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Posts tagged Halloween
Quarantine
0830 days
This one was recommended to me by several friends, so I decided to add it to the list. Surprisingly enough, I am glad that I did.
#17 Quarantine
As the movie starts off, I got a bad feeling of deja vu. This movie felt much too much like the beginning of “The Blair Witch Project” and I was afraid that it would just be a cheap rip off. As it turns out, I was only partially correct. “Quarantine” is a movie that follows a “film crew” of two people that are shadowing a fire dept for a story they are doing for a local news show. Your main characters are Angela and Scott (nice name buddy). The entire movie is shot “shaky cam” style on a hand held video camera. The two go out on a call that appears at first to be routine, but turns out to be anything but. They arrive at an old apartment house to respond to a woman screaming, and find the woman has actually gone quite mad. From then on, shit goes down hill, and fast. Come to find out the buildings tenants are one by one being bitten and being infected with some form of advanced rabies. Think of it as like the virus in 28 Days Later, Rage. Super aggressive, and fast, almost zombie-like people. Oh and the building is sealed up by the CDC and other governmental offices so that the “infection” doesn’t get out. The rest of the film is all about them trying to do just that, get out. Save for one part in the end involving a baby, it wasn’t that surprising of a movie. Everything followed the path that similar movies follow. I was, however, impressed with the way that it went down this path. Taking out each character one by one was very vicious, and at times quite disgusting. I was satisfied with the movie as a whole though, and would probably recommend it to others. I know there is an original movie out there called [Rec] that this is based on so maybe I will watch that at some point. The ending wasn’t at all surprising, though what did surprise me was there was not epilogue, or “stinger” at the end. Maybe it is on the DVD release. Either way, it will probably fit nicely into the top five of the movies I have watched so far, and that’s gotta be worth something.
The Eye
0832 days
Well I can tell what my eye didn’t see, and that’s enough of Jessica Alba scantly clad in this movie.
#16 “The Eye”
This was one of those movies that I heard about when it first came out and thought instantly, this will be on DVD very soon. I was pretty much right I guess. It stars, as I mentioned, Jessica Alba as a blind girl that gets a cornea transplant to see. Once the operation is over, she almost immediately starts to see “things.” Not sure what they are and having not seen ANYTHING since she was a little girl, she freaks out. Everyone tells here that it’s just her body “adjusting” to being able to see again, but she knows that’s not what it is. The visions start becoming more and more vivid, not to mention violent. Jessica then finds out that the eyes came from a dead girl in Mexico. Upon getting the whole story she finds out also that the girl was thought to be a witch because she could see death. Her visions get more and more intense to the point that she actually sees and talks to the dead girl (how she was able to see what she looked like I dunno). Anyway she ends up stopping a bunch of people from being killed in a giant explosion at the US and Mexico boarder. Oh and in the blast she loses her sight again. This movie really was like a mixture of The Sixth Sense and Final Destination. She could not only see dead people but also the spirits that take the dead souls away, kinda like Soul-Taker (look it up). Not all that great of a movie. It had a few creepy parts, and mostly only made me want to see the Japanese original. If you are stuck watching this movie all I can say is, make the most of the shower scene. Other than that, it’s just not worth … crying your EYEs out over.
Black Christmas
0838 days
As far as time line goes, I think this one is the oldest I have watched yet. This is what happens when you take an “Urban Legend” and make a movie about it.
#15 Black Christmas
What does that even mean?
When I first heard about this movie, I couldn’t have been more excited to see it. I love horror movies (obviously) and hearing that it was Directed by the same guy (Bob Clark) that did “A Christmas Story”… my jaw dropped. This had to be a great movie, for more than a few reasons. Margo Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies, and John Saxon that played Roper in Enter the Dragon (and Deaney in Mitchell) were among some of the “stars” in this film. The movie revolves around a sorority house that is terrorized at Christmas time by a rash of obscene phone calls. Then one of the sisters disappears, then another, and another… Each time a murder is committed another phone call, and more crazy voices on the other end. The movie is only about an hour and thirty minutes but it felt like forever. The story drags on forever, and the characters aren’t interesting at all. By the time it ended I was completely bored with it. Oh and did I mention they made the entire movie based around the ol’ “The calls are coming from inside the house.” deal, because, yeah it was. If you couldn’t predict the stinger at the end, you haven’t watched enough horror movies. All in all, I was disappointed all the way around with this one. Though now I need to hunt down the remake they did a couple years ago just to see how bad THAT movie can be. Fudge!
My Bloody Valentine
0839 days
Notice that I didn’t add the “3D” to the end of it, because I didn’t watch it in 3D. Even if I had, it probably would not have made it any better. The movie was ok, and I was hanging in there until the ending.
#14 My Bloody Valentine
If there is one good thing that I can say about this movie, it is this: That movie starts off killing and doesn’t let up until the very end. From the start of the movie, I was very surprised at how quickly they just jumped right in killing everyone. The movie is about a miner that snaps, and starts killing everyone. Apparently it’s some sort of post traumatic stress disorder killing spree, sparked by an explosion that happens in the mine killing everyone but this one dude. First he kills a schload of people in the hospital, then moves on to the mine where a bunch of kids are having a party. The cops show up and “kill” the bad guy. Then ten years later it all happens again. I was doing my best to like the movie, or at the very least tolerate it. I was a little annoyed with the “3D” parts of the movie especially since there wasn’t actually a third dimension for me to see. By the end of the movie though when the big fight with the nemesis, I was done. The guy is standing beside six or seven mental canisters of obviously highly explosive gas. The canisters explode in a giant fireball, he is thrown back fifty feet and through a lot of derbies, or and he was shot too. After all this we see him about to be “rescued” basically with a couple scratches on his face. No burns, no shrapnel damage, nothing like that. Even in the realm of horror movie fiction, that one is hard to believe. If this movie comes up as a choice for evenings entertainment, think about choo-choo-choosing something else.
Trick r Treat
0842 days
Some horror movies try to take what’s good in all other genre of movies, and roll it into one. This one does the same, but fails.
#14 Trick r Treat
This movie, is what could be considered an attempt to be the “Guy Richie” of horror movies. There are about four plots all running at the same time during the beginning of the movie. Most of the movie you have no idea how they can all come together, yet by the end they do. The unfortunate thing is that they are all pretty boring one their own, which translates to a finally that really didn’t surprise me, nor interest me. Once the plots started to merge I was fully aware of how it was going to end anyway. There really isn’t that much to say about the movie. It wasn’t creepy, it wasn’t scary… it was just kinda bland. It did remind me a lot of the APEX movies my friends and I used to watch back in the day. Movies like “The Ice Cream Man”, “Jack Frost”, and “Uncle Sam” if you have seen any of these cheesy horror movies you know what I mean. It might be worth a rent, if you really like crapy movies. The biggest issue that i have with this movie, is I think that it takes itself to seriously. Had it been the same movie, but swayed a little more to the comedy side, it may have saved it from being totally mediocre.
Drag Me To Hell
0843 days
Sam Raimi does so many things in all of his movies that can only be described as “Raimi-esque” and that is why I like his movies. This one however tried to be more serious than campy and came off a little weak.
#13 Drag Me To Hell
In short, Drag me to Hell is a movie about a girl “Christine” that works in a bank, denies a gypsy a loan and then is cursed literally to hell. She then has three days to figure out how to stop it. Here’s a twist you wouldn’t see coming, she doesn’t and dies at the end. I have seen pretty much all the stuff that Sam has done in the past. I own all three of the Evil Dead trilogy and love every second of them. The thing that Sam does well is schlocky, campy, horror. Look at Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. Basically the same movie, just one was done to be slightly more serious than the other. That is why the sequel is better than the first. In “Drag Me To Hell” Sam takes it back to the more “serious” side of horror. It doesn’t work for me. I loved the subtle shout outs to his previous movies like the geyser of blood that pours out of the main characters nose at one point during a “nose bleed”. Or the fact that when she reaches for her drill in the shed (naturally) there is an outline of the drill, much like the chainsaw Ash attaches to his stump. There are other things that just remind me of his good movies and make me want to watch them INSTEAD of this one. It’s to bad too because I really wanted to like this one too. The switch-a-roo at the end didn’t fool me for a second because you made to big of a deal about it. This is where you needed to be most subtle and THEN later on show me a flash back and let me figure it out. Shoving a plot point down our throats is no way to make a audience guess. One final thing. When you create a poster about your movie a) don’t have the end “death scene” on the poster and expect us not to see it in the movie. b) Your tag line basically tells us that she WILL die no matter what, so the “happily ever after” ending is already ruined. Still… It’s Sam Raimi, and I love his movies. A tad surprised that his brother, Ted, and Bruce Campbell didn’t show up at some point though, since they seem to be in everything else he has done.
