In the neighborhood of Gangnam in Seoul, folks head to work expecting another boring day at the office. Soon, some of the citizens start showing odd behaviors and symptoms. What looks like a COVID-19 issue at first turns out to be much more than that.
Warning: Spoilers pertaining to the movie abound.
You really haven’t seen it all until you’ve seen a wrestler elbow drop a flesh eating zombie multiple times until its head explodes. That’s that thing about “Here for Blood.” It has a ton of good ideas and a great sense of humor about itself, but it gets lost in so much filler and narrative excess. What could have been a simple and fun home invasion thriller turns in to a convoluted survival film about cults, and sacrifices, and masked killers, and anointed prophets. It’s all a movie that could have been so much better with tighter editing and fifteen minutes trimmed down.
One of the best scenes of “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is the big fight scene staged in and on top of a train, and it brought to mind some of the better train fights ever staged in film. There have been many as it’s been one of the more classic tropes in fiction, so I listed five of my all time favorites.
What are some of your favorite fights on trains or public transportation?
If you, like me, were blown away by 2017’s “One Cut of the Dead,” you’ll have been surprised to learn that there was indeed a French language remake right down the pipeline. I’ll admit that I was very annoyed by this news, but everyone’s experience making movies is different and this story translates well to any one that has endured making art. “Final Cut” when all is said and done is a very good remake of the 2017 original. It’s funny and clever, but it never quite hits the emotional highs and sincerity that Shin’ichirō Ueda’s original ever does.
I appreciate what Andrew Cymek, who writes and directs “Rocktopussy!”, tries to with his feature film, utilizing as many resources as he can to deliver something that unabashedly melds Heavy Metal, Barbarella, and HP Lovecraft. I’m not sure what he has planned for future films or if there’s going to be more movies under the banner of “Astonishing Tales of Terror,” but “Rocktopiussy!” is off to a good start with a movie that while it doesn’t deliver completely on promises made in the trailer, is at least a fun time with some midnight movie potential.
“Just tell him to call you Billy!”
The one, two, three punch of George A. Romero, Stephen King, and Tom Savini is one of best, if not the best example of the horror anthology to date. While many have come before it, “Creepshow” really set the bar high in 1982. “Creepshow” (and its sequel) were basically the Boomer generation snapping back at the censors and government that helped bring down EC Comics and destroy what was a pretty excellent institution that was almost obliterated by puritans and the like. Thankfully “Creepshow” celebrates the whole spirit of EC Comics with a series of stories that practice in the formula of EC with themes about karma, revenge, poetic justice, and crime.
The new “Evil Dead” sequel “Evil Dead Rise” has become the newest horror hit, taking the deadites and warping them in to the inner city. There the book of the dead is cracked open and the deadites emerge to wreak havoc in a run down apartment building. While the setting of the apartment building isn’t often used, when it is implemented, it can be very effective. Here are five Apartment centered horror films you should watch after “Evil Dead Rise.”
If you like your apocalyptic fiction compiled a lot of the same old tropes you’ve seen a thousand times, then “Strain 100” might be up your alley. It’s “The Walking Dead” with a convenient dash of “The Last Of Us” thrown in, and none of the real social commentary or rich character focus. For all intents and purposes, “Strain 100” has some good ideas and fun moments of zombie carnage, but it’s bogged down by so many editing and writing problems from the outset. The zombies are pretty much the best aspect of the movie, truth be told.