Yet another iteration of “Slaughter High,” director Brian C. Weed’s revenge horror film attempts to be a sanctimonious message about bullying all the while lulling its audience to sleep with an illogical and goofy film about revenge and the past coming back to haunt some classmates. My only fear is the memory of this movie coming back to haunt my nightmares.
John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness,” the second leg in the “Apocalypse Trilogy” is a horrifying film about the apocalypse and one of the many Carpenter films where good fights evil and evil wins. Again. And again. It’s interesting that “Prince of Darkness” is almost a precursor to the found footage film boom of the mid aughts, as director John Carpenter stages a series of dream sequences void of cinematic flare. Through fuzzy hand held cameras, he manages to stage numerous horrific dream sequences signaling the coming of the anti-god, and the anti-Christ, all the while using it as a means of expressing how imminent the apocalypse is. The thirty second dream sequences are much more horrifying than most found footage films I’ve ever seen.
I’m a gay porn critic.
No, not really. I’m not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I used to review porn, but that’s beside the point.
A long time ago I got in to a bit of a verbal war with their Asylum Entertainment’s most noted director who engaged in a back and forth with me for a long time, and even took exception to my bashing of his films on a major independent film website. Often I spent my days on another message board on my online haunts discussing the terrible movies coming from the Asylum, and often times I was inundated with attacks from people in the studios.
“Butcher Boys” is one half “Judgment Night” and one half of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” but in an urban setting. With a rash of disappearances occurring all over the city, two groups of people find themselves lost in the ghettos of an urban neighborhood. After a prank goes awry, two young men get beaten and killed by three psychotic armed thugs. The group that inflicted the prank realize too late that they’ve come across a lethal and dangerous group of kidnappers, many of whom are taking tourists and locals hostage for nefarious purposes.
I can appreciate what the director of “The Moleman…” is going for, but with his indie horror comedy, it often felt like a misfire in every sense. The DVD cover is quick to compare this to “Shaun of the Dead,” but while they were losers, they were at least likable. It’s really tough to empathize or root for two main characters who lure an old man to dinner to have him be eaten by the mole man, or are so stupid they leave a box of kittens in the trunk of their car and accidentally suffocate them all. I should be rooting for them, the script says, but in reality I just found them to be complete morons.
They may not be masterpieces, but the “Scanners” sequels do a damn good job in taking the Cronenberg universe established in “Scanners” and expanding upon it. I was never big on the original “Scanners,” anyway, so the brunt of disappointment with the follow-ups aren’t as rough. The sequels aren’t continuations of the characters, but more the idea of the world filled with Scanners. Scream Factory makes the second and third sequel finally available in a Double Disc combo on DVD and Blu-Ray for the consuming.