“You ever heard the story of Mr. Faded Glory?”

You know, music isn’t always about bushy beards and big, bad riffs, as much as I make it out to be.  I mean, those things are great, and generally essential, but sometimes I enjoy — as I’m sure we all do — the deep, personal, and emotional connection with music as well. No other music I’ve ever heard (save for maybe Jeff Buckley) affects me as emotionally as Andrew Wood’s does.

Wood, an early purveyor of Seattle’s grunge rock scene and undoubtedly its biggest personality, died in March of 1990 from complications of a drug overdose at the age of 24, just as his band, Mother Love Bone, was about to release their debut full-length, Apple, and have a profound influence on a scene that would blow up into an industry and change the musical landscape in the decade that followed. But this story, a 10-year project for director Scot Barbour, tells of Wood’s years before his death, and shows us a man many of us never knew existed. Wood grew up in an abusive, dysfunctional household and used humor, drugs, and his alter ego, Landrew the Lovechild, to cover up the pain. His penchant for being the center of attention manifested itself in Landrew, the ghost-faced entity and lead singer of Wood’s first band, Malfunkshun, who would come down from Olympus to preach love rock to the people. His love rock was truly something special.

Malfunkshun, set against the backdrop of an emerging Seattle scene that included bands like Malfunkshun, Soundgarden, Green River, the Melvins, U-Men, and Skin Yard, features interviews with friends, family, band mates, industry heads, and even Wood’s rehab therapist, includes lots of old photos and rare live footage of Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone, incorporates colourful animated sequences that turns Wood’s life and music into a seemingly appropriate abstract kaleidoscope, and plenty of footage of Wood himself, including an interview in his room — dubbed Landrew’s Lovenest — where he’s clutching a stuffed toy frog, as if it was his childhood innocence, and hamming it up. Malfunkshun also comes with two bonus audio discs, Malfunkshun’s Return to Olympus and Melodies and Dreams, a solo album of material — music and interviews with himself — recorded to tape in the Lovenest. This disc alone, which also includes a rare song recorded by Chris Cornell and Wood when they lived together, is worth your money.

Truthfully, I wasn’t old enough to appreciate Wood’s impact at the time, but I’ve since come to revel in his music and appreciate his legacy. This film allows me the ability to feel and understand what it was like for him and the scene he helped create back then, and I come out of it a bigger fan of love rock than ever before.

Check out the trailer for Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story!

Valhalla Rising

When I rented this movie, it came with a warning from the clerk. She said that people had been complaining about the lack of dialogue. I thanked her for the warning, but assured her that I would go ahead and rent the movie anyway because I only care about Viking blood. Lots and lots of Viking blood. So, to put your mind at ease, there is a good amount of dialogue and there’s even more Viking blood. It’s definitely slow in parts, but it’s beautifully shot, and its story about a mute, one-eyed Viking slave fleeing his captors and making a journey through the fog to the Holy Land is pretty awesome. Highly recommended.

Piranha

This Piranha is a re-make of the 1978 movie of the same name and it’s an ultra campy, super gory jiggle fest about piranhas who ruin spring break for a lot of drunk douche-bags. Sometimes we only a watch movie because it’s overloaded with blood and tits; this is one of those movies. The acting is terrible and most of it didn’t make sense, but that doesn’t matter one bit here. I didn’t watch the 3D version, but I imagine it’ll blow your mind.

Paranormal Activity 2

I didn’t think Paranormal Activity 2 had as many scares as Paranormal Activity, but it also didn’t aggravate me as much. What I mean by that is, the first movie really built up its horror well with a heavy concentration on the escalating terror, but all the squabbling, home video nonsense got on my nerves after awhile. This one here didn’t have any of that petty arguing, which made it much more watchable, but its horror seemed weaker somehow. If you haven’t seen the first one, you should, because it ties in neatly with this one. Not a bad sequel at all, it’s just too bad they couldn’t take the best of both and make one great movie.

Antichrist

This is one awesomely bizarre movie, man. Shot in varying styles and laid out in four chapters (with a prologue and epilogue), Antichrist is about a couple who retreat to a cabin (dubbed “Eden”) in the woods to cope with the loss of their son. The psychotherapist husband (Willem Defoe) tries to treat his grieving wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg), but everything becomes unraveled in a darkly erotic and disturbing manner. I swear, you could dissect this one for weeks and still not have even scratched the surface. It’s completely intense, among other things. Hell, it’s not even a movie. It’s art. See it immediately.

Frozen

The idea behind Frozen, the 2010 horror movie about three skiers stuck on a chair lift high above a mountain side, kind of reminds me of the old Mitch Hedberg joke about the above-ground swimming pool commercial, and how it can only be 30 seconds long because that’s the most amount of time you can depict having fun in an above-ground swimming pool. I didn’t think it would be possible to squeeze a whole movie’s worth of scares out of such an above-ground premise (and it wasn’t, really), but Frozen does manage to push your anxiety meter well into the red simply because it thrives on a totally reasonable, palpable fear. That being said, it’s not hard to predict what lies ahead for our stranded skiers (i.e. finding a way down, frostbite, etc.), who don’t seem to be taking their survival very seriously (do up your coat, idiot!), and you have to be able to handle the kind of dialogue that evolves from a stranded situation, such as blaming, arguing, crying, and reminiscing. However, the circling, hungry wolves were an excellent touch.

Check out the trailer for Frozen!

30 Days of Night: Dark Days

If you remember 30 Days of Night at all, you’ll remember that an Alaskan town was ravaged by vampires during a time of the year when the sun doesn’t rise. Well, its sequel, Dark Days, finds a survivor from that movie (Josh Hartnett’s wife) traveling the country giving lectures in an effort to shed some light (ha!) on what happened to her town and to convince people of the existence of vampires. She makes her way to LA where she hooks up with some other survivors intent on revenge and they convince her to go vampire killing with them with the specific purpose of taking out the Queen and preventing the next planned attack. This movie trades the chilly Alaskan landscape for the sewers of LA, and while quite straightforward in its action-horror delivery, it provides a decent amount of gore and was a bit better than I expected.

Check out the trailer for 30 Days of Night: Dark Days!

The Wild Hunt

The Wild Hunt is a 2009 Canadian movie about a role-playing weekend that goes horribly wrong, but if you’re at all nervous about watching a movie about a bunch of nerds dressed up as Vikings, Arthurian knights, and elves, running around in the woods swinging foam swords and anvils at each other, don’t be, because this movie is awesome. It’s about this guy named Erik, whose girlfriend, Lyn, leaves him to go take part in the role-playing game, which she was introduced to by Erik’s brother Bjorn. So Erik must go after her and try to convince her to come back, only in order to do that he must assume a character and join his Bjorn’s Viking clan and rescue her (she is a Viking princess) from the clutches of the evil Murtagh. Despite the underlying, self-effacing humor, The Wild Hunt is a dark story about love, delusion, escapism, fear, anger, and responsibility. It’s got a really great indie vibe to it, amazing performances, and climaxes with one brutally savage scene. Definitely check this one out.

Check out the trailer for The Wild Hunt!

Mother

A Korean film from the same dude responsible for The Host about an eccentric and neurotic mother of a mentally challenged boy who she believes has been framed for murder. A young school girl has been killed and all evidence points toward the kid, so the police pick him up and the case is closed. The mother, however, is adamant about her son’s innocence and sets out to prove it. Hye-ja Kim (as the mother) is really awesome, and aside from being a suspenseful whodunit, it’s also pretty damn funny, which is a difficult combo to pull off. Recommended, but only if you can handle over two hours of sub-titles.

Check out the trailer for Mother!

Open House

Grabbed this one for a lark simply because the wife loves True Blood and, well, Stephen Moyer and real life wife Anna Paquin are pretty prominent on the cover, as well as Canadian model and Battlestar Galactica wet dream Tricia Helfer. I mean, come on, that’s just too good a cast to pass up. This one was even written and directed by Paquin’s brother, Andrew, which gives the whole project a take-your-kid-to-work-day feel to it. Even though Moyer and Paquin are leads on the cover, their combined on-screen time is about six minutes, so now it’s a cash grab as well. Keeps getting better, doesn’t it? It all combines for one lame horror movie about a fucked up dude and his fucked up chick who make a living by scoping out open houses, killing the people selling the house, moving in, posing as the new homeowners, and killing the neighbors or anyone else who happens along. However, this time is a little different for them because the dude never actually kills the girl who owns the house, keeping her bound and gagged in some cubby hole in the basement (because he likes her and really wants to stop doing what he’s doing), a secret his controlling lady doesn’t know about. It lacks in both sex and gore, which the whole premise is based on, and I predicted the “twist” about a quarter of the way into the flick. I know the True Blood season is over, but avoid this one at all costs and watch vampire re-runs instead.

Check out the trailer for Open House!

Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage

Rush is, and probably always will be, the butt of Canadian rock n’ roll jokes. A charge not totally unjustified, especially given some of the stuff they put out in the 80s, but man, have they ever been one beloved and influential band. This documentary, brought to you by Sam Dunn (Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, Iron Maiden: Flight 666, Global Metal), chronicles Rush’s insane cult following as mega-awesome progressive rock band, and tells their untold story, from small town Canadian geeks to the third ranked band with the most gold or platinum studio albums behind The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Rush, ever the polite, humble, and well-behaved Canadians they are, have spent the four decades avoiding the pitfalls of stardom — drugs, booze, and women — to concentrate on one thing: musicianship. They have that in spades, in case you don’t know. A really funny, enlightening doc, and it just might convert the one guy out there who’s not a Rush fan, or the millions who make fun of ‘em.

Check out the trailer for Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage!

The Square

This Australian movie has it all: blackmail, murder, adultery, and more twists than a stick of licorice. Raymond, a contractor, is cheating on his wife with Carla, this chick who lives across the lake. Carla’s husband is into some bad shit and keeps a bag of money hidden in the ceiling, so her and Raymond set up a plan to steal the money and burn the place down. This way they can take the money and run away together, and Carla’s husband will think the money went up in smoke. Of course, the plan goes awry, someone is killed in the fire, and Raymond starts receiving blackmail letters. His nerves are completely shattered and he’s losing his composure, and must kill again in order to keep his affair and crime a secret. On top of that, Carla’s husband comes to discover that the money was never in the bag when the house burned down, so now he’s pissed and on a mission. It’s an intricate storyline, a clever one at that, and while the movie does kind of drag in parts, it’s fairly well crafted and played out. Decent enough, this one.

Check out the trailer for The Square!

After.Life

The alternate title for this one should be Naked on a Slab because that’s how Christina Ricci spends the majority of this movie. See, she’s dead. Or not dead. Who knows, but either way she’s awfully whiny about it. And Liam Neeson plays a mortician who can either talk to the dead or abducts people and convinces them they are dead. The dude from the Mac commercials thinks something is up. So, is something up? What’s the deal here? Is she really dead or is the guy in the mortuary a real sicko? Um, I don’t know, but Ricci sure is naked, and she sure is on a slab. Really, my wife said it best: “After.Life is a horrible movie unless you’re really into Christina Ricci’s tits. If that’s the case, you’ll love it.”

Check out the trailer for After.Life!

First though, the rundown. Stefaniuk plays Joey, the self-absorbed leader of The Winners, and he and his band have just been dumped by their manager Jeff (Dave Foley). Despite being at their lowest, they stick to their plans to make it from Montreal to Toronto and down the Eastern US seaboard in order to play a showcase gig attended by industry insiders, movers and shakers. However, before leaving Montreal, the band’s bass player, Jennifer (Jessica Paré), leaves a gig with a powder-faced dandy named Queeny (played by Burning Brides singer/guitarist Dimitri Coats), goes to a party, and gets turned into a blood-sucker. When she arrives at the next city, there’s something noticeably different about her, and suddenly, people start taking a bit of an interest in the band, particularly its sexy bass player. Jennifer tries to hide her new affliction, but when she starts feeding on people along the way, the band’s funny French roadie, Hugo, discovers her secret and, as a good roadie is wont to do, helps her take care of it.

One night, after devouring Beef Bellows (played by Moby), the lead singer of the band Secretaries of Steak, Joey and the rest of the band get hip to Jennifer’s vamped ways. They all agree that it must be kept a secret and that she can’t turn any of the other band members into vampires. That proves difficult, and soon enough Jennifer ends up biting the guitarist and the drummer. Now Joey’s the only one who’s not a vampire, and repeated visits/visions from some bartender/Lucifer/head vampire dude (played by Alice Cooper) urging him to embrace the vampire ways and fulfill his dreams of becoming famous, is making it hard for him not to sell out, as it were. Speaking on behalf of the other side of the coin is super- producer Victor (played by Iggy Pop), who is urging Joey to not give in to the hype and remain true to himself, etc. Finally, though, Joey opts for selling out, either because he wants to be famous or because he’s totally in love with Jennifer.

The Winners become overnight sensations, an exploding IT band, with a new populist following. However, they can’t control their thirsty ways and even feed on radio DJ Rockin’ Roger (played by Henry Rollins) live on the air. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone except Eddie Van Helsing (Malcolm McDowell), the eye-patched vampire hunter who’s been trailing them all tour, hoping to destroy them and get his hands on the ultimate prize, Queeny, the dude who killed his wife many years ago. The movie winds down with the band opting for the high road once and for all, so they collaborate with Van Helsing who has a plan that will make them human again and help him exact his revenge on Queeny.

So yeah, Suck is a bit boring, but what it lacks in action it makes up for in wit. The roadie, Hugo, is the funniest of the bunch, the bilingual fall guy with some clever one liners, and having noted shock rocker Alice Cooper play the dude urging Joey to embrace the shtick appeal seems wholly apropos. Also, Moby is a well-known vegetarian, so his role in this film is all cow tongue in cheek, and it works, and naming the band The Winners when they are obviously anything but, works as well.

However, what I enjoyed most about this movie was playing the album cover game. It was the one thing that kept my interest all the way through. See, Stefaniuk put scenes in this movie that were near exact shots of famous album covers, and once I got hip to it, I spent the rest of the time searching them out. Here are the covers I discovered, in no particular order: The Beatles’ Abbey Road, T Rex’s Electric Warrior, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, The Who’s The Kids Are All Right, and The Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet. Also, the scene where Joey talks with Alice Copper at the crossroad’s is a Robert Johnson homage, and there was one scene that I thought might have been The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, but wasn’t quite sure. Anyway, there could’ve been more I didn’t pick up on, so go ahead and get this movie and see what you can find!

*Yup, that’s what she said.

Check out the trailer for Suck!

Parasomnia concerns our main man Danny Sloan, who happens upon a girl while visiting a friend in the hospital. This girl, Laura Baxter, suffers from a condition known as parasomnia, which means she sleeps for most of her life, only waking up every now and then for a few minutes at a time. Plus it has to do with the way you dream, etc. Anyway, Laura is being kept in the psych ward of the hospital. Danny becomes immediately smitten with this sleeping beauty and starts making regular visits. Unfortunately for Laura and Danny, she’s got one nasty neighbor. It turns out that the guy in the padded cell next to her, chained to the wall with a mask over his face, is a deranged murderer, know for his hypnotic powers. But the problems for Laura and Danny don’t end there.

A bunch of doctors are planning on taking Laura away to do some experiments on her. Danny does some research and finds out that the doctor who will be performing the experiments has a terrible track record of killing his test subjects. So, not wanting to lose Laura, Danny steals her from the hospital. However, this does not go unnoticed by Byron Volpe, the insane killer in the next room, who has “control” over Laura and torments her in her dreams. He claims she is his, but Danny takes her anyway.

Life outside the hospital with a girl who only stays awake for a few minutes at a time isn’t all roses for Danny, but he loves her so he is willing to put up with it and help her out as best he can. But when Volpe, from the hospital, starts getting into Laura’s dreams and mind fucking her into killing people and attacking Danny (when she’s awake), things become a little hairier. Now the cops are involved and every bloody trail leads to Danny. So Danny figures the only way to be clear of everything is to go to the hospital and kill Volpe. However, Volpe uses his amazing mental powers and turns the whole hospital into one gruesome killing floor. Danny narrowly escapes.

So…um…I think at this point Volpe has escaped and has kidnapped Laura. Yeah, and Danny tracks them down. Volpe, using mind control, gets Danny to tell Laura he hates her so that she will want to be with Volpe, but the spell is interrupted and stuff happens but I won’t spoil it for you. You know, Parasomnia had potential what with the gore and the creepiness of Volpe’s character, but it was ultimately a victim of its own limitations, let down by an awkward plot, poor acting, and the low budget effects of Laura’s nightmares. So it goes, huh? Oh well, onward we march into the mouth of badness!

Check out the trailer for Parasomnia!

There’s not much to this one, so here’s your brief rundown. I’ll try to keep the hate and sarcasm to a minimum. Ricky and J.T., two slacker outcasts at school, decide to ditch one day and go drink some brews at an old abandoned mental hospital. So they break in and throw shit around. Then they discover the body of a woman, naked and chained to a bed. They think she’s dead, but lo and behold, she’s still alive. Ricky wants to do the right thing and help her or call the cops, but not J.T. He’s stumbled on a horny teen’s treasure chest. Ricky’s intimidated by J.T. and can never stand up to him, so he hangs his head in defeat and goes home, leaving J.T. there with his new toy. The next day, J.T. tells Ricky that the girl tried to bite/attack him, so he hit her over and over again. He even broke her neck. But guess what? She’s still alive. To prove his point further, he grabs the gun Ricky carries with him and shoots the girl. Still not dead.

J.T. falls into a spiral of possession over this girl, whose prostrate, bound, and naked availability has taken possession of him, and soon he stays there all day and all night fucking her. Ricky never wants any part of it because he’s in love with the JoAnn, the popular, pretty girl at school. So J.T. invites his buddy Wheeler to join in on the fun because Ricky’s being a total bummer about the whole thing. Hell, he even tries to free her at one point. What a pussy. Anyway, the jocks (including JoAnn’s boyfriend) then find out about this girl and come down for a piece of their own, only one of them gets their dick bitten off. It’s at this point that J.T. discovers that when the dead girl bites you, you become just like her. So, J.T. and Wheeler come up with a brilliant idea: kidnap a new girl, a new fresh, young, hot girl to get bitten by the old, stinky girl and then they’ll have a new rape victim. Yay!

So, after a botched attempt to snag a fat woman at a truck stop, they settled on JoAnn. This doesn’t sit well with Ricky, of course, who shows up to rescue her. He hacks off Wheeler’s arm with a machete and then the dead girl breaks free and attacks J.T. She leaves Ricky alone, however, because apparently she is cognizant of the fact that he was the only one who didn’t stick his cock into every one of her holes. Unfortunately though, JoAnn gets hurt in the process and is at death’s door. But J.T., always the gentleman, offers to bite her so that she can become a dead girl and Ricky can have her any time he wants. I guess Ricky is so in love with JoAnn that it’s just too good of a deal to pass up. The dead girl runs off into the night and JoAnn takes her place, and Ricky, who never wanted any part of the captive sex in the first place, plays to the statistics and becomes the new J.T. I will just assume he and JoAnn fucked lived happily ever after.

Man, what a horrible movie. I hated everything about it. It made me so angry. Even the artsy soundtrack. Here’s the goddamn trailer.

While the ass-to-mouth part is somewhat original, it’s held up by a standard horror movie foundation. While on vacation in Germany, two girls (Jenny and Lindsay) get a flat tire in the woods in the middle of the night. Cell phone service is non-existent, naturally. So, dressed up for a night of clubbing, they hoof it through the woods and stumble upon Dr. Heiter’s place. Dr. Heiter is a famous, retired, and as it turns out, completely insane surgeon (once a master at separating conjoined twins) who welcomes the girls into his home with the promise of helping them. Only instead of calling the car company, he drugs their water. The two girls wake up in Dr. Heiter’s basement/operating room and their vacation is more or less over.

Dr. Heiter then kidnaps and brings home another victim, a young Asian man named Katsuro, and with three bodies he can now go ahead and perform his experimental surgery, and turn his victims into a human centipede. He explains to them his plans to remove ligaments in their knees so they can only crawl and to sew their mouths to each others asses, running a single digestive tract through each of them. Is this actually possible? Well, the poster says, “100% Medically Accurate,” so I guess so. Anyway, he joins the three of them, with Katsuro up front, Lindsay in the middle (her punishment for trying to escape), and Jenny bringing up the rear, and goes about trying to train them like a dog; he makes Katsuro eat from a dish, bring him a paper, and keeps them all locked in a crate. Katsuro rarely does as he’s told (the other girls can only follow his lead) and ends up on the business end of a beat down every now and then. Finally, the police show up looking for the missing kids, and instead of acting all cool and aloof, the strange Dr. Heiter goes berserk. The centipede tries to escape, there’s a dust up with the authorities, and all but one of the characters die (I’ll let you find out which one for yourself).

Now, as I said earlier, I didn’t find this movie as shocking as most. Yes, the concept has a lot of appeal, but it seems to me it could have been way more graphic than it was. The scene where Katsuro shits into Lindsay’s mouth (which, given the ass-to-mouth nature of the film, was the moment you knew was coming) was, for me, hardly disgusting. I don’t want to sound like a real sick bastard here, but I was expecting to see shit oozing out of the ass/mouth suture wound like wet mud dripping out of a clenched fist. Also, we never get to see a mouth sewn to an ass at all because they are wearing a sling around their heads the whole time (and on top of that there is very little shown of the surgery itself). With a concept like this, I was expecting much, much more. On the high side, Dr. Heiter (played by Dieter Laster), dressed in his best Dr. Steel ensemble, pulls off a real creepy dude, so I guess that is something. All the being said, I am looking forward to the release of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) some time next year, if only for the fact that it has a chance to make up for all the revolting, terrifying shit it missed with this one. Yes, pun intended.

Check out the trailer for The Human Centipede (First Sequence)!

Right, so Cooper plays Leon, a photographer whose subject matter is the heart of the city, only things aren’t going so well for him. He meets with a gallery owner (played by Brooke Shields) who tells him that his photos lack a certain grittiness and that he needs to face danger head on with his camera. So, taking her advice, he heads into the subway one night where he snaps some photos of a young girl being harassed by a gang of thugs. The thugs flee and the girl thanks Leon and gets on the subway. The next day, Leon reads in the paper that the girl he photographed is missing, and so now of course he’s gotta figure out what happened. This leads him back into the subway at night where he spies a strange man (Jones). He follows him, takes photos of him, etc. Soon Leon is obsessed with this man, named Mahogany, and thinks he is responsible for the numerous disappearances that have taken place over the last hundred years.

One day Leon follows Mahogany to his work, a meat packing plant, and discovers that Mahogany is quite the skilled butcher, which comes in handy for his night job: serial killer. Yep, Mahogany has been killing people on the 2 AM subway. But not just killing them; he attacks them with his giant meat tenderizer, bashing them all to hell, and then removes their eyes, teeth, fingernails, and hair, and then sticks hooks through their ankles and hangs them in the subway like it’s a meat locker. These scenes are quite graphic, borderline ridiculous in fact, but offer truly squeamish thrills. I still don’t understand how Mahogany manages to keep his suit so clean with all that blood flying around, but maybe he’s just that good of a butcher.

Leon’s obsession with Mahogany takes a dark turn, much to the displeasure of his girlfriend, Maya, and soon he is out there day and night trying to get to the bottom of things. There’s a noticeable shift in his temperament as he becomes rougher during sex and even develops a taste for red meat (Leon is a vegan). Then one night he follows Mahogany on to the train and takes pictures of him killing people. Mahogany catches Leon spying on him and beats him down. Leon, however, is spared by the butcher, who doesn’t gut him but instead leaves him hanging and watches as something attacks Leon and carves markings into his chest. Leon awakes in the meat packing plant and stumbles home, bloodied, marked, and without his camera. Maya then takes matters into her own hands by going to Mahogany’s place to get Leon’s camera back, which contains the evidence to everything he’s witnessed. She narrowly escapes with a pile of train schedules that are supposed to be evidence, and goes to the police. The police don’t do anything, though. In fact, the absence of police throughout the whole movie seemed a bit odd to me. How is it that the vicious murders are taking place on the subway and yet there are no police patrolling the subway? Well, even though it made no sense, it does get explained by movie’s end.

Speaking of the end of the movie, Leon and Maya both find themselves confronting Mahogany on the subway and the motives for killing are finally revealed, in a turn based as much on science fiction as it is on horror. You’ll probably scratch your head over the ending because Mahogany as psychopathic butcher is a much better idea than, say, Mahogany as chosen butcher, but that’s the way these things go sometime. All in all though, The Midnight Meat Train is decent enough. Plenty of suspense and brutality for all.

Check out the trailer for The Midnight Meat Train!

More on the masked guy later, though. The movie’s really about this dude named Arkin. Arkin is a handyman of sorts and is doing some work for this rich family. He also has an ex, a kid, and alimony payments. Plus, his ex is in trouble with a loan shark, and since Arkin worries about harm befalling his daughter, he has to do something drastic to make some money. That’s why he decides to break into the rich people’s house and crack the safe in the bedroom and steal the giant gem inside of it. So, when the family heads off on vacation, Arkin makes his move. However, once inside the house, Arkin realizes he’s not alone. It turns out the masked man made it there first, nabbed the family before they were able to vacate, and is torturing them in the basement (well, just the parents, because the teen daughter is out with her boyfriend and the little girl is hiding somewhere in the house). Arkin soon realizes what’s going on, but his plan to escape is foiled by all the booby traps that have been set up around the house.

These booby traps include such things as a living room floor full of bear traps, razor-sharp wire across doorways, a chandelier of knives, a bedroom floor covered in some sort of burning adhesive, a wall of nails, millions of fish hooks hanging from the ceiling, and other such unsafe problems. Now that I think about it, it’s kind of like Home Alone but with deadlier consequences. Anyway, Arkin manages to avoid most of the traps and the dude in the mask as he goes from room to room, floor to floor, trying to find a way to help save the family and get the hell out of the house. All the while, the masked sadist is gutting dad and sewing mom’s lips shut, and trying to figure out who else is in the house. And maybe find out where that pesky kid is hiding. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, he collects people. The idea is, every house he goes to, he keeps one of his victims alive, stores them in a trunk, and drags them to his next job. It doesn’t really make much sense and it’s never explained why he does it, so let’s move on.

The teen daughter eventually returns home with her boyfriend, and thinking that the family has left on vacation, they paw each other and start getting it on until Mr. Torture shows up and ruins their naked fun. The boyfriend falls into the bear traps and the girl reaches for a pair of scissors, which are rigged up to some sort of device, and ends up being propelled into the wall of nails. Arkin eventually finds the little kid and they fight back and try to escape, but the masked man intercepts them, and while the girl finds safety once again, Arkin is taken to the basement where his mid-section is sliced open and a jar of cockroaches is placed over the wound. However, Arkin gets out of that situation, finds the girl again, manages to take down the bad guy, and get out of the house.

It doesn’t really end there, but I think you get the idea. I’ll reiterate everything I said off the top, so viewer beware, and so long as you don’t demand answers to nagging questions, like, “Why would the guy booby trap the house after he captured the family?” or “How did Arkin even know about the safe…or that there was a huge gem in the safe?” then you might at least moderately enjoy the blood that spills from this one.

Check out the trailer for The Collector!