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!

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.

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!

No idea who or what the cave monsters are, but they’re like a human/bat hybrid of some kind. They are blind, slimy, make terrible noises, crawl up and down the walls of the caves, have razor sharp teeth, and feast on human flesh. So, when the girls run into them, all bloody hell breaks loose. They start dying off one by one in a frantic attempt to find a way out. It’s really not a pretty sight (except to gore hounds like you and me!) when one of those bastards sinks its teeth into a lady’s jugular or disembowels her and feeds on her innards. The girls stand a better chance when they discover that the monster’s respond to sound, so they try to stop screaming, but in the end they all pretty much get it, despite the fact that they turn into killing machines themselves in the name of survival.

I need to go into a bit of an aside here because there’s a sub-plot that needs an explanation, but I won’t bog you down with too many details. This is also going to be a spoiler, so tread carefully. One of the girls, Sarah, had lost her husband and daughter in a car accident the year before, and so this cave trip was a way to get her back into the swing of things. Her friend Juno, however, was sleeping with her husband. Sarah doesn’t know this, but their friend Beth does. Anyway, Juno knows that Beth knows, so when Beth is attacked in the caves (and also struck down, accidentally, by Juno), she is left there by Juno, on purpose, to die. Sarah stumbles upon the dying Beth later who tells her that Juno was sleeping with her husband and had left her there to die. So, naturally, Sarah and Juno are the only two left standing at the end of the movie, and as the monsters descend on them, Sarah puts some sort of pick axe through Juno’s knee and leaves her for the monsters to feast on. Sarah, bloody and tired, finally escapes the caves.

The Descent: Part Two takes place two days later. This movie, more than anything, is frustrating as hell. It’s filled with stupid decisions and horror movie nonsense and will likely leave you feeling angry when it’s over. Okay, so there’s a search party out for the missing girls, only the search party is looking in the wrong caves. Then Sarah shows up in the hospital but can’t remember a damn thing about the last two days. The sheriff is all suspicious-like because she’s the only survivor and had blood all over her clothes, and the blood-type matched that of her friend Juno. Oh, hey, what about all the other blood that would’ve got on her clothes, like Beth’s blood and some of those monsters’ blood? No? Okay then. Then someone discovers an abandoned mine whose shaft leads to the unmapped caves in question where The Descent took place. The sheriff, who doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about Sarah’s amnesia or obvious post-traumatic stress symptoms, forces her back down into the caves in order to find her missing friends. Are you kidding me? You can’t do that! But do it he does. In fact, even the sheriff himself, along with one of his deputies (plus three actual professional cave divers) go down there too, because one thing this movie needs in order for it to work is a bunch of amateurs down in the caves.

If I can say one good thing about this movie, it’s that, unlike the first part, it didn’t take an hour to get to the carnage. Not long after this new group goes down do the monsters start attacking. Sarah’s memory is quickly awakened and she runs for her life. The rest are left to fend for themselves against an unfamiliar foe, hungrier than ever. All of the professionals die first, of course, leaving only Sarah, the sheriff, and the deputy. Sarah teams up with the deputy, making sure she does her best to remain quiet, while trying to find her way out of the caves once more. There are plenty of attacks, but Sarah’s been through it all before and now kills with revenge and hate on her side. Then there’s the sheriff, adept at performing one idiotic stunt after another (like firing his gun, which caused an avalanche), and just as he’s about to get his just desserts, here comes Juno to save the day.

Oh, sorry about spoiling that for you. But it’s so stupid, yeah? When we last saw Juno, she had a pick axe through her leg and was being attack by a handful of monsters. So she should be dead, but here she is, relatively clean, I might add, with a bit of a limp. How did she manage to survive? Who knows. That is obviously not important. Then Sarah and the deputy show up, and Juno hasn’t forgotten what Sarah did to her. So they fight. But then they make up because, let’s face it, Juno did sleep with her husband, so the pick axe thing seems like a reasonable response. They agree to work together to survive and escape, but the bright-minded sheriff puts a kink in that plan by handcuffing himself and Sarah together. Really, idiot? You still think she killed Juno when monsters are attacking you and Juno is alive? Also, how easy do you think it’ll be to move around in the caves when you’re handcuffed to someone? Come on! Well, he finds out pretty quickly how stupid a move that was when he falls and the girls decide to chop his arm off in order to save themselves. Good-bye, numb nuts.

It all winds up with some sort of female show of solidarity, with Juno dying while fighting to save Sarah and the deputy, and then Sarah sacrificing herself so the deputy can escape. I have to say, the concept is a pretty interesting one, playing on the whole claustrophobic thing, and the monsters were dope. There’s a lot more blood in the second one, but the first one had a better atmosphere. In fact, if part one took a quicker route to the action like part two did, it would’ve been all right. I’d like to think that part two would’ve worked better if they cut out all the shit that just went against common sense, but then there wouldn’t be much of a movie left. Also, the way this one ended, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a part three on the way.

Check out the trailers for The Descent and The Descent: Part Two!

As it turns out, the basement is where Quaid paints nude portraits of strippers he hires, but that’s not why he invited Stephen over. No, he wants to work with Stephen on a film thesis that will study people’s fears. Sure, why not. So Stephen brings in his film editing friend, Cheryl, and the project is a go. Pretty soon they’re interviewing test subjects, asking them about their deepest fears, when they first felt fear, etc. It didn’t seem like much of a study to me, and not to Quaid either I guess, because he starts getting antsy for some real exploitation of people’s dread. So that’s when Cheryl steps in front of the camera to reveal that she was molested by her dad, who worked at a meat packing plant, and now she can’t eat meat. Even the smell of it takes her to a terrible place. We also find out that Stephen’s brother died when Stephen was 15. He got drunk and crashed his car. Stephen, then, is kind of afraid of cars. Or drinks. I don’t really know. So what does Quaid do? He buys Stephen a car ($1,200 on Craigslist!) so he can face his fears. What a swell guy.

Stephen digs Cheryl, by the way, but there’s this girl, Abby, who works with Stephen and is kind of into him. Abby’s got plenty of fears herself, see, because she’s covered from head to toe in one hell of a birthmark. She offers to be interviewed by Stephen privately for the study, where she takes her clothes off and tries to kiss Stephen. He rejects her, but not because of how she looks, but because his heart belongs to Cheryl. That hardly matters to Abby at all who is now even more ashamed. Seizing on this wonderful opportunity to take advantage of Abby, Quaid, the wonderful guy he is, swoops in, says a few lines, takes her out to the club, gets her to pose for him (she asks if he can paint her “normal”), and then fucks her. In the meantime, the relationship between Stephen and Cheryl blossoms.

Ok, back to the study. Quaid becomes increasingly pissed off with Stephen and Cheryl for not taking the study seriously (it’s just a school project as far as they’re concerned), so he flips out and destroys all the equipment. Cheryl and Stephen have finally had enough of this crazy dude who they befriended for some reason and are out of there. Quaid soldiers on. He calls back a previous interviewee, some dude name Josh who was once deaf as a kid and now lives in fear of going deaf again, and knocks him out, ties him up, and shoots a couple rounds from a gun right beside the dude’s ears, popping his ear drums. His next move is to push Abby to the brink by wiring the tape of her taking off her clothes into the college’s communications system so that every TV in the place is playing her humiliating strip tease. Then the recording shows the painting Quaid did of her as he splashes red all over it to symbolize her birthmark, then he holds up a note that says she isn’t normal. Abby loses it and decides that a bucket of bleach and an SOS pad is the only way to rid herself of her horrible defect.

Quaid’s next target is Cheryl, whom he finds snooping around his basement, looking at all his portraits, which are all now covered in bloody gashes. So, he locks Cheryl into a room with nothing but a bucket, some flies, and a plate with a giant slab of meat on it. And he’s filming it all, of course. Then he heads off to find Stephen. He picks him up in his car and takes him for a ride. Oh, it turns out Quaid has been drinking. Time for Stephen to face his fear! Stephen manages to get out of the car after a bit of a hairy ride but he’s then thrust right into Abby’s horrible situation. After finding her raw and bleeding body, he gets her to the hospital, where he sees one of those in-case-of-emergency axes hanging on the wall. Time to go find Quaid and make him face his fears. So off Stephen goes, axe in hand, and arrives at Quaid’s house to scare the fuck out of him. Quaid bests him, of course, and has something wonderful in store for Stephen. He ties him up and forces him to watch the video of Cheryl, who after having been confined for about a week breaks down and eats the rotting, maggoty piece of meat. Suddenly Joshua shows up with bandaged ears, finds the axe, and…well, people die. I won’t tell you which people though. You’ll have to find out on your own. If you want to. This movie isn’t that great. Some gore, some tits, and the action picks up near the end when Quaid finally goes mental, but it took a long time for that to happen. Up until then it’s just a bunch of bad decisions and verbal nonsense.

Check out the trailer for Dread!

The cover is incredibly misleading for starters. Who is that scary yet alluring creature? She certainly isn’t in the movie. And that graveyard? I didn’t see a graveyard. Way to make a fool of me, graphic designer/marketing department, whomever and wherever you are. Shame on me.

Fuck, you know what? It’s my fault. A grieving couple moves to a remote location on the Irish coast and take in a kid who happens to be “evil” and I’m supposed to think it’s going to somehow be different than every other movie in remote locations with an evil kid? Shame on me again. And, to top it off, it’s a British flick, which means it’s filmed in that way British movies and TV shows are filmed. You know, kind of soft or foggy or whatever it is. I don’t care for it. And I didn’t care for this movie. But maybe you will, so here’s how it all plays out…

Like I said, there’s this couple, Martha (Samantha Morton) and Tomas, and they have lost their first child to sudden infant death syndrome or some such thing. So they move to the coast to clear their minds and start over. At this point, Martha is pregnant with what will be their second child. They have neighbors where they now live, a young couple with two children and a crotchety, doomsday-speaking old man. You know, the kind in rubber boots who hangs tin cans from the tree in his yard and chews on the inside of his cheek. That’s him in the picture. Predictable for the movie, but it’s how I imagine I’ll turn out someday so I didn’t mind him so much.

Ok, one of the young couple’s kids drowns and then a day later the couple themselves is burned in a fire. Their surviving daughter, Daisy, is then taken in by Martha and Tomas. She’s odd. They think she might be autistic, but according to Old Man Gloom, she’s a changeling fairy and totally evil. As you would expect, bad things start to happen when she’s around. And not even cool bad things either, but lame bad things, like the kids she plays with one day end up with meningitis. Are you scared yet? I didn’t think so. The more lame bad stuff that happens, the more Tomas wants to get rid of Daisy. But, right on script, Martha doesn’t believe Daisy is evil and refuses to give her up. Now Tomas and Martha’s relationship is falling apart. Of course!

The only thing left is for Daisy to prove Martha wrong by attacking her and forcing her into premature labor. Sure, why not.

Ugh, the whole thing sucks. No blood, no scares, no grotesque anything…the psychological horror that it’s supposed to impose you on is as uncomplicated as a game of tic-tac-toe. A changeling fairy? I couldn’t think of a less imposing bad dude…or dudette. The wife told me that fairies can be evil (and even quoted Labyrinth to prove her point), but I’m not buying it. The kid isn’t even scary. Whatever, you can’t win ‘em all.

Here’s the trailer for The Daisy Chain, just in case you’re not convinced.