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Reviews
The Outpost (1995)
"Can I borrow...your mind"?!
This being the not-so-direct follow on to The Hills Have Eyes P2, it actually does a pretty good job of creating a thorough, solid, enjoyability entertaining horror movie. Seeing that The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 was utter rubbish, it's a small surprise that this little horror film is as effective as it is.
The elements are all there for an entertaining, effective horror film. You've the good use of the narrow halls of the military facility way out in the desert, the creator stalked by his own invention, and the creative use of the monster as sympathetic victim to these experiments. As a by-product of these experiments though, he know has to chow down on brains.
Some good gore and the mutants 'Cronembergian'(Think 'Shivers') /Alien style methods of killing make this more interesting than most low-budget, straight to video slashers/horrors, and while not original is adept at being entertaining and a little creepy for 90 or so minutes. Add to that the 'they always come back' ending (or they always come back again and again) and this is an unoriginal though enjoyable low-budget horror movie worth catching once. And it freaked my two sisters out, so thats a bonus!
An American Haunting (2005)
Another American Mess
There is nothing much worth mentioning in this film because nothing of any interest seemed to happen. As inconsequential as movies such as The Cave, creative thinking and simple story telling seems to have gone out the window. The film comes across like a poorly paced and badly edited TV movie, with elements from films such as The Exorcist and The Ring thrown in that do little to help the movie. Goosebumps is scarier than this.
None of the characters shine because the script gives them nothing to work with except to state the obvious or spout tired dialogue, and the film is so unfocused you barely know whats going on anyway. Is it a ghost? Is it a curse? And when you find out, who really cares. It's a low-thrills movie full of swooning, swirling camera angles and loud noises. It's last act revelation gives it a slightly more interesting direction but it's too little too late because by then you would have given up the ghost.
I don't know why this was given a 15 Certificate because there is little remotely frightening or bloody in it. This type of supernatural horror has been done 100 times before, much much better. Watch The Evil Dead, The Amytiville Horror or Sleepy Hollow instead. In fact, watch anything else because it really is a waste of money.
Really, really poor.
The Devil's Rejects (2005)
"You ain't getting away that easy, bitch"
Horror fans can heave a sigh of relief as eventually something resembling horror strolls into our cinema screens. Bloody, sadistic, cruel, extreme, these are all the things that have been missing from horror for the last two years, in which studios and producers have made a quick buck from remaking almost, or soon to be every, horror movie that was ever made. Had enough with the dull Dark Water? The turgid Ring remake? The dire Amtytiville Horror? Assault on Precinct 13? Herbie Fully Loaded? Well, you're not getting away that easy. Also proposed are a Last House on the Left remake, along with a Wes Craven produced 're-imagining' of The Hills Have Eyes (both promise, however, to have a new motor rather than just a fresh coat of paint).
What has been 'original' in concept has been just as uneven in quality -Boogeyman, Cursed. PG-13 horror playing it safe to procure a bigger audience and greater box-office clout. Cursed should have been an 18 if anyone wanted a sellable movie, but in cutting and editing out all the good bits you're left with a predictable and un-scary sub-standard Scream clone, but with werewolves.
However, The Devils Rejects is one in a steady rise in horror that's not afraid to be horrific, another notable exception being the visceral The Descent. Both are original, subversive, violent and bloody, telling a story without being drowned out by a typical structure that straightjacket's the movie. Rejects pays homage to the controversial exploitation movies of the 1970's such as aforementioned Last House on the Left, Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, without doing the heavy-handed Cabin Fever scene stealing. This movie has the same tone and feel and desperateness of those films but does not duplicate them.
From the opening scenes, and having seen House of 1000 Corpses, you are aware of what to expect yet this film delivers something more. All the acting is spot-on, OTT but believably so, not without humour and a Last House on the Left style of camaraderie between the murdering trio. Amoral it is but like the brilliantly vengeful Sheriff Wydell, who steals the show and provides the most entertainingly heated exchanges between cop and killer, it treads the line between justice and revenge, right and wrong, so that it is constantly challenging your assumptions and never giving any simple moral platitudes.
Zombie's direction is stylish and assured and the movie has a delightfully frantic pace throughout. The soundtrack does give the impression of these murderers as rebels but it IS a classy collection of tunes, and every shot reminds you that nowhere and nothing is safe. The motel. The desert. The whore house. Even the main characters, in the most interestingly subversive, compelling part of the movie, are tortured by the Sheriff, giving up their uniformly 'tough-talking killer sh*t' after he's blasted a couple of rounds of staple-guns into their chests and applied a few electric shots and literally 'nailed the bastards'. This is the scene where you find yourself routing for the Sheriff as he applies his own brand of 'rough justice', rejoicing in the revenge dished out as they did the 72 or so they slayed. For cool, confident, sonuvabitch Sheriff Wydell is really the only one it is possible to identify with, in the face of their sadistic actions (the scene of the daughter blind and fleeing madly into the road, only to be splattered by a passing truck) and glee at the death they have caused.
This movie does not strike up a deep rapport with the family, or ask us to somehow be sympathetic, even if there are some scenes in which the killers actions are deemed almost as heroic (such as in the last scene), but that is also debatable. The slo-motion car shoot-out against cops and killers may seem heroic, but the camera details every bullet that enters the family's murdering bodies as if to say, 'What comes around, goes around'.
The Amityville Horror (2005)
I had "High Hopes"
Why can't they make a good horror film in Hollywood? The fact that The Amytiville Horror is now a blockbusting hit for the second time would suggest that the above claim is wrong. But money and quality don't exactly tally up.
Because this film has a history that surpasses 'fiction' into supposed 'reality' - possibly its 'True Story' status, along with tales such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Blair Witch Project, both hits, is the reason for this. Some people are perhaps gullible enougth to believe that if the tag says 'True Story' than it is somehow more believable and more 'realistic'. The style of all of these films try and impose a sense of the real, whether through the use of video footage or pictures or newspaper clippings. They are all based on the belief that the supernatural exists, and this is what draws in the audience, fascinated and intrigued by these wild 'true life tales'. Just imagine the derision if The Blair Witch Project had been marketed without the idea that it was based on the documented footage of these kids who had gone into the woods chasing up a curse and NEVER - CAME - BACK. What if it premiered as a movie based on fiction, without the hype - I imagine that most people either wouldn't have bothered or would have thought they'd been cheated out of their money by 'amateur' filmmakers. Its reliance on 'fact' is the anchor for the film's success, as is Amytiville's.
The original at least had its own identity - a creepy little score and some neat imagery of the house, rather simple, (not the sheer height of the house in the remake), with the peering-eye windows and the red glow over the house. It took its pace slowly but when things happened they had an impact - the priest being told to 'get out' - noises at night when the clock turned 3.15 - it had some room to breath. The remake is another example of shameless style over substance, over the top in its reliance on CGI at most times, the frequent and all too detailed ghosts in torment just seeming to 'shock for shocks sake' but getting nowhere. The characters are pretty but dull, and the children of the family just irritating. Ryan Reynolds does his best and at times nearly pulls it off, all red eyes, but the fact that he becomes 'possessed' almost straight away means that all suspense is lost.
None of it seems plausible as it plays out, none of it adds up as it goes along, the script and film in general holds no water. The teaser trailer for the film provided me with high hopes in its 'economy of style' (take note) - the blank screen, shotgun blasting, and then the house and the omen-like score gave it a simplicity that could have worked wonders. But it simply went straight for the jugular and never gave any thought to pace or contrast or reflection or mis-direction - anyone who had seen the first film would have known what was about to happen and why. The interesting parts of this film were few and far between and even then adhered to cliché done better before (why do possessed children always want to go somewhere high and dangerous? (New Nightmare),and everything good about the original was thrown out for sudden shocks and scares. Even the poster looks good, but still it failed to hold me in any way - possibly because it was always about appearances and not about making a movie that questioned the audience in anyway, didn't take a fresh approach, a new look at the myth. It was another moneymaker, but what a wasted opportunity to make something memorable. Just another vacuous remake in the sea of vacuous remakes, all shells of their former selves.
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Passionless
For a film dealing with the death of Jesus Christ's final hours of torture and mutilation, and considering the significant hype that this film was one of the most violent and bloody ever made, I expected to be moved, brought to tears, devastated. Even considering my non-adherance to religious dogma, I thought that this would be a powerful portrait of one mans suffering and pain. But, inevitably, the film failed to move me in any way past exclamations of, 'ohhhhhhhh, thats got to hurt', the film essentially being devoid of any real spiritual message (although there are excerpts intercut throughout his torture of his kindness and humanity to try and force a rapore between audience and character to make up for any lack of background that has gone before). Prolonged and extensive scenes of violence initially shock, then, after being kicked, cut, whipped and so on, desensitisation kicks in. The score tries hard to stir the emotions, and if it wasn't for a one-note script and premise, it would probably have worked.
This dosen't mean I've missed the point: I understand that the film was created to show just how much suffering one man went through, but on the one hand, I find it difficult to swallow the idea that he died for humanity's sins, and that he therefore died for everyone, past and present. The film, if anything, shows he died becuase he wanted people to believe that he was the son of God, and to sacrifice himself, in true martyr fashion, in the name of what he believed: and it just shows how ignorant and bloodthirsty the Romans were.
The film at least gave the Christian Churchs an advertising tool for their religion. I got free entrance to see the film and a free lecture at the end of it about reaching out to God and how we are all full of sin. An unfortunately empty and uninvolving film, using tactics from a horror movie to sell a dying religion, you get the feeling that they're flaying a dead carcass (no pun). I don't want to generalise, but I feel that it will be mostly those already of the Christian faith who find it a rewarding and humbling experience, for they are the ones familiar with his history. I don't think seeing someone getting tortured for a couple of hours constitutes a religous experience.
Cabin Fever (2002)
Mediocre...fails to establish any true horror - SPOILERS
Cabin Fever could have been so much better, if only Eli Roth was more concerned with building some clever ideas into his premise of a flesh eating virus, that reduces some pretty looking horror fodder into less pretty looking dead corpses. The film never really establishes a consistent sense of threat or danger: the kids of the film always feel like they're only a few steps away from help or civilisation, with people wandering in and out of frame throughout the film but who are for one reason or another unable to help.
The film, trying hard to be a homage but, without a really well developed central conceit, seems more to be a rehashing of old ideas that have been used in horror from the '70's onwards, copying and pasting scenes from better, more original and bolder horror movies. Kids going into a cabin for week of 'fun' and some OTT splatter is borrowed straight from The Evil Dead; Last House on the Left's songs (by David Hess) are thrown in for good measure here, there and everywhere, used to recreate a sense of forboding but feeling slightly out of place in such a threat-free teen movie; the ending basically reeking of Night of the Living Dead, where cops, thinking mistakenly that the guy crying "I made it!" is infected with the disease , blow him away; even the scene with Anne Heche in I Know What You Did Last Summer as a hidden-away poultry slaughterer is replicated. However, Cabin Fever fails to create even the slightest bit of tension that any of these films managed to evoke.
It is an entertaining enougth movie, there are a few laugths, a few surprises and some pretty nasty moments of gore - the dead dog at the films beginning splitting apart at the ribs and spraying blood in a mans face; one hapless teenager giving his hopeful girlfriend a 'finger massage', only to realise after fondling her that her lower half seems to be rotting away; the remains of a flesh devoured victim, the face eaten away. The film is ultimatly more involving when the decaying kids are on the run from the hill-billy locals. But ideas of paranoia and flesh eating disease are not milked of their potential, and Eli seems content to make a incoherent, generally illogical movie that could have been a classic, but instead tries only to replicate classics, and ends up with something more along the lines of American Pie - The Exema Years.
People slag off Scream now more than ever, saying that it laid the way for all these ironic, wink-wink, nod-nod horror movies, but the makers of these more recent traditional horror cannot think of an original idea between them - The Ring remake, Dawn of the Dead remake, The Wicker Man remake etc, etc...but Scream had more wit, more shocks, more entertainment and intelligence than any of these combined, with some sort of emotional resonance and a genuinely satisfying cartharsis, managing a different, postmodern approach to a genre which before has been afraid to adopt any new angle. Scream - a homage to horror in the true sense, with style. Only one word kept occurring throughout Cabin Fever - mediocre.