Most entries in Lionsgate's After Dark Horrorfest collection had at least some semblance of quality. And that makes it more than a little surprising that this amateurish waste of video found its way into the series.  The lighting is atrocious, the acting unconvincing, and even the gore effects look fake and rubbery.  It's basically a rehash of 1964's SPIDER BABY, about a family of mentally retarded orphans who kill people and drink their blood.  That film had a sense of humor and a weird unpredictability to hold viewer interest, but this is an unimaginative bore that fails to tell anything like a story and doesn't have enough clever moments to make it bearable.  Three idiot brothers and their idiot sister have to keep moving to new towns because their uncontrollable bloodlust leads them to slaughter attractive young people, but these loony losers are so stupid and careless that they could be apprehended in about three days by the police chief on THE SIMPSONS. I can accept that their bloodthirst sometimes overcomes them and leads them to kill without thinking, but instead of being horrified afterwards at how they've lost control and risked being found out, they aren't especially worried and even seem to think it's funny, which robs the situation of tension and also makes sure nothing like realism ever slips in.  One flat, homely little scene after another ends inconclusively, with none of the cardboard characters ever saying anything interesting despite the fact that we're plainly supposed to be giving a lot of thought to the complexities of people struggling against their darkest urges. It's plenty misogynistic, with sobbing girls chained up in a room that looks like a crudely designed set, but it's all just meanness for its own sake, as every attempt to make it look like the script has anything insightful to say about the killers' psychological problems ultimately cops out.  There isn't any honest plot progression, just a series of tedious, repetitious confrontations between sarcastic psychos with the emotional depth of a thimble, leading up to an irritating and completely predictable non-ending in which they simply pull up stakes once more and move on to kill more clueless dolts in the next small town.  Even the simplest of props somehow look fake in this movie, including the laughably ineffectual gags in the victims' mouths, which obviously have to be held in the actresses' teeth to keep from falling out.  THE HAMILTONS is about as low-intellect as horror movies get, loaded with amateurish stabs at art and wincingly false emotional content.  If you're looking for gore and visual effects you'll be disappointed and if you're after any kind of psychological chills your intelligence will be insulted.  The ham-fisted HAMILTONS is a sad comment on the times in which it was made, an era so desperate for product that any thoughtless exercise in shallow mean-spiritedness could get released onto DVD by a high-profile distributor and earn serious discussion as part of the horror genre.  I'd only recommend it as a cure for insomnia. Z-z-z-z-z--z...   

A family of trained specialists from an agency of paranormal and forensics investigators called "The Veritas Project" secretly set up shop in an RV hidden near a high school where students have been mysteriously falling ill, lapsing into comas and dying right after screaming out the name of a harrassed student who hanged himself in an unfinished wing of the building 20 years earlier.  The victims tend to be the school's meanest jocks and bullies, and suspicion points to a pair of much-hated goth kids who have set up their own voodoo altar in a hidden room and who always seem to know who's next in line to die.  More and more strange clues are found before the complicated nature of the killings is finally revealed.  Based on a novel,  HANGMAN'S CURSE is not only one of the better high school horrors, it's also one of the few that dares to present a rather positive world view despite the presence of violent creeps, drug abusers and vengeful misfits. The crime-busting family shines as an alternative to the unpleasant characters by showing us that not every member of society is hateful and selfish.  The mother, father and two teen kids travel from one location to another together as they tackle the cases they are assigned, and they have clearly become a close-knit family who are basically respectful of each other, trust each other, and take their work seriously.  Far from the usual dysfunctional family seen in B-grade horror movies, this clan's faith in their own family unit gets them through some tight spots, and they appear to have a pretty healthy outlook even when they're in danger. The football coach is a jerk, the schoool bullies are treated far too leniently and many of the students have bad attitudes, but the heroic characters remain determined to see it all through and put a stop to the curse at all costs.  There are only a few isolated moments that qualify as "scary" but the mystery is so complex and intelligently plotted that it holds viewer attention even during the talkier stretches.  The performances are excellent except for a wacky "acoustics professor" character who goes overboard to the point of looking like he thought he was in a slapstick comedy instead of a horror-mystery.  Editing and photography are also above average for a teen horror pic and it's refreshing to see a movie that has enough confidence in its plot and characters that it doesn't resort to slathering on layers of foul language, explicit sex and other exploitation elements that typically dumb down this kind of movie.  Which is not to say this is a kiddie film: there are a number of creepy passages, people do actually die, and topics like drug use and teen suicide are dealt with in a mature manner.  My biggest complaint was that, when an army of poisonous spiders arrive and attack, they look much larger than the spiders described in the dialogue.  I'm also not comfortable with the "lesson" of goth kids having to turn over a new leaf and conform to the standards of the majority in order to be accepted at school, but in truth, kids who go around deliberately trying to look like freaks the way the white-faced, black-lipped, overdressed outcasts in this movie do really do draw attention to themselves and invite scorn and ridicule from the insecure and self-conscious teens around them, and they really would have a much easier time going through a difficult period of life if they didn't wear their negative attitudes like badges of honor.  Quibbles aside, this is an intelligent, well-crafted feature that takes the time to develop its characters and has a real story to tell.  Check it out.       

  

 

 

 

The kind of movie that hides behind the term "homage" as an excuse for not coming up with the slightest instance of anything like original thought.  During Mardi Gras, a bunch of goofballs takes a cheap boat tour of a forbidden patch of swampland.  Of course the boat breaks down, stranding them in the territory of Victor Crowley, a Jason Voorhees clone sporting the usual deformed face, wild animal mentality and tendency to chop every human being he sees to bits for no reason.  The only thing that distinguishes this nonsensical production from the rest of the pack of retro-'80s slashers is its sense of humor. HATCHET falls short of being a comedy, but the dialogue is peppered with a lot of good jokes and wisecracks that make it more bearable than the usual repetitious shouting matches so common in this subgenre. There's some extreme gore but it all looks so unrealistic that it's hard to tell if it was supposed to look funny or not.  One screaming victim after another is hacked and chopped and torn apart as absurd geysers of blood shoot out of them as if spraying from shower heads.  The explosions of blood are so resolutely phony that you'd almost think the whole project was a satire, but it's not clever enough for that.  Instead of showing any insght into slasher film cliches, the script simply re-creates them in paint-by-numbers fashion.  The cast features many likeably dopey characters, which earned much fan criticism for putting so many stupid people onscreen.  But let's be fair: I think it's safe to assume these people were supposed to be stupid stereotypes, thus imbuing the scenario with a welcome taste of humor.  Unfortunately, seeing so many basically likeable dimwits get chopped up is more depressing than it is scary.  It's like watching the cast of a decent sitcom systematically slaughtered.  The plot, such as it is, makes no sense and relies entirely on elements from better-known features. There's some talk about whether the killer is a supernatural entity or simply a very strong madman, but the lazy script never goes to the trouble to decide one way or the other for sure.  He does manage to appear in some seemingly impossible places, which would indicate that he can teleport at will, but since he has the I.Q. of a red beet and never says anything other than "Rrraaauuuhh" as he runs through the absurdly brightly-lit brush, he is of no interest as a villain.  Another element borrowed from the FRIDAY THE 13TH series is Kane Hodder, the guy behind Jason's mask in 4 of the sequels, who plays both the ugly killer and his father in an awkward flashback.  A few other horror stars make cameos, including Robert Englund as a mean old redneck, Tony Todd in an embarrassing voodoo huckster role (doing a terrible job of delivering what should have been a very funny joke), and '80s effects man John Carl Beuchler as a smelly old imbecile in a rowboat.  The derivative nature of the project is demonstrated in the cynical  groaner of an ending, which tries to copy the finales of both the first FRIDAY THE 13TH and the original THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. It's all staged so poorly here that you get the impression writer-director Green didn't quite understand why those endings had such impact back when they were new.   The end of HATCHET simply looks like the film broke.  Like every other bad slasher film from around this time, it includes unneeded scenes of people puking in a cheap attempt to upset the viewer on at least some level, even if it's only stomach upset.  The witty dialogue and amusing characters make it watchable for most of its running time, but the one-note string of killings leading up to a pathetic non-ending may leave a bad taste in your mouth in spite of the bright spots.  It's a shame nobody tried to invest some originality into this movie beyond the inclusion of so many verbal gags.  With a little more thought it could have been a true winner.   

A confused mess about six young friends trapped aboard a small boat and lost at sea, where anything can happen and rarely does. Writer-director Levens seems to think all that is required to satisfy horror fans is to get a few good-looking young people together and intercut scenes of them arguing amongst themselves with shots of random spooky imagery, even if there's no plot, no sense of forward momentum and no particular point of view being expressed.  The closest the film ever gets to being watchable is some borderline interesting conversations about the nature of perceived reality.  The lines are poorly worded and delivered by terrible actors, but at least there was that minor attempt to put in a concept worth thinking about.  Sometimes the dialogue is delivered in a very natural manner, with characters fumbling to find the right words the way people do in real life rather than reciting the perfect, concise, obviously rehearsed kind of sentences found in most movies.  It's difficult to tell whether this smattering of verisimilitude was the result of a deliberate stylistic decision or a byproduct of non-actors who couldn't remember their lines and had to improvise a lot.  All sorts of minor things happen over the course of the dreary night at sea, but none of it adds up to anything deserving of serious consideration.  Some of the kids tell little horror stories, but these brief vignettes are uniformly ridiculous, full of holes, badly enacted and don't make any sense.  A half-hearted theme has the kids dying in ways that echo their confessions of their worst fears, but this thread is sloppily handled, inconsistent and not nearly as dramatic as it could've been.  One girl (who brought along an enormous but empty prescription pill bottle) has a seizure and vomits up some worms.  Two guys go off on a raft (even though it's pitch black outside and they have no idea which direction to go), come back a bit later, and sit around silently for a few minutes before disappearing.  The girls don't even seem to notice anything strange about their friends' sudden lapse into zombielike behavior.  A live cat is eventually found on board, as is a dead bird.  At one point some pale-faced, wide-eyed weirdo shows up, but after spending a few minutes doing nothing that has any impact on the situation, he leaves, apparently having figured out that nothing interesting was ever going to happen in this movie.  HAUNTED BOAT drags on and on in this manner, presenting one mysterious but arbitrary event after another, until the insufferable cop-out ending, which suggests that the whole night may have been a figment of one bimbo's imagination.  It is unclear whether her friends ever really existed in the first place, just as it remains unclear how a poorly wrought rank amateur production like this was able to find a distributor.  Even the music score (a laughable combination of light classical and generic hard rock) is lame.  The useless feature was released on DVD by Lionsgate, which is no big surprise.       

Some twits researching an old Native American ghost tale in a vast forest are set upon by supernatural forces as they wander the woods.  It's as if somebody said, "Hey, I know! Let's make THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, only let's have things actually happen in it!"  A promising idea, perhaps, but HAUNTED FOREST is too slow-moving and doesn't make enough sense to leave much of an impression one way or another.  The requisite spooky old book describes the murder by white settlers of an Indian girl named Satinka, whose spirit was absorbed into a nearby Evil Tree. The tree looks really cool, with a big vaguely humanoid body and arms sticking out.  Now Satinka's ghost (sometimes referred to as a witch) prowls the forest, sticking four-inch-long thorns (which sprout from her hands) into people to make them hallucinate and go crazy so she can pull them down through the ground, into the subterranean tomb in which the tree keeps its collection of corpses. There's some confusion as to the identity of Satinka the girl as opposed to that of the (apparently sentient) tree itself, but the story never sorts things out adequately.  The tree (or Satinka or whoever) has help from a deranged hunter who sets traps in the woods and brings it fresh victims.  Despite a nicely picturesque look and some workable "Boo!"-style scares, there's very little to hold your attention.  One problem is that the characters don't display any personalities.  The star, Cevy DiCione, is especially one-dimensional but it may not be fair to blame the actor, since director Borelli doesn't get anything interesting out of anybody else either.  As it stands, the poor guy comes across as every bit as wooden as the tree that's after him.  Most of the time people just walk around, have mild arguments (in an odd collection of accents) and look for whichever one of them has aimlessly wandered away most recently.  Scenes of dead hands reaching out of the earth and other sudden visual shocks are impressive and startling enough to make you jump a few times, but Satinka herself looks like a leftover from Japanese ghost movies like THE RING.  Whatever good intentions the film had are trashed by the predictably downbeat ending... not scary, mind you, just depressing... which makes no sense but provides the dumb "twist" so many lowbrow horror movies seem to think of as a requirement.  It's slow going and it falls apart at the end, but I have to admit it kept me more entertained than its obvious babes-in-the-woods model BLAIR WITCH did.

Unmercifully boring, disposable horror gruel made in America by a largely Japanese crew.  A two-timing photographer drives along a dark stretch of road at night with the corpse of his just-killed wife in the trunk.  Occasionally he hallucinates generic horror imagery like blood and ghostly presences, and once in a while a cop stops him for a few moments of would-be suspense, but absolutely nothing else ever happens. You get a great deal of driver's-eye view footage of car headlights shining onto a very ordinary looking highway and a few brief appearances by the dead wife, but it's clear early on that all the supposedly supernatural stuff is just a product of the protagonist's guilty conscience, so there isn't much here to hold your attention as the one-note movie rambles on and on...and on. The film is competently put together and has nice professional lighting and passable cinematography, but the main character has no personality, the intended nightmare mood is never successfully achieved and the recurring "scary" bits are just annoying false scares leading to one of the most predictable endings in genre history.  Another waste of time brought to you by the "We'll release anything" folks at Lionsgate.

Women just can't get a break in the world of horror movies. Countless possession and exorcism films have shown us that active sexuality in females is often a sign of demonic possession that must be overcome by males. On the other hand, scores of psycho movies have told us that sexual repression is just as dangerous, causing women to become crazy murderers. This is one of the latter. It's like watching an uncomfortable amateur attempt to make an Italian horror movie in the U.S.  A wacko in a ski mask is murdering women in a small farming community, stabbing them with scissors. Crazy middle-aged farm girl Ingrid (May Britt), a woman with a very strange fashion sense, suspects every guy she meets might be the killer. She's paranoid, unfriendly and anti-social but she still goes to church choir practice. The movie strikes a blow against Christianity by having Ingrid constantly blame and credit The Lord for everything that happens. It delivers a slap in the face to America's law enforcement too, in the person of Aldo Ray, the town's well-meaning but useless drunken bum of a sheriff. Cameron Mitchell, a man with a white streak in his hair that keeps moving around, is Ingrid's Uncle Carl. Ingrid is assaulted but gets away. Uncle Carl doesn't believe her because he knows she's nuts. She imagines blood in goat's milk, is raped in her home, and eventually manages to kill the psycho herself. Uncle Carl buries the guy's body in the yard, but when the grave is opened later, the goat is buried there. The cops catch the murderer but the attacks continue anyway. None of it makes much sense, but at the end all the confusion is conveniently washed away with the revelation that Ingrid is a lot crazier than we thought. It turns out that about 60 per cent of the events we've seen were only products of her troubled imagination.  The guy she claims raped her was really nowhere near her at the time and Uncle Carl has never even been to Ingrid's farm. The poorly edited feature does a miserable job of explaining its own story, but I think what they were going for is something like this: Ingrid is crazy because she saw Uncle Carl having sex with her mother (his sister) when she was a child. As an adult, she constantly imagines nonexistent people and events and is terrified of anything remotely connected with men and sex. The scissors-wielding maniac was the real thing, but his story never sems to have much to do with Ingrid's disturbed state of mind and when the police unmask him, he turns out to be exactly who you expected him to be. Featuring a main character who's completely bonkers and doesn't see anything the way it's really happening makes for an extremely confusing movie, especially since we aren't told how crazy she is until the end. The acting is strained and the characters all seem distant, adding to the overall dreamlike mood.  In the end it's mostly a disaster, full of underdeveloped ideas and unknowable people.  At least it's kind of fun watching Mitchell's hair keep changing.  In accordance with the Fairness Toward Lousy Movies Act, I should point out that when Cam's hair is seen to be white at the end it's actually legitimate, since all the previous footage of him was only occuring in Ingrid's mind. Since she hadn't seen him in over 20 years, she would most likely have imagined him looking the way he did when they last saw each other.  So I'll grant them that.  Of course it doesn't account for the fact that the editor's scissors made a bigger mess of the plot than the murderer makes of his victims.

A formulaic serial killer-in-a-hospital potboiler that's basically HALLOWEEN II by way of SHOCKER.  A suicidal teen is hit by a speeding vehicle and ends up in an ambulance next to the freshly-electrocuted body of a convicted mass murderer named John Chambers (just like the famed makeup artist). Through the miracle of CGI, his tattoo jumps off his arm and onto hers. He revives on the autopsy table and spends the rest of the movie looking for her, walking, talking and stalking in the darkened corridors of the hospital tearing people's hearts out with his bare hands, which somehow gives him greater strength and stamina. He doesn't eat the hearts or anything; he just yanks them out and flings 'em onto the floor. He also never shuts up, constantly yammering on about pseudo-religious themes and other standard devil-worshipping movie bad guy stuff.  The actor who plays the killer is excellent in the role but he would have been scarier if they hadn't made him such a chatterbox. He doesn't wear a mask or look like a disfigured monster or anything; just a big bully with a shaved head. About one-third of the way through this paint-by-numbers movie, I was thinking I knew everything that would happen from that point on. I figured that (1.) we would never find out exactly how the killer's supernatural powers work, how he got them, or exactly what his purpose was; (2.) he'd chase the injured girl around the hospital a lot; (3.) he'd bump off some unimportant background characters; (4.) at the climax he would be done in by some sort of computer-animated special effect; and (5.) at the very end there'd be some sort of depressing last-moment indication that his evil somehow lives on.  Of course, I was right on all counts.  The direction, lighting, photography, acting and the staging of the action scenes are all impressive but HEARTSTOPPER is sadly underdeveloped, with a supernatural story that never explains anything enough to make it really interesting. Since the psycho is impervious to everything up to and including electrocution in the electric chair, there's no stopping him, so he's able to casually slaughter everybody he comes into contact with. Some sort of demonic force, in the form of a tornado, seems to be following him, as when he answers a ringing phone and doesn't hear anything on the other end.  He mumbles about "reaping the whirlwind" so I guess that all ties in.  The dialogue is generally pretty good but is often difficult to hear because of the way the cast mutters, whipsers and gasps out their lines.  Robert Englund appears as the town sheriff and gives the best performance in the film. I was sorry to see his character killed off so soon. 

It's hard to believe it took until 2005 for somebody to make a movie with this title, but as far as I know this is the first one to use it.  It's a crazy, terribly inconsistent jumble with a script that's all over the place. There are some fresh and clever ideas here but they all get smothered under truckloads of stupidity and confusion. None of the characters behave rationally and their annoyingly stupid behavior makes watching this pretty frustrating. A stupid young woman who has nightmares about the impending gory deaths of several of her old high school classmates tries to "protect" them by luring them all out to a spooky, filthy, half-trashed old ruin of a house in the middle of the woods. Now there's a good idea.  She tells them it's a class reunion. When the few people she invited arrive, she immediately tells them nobody else is coming and then heads upstairs to take a nap, leaving them with absolutely nothing to do but telling one of the clueless guys to make sure no one leaves. (I told you she was stupid.) Incoherent vignettes show the others meeting violent deaths in little partial stories about an unbelievably complicated practical joke that goes wrong, some little stone statues stolen from a museum that come to life, and another idiot girl who runs over a hitchhiker and then goes along with an even crazier and stupider stranger who wants to dispose of the body for her. The part about the prank cheats by showing lengthy scenes of conversations that would never have happened that way based on how the story ends, the bit about the statues is just a mess with only one very brief computer-animated effects shot, and the one about the girl on the road only contains characters who don't appear to have two working brain cells to rub together. The stupid dreamer (named "Cassandra", of course) sees her stupid classmates die, but things don't happen like in her dreams anyway. Instead, they get decapitated by a crazy person who eats hair and carries garden shears, and who never would have been anywhere near them if little miss know-it-all hadn't stranded them all out in a crumbling old dump in the woods at night. It's a bad idea to have your heroine be a total idiot.  After a while I really wanted to slap her.  At the end she shaves her head to confuse the killer, presumably because she remembered that tactic worked on Jason in FRIDAY THE 13TH THE FINAL CHAPTER.  There's a very clever trick ending (blink and you'll miss it) in which events thought to have already taken place turn out to have been a prophecy, but most viewers will probably have lost interest by then. Two directors are credited, which might explain the project's choppy, schizophrenic nature. Yikes.

This seventh entry in the series is actually an improvement over the previous couple of sequels. Former MTV announcer Kari Wuhrer is outstanding in the lead, the photography and visuals are top-notch, and the plot moves along in a manner that feels enough like a story to remain interesting from start to finish.  Of course it's a HELLRAISER movie, which means that, like the previous six films, it doesn't make any sense as a narrative and spends a lot of time raising questions it can't answer.  A strange death cult is promising members eternal life, a strange kind of immortality that requires people to kill themselves, immediately after which the slimy cult leader makes love to their dead bodies,  which somehow resurrects them.  Ms. Wuhrer is an undercover reporter who plans to join the group to get a good story and ends up being terrorized, stabbed, plauged by nightmarish visions of tragedies both real and imagined, and pestered by Doug Bradley's chatty Pinhead Cenobite, who periodically shows up to deliver some of his patented, vaguely poetic-sounding but essentially meaningless soliloquies about guilt, pain, souls and other favorite subjects of his.  The most frustrating aspect of all this for me was the failure of the characters to ask the right questions, not to mention the usual tendency among people in HELLRAISER movies to deliberately antagonize Pinhead even though he has the power to rip people who tick him off to bloody shreds with oversized fish hooks and he always seems perfectly willing to talk anyway.  Pinhead has always held that Hannibal Lecter-like quality of seeming to be genuinely interested in the people he meets and eager to listen to people's sordid little stories and guilty secrets, but instead of trying to engage him in the morbid conversations he seems to hunger for, most folks tend to start off on the wrong foot by shouting at and threatening this obviously superhuman being.  I was left wondering about a lot of things (How did one character know she could close the puzzle box back up by killing herself?  Why did the box, which can literally take years of concentration to open, pop open by itself when somebody threw it on the floor?  How come this guy can instantly resurrect the dead simply by having sex with their lifeless bodies, anyway?  Why isn't he a multi-billionaire celebrity with a worldwide following instead of a greaseball hdiding in the sewers of Bucharest with a handful of retro-punk rock-look losers?  And if they can still be killed, what's the point?  Why did he want the puzzle box opened in the first place?  And with the cult wiped out and the whole ugly business concluded at the end, why bother having another girl reporter be sent to the scene?  The list goes on and on!), but this sequel, which was originally conceived as an unrelated, non-HELLRAISER project isn't really any less coherent than any of the others, even those supervised by series creator Clive Barker himself.  The main thrust of all these movies has been surreal violence, off-the-wall imagery and darkly poetic but inconclusive musings on the nature of life, death and the pursuit of kinky pleasures. At least the acting and visual appeal is there in this installment.  Just don't ask this project to make any sense or to provide solid internal logic, and you'll do fine. You won't be bored by it.

This movie is trashy, sick and in completely terrible taste, BUT... It does an absolutely great job of living up to its title, offering almost nonstop-- and sometimes almost unbearable-- suspense once the horror begins.  A young woman travels to her family home with a confused lesbian friend who has scary chase-scene dreams and boatloads of anxiety over her sexual identity. Almost upon their arrival, an unknown man in a lineman's unifrom shows up and slaughters the entire family in scenes that are incredibly brutal, violent and pretty appalling even by slasher film standards. The already stressed and confused lesbian survives the initial attack and spends the rest of the movie trying to avoid the clutches of the macho murderer and hoping to rescue her friend, who the guy has inexplicably tied up and abducted instead of simply killing.  Lesbian activists will surely complain about the way lesbianism is equated with mental instability, and many others will have their sense of decency offended over and over again as HIGH TENSION progresses, but in spite of its total tastelessness you've got to respect this movie's technique and its surprising success in maintaining a mood of nerve-jangling, nail-biting suspense throughout most of its running time.  I've seen the final twist done before in several other films, but to the director's credit, I honestly did not see it coming here. This project is so perverse and sadistic that it's difficult to give it a recommendation, but I have to admit that I was never bored (far from it) and in the final analysis I'd have to rate this as one of the most intensely scary movies I've seen in years.  Photography and direction of the action scenes are excellent, and the tension is high indeed, but be warned: this movie takes no prisoners when it comes to shocking its audience. It's highly recommended to adventurous viewers, but if you are squeamish or easily offended, you might want to skip this one. It wants to horrify you, sicken you and upset you, and it's well-made enough to do all three.  

Somebody noticed that Wes Craven's overrated exercise in cheap brutality from 1977 hadn't yet been remade in the grainy, semi-overexposed, cheap-looking style that is the cliche' horror trend of the early 21st century, so this tired rehash was cranked out to make a quick buck. As with a million other contemporary low-end shockers, this version has absolutely nothing new or clever to say but offers its sadism in the tiresomely jerky, fluttery style of 2006 horror that's supposed to add a sense of urgency. Another family of dumb jerkwads, led by their macho creep security cop patriarch, falls prey to a gang of ugly retarded murderers in the desert. The radiation-mutated killers have no personality or motive and there's nothing really interesting about them, but now they've been retooled to showcase deformed faces to complement their beastly attitudes. Instead of settling for the grimy unshaven biker look as in the '77 version, the attackers now look like variations on Jason from FRIDAY THE 13th Parts 3 and 4. That's not really an improvement, though, since they have less characterization than ever. At least the original had Michael Berryman. This one doesn't have any interesting villains. This version is predictably a little more pretentious than its model, with an obnoxious flickering opening titles sequence making the tired point that atomic testing was a bad idea.  The only other element that might be considered anything like a theme is the even more tired STRAW DOGS statement about how civilized, pacifistic "nice" folks will sink to violence and barbarism when the going gets tough. Gee, we've never heard that one before (Yawn). This dull, repetitious and hopelessly mean-spirited little movie would have been a lot easier to take if it had admitted what it really is (a pointless exercise in human suffering) instead of pretending to take some kind of moral stance. The only scene I liked was when a sweaty guy inside a motor home, happy that the A/C is finally working again, exclaims, "At least now we'll be able to breathe in here" as he lights up his next cigarette.  If you like watching terrified women cry, beg for mercy, get brutally moletsed and shot, and then die extraordinarily slow and painful deaths, this is for you.  If you're looking for anything else, keep looking.  

Washington Irving's short story The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, which the screenwriters don't seem to have understood fully, provides the basis for this fair-to-middling horror effort.  A new kid at Sleepy Hollow, New York's high school is actually a blood relative of the original Ichabod Crane. The family name has been changed to "Cranston", so nobody knows about his ancestry. By coincidence, the innocent teen is hired to tell the story of the Headless Horseman to groups of kids as part of the town's Halloween celebration. (What were the odds?) Cemetery caretaker Stacy Keach is the requisite Crazy Old Guy who knows the "truth" behind the famous story but, as is so often the case with Crazy Old Guys, nobody will listen to him until it's too late and heads have begun to roll.  THE HOLLOW tells us that Irving's famous folk tale was more-or-less true, kind of like how RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD told us the events in the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD really happened.  Unfortunately this movie has little of RETURN's wit or energy. The characters are basically all teen movie stereotypes, including the nice handsome kid, the hot-headed jock, the cute cheerleader, the football coach who's a jerk, and so forth. There are some great briefly-seen CGI effects, including a shocking moment in which a girl has her head lopped off by the Horseman's sword while she's running away, shown onscreen with no cuts (other than the decapitation, that is).  The film has a beautiful autumnal look with all the outdoor night sequences lit with warm oranges, yellows and greens, but it's a shame the trees and assorted foliage don't really suggest New York in the fall.  The most damaging problem from a visual standpoint is the fact that not only does this Headless Horseman have a head (?), but that it's a big, goofy-looking oversized pumpkin.  Sure, he kills people, but in truth he looks a little bit ridiculous riding around with that big silly pumpkin mask.  All in all the movie isn't a total disaster or anything, just a very run-of-the-mill teen slasher entry with a supernatural killer and a tenuous link to a famous work of fiction.  Don't expect brilliance, but THE HOLLOW might be worth a look if you enjoy movies set at Halloween (like I do). 

Another of those home-grown, backyard exploitation features you can't find in most of the reference books, this meandering TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE copy looks so cheap that by paying $2.49 to rent the video, I think I enabled the producers to turn a profit.  It's full of bad acting and the plot makes no sense at all, but it's all so darned strange that you just might enjoy it if you approach it in the right frame of mind (i.e., drunk or prepared to laugh at it).  A college professor sends some students to a secluded creepy old house out in the sticks at night to test some model rockets. Yeah, that could happen.  Unfortunately, nobody in the area has noticed that the place is home to a three-man family of mentally retarded maniacs who torture and kill people for no reason.  One guy, who believes parasitic insects are eating his brain and asks others to look into his ear to see them, attacks people with a hand drill.  His even dumber brother dances with a dead body and burns a girl's breast with an iron. Their dad, a former Nazi scientist, wanders the area in a Richard Nixon mask and kills passing motorists. When he's unmasked, there are worms on his face, so I guess he's supposed to be either dead or diseased or something.  In the only scenes that are kind of creepy, a guy staggers around the corridors of the house with a weapon sticking out of his head for a long time. You have to wonder if they weren't just making all this up as they were going.  The movie purports to have been made in 1985, but if that's true, why does it have that very mid-'70s style soundtrack?  It played at some drive-ins in the mid-'80s and was released onto video in desperate packaging that tried to pass it off as a cult item.

 

 

 

 

HORROR OF THE HUMONGOUS HUNGRY HUNGAN (1991)

Dir: Richard Gardner

An excruciating home-movie that kicks off with nonsensical narration read by Jack Palance (yes, that Jack Palance). Dark, blurry and often out-of-focus, it concerns a mad scientist (a bad actor who is too young for the part anyway) who creates a monster by using an ancient voodoo potion that only works on dead bodies made from parts of other dead bodies a la Frankenstein. Considering the magic formula is what reanimates the dead, it's hard to determine exactly why electricity and radiation are required too, but the script (if there was one) tosses them in, probably just to cover all the bases. Apparently the doctor assembled the creature's body from parts of hospital patients. Since one of its hands is a gigantic six-fingered alien claw, he must work in a highly unusual hospital. The Hungan, as the monster is called, escapes from the couple of rooms and one short hallway that represent the facility and walks and walks and walks (and then walks) through the woods occasionally pausing to kill young campers. Most of the kills happen offscreen or just out of camera range, so don't expect ambitious gore effects. It's tempting to say the acting is like a high school play, but I've seen a few high school plays and they always had much better performances than anything here. Much time is wasted (the viewer's) on interminable footage of people dancing (badly) at a small party where a semi-professional rock band called Cry Wolf performs. They perform so much that the movie eventually figures out to about two-thirds horror story and one-third Cry Wolf commercial. More footage is wasted on the dozens of people who wander in and out of the film for a few minutes here and there, constantly jabbering their irrelevant ad-libbed smalltalk. The closest thing there is to a main character is an irritatingly whiny girl who has dreams of being chased by the monster every time she falls asleep and who never stops whining when she's awake. The monster's hair and clothing in the nightmares doesn't even match those in the 'real world' footage. In a desperate attempt to justify her presence, the Hungan eventually explains that her fear (along with the voodoo and electricity and radiation and whatnot) helped bring him to life, even though she has no connection to any of the people in the monster-making part of the plot. She heroically decapitates the creature in her dreams, but when she finally comes face to face with him for real he simply slashes her with his big rubber claw and she dies instantly like everybody else. The quality of the monster can make or break a project like this, and unfortunately this creature scores a zero in terms of imagination. He's is a guy in ordinary clothes, a simple big-nosed facial prosthetic and an old granny wig. And of course there's that big unexplained alien claw (from Joe Reader's House Of Horror Studios). It's nice to be supportive of independent films, but it's hard to express anything positive toward haphazard muck like this. I take that back: during one of the party sequences an unnamed character does an absolutely excellent Pee-Wee Herman impersonation. It's definitely the high point. A/k/a THE HUNGAN.

 

 

 

The long-awaited (it took two years to get released) diectorial debut of rock star Rob Zombie is a stylish homage to horror films of the 1970s like THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, THE ROCKY HORROR PICURE SHOW and 1980's MOTHER'S DAY.  In a mansion in the woods, several wacky babbling hillbilly stereotypes torture and kill people for no reason.  A pack of nerds with "Victim" written all over them (and misspelled at that) arrives to supply fresh meat and the overacting inbreds get to chew the scenery along with a few body parts.  That's about it plotwise.  Some of the victims are lowered into a pit of rotted zombies.  The zombies are unexplained but we assume they are the handiwork of the film's wonderfully creepy lead villain, "Dr. Satan".  The doc is a triumph of imaginative design and makeup work.  It's a pity we only get to see him for a few moments and we're never told much about him or the other wackjobs.  They kill because they're nuts, end of story.  Most of this noisy film consists of ridiculous looking foul-mouthed characters screaming oscenities at each other at the top of their lungs, punctuated by the occasional fatal shooting.  The ugly cynical shadow of MTV's influence hangs over this movie like a storm cloud, always threatening to overwhelm the show with empty pseudo-artsy pop culture techniques designed for teens with tiny attention spans.  So you get the aggressive self-conscious look of a music video applied to horror themes that were fresh and bold two decades earlier.  None of this is to say that HO1000C is without merit.  The aforementioned Dr. Satan is alone worth the price of a rental,  and it's fun to see veteran exploitation stars like Sid Haig and Karen Black (who still looks great here) back in action.  A few of the shocks work, aided by the highly detailed sets and outstanding makeup FX.  And there's an exceptionally beautiful actress (who would marry the director soon after this was shot) who stands out as a fun-loving, very sexy kill-happy psycho.  But the prevailing mood is one of unfocused clutter as the movie screeches mindlessly from one loud confrontation to another, quickly growing repetitious.  Anybody who comes along is casually murdered, including the local police force, and no one seems to notice.  An eccentric attempt to bring back the terrors of an earlier, scarier horror film era, this project is so busy referring to other movies that it forgets the need to add anything new to the recipe.  Ideas that were shocking and transgressive in the '70s just don't have the same impact a generation later in a society accustomed to mainstream cinema that had long since become just as brutal as the previous generation's horror films.  Movies are products of their times, reflecting contemporary attitudes and fears.  Without the backdrop of the societal era in which they were first presented, themes from yesterday's shockers can seem cliched, outdated and meaningless.  Which is the problem here.   And no, this is not a sequel to 1972's HOUSE OF SEVEN CORPSES.    

 

 

 

 

Director Lucio Fulci had explored anomalies in the time-space continuum before, notably in THE BEYOND and THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY. In this later effort, the time-tinkering is more upfront and literal and actually drives the plot, but it's too bad it wasn't a little better thought out. A demented elderly couple live in a secluded mansion filled with clocks of all shapes and sizes. Adding to the happy mood of their country home is the little basement chapel in which they keep the putrefying corpses of their niece and nephew laid out in coffins. The man spends most of his time cleaning and maintaining his clock collection and refers to the timepieces as "my babies."  Their loyal one-eyed gardener (Al Cliver of ZOMBIE) is nearly as deranged as his employers. Three horrible teenage thieves fleeing from a supermarket robbery finagle their way into the house and try to rob the old couple, but the situation gets out of control and the old man and his wife are killed. Then things start to get weird. The clocks all stop at the exact moment of the old man's death (an idea discussed in the old TWILIGHT ZONE episode "Ninety Years Without Slumbering"). The punks decide to spend the night in the shadowy house, but they fail to notice when the clocks all start running backwards. The sound effects of the tick-tocking of dozens of clocks played in reverse are effectively freaky, and in one simple but trippy scene we see the sand in an hourglass running back up into the top chamber. One of the kids knows something is wrong when he notices the old folks' bloodstains are missing from the floor, the bodies aren't where they should be and a table that had been knocked over has reset itself. With time running backwards, the bodies of the old couple come back to life to take revenge, but don't forget about their victims in the chapel, who are beginning to rot in reverse, growing more healthy...  THE HOUSE OF CLOCKS features the gloomy, dreamlike mood of most Fulci horror films, a generous helping of suspense, and even some of the maestro's trademark blood-and-gore setpieces. The problem here is in the lazy approach taken to the main concept of the clocks controlling the flow of time. Once they shift into reverse, different clocks run at different speeds and we never get any grasp of which clock controls what. Many of them run so crazily fast that by the end of the film, months should have sped by, but we're told it's only been a few hours. One character's injuries instantly heal but another's aren't affected at all and refuse to stop bleeding. Time backs up very slowly for certain people, rooms and objects and much faster for others. Presumably this is because certain clocks control the flow of time as it affects specific areas of space in and around the house, but none of this potentially fascinating material is ever sorted out. As in many Fulci movies, we seem to be in an otherworldly alternate reality of pure horror in which anything can happen at any time, as long as it's something horrible. Not all of the visual effects work, as when a chainsaw is forced through a door and you can see the ragged slots the blade makes in the wood already in place before it comes through. The bloody stabbings and shotgun wounds, on the other hand, look very convincing. Despite the misgivings, it's still one of Fulci's best later efforts. It's not on a par with THE BEYOND but it's consistently entertaining and nightmarishly unpredictable. Fulci came up with the basic idea himself, and it's mostly a great one that at least puts a strange new metaphysical twist on familiar haunted house themes. Some of the background music is cleverly designed to suggest the sound of ticking and chiming clocks. The ending might feel like a bit of a cop-out but it actually fits pretty well with what has come before. This movie could have been a whole lot more, but it's still unique enough to be worthwhile.  

In a movie that seems to have been designed to induce sleep, a self-absorbed author suffering from writer's block and chronic headaches has recurring nightmares. He dreams of an empty, dilapidated old house nearby. He slowly wanders through the place with a puzzled look on his face while the camera lingers on the peeling paint, splintered woodwork and layers of dust. He sees himself without a shirt standing next to a noose and finds his own dead body at the bottom of a well. These sequences seem to last forever and are scored with "music" that sounds like somebody who didn't know how to play the organ randomly pressing various keys. Other parts of the score sound like someone banging two blocks of wood together. There's almost no ambient sound, so most of the time things like doors, drawers and motor vehicles make no noise at all. This is pretty disorienting, as is a problem with the sound recording that results in an odd echo effect when characters talk. In many scenes it sounds like the actors are looping their dialogue while their original line readings can still be heard faintly in the background. When he's awake, the guy ignores his annoying, neurotic recovered alcoholic wife (I think maybe she's supposed to be English), sits at his typewriter and drives his convertible around on narrow backroads. The story he's working on is just like his dreams. His brother (whom we never meet) dies in a car accident. The wife commits suicide rather than spend any more time in this movie. The hero sees himself in a coffin. Cops arrive and find the convertible parked by the spooky house. The hero is apparently dead. The End. This forgotten attempt to make a surreal nightmare film like DAUGHTER OF HORROR or CARNIVAL OF SOULS occasionally captures an authentic dreamlike feel that's enhanced by the crude camerawork, stiff emotionless acting and grainy cinematography. But the excruciating soundtrack combined with a devastating lack of any real story or plot progression make its 69 minutes seem like hours. The murky B-&-W production has its credits scrawled in chalk on sidewalks, stone steps and walls.

Marginal Italian horror from the director of such wonderful hits as MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY and CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD.  This entry in the "Houses Of Doom" series has a workable premise (influenced by THE SHINING) and some solid shocks but is too carelessly written to have much impact.  A group of typical, movie-style, good-looking, incredibly stupid college students seek shelter in an old abandoned hotel after a landslide closes the nearby roads.  They are allowed into the dusty old (very homely) building by a creepy older man who never says a word.  Thanks to some corny psychic visions and a side trip to the nearest library, we learn that the business was closed to the public 20 years ago, after a big bearded nutcase killed five people there and chopped off their heads in the hopes that the headless bodies would be unidentifiable. He hid the heads somewhere on the grounds, but now the victims' ghosts are up and about and in the mood to kill some good-looking, incredibly stupid college students.  The ghosts appear normal, looking just like when they were alive except for the trickles of blood they sometimes have on their faces.  They stare wide-eyed at the kids, walk slowly around the halls of the hotel like zombies and try to stab or decapitate anybody in sight. One scary development has the doors and windows suddenly sealed over with concrete, and just like in a number of other Italian movies, some big hairy tarantulas that have nothing to do with the plot crawl over the actors.  Sometimes a slimy, putrescent corpse hand reaches into frame and gropes around or pushes people but I still don't know whose hand it was, since the ghosts all look just like ordinary people and not rotting corpses.  One guy figures he can use his metal detector to locate the missing heads, and while that seemed illogical to me, it turned out that he knew more about severed head-finding than I do, because he did indeed find 'em with it.  Of course that may be because the heads were stored in an iron box, which he couldn't possibly have known about, but still, you can't argue with success.  I suppose a more acccurate title would have been HOUSE OF LOST HEADS. At least two of the deaths came as total surprises to me, which is unusual in a stalk-'n'-slash type plot.  The prop heads and other makeup effects are excellent, which also helps . The film loses a lot of points for its cliche' dumb shock ending, in which we learn that the ghosts are still around, waiting for the next batch of youthful nincompoops to stumble into the hotel even though we've just seen them vanquished and dematerialized.  It's passable, rather formulaic horror entertainment, nothing more, nothing less.  One question still nags at me, though: I understand that the murder victims were angry about having lost their heads, but what was the hotel washing machine so upset about....?  

 

Here's a forgotten cheapie that opens with narration by Satan himself (sometimes it rhymes, sometimes it doesn't). The meandering movie is dark, atrociously shot and edited and has poor sound quality. Poor old Lon Chaney Jr. stars as Belial Desard (some characters pronounce it "DeSade" and still others say "DeSarr"). Belial is supposed to be completely evil but seems more like someone's harmless chubby old uncle. He has a cloven hoof for a foot (we never see it) and wears a hood most of the time to hide the little devil horns growing out of his forehead. His brother Andre (John Carradine) is a "good" Satanist who is sick (we never find out what his ailment is). Chaney leads a coven of devil worshippers who spend most of their evenings leering at belly dancing acts in a clearing next to a graveyard. Two doctors, a no-nonsense man and a frumpy woman, arrive to treat Carradine but it turns out that he really wants their help in stopping Chaney's coven. All the members of the Desard family are cursed. One of them is a werewolf, but even though he knows he's a werewolf, and even though it's the night of a full moon, the cult has to call upon the devil to make him transform anyway. In a scene that seems to last for hours, the werewolf guy is locked in a cell, where he gasps and hollers and looks with wide-eyed horror at his chest and hands...while they remain completely unchanged!  Finally he turns into not a werewolf but a man with a gorilla's head. Then he drops dead. (Maybe he killed himself; I couldn't tell.) Most reference sources state that John Carradine spends the whole movie in bed, but that's not true. Actually he's up and around quite a bit. Carradine and Chaney both wear robes that make them look like elderly pupils who never graduated from Hogwarts. The male doctor sometimes seems to believe in the supernatural but then scoffs at it in other scenes, so it's hard to tell where he stands. He wears a cross which Carradine tells him can stop the "bad" Satanists because it has a tiny sliver of metal shaved off the Holy Grail embedded in it (an interesting idea). Meanwhile, more cultists chant in the woods and provide exposition that isn't much help.  At the end, Carradine defeats Chaney by turning him into a rubber Don Post Skull mask.  This happens just as Lon was about to kill a girl as a sacrifice to the devil on his stone altar, but we're told the girl is hopelessly "damned" anyway, so I'm not sure why saving her was a big deal. This plodding, muddled film started out as BLOOD OF THE MAN DEVIL, a project which director Harold Daniels evidently never finished. More bits were shot by Reginald LeBorg, who had directed Chaney in THE MUMMY'S GHOST and THE BLACK SLEEP.  Then somebody had the bright idea to call in legendary hack Jerry Warren to shoot still more scenes, edit the whole mess into something that might pass for a story and add a music score.  It's a little more entertaining than most of Jerry's other work, but that's probably because someone else shot most of it.  It's hard to believe this had a basis in literature, but it was based on a book called The Widderburn Horror. The village of Widderburn is mentioned quite a few times, but some of the actors call it "Winterburg".  The two aging horror stars give it their best shot, with Carradine coming off the best, especially in the couple of scenes in which he's supposed to be mourning the loss of his loved ones. Despite the incompetence all around him, he manages to look believably grief-stricken, proving once again that he really was an exceptional actor.  Most of the remaining cast don't seem sure of what they're supposed to be registering most of the time. The film is interesting in an arts-and-crafts kind of way, and its confusing history is a better story than the jumble that made it to the screen. A lot of time is taken up with footage of those belly dancers.

Anticlimactic one-joke horror from the man who directed THE DAY MARS INVADED EARTH the same year.  The first half of this obscure movie is intriguing and does a great job of creating the same shuddery mood of mystery as the creepier episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE or THRILLER.  I had a difficult time staying awake through the second half, however, and it's only a 62-minute film.  An architect and his wife are hired to survey a deserted mountaintop castle built by a crazy old lady who's locked up in an asylum. There's no sensible reason for her to be crazy, or even for her character to be in the story at all.  As soon as the couple arrives at the structure, they're haunted by ghostly phenomena. Lumbering shadows lurk in the corners of darkened rooms, objects vanish or are moved mysteriously from one place to another, lights go out and doors creak open at night.  This material is so eerie that you'll think you're in for a good scary movie.  Then the estate agent who hired the couple shows up with his strange jealous foreign wife and the script starts to plummet.  The punchline is so patently ridiculous and unscary that the end result is more like having someone spend an hour telling you a joke than like watching a motion picture.  The house turns out to be a hiding place for a quartet of circus freaks who were living there illegally with their boss, who died in his sleep two months before.  As in most horror movies that use real sideshow people, the freaks are supposed to be sympathetic, harmless misfits who just want to lead quiet normal lives. The problem is that, also as in most such films, they are depicted as sneaky, dishonest, simple-minded and ultimately dangerous to so-called innocent people.  These allegedly kind and gentle circus folk terrorize and kidnap a woman, drug her, and imprison her in a "headless woman" illusion for the sole purpose of scaring the other intruders away!   And one of the people they're trying to frighten off is the woman's husband!  Did they really expect him to accept that his wife had somehow gotten decapitated and simply run home and never return?  When the freaks' beloved boss died, they weren't bright enough to lay him to rest or even pull his bedsheet over his head, so he's still lying there rotting in his bed in plain sight eight weeks later.  Giant Richard Kiel is ready to kill a normal-sized man just for finding him, and yet it's clear that the movie wants us to sympathize with these deranged individuals.  Can't anybody ever come up with a story in which people with real-life deformities don't pose some kind of threat?   And don't real people who have such deformities feel insulted by these spook stories that keep making them out to be vengeful and childish and using them to creep people out?   For that matter, what's up with the title?  Do these people really qualify as "damned" just because one is abnormally tall, one is abnormally fat and the other two don't have legs?   At the end they all simply leave to search for a new carnival to employ them.  No explanation is given as to how they've been finding food to eat, nor how they made a large chair vanish from a room in a matter of moments without being seen.  The fat lady is the same actress who was the hilarious Mother Joyboy in THE LOVED ONE two years later.  Good photography and spooky lighting aside, this movie is still a circus-fat-lady-sized disappointment.   

Not to be confused with the 2003 video game-based zombie movie of the same name, this is a poorly made anthology from Oklahoma. It wastes some fine actors and an ingenious wraparound gimmick on a series of underdeveloped situations plagued with terrible scripting and a stultifying air of  amateurishness.  John Ericson gets lost in a thunderstorm and ends up taking shelter in the digs of a hospitable but vaguely sinister mortician (Ivor Francis, who is perfect for the role). Francis takes him into a dark room containing several coffins, and relates the incidents (they don't deserve to be called "stories") that led to the death of each coffin's occupant. In the first one, an elementary schoolteacher who hates children (wha-??) is attacked in her home by a gang of little kids with big awkward fake-looking fangs. Honest, folks, that's all there is to it.  In the second, equally pointless vignette, Burr DeBenning continues the very short horror career he began a year earlier in THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN, playing a psycho who makes home movies of himself strangling women. It's all shot from his camera's point of view and it appears to have been mostly ad-libbed, so it was probably extremely easy to make. It opens with the killer being hauled away by the cops, so there's no chance of any suspense or surprises. The third segment is the best one, although the dialogue is almost as bad as in the others. It's still the closest this movie gets to anything like storytelling, as a "Columbo" style detective matches wits with a stuffy Scotland Yard inspector (Bernard Fox, "Dr. Bombay" on TV's BEWITCHED) in a contest to see which one will be named The World's Best Criminologist. This is the only part of the movie that has any kind of real plotting or that goes anywhere beyond A-to-B, but it's routine stuff despite a clever twist at the end. The last segment is about a heartless rich businessman. He cruelly pushes aside a dirty old wino and then, like an idiot, somehow walks into an empty downtown building and falls down an elevator shaft. He is imprisoned in a tiny cell for an indeterminate period by an unseen captor who supplies him with bottles of booze. We never do find who or what was responsible or how they knew the guy would foolishly stumble into the empty building and get himself trapped therein.  After a while he's inexplicably set free, and the mortician explains that the guy became a drunk and died sometime later of liver disease. Predictably, the final coffin is reserved for Ericson himself. The direction of individual scenes is fairly competent and some of the actors are good, but the allaged 'tales' are so crude, simple and unsatisfying that they feel unfinished and are practically an insult to the intelligence. Most of the time it's difficult to even tell quite what the filmmakers were trying for. The illogical feature is also known as ALIEN ZONE and ZONE OF THE DEAD. Under any name, it's one of the poorest horror anthologies ever. My favorite quote is when the corporate creep in the last installment mutters, "Twenty-three different kinds of morons...."

A man has a recurring nightmare in which barking hounds chase him into a spooky mansion. He dreams he enters the cellar and finds a cackling old witch stirring a cauldron. He sees her toss his own severed head into the flaming brew just before waking up, terrified.  His cold, distant wife announces that she's booked a holiday at an out-of-the-way resort hotel for the two of them to try to rekindle the spark in their loveless marriage.  It comes as no surprise at all when the place she takes him to is revealed to be the very house from his dreams.  There are a few things that are surprising, though.  First, the notion that the guy would agree to stay there after all those traumatic nightmares is pretty hard to believe. I also found it more than a little odd that the couple sleep in small separate beds in separate rooms even though the alleged reason for this weekend getaway was to give their failing marriage another chance.  Naturally the guy sees the witch from his dream lurking on the premises here and there, and although we never do find out what she was making in that big cauldron of hers, it is clear that her favorite ingredient is freshly severed human heads.  Maybe she was just hungry for human head soup. She kills a priest, a teenage girl and a guy who looks like Napoleon Dynamite.  Good old Paul Mueller (from LADY FRANKENSTEIN,  A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD and many other Euro-horrors) is the blind pianist who now owns the mansion and who provides what little useful exposition there is.  The story is slight and routine but Lenzi does succeed in brewing up an impressive mood of apprehension.  Much of what happens is left ruefully underexplained but the film is always watchable and is at least well-made enough to hold your attention.  The end contains several surprise twists (some of which are telegraphed) and a special guest appearance by the grim reaper himself.  The reaper seen here (made in the classic image of a black-cloaked skeleton with live worms crawling on his bony face) is an impressive, scary creation but I wasn't sure why the old hag needed him to carry out one last decapitation when she had spent the whole film knocking folks off on her own and doing just fine. I expect she was just getting tired by that time.  It's hard to believe that a witch would go to THIS much trouble just to snare one apparently random guy in a web of horror when other people are killed off so nonchalantly, but if you try to look at the story as one man's private nightmare it becomes a little easier to swallow.  Like most Lenzi movies, this entry in the Italian "Houses OF Doom" series has good makeup effects, efficient direction and lighting, weak dubbing and a nihilistic ending.  Flawed, obviously, but worth a watch if you like supernatural mysteries with that unique '80s Italian vibe. 

The third movie adaptation of Richard Matheson's great end-of-the-world tale, following 1964's THE LAST MAN ON EARTH and 1971's THE OMEGA MAN, is the first to use the novel's title.  Once again, Hollywood producers and script doctors who think they know more than respected novelists make some noticeable tweaks to the story seemingly just because they have the power to do so, but the end result this time is a fine movie, especially by the low sci-fi cinema standards of 2007.  Will Smith proves once and for all that he can play a character significantly different from his well-known laid-back, friendly doofus persona as brooding, half-mad Dr. Neville, the only survivor (or so he thinks after three years without seeing another human being) of a plague that wiped out mankind.  The element of chemical warfare from the book is here replaced with a new origin for the plague, possibly because someone on board thought biological weapons were too hot and heavy a topic for audiences in these troubled times.   In this version, the human race died out because of a strange attempt at a cure for cancer that is horribly poorly explained by a woman scientist on TV at the beginning.  After she makes a completely inappropriate 'highway driving' analogy that makes no sense at all if you stop and think about it, the film gets down to business and jumps ahead three years into the nightmare existence of Smith's well-educated but helpless scientist (an ordinary Joe with no special inside knowledge in the novel), who talks to mannequins on a regular basis and sets traps for the flesh-hungry nocturnal mutants who are constantly in pursuit.  The monsters are clearly a product of the movie's times, but that was true of the earlier versions too.  The Italian version of '64 featured traditional vampires who would have been right at home shambling through the dungeon of any gothic castle from that great era of Euro-horror, and in 1971 the mutants were more like a crazy religious sect than supernatural menaces, reflecting the concerns of that era with cults and nonconformists.  In 2007 the story's monsters are ripped straight out of 28 DAYS LATER and THE DESCENT, fast-moving computer-animated hissing ghouls designed to catch the attention of young video game addicts.  They're so energetic and fierce that they don't seem like ambulatory corpses by any means, but they are reasonably frightening taken on their own terms.  Among many good touches here are the brief flashbacks of past tragedies that haunt Smith's nightmares and how they are used to efficiently convey his horrible memories without bogging down the story.   When he eventually learns he is not the only human survivor on earth after all, his reaction is amusing but perfectly believable coming from a guy who's gotten used to being completely alone for three years.  Instead of jumping for joy or acting like he's particulaly glad to see a friendly face, he is initially just annoyed at having his longtime routine interrupted.  A very clever scene has a DVD of SHREK playing on a TV in the background, with the relationship between the cartoon ogre and his irritating hanger-on and would-be friend Donkey mirroring that of Smith and the friendly female survivor who is determined that they must now band together.   There are a few plot points that remain unclear (how did the other humans get to an island that had no bridges leading to it?), but overall this is a well-planned, perfectly paced feature that holds up as solid movie entertainment.  It's still not the faithful adaptation that devoted fans of the book were hoping for all these years, but it's at least as good as the two previous ones. 

 

An asinine plot full of ridiculous situations and unrealistic behavior is given a lavish treatment by the special effects department in this very uneven, very dumb feature. Various bad guys with conflicting interests are after the Ice Queen, a ridiculous humanoid who looks like a normal naked woman when she is warm but turns into a blue-faced, fanged monster whenever her body temperature drops below a certain level.  Her body chemistry is described as being the opposite of humans, which only means that she becomes stronger the colder she gets and thus warm temperatures put her in a dormant state. If this creature had been treated as a bizarre biological fluke or a one-of-a-kind supernatural entity, ICE QUEEN would have been a lot more plausible. Unfortunately the script tries to tell us that these "ice people" were a factual, scientifically recognized species. The concept is too silly for words, and sounds that much more so because of all the desperate attempts to talk it up in a scientific context. The high-tech life support machine (installed aboard a tiny two-passenger airplane) that monitors this incredible find doesn't even beep or have an alarm of any kind that goes off when it's in danger of shutting down, so as soon as the only scientist present turns his back, the creature is up and attacking.  The resultant plane crash causes an avalanche that traps a small group of people in a Vermont ski resort.  Cars and buildings are buried under mountains of falling snow, depicted via a clever combination of miniatures, set dressing and stock footage. The visuals in this portion of the film are excellent and dramatic and seem out of place in such a low-I.Q. story. Throughout the movie the trapped humans act frustratingly stupid and illogical, with only an occasional flash of humor working successfully.  People see the wrinkly blue creature with bright red eyes and enormous fangs but don't seem to notice that she's a monster.  A man who is stabbed dies instantly in another very unconvincing scene. A sleazy but well-meaning female character has some of the most cartoonishly oversized, unnatural looking silicone breast implants you'll ever see.  The story is full of totally unbelievable incidents, like when a man who calls for an emergency rescue team is laughed at and hung up on simply because the dispatcher knows he sometimes drinks.  The monster likes to shove her hand through people's chests and freeze them from the inside out but there's never any explanation given for why she becomes an unreasoning killing machine once she gets reverse-thawed.  As played by Ami Veevers-Chorlton, the monster is a spastic loony who constantly thrashes around like an enraged, drunken stripper for no reason.  She typically stands around roaring and waving her arms and legs erratically for a long time before attacking but people still can't get away. Her face and hands are very blue but when bits of her skintight jumpsuit get torn away we see healthy pink Caucasian skin undrneath.  Hot water will dissolve her completely but a large pan of it thrown directly into her face doesn't even leave a scar. Scenes of her trying to look sexy and flirting with the normal human guy she is inexplicably attracted to are hilarious, but ICE QUEEN treats its preposterous concept so seriously most of the time that it's hard to tell if these scenes were supposed to be funny or not.  We are repeatedly told about the disastrous avalanche cutting the whole valley off from the outside world but at the finale the landscape suddenly contains green grass, tall weeds, and trees without so much as a flake of snow on them.  And the ending is even dumber than what's come before.  They did come up with a pretty great monster makeup (courtesy of Optic Nerve) for their silly ice queen, anyway. 

An ingenious concept for a sick new kind of monster and outstanding gross-out makeup effects by Rick Baker are the main attractions in this famed low-budget puzzler. AIP must have thought they had a real winner on their hands. The film was heavily promoted, the monster was presumptuously referred to as "The First New Horror Creature" in a campaign to rank him among such successful monsters as Frankenstein and The Wolfman, and licensed merchandise (still something of a rarity at the time) was offered, including Melting Man makeup kits, masks and a tie-in paperback novel. The central idea is clever but the script is perfunctory at best, introducing the premise and then going on autopilot for most of the movie as the monster staggers around the woods while nothing much happens. Astronaut Steven West (Alex Rebar) returns from a space mission contaminated by some kind of unexplained radiation after traveling too close to Saturn's rings. His flesh is now literally melting from his body, turning him into an unforgettably disgusting mess covered with dripping red slime and sticky goo. He now has a taste for human flesh, which we're told he must consume in order to slow down the melting process. This point, like everything else NASA doctor Burr DeBenning says about him, doesn't make much sense and leaves the viewer to wonder just how Burr figured these things out.  Steve escapes from a pathetically cheap looking military hospital of some sort and kills a fat nurse in a laughably edited sequence: The nurse runs screaming toward the camera down a very long hallway in slo-mo for a long time. The Melting Man is nowhere to be seen in the background, but when Chubby runs right through a plate glass door without thinking to open it first, he's right behind her anyway.  We're never told just how West acquired this disease ("radiation" is the convenient buzzword), or whether he can transmit his condition to others. We're never told much of anything else either, making one wish the filmmakers had gotten some help with the script from someone who knew at least a little bit about biology, radiation, or...um...anything else.  More incredible than the Melting Man himself is the idea that a U.S. astronaut known to have been truned into a radioactive killer could just walk away from a government facility and that the Army would dispatch a total of one soldier-- an aging general (Myron Healy) at that-- to aid in the search!  DeBenning says that the Melting Man is "getting physically stronger as he melts", a notion that makes no sense even by the most forgiving standards of drive-in sci-fi.  The dialogue is so unnatural that it borders on the surreal, as in this classic exchange: DOCTOR: "If I agree to tell you about this, you tell no one, not even your wife."  SHERIFF: "You know I'm not married."  Another strange bit has a comic relief elderly couple on their way to visit family stopping in the middle of the night to steal some lemons from an orchard to take as a gift to their hosts. Huh?  The only believable moment is when a scared little girl runs home screaming that she saw "Frankenstein" in the woods, which is very likely how a child would describe an encounter with a monster in real life.  The Melting Man himself is a classic of horror makeup work, with a series of increasingly deteriorated looking, goo-covered masks used to indicate his ongoing meltdown. There are some attempts to generate sympathy for him, and they almost work. He leaves bloody chunks of himself wherever he goes and smears blood and glop on various trees, windows and other surfaces.  He also leaves sticky, gooey footprints everywhere but DeBenning and Healy never notice them, relying on a Geiger counter to follow the Melting Man's trail when it seems that simply looking down at the ground would suffice.  I have to admit that, as monsters go, this guy is scary and memorable, and more than any other film I've ever seen, TIMM captures the true feel of having stayed awake all night through the course of some terrible crisis. Shots of the Melting Man lurking in the dark outside people's homes and peeking in windows are effectively shuddery and could easily give children nightmares, but you'll wish this potentially interesting monster would have been used in a more ambitious movie. Future SILENCE OF THE LAMBS director Jonathan Demme has a bit part and Janus Blythe from THE HILLS HAVE EYES shows up long enough to chop one of the monster's arms off, after which she sits in a corner and cries, screams, laughs, and freaks out in a shot that goes on so long that you'll feel embarrassed for her.  It's amazing that there still haven't been any sequels. Yes, poor Steve melts completely away into a puddle of blood in the impressive and creepy conclusion, but he sure left plenty of himself behind. Some scientist could always find his DNA in a blood sample and resurrect him somehow, right?

It consists of about 30% stock footage and 70% tedium, but THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD still has more the feel of watching a real movie than anything else Jerry Warren was ever associated with.  It's one of the least adventurous adventures you'll ever see, concerning four bland explorers (including B-movie fan fave Robert Clarke) traveling deep beneath the surface of the ocean in a diving bell built by oceanographer John Carradine, who must have been given a budget of about 35 bucks by The Diving Bell Construction Funding Committee.  Seen from the outside, the craft looks like an oversized punching bag that would barely hold four people if they were crammed together in the manner of players in a game of Twister, but it contains a fairly spacious cabin on the inside.  When the cable to the bell breaks because renowned scientist John forgot how water pressure works, the divers sink deeper and deeper until they find themselves in a strange underwater cave that has clean breathable air provided by a previously unknown undersea volcano.  I'm not sure how that would work, scientifically, but, okay.  Questions involving the nature of water pressure and the logistics of getting in and out of the diving bell will start to bother you too, unless you focus squarely on the characters' expository dialogue. Back on the surface, Carradine talks to fellow geniuses about sending a second expedition down to rescue the first one.  Our brave band of adventurers, meanwhile, spend their time walking around the cave, catching fish to eat, and complaining.  Unlike most adventures that take place underground or underwater, there's almost no science fiction involved here.  The immense air-filled cave beneath the ocean is a fictional concept, but don't expect anything more imaginative than that.  In this respect, the movie is much more like a real, true-life exploring mishap than any other movie I can name.  There are no lost underwater civilizations, no fantastic cities, no super-science or crashed spaceships full of intergalactic invaders, no alien technology or bizarre weapons or strange monsters.  There's nothing but a real big cave.  So, just like it would be in real life, our heroes are faced with nothing beyond boredom and inconvenience while they await their rescue. Eventually, they meet a crazy old man who has been stuck down there for decades. He can't act and he looks just like the guy who used to run out and say "It's" at the beginning of Monty Python's Flying Circus.  He never poses much of a threat, and a conveniently-timed earthquake soon disposes of him with a few well-aimed papier-mache' rocks.  None of the expedition's members appear to have any personality whatsoever until about halfway through the film, at which point the reporter played by Phyllis Coates (one-time Lois Lane) is suddenly fleshed out as a selfish, defensive,  hostile troublemaker. This character conflict never goes anywhere, and at the end all four of the so-called heroes are rescued, at which time they make a few good-natured remarks about how they're glad they didn't end up left to die down there.   With no real action and only a bare minimum of plot progression of any kind, this is a justifiably forgotten relic of the drive-in era.  It was apparently made in 1957 but went unreleased for three years.  

 

Not to be confused with any of the previous films with this title.  This particular INCUBUS is a supernatural slasher quickie with some good camerawork, a few brief chilling moments and a very effective, nightmarish, warped- sounding score by Simon Boswell.  The plot and the acting, however, sink the film. Another gang of cardboard victim types manages to get themselves trapped inside a spooky, empty old research facility in the woods (?).  The building has an industrial-grunge look, the usual flickering flourescent lights, dark filthy corridors and the lamest security fence ever.  Inside is a comatose serial killer locked in a clear glass room.  (I've heard of convicted murderers being sent to the gas chamber, but to the glass chamber-??)  The guy isn't really an incubus in the traditional sense, but he does have the ability to invade and possess people's bodies while they sleep.  The main star is media celebrity fluff-girl Tara Reid, who was 30 years old at the time but looks 45.  When her companions die, she does some of the worst, most embarrassing sobbing and bawling I've ever seen.  The plot is full of holes, the most distracting of which is the killer's tongue problem.  It seems that he bit off his own tongue as a child (a reaction to having his insane momma scar up the inside of his mouth with a bottle brush in a bizarre, incoherent and perhaps incomplete scene).  When he possesses people, the first thing they do is to bite their own tongues off.  One victim speaks with perfect clarity after his tongue is gone, and when the original incubus guy is awakened, he can talk perfectly plainly too!  It's hard to believe the makers of even a rush job like this could have failed to notice such a glaring gap in logic.  Survivors decide to tie one girl up and let her sleep just to see what will happen in a very dumb scene that was probably written in because somebody thought it would be cool for a girl to get tied up. Even after being tied up in the middle of a horrible experience that has just caused the deaths of several of her friends, she manages to easily relax and drop off after about 10 seconds.  What happens when she wakes back up is even stupider. The dim characters worry about their flashlight batteries dying, but in many scenes they all shine their flashlights around unnecessarily, wasting what battery power they have left.  The end is another one of those annoying cheap shocks that violates the story's established logic (where was the killer's spirit between the time his physical body was killed and the time the last character dozed off?).   As noted, the music is memorably creepy and the movie has a fairly decent overall look, but those elements aren't enough to compensate for a sketchy story, weak characterization and one monumentally lame-o ending.  

  

 

 

There has only ever been a handful of attempts to combine the traditional Western and gothic horror genres.  This head-on collision of  the two genres directed by the prolific William "One-shot" Beaudine shows why.  Jesse, portrayed here as a semi-sympathetic anti-establishment Robin Hood type character rather than the cold-blooded villain some movies make him out to be, is fleeing the law along with his big, strong, hulking good-natured pal Hank Tracy. Hank is wounded in a gunfight and the pair make their way to a little Mexican village in Arizona where spunky young Juanita tells them they can get medical help for Hank at the old abandoned mission on the hill. Juanita is convinced that the doctors who reside there are evil, murderous criminals and she holds them responsible for the mysterious recent deaths of several village teens, but she sends poor Jesse and Hank there anyway. The residents of the mission-turned-cliche'-mad-lab are none other than the unlikely named Maria Frankenstein, granddaughter of the original Baron (not his daughter as the title claims), and her nervous brother who looks about 25 years older than her. (One wonders why the script didn't have her refer to him as an uncle rather than a brother. But anyway.)  Maria has the mission fully stocked with traditional Frankenstein accoutrements brought from Europe, including buzzing electrical devices, Jacob's ladders, and unconvincing accents. She develops an instant crush on Jesse but when he acts more interested in the younger and less evil Mexican girl, the woman scorned sees an opportunity to take revenge while finally perfecting that monster-building project she's been toying with. She secretly replaces Hank's brain with an artificial one (it looks just like the real thing) built by her infamous grandpappy. Momentarily forgetting that the movie she's in is not a comedy spoof, she renames the outlaw "Igor".  Hank/Igor, looking like Freddie Jones would in FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED, follows Maria's orders like an obedient robot. Of course she goes too far when she instructs him to kill Juanita, as his new artificial brain illogically seems to remember that Juanita had once been kind to him, so he throttles his wicked master instead.  The end sees Jesse riding off with U.S. Marshal Jim Davis, presumably to give up his outlaw ways and do the right thing by allowing himself to be hanged. The stitched-up scar makeup on the "monster" is excellent and the script does a fairly credible job of tying the events and storylines together into a reasonably coherent story.  But there are just too many moments of absurdity along the way to overcome. You won't believe the ridiculous colorful FLASH GORDON-style helmet, complete with a blinking neon lightning bolt screwed on, that Maria uses on the subjects of her brain experiments. I got a kick out of the large bottle in the lab marked only as "POISON".  Some of the accents hover uncomfortably between Spanish, German and Hungarian. And of course the whole juxtaposition of GUNSMOKE-style cowboy shootouts with gothic horror situations is a little jarring to begin with. This was Beaudine's last film, released theatrically with his similar BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (made right before this project) for the ultimate Western bad guys-meet-classic monsters double feature. Of the two, this one is easily the better film, but that's not saying much. If you crave more Western/horror combo platters, you might also enjoy CURSE OF THE UNDEAD, TEENAGE MONSTER, SHADOW OF CHIKARA and GRIM PRAIRIE TALES.

 

 

The folks who brought you ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE and THE EDGE OF HELL struck again, this time with an attempt to make a movie about Chinese hopping vampires aimed at English-speaking audiences.   Resurrected corpses of victims of violent or wrongful deaths, the goofy monsters have purple skin, traditional vampie fangs and pointy ears with a cool batwing design.  They hop around like bunnies, a trait which, ridiculous as it may look, really is an authentic part of Chinese folklore.  The shopkeeper uncle of a bland heroine is killed by what might rank as the least convincing street gang in movie history.  He returns as a "hyong-tse" (hopping vampire) and bounces around town scaring kids until a priest (James Hong, who keeps a gaggle of the undead in a secret room in his magic shop) catches up with him and sticks a Post-it note with prayer symbols on it to his forehead.  The gang causes more trouble and commits more murders, leading to a real yawner of a final battle between a handful of punks and a handful of hopping monsters.  Treating this story in a light-hearted manner was probably irresistible because of the silly-looking nature of its monsters, but the tongue-in-cheek tone is so pervasive that it ultimately works against the film, the result being the same kind of "too stupid to be scary but not funny enough to be a comedy" tone that characterized so many other late-'80s genre efforts.  A lot of the jokes are pretty good, but the lack of scares and the camp dialogue create a mood that's more like watching a bunch of friends play-acting than watching a real movie.  The death-dealing punk gang members are clean, blow-dried, nicely dressed teens who look more like spoiled suburbanites than authentic gangsters (the same problem plagued ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE, and here as in that film, a baseball bat seems to be the most popular weapon of choice).   After the uncle's murder, no police of any kind ever show up and the shop continues to open on schedule with no steps taken to increase security or find the killers.  In the strangest sequence, the gang is fighting off a former comrade turned vampire.  They eventually hold up a mirror in front of him.  The first time they show him his reflection, he melts, bleeds and splits open as a weird-looking muscular monster emerges from inside him.  So the kids show this monster the mirror, which causes him to fall over and die.  Clearly intended to be a THE HOWLING-style showstopping transformation effects sequence, the scene does feature some excellent makeup work (supervised by Steve Wang) but makes no sense and carries no dramatic weight.  As for the title, a character says "this place gives me the jitters" at one point to justify it, but the closest thing to the jitters you'll get from watching this is an itchy fast-forward-button-pushing finger.

 

 

After the success of the first PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie in '03, it was inevitable that somebody would get the bright idea to make a slasher fick with a rotting zombie pirate as the culprit.   Of course it wasn't inevitable that it would turn out to be this bad.  Some bad actors on a beach at night remove a human skull from a conveniently placed treasure chest, unwittingly (or should that be witlessly?) resurrecting Jolly Roger, a green-faced pirate ghoul on a mission of murder.  A throwaway line of dialogue tries to explain that the old salt had made a deal with the devil, allowing him to reclaim his treasure if he hunts down and decapitates all 16 of his mutinous crew members' handily identical modern-day descendants (all of whom still reside in the same town).  It might have been possible to make a good scary movie out of such a concept, but the people behind this one weren't up to the task.  For one thing, the villain himself is an embarrassment.  Clad in a dusty pirate costume and a rubber Halloween mask with obvious eye holes cut out, he never appears to be anything more than a guy going to a masquerade party as a dead pirate.  He also talks too much, strutting through town yammering every pirate cliche' in the book ("Ahhhrr, Matey", "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum", and so on).  When he encounters the present-day incarnations of his crewmen, he sees their eyes glow yellow for a couple of seconds.  A little help from the devil in identifying them, I guess.  Since he's magically reconstituted from a skull anyway, it's puzzling that he only regenerates to the point of being a rotting ghoul instead of going all the way back to his original human form, but I guess the need to have a monster for a killer outweighed the need for logic.  Inconsistent special effects include a surprising and very well done CGI beheading and at least one incredibly realistic prop head, but at other times the victims' bodies look like mannequins and the rolling heads like bewigged melons.  (Well, at least some of the effects are impressive.)  The characters are the usual chowderheads who never react believably to anything.  The dialogue seems improvised and most of the conversations feel incomplete.  The low point (or perhaps high point, depending upon viewer enjoyment of incompetence) is when a security camera tape is played back after J.R. commits some murders at a cramped strip club.  Instead of anything that looks like actual surveillance footage, the cops see the actual murder sequence from earlier in the movie, complete with multiple cuts, camera angles and close-ups, only this time it's in black and white.  Any chance the movie had of being taken seriously on any level goes out the window at that points.  At the climax, the treasure chest is crammed full of severed heads in one scene but only appears to contain two in the next.  Apparently those two melted away into skulls while the other 14 or so disappeared altogether.  The ending is as moronic as it is predictable, as the (previously vanquished) sword-swinging ghoul shows up to claim one last head, indicating that he can't even count to sixteen.  And even then the final head he lops off isn't the one that would make the playing out of the scene agree with the script.   On the whole an utter dud, recommended only to those who think the LEPRECHAUN movies are the height of horror.

 

 

 

 

Hayden Christensen, who has even less presence here than he did as Anakin Skywalker in two STAR WARS prequels, is a young nobody who discovers he has the power to "jump" from one place to another by sheer will power.  He can vanish and re-materialize anywhere in the world, but since he's a selfish twerp with no personality, he can't think of anything to do with this incredible ability beyond stealing cash from bank vaults and getting himself an expensive apartment.  He is pursued by violent, taser-wielding Samuel L. Jackson, another STAR WARS star, who leads a coven of crackpot religious fanatics who call themselves the Paladins ("Have stun gun will travel"?).  According to the ridiculous mythology of this obnoxious movie, the Paladins have been persecuting the jumpers for thousands of years because they believe their power should only belong to god.  Since the only marginally effective weapon they have against those with the power is electricity (good thing Jackson brought his prop light saber along from STAR WARS), and since the information they use in tracking them comes from the internet, you can't give this concept serious thought for ten seconds before you realize that until very recent times the Paladins would have had absolutely no way of tracking these superhuman humans.  The sensible thing for Jackson's coven to do would be simply kill the jumpers by ordinary means (if you sneak up behind a jumper and put a bullet in him, he'll die just like a normal man), but since they, like Christensen's character, are idiots, they insist on gloating first and then ritually killing their prey with what looks like an ordinary hunting knife purchased from a sporting goods shop even though Jackson keeps it carefully wrapped in cloth and treats it like some sort of sacred artifact.  There was the potential for a classic sci-fi thriller here, but so much of the movie's brief running time is wasted on the boring details of the cardboard characters' lives, there's very little time for real excitement.  An even bigger problem is the lack of sympathetic characters.  Christensen is such a self-centered creep that you can't really care what happens to him.  In a scene that fully sums up his character, he watches a TV news report about people trapped by a disastrous flood.  Even though he could use his amazing gift to rescue the victims from almost certain death, the thought never occurs to him and he calmly switches the TV off.  The one effort made at making him appear human is his love for a girl he had a crush on back in high school.   She's played by Rachel Bilson, a scrawny stick-figure of an actress who probably weighs less than the lipstick in her purse and would have to gain about 35 pounds before she could qualify to be an elf.  Her character is just as dull and unknowable as her jumping jerk boyfriend.  They meet up with a cynical Irish jumper who's an even bigger jerk than Christensen.  And you can't root for Samuel Jackson's character either, since he has devoted his life to a stupid, misguided cause and is so cold-hearted that he's willing to murder any innocent people who get in his way.  Ugly film processing manages to make the entire cast look oily, sickly and peaked, with visible acne and cold sores making sure no Hollywood glamour seeps in.  There are continuity errors too.  Watch Hayden's gray T-shirt constantly change from being spotted and filthy to being torn full of holes to looking brand new again between edits.  And check out Jackson's changing scar makeup.  The intriguing possibilities of the jumping concept are so seldom addressed that this is like watching any crime movie with a "chase" theme most of the time, the sole difference being that the background scenery keeps changing.  At the end Christensen uses his power to strand Jackson atop a spire in the middle of the Grand Canyon.  No human being, not Batman or MacGyver or anyone else without the power of actual flight, could escape such a place but Jackson reacts to the fact that he's been left to die alone and isolated by giving a smirk that looks like this cruel man has suddenly become a good sport and is thinking, "Ahh, that little scamp got me!"   The final scene, concerning Hayden's mother (Diane Lane with a hideous haircut), insults viewer intelligence with an unnecessary revelation that adds nothing to the story but a laughable one-in-a-billion coincidence.  That, and of course, the opening for sequels.  With no interesting characters and very little in the way of clever dialogue, JUMPER is a junker.      

 

 

 

 

Horror elements ripped off from JU-ON (THE GRUDGE), PULSE, SCARY TRUE STORIES, THE RING and DARK WATER are shuffled and mixed around in an attempt to come up with a new recipe, but it still tastes like the same old ingredients stirred into a familiar and somewhat stale concoction.  Another batch of interchangeable, blandly nice Japanese girls are creeped out by the standard array of flickering lights, blurry shadows, unexplained clicking noises, spooky cell phone calls, body-shaped black stains, and out-of-focus ghosts who crawl along on their hands and knees (I'm beginning to get the idea that being dead in Japan causes either two broken legs or severe foot pain).  JU-REI pompously presents its string of events in reverse chronological order, opening with "Chapter 10" and ending with "Chapter 1" followed by the "Prologue".  At least the film ends before it gets around to providing "The Prequel".  In MEMENTO there was a clever narrative reason for the out-of-sequence storytelling, but in JU-REI it serves no useful purpose and only makes the film hard to follow.  It feels like the filmmakers were looking for a way to imitate JU-ON's episodic, one-character-at-a-time style, but beyond that there's no reason why this movie's series of hauntings couldn't have been presented in their natural order.  There certainly isn't enough of a cause-and-effect relationship between the segments to warrant the backwards presentation.  Some of the supernatural occurences are nicely eerie and a couple of the sudden shocks, as pale hands abruptly reach into frame, are effective enough.  But there's not much in the way of logic to the supernatural setup shown here. People see the shadowy blurred ghosts, get literally scared to death, come back as shadowy blurred ghosts themselves, and scare other people to death.  That's about all there is to it.  You can follow the series of events as far as who died when and where, but the plot developments seem so arbitrary that it's not worth the trouble it takes to go back and sort everything out.  Telling the story is supposed to be the job of the writer and director, not the audience.  The short chapters generally end the same way, with each segment's central character being grabbed or popped out at by another pale-faced, out-of-focus spectre.  We never see the ghosts actually kill anybody but everyone drops dead anyway, so I assume the deaths were caused by sheer fright.  Why that would make each successive victim determined to return to claim another victim is never made clear.  I like the quiet, unhurried style of most Japanese ghost movies, but this one is so slow in parts that it threatens to slip into a coma.  A scene in which we're looking up a flight of stairs while a lamp at the top flickers on and off and a shot of a sick old woman lying in a hospital bed go on for so long with nothing happening that I began to think the cameraman must've fallen asleep and left the camera running. The gloomy, nearly colorless look of the film is efficiently maintained but it's nothing new. There are a few workable scares, all of them of the "jump-out-and-go-BOO!" variety, but the people who will like JU-REI best will be those who have never seen its numerous sources of inspiration.  It's from the director of DEAD GIRL WALKING, released the same year.