Co-written and directed by Daniel Brown and Kate McMeans, “The First Step” displays what happens when you take simplicity and pair it with old fashioned scares. What you end up with is a damn good short horror film. I’d even venture to call “The First Step” terrifying but that’s mainly because I hate basements, attics, and old houses. But that’s my hang up.
“Don’t Go in the Woods… Alone!” is one of the Video Nasties that renders the slasher genre completely inept with a film that’s nothing but splatter fodder. And bad splatter fodder to boot. Representing the worst the slasher sub-genre has to offer, “Don’t Go in the Woods… Alone!” is bereft of a storyline, common sense, and even likable characters. The only two people that manage to survive our hobo serial killer are two of the most grating heroes pictured in the genre.
Director Ron William Neill’s “Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman” is a sequel to “The Wolfman” and a prequel to “Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” One of the many future crossovers for monsters, Neill’s movie is often incoherent, but at least delivers on the promise of the wolf man meeting Frankenstein. They only do battle for about four minutes in the finale, but technically they cross paths, so your expectations should be low for this sequel. The reasoning for bringing the characters together stretches all ideas of logic and suspension of disbelief. So “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” is really a process of asking the audience to willingly ignore its inconsistencies and wait for the monsters to meet up and fight.
I’ve never gone in to a movie wanting to love it so much and come out of it feeling so utterly disappointed. Except maybe “Cabin Fever.” In either case, I wanted to love “Frankenstein’s Army” if only for its interesting tale of a Russian squad going in to battle and finding a madman scientist using soldiers to form his own army of decrepit freaks. Normally I’m a big fan of the found footage sub-genre as well, but once I realized “Frankenstein’s Army” was found footage, it threw me out of the narrative almost immediately. I can see the found footage formula working in the age of digital camera, and digital camcorders, and cell phone videos. I can even see it working in the nineties with VHS camcorders, but to have us believe there’s a found footage movie set during World War II is immensely absurd, and just downright desperate.
Holy hell, if the Syfy Channel in America is trying to capitalize off of Annabelle from “The Conjuring,” they’re going about it all wrong. It’s hard to rationalize a movie so horribly inept and put together. Through no fault of my own I even fell asleep after the thirty minute mark from sheer boredom, and after awakening I couldn’t quite bring to rewind the film and begin again. “Finder’s Keepers” doesn’t require a lot of thought or explanation. It’s really just a hodgepodge of ideas that amount to absolutely zero. There’s no pay off, no reason to care for the characters, and the writing is painful.
You get the sense the writers really went in with nothing, when they build up a cast of characters, and the only two minorities end up being more interesting than our main characters. The film is mostly centered on Jaime Pressly and Patrick Muldoon’s divorced couple, and their efforts to save their daughter. Yet the entire time I wondered what the pair of Latin women investigating the paranormal, with insight in to the supernatural, was up to. In typical horror movie fashion, they die horribly, even though the main characters are the ones committing truly stupid acts.
Which is shameful since Justina Machado is insanely sexy and always a treat to watch on screen; I’ve always found Jaime Pressly attractive, but Machado actually makes her look plain by comparison. That digression aside, “Finder’s Keepers” is filled with idiotic plot twists, and utterly horrible dialogue. If that’s not enough the characters spend so much of their time bickering that they don’t notice their daughter is being possessed by an ugly doll she finds under a floor. When their friends begin turning up dead (including a utterly wasted Tobin Bell), they begin to figure out that their daughter is being overtaken by the doll she found.
The writers try to elude that the past owner has broken out of his asylum and is doing the murders, but oddly enough that’s dropped in favor of the adorable Kylie Rogers mugging for the camera. The red herrings fly fast and loose, and a lot of plot elements are injected just for the sake of compensating for the clear lack of frights. The writers can’t even decide what the doll is, offering explanations that maybe it’s a worry doll, or a voodoo doll, or an evil spirit, or the embodied spirit of its owner, or a demonic presence consuming the daughter. It’s basically whatever works toward finishing the film the quickest, and for that I thank them.
It’s indicative of the kind of veteran Bill Paxton is that he would choose “Frailty” as his first directorial outing to bring to audiences in 2001. Paxton approaches Brent Hanley’s script with a brilliance and very low key delivery that keeps “Frailty” one of the best horror mysteries ever conceived and yet one constantly over looked. This is a film where even McConaughey manages to shine in his lead performance, and I’m rarely one to endorse his acting abilities. “Frailty” is one of those horror movies that sneak up on you, presuming to be one kind of animal, when it’s a whole other sinister animal entirely.
Director Robert Lieberman’s horror drama has a lot going for it, one of which is the immense dread that drips from every minute of the film. We’re never quite sure what occurred to character Travis Walton in the woods, and why he was abducted by Extraterrestrials, but I was very interested in finding out how the various sub-plots would fare. Sure, “Fire in the Sky” is a very loose adaptation of the original abduction accounts, but it works as a horror film that side steps awe inducing UFO sighting. There’s not even much of a focus on the abduction of Travis Walton.