Just Watched Movies (2013)

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Rang in the new year with a dose of Italian:

Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror
Anthropophagus: The Grim Reaper
Demons
Demons 2
Zombie 3

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Barb Wire-After getting involved with a couple trying to escape from a restricted zone during a devastating World War, a good-hearted bounty hunter finds herself the target of those trying to put an end to the couple's escape attempts and inadvertently joining in the revolution. Overall, not all that bad of an action effort as there's a lot to like here without getting into the obvious charms of the female leads. With some fine shootouts, including a fun hotel-room sequence and a thrilling high-speed chase through a shipping yard that gets off some good explosions and wreckage to the surrounding area that's always fun to see in such scenes. While the plot makes little sense as it has way too many supporting characters for such a flimsy action-film to start with, the motivations are never really explained beyond the bare minimum and it reeks of familiarity right from the start, there's far less entertaining ways to spend the time.

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The Three Stooges-Okay, no big write-up here, just the fact that this was gut-busting funny. Never feels like their shorts were edited together to make a full-length movie despite the gimmick of appearing to be so, yet actually a lot of fun and definitely contains a lot of homages to their stuff and even replicates many of their best gags and stunts. So what if it's not them, it's still hilarious and that's what matters.

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The Japanese version of Rodan, 'Radon' which is better than the American version in every way. The most notable reason is the inclusion of the original score which is awesome and contains so many familiar riffs and cues from upcoming films that it's like a series of demo tracks for those films. Beyond that, the atmosphere is way better, the early mining disaster scenes are a lot creepier and the insects are much more frightening. It really looks it's age, but considering that, wholly impressive and is about as good as it's going to be.

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War of the Gargantuas-When the military tries to intervene on a scientist's proclamations that a giant monster wrecking havoc on Japan isn't dangerous, they find that a second giant is responsible for the damage as they wage a destructive war amongst themselves. Good old-time monster movie fun here from the Golden Age of these movies when it was almost like clockwork that fun was to be had when they came out, and that's not changed here. With a ton of confrontations between the military and the creatures resulting in fiery action scenes that still hold up to one of the most vicious fights ever filmed in that time and truly spectacular special effects that highlight the whole affair, it's got a lot of positives with only a few minor gripes (the film plays almost like a remake of the previous years' Frankenstein Conquers the World down to a T, the finale is way too abrupt and makes no sense and it gives away there's two creatures early on despite them being shocked at it's existence like a giant surprise) though this is still one of the classics of the genre.

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Scary or Die-A website host goes over the new submissions for a horror-themed website: illegal Mexican zombies rise up over their killers, a lonely man falls for an attractive vampire cult leader, a dirty cop thinks his mark is still alive, a man fears he'll turn into a flesh-eating clown, a woman rises from the dead to seek revenge on her killer. A pretty mediocre Anthology, mostly because so much of this isn't really that scary at all and actually has too many cliches to really make much of an impact. Really all the stories are going to play out the way you expect them to without any real change simply because their stories don't offer any place to go but to dwell in the land of the familiar, most notably the third one which acts like 'The Tell-Tale Heart' with a different organ chosen and the last one, which is overall the weakest at barely ten minutes in length and given a pointless, needless narration which brings out the entire backstory and what's going on on-screen while it's happening and robbing it of everything it could've had by choosing to do so. The others aren't bad, but overall nothing really sticks out beyond the outrageously-creepy clown in the fourth which proves to be its saving grace.

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Days of Darkness-Finding that a passing comet has showered the Earth with space particles that turn the living into ravenous zombies, a couple escape to a compound stronghold but soon find a greater danger at work in the area and must fight to survive. Not all that terrible an effort but really hurt by several rather damaging flaws. The biggest issue with this one is the fact that there's just never any consistency within the film as it bounces around from plot-point to plot-point without any real effort to distinguish why that's happening. At first, it's the radioactive spores from the comet's passing that causes everything, then it's that they're being controlled by alien parasites, there's a segment about women being immune to their attacks as they only want to fertilize humanity to take over the planet but sometime later women are attacked without impunity and the whole fertilization plan is ignored altogether so this one tends to jump around to about four or five different plots. There's enough action and gore to forget about such qualities at times, and while it does go all over the place it has some good central ideas spread around. It's just too flawed to truly overcome them.

[Fenril]

- Lost highway. A jazz musician and his wife receive a series of distrubing videos which show their house's exterior, interior and even the couple itself sleeping. After an encounter with a strange man who claims to inhabit their home when they are away, the musician is immediately arrested for the savage murder of his wife. And *then* things start getting really trippy...

Vintage David Lynch movie with his expected surreal ticks, impressive soundtrack and a storyline that's open to multiple interpretations.

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Added uncut copies of The Seventh Sign, From Dusk till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money and From Dusk till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter to the collection.

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Ghost Storm-When a series of strange accidents leave the residents of a small island community frightened of a mysterious electrical storm, a group of survivors try to solve the long-hidden reason for it's release to placate the storm and restore peace on the island. A pretty middling affair overall, though it's also frustratingly full of potential that could've made this one quite enjoyable had they been utilized more. The general concept of the storm and it's creation are quite clever with the revelation made late about it's true origins and intent make for a really neat twist to the formula, as well as a pretty original tactic of having it form a moving tentacle-of-mist that snakes out and calcifies victims to turn them into dust which creates a couple creepy scenes including the graveyard opening and the house ambush. It's got some action as well when it whips through the main street of the town harvesting bodies, and the final measure of defeating it generates some fun. Unfortunately, the fact that there's no consistency in the beings' actions since it'll turn them to dust in the beginning then vaporize them later, seemingly at random points in the script, makes no sense and the objects fascination with modern technology is never really explored so it's quite distracting. The usual Sci-Fi Channel problems are still in effect, so those as well work against this one to lower this one significantly.

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Creep-Getting stuck after-hours in the London subways, a woman finds the underground area is the hunting grounds for a deranged, demented killer and must find a way out of the nightmare before falling victim to it's rampage. An incredibly enjoyable, if only slightly flawed, makes this quite an entertaining effort. One of the better efforts here is the absolutely creepy locale used here, as the subway system is effectively milked for all it's worth here as the long, dark corridors, hallways that feature hiding places for the killer to jump out of and really builds up in the film a rather creepy air about it. The action-packed chases are quite fun, from the abandoned train encounter to the platform stalking scene and even the treks through the tunnels inside the darkness all create a thrilling, non-stop pace that moves this one along quite nicely and rarely letting up. While there's not a whole lot of potential victims on display, one of the few minor flaws, there's enough bloodletting to be unleashed that there's a sense of satisfaction for the gorehounds. While the low body-count is one such flaw, the main one here is the relatively lame killer, who has no backstory and doesn't seem to really offer up much in the way of believable behavior here once the film shifts into the final half which is where it's really lost overall. Otherwise, this one turns out to be quite entertaining.

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Dead Genesis-After joining up with a roving band of zombie hunters attempting to rid the world of the creatures, a documentarian following their actions finds that they're far more unbalanced than expected and tries to rely on them to get out of the epidemic alive. A fairly enjoyable, though pretty problematic offering that manages to feature a few substantial flaws. The main one, the incredibly irritated shaking camera effect that renders the majority of this one's action scenes nearly impossible to make out and thus really renders them impossible to understand which is what you want in that situation. There's also the fact that there's just no accounting for all the unnecessary tangents this goes into at the end, where it seems to be about three or four different ideas at once but not one really meshes with the film's central storyline as a whole and feels really out-of-place. That said, there's some pretty good stuff here, from the numerous shoot-outs with the zombie swarms they encounter along the way, gets in some pretty decent bloodletting along the way with some fine zombie make-up as well. The main thing, though, is the opening which is probably as gruesome and shocking a way to do so as there's been, breaking one of the golden taboos of horror films quite readily and not really making any qualms about doing so, which gives it points as well as for the general creativeness on display, but it's not enough to overcome the flaws.

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House Hunting-Two couples arrive at a deserted house in the wilderness only to find they are unable to leave and must resolve the conflict of what family gets to stay at the house. Mistakenly viewed as a horror film even though it's a thriller, the mistake meant a lot of time was spent on this that never really showed much, meaning a lot of time that just seemed wasted without really offering anything. The plot to this is the biggest problem, as there's not a lot to do with the gimmick as a full-length feature and thus it expends far too much time going nowhere to fill space when as an hour-long episode it might work, but the fact that this one still has a truly terrible premise in that they must kill each other for one family to take ownership of the house is still inherently lame even though it does start to throw in some demonic hallucinations toward the later half to make it seem to be a horror film. Otherwise, this one was a big disappointment.

[Fenril]

- I tre volti della paura [aka Black Sabbath]. An anthology film with three stories, very loosely based on short stories by Chechov, Tolstoi and de Maupassant:

Il telefono. A woman receives anonimous death threats over the phone and calls a friend to keep her company. Said friend has her own agenda...

I Wurdalak. The patriatch of a rural family sets out to slay a rumored wurdalak (or vampire); he suceeds, but returns with a set of strange new desires...

La goccia di acqua. A nurse steals a ring from a patient that had died during a spiritism session, only to find her house inexplicably plagued by leaky faucets.

One of Mario Bava (and in general, one of Gothic cinema)'s best entries. While old-fashioned and fairly predictable nowadays, this remains solid scary entertainment. Includes a gleeful introduction and a playful epilogue from Boris Karloff (who also stars in the Wurdalak segment).

[Fenril]

- Prom night. Six years after accidentally causing the death of a playmate, four teenagers are targeted by a masked killer on the titular night.

80's slasher that, frankly, I found a bit overrated. This isn't to say it's all bad: a slasher starring Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis can't be all bad [to be fair, neither is at their finest here, through]; there is one great decapitation scene, a very effective chase scene (notable because it happens to the most unpleasant character of the lot and still generates a lot of suspense) and a fairly dramatic opening and closing. Other than that, through, this is a mostly dull affair, and at times gives the impression that the people behind this weren't really interested in making a slasher movie --this goes through police procedural, teenage comedy and even musical drama before finally picking up the pace for the third act.