At first glance of “Long Pigs” and screen captures, many movie goers will be quick to dismiss Chris Power and Nathan Hyne’s mock documentary as merely a low budget film attempting to shock us in to submission and while in many ways “Long Pigs” is a gruesome and shocking film, “Long Pigs” also has a sense of sardonic humor and intelligence to it that makes it much more than just a movie about a cannibal and his fixation on the fine art of grooming human corpses to be eaten for his cooked delicacies. The directors behind this clearly were influenced by the likes of the classic film “Man Bites Dog” about a documentary crew anxiously trying to get in to the mind of a criminal who get too close for comfort, and “Long Pigs” is very influenced by that title engaging in a long moral and social breakdown of the greatest of taboos: cannibalism, and what repercussions they have in today’s society.
Tag Archives: Crime
Second Coming (2008)
I honestly don’t even feel good calling this a horror movie, but I guess at the end of the day it is. “Second Coming” is a movie I’d looked forward to watching since I received it and I’m saddened that it didn’t meet my expectations at all. In fact it’s so far below my expectations I was pretty crushed to finish it. “Second Coming” could very well be an engrossing supernatural crime thriller, but in the end it’s really just a glorified television melodrama with a supernatural angle that doesn’t even make good on its tagline of a revenge tale.
Kick-Ass 2 Issue #1
Okay so I didn’t love the first mini-series/graphic novel from Mark Millar, and sure, I thought “Kick Ass” the movie was pretty crummy, but overall I was pretty interested in seeing where Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. would go with volume two, the highly anticipated follow-up to the comic book series that proved to be most controversial. I mean sure it’s fishy that this came along right after plans for a sequel were talked about, and fine, many of the new characters seem oddly capable of being…oh… put in a movie with a big star at the helm, but nonetheless I was open minded to the first issue of volume two that sticks true to the first arc of the comic book and thankfully doesn’t adhere to the events of the live action movie.
The Tortured (2010)
Robert Lieberman’s dose of mean spirited brutally disgusting torture porn entitled “The Tortured” is a lot like “Hard Candy” except dunderheaded, half-witted, and a pure right wing cartoon. Two young good looking parents in an upper class neighborhood are angry that the police aren’t doing enough to find their son who was kidnapped before husband Craig’s very eyes in their back yard one day. Wife Elise of course barely blames her husband, except blames the authorities. We learn all of this information in only the first five minutes of the film that speeds through the kidnapping, the investigation, Elise’s anguish at the kidnapping, and we even visit the hilariously cartoonish Koslowski, a pedophile hillbilly too ridiculous to be horrified of.
Brain Dead (2007)
Director Kevin S. Tenney, the mind behind eighties cult classics like “Night of the Demons” and “Witchboard” aims about as low to the ground as possible with a mini-budget horror comedy that’s neither scary nor funny. I guess it takes a special kind of mind to appreciate what Tenney has to offer audiences, but I just couldn’t find the fun in what was really just a series of misfires in an unfocused muddled movie that, in the end, is just a waste of time. I enjoy horror movies where you have to just go on auto pilot and not ask for logic, but “Brain Dead” asks almost too much from its audience.
Circle (2010)
I held out almost little hope for Michael W. Watkins crime thriller slasher film about a Greek mythology obsessed serial killer who has a penchant for gathering and murdering his victims on the basis of fulfilling some need within him to manifest some Greek legend, but “Circle” gradually proved me wrong as it progressed. While it’s not a masterpiece by any definition, it definitely is a solid horror film with some roots in the formula cop sub-genre in which we’re following two mismatched hard boiled cops on the track of the vicious Bennett, a mastermind and genius psychopath who manages to break free from his asylum after ritualistically killing off a group therapy session he was engaging in.
Case 39 (2009)
Floundering in movie purgatory for a few years, “Case 39” is a supernatural thriller that has managed to be not only an indicator of its star status and how far its performers have come, but it’s also a statement that sometimes, just sometimes, studios can be on to something when they shelve or keep movies back in production. Held back for four years only released in the UK and now just being introduced to American theaters (maybe due to Bradley Cooper’s rising star status), “Case 39” is about as horrible a movie as you can imagine. It’s a movie that should have just been given a DVD release instead of a theatrical release as a movie starring Cooper pre-“The Hangover” fame. Hint: During filming he clearly wasn’t a big enough star to live through the whole movie.