“What is Life? It is the beginning of Death. What is Death? It is the end of Life. What is existence? It is the continuation of Blood. What is Blood? It is the reason to exist!” --- José Mojica Marins (At Midnight I Will Steal Your Soul)
Writerdirector Jonathon Hensleigh has been a successful screenwriter and executive producer for Hollywood for more than a decade; Die Hard with a Vengeance, Jumanji, ConAir, Armegeddon, and Gone in Sixty Seconds are some of the movies hes penned or produced. In 2004 he turned to directing with the...
Now before I launch into my tirade, let me make it clear that CGI effects in movies frequently look incredibly impressive and justifiably need to be used because there would be no other way to realistically achieve the look the director desires. Movies such as Steven Spielbergs Jurassic Park (1993)...
Jesus H. Christ in a fucking Hummer, where do I start?! Im confounded by the sheer audacity in which the producers (thirteen of the idiots!) tore to shreds any respect for George Romeros landmark original movie Day of the Dead (1985). This so-called re-imagining (as described on the DVD back cov...
Present day: In a seedy bar in a Eastern European town ravaged by war, a sly businessman Hunt (Julian Wadham) hires an ex-marine DC (Ray Stevenson) to assemble a crack team of ex-soldiers (read: borderline criminals) to protect him on a mysterious journey into dangerous territory. Their mission is t...
Watching the news footage of the destruction and havoc Mother Nature wreaked upon Burma I was reminded of a terrible bad dream I had a year or so ago. It wasnt quite a nightmare, in that I wasnt jolted awake by the sheer terror of it, but it was so vivid and realistic that it haunted me for days, ...
Youre traveling through another dimension Crazy thing is I never saw Twilight Zone The Movie (1983) when it came out, and never got round to seeing it n VHS. I finally saw it the other night on a new re-mastered DVD, twenty-five years after it came out. Four talented directors, four tales fro...
Heres a splash of old with a soaking of the new; from Cronenbergs tale of maternal rage to one of the many early 80s slasher remakes that are beginning to emerge and will continue to do so over the next couple of years. Still, the art work rocks, so Im cool with it.
...
69 contenders only 13 places. There will be blood!
Ive compiled a list of 69 horror movies that I think deserve consideration for inclusion in my inaugural Pleasure of Nightmares - Hall of Infamy (it's opinionated, but hey, moderator's perogative).
But, in keeping with my Pleasure of Nigh...
except the Phelps family, the most hated family in America.
Clever and hilarious investigative journalist Louis Theroux lived with the extended Phelps family in Kansas, attended their Westboro Baptist Church, and listened to Fred Phelps, aka Gramps, the head pastor, preaching the angry Word of G...
The horror genre in cinema tends to polarise audiences. Actually thats not entirely true. There are the hardcore True Believers (horrorphiles like myself) who favour the darker, often more visceral movies, and there are those who prefer their horror to be more on the suggestive tip, ie psychologica...
Are your bad dreams a little on the bland and tedious side? Do you need a little inspiration for your nightmare melting pot? Imagery thats truly surreal, grotesque, outlandish and seductively horrendous? Youve come to the right place The Horrorphiles Art Lair, a scarily fine selection of painti...
Last July I featured a few upcoming titles I thought looked promising; Bug, Fido, Skinwalkers, Catacombs, Rogue. Well, I got about half right. Rogue was excellent, Bug was good, Fido was okay, Skinwalkers was poor, and last night I watched Catacombs: dreadful.
Just like the cover of a book or th...
A further handful of potentially potent new movies that are hitting the big screens and not-so-big screens now and in the near future:
The Broken finds Lena Headley as Gina, a woman who sees herself driving past on a busy London street. Creepily intrigued she follows the car to her own apartment an...
Ever since the resurgence in modern horror movies took audiences by the throat and throttled them you can count on numerous new titles being released every month, mostly straight to DVD, but some manage to squeeze a short theatrical season if theyre lucky. Who knows when this glut of turgid filmmak...
I read in the news this morning the appalling story that has emerged from Austria regarding a father who imprisoned his daughter for twenty-four years in the home cellar and fathered several children with her!
According to the prosecution spokesman a 42-year-old woman, Elizabeth Fritzl, had accu...
Writer/director Jonathon Hensleigh has been a successful screenwriter and executive producer for Hollywood for more than a decade; Die Hard with a Vengeance, Jumanji, ConAir, Armegeddon, and Gone in Sixty Seconds are some of the movies he’s penned or produced. In 2004 he turned to directing with the dark, trashy, action-hero flick The Punisher. Now he’s jumped on the horror bandwagon with Welcome to the Jungle (2007), a straight-to-DVD title released through Dimension Films’ Extreme division (not to be confused with the action flick starring The Rock!)
From the super-slick to the pseudo-cinema verite, Welcome to the Jungle presents the “found footage” of a group of hapless, unlikable wannabe adventurers who head into the New Guinea jungle to try in an effort to locate Michael Rockefeller, the heir to the American Rockefeller fortune, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1961, supposedly launching the largest manhunt in American history. He was never found, and it is generally thought he ended up in a cannibal cauldron.
The movie wears its influences brazenly on its sleeve, and therein lies the problem, the two movies it steals blatantly from are unquestionably better: The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Hensleigh has good intentions, and the movie, for the most part, has good production values (if shaky-cam, no music, and wilderness location shooting amount to much), but it becomes bogged down very quickly, and, ultimately, doesn’t deliver the goods.
Aussie chums Mandi (Sandy Gardiner) and Bijou (Veronica Sywak) talk secret girls business before the big adventure
American Colby (Callard Harris) and his Australian girlfriend Mandi (Sandy Gardiner) team up with Colby’s buddy Mikey (Nick Richey) and Mandi’s Aussie mate Bijou (Veronica Sywak), whilst holidaying in Fiji. They’ve had a tip-off that an older, bearded man that bears a striking resemblance to Michael Rockefeller has been spotted in the New Guinea jungles. So they get drunk and decide, what the hey, let’s go on an adventure, find the missing man, bring him back to civilization and get filthy rich with the inevitable story-sell.
Ahhh, if only it were that easy. From the start there’s trouble, and it only gets worse. Colby and Mandi are focused and driven, while Bijou and Mikey are erratic and casual. Bijou is scatter-brained, Mikey is arrogant, and both of them prefer to get hammered each night. So tensions quickly arise. This of course is during the lengthy travel time we spend with the two couples which pretty much occupies the bulk of the movie’s 80-odd-minute running time.
Colby (Callard Harris) and Mandi gettin' their feet dirty
The footage for all of this is presented at the very beginning of the movie as “Camera #1”. There is a second camera, but it’s safely in Mandi’s backpack. Whereas The Blair Witch Project's bickering and group tension played out superbly against the claustrophobia and impending doom associated with being lost in a forest, Welcome to the Jungle’s similar dynamic just isn’t that dynamic. For starters the actors aren’t as good as they think they are, so their characters aren’t as nearly as convincing as they should be. Secondly, two much happens conveniently for the camera (an inherent problem when you’re dealing with “found footage”). Thirdly, there is no apparent fear, as the majority of the action takes place in broad daylight with lush greenery all around; the scenery looks great, it almost distracts from the narrative.
Mikey and Bijou are confronted by one of the locals
The Blair Witch Project dealt with the supernatural, and ghosts and spectres and things that go bump in the night are fundamentally elusive and tricky. It worked because it was always more about the fear of the unknown and the power of the dark than any actual physical violence. But cannibals are cannibals are cannibals. If you’re gonna have a movie about people falling prey to humans who eat humans then you’d better make sure you’ve got the horror goods in your bag, especially when the audience has tolerated more than an hour listening to these honky idiots arguing and bitching and stealing each other’s things, and then abandoning each other.
Yup, Mikey and Bijou steal one of the cameras and jump on the raft, intent on having their own adventure, sick of Colby and Mandi’s uptight attitude. But of course Mandi and Colby have another camera. And so after Mikey and Bijou run afoul of one of the local tribes and their camera is left by the river’s edge we are then presented with “Camera #2”.
Bijou gets a mouthful from the locals and ends up with a splitting headache
I think I’m already giving this movie more space and credit than it’s due. So, you know from the start of this movie these two couples aren’t gonna have a happy ending. Perhaps one couple might survive. Colby and Mandi come across Bijou (in a surprisingly convincing Cannibal Holocaust “tribute”), and after night falls they hear the blood-curdling screams of agony from Mikey somewhere close by.
They eventually find poor Mikey, sans arm and feet, but, wow, he’s still alive (!) Colby does the honourable thing, and then the two of them attempt to get the hell out of dodge. But instead they meet another tribe who appear benevolent. The tribesmen offer them food and festive necklaces, and let them sit near the fire to watch the ritualistic dancing. “Well, at least we get out of here alive,” Colby assures Mandi, who nods in relief as she scoffs down the meat stew.
Colby and Mandi discover the remains of a Christian jungle missionary couple
Yeah, right. Well, there are a couple of very quick money-shots, but nothing to write home about; decapitated head, severed torso, but it’s all come too late in the game. And it doesn’t possess any of the visceral punch the premise demands. The build-up has taken far too long, and the pay-off is half-assed. The most convincing and chilling moment is a brief meeting the two couples have with an Aussie swagman who solemnly warns them not to screw around with any tribal death artifacts they might come across (Mikey is harbouring a skull he just found).
A final word to the Dimension Films company; if you’re gonna have a subsidiary division called “Extreme” then go the bloody distance guys!
Here's the trailer:
Special Note: My Welcome to the Jungle post is the springboard for a series of movie reviews on hardcore nightmares which I’m calling my "Extremus Atrox" selection. So next week prepare to have your sensibilities challenged with a potent bunch of movies that are truly subversive and controversial, dark as coal, twisted like barbwire, intensely graphic and atmospheric, and nasty as Hell, but also, provocative, relevant and memorable in this important cinematic arena that is the modern horror genre.
Now before I launch into my tirade, let me make it clear that CGI effects in movies frequently look incredibly impressive and justifiably need to be used because there would be no other way to realistically achieve the look the director desires. Movies such as Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World (1997), and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03) and King Kong (2005) are perfect examples.
Peter Jackson's King Kong embraces CGI superbly
What frustrates and, ultimately, disappoints me is the use (and there seems to be more and more of it) of CGI effects being employed in horror movies in place of the “old school” prosthetic, mechanical and animatronic effects. Call me old fashioned but I just don’t buy it. They don’t have nearly the same visceral power or palpable impact as effects which are engineered and executed in front of the camera and filmed!
For a director who says he loves his old school, Rob Zombie used too much CGI for my liking
Take for example the “re-imagining” (Hmph! Re-imagine my arse!) of Day of the Dead (2008). It has some token prosthetic make-up on the zombie faces adding wounds and lacerations, but the camera never lingers long enough to appreciate the effects work (probably because the make-up wasn’t that good in the first place). But virtually all the gore and blood effects have been CGI-ed. It’s abysmal.
You never really feel that horrified, even though zombie heads are being lopped off left right and centre. And the actually colour and consistency of the blood is not realistic enough, it’s this weird hue and looks like kinda gloopy. Okay, okay, so there are dozens of horror movies that don’t get the blood the right colour and consistency and aren’t using CGI. But at least they’re mixing a batch up every day and preparing squibs!
Nothin' like a zombie mum slidin' her fingers through a nurse's cheeks!
Damn, I could tell you a few things about fake blood. I worked on Peter Jackson's Braindead (1991) and there was more blood being pumped on set than any other horror movie up to that point, possibly still holds a record. The zombie massacre finale (which took around two weeks to film) left the interior house set stinking something chronic; a sickly sweet smell that if you were unlucky to be hungover on set (and crew frequently were) you were in for a rough day at work.
Nothin' like a zombie nurse chewin' the lips off a priest!
The blood was made up of a special formula that included corn syrup, starch, and red food colouring. It was quite brilliant actually. It looked damn realistic! But it was a nightmare to clean off anything it came into contact with, apart from skin. Sounds like real blood to me.
One day I was hanging around with the special effects boys and they were setting up one of the pressurised gallons of blood in preparation to pump blood on set. Several of us were close by when the technician fiddling with the gauge uttered a very ominous “Uh-oh!” quickly followed by a, “Everybody get back! Now!” Suddenly the top of the vessel burst and a gallon of blood jetted everywhere. Thankfully I avoided being doused in the red sauce, but boy, what a sight to behold that was; a huge geyser of fake blood exploding like a scarlet volcano!
The chestburster from Alien ... 'nuff said
Movies such as Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982), George Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), and Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) could not be the brilliantly and viscerally powerful horror movies they are if their special effects make-up work had been digitally generated by a computer. It’s a simple fact. By having the effects work actually there with the actors in three dimensions being caught on film (or on digital video as will be the case more and more) the end result is so much more resonant.
The Thing ... You gotta be fucking kidding!
It should be that when an effect is simply too difficult to achieve convincingly through the use of prosthetics or mechanics, that’s when you employ the digital artists, and only then. But of course, it’s a cost cutting measure these days. It’s actually cheaper to have a couple of people sitting in front of a computer punching numbers and letters into a keyboard and fiddling with a mouse than it is to have a crew of technicians armed with an array of hardware and soft and hard materials, stanind by on-set. It’s software vs. hardware. And the soft option wins.
It's what's under Ray Liotta's cap that really counts
I’ll finish with a fine example of when CGI effects are used intelligently: the dinner dénouement in Hannibal (2003). There was no way Ridley Scott could’ve shown in the same wide shot the real Ray Liotta talking and moving whilst Anthony Hopkins sliced slivers of Ray’s brain from his exposed cranium and popped them into a little sauté pan. Bon appetite!
Here's an example of old school effects and just how brilliant they are. They don't make 'em like this anymore:
Jesus H. Christ in a fucking Hummer, where do I start?! I’m confounded by the sheer audacity in which the producers (thirteen of the idiots!) tore to shreds any respect for George Romero’s landmark original movie Day of the Dead (1985). This so-called “re-imagining” (as described on the DVD back cover) is an absolute travesty! I wouldn’t be so fired up if it was just your average blundering misfire of an attempt at a zombie flick, but this actually has an opening credit which states “Based on the Motion Picture Day of the Dead by George A. Romero”, and there lies the tip of my lament, Romero’s original is my favourite zombie movie.
It gets worse. Directed by Steve Miner, who was responsible for the first two dreadful sequels to 1980's Friday the 13th (although the MPAA did cut most of the best stuff out of Part 2), as well as the trash House (1986) and the ill-conceived Warlock (1989), not to mention the producer of television’s teen-soap Dawson’s Creek. Partly because it was obviously shot on HD-video, and partly because of Miner’s visual style, the movie looks like television (hardly surprising then that it’s been shunted straight-to-DVD). Hideously garish opening credits pixelate as they move down the screen (cheap opening credit design is always a good sign as to whether a movie will be good or bad).
Mena - what was I thinking?? - Suvari as Sarah
Miner directs like he’s got an itch he can’t scratch; speed-ramping the zombie action every chance he can, whip-panning like an ADD kid, and generally paying no regard to any of the zombie movie rules or conventions, or even to any logic or reason. Okay, so rules are made to be broken, and I’ll be the first to admit that, but when you throw the rule book out the window with such arrogance you will certainly feel the wrath of horrorphiles.
Zack Snyder’s “re-imagining” of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) managed to balance between creating a viable new interpretation of the original premise whilst adding new flavour and a very particular element of cinematic chutzpah which the original lacked. I actually think Snyder’s version is superior, but I’ll concede I’m probably in the minority with that opinion.
Ving - I'll pretend I wasn't in this! - Rhames as Captain Rhodes
In Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) the zombies didn’t shuffle along like the Romero dead we know and love, they jogged, they even ran. But they were still thick as bricks. In Steve Miner’s Day of the Dead, not only do they run, they fucking sprint, and they jump and run along ceilings like fucking Spider-Man! What the fuck?! They’re infected with a bio-toxic rage (28 Days Later anyone?) and have become super-human, then do pointless things like dragging their victims off down the road. Zombies don’t drag victims off; they chow down on the damn spot!
Nick - where's my damn hipflask?! - Cannon as Salazar
This Day of the Dead feels like an unintentional parody. But the movie is played straight. Mena Suvari plays Sarah; she’s part of the military operation trying to quarantine her small Colorado town after a nasty bio-hazard. Ving Rhames plays Rhodes, her superior. There’s also a Doctor Logan (Matt Rippy) and even soldiers named Salazar (Nick Cannon) and Bud (Stark Sands), which is close enough to Bub (the featured zombie-soldier in Romero’s movie). These character names are the only links to the original movie. Yes, it is outrageously tenuous at best. Oh, and that the survivors end up in a military bunker and try to make their way to a missile launch silo.
Ving Rhames was in the remake of Dawn of the Dead also, and it’s blatantly obvious the producers have used him to confuse less-savvy audiences into thinking this is a direct sequel. He has second top-billing but has about fifteen minutes screen time tops. The only choice moment he has is when he eats his own eyeball then scurries after Sarah on half-devoured legs.
AnnaLyne - I knew my extensive weapons training would come in handy! - McCord as teenager Nina
In attempting to explain the zombie plague as a military bio experiment gone horribly awry destroys any of Romero’s supernatural mystery which binds his movies together in an essential atmospheric otherworldliness. This Day of the Dead has no atmosphere. It has no fear, full stop. The zombie make-up is dreadful, the dialogue is dire, and the dénouement is diabolically bad.
Stark Sands - yup that's my name! - as Bud
Key producers Boaz Davidson (who has more b-grade trash to his name than you can shake a severed arm at) and James Glen Dudelson (who produced and directed the inexplicable and excreable straight-to-DVD Day of the Dead 2: Contagion a few years ago, and yes, the concept is totally screwy) have cheapened out and employed CGI-effects for most, if not all, of the gore effects. There are plenty of beheadings and splattered blood, all of which has that distinctly added-in-later look of computer generated effects. For the most part, I hate it. It should only be used if a prosthetic or mechanical effect could not do the job better (but don’t get me started on that …). To add insult to injury the zombies disintegrate in fire, like the fucking vampire undead! Argghh!
The survivors (my sincerest apologies if I’m spoiling the plot for you) Sarah, her brother Trevor (Michael Welch), his girlfriend Nina (AnnaLyne McCord, the movie’s token eye-candy), and the very annoying Salazar, eventually get the hell out of dodge and end up in a military bunker, but not before stocking up at the local gun store where they conveniently find automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Trevor and Nina immediately know how to handle their hardware, gee, how damn convenient is that? Yup, this movie is real stupid, but in that frustratingly arrogant way.
A miscellaneous zombie displays her contempt
Oh, did I mention the movie was shot in Bulgaria with an entirely Bulgarian crew? Also the movie was finished months and months ago, but it ran into a troubled post-production and subsequent distribution problems; further proof that the spoiled brew of producers were floundering with a flatulent insult of a movie. Hmmm, have I been vitriolic enough?
Jeffrey Reddick’s pitiful screenplay steals more from 28 Weeks Later than Romero’s Day of the Dead. Of course 28 Weeks Later eats this corpulent piece of rotten flesh for breakfast. If you’re a zombie purist (if there is such a thing) then avoid this like the plague.
Exactly what I felt like doing after this putrid excuse of a movie
Present day: In a seedy bar in a Eastern European town ravaged by war, a sly businessman Hunt (Julian Wadham) hires an ex-marine DC (Ray Stevenson) to assemble a crack team of ex-soldiers (read: borderline criminals) to protect him on a mysterious journey into dangerous territory. Their mission is to scope out an old military bunker.
Once at the outpost, the men make a horrific discovery dating back to WWII. Amid the carnage, they find something even more unsettling and disturbing – a survivor. As unknown assailants attack the soldiers stationed above ground, Hunt reveals the real truth behind the mission, and D.C. and his men find themselves trapped in a claustrophobic and terrifying scenario
Watching the news footage of the destruction and havoc Mother Nature wreaked upon Burma I was reminded of a terrible bad dream I had a year or so ago. It wasn’t quite a nightmare, in that I wasn’t jolted awake by the sheer terror of it, but it was so vivid and realistic that it haunted me for days, even weeks, after.
In the dream I was sightseeing with members of my family and some old friends. The city was a huge sprawling metropolis, like some kind of exotic Babylonian concrete jungle. It was both futuristic and ancient, with massive skyscrapers, bustling plazas and temple-like structures all conjoined in a strange urban architectural brew. There were thousands of people too. The city was over-crowded. Perhaps we were somewhere in the future …? It certainly felt like the surrounds of a progressive society
“You’re traveling through another dimension …” Crazy thing is I never saw Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983) when it came out, and never got round to seeing it n VHS. I finally saw it the other night on a new re-mastered DVD, twenty-five years after it came out. Four talented directors, four tales from the supernatural dimension Rod Serling coined The Twilight Zone … dah-dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dah!
The original television series began in 1959 and was a huge success. It had its rivals such as The Outer Limits and Night Gallery, but The Twilight Zone was always the show people remembered, especially its ironic twists and strict moral code. It was inevitable a big screen version would be made, but it took a while
Here’s a splash of old with a soaking of the new; from Cronenberg’s tale of maternal rage to one of the many early 80s slasher remakes that are beginning to emerge and will continue to do so over the next couple of years. Still, the art work rocks, so I’m cool with it.
… except the Phelps family, the most hated family in America.
Clever and hilarious investigative journalist Louis Theroux lived with the extended Phelps family in Kansas, attended their Westboro Baptist Church, and listened to Fred Phelps, aka Gramps, the head pastor, preaching the angry Word of God. Very scary stuff!
The horror genre in cinema tends to polarise audiences. Actually that’s not entirely true. There are the hardcore True Believers (horrorphiles like myself) who favour the darker, often more visceral movies, and there are those who prefer their horror to be more on the suggestive tip, ie psychological horror, or the supernatural.
Graphic body split from Videodrome
When you break it down to the nuts and bolts there’s your horror and your terror. These two elements are essential ingredients to the cinematic mechanics of the genre, but they’re also what polarises audiences. Many will argue that that the blood and gore element is unnecessary, and that tension and atmosphere is paramount. I’ll agree that tension and atmosphere is very important – crucial even – but that there is definitely a place for graphic violence
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