lead, and it does. It doesn’t take long before the locals and the city folk clash, resulting in injury and death. But this is where Inbred really takes off. Yes, we’ve seen it all before but rarely as fun as this. Instead of just pounding us with the latest ways of displaying that old “favorite”, torture porn, Chandon takes his cliché plot and infuses it with a lovely black and absurd sense of humor that reminds me a lot of the Belgian movie Calvaire with a dash of Monty Python, especially in the scenes where the locals Continue reading »

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Nov 022011
 

DVD Artwork

Filming H.P Lovecraft has never been easy, adapting that particular brand of cosmic horror does not tend to come out well on screen and the only movies that has had some success are the ones that have taken liberties with the original story it is based on. Cthulhu is another one of those and does it quite well.

This is basically an adaption of The Shadow over Innsmouth, the same short story that gave us Stuart Gordon’s entertaining Dagon. In this case however, Dagon is the one that sticks the closest to the source material where Cthulhu tells an entirely different story set in a town that very well could be Innsmouth though not as dingy. The main character, Russ, receives a message that his mother has passed away and is forced to return to the place of his birth, a small coastal town Continue reading »

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Nov 012011
 

DVD Artwork

SEX = INSTANT DEATH! VIRGIN = SLOW DEATH!

When a movie has a scene where the main characters set camp for the night and start telling each other that this is the site where that biker vanished some years ago, upon which they cut to a scene where a biker stops by the side of the road and promptly gets his dick torn off by Bigfoot, there is no going back. You HAVE TO worship that movie. It is fucking genius.

Night of the demon is one of those semi unknown little gore flicks of the eighties that never got a decent DVD release. Well, until know. Code Red has finally released it but more on that later in the review. Sure, it doesn’t really qualify as Continue reading »

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Oct 292011
 

DVD Artwork

A young man travels to the countryside to meet his fiancé, Yuko. When he arrives at the secluded house he is told by her mother that she has died in a car accident. He spends the night at the house and hears some strange sounds at night, even seeing someone that looks just like his dead love. Later he sees Yuko outside the house and follows her to a grave with her name. Cut to some days later where the young man’s sister is worried since she hasn’t heard from him in some time. She persuades her boyfriend to take her to the house, but is told that he already left. For the sake of proper plot development she doesn’t believe Yuko’s mother and fakes the car breaking down so that they can investigate what really happened. Cue eerie Japanese vampire. Yum yum.

Vampire doll is a fine piece of Gothic horror, straight out of the Hammerverse with an atmosphere worthy of Terence Fisher, yet firmly located in the Japanese horror folklore Continue reading »

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Oct 282011
 

Theatrical Poster

Beat Takeshi goes back to his roots, eh? Outrage is truly a “classic” Yakuza tale, featuring several groups of gangsters being played out against each other by the top dog, and sadly, that is about it. The first 30-40 minutes of this movie aren’t exactly what I would describe as entertaining, it is just a collection of scenes featuring Yakuza screaming, beating each other up and so forth. Not that heavy violence is a bad thing, but when Outrage has no characters whatsoever it gets kind of… dull actually. They can shout how much they want but, beat up innocent people just for the fun of it but when there really isn’t anything separating the characters other than the fact that one of them is played by Takeshi Kitano and the others aren’t, it doesn’t make great viewing. The actors are all good, except for the fact that Kitano himself does one of those roles that he can Continue reading »

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Oct 282011
 

DVD/VHS Artwork

Here is an oddity, a shot on super 8 anthology horror movie that was shelved when the footage was deemed unusable, but “rescued” in 2010 when technology was available to make it watchable and released on DVD along with an actual VHS tape in a nice box with some other low rent crap like Cannibal Campout and the Video Violence movies. I do use the word crap with a bit of love for the same reason that I tend to watch movies like Burial ground over and over again, because they make me feel good. They give me a warm feeling in my stomach and a smile on my lips. Yes, it looks like shit (Shot on über grainy super 8 film), the dialogue is pretty god damn awful and the actors couldn’t even be accused of actually acting but the movie is full of so much yummy fun that you cannot hate it.

So, The Basement is an anthology movie in the same vein as Tales from the crypt where a group of characters meet in a basement where a guy in horror makeup tells them Continue reading »

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