Horror movies to avoid - extensive spoilers throughout

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Neil W

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May 27, 2008
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Over the years I have watched some shockers. As is my habit, I do a little review afterwards. As a public service (he said, somewhat tongue in cheek), I offer up some of those reviews in the hope that I may be able to save some other unsuspecting souls from suffering what I had to sit through. No, let me be honest - I did choose to sit through them.

And let me start with a relatively upmarket one:

The Strangers

Reading the paper and/or watching the trailer means that you go in to this film knowing that it's about some people being menaced by strangers wearing masks. It starts off with titles telling you that it is based on real events (I don't always trust this after the Coens lied to us at the start of Fargo), complete with a redundant voice-over reading those titles word for word (and not very well either). These titles tell us that X and Y went back to Z after a wedding reception, where violent things took place and nobody knows quite what happened. To cement this, the opening sequence is two boys cycling by, only to go into the house and then make a hysterical phone call going on about all the blood.

Point being we know from the start that this is not going to turn out well.

We then go into an interminable opening sequence where the two main characters, played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, return to this holiday home in the middle of nowhere. All is not well between them. We never find out exactly why, but we seem to take half my life to not find out. The audience was full of young couples, the target demographic I imagine, and by gum, there was some restlessness among the natives. The feeling of everyone wanting to shout "Get on with it!" was almost palpable.

The rest of the film is building tension - which it does quite well - but without anything much actually happening. Liv Tyler's character is drippy and snivelly and she plays it so well that you hate her. Both of the beleaguered couple are late realising the peril they are in and fail to do any of the things which might help them but, instead, do things which are even more monumentally stupid than the things which characters in this kind of film normally do - the audience was saying, fairly frequently, "Oh, that's completely stupid. He/she would never do that." Finally, in the last few minutes, the masked strangers actually get round to slaughtering them - yes folks, they die, just like you knew they were going to after the first few minutes made it clear, sorry for the spoiler - and that's it. Oh, except for the replay of the sequence of the two lads discovering the mayhem and then, the final shot, the clearly dead Liv Tyler suddenly grabbing one of them and screaming like only someone who has been lying on the floor bleeding for hours can scream. That's right, like an air-raid siren. A complete cheat ending, stolen from Carrie, flying in the face of everything in the film up to that point, just to create a final shock moment.

This film is one of the most irritating films I have seen for a long time, and I do not recommend it.
 

Neil W

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Xtro 3: Watch The Skies

This is a cheap and tatty generic sci-fi military paranoia paste-up job, using clichés minted in a thousand other movies.

It does the best it can on a budget of about ninepence, but that isn't very good. The special effects aren't very special (lots of ordnance expended, and the chameleon effect is interesting), and the alien is poorly executed.

The cast (with the exception of Robert Culp, adding a few bucks to the pension fund) is composed of total unknowns, and this movie is not going to change that for any of them.

And there is incessant use of the F word to no particular effect. It isn't big and it isn't clever, guys.
 

Neil W

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Cerberus

Why do I watch these things? In the forlorn hope that they might turn out to be better than I know they are going to be.

See, the acting and script may be OK (well, let's be honest, generic baddie is over the top and down the other side), but there are these two things to consider...

One is the gore. There's quite a lot of it and it is utterly unconvincing. This is probably not a bad thing. However...

The second is Cerberus himself. Cerberus is, I'm afraid, downright bad. Bad CGI of a bad design animated badly and integrated badly into background plates. It would have been more convincing if they had used a giant cardboard cutout (and I have a feeling that, in some scenes, they may have done just that).

And because the film is actually named after its least successful - by which I mean completely unsuccessful - element, the verdict must be "failure."
 

Neil W

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Flesh For Frankenstein (1973)

Repeat after me - Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.

Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.

Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.

Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.

Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.

Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.

Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.

Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.

Being in 3D does not automatically make a bad film good.
 

Neil W

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The Fourth Kind

Abbey Tyler (Milla Jovovich) is a psychologist in the isolated Alaskan town of Nome, doing her best to deal with a spate of owl-related nightmares following the murder of her husband. Hypnotic regression leads to the conclusion that there may be multiple alien abductions going on...

I have a grudging sense of admiration for this preposterous nonsense, mainly for the straight-faced way it continues to pretend to be a re-enactment of true events, even to the extent of a) saying so (Jovovich, straight to camera, in the very first shot) and b) peppering the entire movie with faux verite video and audio clips throughout. The fact that the video clips rapidly go off into scrambled static and white noise provides handy justification for not having any special effects whatsoever.

The absence of a resolution isn't necessarily a problem, but I think it requires something a bit weightier than this load of old tosh before a film-maker can get away with it. So, nice try Olatunde Osunsanmi (writer, director, plays an interviewer, didn't do the music though) - technically an improvement on Ed Wood's efforts, but ultimately cut from the same cloth.
 

Neil W

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The Rage (2007)

Just because a film has a lot of blood and gore, that doesn't automatically make it a good horror film.

Yes, there is a lot of blood and gore here - a truly prodigious amount actually - but, if that is a worthwhile thing in itself, it's the only thing.

There is no plot of any consequence (not that makes sense, anyway), there is a great deal of running around and screaming and shouting, but no character development and no acting of any consequence, complete predictability from start to finish, and some really bad CGI vultures.

So if that's your thing, enjoy!
 

Neil W

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Jason X

I suppose the virtue of this movie is that it delivers exactly what you expect it to. And the downside is that it's pretty dumb. But then, so were the others.

Maybe I'm not the best person to comment, because I find the whole Jason Vorhees saga irritating in that the killer is implacable, unstoppable and unmotivated, and therefore devoid of all credibility. Being killed by Jason makes as much sense, and carries as much emotional weight, as being run down by an avalanche.

Accordingly, I can't get behind these movies at all - they simply become a cynical exercise in imaginative slaughter and guessing the order of victims, with no rhyme or reason about it.

Oh well, the sci-fi setting in this one makes a change, Lexa Doig is pleasingly decorative, and the fact that the whole thing is considerably sillier than usual (which is saying something) might be considered a bonus.
 

Neil W

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Hydra

This film would have been better without the monster.

An uninspired retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, it benefits from attractive locations and technically competent film-making - good lighting and frame composition etc. OK, so the acting's no great shakes, but it would still be an OK thriller.

Except that someone messed up quite a lot of the movie by putting this really bad CGI Hydra in it and then requiring the cast members to act as if it was really there while the special effects people integrated the really bad CGI Hydra into the shots. Really badly.

I can't emphasise enough - the Hydra itself is poor.

Shame, really.
 

Neil W

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The Grudge 3

There are many problems with this movie. The main two, in my view, are faults which we see all too often.

In runner up position is our old friend Unbelievable Behaviour. There are great swathes of this movie where you sit there going, "Get up!" "Run!" "Don't go in there!" and countless other variations. Maybe characters in horror movies have to behave unbelievably to some extent, but a little bit of credible behaviour from time to time does help. There is none to be found here - absolutely none.

But the biggest problem is Unsympathetic Protagonist. The character of Lisa is one of those characters written in such a way that everything she does grates on your nerves. She disbelieves, does things you wouldn't do, doesn't do things you would do, snivels constantly: in short, you spend most of the film wishing she'd been the first one to be killed, not the one to survive to the end.

It is, however, fairly glossily filmed.
 

Neil W

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Aquanoids

Jaws was a great movie. Creature From The Black Lagoon wasn't a very goodmovie. There is no reason why their offspring should be a bad movie. And yet it is. Very bad.

OK, so someone lends you a videocamera, gives you fortyseven quid, and suggests you should go and make a film. Here are the lessons you can learn from Aquanoids:

1. Start by writing a script where the dialogue is believable (eg. don't have your character saying "It's the missing surfer!" - we KNOW it's the missing surfer).

2. Cast actors who can act, even if only a little bit.

3. Find an editor who can edit and a director who can direct (see the sequence where the two girls go to the marina on scooters and then head out on the jetski for a masterclass in how not to do either).

4. Steer clear of gratuitous video effects - what worked in Predator won't work if you can't afford to do it properly;

5. Avoid synthesiser music.

6. Don't make a sequel when no-one ever made the original.

7. Don't call your movie "Aquanoids" if there's only one Aquanoid.

But I do award a point over the baseline minimum for a) the sheer gall of starting off with an appalling day-for-night cross between From Here To Eternity's rolling in the surf sequence and the Jaws opening sequence, and b) gratuitous boobage.

This was in the cheapo cheapo DVD bin. I wuz robbed.
 

Neil W

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Prom Night (2008)

You know how, when you're a kid, you want to ride a bike but two wheels on a full scale bike is too difficult because you fall off, so they bolt on two extra wheels to your back wheel so that you can't fall over? Training wheels? Well, someone had the bright idea that if you go from ordinary movies to full scale horror movies you might fall off, so it's a good idea to make a movie which is the equivalent of a bike with training wheels - all the things which go into horror movies are there, but in junior, non-scary versions. So, when someone gets stabbed - which happens fairly often - there's no blood or stab wounds. And there are lots of scary moments - but they aren't actually scary.

This is a slasher movie for people who need it spelled sl*sh*r because they can't cope with the full spelling.

Above everything, this movie is a movie of disappointments. You have a moment where boyfriend and girlfriend have an argument. He goes looking for her, not knowing she has been killed. Does he find her, giving us a moment which may have some emotional resonance? No, he gets killed too, without ever finding her.

This movie is glossy, and the young people in it are attractive and try hard. But it is disappointing.
 

Neil W

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Zombie Women Of Satan

A synopsis is fairly pointless - suffice it to say that if you have clocked the title, you should have a reasonable idea of what this (very) low budget British horror film is going to offer you.

I suggest you don't take the offer. I did, and I regret it. The plot is perfunctory. The acting seems to consist of shouting. Most of the characters are badly conceived and executed even worse. The nudity is very unappealing. The sex is even worse. The humour which is intended to be present isn't. The special effects are non-existent. The gore is liberal and, if that - and that alone - is your thing, the film may have something to offer you.

The script is peppered with the F word. Yes I know it is an 18 certificate, and I have no objection to the word itself, but I once more make a point I have made numerous times before - make the language in a script/book/whatever serve you. Making every other word an obscenity, for no purpose, makes your script worse, not better.

This is a cheap, bad film. Not the first, not the last. But it is one of the sad ones because, every now and then, you get the whiff of the shadow of the ghost of the rather better film this might have been.

Not to the extent that I recommend seeing it, though.
 

Neil W

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The Return

This film starts off promisingly atmospherically, and then continues with an awful lot of something happening but not quite. There are hints and flashbacks and memories and blokes who look creepily suspicious and something almost happened just then but not quite and is it supernatural or psychological, well you'll just have to wait and see, won't you? Yes, but I fear I'm going to drop off.

End of Part 1 thank heavens, the adverts have woken me up.

Part two arrives, and she's dropping in to see Dad, and things are almost touched on but not quite. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is playing the girl who is going through this odd almost non-experience has a constant expression as if someone has just farted under her nose. I quite like Miss Gellar under normal circumstances, but her character here is unattractive and irritating.

OK, it's "The Return", I get it, she's returning to her past to find out what has happened to her in the past so that she....

That's the problem here. You know such a small amount that you don't really understand why anything is happening. The drip feeding of information is so slow that it is difficult to maintain interest. Perhaps the payoff will be worth it, but am I really that invested that I am prepared to experience the second half of this film? I'm not going to tell you. Now there's some suspense for you - more than there is in this movie, at any rate.
 

Neil W

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Colin

I occasionally haunt the pound shop because I love the conversations I have there ("How much is that?" "A pound." "And that?" "A pound." "And that?"...) The DVD of zombie movie "Colin" was there. It was a pound. I read the effusive sleeve blurb telling me that "Colin" had cost ninepence (OK, forty quid) to make, and what a wonderful piece of work it was, especially given how little it had cost. I passed.

And then it turned up on late night TV. So I thought, "Let's try it out - if it's any good, I might go back to the pound shop and splurge." Ed Wood, he of the infamous Glen Or Glenda, Plan 9 From Outer Space et al, has achieved an affectionate respect among some mainstream filmmakers because of his sheer determination to get his films made with threadbare resources and his success in then getting them out there into the market place and seen by the public. Yes, one accepts that it was a remarkable achievement. But that doesn't mean that his movies weren't hamstrung by both technical ineptitude and an absence of production values.

Meet "Colin", the noughties equivalent of Ed Wood. Only, rather than the thousands of dollars Wood's films cost (a small number of thousands, admittedly, but still thousands, and during the 1950s, too), "Colin" cost forty quid.

It shows. Filmed on hand-held lo-res video throughout, it's not so much that production values are low, more that there aren't any. It is technically lacking in every respect - script, acting, lighting, pacing, editing - to the extent that it is more or less unwatchable.

And I say this as someone who actually watched "Aquanoids" all the way through.

I give it one star for the Ed Wood factor.
 

Neil W

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Return To Horror High

To make a horror comedy is a laudable ambition. And it can be done successfully. But for every American Werewolf In London or Scream, there are a dozen Return To Horror Highs.

First, this film isn't funny. At all. In any respect.

Second, the horror plot is absolutely generic, but that's OK. What is not OK is that so much of it is so very badly executed. If you do a horror comedy, you have to play the horror straight. Here, you have two or three nice performances, and a bunch of very bad ones (not least of which is the baddie, who delivers what must be one of the worst performances ever committed to celluloid. And I have the horrible feeling that it was the performance which was demanded of him.

This is a poor film. Not even the novelty of a young George Clooney is enough to save it. Avoid it.
 

Neil W

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Pieces

This Spanish slasher horror, dubbed "Pieces" for its appearance on the UK late night horror channel, is about a maniac who carves female students to pieces with a chainsaw in order to assemble the bits into a jigsaw woman because of some childhood trauma.

It features a handful of English speaking cast members of middling celebrity (Edmund Purdom, anyone?), and a number of dubbed Spanish actors. It features a huge amount of bright red stage blood sloshed around in the course of some gruesome and not very well executed special effects. It features some spectacularly bad acting (yes, Professor Brown, you head the list). It has a plot of vast improbability. It has production values so low as to be negligible (grainy film stock, bad sound synchronisation, poor dubbing etc.). The list goes on.

It seems to have vocal support from those for whom it is a guilty pleasure of the "so bad it's good" variety. But it isn't. It is so bad it's bad.

Really.
 

Neil W

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The Retreat

Group of teenagers. Cottage in the woods. Mad axeman. Last one standing. Ludicrously stupid behaviour. Preposterous twist ending.

Yes, it's one of those. I think the thing which impressed me most - or depressed me most, if you will - was the degree of stupidity exhibited by the teenagers. I am sure it is possible to do one of these films and have the group not split up so that they can be picked off one by one, or not go down into the cellar in the dark, or kill the killer when he is unconscious, or at least take his axe with you.

Dismal stuff, with the minimum mark allowed, plus a bonus point for being filmed in real woods with real snow (we don't get much snow in my neck of the woods, and I'm easily impressed).
 

Neil W

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Island Of Death (1976)

English couple Celia and Chris travel to a picturesque Greek island to spend their holiday killing perverts (of which, fortunately, there are vast numbers on this island - you know the type of perverts I mean - homosexuals, lesbians, rapists, hippies, drug addicts, middle aged women...) It seems to have slipped Celia's and Chris' notice that they themselves are far worse perverts than their victims, what with their vaguely incestuous relationship (they are brother and sister), Chris having sex with goats, urinating on people - oh, and killing people.

This sleazy little exploitation movie is very much a product of its "video nasty" era. It is professionally put together, nicely photographed, with attractive and sunny scenery, and an attractive leading lady who frequently sheds her clothes (collar and cuffs don't match, by the way). Unfortunately she, along with everyone else in the film, can't act to save her life, and the meretricious content of the film doesn't have the saving grace of a moral, a decent payoff, or even any sense. It is perhaps worth watching as a kind of twisted travelogue, or even just to experience it but, make no mistake, it is not a very good film. Not even if you savour bad films.
 

Neil W

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Stag Night Of The Dead

I had a problem with this one because reviews at the IMDB have to be a minimum length, and yet I could deliver a full review with just two words - "cheap" and "awful." I can't see that saying the same thing with different words helps.

But let me say that production values are very low (image quality is not exactly HD, there is loads of background noise on the soundtrack) effects are minimal and poor, performances are likely to ensure that the unknown cast remains unknown, and a relatively promising idea ends up dead in the water due to ineptitude and lack of resources. Even the zombie makeup isn't very good.

Kudos for using a tripod for much of the film, and for music which sounds orchestral and effective.

For zombie completists only.
 
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