Fourth Wall Studios has invested in a project that I found quite fun to experience, even if the concept doesn’t totally make a lot of sense. “6:14” is one short film in their series of short horror films that doesn’t just make you the viewer, but the game player. After inserting my phone number and information to Rides.tv for my account, I watched “6:14” ready to see what would occur. Ethan Embry plays a man who keeps waking up at odd times during six o’clock. Whenever he awakens he finds he’s in a closed off environment and there is someone waiting in the darkness prepared to murder him in the most violent and creative fashion.
Tag Archives: Horror
Shark Night 3D (2011)
Sara Paxton, Sara Paxton, and Sara Paxton. Now that you know why I saw “Shark Night” in the first place, let’s skip the excuses. And it’s only apt, since “Shark Night” should really be called “All the Boys Love Sara Paxton.” It feels like the studio only had sharks in a lake as a concept for a film and basic outline. They then discovered they were casting Sara Paxton, and they basically built the film around her. What starts as a goofy yarn about sharks in a lake, transforms in to Sara Paxton vs. Sharks in a Lake. The film is a love letter to Paxton and her absolutely unique sex appeal. She’s a country born small town ideal college girl who everyone wants. Guys flirt with her, girls hang around her, and even her own dog refuses to leave her side. She engages in a high speed chase with the local sheriff who happens to be her friend and he laughs off her fleeing, flirts with her, and has a beer! Even after she and her friends are hunted by sharks while their friend bleeds to death from a bitten off arm, the men still try to get Paxton’s character in to the sack.
The Thing From Another World (1951)
Upon its initial release, John Carpenter’s “The Thing” was poorly received both at the box-office and by critics. It didn’t help that it had been released around the time of “E.T” and its domination of pop culture, and that it had been considered by most to be a remake of a classic, barely flawed monster movie from the fifties. John Carpenter proved you can remake a film and provide your own twist without ruining the integrity of the original. “The Thing” is considered by most to be the closest adaptation to the original short story “Who Goes There?” around, while “The Thing From Another World” is not so much an adaptation and opts to create a hulking beast in place of an amorphous entity that hides inside human beings. Perhaps they thought it’d be too cerebral or dark for its time.
The Definitive Document of the Dead (2012) (DVD)
With the “Definitive Document of the Dead” you have to take the good with the bad. It completely glosses over Romero’s production of “Day of the Dead” to where it’s almost an irrelevant foot note in the legacy of the Dead films. Yet, the documentary does go back to Romero years after “Day” to where he’s directing “Land,” “Diary,” and “Survival” implying that they’re all valid and relevant projects of Romero’s career. Difficulties in Hollywood and the studio system are side stepped, and often times the documentary can never decide if it wants to be a Hollywood inside look or a fandom tribute, so it tries to be both.
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
“An American Werewolf in London” is almost the perfect horror comedy and romance that never quite relies on either genre to move its story and deliver its horror. That’s pretty shocking considering John Landis was often a director known for comedies. Occasionally dark and almost always adult, Landis was once a man known for rich and iconic comedy films. “Animal House” and “The Kentucky Fried Movie.” Need I say more? With “An American Werewolf in London,” the stark comedy can often incite laughter, but it’s so dark it almost feels like awkward laughter most of the time. It’s just uncomfortable laughter because when there’s a laugh to be had, it’s at the expense of someone or something gruesome. When something is horrific it has a true sense of humanity behind it and there isn’t a cheap play for gross out sequences.
An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)
This movie proves without a doubt that just because you have a snazzy set of computers and artists, doesn’t mean you can replicate good old fashioned special effects. Sometimes the actual material and human actors can be much more effective than dapper computer animation that, even in 1997, looked like cut scenes from a Playstation video game. Of course it’s not like studios ever really learned their lesson after “An American Werewolf in Paris” landed with a thud in 1997. They just tried and tried until they succeeded. Supposedly in development for six years, “An American Werewolf in Paris” feels as if someone had the bright idea to remake the John Landis eighties classic “An American Werewolf in London,” backed out, and then kicked up production again once computer technology advanced. And then somewhere along the line a remake of a classic horror comedy became a stale and brutally underwhelming horror comedy that failed to amount to even an ounce of the charisma and brilliance that the first film did.
Mockingbird Lane
This is one of the few times where my fandom has kind of come back to bite me in the ass. I am a fan of “The Munsters” and from day one was opposed to this radical reworking of the series. The darkly comic tone with a violent dramatic atmosphere made me irritated beyond belief. “Mockingbird Lane” surprising enough ends up being a wonderful re-imagining of the series that doesn’t quite alter the comic tone of the original series so much as it adds a lot of menace to it. Instead of a sitcom it’s a dark comedy drama, and instead of the eccentric tone there’s a more menacing and brooding color palette. What makes this special even better is that it completely changes the dynamic of the Munster family.