Archive for category Trash
Further Proof That Uwe Boll Is A Douche
Posted by Matt in New Releases, Trailers, Trash on September 8th, 2010
Unlike many horror film fans, I only started disliking Uwe Boll within the past year. Prior to my viewing of Seed, I hadn’t been exposed to any of Boll’s directorial prowess, which includes House of the Dead and other films ranked amongst the worst of all time via IMDB. In case you haven’t seen it (hopefully you haven’t), Seed is about a prolific serial killer whose execution is botched via a faulty electric chair. The prison guards bury him alive and of course he doesn’t die. Instead he crawls out and goes on a killing spree. Pretty standard cliche stuff. The point of bringing Seed up here is that the first two minutes of the film is comprised of actual footage of animals being abused or slaughtered – stuff you’d see in PETA videos like skinned dogs in their death throes. It’s absolutely horrific and unwatchable to me. While I think it’s important to recognize that this type of ugliness exists in the world, Boll used the footage specifically to get a reaction, not because he had anything to say about cruelty or suffering. He wanted his audience to be shocked by the violence shown and then take that mindset with them into his film. Unfortunately, there’s nothing remotely interesting about watching Seed‘s cliche drivel and nothing that would show intelligence behind including the animal footage. Shock value with no message or meaning.
Anyway, the talented Mr. Boll just released a trailer for his newest “shocking” piece of garbage, Auschwitz, which is obviously about the Holocaust and stars Boll as a Nazi guard. As expected the trailer is horrific, featuring footage of people being gassed, a child’s body being burned and Boll pulling teeth out of a dead body. At one point, the words “never forget” appear over a black backdrop. What is so infuriating about this isn’t the fact that there’s going to be a film about the Holocaust that graphically depicts the atrocities that were committed. I’m all for preserving the memory and awareness of these awful things. What is infuriating is that Boll has the audacity to turn the Holocaust into what will likely amount to a torture porn flick and has the balls to say “never forget” in his trailer! This guy has achieved a brand new level of douchiness never before seen. I bet Boll will attempt to pass off this film as artistic or as making a statement about the Holocaust. Don’t be fooled – we’re just looking at a hack director’s latest attempt to cause controversy in order to keep his name out there. He’d actually be less of an ass if he was up front about just wanting to use the Holocaust as his backdrop for horror. Mostly I get angry at this man’s pretentiousness, not his subject matter. Maybe now’s the time to go ahead and sign the Stop Uwe Boll Petition.
Alone In The Dark II – Disgraceful. Will The Real Edward Carnby Please Stand Up?
Posted by Chris in Reviews, Sequels, Trash, Video Games on April 29th, 2010
The other day I sat down and watched, against my better judgment, Alone in the Dark II (2008). I got nostalgic and soon found myself suckered in with the mentality that it couldn’t ruin one of my favorite childhood franchises worse than Uwe Boll did. I was dreadfully wrong.
Growing up, Alone in the Dark’s signature hero, Edward Carnby, was the Chris Redfield before there was a Chris Redfield. He could shoot his way through a house full of zombies, and if he ran out of bullets he’d a grab a knife from the cutting board or even the cutting board itself and crack open some rotted heads. If that didn’t work he would just throw some killer head-butts and crescent kicks. Let’s see Redfield do that.
However, with superior graphics, the Resident Evil franchise took the spotlight away from its spiritual grandfather, so Alone in the Dark attempted to revamp for the new millennium with Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (2001) which moved Carnby and the franchise out of prohibition era America into modern day with some lame explanation about the character being a descendant in some secret organization that passes down the name… really a load of marketing garbage to try to compete with Resident Evil. Carnby, himself, was transformed into a Fox Mulderish wise cracking, early thirty-something, and if that wasn’t bad enough they even paired him with a red-head love interest and threw some government agency conspiracy into the mix.
Unfortunately, this “X-file” that no one should have opened gave Uwe Boll, the worst German since WWII, an idea. And when Uwe Boll gets an idea, a beloved survival horror title becomes a disgrace.
Boll’s “brilliant” vision of bringing Alone in the Dark (2005) to the screen cast Christian-we thought your career was over-Slater as Carnby while Tara-bad boob job-Reid played the Dana Scully-ish character. The movie was mess of bad slow motion, half-assed CGI monsters, plot holes, and Stephen Dorff – the guy you wouldn’t know if he wasn’t the villan in the first Blade movie – who brought plenty of terrible over-acting as the psudeo-villian that, of course, turns good just in time to save the day. While Slater was, in retrospect, a passible Carnby, the movie itself was terrible and only loosely based on anything anywhere in the games.
After the dust cleared from that mess, I was content on going back to playing the original trilogy on an old laptop and forgetting about the other two massacres until Atari decided they were going to try to make everything better by resurrecting Carnby in 2008 with the simply titled Alone in the Dark, which did its best to try to create a plot that would completely discount everything that happened in The New Nightmare and Boll’s piece of trash by simply pretending the game, and the horrible movie based on it, never happened -what I like to refer to as the Highlander 3 maneuver. Nevertheless, this new Alone in the Dark expected us to swallow the fact that Carnby Rip-Van-Winkled it sometime during the Hoover administration and woke up in modern times. Iwould be wiling to swallow this if the gameplay wasn’t a mess of innovation for the sake of it, an over extended mutli-genre debacle, and filled with more bugs than an apartment in Baltimore. At least, I was sure now that the franchise couldn’t get any worse?
Then I sat down and watched Alone in the Dark II (2008). Although, why it has the right to be a “2″ to anything still remains cryptic. The original game to bear that title was about zombie pirates turned bootleggers kidnapping a little girl during prohibition and this is definitely not that. You could try to make the case that it’s a sequel to the Boll monstrosity, but honestly you would have to get some military quality bungee to make a stretch like that since the plot bares no resemblance to anything Alone in the Dark. Maybe most insulting is that Carnby is now portrayed by Rick Yune, whose ethnic background is completely different than that of the character he is portraying. Real good continuity, people! Perhaps the producers should just be honest about the fact that they just stamped the franchise name on their crappy movie and put Carnby’s dog tags on Yune’s horrible character because they wanted people like myself to get suckered into watching it.
However, if the film was even average I wouldn’t have cared. Instead, it unloads its abysmal writing by kicking off with a shootout/chase scene that has something to do with a witch, a dagger, and some group of demon hunters that run around firing big guns at bad blurs of CGI while yelling poorly acted lines to each other through cool stylish headsets. Carnby somehow, which remains puzzling (yes five minutes in and its already confusing) becomes involved with the dagger, gets stabbed with it, and spends the next half hour being carried around by the demon hunters group. While Carnby is lying around bed whining, Lance Henriksen – who we want to like because he was Bishop from Aliens – goes on this whole rant about how he’s not going to get involved, probably setting up the reluctant hero that has sacrifice himself cliche. Then we cut to more shootouts with the CGI blur.
If you haven’t surmised it, the film was unwatchable, made Uwe Boll look like Martin Scorsese, and I couldn’t even force my
self to finish it, which leaves me with one nagging question. Do I want there be to another Alone in the Dark anything? It’s a really sad reality because this series had some strong potential back in 1992. Back then, there wasn’t anything like it. Dark halls, puzzles, guns, and Lovecraft style creepiness: footprints in the distance and macabre sneaking up on you from behind every corner had never rooted itself in the world of gaming. This franchise should have developed into something fantastic as technology improved. Instead, we get a character that’s completely revamped too many times, too far separated from his tough-as-nails Charles Bronson meets Macgyver roots, and four bad attempts at trying to have this franchise claim a foothold with a new generation. Can the real Edward Carnby please start cracking some more heads with a frying pan, and maybe box the hell out of Uwe Boll, until we get another decent entry into the franchise?
Sins Of The Father Cliche
You know what really grinds my gears, horror movies that still rely on the revenge plot as their groundwork. Conceptually, it seems like a classic idea. Who didn’t love reading about Poe’s hero walling-up his dick-head friend in The Cask of Amontillado? Well, it’s been about hundred years and the idea is getting tired especially when the wronged party takes it out on the next generation. Shouldn’t Kruger have the last and only remaining pass for this MO?
Unfortunately, no laws against horror movie cliches exist, which brings me to Drive-Thru, a complex in-depth story about a fast-food chain’s mascot clown (named “Horny The Clown” for extra awful effect) killing the local high school kids. Sound excellently bad? Well, the opening scene of really exaggerated wiger-thugs getting owned by what appears to be a mix of Twisted Metal’s “Hell Clown” and Ronald McDonald with a meth problem wearing Ace Freely’s get-up from the Psycho Circus tour had me expecting the usual teeny crap for sure.
While the highschool-ness was instantly out of control: rival clique making snarky comments, the token drug reference kid, and the heroine being poked fun at for her virginity by her destined-to-be-chop meat BFFs that all wear skirts that can pass as thick belts, Drive Thru also attempts to sneak in an air of mystery about its back story. As the teens start to become chop meat, the parents in the town share knowing glances and make references to the past that leads the heroine, Mackenzie, (Leighton Meester) to become suspicious of her mother. If that’s not bad enough, Mackenzie starts to get clues who the next victim is going to be through supernatural text messages, the Ouija Board, the Magic 8-ball and Etch-a-Sketch for some reason. Well, at least, her Slinky doesn’t start tapping out Morse Code
At the risk of spoiling the ending of this instant-classic, the horrible truth is that Mackenzie’s mother and all of her friends’ parents used to torment the boy that once portrayed Horny the Clown until, of course, one prank goes too far and leads to his accidental death. Yup, it’s that original folks. Even though this flick doesn’t take itself seriously and it’s probably trying to exploit cliches to be funny somehow it’s overall annoying.
Horror movies that try to be funny-bad are searching for a seldom reached middle ground between good horror and campy horror that’s amusing for its cheese value. Not to mention, when your ace card cliche is owned by Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Friday the 13th, and even Masters of Horror: We all Scream for Ice Cream, which actually dealt with accidentally killing a clown, it’s a little hard to see the chuckle value in it.
The only amusement factor in Drive-Thru comes from their attempts to populate the film with amusing characters, and bad caricatures; the film’s good cop/bad cop routine is almost unforgivably bad as the thin female by-the-book detective deals with her overweight bumbling Dirty-Harry wannabe partner’s attitude. On the lighter side, Morgan Spurlock-the Super-Size Me guy- makes a rather amusing cameo as the manager of the fast food joint and one of my favorite character actors, Sean Whalen–kinda the poor man’s Steve Buscemi–plays the typical creepy janitor.
Still, at the end of the day, this movie’s a mess, not particularly funny or scary. It’s just there; but, at least, if you’re reading this review it doesn’t have to be.
Bloody Birthday – Curtis Is Such An Asshole
Posted by Matt in Creepy Kids, Reviews, Trash on February 9th, 2010
Every once in a while, I’ll receive a movie from Netflix that I don’t remember adding to my queue like this week’s Bloody Birthday (1981). Perhaps I took some shoddy advice from a Bloody-Disgusting forum member. Maybe I took to my keyboard in a drunken stupor some months ago. Whatever happened, I decided to go into this one cold without even reading the movie description on the sleeve. From the disc art, it looked like it could be a cheesy 80′s slasher, so I was gearing up for some teenage slaughter mayhem. Turns out there is slaughter, but not in the form I expected.
In the film’s prologue (after a long and annoying titles sequence), we learn that three children were born in the town of Meadowvale, California in 1970 during a solar eclipse. Fast forward 10 years later and a series of bizarre murders in Meadowvale kicks off with a teenage couple fooling around in everyone’s favorite cliched horror film make out spot – the local graveyard. The suave male, who happens to look like Scott Baio during his Charles In Charge days, convinces his girl that sex in a freshly dug grave is the next best thing. Predictably, someone attacks the couple in the grave, killing him with a shovel and strangling her with a rope.
The next day, police question students at the town’s elementary school because the murder weapon is revealed to be a jump rope. Here, we’re introduced to our three eclipse children – Curtis (Billy Jayne), Debbie (Elizabeth Hoy), and Steven (Andy Freeman) who we learn not only share a birthday but also enjoy watching Debbie’s older sister (Julie Brown of Earth Girls Are Easy fame) dance naked through a peephole and oh yeah, murder people. That’s right, explained by some astrological bullshit about Saturn being blocked during their births, these three devils were born without a conscience and love to murder people.
Little Bastards...
Bloody Birthday lays all of its cards out on the table within the first 15 minutes but that isn’t my biggest complaint. By 1981, the “creepy kids” motif had certainly been done before with Children of the Damned and The Omen being the most prominent examples, but it wasn’t yet the cliche that it is today. What does annoy me is that these kids truly do act like 10-year-olds. Meaning, they’re idiots. They need to take some creepiness lessons from Damien – you don’t find him firing revolvers at teachers in a school where he could easily get caught. Plausible deniability, kids. Read up. Of course they don’t get caught and the incompetent local police doesn’t try to determine cause of death beyond “killed by psycho”. Seriously, one guy gets beaten over the head with a baseball bat and his death is attributed to hitting his head after tripping on a skateboard. Another girl gets shot in the eye with a bow and arrow, her body left on the street, annnnnnnd….no indication of cause of death! Must’ve been that damn illusive “psycho” that’s wandering around our little town!
The trio is uncovered by classmate Timmy Russell (K.C. Martel) after a failed attempt to lock him in a refrigerator at the local junkyard. Timmy’s sister Joyce (Lori Lethin) joins the fight after she discovers Curtis trying to poison birthday guests with rat poison. It all leads to an underwhelming conclusion that lacks any suspense (as the rest of the film does).
Also of note is the film’s terrible score which deftly segues from Brady Bunch inspired jingles to Kenny G saxophone-laden sex scenes. If nothing else, it’s funny to laugh at but it really detracts from the “creepy kid” atmosphere that director Ed Hunt is trying to achieve.
Beyond the Swiss cheese plot, Bloody Birthday‘s main offense comes in the form of Curtis. Oh, how I hate this little fucker. While Debbie irritates me with her false angel act (“oh, mommy! I didn’t do anything bad, I’m a good little girl”), she doesn’t come close to Curtis. As the dorky bespectacled dweeb of the murderous trio, he’s constantly annoying me with his faux evil smile, ridiculous gun-holding stalking scenes and general douchiness. If this video doesn’t make you hate him, then I probably don’t like you either.
But maybe it’s not all bad. In images, here are Bloody Birthday‘s strong points:
Scott Baio
Julie Brown's Nude Scene
"Hot" girls in high-waisted pants
This dog with the freaky eye
These headphones
The Bloody Birthday DVD features a recent interview with the film’s now-elderly producer, Max Rosenberg, who explains how he wanted to make a film showing that evil can come in all forms and show the consequences of having no conscience. I guess he achieved this but (and I feel bad for saying anything negative about the venture of an old man) he really only succeeded in creating a sub-par (sort-of?) slasher. Next time I update my Netflix queue, I should probably lay off the booze.
Swamp Devil: A Trash Review
“Well that wasn’t fun.” Those were the first words to come out of my girlfriend’s mouth after I forced her to sit through director David Winning’s 2008 film Swamp Devil, which inadvertently arrived at my doorstep yesterday due to a Netflix shipping error. And she’s absolutely right – Swamp Devil is so banal that it fails to illicit any fun (don’t even mention fear) from the audience. This dud doesn’t even have the benefit of being so bad that it’s funny. It’s just typical cliche trash that you’ve seen 1,000 times before.
Since I decided to go into this viewing cold, not reading anything about Swamp Devil, I didn’t know that it was originally part of a Sci-Fi Channel “Creature Feature” series that aired last year. That certainly explains the film’s obvious CGI, PG-13 dialogue, and lack of any gore/violence. While it’s probably not one of Sci-Fi’s worst original features as there are plenty to choose from, it could possibly qualify as its most uninteresting.
The story kicks off when city-dweller Melanie Blaime (Cindy Sampson) receives a call from a man named Jimmy Fuller (Nicolas Wright) who says he grew up with her in Gibbington, Vermont. Jimmy is calling to tell her that her estranged father, Howard (Bruce Dern), whom she has not seen in twenty years, is on his deathbed and she needs to come home immediately. He hangs up on her, giving no further explanation but Melanie still decides to return home to help her father.
Upon her arrival, Jimmy meets Melanie at the most logical of places – the “Gibbington City Limit” sign on the side of the highway. Seeing as he hung up on her in the previous scene and the two didn’t exchange numbers or make a plan to meet, I guess we’re to assume that he’s been standing at this signpost for countless hours. This is just one of Swamp Devil’s many excellent unexplained plot lines but I’ll get to the rest later.
Finally! Do you know how long I've been waiting here?!
Naturally, Melanie invites this creepy stranger who casually professes to have had a crush on her when she was 9-years-old into her car so they can visit her father. It’s only then when Jimmy reveals that Howard isn’t sick – he’s been accused of murdering a teenage girl and has been on the lam for weeks. I guess that little fact might have deterred Melanie from visiting her old man.
While it is not clear why Jimmy wants to help her father, he explains that the town has come to view Howard, a former sheriff, as crazy due to his obsession with a supposed swamp monster. The two begin to form an unlikely (and completely non-believable) bond as they search for Howard in the swamp, hoping to find him before the local authorities do. But there’s something odd about Jimmy, aside from his tendency to call distant acquaintances and lie about their father’s medical condition. No one, including town sheriff Nelson Bois (James Kidnie), has any idea who he or his equally-creepy mother is and he also has a seems to often have muddy hands for no reason (obvious plot point, much?).
Meanwhile, it is revealed that there is indeed a “Swamp Devil”, which is basically a poorly executed Ent from The Lord of the Rings. If Peter Jackson had a budget of about $987, The Battle of Isengard might have looked something like this film does. We’re not told what this creature is or why he has a tendency to murder townsfolk by dragging them into the swamp. Also, couldn’t they have set this movie in another state? Vermont isn’t exactly famous for its swamps, is it?
I've come to stomp you, Saruman
Basically, the movie plods along as Swamp Devil picks off random people while Melanie grows increasing concerned until Jimmy tells her he knows where to find Howard. When the two walk a brief distance into the swamp, Jimmy says Howard will find them and, you guessed it, Howard shows right up and points a gun at Jimmy. Melanie, under the impression that her father has experienced some kind of mental breakdown, pleads with Howard to lower the gun because Jimmy is her friend. At this point, Jimmy starts acting even stranger and he reveals himself as the Swamp Devil (using some moderately decent CGI), which has already been painfully obvious since about the 20-minute mark.
The father and daughter (along with another local whose involvement I don’t feel like explaining) escape temporarily and take refuge in Howard’s cabin where he explains why the Swamp Devil is after him. Jimmy raped and killed a 13-year-old girl back when Howard was sheriff but a lack of evidence prevented justice from being served. Howard and his cop buddies took the law into their own hands by dragging Jimmy out into the swamp and beating a confession out of him. Jimmy’s lack of remorse angered the men so greatly that they killed him and dumped his body in a pool of water. Shortly thereafter, the men involved began dying mysterious deaths that appeared to be suicides and Howard’s wife was found dead in the swamp without explanation. Fearing for his daughter’s safety, Howard sent Melanie to live with her aunt in “the city” while he attempted to stop the Swamp Devil.
Following these revelations, the monster busts in and snatches Melanie away in order to attract Howard. He, along with another local and a female cop, track Swamp Devil into the woods. By looking at a map showing the locations of Swamp Devil (I feel stupid every time I type those words) murders, they deduce that the monster is unable to cross the county line. That’s why Jimmy met Melanie right at the border earlier.
After Melanie is freed, the climax of the film surrounds trying to get Swamp Devil to inadvertently cross the county line. It would be a waste of time to type out the rest of the ending but suffice it to say that they manage to achieve their goal and destroy the monster. But wait! That creepy mother I mentioned before somehow resurrects him during the film’s coda, not that it makes any sense or is explained.
God, this is nonsense
It would be hard to tell from what I’ve said above, but Swamp Devil actually has some things working in its favor. The acting is above average for a Sci-Fi Channel feature or any low-budget horror film for that matter. The CGI effects aren’t spectacular but they’re often passable and the cinematography is pretty strong.
That said, what really kills this film is Gary Dauberman’s script which is riddled with cliche dialogue (they actually have the balls to take the “you’re one ugly motherfucker” line from Predator), continuity lapses, and huge plot holes. For instance, Dauberman never bothers to explain exactly how Swamp Devil came to be. We learn that Jimmy is killed and dumped in the swamp but how that turned him into some kind of vine monster, I can’t begin to guess. Why can’t Swamp Devil leave the county? If he can’t leave the county, why the hell didn’t Howard just move? What did Jimmy’s mother have to do with anything? I could go on.
Though I’ve applauded the acting performances in this film, I think it might have been better had the cast been awful. At least that way Swamp Devil could be considered a “good bad movie”. As it stands, it’s completely unremarkable, not scary, and flat-out boring. Thanks, Netflix. Now that I’ve suffered through this, can I have my copy of Slaughter High?
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