Tucker and Dale vs Evil is built on a simple germ of an idea – what happens if you use the hillbilly-slasher framework, but portrayed from the hillbillies’ perspective? And what if said rednecks are actually innocent sweethearts, the “murders” caused by freak accidents (that are hard to describe without mentioning Rube Goldberg)? It’s a…
I was expecting, thanks to its marketing, The Loved Ones to be a tongue-in-cheek horror movie, with a broad, comedic take on the prom night slasher film. I certainly hadn’t anticipated the gutpunch of an early scene where a girl drives alongside a dog, who, recently stabbed, pants futilely for air. It gets darker from…
The fifth film in the Wrong Turn series changes setting again, moving from a mental hospital in the Bloody Beginnings to a small town in the middle of a music festival. Bloodlines introduces a genuine antagonist –named Maynard – with substantially more intelligence than the gibbering inbred psychopaths rampaging through the earlier films (though they’re…
Bloody Beginnings does its best to bloody up its beginning as quickly as possible; after a scenery-chewing psychiatrist speeds through the necessary exposition – we’re at a West Virginia psychiatric hospital filled with incest-mutated psychopaths who can’t feel pain and, of course, “There’s a button to open all their cells in case of fire,” duh…
This entry in the Wrong Turn series is the weakest so far. It follows a group of escaped prison inmates (plus supporting ‘victims’ – prison guards, police and a civilian). Like Wrong Turn 2, it features really clumsy introductory dialogue establishing these characters’ personalities; unlike Wrong Turn 2, you don’t get the sense that anyone…
This straight-to-video sequel establishes a tonal shift from the relatively serious Wrong Turn in its opening scene. A young starlet spouts hammy dialogue into her mobile, speeding along country roads in a red convertible, before a deformed hillbilly literally splits her in two with a hatchet. The scene is far broader – and more enjoyable…
Wrong Turn begins with a tense, understated mountain climbing scene, competently shot and edited. It’s an encouraging start. The credits are comparatively lazy, using a Se7en-esque sequence to flash a bunch of silly exposition – shots of headlines with “Inbred-induced psychosis” etcetera. Yes, it’s one of those: another hillbilly horror film. Wrong Turn is populated…
The underlying concept of Cabin in the Woods is nothing special. It’s a horror movie that’s also a satire of/commentary on horror movies, but that’s not uncommon after Scream (and April Fools’ Day and Friday the 13th Part Six before then) – in fact, it’s got to the stage that mediocre horror movies can be…
Watching Cabin in the Woods, this guy (Fornicus, Lord of Bondage and Pain) made me wish there was a film about him: it seemed like it would be a classy gothic horror flick. Turns out he’s a direct reference to Hellraiser, but Hellraiser wasn’t exactly classy: in fact, it’s the best kind of B-movie. Pinhead,…
The Bay isn’t the best found footage film of 2012 – that was Chronicle, which told its fairly standard teen superhero story by pushing the boundaries of the genre – but unlike Chronicle, The Bay plays fair. The context is an environmental-horror tale of a small town decimated by an (initially) unknown pathogen, framed as…
ccpopculture 