Category: Reviews

Turbo Kid. Strange. Reminds me of Tank Girl. Bad guy has one eye, but calls himself Zeus. Why the hell not Odin? Well, it’s got gore like a horror movie. Or at least a Raimi film. The garden gnome club. This is my “Gnomestick”. 

Well, that was probably the most self aware horror film I’ve seen since Leslie Vernon : Behind the Mask, or Cabin in the Woods. A supernatural serial killer, called Mr. Bonejangles, our titular villain, is being transported to a mental hospital, when his transport gets interrupted by a zombie attack. His escort wanders off, and Bonejangles does his killer thing. So, the zombies are part of a curse by an evil witch.  This movie has some of the best moments. Including one dude, after his hand is amputated, trying to pull the Ash Williams chainsaw upgrade and dropping the saw into his own body. I’d say this one is worth watching. It’s just wow; so surreal. 

So, Dave Made a Maze, in which the titular Dave, builds a cardboard fort in his living room. Except the maze has extra-dimensional properties, and it’s much bigger on the inside. And after Dave can’t get out, his girlfriend and their friends, including a camera crew, all head into the maze. And damn, if it isn’t bigger on the inside.  And the maze, of course, has traps. A few people die, the gore is strangely crafty, with one woman shooting wool from her severed arteries. This is another one that doesn’t quite pass the horror test. Still it’s fun and the Minotaur is a bit scary.  The labyrinth is pretty neat, with some really cool visual effects, like the living paper swans. 

So, All I Need, it’s a movie about a hotel room filled with bound young women, and a dude who delivers packages. It keeps switching back between the hotel room with the girls trying to escape, and the dude slowly working his was up the ranks of some criminal empire. And it really doesn’t work. It’s slow and it’s jarring, and the hotel room seems oddly secured, despite being filled with a ridiculous number of kidnapped women. The scenes with the girls, while tense, just seem kinda ridiculous, given the sheer number of bodies in the room. 

So, Condemned, originally titled God’s Acre, is a horror movie about a dude who rode a bubble, buying property, becoming a landlord, and then losing the majority of them in the collapse, as the tenants failure to pay resulted in the bank foreclosing on most of the properties. Just one crumbling unit is left, and he’s going to try to fix it up, flip it and rebuild his life. Except the walls don’t match the blueprints. And so he uses a hammer to open up the wall, finds weird stuff and develops a theory about a former tenant who killed his wife and daughter. After which, he follows up on one of them, only to find out that the guy’s wife was still alive and carrying a shotgun, which he accidentally discharges into the fellow. And then has a breakdown, because he remembers where the stuff in the walls really came from. I don’t know, this was a slow film, and didn’t really work for me. 

So, I decided to rewatch one I hadn’t seen in ages, Drag me to Hell. I’ve been a fan of the Sam Raimi’s work for a while, and this definitely has feel of his other work. It really reminds me of the Evil Dead films. The gore is gross and over the top; the vomiting of bile, the toothless gnawing, the popping eyeballs, all of it. It’s somehow far tamer than I remembered. There’s a few fun scenes, but also some that remind me of loony tunes. Like the anvil falling on her head in the garage. The levitation during the seance is pretty great, and the final scene with the rail road tracks is just perfect. But the scene with the flooding grave… It was just a little too silly. 

So, Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil, is one I saw recommended by netflix and on facebook. The original language was likely Italian, but I watched the rather terrible English dub. Crazy old man, keeps to himself in his fortress in the forest. Little girl is being bullied, her doll’s head gets tossed over his fence, she learns about the devil locked in a cage in his house, and gets entangled in his life. And then we learn that the dude from the Gov’t who’d come to town and tried to arrest the blacksmith, is also a devil. Politics gets in the way, and long story short, the blacksmith goes to hell with a giant gold bell, to rescue the little girl, and annoy the devils. Weird movie. I was hoping for something like “Witching and Bitching”, but this wasn’t quite as interesting. 

Officially, Law Abiding Citizen isn’t a horror film. But it starts out with something that would be at home in the rape-revenge horror category, a home invasion, murder of wife and daughter by creepy dudes. Then we get some courtroom bits, dealing with the system, and how people make deals. After that, we get the fun of the main dude beginning his revenge. Swapping the lethal injection chemicals for something messier, multi-limb amputation of the accomplice who made a deal to get off on lesser charges. And then we get into his revenge on the system. Bombs, killer robots, and more bombs. In the end, he gets tricked and hoisted by his own petard; or roasted by his own napalm, rather.