afkeegan

I'm a big fan of the pseudo-documentary horror genre. Cannibal Holocaust is a sick spectacle but engaging and inventive. The Last Broadcast and even The Wicksborough Incident have moments that are gripping and a scattering of great ideas. Also, controversial opinion maybe, I really liked The Blair Witch Project. Aside from hailing a certain "reality" TV zeitgeist, The Blair Witch Project was moody and effective and had a great build up that kept you guessing. The eerie pagan figures made of branches, the woods at night full of strange sounds, the anxiety of never being quite able to see what was outside the frame of the shaky camera, all work together to create a little low budget masterpiece that rightfully scared the daylight out of audiences.

Now we've got this flat-footed attempt at "horror" called Paranormal Activity. Man, this was a bummer. I guess the success of shows like "Ghost Hunters" has given Hollywood the idea that people can get scared by little more that creepy sounds and night vision because this flick has spawned a number of imitations. As it is, Paranormal Activity has all the spooky thrills of a fake ghost video on Youtube. I prefer the Youtube videos because they are concise and don't pretend to have little more that one trick up their sleeve. Instead of being spooked, I just sat through Paranormal Activity wondering why the malevolent spirit does such boring stuff at night. He walks around, he turns on some lights, turns on the TV- basically this disembodied demon does everything I do when I can't sleep. Don't get me wrong, I see potential in the "Ghost Hunter" style horror movie. This stuff can be spooky if taken to the right place. But why must they be so unimaginative?

The only mild jolt comes at the very end, and even that is not much better than most homemade Youtube clips. In fact, I highly recommend surfing Youtube and watching the Paranormal Activity style videos on a dark and quiet night. You will be scared! I only recommend this film for people curious about the pseudo-documentary horror genre, researching or trying to make a thorough survey of contemporary horror.

I was very entertained by this film but keep in mind that I watch very strange cult and horror flicks almost exclusively. That said, Dolls did leave me pondering exactly what audience this film was intended for. Far too gory and suggestive for kids, the story is curiously fairy-tale like and full of the kinds of characters and "humor" one would expect from a Nickelodeon special. It really has the odd ball effect of coming off like a children's movie intent on causing permanent psychological trauma for the kiddies. In other words, kinda awesome for certain kinds of adults. Apart from the paradoxical tone and content of the film, the visuals are a treat! Creepy doll heads galore! Porcelain that turns to flesh, wet glass eyes that dart about in their heads, animated by forces unknown! Oh, the teddy bear scene at the beginning! I don't want to spoil it but that teddy bear scene is something else! Worth checking out!

Halloween is truly the greatest holiday! After waiting through the awful summer months, full of sticky heat, punishing sunshine and repugnant bugs, the season of death comes and we celebrate the melancholy passage with candy, darkness, cold and all things dreadful and mysterious. Halloween is a combination of innocence, fear and mourning, and that is why it conjures up such lovely, complex visions. Anyway, this movie is a very enjoyable Halloween season flick. A handful of interlocking, spooky tales are interwoven in a dream-like, drifting way that is still very easy to follow. There's lots of silliness here, for sure, and the twists and turns are at worst predictable and at best clever but never scary. What works here is the haunting poetry of image: burning pumpkins, full red moons, dead leaves scuttling across back roads, a little girl wandering the night in her home- made witch costume and a creepy little imp with a burlap sack for a head who always seems to show up when there's evil going on. It's very evocative and enjoyable. If the film had retained a little more of it's mystery and hadn't shot for the broadest possible audience I'd say there's some art here! As it is, a really cool addition to the horror anthology genre and a cool flick for your Halloween movie marathons!

What you get here, from the guy who brought you the Blair Witch Project- a clever and effective flick in my opinion, is a claustrophobic monster movie taking alien abduction as its premise. Better than most other such attempts, like Fire in the Sky, this film is not going to shed light on the UFO phenomenon or change the way we think about life like Descartes but it does provide fun and thrills. The director is effective at creating tension and the whole cast is reasonably convincing. Aside from the ridiculous monster, a muscular green dwarf with nasty teeth and a vagina-like orifice in its head (what is up with that?), the camera work and gross effects are better than average for a low budget monster picture. None of this stuff is a spoiler, by the way, because you get all this info in the first 15 minutes. Recommended for fun.

The set up for this film is great. Mysterious and frightening events lead an ordinary guy to a laboratory with a time machine. Once there, he is sent backward in time by a scientist in order to escape some deranged, scissor wielding pursuer who's all bandaged up and looks like Dark Man. Up to that point the movie had me. Then it lost me. I must agree with what another reviewer wrote here: the main character's actions push the limits of plausibility after he goes back in time! HERE IS THE SPOILER: He finds out that he is the deranged pursuer, come from the future, chasing himself in the past. It is a premise with potential but the way the film lays it out, every coincidence seems overly convenient, implausibly strange, and repeatedly the ethics and true nature of the main character are called into question. He terrorizes, humiliates and ends up killing a young woman in the film, all to set things right in time as he sees them. Is there really an ordinary man who would do this? It leaves one feeling confused as to what the psychology of this guy is. Did time travel scramble his brain cells? THAT WOULD BE MORE UNDERSTANDABLE AS AN EXPLANATION! He seems to be working on the logic that he must do these insane things to send himself back, but why doesn't he consider doing nothing? What about noninterference? That's what they do in Star Trek, and it seems a lot easier! The film is otherwise well made, there is good pacing and atmosphere and all the actors do fine jobs. Unfortunately, when a story seems so off center, the good work that was put into it seems utterly lost. If there is a remake I suggest the script go through serious revision!

I watch a lot of horror films, the good the bad and the ugly. This isn't a masterpiece or anything but it's about as solid as horror film making gets. The set-up is well done, all the actors do fine jobs, they make you care and then when the really horror begins it's intense and you're basically on the edge of your seat throughout most of the film right to the very end. The effects are fine, there is gore, but I wouldn't say that's the highlight of the film. The premiss is not anything to write home about- it's your basic mutant monster set-up, similar to Carpenter's The Thing. The meat here is the characters dealing with an intense situation. The action is handled very well. You want these people to figure a way out against impossible odds. I never once felt bored during this film or felt like my intelligence was being insulted- and honestly, that's were most horror flicks go wrong. So, job well done here.

Yes, this gets the full ten stars. It's plain as day that this fill is genius. The universe sent Trent Harris a young, wonderfully strange man one day and Harris caught him on tape, in all that true misfit glory that you just can't fake. Too bad it ended in tragedy for the young man, if only an alternate ending could be written for that fellow's story. The other two steps in the trilogy do retell the story, with Sean Penn and Crispin Glover in the roles of the young men, respectively. The world is expanded upon and the strangeness is contextualized by the retelling, giving us a broader glimpse into growing up weird in vanilla America. Recommended for anyone and everyone!

An all too familiar story in our world: A professor with too much time on his hands plots a diamond heist and enlists the help of a New York mobster and a team of nefarious experts who's specialties run the spectrum of various prerequisites for daring jewel capers, such as safe-cracking, etc. No surprises here- although one member of the team is a professional playboy- and are there really such things? How does one earn the title of playboy?- who's only job is to seduce the icy secretary with the key to the vault! You'll probably see the twist coming but they keep their cards close to the vest so there's still a tinge of surprise at the end. Fans of Kinski will not find a heck of a lot to snicker about as they watch their favorite crazy-friend-of- Herzog plod through another flick he probably just did for money. While Kinski isn't quite plausible as a hardened military man, he does a pretty fine, straight job in this role. Good times, all around.