Horrifying Movie Reviews
Remember, folks, SPOILERS
Amytville Horror
Let me reiterate what every other review site out there has said (and better to, since they can actually write). This is not based on a true story! It's all made up! Sure, the murders were real but none of the crazy supernatural stuff happened!
Taken as a purely fictional story, it's pretty darn good. Espically the 'flee wildly' scene at the end. It probably only affected me like that because I've moved so much.
Oddly, this is the one horror movie that my parents let us watch any day of the week, at any old age. Presumably because there was a distinct lack of gore.
Anaconda
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, John Voight and three dollars worth of CGI.
Paper thin characters and others are swallowed whole. Absolutely nothing original, except for the random interesting person, who of course gets eaten.
Bats
A typical "Insert mutated creature" eats people in "random small town". It's pretty good dialogue wise but otherwise pretty blah. Rent it if it's in the ninety-nine cent section.
Sliders fans will notice 'Maggie' and probably cheer when she is eaten. (I hated Maggie).
Blair Witch
Despite my bitching about the shaky camrea in the 'Traffic' entry, here, I didn't get ill. Ah well, I guess it's because the camrea shook only during the action scenes. The people knew to keep it still when it was focusing on people.
Online, a lot of people were complaining about the plot points. They were wondering why the three just didn't pick a straight line and keep walking.
I hate when that happens. I avoid the alt.tv* and movie newsgroups. People just don't pay attention to the movie. Then they bitch about the plot points they missed. I'm not paranoid enough to think they are deliberatly ignoring parts of the movie when they complain. I wish they were. The level of dumbness just staggers me. (Yes, I realize sometimes people just don't put two and two together but this happens even when everything is explained as if unto a two year old).
Blair Witch 2
"Bob, we've finished reviewing all those amateur made videos fans of the first movie made after it came out."
"Good, good. You got the worst one out of the pile?"
"Right here. It drove Stan insane. He's at home, sedated and screaming about illusions and bad acting."
"Good. Good. Let's sprinkle in some horribly impossible plot elements, a few dues ex machinas, actors who couldn't pretend to be dead, improbable settings and the inabillity of anyone to use the phone no matter what horrible things happen. And produce it on a budget of twelve dollars. Use my cousin who has an AOL account for the computer stuff".
Bless This Child
Starring: Kim Basinger and Cute Child #354.
What was the point of the flying evil things around the church if they didn't keep the cops out?
That basically sums up the whole movie. Scary things that look good but don't make sense when you think about them.
Blob, The
This 1988 remake is phenomenal. One of my favorite scenes is the gabber in the movie theatre being eaten.
Like 'Mimic', 'Blob' is one of the few horror movies where the kids are NOT invulnerable. MWA HA HA HA HA!!!
Day Of The Dead
Zombies in a mall! I watched this half-asleep and I now own a copy. I'm wary of watching this again because it was awful in my addled state. I heard it has a genius behind it's low budget but still...
Deep Rising
Starring: Treat Williams, Anthony Heald and Jean Grey.
Horror by the numbers. Most of the time it's bad. Here, it's a good thing. You can turn off your mind for an hour or so.
Fishy type things munch on a cruise ship full of rich people. Mercernaries hire some good guys to motor them out to the boat to steal from the now-munched rich people. Theives and crewpeople wander the boat, getting into trouble and trying to figure out what the heck happened. It's "Posiden's Adventure" meets "Aliens".
You don't have to think, but the spurts of originiallity are cool. A mercanary gets an axe to the head by a confused survivor. A favored character seems to have died at one point but survives due to a surfboard shown for one second on screen. (Okay, you have to think a little).
One last note. The cover box for the movie gives away half of the ending. You'd think that would spoil the whole movie but it doesn't.
By the way, Treat Williams is that guy who stars in every single straight-to-video movie out there. That is what he was built for.
End Of Days
Starring: Arnold Shwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney and a flying monkey made of fire.
Satan is coming to earth and if he does something or other right on New Years, he's gonna get a lot of power. Frankly, it's the same plot as 'Bless The Child' but without the annoying cute-child bits.
Friday The 13th
Starring: A lot of people you never head of and Kevin Bacon.
A group of rowdy teens plan to re-open Crystal Lake Campgrounds despite the rash of murders that happened there a while back. The murderer ain't quite done.
Jason movies, for the most part, are big on the suspense bits. They're also big on the breasteses and the repeating plot of Counselers trying to re-open the camp. Who keeps sending the kids up there? Jason's half-brother?
It took them about seven movies to actually send in goverment intervention. (See 'Jason Goes To Hell'). It finally dawned on them that the cops who keep answering the distress calls at Crystal Lake never come back.
The dead kids seem to be less of a concern. Just like in the "Nightmare" series. Freddy kills off the entire town's children and oops, no one notices?
Friday The 13th Part Who Knows Anymore: Jason Takes Manhattan
Starring: Starring Jensen Daggett, Scott Reeves and a big, rusty boat.
Despite the movie allegedly taking place in New York, the actual city is not reached until the last thirty minutes of so.
Friday The 13th: Jason Goes To Hell
So do we.
From Dusk Till Dawn
Starring: George Clooney, Jullitte Lewis, Quentin Tarintino and a snake.
When a vampire movie gets a 'Making Of' released as a seperate movie in an of itself, you know it has to be good. There are not enough words in the English language to describe how damn cool this movie is. (Stay away from the seuqels).
Gate, The
Starring: Christa Denton, Louis Tripp and Deacon Frost.
Two young people accidentally uncover a portal to hell in the backyard.
I love this movie to death. I wish I purchase it.
Best Scene: "You've been BAD!"
Worst Scene: When the sister doesn't notice the dead man reflected in her mirror. As there was no dead man actually in the sister's room, well...this skeeved me out for years. I wouldn't step into darkened bathrooms. Great, now I'm probably going to start doing it again. I'm so impressionable.
Halloween 3
Cursed masks make head split open and horrible things crawl out. A fate I was wishing for halfway through the movie.
Halloween: H20
Michael takes twenty years to return. He should've waited.
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Starring: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sara Michelle Gellar and boobies.
The entire movie can be summed up in one scene. One of the victims is running like mad to escape the killer. The killer is walking very slowly. The victim enters an alley and sees a parade at the other end. Hundreds of people! Yay! Safety! Or so you would think.
The victim STOPS MOVING. SHE. STOPS. VOLUNTARILY.
Slow-walker catches up to the victim and bam! Another victim. (The murder happened behind a stack of tires, if you can believe it, so the people in the parade saw nothing. Why there was a stack of tires in the alley, who knows? Maybe the killer got the fire department first).
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
I cheered when the black dude bought it. He was such a jerk.
IT by Stephen King
They forgot to ad the letters 'S' and 'H' in front of the title of this adapted version of the book about a group of people facing off against a horror as kid and later, as adults.
Langoliers by Stephen King
A group of plane passengers land in an empty terminal. There is no one around.
Yes, it was made for TV but it's fantastic and creepy and completely original.
Maximum Overdrive
Machines turn homicidal.
The movie is just loosely based on the book which for once, doesn't ruin the whole thing. You might want to close your eyes during the Little League scene, though.
Mimic
By the numbers horror set mainly in the sewers of New York. Cockaroaches are eatin' people. A few clever twists makes this worthwhile to watch if the rest of the 'Horror' section is picked through.
Night Of The Living Dead
Gave me terrible nightmares. A sign of a good movie.
I'm still not so sure about the remake.
Poltergiest 1 2 and 3
Don't watch for the plot. The plots make no sense. Watch for the scares because they are some of the finest scares ever.
Postmortem
Charlie Sheen vs. a serial killer. Watch for the crotchety detective being killed by snot.
Relic, The
A horror novel that is as good as the book, though completley different.
A beastie is roaming the corridors underneath the New York Natural History Museum. Watch it, but be sure to pick up the book too.
Scream
It's hard to describe this movie. What if Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino wrote a slasher pic?
Wes Craven is my lord and master.
I didn't really like how Nipple-Girl was killed but, ah well. A small complaint in an otherwise frightening movie.
Scream 2
Sidney Prescott is in college. Someone doesn't like what she did to the killer at the end of the first movie and they're out for revenge.
The plot has little to do with people who like horror, despite the previews. Still, it's a fun, scary, scream-out-loud (a rarity) slasher pic.
Scream 3
Just like 1 and 2 but without the suspense, realism or humor.
I can just part of a writer's meeting: "Hee, hee, hee. I know! Let's...let's...have a portable device that can imatate any person's voice! And...and *whuff* even when the characters learn they can't trust voices over the phone...they'll do what the voices say anyway!"
Shocker
An intense drama/action flick that takes a turn for the bizarre at the end.
If I could travel through television shows I wouldn't bother with previous commitments, I'd just situate myself on 'V.I.P.'.
Species
Me and my date laughed from beginning to end.
The Stand 1-4 by Stephen King
The made for TV version of this impressive novel follows this plague story as close as possible. I have it all on tape. Make sure the store actually carries both 1-2 and 3-4 if you want to rent it.
Stigmata
Was this supposed to be scary?
A cursed rosary is giving a New York punk girl terrible hallucinations and bleeding wounds. A down on his luck priest (never a happy priest, one liked by the bosses) is sent to help out. On the way he redeems himself. Ooooh.
Nice bit in the hospital after the first attack but afterwards, the concept of 'hospital' was lost on the characters.
Stir Of Echoes
Starring: Kevin Bacon and a great excuse not to do drugs.
We start out with a horribly contrived block party where all the bit players get their moment to be paraded in front of the camrea and say, "Look, I'm a bit player!".
Kevin Bacon gets hyptonized by Illeana Douglas. Illeana is one of those people where you recognize them, of course, but can never remember their names. There's probably a list floating around Hollywood called 'Semi-Supporting Actors'. That homicidal boss from 'Nutty Professor: I'm Very Fat' is one of them. The only reason I figured out Douglas' name was from IMDB.com. At first, I mistyped it. Some jerk business has claimed the mistyped URL and had it re-direct me to their crappy-crap-crap website. Grrr.
Bacon, after the hypnotism, has uncontrollable psychic flashbacks of stuff he never went through. Was there a murder in the neighborhood?
In the end, it would have made a better drama if the supernatural bits were just yanked out like an infected tooth.
The Talisman
Starring: Walter Jones, Jason Adelman and Uncle Fester.
Was this supposed to be porn with all the x-rated bits taken out?
Uncle Fester is running around a private school during spring break and ripping hearts out of people. Our hero is a myopic young trouble maker who had just arrived at the school. He enrolled at the school instead of being forced to go to it. I think he was searching for his sister, or he might have been looking for a good acting class.
He makes friends with Zack The Black Power Ranger, who gives him a tour of the school. The only people staying behind are some teachers, administrators and a group of repressed homosexual bullies. (Boo, hiss!)
The bullies set to tormenting our hero by the imaginative use of thrown food. I realize the budget for this movie couldn't buy a Happy Meal but was this the best they could come up with? The students are allegedly teenagers, having at least a decade of rational thought to come up with something slightly more clever then thrown food. But noo...
When the bullies (boo, hiss!) aren't being three year olds and getting scolded by Helga The Dominatrix Headmistress, they like to lay around their shared room in their socks and tighty whities.
Our Hero spends about five hours having flashbacks to a run-down cemetary, sneaking out at night to the consernation of Zack and romancing a girl who should not exist. (Or was it the secretary? Sometimes people act like secretary's don't exist).
One by one the other cast a heartectomy. (Oh, I slay me). Even the bullies! All at once! (Dogpiling Fester or just running never occurs to them). Eagle eyed viewers will notice the blood from the off-camrea wound always sprays in the same pattern.
The head villian turns out to be the secretary. (Guess she got gypped on Secretary's Day). Snippets of plot indicate it also might be the ghost of his vanished sister, but I hope not because the secretary -really- wanted Our Hero.
The secretary babbles on for about three hours while Our Hero stands there looking stunned. (Running or fighting doesn't occur to him either. Maybe it's Prozac in the water.
Suddenly the effcts of the Prozac are thrown off and Our Hero does something I did not understand and a bunch of stuff I did not care about happens! Whee! The movie is over and I can jam my head between my knees and cry.
Trucks
See 'Maximum Overdrive'.
Virus
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Some Baldwin, Donald Sutherland and a really pissed off Borg.
The visuals are fantastic but once again, like 'Deep Rising', it's yet another by the numbers horror movies. The racial minority isn't the first to die, but I guess even the secluded, out of touch Hollywood writing community has realized that is a cliche.
A technovirus is making deadly mechanical creatures and it's already eaten up a whole boatload of russian scientists. The Heroic American Crew finds the boat and climbs aboard. The bad 'thing' sinks the boat, making it look like an accident. And a hurricane is coming! Oh no! (There always has to be something that prevents the characters from fleeing the danger. Like they would anyway. Horror movie characters are terribly suicidal).
So instead of finding a secure spot on this boat that seems to be larger then most city blocks, they go galhumping around the great thing like a bunch of ninnies and start getting assmiliated.
And the most white dude and the dude's love interest survive, of course. Most horror/action movies do this and it pisses me off. It doesn't happen all the time but when you can pick out who will survie twenty minutes through the movie and you're right, you start wondering why the hell you are even going to these things anymore.
Wishmaster
A delicously evil super-natural vision tries to release himself from imprisonment by giving a young woman any wishes she wants.
I know it sounds like a silly premise but it works. Each wish is horribly corrupted in some way. Usually, the way involves as many horrible deaths as possible.
Wishmaster 2
I wish it never happened. The same fun villiany is there but everything else has been replaced by piss-poor acting and shamefully low budgets.
Main Page | Movie Reviews | Email Me
Created with the Internettrash HTML Editor