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Reviews
Little Red Riding Hood (2016)
For fans of bad cinema only
So the movie has a woman in red riding hood, trying to take medicine to her grandma. And there's a guy in a werewolf costume, which I guess is like a Big Bad Wolf. So in that, I guess the film is faithful to the original Grimm Brother's fairy tale it says it's based on.
The bits about a seductive laundress, an evil leader monster with a crown of fingers, some eyeless monster, magical force fields, and a rocking estate in the forests of modern day California digress a bit from the source material.
Here's the thing though, it's all so bad and incoherent it's fun.
There are flashbacks to scenes we saw less than 15 minutes earlier. And those flashbacks repeat some shots for a second time. There's sound effects recycled from the director's earlier film "The Dead the Damned and the Darkness" (also recommended for fans of bad horror films). The CGI had me praying for a software watermark to complete the cheesiness.
But the cast seems to really give it their all. The costumes exist in a weird limbo between "off the shelf from a Halloween store" and "actually quite good". And the locations threaten to steal every scene they're in (but you can blame that partly on my love for medieval style castles and modern medieval-themed mansions).
There's so much more I want to tell you, but I have to let you discover some things on your own. Does Red Riding Hood get the medicine to her mother? Are breast implants used by monsters in the 14th century? Will the Power Rangers come looking for their foam-rubber sword being wielded by the knight? Does the film tack on an unexplained sub-plot about a girl in the modern day at a different location in order to pad the run time after the director realized he needed another 20 minutes or so? And why is the knight's voice so manly? So many mysteries! I wouldn't recommend watching this by yourself, but only because this kind of comedy is better shared. I also wouldn't recommend it for kids, or people who take bad cinema seriously (as a wise man once said "repeat to yourself, 'it's just a show. I should really just relax'."), and there's a brief scene of "light" sexual assault that may be too much for some*. But if you've got some friends, some pizza, and a suitable amount of brain damage (or brain damaging substances), then give it a go.
Recommended for: fans of "Birdemic 1" ("before James Nguyen sold out"), fans of Rene Perez' other films, movie hecklers, and fans of the theatrical release of "Hercules in New York".
(*all joking aside, I only mention this because I don't want someone thinking this will be fun based on my review, and then they have an emotional trigger set off. If you're on the fence, the scene is meant less as a drawn out exercise in horror-drama and (I'm pretty sure) more as a weak excuse to show a boob.)
Dead Before Dawn 3D (2012)
Who's the target audience here?
The plot: a group of kids unleash a horrible zombie-demon ("zemon") curse on a small town. Everyone who makes eye contact with the kids kills themselves and comes back as a zemon, bent on killing the kids by giving them hickeys. And the kids must race against the clock to break the curse before sunrise. Starring Christopher Lloyd for a couple of scenes, Kevin McDonald in another couple of shots, Jimmy Fallon's college-age clone, and some other people you might recognize as having been in that one thing filmed in Canada.
So you have a band of 30 and 20 somethings, that are supposed to be teenagers, in a film that appears to be targeted at adolescents. What could go wrong? Well, here's the problem: the movie wants to be a light hearted zombie comedy, but it's simply not funny. Lloyd and McDonald are woefully underused and most of the jokes simply fall flat. There -are- a couple of chuckles to be had, but simply not enough to make the movie worth watching as a comedy. As a horror film the movie similarly falls flat; the whole premise of "kids get to narrate how their cursed, and decide to come up with a plague of monsters whose name rhymes with 'semen'" kinda' kills any chance of people taking the movie seriously enough for it to be a horror film. There -are- a couple of potentially scary shot though, reminiscent of an early David Cronenberg perhaps, but there's not enough for the movie to work as a horror film either.
As for the production values themselves... we're talking shots where not-Fallon is talking to Lloyd on the phone, and Lloyd appears in a little bubble as he talks into the phone. Overall the movie is better than that, with hints of a small budget, but how a stinker of an idea like that made it to print is beyond me. I've seen better production on a tweeny Nickelodeon show, which seems to be the film's desired target demographic.
If it weren't for all the people killing themselves, and drooling blood, and getting hacked up, I imagine most parents would be fine leaving their tweens to watch it. Personally though, I'd rather my kids watch films like Shaun of the Dead, Fido or even Wasting Away instead if they need a zom-com fix, because this movie would likely just end up making them feel insulted. Heck, House of the Dead makes for a better zom-com, and it wasn't meant to be a comedy.
On the other hand, Brittany Allen as a blonde cheerleader was kinda' hot. So the film has that going for it.