Okay, let's get this out of the way: If you've never seen a Saw film, don't bother with Saw V. Comprehending the events of the latest sequel in the successful franchise is absolutely dependent upon having a knowledge of what went down in the four previous films, particularly the first two.

However, if you're a fan of the series you're in for a real treat. The film has been panned by most professional critics but I really don’t give a shit. In my honest opinion, Saw V begins with a gruesome bang, picks up where the previous film left off and rarely stumbles.

As the film opens, the police are cleaning up in the aftermath of the events detailed in the two previous sequels. Hoffman comes out of it looking like a hero and the case is declared solved. While Strahm begins to follow the clues (using FBI files he swiped from headquarters), a new series of traps have been set up for five strangers. In a plot point Saw fans will recognize, a common factor connects all the unwilling participants, with the potentially fatal traps serving as a test of both their ethics and ability perform as a team.

The story alternates between the plight of the current batch of victims and Strahm's investigation. During the course of Strahm's pursuit we are treated to a series of flashbacks which reveal how the new Jigsaw was recruited. These moments will also be pleasantly recognizable to fans as they tie into elements from each of the previous installments.

Off on summer holiday Adam, Lee and Grace head into Australia’s outback for some fresh air and scenic country sites. Once in the outback so to say, our trio of friends decided to take a boat tour and do a little fishing, but once their poles are in the water, our new friends and their boat guide are the bait, because there is something lurking just below the water’s surface that is twenty foot long and very hungry.

G’day me horror mates and welcome to Black Water, a tense and tight little flick inspired by real life events, that may make you think twice before heading out into any of ‘strailia’s swamps for a bit of a walk about.

Black Water is a damn fine little flick that deals with true life events that happened to a group of friends while on a recreational fishing trip. It’s a slow builder that plays out nice and slow with sudden impacts of sheer terror and thrills to be had by all, except for those that it happened to.

There is not a lot of blood or even a lot of kills in Black Water, but it is tense as hell at times.

A reporter and cameraman in Los Angeles are shadowing a pair of local firefighters. They are doing a little documentary piece and are also hoping to get in on some good live action at the same time. They get their wish when the fire department gets an emergency call from an apartment building claiming that an old lady is sick and is screaming violently. They report to this call and go check on the lady. The lady is all fucked up and sick and bloody. They try to help her but she attacks them instead and a melee ensues. After all of this action goes down, they discover that the building has been quarantined and nobody can exit the building. Meanwhile, whatever infected the old lady is probably still around within the building and who knows who already was infected and who wasn’t. Meanwhile the camera crew is recording every bit of this for posterity’s sake. Sound familiar? This, my friends, is Quarantine.

Apparently this movie is a remake. Hollywood is getting so good at this remake process that it has become second nature and they can do it quite elusively now. Great. I’ll take a penalty drink for not knowing that in advance. To be fair, I wasn’t the least bit interested in this movie beforehand, so I didn’t do any initial recon. The trailer just wasn’t doing it for me. The fact is, we wanted to go out to the movies last night and this was the only scary movie playing. Anyway, back to the review. The movie itself was all right. There was some good action and the movie had a good pace. Even before all the shit went down, it was pretty entertaining. The acting was good. The characters seemed real and were compelling. The kills were pretty graphic, but a lot of the potential gore was lost on the fucking camera flying everywhere (the whole movie was viewed from the vantage point of the news camera). The camera ended up being a distraction for me.

Day of the Dead is supposedly a remake of the Romero classic of the same name. I’m not sure why they went this route. This movie has NOTHING to do with the original except the fact that the movie does have zombies and towards the end of it they are in fact in an army base. The Horrorist notified me that the character names were the same as well, but I didn’t notice (or give a shit). And surely George Romero wouldn’t have zombies scaling ceilings upside down either.
The story is about a small town plagued by a zombie outbreak. The army comes in to quarantine the town but all shit breaks loose in the process. There are some survivors, but they are not all in the same place. They try to get together and get the hell out of dodge before they become zombie fodder. This is Day of the Dead.

This is logically probably the worst remake ever (yes, I’m including Wicker Man in this). It has little to do with the original and the title was merely a cheap marketing ploy to get you to watch what is supposedly a Romero remake. The sad thing is that this trick would really only apply to the die-hard zombie fans that knew the Romero original, but this legion of fans would have checked this movie out anyways, since it’s a zombie movie and all. Ergo, the people involved in the naming of this movie are disrespectful fucking dolts.

Quarantine (1)
Saw V
The Happening
Black Water
Day of the Dead '08
Diary of the Dead
Cloverfield
I Am Legend
Hatchet
The Mist
Saw IV
Shutter
Species 4
Inside
Daemon
Doomed
Dracula III
One Missed Call
Fair Haired Child
Severance
AVP:R
Ju-On 2
Black Sheep
Silence of the Lambs
Clown
Wishing Stairs
Night of the Living Dorks
HeartSick
5ive Girls
Fido
Judge Dredd vs Aliens
Zodiac
Are You Scared?
Magic
The Washingtonians

In 1978 John Carpenter changed the perception of what constitutes a truly terrifying motion picture experience forever with the release of his horror classic Halloween. The plot of the film is brilliant in it’s simplicity: One Halloween night in 1963, a young boy murders his older sister in an upstairs bedroom of his home in Haddonfield Illinois. The kids is shuffled off to a sanitarium.

Fifteen years later, on October 30th 1978, the now-adult patient orchestrates an escape from the asylum, heads back home to Haddonfield and begins a murder spree which carries over into Halloween Eve and would become the stuff of cinema legend.

The maniac in question is, of course, Michael Myers and he is pursued (with a determination almost as relentless as Michael’s urge to kill) throughout the film by the psychologist who treated him all of those years, Dr. Samuel Loomis (the late great Donald Pleasance). Along the way, Michael targets and stalks one particular young woman named Laurie Strode, who is sympathetically portrayed by a young Jamie Lee Curtis making an assured screen debut.

Nine people with no apparent connection are drugged, kidnapped, and put in a house with no way out. There are seventy-five cameras and just as many hidden microphones all over the house. It seems that an eccentric lunatic is behind everything and he will offer five million dollars to the person who walks out alive.

Blah. Blah. Blah. That's pretty much the plot. There have been better "group-trapped-in-inescapable-situations-and-have-to-kill-each-other" movies. Cube and Saw II come to mind. What sets this movie apart from those is that the accents are among the WORST I have ever heard. Did you ever want to hear Dennis Hopper use a fake Irish accent? Me either. Speaking of Dennis Hopper, he's totally out of place in this movie. Out of everything they could have gotten him to play, he plays...a priest. Yeah, Dennis Hopper as a priest works about as well as Keanu Reeves as an English Aristocrat. Dennis Hopper seems to be at his best when he's playing a dickhead in some capacity. They should have captialized on that.

Before I go any farther, the nine people that are kidnapped are: a priest; a dancer; a designer; an aspiring rapper; a former tennis pro; a woman on probation; an unsuccessful composer and his wife; and a detective. This could have been GREAT if it was actually a character study. Sadly we get to know the characters for all of ONE SCENE. After that we're supposed to relate to them I guess. Oh well, after that scene they're all disposable anyway.

In between the Universal horror films of the 1930’s and the Lions Gate era of horror we’re in now, there was Hammer Studios, a film company that began in the early 50’s but didn’t achieve great success until 1957 when it released The Curse of Frankenstein, and with that film a new era of horror was ushered in that would last until 1975 and would forever leave a mark on the history of the horror genre, a history of flesh and blood.

Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror is an amazing in depth look at one of the most prolific and profitable movie studios of all time and one that supplied a lifetime of thrills and chills to it’s unwavering legions of fans, that is still growing to this day. If you ‘re a fan of modern day horror, then you owe it to yourself to take a stroll back into time and gain a greater appreciation of the horror that came before and to pay respect to the horror elders.

Narrated by Hammer icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, Flesh and Blood takes you deep into the studios beginnings and let’s you be privy to all of the events that lead to the studios incredible rise and to it’s eventual fall. And by the time it’s over you will feel as if you have taken a lifetime tour of a horror museum.

Writer Stephen Mark Rainey has done it again with this brilliantly scary short story collection. Forgoing my usual sit down and read the whole book method I decided to read one or two stories a night before bed. Needless to say my dreams/nightmares were quite something for a while there. A few times I even had to get up and find something innocuous to read in order to scrub my brain out after a particularly scary tale so I could relax enough to fall asleep. This didn’t always work.

The stories and tone of the book put me in mind of Stephen King’s early short story collections. While I didn’t love every single one, most of them kept me sufficiently chilled; definitely worth the price of admission. A few highlights:

Fugue Devil: My favorite in the collection. I hesitate to tell you too much about this one because if you know about the fugue devil, well, then it knows about YOU. And you don’t want that, at all.