Mind you, my childhood of horror was plentiful and abundant. If you want to hear stories, don’t hesitate to drop me a line, but these are just some I wanted to write down, before life takes hold and I forget them. These are just too precious to forget. Along with “Willy Wonka” and “The Wizard of Oz”, notice, two dark, weird and twisted children’s movies, there are also horror movies that played a large part in my childhood and development as an adult.
Here’s a rather hilarious predicament for “All Soul’s Day”. Stay with me: in the film, the town are celebrating Dio De Los Muertos which means in English “Day of the Dead”, now this is a film including cannibalistic zombies… you see where the predicament lies? How to make a zombie film revolving around the holiday “Day of the Dead”, yet not being able to call it that at risk of being compared to the famous zombie film “Day of the Dead”, or risking copyright infringement. Amazing, even when the Scifi channel aren’t even trying, they’re ripping off other people’s shit. But, trust me, at this point, Scifi would benefit in being compared to “Day of the Dead”, though don’t think I didn’t see the small hints at the title around the movie!
What a disappointment this was. This had its occasional highs and lows, and when it went low, it went down low to the ground with such an atmosphere of a TV movie when it shouldn’t have been. It constantly shuffles back and forth between sleek horror to watered down thriller again and again and I just lost patience with it, especially with its slow pacing which was just so frustrating. Nothing really goes on for quite a while pretty often and this never manages to keep our attention to what is happening and gets very boring in certain scenes. With such an original concept, its sad to see that very little originality is present.
I love slasher films, I go ape shit for them, and when I read about “Haute Tension” I went nuts especially after watching the trailer when I went to see “Saw” in theaters last year. Modern slasher films have been incredibly watered down with very little gore, and just nonsensical casting, hiring young hip actors to portray the victims. I always say that these days the best films are the foreign films, and the best horror films are indeed the foreign ones, and “Haute Tension” is no exception. This is a great film that was just so reminiscent of Argento’s gory style, with a killer that is awfully scary.
This does have some great elements that is a gleaming example of what this movie could have and should have been per the generous rating. Admittedly, I’m a real fan of Ryan Reynolds. He was good in that crap “Van Wilder”, and he was my favorite aspect of “Blade: Trinity”. He’s a genuinely good actor who has the ability to become one of the many huge over-exposed actors of the time. Reynolds gives a good performance and was convincing, and he’s really menacing when he begins going nuts. There’s a particularly great scene when he’s chopping wood and he’s making his stepson hold the wood and it’s so well directed and edited I was thinking “that’s how this movie should have been!”: tense, gritty, creepy, and just plain character-based.
The premise to “Man-Thing” is nonsensical and is mostly comprised of bits of many different subplots that never add up to one fluid plot in a movie. There’s industrialists digging for oil in a swamp somewhere in the South and people are being killed off in the mysterious swamp. A new sheriff comes on-board and begins investigating the murders and discovers an evil force is offing the local residents… and there’s an Indian thrown around the movie somewhere, who knows? What they did drop the ball on was the plot which I found often fascinating.
What I really liked about this movie is it managed to take a clever satirical horror film with a twist and add some lore and depth to it. Whether or not “Ginger Snaps” needed to progress beyond the first movie is open for argument, but this film does manage to add some creative and some times engrossing lore to the whole “ginger snaps” story with a similar tale being told in the past century, and it kept me interested the whole way through until the dynamite conclusion. Two sisters traveling abroad the Canadian country side, Ginger and Bridgette, travel through the forest horseback and get lost. When Bridgette accidentally gets caught in a bear trap, Ginger goes to look for help but they’re discovered by a Native American hunter and taken to a local fortress where they’re taken in by a group of soldiers awaiting orders and supplies.