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!

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!

This film is a dramatization of events that occurred October 1st through the 9th of 2000, in the Northern Alaskan town of Nome. To better explain the events of this story, the director has included actual archived footage throughout the film…Every dramatized scene in this movie is supported by either archived audio, video or as it was related by Dr. Tyler during extensive interviews with the director. In the end, what you believe is yours to decide. Please be advised that some of what you’re about to see is extremely disturbing.

That’s Milla Jovovich at the beginning of The Fourth Kind, breaking the wall in order to pull us into a strange world of psychological fury and alien abductions. Jovovich plays Dr. Abigail Tyler, whose work as a psychologist treating abducted patients is documented in this movie through, as the intro suggests, actual video and audio shot by Dr. Tyler during her sessions and actor-portrayed dramatizations, kind of like what you used to get on shows like Unsolved Mysteries or Rescue 911. Only there’s no Stack, no Shatner, but the search for the truth is pretty much the same.

So basically, Dr. Tyler is seeing her own shrink because she’s having trouble dealing with her husband’s death. She claims he was killed by an intruder while they slept in bed. In an effort to get her life back on track, she takes up his work in Nome, Alaska, counseling patients who all seem to share the same nighttime horrors — their lack of sleep, a presence they can’t explain, and creepy visits from a owl. Tyler begins to hypnotize her patients in an effort to draw out what they are having trouble remembering. This takes her patients to a scary place and they go completely hysterical.

When her patients start going off the deep end and killing themselves and their family, the town’s sheriff wants to blame Dr. Tyler, but she believes that there is something unexplainable happening to the people in Nome (who have been going missing in high numbers since the 1960s). Then one night Dr. Tyler is taking notes on a hand-held tape recorder in bed and falls asleep. When she plays the tape back the next day she is completely freaked out when after she falls asleep she hears her bedroom door open, someone enter, and her own blood curdling screams. As she’s screaming we hear a non-human, robotic-like voice in an unknown language (which is later confirmed by an author and expert as Sumerian, a very old and dead language). Now Dr. Tyler, her own shrink, and this author need to get to the bottom of what’s happening, and fast.

After more bad things happen to her patients, Dr. Tyler is placed under house arrest, and a cop is put on watch outside her premises. Suddenly the cop sees something hover over the house and when they get inside Dr. Tyler is in hysterics claiming that her daughter was abducted. Everyone believes she did something to her daughter, of course. In a last desperate attempt to find out what’s going on and to rescue her daughter, she gets her shrink to hypnotize her. Like her own patients, Dr. Tyler begins to recall the abduction and then her body appears to be taken over by an alien presence. The shrink and the writer attempt to help, but then they start screaming and everyone vanishes.

They return, the shrink and the writer remembering nothing, but Dr. Tyler is convinced they were all abducted. The sheriff confronts Dr. Tyler in the hospital one last time, asking where her daughter is, but when she claims again that her daughter was abducted, the sheriff tells her what really happened to her husband, and we’re left to wonder how crazy Dr. Tyler just might be.

Throughout the movie we are shown what is said to be actual, real video footage shot by Dr. Tyler during sessions with her clients; we see them freak out while under hypnosis. We get real audio in the instances of her screaming and during patient interviews. The scene where her patient kills himself and his family, and when the cop sees something over Dr. Tyler’s house, are all shown as real video from cruiser dashboard cameras. And we see the real footage of Dr. Tyler going under hypnosis and being taken over by something, speaking in that ancient language. Finally, the entire film is wrapped around a real interview with the real Dr. Tyler and the movie’s director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, in which Dr. Tyler recounts the whole ordeal. Many parts of the movie are even presented in split screen, so we get the real footage of a session, for instance, beside the dramatized reenactment.

So, is The Fourth Kind in league with all of those other movies that pass themselves off as real (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, etc.) so as to inject a believability of horror into their story or is it all on the up and up? I don’t know. Clearly, the real Dr. Tyler’s credibility is brought into question, but how can you explain away the real, archived footage (other than it’s all part of the movie that is)? There’s all sorts of stats about the town and the number of times the FBI has visited the town, but could those be made up? Are the people of Nome, Alaska being abducted or is just a theatrical hoax? As it says at the beginning, “What you believe is yours to decide.” Not a bad movie, over all, and should be fun for the X-Files fans and conspiracy theorists among us.

Check out the trailer for The Fourth Kind!

While some of the plot details in this ’09 version differ from the original, the meat of the sandwich is the same: killing, raping, and revenge. So, in this one, the Collingwood family (dad John, mom Emma, and daughter Mari) head to their cottage for a relaxing vacation. Mari convinces mom and dad to let her take the car into town to visit her friend Paige (not to see the band Bloodlust, unfortunately, as in the original, but just to hang out at Paige’s work). Paige and Mari meet a reclusive young boy, Justin, who promises them some sweet pot if they come back to his motel room. So they do, of course, but it turns out Justin is the son of a crazy escaped convict and murderer, Krug, who is on the run with his brother, Francis, and his lady, Sadie. Party over.

The gang kidnaps the girls and continues on the lam in Mari’s car, but Mari and Paige put up a fight, causing the car to go off the road and crash into a tree. The killers are really pissed off now, so they drag the two girls into the woods, and after another escape attempt by Paige, they do away with her once and for all and rape Mari. Mari then makes a break for the lake, jumps in, and swims her way to freedom, even though Krug ends up shooting Mari as she is swimming away. Krug and his gang think they killed her, but as was established earlier, Mari is an excellent swimmer…even with a hole in her shoulder. Oh, and cue the terrible storm.

All of this takes place right near the Collingwood’s cottage, and just as mom and dad are settling in for a night alone, there’s a knock at the door. It’s the gang who just raped and “killed” their daughter, saying they’ve been in an accident and need shelter. John and Emma look after their guests, who can’t help but be a little creepy, and when the power goes out and the phone lines go down, it looks like the strangers will have to spend the night in the guest house. After the strangers have gone to bed, a half dead Mary shows up, and mom and dad scramble to save her life. Besides noticing the bullet hole in Mari’s shoulder, Dad also notices the bruises and blood on her thighs. Yeah, not good. Then when mom finds something left by Justin as evidence as to who exactly is staying in their guest house, the only way to handle things now out in the woods in the dark during a storm with no car and missing boat keys is to kill the motherfuckers who raped and shot your daughter.

So, hang on past the first five minutes because things really do turn out quite disturbing. There are some seriously uncomfortable scenes in this one, especially the rape scene in the woods, which is the most graphic rape scene I’ve seen since Gillian Anderson was gang-raped in Closure (aka Straightheads). It’s very tough to watch. Most of the best action — the revenge portion of the film — doesn’t come until the last 30 minutes or so, but it delivers some pretty harsh gore (and some tits). There’s a busted nose, a mangled hand in a garbage disposal, a claw hammer to the skull, a bullet through the eye, and an exploding face in a microwave. Not bad at all. I liked this one a lot, even if some of it was hard to stomach, but it was a very decent revenge/horror flick. And it’s a real plus if you can make me uncomfortable, that’s for sure.

Check out the trailer for The Last House on the Left!

It was George Romero’s 70th birthday on Wednesday, so the wife and I celebrated by watching Night of the Living Dead. The original 1968 version, of course. It’s strange how on his birthday we’re the ones who get such a nice present. Anyway, I really love watching old horror movies because, more than anything, they’re good for a laugh. We’re so used to trillion dollar budgets and CGI this and green-screen that nowadays that when we come across something archaic and raw like a movie from the 60s, it seems comical in comparison. And most times it is, but that’s really not the case with Night of the Living Dead.

It’s amazing what superb lighting, clever camera angles, and chocolate syrup can do. I’ll compare Night of the Living Dead to The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (since it’s freshest in my mind), where the latter was shot as though it was a theater performance on film. Everything was stationary and static. The actors moved as if on a stage. Romero’s classic, however, just six years later, shows remarkable visionary achievements. There’s real chills created in the shots alone. Throw some zombies into the mix and it’s one hell of a movie, even if it is 42 years old. It also stands as the benchmark in zombie movie mania (even though the word zombie is never mentioned once in the movie). It is the one. Everything we know and understand about the undead is established in Night of the Living Dead; their penchant for human flesh, how to kill them, the downside of being bitten by one, the confusion and fighting amongst the people trying to avoid being eaten, etc. But I think I’m telling you stuff you already know.

For those that don’t know, here’s how it all started. Siblings Barbara and Johnny are visiting their father’s grave when a zombie attacks them. Barbara escapes, but Johnny isn’t so lucky. Barbara takes shelter at a nearby house whose owner has perished, likely eaten by a zombie. Then this dude, Ben, shows up (he’s also trying to avoid being eaten) and together they board up the house and hope for the best. Actually, Ben does most of the boarding up; Barbara spends the rest of the movie in a catatonic state. Then two dudes pop out of the basement. They had also taken shelter in the house and had been hiding in the basement with their women (and a sick child) until the madness was over. Well, the madness is only escalating. They turn on the TV and the radio to learn about the mass murders sweeping the land at the hands of the undead, or ghouls, likely due to some radioactive contaminants from an exploded space probe.

So the people in the house argue over how to proceed and finally they decide that some of them will try for a bone dry car, fill it up at the house’s gas pump, and then grab everyone else and make a break for it. It was a good plan in theory, but it didn’t quite work out, and now the zombies have made their way into the house and the sick girl in the basement wants in on the flesh-eating action. The only one left by sun-up is Ben, but when the local authorities make their zombie-killing rounds, they shoot Ben because they think he’s a zombie. Oops.

There you have it, the grandfather of all zombie movies, and while it has a few are-you-kidding-moments, it’s nowhere near the kind of chuckle-fest most of these old horror movies are prone to be. No, Night of the Living Dead is a masterful, original, apocalyptic triumph concerning the reanimation of the recently dead. Fuck yeah.

So you know what you’re going to do now, right? Yeah, you’re going to watch Night of the Living Dead right here!

So instead, Diagnosis: Death stars Raybon Kan as Andre Chang, a thirty-something morally suspect English teacher, and Jessica Grace Smith as Juliet Reid, a precocious virgin teen bookworm, or rather, two cancer patients taking part in a medical drug trial in the hopes of finding a cure for their terminal illnesses. Both, by the way, get cancer by way of floating apparitions that inhabit their body…or something like that. Why did the floating apparitions choose them? I don’t know. Were the other patients in the drug trial afflicted in the same manner? Again, I don’t know. This is a comedy horror. The answers to those kinds of questions hardly matter.

Anyway, Andre and Juliet befriend one another in the hospital where they are being kept on lock-down (that means a huge chain and pad lock on the door and no cell phones or computer usage…you know, standard procedure for these kinds of trials, I’m sure) during the duration of their testing. But not just any hospital I might add; a hospital that used to be an insane asylum! So naturally the two begin to hallucinate (a possible side effect of the drugs) scenes of brutal terror and murder. This freaks them right out and they are convinced it isn’t the drugs, but in fact that something terrible happened there before. They want to get to the bottom of it, of course, and start sneaking around the hospital, doing their best to avoid the ire of the test’s rigid nurse (Suze Tye) and her creepy aid (Bret).

I find it quite amazing how even though both Andre and Juliet are knocking on death’s door, neither one of them ever show any signs of being sick. And what about their eventual miraculous recoveries from cancer given the fact they they were on placebos the whole time? Never explained, but my guess is the floating apparitions gave them cancer at the request of the asylum ghosts just so they would come to the trial in the hospital that used to be an asylum and help solve the murder. Once they did that, the vindicated ghosts probably just took the cancer away as a thank you for a job well done. But again, I don’t know and it hardly matters. What matters here is the laughs, the scares, the ridiculousness, the uncomfortable relationship between Andre and Juliet (if you’re wondering if they ever hook up, please keep in mind that he is morally questionable and she is a precocious virgin), Juliet taking a bubble bath, and the nurse massaging Juliet. Yeah. It delivers on all of those. I just could’ve used more Jemaine. Or more bubble baths and massaging.

Check out the trailer for Diagnosis: Death!

Skånska Mord
The Last Supper

It’s taken me eight days, but I’ve got the first rock n’ review of 2010 for you. I had to go all the way to Sweden to fetch it though, so I hope you’ll understand if I don’t apologize for my tardiness. It’s easy to get hung up over there, what with the milk, honey, hot blonds, and sleazy rawk action. Frankly, I’m surprised I even came back, but I did and I brought Skånska Mord’s debut, The Last Supper, with me. My translation skills aren’t the best, but I believe Skånska Mord means Scanian Murder (Scanian referring to the province of Sweden also known as Skåne), and if I’m right, then these guys most certainly know something you and I don’t, and are probably capable of so much more.

Ok, Skånska Mord aren’t that mysterious or scary. Formed from the ashes of Mothercake and Half Man, they’re just a bunch of denim-clad longhairs with one boot heel planted firmly on the neck of the ’70s and one hand grasping a big, foggy bowl. The Last Supper, however, is quite tricky, walking a rather fine line between heavy, organ-fried, stoner rock and alternative, radio-friendly, arena rock. I mean, you could tell me Jack Endino recorded it in Seattle and I’d believe you. Or you could tell me they recorded it themselves in the back of a busted van on a hot, dusty Tuesday morning and I’d believe that too. I could toss around names like Dozer and Asteroid and your cock would be justified in getting hard, but if I’m gonna compare them to any of their fellow countrymen, it has to be The Quill (and not just because The Quill singer Magnus Ekwall and Skånska Mord singer Jan Bengtsson are dead ringers for Chris Cornell). The Quill haven’t released anything since 2006, and it’s quite possible they’ve broken up, so it seems like a perfect time for Skånska Mord to fill the loud, groovy void.

Listen to “The Hermit” from The Last Supper!

Buy The Last Supper from Small Stone!