Vae Victis: Open Graves (2009)

Open Graves (2009)

Rating: **

Starring: Mike Vogel, Eliza Dushku, Iman Nazemzadeh

While vacationing in Spain, American surfer Jason gets a free antique board game from a creepy dude with stumps for legs. It's called Mamba and the goal of the game is to dice roll your way to the middle of the board, where you drop your token into a model of a snake-headed tower and make a wish. Supposedly, it'll grant said wish true, but for every dice roll that land on an "open grave", players are hindered by a card draw which may contain a cryptic, rhyming message about their fates, thus kicking them out from the game.

So, yes. It's cursed. Very. 

That news comes very late for some of Jason's companions who lost at the game when they decided to try it out for shits and giggles. One gets nibbled and pinched to death by bad CGI crabs. Another gets bitten to death by bad CGI Black Mambas. A girl gets aged to death, while another gets a low-budget Final Destination-style outing. Frankly, it's all very mediocre with a laughable amount of cheese due to how dated the computer effects were for the deaths, creature effects and some oh-so-spooky shots of ghostly apparitions. 

To be fair, Open Graves (2009) has a neat idea, but its direction and execution lack the proper grit and flair to make the story scary or thrilling enough to be above tolerable, leaving us with a monotonous and uninspired letdown of a movie despite all the little things throw in. The second act, for example, practically rips off Wishmaster (1997) with the whole "I'll fix this by wishing to undo everything" shtick, only it's easier thought than done as the game has a terms and conditions to be followed, which further complicate matters, add more minutes to the run time and gave the game more personality than the characters piling up the kill count. By the end of it, the film was simply going nowhere new or exciting, which might be okay if you're just in it for the ham and disappointed laughs, but we can certainly do better than this mess.

Bodycount:

1 female tortured to death

1 male found flayed

1 male falls off a cliff, eaten alive by crabs

1 male bitten to death by venomous snakes

1 female rapidly aged to death

1 female caught in an explosion, burned to death

1 male shot to death

Total: 7

Island of Misfit Boys: Grand Guignol (2022)

Grand Guignol (Japan, 2022)

Rating: **1/2

Starring: Rio Komiya, Riku Ichikawa, Rina Koike

The word Grand Guignol pertains to short plays that were popular in 19th century Parisian cabarets for emphasizing violence, horror, and sadism, embracing shock value through illicit subject matters and over-the-top practical effects as entertainment. This seems to be part of the case for director Hashiimoto Hajime's homoerotic slasher Grand Guignol (2022) which does feature a splatterful amount of bloodwork for its murders, as well as a bout of surrealism which makes its basic premise of a typical backwoods horror flick a bit more... odd.

After getting involved in an incident where a student got his face mutilated with a box cutter, Homura Itsuki sees himself transferred over to a boarding school set at a solitary island where only troublesome kids get to attend. All communication to the outside world is cut, the staff running the joint are unnervingly suspicious and there's a study group dedicated to the art of Grand Guignol drama, the strange scenario gets even more uneasy when a new teacher waltzes in and starts making advances to some of the boys there. That, unfortunately, is little compared to the violent figure out prowling the woods, decked in animal skulls and armed with a razor-sharp chain flail. It isn't long before this thing starts to hunt down students, though it seems this hack-and-slash gig may not be the only craziness going around in this island...

Independent J-horror does have the tendency to go overboard on the bloodletting and craziness, something Grand Guignol (2022) can attest to seeing it's basically running on extreme gore, murderous cults, backwoods bodycounting and an abundant amount of homoerotism. If anything, this movie has the vision to be an outlandish queer horror flick and it does succeeds on that at a decent level, albeit on a noticeable budget and a lack of solid direction; as a slasher, the effects are practical yet shoddy, nowhere impressive on a technical sense but delivers greatly on the messy blood and gore. The killer's get-up also leans on the cheap and silly side considering it kinda resembles a suit of confetti decked out with a badass mask consisting of arranged animal skulls, making the maniac look awfully like a walking, stalking piñata from hell!

The homoerotic elements are ever-present with how much the boys here get on with one another, though it's less emphasizing on romance and more on shock factor, especially when it dives into taboo subjects of forced feminization and creepy adults prowling on younger victims. In fact, the horror of Grand Guignol (2022) is more on the intensity of the madness and kills, focusing on nightmare logic, sexualized depravity and macabre violence thinly disguised as the work of dark supernatural forces and the maddened individuals under its command. The end result succeeds in drawing out the explicitness of its overt violence and fetishisms, as well the over-the-top insanity that is this movie's arthouse plotting and tone, pretty much in tune with original Grand Guignol stage plays that inspired it.

An over-the-top mish mash of the sensual and the savage that comes with a rough edge and spotty quality control. Not exactly a good example of queer horror done right, but it win points for just how off-the-wall bonkers it is! 

Bodycount:

1 male slashed to death with a bladed chain flail

1 male repeatedly slashed with a bladed chain flail, decapitated

1 male stabbed through the gut with a sword, gutted

1 male had his skin flayed off with shearing tools, dies from injuries

1 male shot through the mouth with a shotgun

1 male repeatedly bashed with a sledgehammer, neck snapped

1 female bashed on the head with a sledgehammer

1 female dies from a sword impaled through her back

1 male stabbed on the gut with a sword, bashed to death with a sledgehammer

Total: 9

They Don't Need A Reason: The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)

The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Ryan Bown, Matus Lajcak

The way I see it, the most important thing to remember about remaking a movie is to tell the story of the original through a different set of eyes. Find the best parts that people love about the source material, keep them and then come up with something familiar yet original around it. The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) may have missed a note or two about this.

Couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) were driving to Seattle for a job interview when their car broke down, forcing them to stay overnight at an AirBnB. The two talk and cuddle, think about what the future holds for their relationship, kiss, have dinner, all of the sugar you'd expect a happy couple does. The diabetes is soon interrupted by knocks on the door and a figure in the shadows asking for someone named "Tamara". When they answered no one of that name lives there, the figure leaves and everything seems alright. For a while.

When Ryan decided to ride back to town and check up on the garage that's fixing their car, Maya is left alone to chill until she started hearing creepy lullabies being hummed somewhere, as well as getting the gooseflesh after spotting more shadowy figures lurking about. It isn't long then that all the eerie and crazy shit begins to happen upon her and her lover as three masked figures prowl the house, playing a demented game of cat-and-mouse with murder in mind.

Admittedly, The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) does look easy on the eyes in terms of visual quality and production but, sadly, that is all I could say that this movie did right as everything else is a real misfire; for one, the new main couple feels cheap for how thinly they're written, lacking any depth or relatable flaws to help raise the stakes once the masked goons start attacking them. We see them get terrorized and maybe feel a little scared for them, but it just doesn't have a hard enough gut punch to make their predicament distressing. Petsch and Gutierrez did give their all to play their roles with a tad more spark to them, but the effort just wasn't enough to effectively work a thin script and we're basically left with a caricature of a doomed horror movie couple.

As for the slasher attack itself, The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) is more or less a loose, beat for beat retread of the original movie's home invasion assault with minor differences. We see the couple run and the strangers making chase. Ryan finds a weapon only to kill someone by accident. The two then getting split up during the chaos only to be hunted down and brought back to the AirBnB for a recreation of the iconic final scene where the strangers stab them with a knife. The film try spicing things up by setting most of the action out in the woods and have the strangers act more like hunters looking for prey than creeps toying with their victims, but it also made the mistake of building potential suspects by introducing a nearby town full of creepy townies who eye the unmarried couple as if the two are conjoined in the arse. With this, the creep factor is just gone as there's no lingering mystery to who could be behind the masks as we're now provided a small community full of them, killing off the scare tactics of a random house attack and setting the plot back to tired horror trope of unwelcoming small towns.

And that's what's frustrating about The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024); it has the opportunity to try a different angle towards the titular murderous trio and their killing spree, but the film would rather play safe and retell the same movie with nearly nothing new added. It lacks life or dread. It's tired and recycled. The whole thing is just dull. A beautifully shot yet dull backwoods slasher. Hopefully Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, which are supposed to be released either later this year or at the next, would do better.

Bodycount:

1 male hacked to death with an axe

1 male shot on the head with a shotgun

1 male knifed in the gut, bled to death

Total: 3

Do You Love Camping?: KillHer (2022)

KillHer (2022)

Rating: ***1/2

Starring: M.C. Huff, Emily Hall, Jenna Z. Alvarez

Yeah, you lot have heard of this song before: a group of ladies drive up to the mountains to camp, only to meet their demises at the hands of a psycho. It's the backwoods slasher and it is pretty much a staple in the horror subgenre for its simplicity. KillHer (2022) could've been another round of your typical "people go to the woods, people get killed" plot and for a while it is. Until it isn't.

Mattie is about to get married to a hunk named Jagger and to celebrate this happy occasion, she and her bestfriend Eddie plan a camp out deep into the mountains with Mattie's two other best buds, Jess and Rae, as a pre-bachelorette party. From here, we can tell the dynamic isn't too peachy fine between these girls as Jess and Rae aren't too fond of Eddie's weird sense of humor, though they're toughening it out for Mattie's sake. This situation gets a little testy, however, when it turns out that Eddie have surprises planned out for the entire camping trip involving Jagger showing up at some point, seeing that he gave her the GPS location of where his camp's at. Mattie loves it, Jess isn't buying it, and Rae's just trying to make the best of the situation. 

Problems arise when, after the girls pitch their tent next to an empty one they assume belongs to Jagger, they're awfully surprised to find it occupied by a burly man named Mr. Rogers instead. The fella is gruff. The fella is big. The fella has a chainsaw and a gun back at his tent and he's not too pleased to be camping next to some loud girls. Night soon falls and the pre-marriage festivities of dancing around the bonfire and discussions of bear-related camping tips would soon pave way to something pretty concerning when a scream is heard, followed by the roar of a chainsaw...

Admittedly, KillHer (2022) isn't a slasher film in the strictest sense; it borrows the set-up of your classic backwoods horror-type, using it as a backdrop to what's practically a mystery thriller toying around with character motives and the plot's overall direction, playing up the tropes to hide where and what exactly the film's building up to. The first half of the movie, in turn, focuses solely on building its premise, who these girls are and what could be going on behind their little camping trip, often at times jumping back and forth to flashbacks that spill a little bit of what went on during offscreen scenes. It can get uneven pacing-wise, but I personally find the casts intriguing despite their flaws and the unconventional build-up to its unraveling plot have all the right twists, turns and revelations to keep me glued on the movie and focused. 

That said, the film would eventually dip into bodycounting elements for its thrills, spills and scares halfway into the run, right about the time our killer finally shows their crazy and the bloody mess that comes along with it, both figuratively and literally: one one end, the reveal as to who the real threat here isn't much of a surprise seeing how much the film works its way around subverting tropes and, in all honesty, the way the killer's characterized prior to the reveal was practically a dead giveaway. On the other hand, now that our villain isn't hiding behind a façade anymore, their delightfully unhinged shenanigans have them murdering in glee and plotting seriously messed-up scenarios for the perfect killing spree, just a real treat for slasher fanatics who love little villains with a bit of personality and mischief. It's a workable display of crazed kookiness, even more so when our killer opted to play with some of their victims by setting them up in traps where they're left to die, all the while continuing to taunt and mock them in their predicament just to further break their spirit. 

The backwoods nightmare would soon reach our lead gal Mattie as she's held at gunpoint and forced to discover the horrid truth about the entire trip, including the unkind fate that fell on her loved ones. This is when KillHer (2022) shifts its gear again and morphs into a cheesy action thriller as those who survive our sly maniac join forces to put a stop to them, arming to the teeth with ammo, combat knives and one mean travel van. The resulting brawl is as cheeky as it is gory and intense, a rather entertaining and oddly cathartic fight that closes on a 'feel good' note that's all but fitting to the tone of this entire fiasco of a camping trip. 

To put it simply, despite its snark and subversions, KillHer (2022) is a stab at the backwoods slasher tropes that's just buzzing with palpable enthusiasm for the subgenre. You can see it in its lively camerawork and witty writing, and too the gory kills and the demented killer responsible for them. It may have gone off its rails, sure, but that's just the fun of it! The craziness in its direction is a welcome approach, all the better to keep slashers fun and fresh! 

Bodycount:

1 female seen beaten dead with a rolling pin

1 male seen murdered in a bathtub with a knife

1 female hacked with a garden claw

1 male had his throat cut with a knife, bludgeoned with a trophy

1 male knifed through the jaw

1 female killed offscreen

1 male stabbed to death with a hunting knife

1 male shot to death

1 female stabbed with a hunting knife, gutted with a chainsaw and repeatedly driven over with a car

Total: 9

Shattered Glass At Midnight: Cinderella's Revenge (2024)

Cinderella's Revenge (United Kingdom, 2024)

Rating: **

Starring: Lauren Staerck, Natasha Henstridge, Stephanie Lodge

Once upon a time, in a kingdom far far away, there's a man who got himself framed for stealing the king's priceless jewels. A bounty gets put on his head and his wife, the heartless wench, is happy to help herself to said bounty. So she hired men to do the dirty deed of murdering him for the reward money, leaving the man's daughter, Cinderella, under the mercy of her stepmother and two stepdaughters who eagerly enslave and abuse her in many painful ways just because they can.

Some time passes and kingdom holds a royal ball, a gathering Cinderella is ordered by her stepfamily not to attend, otherwise a very severe punishment will be upon her for disobeying. Pushed to the limits of the cruelty she is subjected to, Cinderella begs whoever can hear for at least a night to attend this ball just so she could be happy in her troubled life for once. And very fortunately for her, the wish is heard and answered by a witty, benevolent and sassy fairy godmother, who is more than willing to bend the laws of time and space to bring in some top men from the 20th century such as designer Tom Ford, hairstylist Vidal Sassoon and footwear extraordinaire Christian Louboutin to help pizzazz the girl up from drab to fab~! 

Cinderella gets driven to the ball by Elon Musk and his Tesla, dances with the dashing prince who fell in love with her at first sight (much to the dismay of her stepmum and stepsisters), but she has to leave before midnight as the magic used to grant her wish can only last that long. A glass slipper gets left behind. The prince finds it and sends his people across the land to seek its owner. You know where this is headed...

...Except, not really: the next day, one of the prince's men makes their way to Cinderella's abode looking for the owner of the glass slipper, forcing her wicked stepfamily to bound her shut and lock her up inside one of the rooms while they try and fail to make the slipper fit. Which includes the whole toe-cutting gag that was originally in the Brothers Grimm book. Appalled, the prince's associate leaves with the slipper, thus taking away Cinderella's one chance of escaping her abusive family. Only, her ever-reliant fairy godmother don't think so. In fact, she thinks it's high time for the girl to stop being an absolute doormat and start standing up for herself. Take some real action against those who lashed at her with sharp tongues and cracking whips. Cinderella needs to take revenge on those who wronged her and our devilish fairy godmother just has the cursed mask to do it~

There's no denying that Cinderella's Revenge (2024) isn't a good movie. Not in the technical sense, at least. The effects are cheapened with dollar store props and too many CG visual works, the editing slopped up the flow of the story more than once and the writing is hammy to the point that the supposed horrific acts of abuse Cinderella endures fail to bring genuine horror. It's upsetting, yes, but it lacks a hard bite. Cinematography is nonexistent and a good bunch of the sets hardly impresses for how barren and lifeless they feel, but I will give the movie this: it made me laugh a lot! 

Direction-wise, Cinderella's Revenge (2024) takes a stab at satire by occasionally poking fun at itself, looping in weird anachronistic jokes and a whole lot of liberties on how the fairy godmother gets portrayed here as a caring yet psychotic guardian who is more than happy to suggest murder as a way out of an abusive household. It can and will be cringey, nonsensical even, but the cheese is undeniable and so does the unexpected laughs it brings. The slasher second act also delivers on the revenge elements well enough, which is plainly cathartic for those who always thought the wicked stepmother and the ugly stepsisters got away too easy in most of today's watered down depiction of the story. I do, however, wish that the whole killer Cinderella jig could have been more fantastical and carnal considering how brutal the original version of the story is with its eye-pecking birds and red-hot iron shoes forced upon the evil stepmother. Instead, we get the standard, by-the-book stabbings and throat cuttings, as well as a brutal beating with a croquet mallet. Nothing to loose sleep over but it gets the bloody job done.

Fairytale horror are often a hit or miss and Cinderella's Revenge (2024) certainly have more than enough misses than hits, but the sheer tongue-in-cheek of it all does save it from being completely unwatchable. Come for the blood, stay for the unintentional laughs!

Bodycount:

1 male decapitated with a sword

1 male gutted with a knife

1 female had her eyes plucked out, throat cut with a knife

1 female gets a shoe's heel to the temple

1 male stabbed to death with a knife 

1 female pounded to death with a croquet mallet

Total: 6

With A Cuddle And A Kiss: Basement Jack (2009)

Basement Jack (2009)

Rating: ***

Starring: Eric Peter-Kaiser, Sam Skoryna, Michele Morrow

A serial killer with a severe case of mommy issues, Jack Riley (Eric Peter-Kaiser), AKA 'Basement Jack' for his naughty little habit of hanging around in the basements of houses before slaughtering the families who own them, gets recently released after serving an eleven-year sentence and goes back to doing what he does best, leaving a nice trail of murdered households. All the while, Karen (Michele Morrow), the only survivor of Jack's last family hack 'n slash before he got locked up, is out tailing the madman in hopes of putting an end to his killing spree, doing her damnedest to warn everyone of the impending evil on two legs. (Yes, Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode rolled into one!)

The two end up prowling each other in a macabre cat-and-mouse game at the town of Downer's Grove, where Karen teams up with rookie cop Chris (Sam Skoryna) to try disentangling Jack's next move and targets, all the while Jack does his usual modus operandi of murdering families and creepily posing their corpses. As Chris and Karen get continuously chewed out for interfering with proper police work, thus ignoring their input on the investigation, we're also dealt with peppered flashbacks and hallucinations detailing what exactly caused Jack Riley to get this much loose screws in his head; long story simple, his mama (Lynn Lowry) loves to psychotically torture little boy Jack with 9-volt batteries and leaving him out chained to a pole during thunderstorms, so big boy Jack is warped in the head with a bloodlust for happy families. Particularly those with mums resembling his own.

Basement Jack (2009), in all honesty, didn’t really do anything new for the subgenre and it more or less suffers from common direct-to-video slasher pitfalls of overused CG effects, mediocre acting and oozing levels of fondue. It does, fortunately, approach its story with an interesting angle of making the killer a tad more fleshed out than your average masked psycho, generously focusing on his psychosis and the patterns to his madness which result to Jack being portrayed closer to how serial killers operate. There are times the movie almost feels like a character study for how much and often these little snippets of the killer's abused childhood get shown, only to share its limelight with the police work being done to capture our elusive serial slayer which does reduce a lot of the kills into offscreen massacres, the victims merely existing to be slain.

The last act of Basement Jack (2009) is where the absolute craziness kicks in, with Jack going further into slasher villain mode, donning himself a broken porcelain doll's mouth as a mask piece and wielding something best described as a wearable sword. By that point, we get a cop station massacre inspired by The Terminator (1984), littered with hilariously awful CG and some impossible yet outrageously fun kills, before going down on a brawl between Karen and Jack atop a hotel that's punctuated with a shot calling back to Halloween (1978) and an ending that reminds me of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). It's the kind of silliness that only a B-grade slasher can pull off and I love the fact that the film embraces its own shlock the further it goes down, even if some of it didn't exactly work. 

Not quite high art, but doable as a fun little timewaster that's a little more better than most video bin horror flicks!  

Bodycount:

1 female found beheaded

1 male found dying from his wounds

1 male repeatedly stabbed through with a knife

1 male found with half of his face missing

1 baby implied murdered

1 boy seen murdered

1 female found slaughtered

1 male stabbed in the gut with a machete

1 female found murdered

1 male gets a machete to the face

1 male and 1 female seen slaughtered with a machete

1 male gets stabbed though the gut with a machete, skewered unto a fuse box and electrocuted

1 male stabbed through the head with a machete

1 female stabbed through the gut with a machete

1 female seen slaughtered (flashback)

2 males double-scalped with a wearable sword

1 male killed with a wearable sword

1 male had an arm lopped off with a wearable sword, killed

1 male skewered through the gut with a wearable sword

1 female gutted with a wearable sword

1 female seen murdered

1 male seen murdered

Total: 24