Just Watched Movie (2011)

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So, what was the last movie you just watched? Could be from TV, DVD, theater, wherever, but let it be known to the Board here.

Sands of Oblivion-When a crew accidentally unearths a long-lost film set from an Ancient Egyptian epic, they unleash a long-contained creature into the nearby desert and race to stop it before it completes it's mission of vengeance for being awakened. Pretty nice to know it's possible to do a horror film on Egyptian culture without going for the mummy route, as this one manages to have some rather nice moments from it. There's some nice action scenes, a couple rather suspenseful stalking scenes and even some gory deaths thrown in, though it's Adventure-movie feel does leave me a little thrown at times and the lack of clear-cut explanations for everything that are stated as fact is a big annoyance, but overall its not half bad.

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The Final Destination-When a premonition from a friend saves a group of spectators from a horrific car crash at a car race, their mysterious deaths afterward have him convinced that a diabolical entity has set about ensuring they're supposed to die and tries to save them before they're all killed. Aside from several personal indiscretions the film, like the blatant and retarded 3D gags, woeful CGI and sloppiness merely there to set up the death that wouldn't happen that way in real life, this one wasn't that bad. The brevity is to be commended as it doesn't overstay it's welcome, there's some ingenious attempts at suspense beneath the dirge of crap hurled at the screen and it's opening crash is pretty cool. Way better than expected, though still flawed.

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Alien Lockdown-Mistakenly viewed as a horror film when it isn't, this is actually a really tired Aliens rip-off of a group of soldiers attempting to quarantine a genetically-engineered alien creature from escaping a government lab after all the communications get broken. It's got some decent action moments, especially in the later half when the things lose and all, but due to the science fiction approach over horror, the kills are bloodless, the creature is so shrouded in fog and darkness you can't see it and it's all about the super-weaponry it has and what the soldiers have to defend against it, plus all it's fantasies and such that it wasn't all that great of a horror film but a decent-enough Sci-Fi alien film.

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Sorority Row-A college sorority prank that results in the death of one of their sisters is covered up and ignored, but a few months later when a serial killer begins to target them during their graduation party, they try to find out the cause behind the deaths before they're all killed off. A surprisingly fun and enjoyable slasher effort, just toned down in terms of nudity from what it could've featured since it seems to have just about everyone here taking a shower or getting naked to screw their boyfriend but hardly featuring anything when it comes to those scenes, but beyond the teasing nature of that area, it has a lot of worthwhile efforts about it. The stalking scenes are a blast, the kills are quite brutal and bloody and it even manages to make a few jokes that elicit a chuckle now and then, so it's got a few extra bits working for it that it normally wouldn't.

Chronicles of the Raven-Tormented by a series of nightmares in which a ravenous raven devours her body, a woman heads to her grandmothers' house to uncover the secret behind it and finds a much larger terror lurking behind the seemingly-happy facade of the family. Takes quite a long time to get going, since there's really not a lot going on in the first act and that the film is intent on build-up over scares, but when it does get something going, it's actually surprisingly decent with it's rather nice throwback feel to the Gothic horrors from the 60s in style and feel, just spiced up with a bit more gore than those. Rather interesting, but not all that effective.

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AvH: Alien vs Hunter-A strange objects' crash in the desert is the catalyst for a series of mysterious deaths in the area, and the local sheriff finds that the main implicator in the events is an alien tracking the real, an interstellar being leaving a trail of destruction across the galaxy. As if the title didn't give it away, this is the Asylum's take on Aliens vs. Predator, and this one pretty much copies it to a tee, even managing to incorporate their appearance into the two creatures albeit subtly. The action's not so bad once you get over the fact that you're watching a rip-off, the plot's easy enough to understand and it moves along quickly enough, so overall this one isn't bad, just unnecessary and there's worse ones out there.

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Subject Two-A man joins up with a deranged scientist for a series of medical experiments that test the threshold of death, but unwittingly finds himself at the center of a series of gruesome murders instead in an effort to successfully raise a body from the dead, and tries to stop the experiments from continuing. Well, the plotline was pretty interesting and it definitely had plenty of opportunity to become better as it went on, but by focusing on the rather inane doctor's reasonings for the experiments, it all just went downhill fast in a sea of boredom, lame kills and hardly any gore at all. Just an all-around failure on all fronts.

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Marked-A down-on-their-luck team of paranormal investigators finding out that their career might be saved by taking on one more job, only to find that a sinister secret has lured them to that particular location. An above-average haunted house film, pretty creepy at times as the house is superbly designed for the situation and the backstory for the whole event is spot-on, dull at others, with a fantastic finale but way, way too many plotpoints to go through so that it all winds up a confusing mess in the end. Could've been great, should've been better, but it's watchable as is.

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Reality Kills-A group of hopefuls are taken to a cabin in the woods to undertake the shooting for a pilot episode of a new reality TV show, but when they're soon stalked and killed one-by-one, they race to figure out the identity of the killer and stop them from killing them all. This was an unmitigated disaster of a slasher, as there's several major problems with this one that really do this one a major disservice, beginning mostly with the fact that the killer here manages to never spill an ounce of blood in their kills but rather electrocutes them with a tazer and then injects them with a lethal dose of poison, so everyone who is killed is never dismembered, scared or even injured. Coupled with a lame motive for initiating the rampage, a thoroughly unamusing series of plotlines that make this just drag out forever with a bunch of characters that are utterly irritating and annoying, a lack of focus on the killer and several more big flaws, can't really overcome the film's only good points, it's admittedly decent stalking scenes. A major disappointment.

Scooby-Doo: Camp Scare-The gang finds that a series of summer camp legends are being brought to life by the descendants of vicious gangsters in order to find long-lost stolen money lost when a summer camp was built over the hiding spot. The latest adventure in the animated films, where instead of doing the live-action version of making it more realistic, this one goes back to the roots with the people-in-masks routine that gives it a fantastic retro feeling that is quite fun to behold. The mystery is pretty decent for a feature-length effort, the animation style is quite nice and there's plenty of laughs and an amazing action-sequence that is a sure-fire highlight of the franchise, plus with the interconnecting plotlines it's never a boring feature and manages to maintain interest all the way through, which several haven't been guilty of. Can't say for sure if it's the best of one in the animated films, but it's surely up there.

The Love Guru-Don't laugh, I actually really liked this one. Something my sister made me watch, as she's starting to get into Hockey and is a huge fan of the Maple Leafs so she thought it was a must-see event and it turned into a rather enjoyable experience. It does tend to revolve around the same stupid humor all the way through so if it doesn't strike you as funny at first it's not going to win you over, but if you enjoy the low-brow and the stupid in your comedies, it's actually a surprisingly decent affair that generates a lot more laughs than you would expect.

Plus, I also watched Deadlands 2: Trapped, but seeing as how Bart wants it put up in Review Hell and the review hasn't been passed yet, can't put it here, even though I did see it.

[Fenril]

Managed to catch a handful of Mexican horror movies that came out in the past year or so:

- Somos lo que hay. [Released internationally as We are what we are; a more accurate translation would be "We are what's in", as it refers to "lo que hay de comer", "what's in to eat"]. After the father passes away, an urban family must figure out a way to keep afloat. The elder son, Adrian, is tasked with the hardest chore: find a suitable victim for their weekly cannibalistic ritual...

Surprisingly good, through more of a dark comedy (a really, really dark comedy) than an horror movie. A fairly sympathethic gay lead, well-orchestrated murder scenes (there's some gory shots, but the scary part here is what you hear rather than what you see) and several ironic plot twists. Recommended.

www.imdb.com/title/tt1620604/

- 24 cuadros de terror. [24 frames of terror]. A film editor stuck on dead-end jobs is hired by a serial killer to edit his homemade snuff movies.

Zero budget crap, plain and simple.

www.imdb.com/title/tt1306951/

- Spam. A cursed website is killing assorted students, teachers and parents on a (strangely americanized) high school. Two students survive the curse and investigate who or what is behind the website.

Better that I expected, really; but then, I was expecting a "so bad it's good" movie (for one thing, it claims to be directed by "Charlie Gore"). There's plenty of gore, the revelation of "who or what" is behind it all is actually not a bad twist (suffice to say, it's not a vengeful ghost nor a demon), and the characters are fairly compelling.
That said, the acting here is amateurish at best and the director isn't very good with suspense. Also, how come * everyone * in this movie has a traumatic experience in their past?

www.imdb.com/title/tt1132488/

- Bajo la sal. [Under the salt]. Corpses start appearing in the salt mines of a quiet small town. A goth kid, two police officers, and a young waitress are all unknowingly connected to these events. So are a few documents buried under the burnt remains of a high school...

Again, better than I expected, and this one is a pretty good mystery. At times it's almost a mexican Twin Peaks, through not as trippy (everyone in this "quiet" town seems to have a dark secret of their own; there are several creepy stop-motion (and flipbooks) animations that end becoming crucial to the plot; even the mystery starts with two objects being unearthed --a gold medal and a human hand...).

www.imdb.com/title/tt1110207/

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The Crazies-When residents of a small-town begin acting strangely and attacking each other, the survivors are lead by government quarantine away from the area, but when they learn of others still trapped in the town, they head back inside to rescue them before they become victims of the deranged residents. Since I have absolutely no interest in the original all that much, dropping what I hated about that one (the political turmoil and anti-war statements) was a big plus and it felt a lot more consistent as a whole since we don't have to wait around for an hour before something happens that makes us call it a horror film in the first place, so with the increased action it's a lot more fun, and is therefore packed with better FX and gore than the original, but it's also missing a key element that really makes me want to keep revisiting this one over and over. I'm not sure what it is, but frankly, it's something that's eating at me and I'm not too sure about what it is, I just know it's missing. Perhaps it's the retarded second half that deals with the search for his wife, the lack of explanation in anything going on or series of cliche encounters with the infected running around, I'm not sure at all but it was, at once, better than I expected but also quite heavily flawed.

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Jigoku-When they get off scot-free after a hit-and-run accident, two friends go about their lives until their family's start to come under mysterious supernatural forces, eventually dragging them into a struggle with the powers of Hell for their actions. Mightily impressive, if extremely slow-going and really plodding, Japanese horror from the 60s, so it tends to favor characterization over anything remotely resembling a horror film in the early stages, save for a rather brutal and explicit car crash for the time-period, but once it starts to get near the hour mark it really starts delivering on the good stuff with some of the most visually-creative and conceptually-ingenious imaginings of the creation of Hell I've ever seen. Far more complex than the Christian ideology I'm sure we're all comfortable and familiar with, this here is the film's best spot and it's real wholesale value, which I'm glad I caught as it was getting really dull before there.

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Frozen-While on a group skiing trip, a group of friends are stranded on a ski lift over an unattended weekend and must survive the elements in order to make it alive to the next scheduled check on the equipment. Not even close to being a horror film, I don't know why everyone is calling it that as it's more of a thriller, but it's a conflicting one. I can recognize quality in a film, and from a technical stand-point, this one has it due to the playing out of the conditions surrounding them, which is very rarely done and is a really nice touch, the gore gags are pretty impressive and the atmosphere is well-developed and all, but then the more you think about the story and how things are to be played out, the more you realize how much logic and realism is thrown out for no reason whatsoever, not only to the point of being distracting but it gets so bad it's to the point of being detrimental to the film as a whole. Sorry, not worth the hype at all.

Blue Demon vs. The Diabolical-The masked wrestler gets involved in a mafia ploy when they frame a woman for a strange disappearance and he must clear her name before a big wrestling show she's a participant in. Now, that sounds confusing as hell, but frankly I'm not entirely sure at it since, again, I don't know Spanish at all so the plot description was merely a lot of piecing film actions together and guesswork to fill in the blanks, so I expect to have some of that cleared up. It's also the first non-horror Lucha Libre film I've seen, and since it's also pretty similar in style and tone to those, it's made them a little easier to understand, especially the more confusing aspects of them. With some fine action scenes and a couple really impressive wrestling matches, a sense of 60s style cheese and fast-moving film, it's not really dull at all and quite enjoyable if you're into those kinds of films, but as I said earlier, this one was just really confusing.

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Hell's Trap-A group of friends on a weekend camping trip come across a crazed Vietnam veteran using the area as his personal hunting ground and doesn't take kindly to the strangers in his territory, proceeding to hunt them down one-by-one in the forested area. No thread page as this one was done off Mexican TV so I don't really have much of a clue as to what went on, but I do have to say this was a surprisingly decent affair that had a lot going for it. Some damn fine stalking scenes, a couple brutal deaths and a really rousing, action-packed finale that felt more like an action film than a horror outing, which in essence also brings up the biggest of several flaws in that it really tends to disregard horror conventions in mixing an 80s style Actioner with a killer-in-the-woods style set-up, so it tends to miss out on suspense and tension quite often in expense of dolling out the action. There's also a few problems with the killer, but those are pretty tame, and overall this one wasn't too bad.

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Fangs of Fury-A man who is recovering from the curse of werewolf-ism is forced into battling a ruthless vampire and his psychotic bride as they prepare to unleash a devastating curse on mankind. Again, no thread page for this one, as it's a Mexican film, and more accurately a sequel to one I watched earlier, Fangs of the Werewolf, only this one was pretty bad. Almost no action at all, just a few short spurts of action that convinces us that we're watching a horror film but instead this one is just so overloaded with talking that even if I spoke Spanish to understand the plot, there's not enough action to keep it interesting. A few decent Gothic set-pieces and a few impressive visual gags are all that this one has to offer up, as the original one was ever more impressive over this one.

Shaft-After agreeing to help a murder witness prosecute the killer, a policeman finds that the level of police corruption intended to hide him is far more vast than he pictured and makes his job to protect her all the more dangerous. Yes, this one is the remake from the early 2000s and not the original from the 70s, but it's still a rather enjoyable experience anyway. Lots of shoot-outs and chasing around, leading to tons of gunfights and stuff being blown up makes for a pretty exciting time as it's got a lot of stuff going on, even though it's pretty standard police corruption story has been done to death in these kinds of films. Not really something that'll stand out in the scene due to it's cliches and familiarity, but enjoyable enough as it is.

[Fenril]

- Triangle. The survivors of an overturned sailboat are picked up by an eerie abandoned yatch, and that's only the beggining of their misfortunes. Reviewed this in the "Australian horror" thread.

- Incubo sulla citá contaminata (aka City of the walkind dead). An unmarked plane unleashes a horde of bloodsucking zombies on an already contaminated city. One of Umberto Lenzi's exploitation zombie movies, and in my opinion very unfairly maligned. It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, yet it remains consistently entertaining, with several setups that pay off in good ways (example: a blackout in an hospital leaves a group of very sick people imprisoned in an elevator; just when they are all about to suffocate, the power comes back, the doors finally open... and in comes a swarm of vicious zombies). The ending is a cheat, through the original title foreshadows it.

- La dolce vita. Fellini's masterpiece about the excessses of high and upper middle Italy in the 60's is one of those movies that are more known than actually seen. Remains a powerful, if slightly repetitive (clocking in at nearly three hours) piece, certainly a must for true movie buffs.