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"I RECOGNISE TERROR AS THE FINEST EMOTION AND SO I WILL TRY TO TERRORISE THE READER. BUT IF I CANNOT TERRIFY, I WILL TRY TO HORRIFY, AND IF I CANNOT HORRIFY, I'LL GO FOR THE GROSS-OUT. I'M NOT PROUD." --- STEPHEN KING ::::::::::::: Spoilers for plot points and resolutions can occur within my movie reviews with or without warning. Read at your own risk.

Shutter Island

March 4th 2010 23:41
Shutter Island movie poster
“God gave us violence to wage in his honour.”

Martin Scorsese, arguably the greatest living American director, has delivered some of the finest examples of bravura cinema storytelling ever put to celluloid; Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, Goodfellas, Cape Fear (1991), Casino, and The Departed, movies that expose the most potent and fragile elements of humanity; dark and resonant studies of character, faith and betrayal, loyalty and deception … and the glorious beast of violence.

Although Scorsese has worked with original screenplays, he frequently prefers to direct a story adapted from a novel, painting his own shades on the story’s multi-layered levels (A Martin Scorsese Picture). Shutter Island (2010) is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane and has been adapted for the screen by Laeta Kalogridis (who penned Oliver Stone’s Alexander and the Russian sf-horror Night Watch – talk about chalk and cheese!) Scorsese has grabbed the baton and he runs hard; Shutter Island is the best movie he’s made since Casino.
Shutter Island Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio as Teddy
To analyse this movie in any great depth is to fiddle ungraciously with the movie’s great conceit. And therein lies The Rub. Scorsese is essentially taking the paranoid brilliance of Phillip K. Dick and injecting it into the intensity of a Hitchcockian psychological thriller, laced with Gothic overtones, and anchored in a dark historical context. Shutter Island is pure nightmare, a slow-burner that smolders away for two hours, leaving third-degree wounds across your psyche by movie’s end. Where had the reality ended and the insanity begun? Where had truth been masked and the façade of lies fabricated? Is everything clear cut, or is everything within a frame?
Shutter Island Mark Ruffalo
Mark Ruffalo as Chuck
It’s 1954 and US marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) are investigating the mysterious disappearance of a patient from a high security institution for the criminally insane called Ashecliffe, on ominous Shutter Island. On the island Teddy and Chuck met the affable head Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and his associate Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow). Almost immediately Teddy deduces that all is not what is seems. There are demons in Teddy’s closet and the onset of a ferocious hurricane seems to be aggravating them.
Shutter Island Ben Kingsley
Ben Kingsley as Dr. Cawley
Shutter Island Max von Sydow
Max von Sydow as Dr. Naehring
Like Phillip K. Dick’s famous novel Time Out of Joint and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Shutter Island plays on the audience’s suspicions, on the character’s paranoia, and on the duplicity of the narrative itself. On the surface the movie is a convoluted murder mystery, but once the surface is peeled back, the darkness gleams like a monster waiting in the abyss. Packaged in Scorsese’s usual high calibre production style; fluid, striking camerawork and cinematography, edgy and compelling use of music (a diverse range of sourced pieces from Mahler to Cage), elliptical editing (from Scorsese’s ever-loyal Thelma Schoonmaker), and a fantastic cast that sees DiCaprio put in some of the best work of his career, but also features a shining performance from Kingsley, solid work from Ruffalo, with the always excellent Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer and Elias Koteas (seemingly channeling De Niro) in small pivotal parts, and in one delightfully menacing scene (which felt like it was conjured from the mind of Roald Dahl), Ted Levine as the Warden.
Shutter Island Leonardo DeCaprio and Michelle Williams
Teddy has nightmares of his dead wife (Michelle Williams)
Shutter Island Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo
Teddy and Chuck confront the storm head on
Shutter Island is, however, very talky, and I felt some two-hander scenes went on too long, such as Teddy’s encounters with George Noyce (Jackie Earl Haley) and Rachel 2 (Clarkson). Perhaps this is reflective of screenwriter Kalogridis trying to harness too much of the novel’s literary weight? Apparently, however, there were considerable modifications made to Lehane’s original story to steer the screenplay toward being a more action-oriented “blockbuster” (and rightfully so the movie has given Scorsese and DiCaprio career highs in box office openings). Thankfully Scorsese’s innate ability to maintain audience interest simply due to the performances he elicits from his actors prevents the movie from becoming turgid or tedious.
Shutter Island lighthouse
Does the lighthouse contain the truth?
The last ten or so minutes reveals quite the masterminded operation that in itself questions everything we’ve witnessed as an audience. This is moviemaking as workshop; the artifice that continues to be sculpted as it is polished; the art of hallucination amidst the pretence of radical experimentation. If a patient is diagnosed as insane, then any rationale or defence mechanism offered by the patient must be taken with a grain of salt by those deemed sane. Shutter Island will no doubt reward and confound with repeat viewings.

“What would be worse? To live as a monster or die as a good man?”

Here's the trailer:

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Scrubbers

March 3rd 2010 23:48
Scrubbers DVD cover art
I remember watching the trailer for Scrubbers (1983) as part of the routine bunch of teasers for B-grade genre flicks that were thrown in front of the main feature on VHS releases back in the mid-80s. They were usually for movies that hadn’t done such good business at cinemas, and so distributors were hoping they’d make up some money on the home video circuit. It never really worked, as viewers would simply fast-forward through the lot. The imagery from the Scrubbers trailer was stored in the grime in the back of my mind. Until just recently.

Co-written by Roy Minton, who penned the brilliant, but disturbing Scum (1979), a sordid and sorrowful portrait of life in the English borstal system for young male offenders, Scrubbers is the borstal for young women, the term ‘scrubbers’ being slang for an undesirable person (think Richard E. Grant screeching it drunkenly to the schoolgirls passing by in Withnail and I), however, there are a few scenes of the inmates down on their knees with hard brush and soapy water.

Directed by Swedish glamour actor Mai Zetterling and produced by Handmade Films (George Harrison’s film company), Scrubbers has a theatrical quality to it, partly due to the movie’s low-fi production values, but also in the way Zetterling directs the scenes and actors, often emphasizing an almost pantomime element. While by no means as realistic, in terms of the violence, as its male counterpart Scum, nor as convincing in terms of the acting, there is a sense of conviction that emanates strongly through the whole movie. Many of the actors had actually done time, and look genuinely hardened.
Scrubbers Katy Ingram and Amanada York
Eddie (Katy Ingram) protects Carol (Amanda York) from the bullies
The central narrative focuses on the plight of two women, Carol (Amanda York) and Annetta (Chrissie Cotterill), who at movie’s start have escaped their incarceration and are on the run. It doesn’t last long before they’re both back behind bars in a new borstal. Annetta is desperate to see her baby girl and won’t have a bar of anyone telling her otherwise. Carol is also desperate, for affection. She gazes in distress at her ex-girlfriend Doreen (Debby Bishop), a striking-looking lesbian, and her new lover, the extroverted Shaw (Caroline Needs), both cavorting in the prison bath. Carol achs for something elusive. Later she is befriended by Eddie (Kate Ingram), a butch dyke, who is compelled to protect the fragile Carol.

There are some striking similarities between Scrubbers and Scum, that one could even accuse the screenwriting of Scrubbers as being simply a rip-off of the critically lauded Scum, right down to the lonely suicide, and the one-on-one climatic confrontation between Annetta and Carol in the kitchens. What stands out most memorably from the movie is the vernacular of the inmates, the banter and exchange of cigarettes and whatnot via swinging strings from their respective cell windows, the dirty sing-songs aimed at maintaining some level of morale.

Scrubbers Dana Gillespie
Dana Gillespie as borstal screw Budd
Scrubbers is very much a curio, not as hard-hitting as it would have been when it was first released, but it still carries an emotional resonance, and the nightmare of incarceration - of being slowly and steadily institutionalized (as is evident in the scene when Eddie is released and stalls just outside the detention centre) – is etched in the filthy white walls. This is the kind of movie that would be interesting to remake, updating the story to reflect the current state of the British juvenile justice system. I’m sure the level of bitching and brawling is just as nasty and prevalent, but a contemporary version could lift the acting game and production values to make it all the more harrowing.

So where did the majority of these actors end up I wonder? Kathy Burke (Glennis), was notable in Gary Oldman’s searing study of violence Nil By Mouth (1997), Pam St. Clement (Strapper) went on to star in popular UK series EastEnders, Miriam Margoyles (Jones) featured in several Blackadder episodes, while Dana Gillespie (Budd) was already known as a blues singer. But I want to know where Amanda York disappeared to. And what happened to the rather fetching tartan-skirted lesbian, who performs the Punch & Judy puppet sketch in black lipstick with Doreen? There’s very little about Scrubbers online, even imdb.com has no external reviews or pics available, which is frustrating.

As it was very difficult to find stills from the movie here’s the trailer and two excerpts:


Here’s the Hellhole Bitches chant and dirty limerick scene:


And for those with stronger stomachs here’s the movie’s pivotal gross-out shock scene from the same psycho freaks sequence:


Scrubbers DVD is courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment, many thanks!
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The Hurt Locker

March 3rd 2010 02:55
The Hurt Locker movie poster
Fear as a fix, fear as a friend, fear as a foe, fear as a formidable film: The Hurt Locker (2009) is one of the best war movies of the past twenty years, boldly and apologetically portraying the soldier as adrenalin junkie, embracing war’s terror with open arms, sweating profusely in the heat of the moment, making the decision between red, blue or yellow, and snipping those wires with a simple pair of pliers in order to defuse a bomb capable of destroying anything and everything within a 300 metre radius; this is the job of the bomb technician, those precious few that dice with death within the hurt locker.
The Hurt Locker Jeremy Renner
Jeremy Renner as Sgt. James
Director Kathryn Bigelow is a Hollywood rarity, a female director who has been nominated for a Best Director at this year’s upcoming Academy Awards. Only three other women have been given that honour, although none actually won the award: Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion, and Sofia Coppola. Kathryn Bigelow deserves the acknowledgement; The Hurt Locker is sensational filmmaking, not to forget Bigelow made the superb vampire movie Near Dark (1987), and the guilty pleasure thriller Point Break (1990). Whether she manages to keep ex-hubbie James Cameron from repeating his 1997 success will be known in a week’s time.
The Hurt Locker Anthony Mackie
Anthony Mackie as Sgt. Sanborn
“Fear is clarifying. It forces you to put important things first and discount the trvial,” explains Bigelow in her director’s statement, “When I learned that these men [bomb technicians] volunteer for this dangerous work, and often grow so fond of it they can imagine doing nothing else, I knew I had found my next film.” Indeed this is an area of the army rarely, if ever, focused on in Hollywood war movies. But more significantly, the screenplay by Mark Boal, who experienced first hand the combat – and the bomb disposal units - in Iraq during a reporting trip, takes the opportunity to present the true colours of these unusually fearless men. Of course, there are many who loathe having to do the work, but then there are a “chosen few” who relish the intensity, the perversely precarious situation they put themselves in, suited up in the specialized bomb protection outfit (um, how much damage can it actually sustain per chance?), and getting down to the nitty-gritty.
The Hurt Locker Brian Geraghty
Brian Geraghty as Spc. Eldrich
Bomb disposal unit soldiers Specialist Eldrich (Brian Geraghty) and Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) have been given a new unit leader, SSG William James (Jeremy Renner), a cocky, reckless, but very skilled soldier. They have around 40 days left of their rotation in the sweltering Iraq heat. But it looks like James may well get them all killed with his gungho approach to disarming the proliferation of bombs scattered around the derelict cityscape.
The Hurt Locker bombs aplenty
Biting off more than you can chew?
The Hurt Locker fiddles with bravado and machismo, debunking with hardened irony the way soldiers interact and deal with the horror of close-combat. Director Bigelow is interested in the way an action movie can utilize potent emotional elements – in particular fear – and create a hybrid suspense movie that doesn’t deliver in ways conditioned audiences expect. This is one of the most palpably suspenseful movies I’ve seen in a long time, that isn’t tagged as a traditional thriller. The cinema verite narrative adds considerable visual verve, as does the restrained use of music, and a stunning sound design and mix.
The Hurt Locker Anthony Mackie and Jeremy Renner
Inbetween bombs the boys find time for a little sniper dispatch action
There is a quiet tragedy that seeps through the fabric of this powerful movie; the dissipation of love. Sergeant James during a brief spell at home with his wife and baby boy talks to his infant as he plays with him, explaining that as you grow older less and less things become important, until you discover you love only two or three elements in your life, or as James admits, just one thing. Having seen the disengaged conversation he had with his wife (Evangeline Lilly) just prior, and knowing the death wish passion in his eyes when he walks toward an unexploded bomb, the audience’s heart sinks, knowing too well, his wife and kid play second fiddle to his adrenalin addiction.
The Hurt Locker badda-boom
Too close for comfort?
The acting is uniformly excellent. There are three key appearances by Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes and David Morse, on-screen for less than ten minutes each, and these “cameos” all shine, but hats off to Mark Renner, Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie, all of whom deliver top notch work. The Hurt Locker instantly joins the classic ranks of dysfunctional and embattled war dramas such as Apocalypse Now, Gallipoli, Come and See, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Thin Red Line, with its own unconventional structure, based around individual moments rather than clinging to a traditional narrative arc.

Here's the trailer:

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Communion

March 2nd 2010 00:46
Communion movie poster
What a strange little movie this one is. Communion (1989) is based on the autobiographical book of the same name by sf writer Whitely Strieber (who wrote the novels Wolfen and The Hunger), who claimed to have had close encounters of the third kind; an alien abduction which intrigued everyone, but convinced no one. More than likely it was the result of a severe case of writer’s block and an over-heated imagination. The movie, directed by Australian Phillipe Mora, only fuels the writer’s fancies, including a cosmic boogie!

The events of the movie, which apparently really took place, are set around Christmas, 1985. Whitley (Christopher Walken jazz-riff acting and chewing scenery like it’s the last movie he’ll ever make!) takes his wife Anne (Lindsay Crouse), young son Andrew (Joel Carlson who is given all the wrong kind of dialogue), and two of their friends, Alex (Andreas Katsulas) and Sarah (Terri Hanauer), to their upstate New York mountain cabin. The weekend getaway doesn’t last very long when following a disturbing incident in the middle of the night freaks Alex out so badly (lots of big flood light action) he demands that they be driven back to the city after breakfast


[ Click here to read more ]
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Alice in Wonderland

February 26th 2010 04:39
Alice in Wonderland movie poster
Let’s get one thing straight! This is most definitely Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), and shouldn’t be confused with Lewis Carroll’s novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, as Tim Burton – and just as importantly, his screenwriter, Linda Woolverston, have taken great liberties with the famous tales, transposing the central characters and particular incidents into a playground realm for Tim Burton to manipulate his own tall stories. As a stand alone movie Alice in Wonderland is only partly successful, and as an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s work it isn’t anywhere near as engaging as it should be. And therein lies the Rub.
Alice in Wonderland Mia Wasikowska
Mia Waskowska as Alice
I’ve always had a problem with Tim Burton’s movies, well most of them. The ones I’ve enjoyed the most have been Peewee’s Big Adventure (which worked a treat back in my more hedonistic uni days), Mars Attacks! (I love how darkly funny and menacing it is), Ed Wood (his most emotionally resonant), and Sweeney Todd (normally I can’t stand musicals). I was never really a fan of Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I hated his take on Planet of the Apes. Batman Returns was okay (but that was probably because of Michelle Pfeiffer’s droll performance).
Alice in Wonderland Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter
I’ll admit I was excited when I first heard that Burton would be helming his own version of Alice in Wonderland, just as I was excited when I heard Guillermo del Toro was going to direct The Hobbit. They both had extraordinary imaginations and are capable of conjuring the most amazing imagery and fantastical realms. But very quickly into watching Alice in Wonderland, I realised the same problem I have with all those other movies of his, I was no waving with this one; it was failing to properly engage me, the storytelling, even the characters, despite how richly etched they are, were hollow, lacking soul. It’s like watching moving pictures, literally


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The Horseman

February 10th 2010 07:00
The Horseman movie poster
A grimy darkened street, a siren wails in the background, voices call out, a young girl walks nervously along the edge of the brick wall, past graffiti-strewn rollerdoors. She stops behind a large garbage container; she counts out her remaining dollars, tears rolling down her cheeks. She wipes them away and walks off. A van drives down a lonely stretch of road. The young girl is on her mobile making a life-changing call. The van pulls into a rural driveway and pulls up beside a small nondescript home. The young girl is being lead up some stairs in a warehouse, she looks nervous. The driver of the van is at the front door of the home, dressed as pest control. A man answers the door; the pest controller is ushered in and proceeds to beat the living daylights out of the man. He wants the truth: who was responsible for his daughter’s sexual degradation and subsequent death by overdose. His name is Christian and he’s about to descend into hell and take as many of the bastards down along the way …
The Horseman Peter Marshall
Peter Marshall as Christian
Young filmmaker Steven Kastrissios has delivered a powerhouse debut feature about as brutal and relentless a revenge flick as I’ve ever seen. The Horseman (2008) takes no prisoners and pulls no punches; it’s a hardboiled journey into the darkness of the soul where vengeance offers little in the way of consolation, only provides distraction from the pain of the loss of one so dear. It’s a low-budget, but technically superb movie. All of the production values are top notch; the making of featurette on the DVD reveals how the production team had employed ingenuity on such a tight budget and schedule using strictly local (Queensland) talent.
The Horseman Caroline Marohasy
Caroline Marohasy as Alice
The Horseman apparently is reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Christian must therefore be Death. Or perhaps War. He’s certainly gone into battle against those he sees are to be held accountable, but he’s also a determined harbinger of death. His teenage daughter Jessica is dead after having performed in a porn video and taken drugs with the men who performed in it with her. Christian proceeds to murder these men and those that were involved in the video’s distribution in an act of cleansing the world from these ruthless, heartless pornographers


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The Wolfman

February 8th 2010 23:50
The Wolfman movie poster
The Wolfman (2010), is Universal’s remake of their classic tale of the curse of lycanthropy, The Wolf Man (1941), and it certainly bears a striking similarity to much of the original’s look and premise. It has also been one of the most hotly anticipated horror movies (first announced four years ago with Benicio Del Toro, it’s final release date kept getting pushed back). I was at one of the very first screenings in the world last night (it doesn’t open in Los Angeles ‘til Friday) and although I enjoyed myself, I was impressed and disappointed in equal measure.

The first disappointment came a while ago when I read that director Mark Romanek had left the production. He’d have certainly injected the movie with some suitably dark subtextual storytelling skills, and arguably, he’d have elicited more passionate performances from his three leads. Replacing him was Joe Johnston, director of such juvenile fare as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji, a director known for his commercially reliable use of lush special effects-driven pedestrian storytelling. He doesn’t fail to deliver precisely that with The Wolfman
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A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

February 4th 2010 23:48
Lizard in a Woman's Skin movie poster
The late Italian director and legendary gorehound Lucio Fulci is best known for his Romero rip-off Zombi 2 (1979, AKA Zombie Flesh Eaters), as it was known in Italy, where Dawn of the Dead (1978) had been re-titled Zombi ... yes, confusing, I know. However Fulci had been making movies for years before he descended into the surrealist, phantasmogorical mire of his 70s work. Before supernatural incoherence completely overwhelmed his sensibilities he made a handful of giallo psycho-thrillers, the Italian "yellow" brand of lurid murder mysteries, lurid being the operative word.
Lizard in a Woman's Skin Florinda Bolkan
Florinda Bolkan as Carol Hammond
Lizard in a Woman's Skin Anita Strindberg
Anita Strindberg as Julia Durer
A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) is the best known of his giallo movies, but it’s not his best movie. Made with the English-language market in mind, the movie takes place in London and features less Italian actors than normal. In the US it was cut and re-titled Schizoid, while in France it was known as The Whores Go to Hell. Fulci directs more competently than his latter work, but the inherent trappings of the murder-mystery genre weigh heavily on the movie and despite some alluring elements the movie is overlong and frequently tedious. Still, a brilliant title, a sensational pursuit set-piece, and several sensationalist, sexadelic dream/nightmare sequences lift the movie’s game considerably.
Lizard in a Woman's Skin Silvia Monti
Silvia Monti as Deborah
Lizard in a Woman's Skin Florinda Bolkan and Anita Strindberg
Carol is seduced by Julia ... In reality or her dreams?
The plot is at once ludicrously simply and painfully convoluted; and therein lies the Rub. The giallo movies reply on way too much dialogue and supposed detective work, and precious little action and suspense. Dario Argento made the two finest giallo movies: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and Deep Red (1975). But Argento injected his murder-mysteries with shards of the supernatural, and drenched his movies in the most memorably creepy atmospheres. Curiously it wasn’t until Fulci launched into his full-blown horror movies that he began to command a most impressive hold on surrealist atmosphere, with his rough-cut diamond from Hell, The Beyond (1981), being the flawed jewel in his crown


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Sakebi (Retribution)

February 2nd 2010 05:27
Retribution Japanese movie poster
Retribution (2006) is a J-Horror ghost tale that melds with a police crime story, written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who made the original Kairo (Pulse, 2001). The literal English translation of the original title, Sakebi, means “shriek” or “the scream”, yet it is known as Dark Crimes (Argentina), The Ghost That Never Forgets (Peru), I Punish (Italy), and Victim of an Hallucination (Brazil). It’s international title is Retribution, which holds dear to its central theme.
Retribution Koji Yakusho
Noboru Yoshioka (Kôji Yakusho) is a police detective based in Tokyo. He has a beautiful girlfriend, Harue (Manami Konishi), yet both have a very detached relationship (I actually thought she was a call-girl from the way they interacted). Yoshioka is investigating a murder, a woman in a red dress found head down in a small pool of saltwater on a disused landfill. He finds a button in another puddle nearby. Another murder has similar circumstances, a young man found head down in a container full of saltwater, also on the landfill. No leads, no substantial clues, but Yoshioka feels they are connected by more than just the elements.
Retribution puddle and victim
Stranger still, Yoshioka feels he is being viewed as a potential suspect, since he owns a trenchcoat missing the same button, and he owns yellow cord like that which was used to strangle the young man. Creeping him out even further the detective starts having visions of the woman in the red dress. She is haunting him, but he doesn’t recognize her, he doesn’t understand her spectre’s motive. Who killed her? What is his connection? Even Yoshioka’s partner doesn’t have anything much to offer. They interrogate a man who confesses to murdering the woman in red, so why won’t the ghost leave Yoshioka alone


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Yogen (Premonition)

February 1st 2010 03:29
Premonition DVD cover art
Premonition (2004), a supernatural J-Horror directed by Norio Tsuruta who made Ring 0: Birthday (2000), has a great premise and some excellent set-pieces, but is marred by overwrought acting and a very ordinary visual narrative that makes the whole movie feel like a television episode to some less-than-stellar Twilight Zone-styled series (which curiously it is: J-Horror Theatre Series 2).

Hideki Satomi (Hiroshi Mikami) is traveling in the car with his wife Ayaka (Noriko Sakai) and daughter Nana (Hana Inoue). His laptop runs out of battery power, and he urgently needs to email some work documents, so his wife returns to a payphone by the side of the country road where he can make the transmission through dial up


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Peeping Tom

January 28th 2010 03:12
Peeping Tom movie poster
Released the same year as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell, was also a movie years ahead of its time, a psychological thriller that operates with the dark machinations and severity of a horror. Powell had garnered enormous critical acclaim for numerous films he made with Emeric Pressburger in the 40s and 50s, but he went alone on Peeping Tom, and it proved to be the kiss of death, effectively ending his career in England. He made several other features before his death in 1990, but none came close to capturing the disturbing slow-burn subversive power of Peeping Tom.
Peeping Tom Carl Boehm
Carl Boehm as Mark Lewis
Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is a strange, lonely, sexually-repressed man working as a focus-puller for a British film studio. He moonlights shooting “cheesecake” pics in his mezzanine apartment for the seedy newsagent on street level below, whilst harbouring his own directorial desires; a documentary on the expression of extreme human fear. It is this unhealthy obsession with the elusiveness of mortality and his intent on capturing it on film that has lead Lewis to become a murderer.
Peeping Tom Anna Massey
Anna Massey as Helen
Peeping Tom Maxine Audley
Maxine Audley as Helen's mother
His twisted state of mind, kept in check (just) by the mundane routine of his day job, and the amorous curiosity of his apartment building neighbour, Helen (Anna Massey), who lives with her suspicious blind mother (Maxine Audley), dates back to the psychological testing of his scientist father when Lewis was just a boy serving as his father’s subject for cold-blooded experiments in terror. Of course, now as a grown man, Lewis is a chip off the old block … but he’s fallen much further. Lewis is a determined documenteur, recording women’s contorted features and dying gasps on his portable 16mm camera after he stabs them with the blade concealed in his tripod. But like all obsessions, it will eventually consume him


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Reazione a Catena (Chain Reaction)

January 25th 2010 00:26
Reazione a Catena movie poster
Reazione a Catena (1971), or A Bay of Blood and Twitch of the Death Nerve, as it is most popularly known, was Mario Bava’s most controversial movie. It is also his most influential, and is considered by horrorphiles as the blueprint to the modern slasher flick. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974) was the first American movie to copy the stylistic of an unseen killer, using their POV as a visual motif, and featuring mischievous adolescents in peril who die in gruesome fashion. Then John Carpenter pared it back and made a box office killing with Halloween (1978) and the stalk’n’slash sub-genre was well and truly established.

Bava wanted another opportunity to work with actor Laura Betti, and the two of them cooked up a story concept (an elderly heiress is killed for control of her fortunes and thus relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field) which they named Odore di Carne (The Stench of Flesh). Later as the movie went into production it had working titles that translated as Thus Do We Learn to be Evil, and That Will Teach Them to be Bad. Finally the title of Reazione a Catena (Chain Reaction) was settled on for its premiere at the 1971 Avoriaz film festival. Bava’s old pal Christopher Lee was in the audience and was apparently so disgusted with the graphic violence that he left the screening in protest. The movie went on to win the festival award for Best Makeup and Special Effects (to the legendary Carlo Rambaldi


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Cronos

January 20th 2010 23:40
Cronos movie poster
Guillermo Del Toro’s feature debut, Cronos (1993), is a peculiar and arresting diversion on the vampire mythology with a stunning lead performance, fantastic production design, and a deliciously macabre sense of irony; up there in the pantheon of great vampire movies.

In 1536 an alchemist builds an extraordinary mechanism that encapsulates a truly exotic scarab, an insect capable of providing its user (parasite) with eternal life, as long as they continue to abide by its demanding usage. The Cronos Device, as its known, survives its maker until 1997 where it ends up in the antique store of aging Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi). Later, Jesus with his granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath) as witness discovers the device’s gift of youthful vigor and is immediately addicted. Meanwhile a wealthy, greedy, but dying tycoon, Mr. De La Guardia (Claudio Brook), knows of the Cronos Device’s existence and he sends his disgruntled nephew Angel (Ron Perlman) out to fetch it, at any cost, before the blood congeals


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Daybreakers

January 20th 2010 03:47
Daybreakers movie poster
We’ve been waiting some time for this movie. I seem to remember first hearing about production on this at least two years ago. I believe it was in post-production hell for quite a while, and it hasn’t done the movie any favours. Daybreakers (2010) tries way too hard and is ultimately mutton dressed as lamb.

Australian directors Michael and Peter Spiereg first came to attention with a low-budget zombie comedy called Undead (2003) which impressed some critics and minority audiences. It featured some inventive visual effects, but was too silly and pretentious for my tastes. The brothers background in visual effects carried over into their next feature when Undead, and their pitch for a science fiction-vampire tale, impressed Hollywood executives. But it took seven years to get the movie made


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Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film poster art
The first major documentary tracing the history of an American institution: the stalk’n’slash flick. Going to Pieces (2006) is based on the book of the same name by Adam Rockoff, published 2002, and has been adapted for the screen by J. Albert Bell, Rachel Belofsky, Michael Derek Bohusz, and Rudy Scalese.

I haven’t read Rockoff’s book, but I intend to purchase it for my own literary archives. It’s curious to note he penned an original screenplay, Wicked Lake (2008) - which was re-worked by another screenwriter – about a bunch of young lesbian witches on a weekender of carnage, which I’m still waiting to be released on DVD under down under (so I can indulge in what looks to be some seriously deep trash), but I digress


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The American Nightmare

January 18th 2010 04:00
The American Nightmare DVD cover art
“I think there is something about the "American Dream", the sort of Disney-esque dream, if you will, of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, God-fearing and doing good whenever they can; that sort of expectation, and the flipside of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter. I think that gives American horror films in some ways a kind of an additional rage …”

The American Nightmare (2000) is a concise, unpretentious and enlightening celebration and examination of several seminal American-produced horror movies and their respective directors (with the exception of David Cronenberg who is Canadian, and special effects make-up guru Tom Savini) from the late 60s to the late 70s directed by Adam Simon


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Thirst

January 11th 2010 00:41
Thirst DVD cover art
A vampire movie with lots of baggage, the South-Korean Thirst (2009), directed by Park Chan-wook (who made the masterful Oldboy), is a difficult kettle of putrid fish, and not a wholly successful stew. The darkly humourous tone sits uncomfortably with its crooked faith whilst straddling the classic vampire mythology it becomes a farce, and frequently falls flat on its face.

Thirst slapped me in the face with disappointment. Having waited all year to see it, my expectations were admittedly very high, especially considering how powerful and potent his mutant revenge flick Oldboy is. He’d raised the bar so high it was going to be very hard to top it. I haven’t yet seen the other two movies in his “revenge” trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Kind-Hearted Ms. Geum-ja AKA Lady Vengeance), but plan to


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Zombieland

December 23rd 2009 03:50
Zombieland teaser movie poster
I’d heard mixed reports about Zombieland (2009), and I almost made the decision to catch up with on DVD, but I realised that was very lazy of me. In order to compile my year’s best nightmare movies I would have to see it before the DVD came out, no excuses.

Zombie and vampire movies are a dime a dozen these days; America, UK, Europe, Australia, every man and his undead dog are making a gutmuncher or fangbarer flick. So, it’s inevitable that there’ll be more dross than decency. I’ll always one to call a spade a spade, and I’m not about to take any prisoners here; Zombieland disappointed me. I was enjoying it, and then as the movie progressed I became more and more critical. By the end I had more problems with it than highlights


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Deadgirl

December 18th 2009 03:32
Deadgirl movie poster
I really wanted to like Deadgirl (2008), but it ended up leaving a sour taste in my mouth, not because I was offended by it, but because I went in rather enjoying the first half an hour, but it quickly began to disappoint me, then it began to annoy me, and finally it had almost wholly let me down. I had high expectations I’ll admit, as I’d been seduced by the title and poster design and from a couple of reports saying the movie was strange and subversive.

Strange, yes. Subversive, yeah. But these elements are outweighed by an inherent trashiness and silliness that rears its ugly head less than half-way into the movie, not long after an element of absurdist humour also springs forth; dark, yes, but altogether incongruous in tone. It made sense when I discovered that the screenwriter, Trent Haaga, worked for the Troma production company. I don’t like the Troma style (except for Street Trash


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Satanás

December 16th 2009 23:35
Satanas movie poster
Satanás (which in Spanish means Satan) is a co-production between Colombia and Mexico, written for the screen and directed by Andrés Baiz. It’s based on the book by Mario Mendoza, which in turn was inspired by the true crime events which occurred in the city of Bogotá, Colombia, in 1986. Known as the Pozzetto Massacre, a Vietnam veteran, Campo Elias Delgado, murdered 29 people including his mother and his teenage English student before shooting dead twenty diners at local restaurant Pozzetto.

In Baiz’s version of events three parallel stories are interwoven; the central narrative follows Eliseo (Damián Alcázar), a lonely, embittered ex-solider in his 40s who still lives with his cranky mother (Teresa Gutiérrez). He visits the library and reads voraciously, his favourite being Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He tutors English to pretty teenaged Natalia (Martina García) and has developed a crush on her


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