Shot over a year from one Halloween to the next leading in to the family Halloween party, “October Country” is a documentary based not around monsters or demons or the undead, but around a family living in the shadows of their past. We visit the Mosher family, a small rather disconnected group of people all haunted by ghosts of war, and by their endless slew of bad decisions that have led them down a road of pain, misery, scars, and distorted memories keeping them in a state of ignorance and sadness that carries on from one generation to the next, all of whom hopelessly indoctrinated by cigarettes.
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
Psycho Shark (2009)
At only a little over an hour long, “Psycho Shark” (or as it’s being called in some circles “Jaws in Japan”) is probably one of the zaniest most deliriously bad movies I’ve ever come across mainly for its wacky directing style. Not much in this movie makes sense and director Hijiri John is such a fan of holding takes, that some shots are awkward. Any competent director will cringe at his knack for shooting people only below the waist and at one point holds a shot in the sand for over a minute after his actresses have left the frame. But take my advice, wait a while, be patient because I guarantee you by the second half… absolutely nothing will have happened. Don’t get me wrong, I love movies about frolicking Japanese girls, but if it’s a horror movie only a little bit over an hour, then you have to have some sense of forward progression in plot and this has none of it.
Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge (2001)
While 1998’s “Halloweentown” was a very cute and entertaining little Halloween movie, the sequel “Kalabar’s Revenge” is much darker and slightly more adult in tone and atmosphere this time around. What’s interesting is you can sense the seeds for “The Witches of Waverly Place” within this sequel, and it’s not a far off prospect that what with Kimberly J. Brown getting older with each movie, Disney wanted to pass the wand over with a new franchise about magic and wizards.
Rogue (2007)
Personally I’m one who thought Greg McLean’s torture porn thriller “Wolf Creek” was one of the most bloated overrated and disgusting movies I’ve ever seen. For a guy whose seen stuff like “Cannibal Holocaust,” McLean’s picture left me feeling dirty and often times like I was enduring something extremely painful, and not intentionally. Whatever McLean had in mind for that piece of swill, he accomplished it apparently. “Rogue” doesn’t leave the Australian outback and this time focuses more on a claustrophobic setting involving stranded tourists on a creaky boat being stalked by a gigantic killer Crocodile.
Killer Cup 2: The Killer Cups Strike Back! (2004)
Oh god! They made a sequel! And it’s longer this time! A group of young people are going on a camping trip and have taken along the bare essentials like food, water, and styrofoam cups! The foreshadowing here is about as clunky as you’d expect with one of the characters making a point of declaring how big one of the cups are. Apparently it’s the master cup or chief general cup. In either case, what begins as a night of drinking and joking around (one of the campers even pretends to be bitten by the cup in a high-larious “gotcha” moment), soon all of the cups band together to strike back at the partiers and inflict carnage upon them.
Killer Cup (2002)
“Killer Cup” is about killer cups! What? You were expecting more? Alright fine! A.Normale’s short horror film entitled “Killer Cup” is pretty much a situation about what you see being what you get. Set to an obviously not copyrighted score by Rob Zombie, “Killer Cup” sets down at any school in the world where we view the plight of the Styrofoam cups used for tearing, smoker’s ashes, sunflower seeds and the like. Clearly, this is Michael Moore’s prologue to an upcoming environmental documentary right?
Halloweentown (1998)
Sure, this is a Halloween oriented film that isn’t scary, or creepy, or violent, or even remotely menacing and sure it’s a premise we’ve seen trotted out in “Sabrina The Teenage Witch,” “Twitches,” and “Buffy,” but deep down it’s a true Halloween movie and one you can watch be you a child or an adult looking for a good time, and I manage to come back to it every year because it’s such a fun time to be had for all.