Of all the genres of film, none is so hard to pull of as the horror comedy. When the combination of a genre dependent upon lightning fast timing and a genre devoted to establishing mood and atmosphere works, it is a wonder to behold (Shaun of the Dead). When it fails, it’s a mess (Creepshow III, Return of the Living Dead II).

Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer - I am happy to report - falls resolutely into the first category. This is one of the most entertaining horror comedy hybrids I’ve seen since the aforementioned Shaun - a movie that makes a legitimate effort to establish the character and his surroundings before leading the audience into an action paced, splattery coup de’ resistance of a finale.

It seems that plumber Jack Brooks (Trevor Matthews) has had anger issues ever since he watched his family get viciously slaughtered by a monster as a boy. Now an adult, he is in a pseudo relationship with a an overbearing woman/classmate named Eve (Rachel Skarsten) , attends night school and makes frequent visits (invited or not) to his hapless therapist (Daniel Nash) where he vents his seemingly endless rage

His class- (the subject seems to be chemistry) is taught by the kindly Professor Gordon Crowley (Robert Englund, in the best performance he’s given since he played the Phantom of the Opera back in 1989), who one night after class asks Jack to come by and work on some pipes which are giving him trouble at home. Jack agrees and in the course of the job unwittingly unleashes an ancient evil buried on the Professors property.

Oh man, where to begin? I try not to gush about films, but this one has it all.

Do you remember the story a few years ago about the two guys that met online and one agreed to let the other one eat him? Well this here is the movie version of that little story and all I have to say is “What the fuck?” Man this is one twisted-ass little tale and one really twisted-ass little independent, foreign movie.

Here’s the break down kiddies, one character known as “The Cannibal” wants to eat human flesh. “The Cannibal” is perverted and bizarre to say the least, he likes to watch pigs be butchered and in his spare time he likes to crawl around on the floor biting the penis off of small clay sculptures. He also tries dating from time to time, but when he tells people of his desire to eat them, he normally gets punched in the face, that is until he meets our second character in this flick known only as “The Flesh”.

Now as messed up as “The Cannibal” is, well “The Flesh” is just plain fucking good old fashioned crazy. “The Flesh” wants to be eaten, yup, but more than that he wants to eat a little of himself before he buys the farm to, can you guess what he wants to chow on? If you said “his cock?” you’re right!

So after hanging out and banging the hell out of one another for about two days, shown in all it’s fully graphic glory, “The Flesh” decides it’s time to go for the gusto and get this whole thing underway for the end game. But “The Cannibal” doesn’t want to let go of his pet just yet, so he gets bitch slapped and ridiculed for a few moments, and then this flick really begins to change gears.

What you are about to see is inspired by true events. According to the F.B.I. there are an estimated 1.4 million violent crimes in America each year. On the night of February 11, 2005 Kristen McKay and James Hoyt went to a friend's wedding reception and then returned to the Hoyt family's summer home. The brutal events that took place there are still not entirely known.

This is what we are told at the beginning of the movie. Trust me, this gives NOTHING away, but establishes a very basic plot. When this movie came out I was excited to see it. It looked like it was going to be really scary and very well done. I just finished watching this last night and amidst the hype, I just wasn't impressed.

There's not all bad in this movie though, the story, while very basic does get pretty tense. In the scenes where the creepiness factor is needed, it's turned up several notches. This makes the tension in those scenes so thick you can almost cut it with a knife. Sadly, this is also one of the movie's downfalls. Once the tension is gone in a scene it doesn't come back for a little while. Nothing like dangling a carrot in front of your audience.

Torso starts out with a naked woman and the disturbing eye gouge of a doll before the opening credits even start, then moves on to a threesome during the opening credits. So hey, it’s already got that going for it. Oh, and the victims are all pretentious art students. Bonus!

After a mysterious be-gloved killer takes out a couple of their friends with a scarf, a group of college students decide to head out to a friend's country villa. Too bad the killer has followed them and traded in his scarf of death for a hacksaw.

I wasn’t expecting much but Torso (I Corpi Presentano Tracce di Violenza Carnale, or Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence) was a surprisingly good giallo in the style of Argento. There isn’t anything here you haven’t seen before but the story was plausible, the cinematography gorgeous and the acting didn’t suck.

The kills and the gore are only so-so but stay for the incredibly beautiful women (who are naked a great deal of the time.) Or, if women aren’t your thing then stay for the incredibly beautiful scenery. The story itself is a pretty good one, I didn’t figure out who the killer was until almost the end (although to be fair, I can’t even figure out whodunnit in an episode of Scooby-Doo, I’m that bad.)

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.

Quarantine
Torso
The Strangers
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

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.

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.