The highly anticipated, long awaited, long talked about duel horror fans (including me) have been awaiting has finally come onto the big screen. After many many script changes, and remaining in ten years in movie making limbo, “Freddy Vs. Jason” has come. A new generation of kids have come to Elm Street and Freddy Krueger wants their souls, but his memory has long been extinguished by the parents of the previous years and he no longer has power over their kids’ dreams. Now, desperate to reclaim his power over the children and reincarnate his memory, he tricks the machete wielding, hockey masked killer Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) into rising from the grave once more to instill horror into the kids, but when Jason becomes too hot to handle, Freddy Krueger decides to take matters into his own hands and kill Jason himself. Who will win the ultimate undead battle? I’m not telling.
Tag Archives: Horror
Donnie Darko (2001)
Over the past two years, “Donnie Darko” has slowly managed to achieve an underground cult status among movie lovers and horror lovers, so when I was able to grab hold of this, I had to check it out. Jake Gyllenhaal, independent actor for critically acclaimed films such as “Moonlight Mile”, and “The Good Girl” stars as the anti-social delusional boy known as “Donnie Darko”. Instantly, the movie begins with a mystery: we see Darko lying along a road looking out upon the city and so forth a voice tells the prophecy to him about the end of the world occurring in 28 days. Throughout the entire film, a demonic spirits in the form of a rabbit begins telling him these omens, and thought Donnie struggles to fight it, can’t escape the messages.
Red Dragon (2002)
I was very skeptical as to whether this would work; first off I really enjoyed the first film and the second film was completely violent and senseless, but inevitably, I was surprised with the end-result. To any one who has thoroughly reviewed this website and inspected its contents, I am a big fan of Edward Norton. He is a great asset to this trilogy and really manages to absorb his role. His character is naive and ultimately shy in the beginning and manages to evolve into a tougher and cooler person by the climax. I assumed he would end up being just a Clarise Starling character clone, but I was glad because he ended up being a much better antagonist towards Lecter. I enjoyed the way he had a special ability to see things on a crime scene but the writer’s never truly put a lot of emphasis on it and it never truly became the basis for his character which made him a lot more interesting.
Final Destination 2 (2002)
I’m a self-confessed hardcore horror addict, and I really liked the original movie which came onto the screens with a lot of mixed reviews, but managed to keep me thrilled. I wasn’t surprised there would be a sequel and wasn’t expecting much but got more than I bargained for. There’s barely any stars in the movie which makes it more believable when the characters die in their awfully gruesome deaths and there’s plenty of gruesome deaths to go around. From a ladder through the eyes, to being crushed by glass, to being spliced by a wire fence, there’s a lot of gory painful deaths shown in this movie, and the director doesn’t hold back.
28 Days Later (2003)
Occasionally within the throes of watered down horror movies, a director comes along and decides to completely re-write the way horror is done. Danny Boyle is one of those people who will undoubtedly change horror movies. The movie constantly changes into pastels of moods within its canvas setting constantly going from light moods, ala the shopping scene, instantly cranking up the tension. He can leave us smiling with delight and in a split second leave us biting our nails and cringing in our seats. Boyles relies a lot on isolation to scare us, showing massively long scenes of lonely landscapes forcing us to feel even more terror and insecurity.
After animal rights terrorists invade a science lab, they begin breaking monkey’s free from their cages despite the frantic warnings from a scientist and are violently attacked by the apes that tear them apart and infect them. 28 days later, a man awakes from a coma in a hospital bed to discover a desolate and trashed hospital before him. He begins to inspect the marvel before him as the entire city of Britain is empty with no one in sight. He stumbles upon survivors that save him and tell him a virus has broken free on the general population and mankind as he knows it ceases to exist. The results of the virus are the infected. People that growl with beaming red eyes that kill anything in their path and infect others by tearing them apart or vomiting blood on them. It only takes twenty seconds to become one, so they waste no time disposing of their friends.
They stumble upon father and daughter survivors who decide to travel a military base where they supposedly have everything under control, but what they will find is not what they will expect. Boyle dares to break the mold of the horror genre by masterfully giving us a range of moods and colors, and terrifying sequences non-stop. Writers Boyle and Garland actually gives us characters we can care about and the director helps us by exploring the psychological effects this horror is having on them. We see Jim, the coma patient, have dreams that he is alone and deserted; we can see the desperation within the father’s eyes, and the torment in the daughter’s. These are actually characters that we feel bad for and within a split second Boyle takes them away from us. Characters in this movie come and go and Boyle snatches them without hesitation. Boyle often drops the characters off in small cramped dark places making the audience even more nervous and more anxious as we know terror is looming but we can do nothing about it.
The infected are horrifying as they stare with beaming red eyes and bloody faces and growl aloud; they can run and jump and dash and never stop. While “28 Days Later” is horror first and foremost it’s also more of a commentary on humanity and how we never really learn from our mistakes. We watch four people forced to live and exist in a world without order, a world with carnage, a world not very different from ours. This forces them act upon themselves and begs the questions: In a world without order, how do you achieve it? Who decides what life should be like, and is it all ultimately futile? This shows what humans do when there’s no structure or basis for order and basically take it upon themselves to do it with unsuccessful results. Danny Boyle is a genius director and might as well have re-invented the horror genre. Bravo Mr. Boyle, bravo.
FearDotCom (2002)
The problem with this film is that it’s an evident rip-off or to put it nicely, “homage” to the Japanese cult horror film “The Ring.’ The plot is simple and straight to the point: bad website cursed, bad website kill, people who look at site die, the end. I was very intrigued to watch this, because I am anxiously awaiting “The Ring” and haven’t seen it, yet, so I figured this movie would be the next best thing… boy, was I dead wrong, dead, dead wrong.
George Romero's "Resident Evil": The Script For the Movie we Never Saw
For those of you non- horror movie geeks and none “Resident Evil” fans; back when the “Resident Evil” movie was in the works, the studios recruited horror legend George Romero to write and direct the movie. He then created a script that was rejected by the Hollywood fat-cats because it was too violent and too scary. So he was fired from the project and the studios made the movie more watchable and watered down to appeal to the teenage male audience. So, after firing him they enlisted action director Paul Anderson (Mortal Kombat) to re-write the script and water down the movie. The movie wasn’t as good as audiences guessed it would be, and when fans discovered this crime, they instantly protested. Though, George Romero’s vision was never given to the American audience, his script still lives on in the internet.