If you can accept that Nick Gordon’s “Girl House” is a digital age version of “Slumber Party Massacre,” you might be able to make it through the so bad it’s good horror film just fine. I feel like punching people that use the term “Hate watch,” but “Girl House” is the very definition of a Hate Watch. It’s stupid, tedious, and makes no sense, but is saved miraculously by a very mean spirited and intense second half. It’s not often a movie starts out as a cheesy thriller about an internet stalker and transforms in to Leatherface: The Handy Man in “California Power Tool Massacre.” Actor Slaine does as grand job as monstrous villain “Loverboy.”
Tag Archives: Survival
All Through the House (2015)
Todd Nunes takes “Black Christmas” and wraps it in the Santa slashing madness “Silent Night, Deadly Night” for what is a pretty wonky slasher film. I appreciated the humor and inherent mean spiritedness of it all, as Todd Nunes definitely has a love for slasher films. He and his crew even seem dead set on creating their own iconic slasher with our silver faced Santa who has a knack for mutilating his victims with garden sheers. There’s also his habit for turning his male victims in to eunuchs, which is of shocking importance once the finale rolls around. I really like that Todd Nunes stuffs the film with more Latin and Hispanic actors, providing a very welcome diverse cast.
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Currently on the public domain hit list, “The Last Man on Earth” is one of the first and finest adaptations of “I Am Legend” that while not perfect, is infinitely better than most of the successors to follow. Set in 1968, Robert Morgan is a doctor who finds society at the mercy of a mysterious plague. Everyone in the world is gradually dying out from this disease, and he soon discovers that those who die inevitably return from the dead. Unless burned, the bodies will re-animate and look for the closest blood source. Cue director Ubaldo Ragona’s awfully gruesome imagery of a humongous pit of fire where bodies of the recently deceased have been dumped to burn.
Night of the Living Deb (2016)
Ever since “Shaun of the Dead,” many filmmakers have been intent on delivering their own horror comedies about self obsessed thirty somethings thrust in to the zombie apocalypse. Kyle Rankin’s “Night of the Living Deb” is not a masterpiece by any definition of the word, but it ends up being a decent diversion that has a good time using zombies as a means of emphasizing the dynamic between our main characters. Set on the fourth of July, awkward Deb awakens in the apartment of her love interest Ryan. Though she’s in love with him, Ryan isn’t entirely interested in her and is anxious to get her out of his life as soon as possible. Little do either of the pair know that overnight their small town of Maine has been consumed by a zombie apocalypse and everyone they known are now flesh eating zombies.
Five Ways to Fix “Fear the Walking Dead”
I’ve given “Fear the Walking Dead” two seasons already and it’s failed to really impress me. It shifts locations constantly, doesn’t seem to garner one interesting character of the bunch, and there are so many sub-plots that are set up only to be left dangling at the end of the season. While most people are saying the show resolves a lot of the sub-plots, I still am asking a bunch of questions after the finale. Also, I’m still trying to figure out why the series builds up these huge storylines only for them to sputter out and run out of gas so suddenly? So Daniel really is dead or what? Why did Ofelia leave the hotel and go out on her own, again? Why didn’t she at least leave a note for Alicia? Was she trying to look for her father? So can Nick talk to walkers or was he hallucinating? Why did Madison and Alicia fight for the hotel and work so hard to clean it out as a refuge only for them to give it up at the drop of a hat?
Lake Nowhere (2016)
I don’t know if I’d called Maxim Van Scoy, and Christopher Phelps’s “Lake Nowhere” a masterpiece, but I have to say that the more it unfolded, I appreciated its enthusiasm more than anything. It wants to deliver a genuinely retro horror experience, and by god it succeeds most of the time. I’m not completely bowled over, though, as “Lake Nowhere” is really only fifty minutes in length. Five of those minutes are devoted to some faux horror movie trailers you’d find in front of a cheap horror VHS.
The Shallows (2016) [Blu-Ray/Digital]
Sony and everyone else are probably going to compare “The Shallows” to Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” but oddly enough “The Shallows” is nothing compared to it. In the end after all is said and done, Jaume Collet-Serra’s “The Shallows” is a fairly simple and very tense survival thriller in the vein of “Open Water” and “127 Hours.” Rather than someone stuck in a rock crevice with their arm wedged between rocks, we follow a young surfer whose leg is wounded and is stranded on a rock looking out on to land. She can easily try to swim back to shore, but the predator she’s face, a man eating shark, is so much faster and swifter than she can ever hope to be. Jaume Collet-Serra has really come up in the film world as a director who offers up tense and exciting films. “The Shallows” is very much in his wheelhouse as a film that’s action packed and knuckle biting, also sneaking in contemplative undertones about life and grief.