I recently re-watched the slowly growing classic “Ginger Snaps” and while the re-watch quality hasn’t been kind to it, it’s still a damn good werewolf film. What “Ginger Snaps 2” does is offer a much different approach to the story which may or may not bode well with audiences. You can say whatever you want about this sequel, but in the end you can’t call it repetitive or prosaic. It’s a completely different sort of concept and narrative yet manages to extend the story from the first which is what a sequel should be. One of my many ever recurring complaints about film is that sequels always tend to repeat the first film instead of extend or add on to the original story told, and “Ginger Snaps 2” doesn’t fall prey to that trap. In the end, it’s ultimately not better than the first film, or even the sub-par final film, but it still ends up being an engrossing piece of werewolf fodder that adds to the mythos and does away with the werewolf/period allegory and presents a more upfront premise.
Masters of Horror: Incident on and off Mountain Road
The pilot episode of “Masters of Horror” pretty much brings to the table what I was expecting. Gore, good acting, and plot twists. and it’s just what I got, thank god. The story, compacted within a fifty minute window, is smart enough and well written enough that it doesn’t feel rushed. The plot for the pilot is simple enough to be squeezed in to a small segment, yet manages to give us enough character depth and subtext we would desire. Not to mention some brutally gruesome images of torture that make the viewing all worth it. Bree Turner (I think I’m in love) gives a good performance as Ellen, a young woman who crashes in to a deserted car in the middle of a road.
Darkness (2002)
It’s weird how the biggest houses with the most windows at the top of a hill on the countryside always manage to somehow be the darkest. I live in a large apartment with many windows and it’s often too bright, but somehow the setting here is dark and gloomy even in a beautiful house such as the one in “Darkness”. “Darkness” is unequivocally one of the most embarrassingly derivative “horror” films I’ve seen in years. It’s a film that borrows and yanks elements from other better horror movies just to tell the nonsensical and utterly pointless story we see here. You could guess the story before I even spelled it out for you. A small family, relocating to a job in Spain where seemingly no one speaks the native language, moves in to a great house haunted by ghosts. Cue an unnecessarily large back story, many obligatory plot twists, and surprisingly bad acting from the great cast featured.
Crusades: Crescent & the Cross
“The Crusades”–most recently depicted in the epic “Kingdom of Heaven”–is the focus of yet another documentary in the History Channel’s sprawling documentary epic called “The Crusades: The Crescent and the Cross”. The Crusades was the ultimate holy war, one the world is experiencing now, but it was less a war of religion, but more a journey to prove their religion wasn’t in vain. As an interviewee declares, it was less of a search and more to prove their love of their religion, and ultimately futile effort that would prove later on.
Night Watch (Nochnoy Dozor) (2004)
And then when they said there’s no more original ideas, out comes “Nochnoy Dozor”. If you’re unfamiliar, “Nochnoy Dozor”–or “The Nightwatch”– it is a Russian fantasy epic, the first of a planned trilogy that just finished smashing box office records in Russia becoming the highest grossing film of all time there beating out “Spider-Man 2”. Though it’s not as if Russia is a Mecca for light-hearted epics, “The Nightwatch” has made quite an impact there, and will soon be released and then remade here in the US. Before the Hollywood butcher shop decided to hack their way in to a crappy remake, I decided to grab a hold of the original film, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Red Siren (La Sirene Rouge) (2002)
This is a film that could work. It could work as a film, and it could work as a separate entity. As a film that involves such an elaborate plot, it could work as a purely engrossing thriller, but the problem is it doesn’t work. About half of the time, the film is beaming with potential and possibilities that are completely misfired with another half that just can’t get it at that level of sophistication. “The Red Siren” bounces back and forth with a hackneyed plot that is both confusing and un-involving while presenting sub-plots that are hardly ever developed. So much seems to be happening during this, but none of it is ever fleshed out in to anything completely coherent. “The Red Siren” could also work were it not such a shameless retread of “The Professional”.
The Batman vs. Dracula (2005)
“The Batman” is one of the only series featuring Batman that hasn’t been animated by the well known and widely accepted form of Bruce Timm’s design, and as a series it’s always been a very poor successor in simple fact that it’s only basically been invented to cash in on “Batman Begins”. The series was created and rushed in to premiere showing on the WB network months before “Batman Begins”. The series as a whole is terrible; it’s bland, lifeless, and often uneventful. “The Batman vs. Dracula” is the first animated film from the Batman franchise that didn’t feature artwork from Bruce Timm et al. But this isn’t the first time Batman and Dracula have crossed paths, any respectable comic fan knows that Batman and Dracula are pure rivals, and this makes the distinct hinting that this is the first time they’ve ever crossed paths.