We’re gonna try something a little different. I’ve been watching a bunch of movies lately, but haven’t found the time to write about them individually. So, instead of giving them the usual treatment, I’m gonna go ahead and shove ‘em all into this one post, lighting round style. The reviews will be much shorter and won’t provide as much plot detail, but will provide the same toothsome repartee, so I’m hoping they work all the same. Who knows, maybe I’ll really like doing it this way. Anyway, bring on the bad fun!

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!

(more…)

The fact that 2009′s The Collector comes from the same dudes responsible for writing the Saw franchise well past respectability and straight into this-is-just-getting-stupid-now territory (those being numbers IV, V, and VI) is a heavy burden to lay on a movie, and although the movie squirms and fights as best it can, it’s unfortunately unable to free itself from that constraint. A fitting description given that The Collector is, as you can imagine, all about captivity and torture. And booby traps. Yes, lots of booby traps. It doesn’t really make a lick of sense, mind you, and you have to suspend your disbelief from the fucking rafters like a bound and gagged body in order to shut it up from asking any sensible questions (and you’ll be wanting to ask a lot of them, believe me), but sometimes that doesn’t matter when some dude in a leather mask is terrorizing a helpless family for shits and giggles and hurting them in creatively sadistic and terribly painful ways.

(more…)

In the first movie, you’ve got these six chicks, all of ‘em adrenaline junkies, who take a vacation in the Appalachian Mountains to go cave diving. Although it’s more like cave crawling, because these are unexplored caves without much room, see, and since the goal of these movies, as much as I can gather, is to make you squirm one way or another, they lean heavily on the claustrophobic button. So there they are, crawling through rocky cracks deep in the Earth’s belly, in these unmarked, unexplored caves (because that’s more of a thrill despite the fact that no one knows where you are) with dust, debris, and water falling all around them. They don’t really know where the hell they’re going, so they just keep making their way deeper and deeper. Then there’s a mini avalanche of some sort and their only way out has just been cut off. The rocks also fell on one of their equipment bags; the one with the rope, so that’s a major setback. Anyway, this shit goes on for about an hour, and will only really make you uncomfortable if you hate the dark and have a major fear of being trapped in a small space. Or buried alive. For everyone else it’s 60 minutes of watching six women crawl around in caves. But then, finally, the cave monsters show up.

(more…)