Screenhead

I am NOT a huge fan of Jack Ketchum’s work.  Ever since I saw The Lost–in which only I really lost, about ninety minutes of my life and a sinking feeling that someone somehow was making a living at writing torture porn–I looked at pretty much everything he did with a sinking suspicion.

So when I settled in with a copy of Offspring, one of the newest parts of the Ghost House Underground collection, which the folks at Lions Gate sent my way, I wasn’t expecting much good to come of it.  Were my suspicions met?  You’ll find out directly.

First, the plot.  We’re going back to Maine, a land that Stephen King pretty much managed to convert almost singlehandedly into the horror capitol of the world.  But the town of Dead River is playing host to a secret that even King might have had a hard time swallowing–a clan of flesh-eating monstrosities that propagates seemingly entirely by abduction.  And when the local sheriff is forced to step in and deal with them, he’s reminded all too clearly of the last time he took these killers on.

This one is, somewhat, different.  In fact, “graphically screwed up” might be a better term.  In fact, if you want to get an idea of what it’s like, imagine Clan of the Cave Bear intermingled with The Hills Have Eyes.  And you’ll be mostly horrified, but at the same time, you’ll be so catastrophically weirded out by the whole thing that you’ll scarcely know what to think.  Watching these dirt people tear apart actual humans and eat flesh is…well…it’s not the kind of thing you’ve seen lately, I guarantee that.

It’s graphic, it’s violent, it’s grotesque in the absolute…but it IS unique.  And that definitely gives it at least a point in its favor.  But the sheer horrendousness of the content leaves it difficult to recommend.

It’s downright painful to be looking at a movie that’s the most unique thing I’ve seen in a good while, but have it be so thoroughly repugnant that it’s tough to recommend.  It’s really just painful.

The Screenhead Ten Scale shares my consternation and hands The Offspring a thoroughly confused five out of ten.  It’s too unique to not bear mentioning, but it’s too downright vulgar to encourage anyone to watch.

The crew out at Chaos Squared told me, when they sent me a screener and press kit for Blood Night (available October 30th), that this would be a “throwback to eighties slasher horror“.  What they did NOT tell me, however, is that we wouldn’t see much of anything even vaguely resembling a plot for about the first ten minutes or so.

See, the first ten minutes of Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet is devoted to more gore than you’ve seen recently (yeah, even Saw counts) and a series of brutalities one after the next.  We go from mass murder to rape then back to mass murder followed up with suicide by cop, and all of this in the first ten minutes.

As for the story, it’s fairly simple–our title character is locked in a psych ward after killing her parents messily in the night.  From there, she’s raped in the psych ward, loses her baby, and extracts a bloody revenge before being killed.  The local kids take this legend and run with it, calling it “Blood Night”.  But on this Blood Night, four kids are going to find themselves face to face with Mary herself…and they won’t like what they find.

I will spare a note of eye-rolling for the fact that they actually brought a Ouija board into play here, one of the oldest cliches in horror film, to really kick things off.  Come on, guys, that’s just lowbrow.

But there are a great many moments when Blood Night proves to be a pretty sweet, if somewhat straightforward, horror endeavor.  We’ve seen this before, and in this case by design.  But that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie.  In fact, it’s actually pretty good.

If you’re into slasher horror, then you should almost certainly love Blood Night.  Sure, it’s got a tendency to be over the top, and whoever the fake blood vendor was on this project is laughing all the way to the bank, but Blood Night does pack a lot of good old fashioned thrills and a few good scares into its repetoire.  Look for a couple good performances from horror mainstays Bill Moseley and Danielle Harris, too.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives a nod of respect to this shocking little throwback and hands it a respectable seven out of ten.  Yes, it’s derivative, but it’s what they do with the derivation that makes it good.  Make no mistake, Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet has chills, laughs and gore enough for three movies.

So I finally made the long trek–”a theater near you” is really a relative term–to catch Paranormal Activity in theaters, and I’ll tell you this–this is the first time I’ve been scared by a movie in a long time.

Paranormal Activity is the story of a young couple, living together, who finds themselves beset upon by demons.  Apparently these demons have been following around the distaff half of the couple since she was a little girl, but only now does she feel the need to actually, you know, do anything about it.  And what ends up happening over the course of about three weeks will amaze you, as you watch it unfold thanks to the male half’s camera array.

Paranormal Activity isn’t scary because of its plot–frankly, it doesn’t even have that much of a plot.  And what plot there is is so laden with cliches it’s almost meaningless.  It’s as though it was written by particularly talented fourteen year olds. Seriously–cliche city in here.  One of them actually brings in a Ouija board.  The WHOLE THEATER groaned at that.  We all know better.  Ouija boards are like the only thing horror movies, pagans, Christians, and the paranormal research community all agree on, and they all agree that using one of these things is the DUMBEST IDEA EVER.

But where Paranormal Activity absolutely SHINES is in its incredible capacity for building tension.  Paranormal Activity will make you CRINGE.  They have this incredible way of locking you into something seemingly innocuous–probably thanks to that elapsed-time counter at the lower-right hand corner of the screen when we’re watching “playback” footage.

When you stare at a scene for even just half a minute, you’re waiting.  You know, you KNOW, something is going to happen in front of you, but you have no way of knowing what that something is.  So you’re staring, you’re staring, you’re beginning to wonder if maybe nothing’s going to ha–BAM!  Suddenly all hell breaks loose and there’s banging around and things going nuts and doors slamming and footprints and weird shapes and everything’s just gone all insane!

See what I mean?

That’s TENSION, ladies and gentlemen.  And it will get your heart pounding and your pulse racing like no installment of Saw EVER did.  We’ve forgotten about the simple power of tension in an arms-race-esque rush to make the best special effects and blood packets.

And I’ll tell you this–the ending is going to kill you.  It got me pretty good and I’ve been watching horror for, nearly, two decades now.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, as a lesson to others, hands Paranormal Activity a nine out of ten for showing us, once again, what something as simple as a tension filled moment can do.

This is Final Solution first teaser trailer, and I thought it would be perfect for the Halloween season. Enjoy! 

During the Second World War in Nazi occupied Denmark, local fishermen helped Jews flee to the neutral grounds of Sweden. The trip was not cheap and came at an even higher price for the Landau family who were forced to leave their youngest daughter Emma behind. Here she would be hidden by her mother’s friend, waiting for a chance to follow her family.

The Nazis employed fishermen of their own to ferry the fleeing Jews to a remote and hidden Extermination Camp deep in the dark forests of Sweden. This became the fate of Emma´s entire family.

As time passed, Emma grew up watching the Nazis lose the war, the powers in Europe shift and her mother’s friend pass away. Never getting any news about her family´s fate, she decides to follow their trail and uncover what happened to them in Sweden. But what she and her friends found was evil beyond their wildest imagination.

There’s a scene in Dumb and Dumber that explains my entire outlook on Saw V.  I’ve included it below.

Basically, it’s Lloyd pulling up to Harry on a scooter that he explains he traded, straight up, for their old van.  Harry looks at Lloyd and says, “Just when I think you couldn’t be any dumber, you go and do something like this… AND TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF!”

That’s exactly how I feel about Saw V.  Just when I thought they couldn’t make a movie any dumber, they went and did something like this, and totally redeemed themselves.

Saw V puts is back in that grand old world where Jigsaw is dead but his copycats continue.  With Detective Hoffman now clearly in charge and pretty much the only possible successor to Jigsaw’s twisted legacy, the games continue as Agent Strahm tries to get to the bottom of the whole mess.  And the mess carries on as a kind of super-game takes place for five interconnected people who all have something in common…and a whole lot to lose.

Yes, Saw V is so laden with flashbacks it almost makes no sense.  Trying to figure out how Detective Hoffman got the necessary amateur engineering skills to build his own Jigsaw traps is a little outlandish at best–skills like that don’t just show up overnight; they’re the result of years of study and practice.  But still, it’s downright entertaining to watch Hoffman’s evolution from detective to Jigsaw-lite.

The concept of the super-game is another winner–never before has Saw been so devoted to one single game.  Saw IV came close, but even that was a series of games within one game involving different people each time, not the same set of people.  And the twist ending is still well in evidence and came literally out of nowhere, but only in retrospect is it made clear.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands the best film in the series an eight out of ten, and hopes that future versions will be anywhere near as good.

Apparently it’s finally happened.  Somehow, the Asylum managed to either get sick of mockbusters or got sick of getting slammed relentlessly in the critical community for churning out a constant stream of knockoffs, because for the first time in a good long while that I can recall, the Asylum has released an actual original horror movie, of which they’ve sent me a copy.

And they’re even going back to their roots, handling The Haunting of Winchester House, based on the (allegedly) true story of Sarah Winchester, in which she was told by a medium that, if she didn’t stop building onto her house, she would be torn to pieces by the various ghosts that haunted her due to the fact that she and her family made obscene amounts of money by killing a bunch of people with their rifles.

I’m frankly torn.  On the one hand, there are a few good scares in here, some nice suspense building, and it’s the first original horror flick from the Asylum I’ve seen in some time.  And yet, there’s also plenty of confusing parts, an admittedly rather half baked ending (in retrospect, they will MOCK THEIR OWN ENDING.  In canon.) and it’s based on a truly weak sauce legend that was basically “some rich old coot wouldn’t stop building a house because the 19th century equivalent of Miss Cleo told her not to or she’d die.  By ghosts.”.

Seriously?

The Screenhead Ten Scale cuts through my indecision, pats me on the shoulder and says, hey, when in doubt, split the difference.  Thus, Haunting of Winchester Manor gets a six out of ten, and a note of hearty encouragement to stop ripping off EVERY MOVIE THAT HITS THEATERS.

Welcome back to original horror, Asylum. We missed you.

Sad news for Joss Whedon fans–seems his big horror opus Cabin in the Woods got pushed back at least a year.  But it’s the why behind that decision that’ll blow your mind.  In fact, in light of that point, it’s actually not so sad after all.

It got delayed so it can be converted to 3-D.  Apparently, the folks out at MGM–who’ve been having some pretty horrible financial problems lately–got a lot of great early response to the film.  So they sat down and displayed a huge amount of logic and said, what could possibly make more money than a Joss Whedon horror flick?

Why, a Joss Whedon horror flick in 3-D, of course!

Okay, so even I have to admit that the thought of a Joss Whedon horror flick in 3-D fills me with a kind of glee that I haven’t had since…well, since just before I saw Zombieland…but why didn’t they just start filming in 3-D instead of losing all the effort that went into it thus far?

Oh…yeah.  So that we’d talk about it.

Rebecca De Mornay stars as the mother in this horror film about really sick and disgusting members of a villainous family return to their childhood home to terrorize the new home owners and their guests. The producers are calling this horror movie a remake, but the story doesn’t appear to be like the original.

Anyway this is a behind-the-scenes clip of director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II & III) working with the cast and crew.  One thing I did notice — they swear a lot. Enjoy.

Seems like Rec is well on its way to becoming a franchise–not only has the sequel already bowed in Spain to a fairly respectable opening weekend, but Rec 3 now has its own website just established.  The website, which can be found here, has just one word on it:

Proximamente

Which, if you speak Spanish, or just in case you don’t, translates roughly as “soon”.

I have to admit that I’m terribly happy about such an idea.  I loved both the first Rec and its remake, Quarantine, and having seen the trailer for the second Rec, it too looks like a gigantic dose of fun on a bun.

Sadly, there is no word about when Rec 2 will make its way to the United States (in anything other than festival form), and there’s only Proximamente as far as word co when Rec 3 will be released at all.  So there’s plenty of news yet to come on this series, and you know we’ll be watching every second.

I was definitely looking forward to a copy of Trick R Treat.  It had just about everything you could have wanted in a horror flick–myth, legend, doublecrosses, strange monsters, creepy whatsits…and of course some unexpected bonuses like Thurman Merman himself from Bad Santa briefly showing up and impressively projectile-vomiting all over the set.  That was just awesome.

Anyway, today we’re talking Trick R Treat, which just became available today in video stores.  From Warner Premiere, this impressive little horror flick is one of the rare breed of overarching-vignette stories that we haven’t seen in quite some time.  You’ll follow a series of interconnecting and overarching stories as they talk about a wife whose husband loves Halloween, and why she should too, then over to a local principal with a secret, a young virgin’s pursuit of that “special someone”, a terrifying prank gone horribly wrong, and a sour old man who could use a little sweetening up for Halloween.

The great thing about Trick R Treat is that most of it is good.  There’s a lot of creepy fun to be had here and most of the sketches will satisfy like a king size Snickers.  There’s not even terribly much to say about most of the movie except that it’s really, spectacularly good.  I was just about to horrifyingly force the Screenhead Ten Scale to hand over yet ANOTHER ten until about the last five minutes.

Somebody owes me an explanation for the last five minutes and they’d better do so lickety-damn-split.  Because I take SERIOUS issue with an ending that won’t even play by its own rule book.  They go to spectacular lengths to illustrate how important the burning jack o’lantern is in keeping away “evil spirits”, and yet, despite the fact that the last victim of the night has easily a couple dozen burning on his porch, he’s STILL ripped to shreds.

Admittedly, on a percentage basis, this is a minor gripe, even if it’s a pretty low blow, especially when I was enjoying the movie so well.  And despite this fairly sizable screw-up, it’s about the only one.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale acknowledges that it’s being a bit of a fussbudget about things and hands over the fair rating of nine out of ten.  Had they fixed that last problem, we’d have yet another perfect dose of horror on our hands.