Teens Are Salty: Jennifer's Body (2009)

Jennifer's Body (2009)
Rating: ***1/2
Starring: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried and Adam Brody

In the small sleepy town of Devil's Kettle, lived two girls who are the best of friends; the shy, conserved bookworm Needy Lesnicki and her posh, cheerleader friend Jennifer Check. The two girls have almost nothing in common, with Jennifer having the body that gets the boys drooling up to her, while Needy only has (other than her books, her glasses and her boyfriend, Chip) the sheer will and friendship with Jennifer to live with in her near non-existent life.

However, one fateful night will drift them further from one another when a mysterious band called Low Shoulder comes and a freak fire accident mysteriously starts in a bar full of townsfolk and teens. Needy and Jennifer were at the scene and no soon after the fire, the band takes Jennifer "home" and, somehow, turned her into something worse: a flesh eating demon thirsty for the blood of young teen boys.

As Jennifer begins her orgy of flesh eating, blood draining, mayhem, Needy struggles to fix everything back to the way it is before her friend kills every fresh boy she gets. 

What I saw in Jennifer's Body is the very same type of teen-oriented horror flick that nearly flooded the late 90s, though with the restraints on realism bent and more humor added in vein of morbid and cheeky tones, all the while still retaining that cynical teenage garbles.

First of, the film stood its ground on two of its main casts: as Jennifer, Megan Fox have the looks and created a gal that is the ultimate queen bee with some personal issues. Not much is said, but regularly hinted that she's not all right with her life as a cheerleading "it-gal", allowing Fox to try and be "flexible" enough to be hot, funny or miserable when called for.

Second in line is Amanda Seyfried as Needy, Jennifer's bestbud since kiddie days and probably the only thing keeping Jennifer going even before she got possessed by a demon. What I like about her is that, in a context, she's much like Jennifer; despite being awkward and nerdy (check out those horror posters in her room! Evil Dead FTW!), she's actually just as complex and pretty as her admired buddy, even as far as being comparable. Seyfried did a great job making this character funny in that natural, snarky teen sense, even as she starts to deal with the changes going on with her life and of Jennifer's.

Now, setting aside the strong performances of its two female leads, Jennifer's Body is often compared as the Juno (2007) of horror flicks, not very surprising since the film's writer just so happen to be the same gal who penned the aforementioned teen flick. The result is a quirky, pop culture oriented film done in an angle of bloody mayhem and gutsy slasher narrative, giving out some sincere moments between casts while impressively dishing out some gory kills. The only problem, though, is that the film has its moments where the humor isn't that catchy and the main focus on the two leads leaves many of its cast either thin or annoying. (Like that dorky girl who claims everything in Wikipedia is true. Lies. Bitch, not everything in Wiki is true! Heck, it once called The Innkeepers a slasher flick. Slasher my ass...)

The male casts have their moments of recognition; Adam Brody as the lead in the band Low Shoulder created a character that's quite a charm in the eyes despite his little hidden agenda and overall smugness. Johnny Simmons played Needy's love struck buddy Chip, who despite his minimal screen time, is all the nerdy rooting one can ask in a teen flick. (Although he has a long way to go on being as respectable as Derek from My Super Psycho Sweet 16 (2009) or even Randy from Scream (1996).)

Now concerning its grue, I have very little to complain about; it's CG viscera for some but it's not as obvious as some computerized gore ends up. The killings are either done off-camera or obscured and, strangely, the build-up and the impact has more on dark comedy in it than fear. Yes, there are moments of grief, especially that one funeral scene where a mum shows her bereavement over the realism of her son's death but, more or less, sometimes you may get a chuckle or two with some of the film's own comic mechanism, not that it tries to hide it or anything ("Lasagna with teeth"?), which may also reckons some to disagreement.

Jennifer's Body isn't exactly for everybody; the jokes may not appeal to everyone within the mind set it's aimed at, especially since the film's mix bags genre of comedy, teen drama and horror's jumbled all over the plot. I'm not even sure myself what to make out of this film, other than the point that I did enjoy it to some extent, but I can agree with many that the film lacked surprises with its predictability and many slasher cliches.

There were also some unexplored themes that the film started out with such as High School politics, feminism and even Jennifer's own social life outside her flesh-eating side-persona, all left alone due to the narrative's main focus on the rampage through Needy's point of view. It would have made a more interesting watch if we actually found out what made Jennifer tick as the whole thing was just hinted between scenes.

Still, anyone looking for easy entertainment that relies very little on the grey matter and more total teen drama, cheese and dabs of humor, Jennifer's Body might count as one. More of a teen comedy than horror, despite the gore, dread and supernatural subtones, there's no denying it's still aimed for horror audiences and it's still a passable one at that. Just look at it this way: it beats watching Twilight.

No offense, Twihards.

Bodycount:
7 victims caught inside a burning bar
1 male disemboweled and eaten alive
1 male mauled and eaten
1 male killed offscreen (flashback)
1 male mauled, bled to death
1 female gets a boxcutter to the chest
1 male seen dead
1 male seen drowned in bathtub
1 male seen dead
1 male seen dead
1 male seen stabbed on the heart with a knife
Total: 17

Short Shear Terror: It's just a Movie (2011)

It's Just a Movie (Canada, 2011)
rating: ***1/2
starring:  Paul Whittington and Jeff Carpenter

Does it really make us monsters for liking a monster? Can a single film really damage a child's mind that bad? And if it can, why the hell are you letting them watch it anyway?

An experimental art film about the perspective of horror media to the censors. Told in a gory manner, the stop-motion art-film had two key scenes that runs all through-out; a pro-censor man in his sermon about the evils of violent horror films, of how it can affect the little youngin's noggins with all that grue and gore. While the first half had this guy talk of censoring and stopping movies like Cannibal Man, The Driller Killer and Toolbox Murders, the next scene, however, goes into an artistic approach to this matter. It suddenly shows that the Pro-censor man, now holding an axe, laughing away as a VHS hopes inside a player, only to be "hacked to death" with an axe. Assuming it's ole Censorman's handiwork, the scene is just played-out bloody as sprays of bright red began to spill and splash out of the machine. The short ends with the VHS hopping out of the machine "wounded" but soon killed, and the TV smashed with a sledgehammer. A shard finally decided to talk back with a message that we all can agree with.

Simple yet stylishly bloody (or gory in a machine's point-of-view), It's Just a Movie is a horror film for horror fans; straight out of a real-life nightmare, it takes us back to the dark days of Moral Panic and the notorious Video Nasty bannings. Honestly, though, some of the movies in that list does kinda deserved to be banned for other reasons, but the short's message is clear to us. The censors had once threatened creativity, unfairly bashed these films due to their nature, single-outed as the main reason why kids went bad those times. Everybody from religious nutjobs to political pigs had easily pointed fingers to this misunderstood genre, threatening its existance, but in a way, also hyping it. Right now, we're kinda lucky that the censors had loosen up a bit today, and thanks to the help of video releases and the cult status built from all that censoring, we all can enjoy these films uncut and free from judging eyes. The film talks about this in a way we all can understand as a horror fanatic, and in a twisted sense, it terrifies us cuz we know what the images meant.

Bodycount:
1 Betamax Tape hacked in half with cleaver
1 VHS player hacked to death with axe
1 Betamax Tape smashed with sledgehammer
1 Television smashed with sledgehammer
total: 4

Golden Title: Jaws (1975)

Jaws (1975)
rating:*****
starring: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss

Typical sex=death formula

Daybreak, a young woman had left a party on the beach in favor of skinny dipping into the open waters of New England's Amity Island. Her boyfriend playfully, yet in drunkenness, follows her until he passes out, leaving his gal to go into the waters alone. But a simple tug, and a sharp pain, had her viciously thrashed back and forth into her death.

Amity's police chief, Martin Brody and Deputy Hendricks later finds her remains on the beach, easily regarded as a shark attack. In hopes of preventing any further attacks, Brody asks Mayor Larry Vaughan to close the beaches until they got the waters cleared, a suggestion overruled in favor of tourist income from the upcoming Fourth of July and dismissed the death as a boating accident. But it wasn't for a moment when another shark attack occurs, this time taking the life of a young boy, the film's most gutsy scene, which enraged the mother into staking a bounty for the animal.

The bounty attracted hunters, including one professional shark hunter Quint, and forced marine biologist Matt Hooper to re-examines the early victim's remains and unarguably concludes that it was a shark attack, not a boat accident, that killed her. When a shark was caught by the hunters, the town felt relief believing this was the shark that killed the young boy, though Hooper begged to differ. After being refused to do an open autopsy of the shark, Hooper asked for the aid of Brody to take the shark's remains and found out that the shark hadn't eaten any human remains. A spotted shipwreck with a larger bite mark was found later, indicating an altogether different animal from what was caught earlier.

As the Fourth of July came, another shark attack estuaries, killing a man and left Brody's son, a witness, in shock. Seeing that the shark problem had gone too far out of hand, Vaughan was persuaded to agree in hiring Quint to catch the shark, who in turn reluctantly had Hooper and Brody tagged along to help him in his vessel, the Orca, with the chum line and hooks.

After repeated brief attacks from the shark in early encounters, it all leads to the very day the shark decided to rear its raw nature at them. After a long chase, Quint harpoons a barrel to the shark and had it tied to the stern, but the shark drags the boat backward, breaking water unto the deck and flooding the engine. But in an attempt to suffocate the shark in shallow waters, Quint overstalls the boat.

Now stuck in the middle of the ocean with a shark waiting to eat them, the group attempted to spear the shark with a hypothermic spear filled with strychnine, inside a shark-proof cage but failed when the animal unexpectedly attacked and forced Hooper, who volunteers, to drop the spear. Hooper managed to escape  to safety, leaving Quint and Brody to face the animal when it leaps to the boat's transom. The attack tipped the boat and slid Quint straight into the shark's maw, eating him. Now alone, Brody took one last shot to kill the savage; finding a pressurized scuba tank, he managed to shove it into the shark's mouth and aimed at it with Quint's rifle. Climbing to the sinking ship's mast, he took a clear shot to the tank, which explodes and blew the animal's head to pieces.

Bigger boat? How about Bigger GUNS?

Now with the shark dead, Brody, and a surviving Hooper emerges, to paddle back to Amity Island, both had faced their fears and shortcomings, as seagulls begin to flock on the shark's corpse, pecking at the once great beast.

Jaws is the movie that made Steven Spielberg's directorial career after his cult fave Duel, showing how much of a phenomenally skillful and artful director he is. The changes from the novel actually seems wise enough to entertain his audience; taking the novel's primary plot and did all the necessary tweaks and timing to make his movie all the enjoyable.

Based on Peter Benchley's bestselling novel, which arguably darker in comparison to the film, Jaws can be best described as a movie of two halves, which mainly be the reason, too, why Jaws happens to be a fitting review here; the first half is where the gruesome turns had its fill. One at a time, innocent people are munched alive by a preying shark, dubbed "Bruce" in production, in a manner not to different from this blog's main entre', the slashers. The shark's repeated attacks added notoriety, as well as class, brought flair in the film's construction as it slowly evolves into an ocean adventure that is the second half, wherein the masculinity of the three men are put to the test. (Brody's fear of drowning, Hooper's inexperience with water)

As far as it is going for as a thriller, Jaws's build for suspense is a high note that had brought success to it; the film's famous score, for one, had acted as a suspenseful doomsayer on its own of sorts, warning the viewers of the approaching danger that is the animal. Attentive viewers would notice that, during the prank scene, the motif is absent, hinting that the danger is far from it, but devilishly turning as yet another man is killed no soon after the prank. The theme is widely recognized as a raw-natured, yet wildly provocative tune.  Other than that, due to some budget restrains, the shark had enough time to be openly present around the bridge to the second half, spending most of its time around the first half visually obscured through point-of-view shots underwater, as well as violent flails of the attacked, tapping sorts of primal fears of the unseen and the unstoppable. It is terrifying without the need of visceral effects and delightfully entertaining without the need of hammy one-liners. (though "We're gonna need a bigger boat" is catchy as it is) More to add the effectiveness of the climax where the trio had to face the shark.

Hooper and Quint

The three main men of the film are a likable bunch; Roy Scheider took the role of  Brody as a everday everyman, who finds himself in an extraordinary predicament, forced to fend off his fears to rises to the occasion. Dreyfuss as Hooper had his character as brash enough for a scientist to not come off as wimpy or as self-righteous as he was in the original novel, a change I'm more than happy to see on the big screen as he changed from antagonist to Brody's trusted friend, the very backbone of the movie. Lastly, we have Robert Shaw's Quint, one of the most memorable modern-day Ahab, whose background as a survivor from a sinking USS Indianapolis warship during the War in the Pacific in 1945, making him a foe most formidable against ole' "Bruce".

I like to see Jaws as a film best fitting my taste for high class movies meet my taste for bodycount horror, just as Psycho or Dressed To Kill did. Stephen Spielberg sure had a long way since his mega-success today; with a mega franchising, the film had stray much away from the modern day Moby Dick story in its sequels, theme park rides and yes, the merchandising; its legacy as a Summer blockbuster horror flick that warped a simple story to a cultural phenomenon is a tad too big to not be impressed about, bringing that much fear to the waters as Psycho did to warm showers.

Speaking of showers...cover up, man!

Bodycount:
1 female ravaged by shark
1 bot eaten by shark
1 shark speared to death
1 male found dead underwater
1 male ravaged by shark
1 male bitten in half by shark
1 shark had its head blown off by a shot air tank
total: 7

Slasher Masks of the Week Vol 17

Five slasher masks, randomly chosen, falls under my verdict, every week. 

here's this week's meat:

Hot Fuzz: The Neighbourhood Watch Alliance may be one of the silliest, yet grooviest band of killers I've ever seen, but in this action-slasher, I got to admit, they know how to dress up! Simple, yet intimidating, nice!

Purvos: Never heard of this film, but the mask...kinda sucks. I dunno, we got too many zombie masks out there...

Zibahkhana- The Pakistan slasher-zombie hybrid, perhaps the only Pakistan zombie-slasher hybrid in the world. I'm still trying to look this one up, but so far, I'm digging that mask! Kinda sacred looking...

The Wisher/Spliced- I recall seeing this number back when I was ten and now, I can see how...cheap it is. Mediocre, yes, but boring? A bit. Anywho, the killer dons a simple make-up and wig to cover his identity, and so far, it works. Just wished he'd been more smarter...

Severance- Death to Palisade says these locals; unrestrained animal urges to kill never looked so good in simple masks. A little satirical, but who's counting?

TV Terror: Harper's Island (2009 TV Series)

Harper's Island (2009 series)
Rating:***1/2
Starring: Elaine Cassidy, Christopher Gorham and Matt Barr

I'm not much to speak when it comes to TV series. Honestly, I prefer watching movies than television dramas for the same reason why I don't own a lot of comic books despite being a comic book fan.

For me, I prefer seeing a whole event under one sitting as I don't want cliffhangers nor do I like the fact that I have to see a previous episode just to understand what's going on. It's frustrating in my case, hence why I stick to miniseries, both in my comic books and TV shows.

Now, Harper's Island was introduced to me as a commercial and I recall not really caring much about it. Heck, even after seeing one episode, I ignored it for a while until I saw one scene that caught my interest: a man tied and drowning underneath a boat with his head near the propellers. The moment the boat starts its trip, off goes the unfortunate fella's face.

By then, I said to myself  'Okay, you got my attention, TV show. Hit me with your best shot'.

In Harper's Island, a murderer named John Wakefield took the life of six locals at the titular location and one of them happens to be our protagonist's mother. Said protagonist is Abby Mills, who comes back to the island seven years after the massacre to face her demons and, at the same time, celebrate her bestfriend's wedding. However, it seems someone is killing off the guests one by one. As the local police tries their best to investigate and stop these murders, this proves to be easier said than done when one suspect to another are getting killed off themselves, leading to a conclusion that sent chills down on everyone: John Wakefield's back.

Harper's Island finds its strength on the gimmics of being a slasher film mashed into a teen TV drama. It was marketed with a tag line promising 13 weeks, 25 suspects and only 1 killer, thus resulting to an extremely large cast, made for the picking in a "Mystery Event". It doesn't really stray much from its slasher roots, a reason why it got hold of to me so easily as we basically have here stereotyped casts with not-so-stereotyped personalities get sliced up. It's nothing that suspenseful, nor new, but the overall romp of having us watch and anticipate the deaths and the identity of the killer who just so happens to know everyone too well is simply fun at the very least.

Promisingly, each episode has to show at least one death, with a minor character dying off within the earlier episodes before cutting down the main cast in the latter, much like how the good old bodycounters back from the days worked. And to top it all off, the kills are pretty good too! Gory at times, shocking in another, and while it's no gore hound's feast (it's a TV series after all), the kills are fair on their own and I really prefer my slayings to be as old-schooled and as random as possible. Harper's Island answered that for me, so that's another point for this treat.

But just as any slashers made over the past fifty years and ongoing, there's no denying the fact that Harper's Island is guilty of two common crimes this sub-genre keeps committing: cheese and cardboard red herrings. Since the cast waters down in each episode, more than one in some, the murder mystery angle thins down altogether that it soon becomes too obvious who's doing the killings; John Wakefield did appear in the latter episodes but his initial appearance was too soon and made it too obvious that he ain't working alone. Other than that, we will also witness a lot of melodrama that may eat some time and build up some cheese as even the killer just had to share his own thoughts about his slaughter. Kinda funny seeing a cool killer like Wakefield express his parental instincts later on but until then, there are enough murders to keep our minds jarred, enough trivial mystery to keep us glued to our screens and probably the excited expectation of a good death somewhere in between.

TV horror is fun, in a mild and somewhat guilty way, and for the 13-episode slasher film serialization Harper's Island, it's quite easy to accept it at least as a good time-passer. It knows its way around the sub-genre and I'm pretty thankful for that as it provides cheesy thrills, a good murder spree and a plot that is not so complicated. A bit melodramatic, but horror fans can find a thing or two to enjoy from this television show that's smart enough to end it all in a single season. 

Bodycount:
1 male dismembered by boat propeller ep1: Whap
1 male hacked in half with a head spade ep1: Whap
1 male decapitated with an axe ep2. Crackle
1 female seen hanged ep2. Crackle
1 female doused with lighter fluid, set abalze ep2. Crackle
1 male had his face shot off by a rigged shotgun ep3. Kablam
1 male shot his own leg by accident, bled to death ep4. Bang
1 male had his face split open by a falling head-spade ep5. Thwack
1 male impaled on a harpoon ep6. Sploosh
1 male had his head split open with a head spade (flashback) ep7. Thwack, Splat, Sizzle
2 females and 1 male seen murdered (flashback) ep7. Thwack, Splat, Sizzle
2 other victims mentioned (implied in flashback) ep7. Thwack, Splat, Sizzle
1 male dismembered offscreen ep7. Thwack, Splat, Sizzle
1 male shot on the back ep8. Gurgle
1 male pinned to the wall with shot arrows ep8. Gurgle
1 male found bleeding to death from stab wounds ep8. Gurgle
1 female found dismembered in half ep9. Seep
1 female found with garden shears stabbed into her back ep9. Seep
1 male and 1 female shot down ep10. Snap
1 female killed, later found hanged ep10. Snap
1 male had his neck snapped with noose ep10. Snap
1 female gets a boarding knife to the gut ep11. Splash
1 male gets a boarding knife thrown to gut, slashed to death ep11. Splash
1 male found with throat cut ep11. Splash
1 male gets a boarding knife to the chest ep11. Splash
1 female suicide, dropped herself off a bridge ep11. Splash
1 male had his head shoved to memo holder, impaled in the eye ep12. Gasp
1 female gets a buck knife to the side ep12. Gasp
1 male gets a buck knife to the back ep 13. Sigh
1 male gets a buck knife to the chest ep 13. Sigh
1 male hacked to death with billhook (flashback) ep 13. Sigh
1 male gets a boarding knife ran through his gut ep 13. Sigh
Total: 36

Swimming With The Fishes: Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

Humanoids from the Deep (1980) (AKA Monster: Humanoids from the Deep, Beneath the Darkness)
Rating: ***
Starring: Doug McClure, Ann Turkel and Vic Morrow

A species of humanoid amphibians starts to surface in a small fishing town, looking for females to mate with and a few others to kill and devour. Since this is the first time the town is seeing these freaks, some sort of explanation is needed, hence comes a trio of concerned citizens, including a fisherman, a bashed Native American, and a scientist who may know something about the mutations. But when the humanoids begin to murder more innocent lives and violently molests buxom girls, could they make it in time to stop these creatures from rampaging at an upcoming Salmon fest?

Thus setting us off to 80 minutes of pure B-flick wonderland full of boobs, blood and men in giant frog suits! Executive produced by Roger Corman, who had handled a fair number of slasher titles before such as Chopping Mall (1986), Stripped To Kill (1987) and Slumber Party Massacre II (1987),  Humanoids from the Deep actually felt more like a sleazier mish-mash of 50s sci-fi monster flick and a little known supernatural slasher flick I like to call The Incubus (1982), hellbent on delighting fright fans with a plot so obscure it's bound to be crazy entertaining!

Good things to come from this film would be it's quick pacing and the pretty insane scenes that go with it, cycling around fish rape, fish kill and, uh, fish monsters so you can bet it's easy to follow. The overall silliness of the dialogue and a hefty number of slimy monster attacks to make the entire movie jarring to sit through if one's not in the mood for hammy monster exploitation and would probably set off the idea that Humanoids' made entirely just to entertain horror fans with a taste for the bizarre, cheesy and bloody. (So those who're into deep stories, character development, emotional twists and whatnot. Seriously? I can understand that if yer looking for general horror, but this is a slasher blog! We worship the cheese, simplistic plotting and bodycount!)

The monsters themselves kinda prove my point of this film's sole purpose to entertain through corniness; they're fish men with long arms, bulging brains and seaweed draped on their backs. I'm pretty sure the production only have three suits because every shot of one whenever its in a rampage looked like as if it's shot from different angles and edited to make it appear as if there's a gaggle of them. That might be far from the truth, all I know if that the big bastards are unintentionally funny, so I'm looking pass their rubbery hide and accept these monsters for the joke that they are. Besides, any kind of monster man enough to rampage through an entire festival celebrating Salmon is bound to earn some respect! Especially if these scenes just so happen to be the very climax of the film.

Humanoids from the Deep pretty much fails as a high class monster flick that ole Roger Corman was trying to disguise it as in hopes of attracting big names to take part on it but, despite the Gouda-laced characters, exploitative monster attacks and glaring plot defect, as a B-flick with a bodycount and horny fishfolk, it definitely works in my book. Better to be enjoyed with our brains turned off, that's for sure!

Bodycount:
1 boy dragged underwater, killed
3 males immolated in explosion
1 dog strangled, mauled to death
2 dogs found mauled and disemboweled
1 dog seen clawed on the side
1 male had his face mauled open
1 male had his back clawed open
1 female presumably killed
1 monster brained by a thrown crowbar
1 monster shot with rifle
1 female and 1 monster immolated in car explosion
1 monster shot with rifle
1 monster shot with rifle
1 monster shot with rifle
1 monster shot with rifle
1 monster shot on the chest with harpoon
1 monster shot with rifle
1 monster shot on the head with rifle
1 male thrown to the water, killed
2 males mauled underwater
1 male mauled underwater
1 male had his neck clawed open
1 male had his neck broken
1 male bearhugged to death, gut clawed open
1 male had his head torn off
1 male mauled
1 male had his neck mauled open
1 male had his neck mauled open
1 male had his chest clawed open
1 monster brained with rock
1 monster shot with rifle
1 monster shot with rifle
1 monster shot with rifle
1 monster had its head bashed open with wooden plank
1 monster beaten to death
1 monster stabbed to death with kitchen knife
1 female had a baby monster bursts out of her womb
Total: 42

Happy Mother's Day!

It's the second Sunday of May, so bring out the mothers!

here's sum catalogs of some mother related monstrosities
Mother's Day (1980)
Mothers Day (2010)
Macabre
The Final Terror
Inside
Friday the 13th

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY TO YOU ALL!

Mum's Angry Bush: The Final Terror (1983)

The Final Terror (1983) (AKA Campsite Massacre, Carnivore)
Rating: ***
Starring: John Friedrich, Adrian Zmed and Ernest Harden Jr.

A good way to fully appreciate a backwoods slasher is to look for its other strengths besides its location. We all have been treated to summer camps being terrorized by a hunting knife-wielding maniac, or campers falling prey to redneck monsters, all in the sense of a survivalist situation most likely inspired by Deliverance (1972). So what makes The Final Terror (1983) a little special? Probably the fact it tries to be Deliverance.

It opens with random shots of nature; trees of every angle, birds chirping and wildlife doing their wildlifey things. A couple in a motorbike then wheels into scene, only to be later killed off by an unseen loonie, one of them through a spring-based trap I'm glad to call the Rusty Can Lids of Death!

Things continue after the credits with our assorted male victims, boot camp trouble-makers of sorts, in for an adventure holiday in the woods along with some ladies. The only thing wrong with this picture other than the fact I watching grown men singing three blind mice on their way to the woods, is Eggar, who hates them and is hated in return, tasked to go along since he's the only one authorized to drive their bus. After a prank gone wrong, the group later find themselves stranded in the woods, with Eggar missing and someone in a camouflage hacking people with a billhook.

Now, before you could say this might be just another backwoods slasher, well, you might be right; it has all of the tropes and trappings of the usual teen-terrorized-in-the-woods plot, though there's no denying the fact that Final Terror is a cheap production as there are problems with the lighting and the kill effects have their dodgy moments. There's also not enough exploits and murder in this bodycounter, with only one sex scene that also doubles as the film's bloodiest murder, yet with a good acting cast and set-pieces, this movie did pull off some rather distinguishing choices that may not leave that much of an impact, but I do appreciate nevertheless. What Final Terror lacks in gore, kills and titillation, it does make up with a strong focus on suspense and atmosphere, spending most of the the latter half trying to work a survival story in which our hapless victims have to outsmart the killer. It can be sluggish at times, but it entertaining for how moody it can be, even sporting a cool-looking killer and boasting some lush cinematography for its backwoods settings.

May qualify as average for some, but if you just have to rent something for a while and is in a pateint mood, The Final Terror (1983) is a good pick!

Bodycount:
1 male found with throat cut
1 female slashed by can lid trap
1 male hacked to death with billhook
1 female found with throat cut
1 male had his heel cut with billhook and falls to his death
1 female impaled on a spiked log trap
Total: 6

Throw your Gramma!: Granny (1999)

Granny (1999)
Rating: **
Starring: Sava Popovic, Katie Dugan and Tomi

Surely, we all have our curiosities when it comes to bizarre slasher entries that's rarely heard or talked about. That one title you're sure no one would bother picking up unless it's the only thing to see on a boring weekend night and they're open to kill a brain cell or two.

Mine was this short yet painfully testy teen slasher Granny (1999), a simple tale of eight college students who just wanna hang out one night. Alone. With no care in the world. In a house in the middle of a secluded forest. (And as we all know, houses in a forest are definitely safe) But after a serious (boring) talk concerning phobias, they suddenly hear crying coming from the basement. One of them volunteers to check alone (cuz it's safer that way, right?), only to find a maniac in a hag's mask and biddy clothes, waiting for him with an axe to grind. Literally.

Granny gets out and starts killing the teens who just happen to keep doing the dumbest shit anyone of this genre would do, thus starting a night of cliched slasher trappings, low-budget gore effects and an uninspired ending to tie it all close. For a movie of measly 58 minutes, it sure felt longer!

I maybe saying this cuz I have my expectations set a tad high but its definitely a feat to make something so short feel so tedious. In fact, for a post-Scream slasher, it practiced more of the cliches rather than knowing and avoiding them, something that I fail to see would improve the movie's already weak scripting and plot, more so point out the film's painfully low logic from beginning to end. Now I know like any slasher fans out there that logic isn't this subgenre's strongest point but a little could have graced this film! You just had to split up when everybody is dying, right? Or go and kiss your boyfriend for some minutes, knowing a killer is out there filleting your friends? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!

I can see only cheese lovers would get a fix out of this as no matter how bad Granny (1999) is, it does win at the factor of being a hammy flick. The killer Granny themselves win some points on how creepy they looked and then there's the nostalgic 80s vibe of the film, with a score that screams synthesizers to murder set-pieces that defies reason but nevertheless entertaining. I couldn't bring myself to say this film is a definite flop; its short running time and cool killer should had gotten this film an easy cake walk but it soiled itself of every possible opportunity of improvement by being dumber than usual. 

Its small cult following sure proves this film's minimal worth but of those in search of anything better, don't bother. Cheesy slasher purists only.

Bodycount:
1 male hacked on the head with an axe
1 female stabbed to death with a carving knife
1 male clubbed to death
1 female had her neck broken
1 male gets knitting needle to the eyes
1 female asphyxiated in a plastic bag
1 male killed offscreen
1 female suffers a heart attack
Total: 8

Porkhead Mules: Madison County (2011)

Madison County (2011)
rating: *1/2
starring: Ace Marrero, Katie Stegeman and Joanna Sotomura

Sigh, well, there goes my hype.

Again.

ugh, again? when will these kids learn?

What can I say? It's technically the same backwoods slasher you'd seen over the past two decades; college kids going into the woods to do a project only to be hunted down by a masked loon.

Should have been easy enough on its own but somehow director and writer Eric England thought it would be a better idea to do a conspiracy tale based on the grisly murders that nearly ate the whole running time talking about it. In fact, it's not hard to imagine that everybody living in the nearby cornpolk town are hiding something grim if these folks are so weird as heck that only the dimmest group would not suspect them of trouble. Nobody from this sub-genre ever did though. So, I point my question: is it really a bad idea to rid the world one dumb person at a time?

Well, it depends on your democratic position but we might get off the topic here. Let's get back on the review.

As I said, there's nothing special about this flick. Nothing. It has blood. It has a decent bodycount. Some slow pacing in attempt to do good tension but all this lacked anything big to keep it worthwhile. There's a few scene that stood out for me, one was where our porkheaded killer toys with his catch by wailing along a victim, hacking them to death with an axe soon after. Other than that, it's a plotless generic horror flick that's criminally even full of plot holes and crappy editing.

The only saving factor about this film is its killer, Damien, a horribly scarred psychopath who's forced to wear a pig's head carcass to cover it up. I like his look. I like his build. He's something simple with a mask, But what "killed" him to be anything more terrifying was that the entire flick was shot in daylight and I really think he would had looked cooler in the dark. Still, that rating you see there was pulled off from the wailing killer alone so, yeah, this film owes that much to its freak.

At least the film's tag line totally understands its audience: "Pretend you're somewhere else" sounds like a pretty good idea! I'm gonna pretend I'm not watching this and I'm seeing Death Stop Holocaust instead!

Bodycount:
1 male stabbed on the gut with kitchen knife
1 male gets a broken baseball bat through the mouth
1 female hacked to death with axe
1 male stabbed to death with kitchen knife
1 female knifed to death
total: 5

Truth Kills: Truth or Dare (2011)

Truth or Dare (AKA "Truth or Die") (United Kingdom, 2011)
rating: **
starring: Liam Boyle, Jack Gordon and Florence Hall

Not to be confused with my fave bad-cheese, ultra-violent, Shot-on-Video classic Critical Madness, Truth or Dare is less of your typical slasher and more being a psycho-thriller with torture porn and revenge film elements.

The story tells an older brother's vengeful attempt to milk out the truth from five teenagers who happens to be with his younger brother one night he was humiliated in a party. Trapped in a cabin at gun point, the group is forced to reveal what they know in a vile version of "truth or dare", where you tell the truth or die lying.

Of course, it's not all that simple as becomes more complicated the further it reaches the climax, but before that, Truth or Dare does its best to be a sort of SAW clone where victims are forced to confront the past and even their own personal demons. Worked at some point, but overall, there's a pacing problem and a lot of scenes just doesn't spark quite right.

For one, Truth or Dare practices casting unlikable characters for the sake of being meat for a random and unpredictable kill, may it be from the captives or the captor(s) themselves, each with their own secrets kept which later fuels the story at the near end to a full drive. They're all guilty, and the film did some good scripting to keep us glued and guessing who's to blame and who're to live, but with a cast full of suspects, I was really hoping to see good torture or kills in this one. The kills were okay, but they're not as intense or special that it'll get me to rate this film any higher; ironic coming from a movie whose title's based on a game, I was expecting a lot of torture/killing methods for "dare" choices, but they kept it simple, hardly knocking.

It could be me, however, when I said that the biggest letdown was that this film's ending felt a bit anti-climatic and even gloomy for me. Not gonna spoil much, but it revolves around suicide and the most undeserving survivors I've seen. As if the overall simplistic murders isn't bad enough, they had to mess it around the damn plot with a twist that just doesn't work. At least for me.

Until then, the Truth or Dare was a good run. Doesn't show much, but it's easy to follow and the narrative will keep you anticipating for what will happen next. As a thriller, it does it job, and nothing else.

bodycount:
1 male ingests acid
1 male shot on the head
1 male head blown open with shotgun
1 female neck broken
1 male slips, head-first, to a rake
1 male and 1 paralyzed male decimated with grenade

My name is: Tony (2009)

Tony (United Kingdom, 2009)
rating:***1/2
starring: Peter Ferdinando, Frank Boyce and Lorenzo Camporese

I heard very little about Tony other than the fact it centers on the life of a loner who's obsessed with action flicks and has a nasty habit of murdering people. There was nothing else and the simplicity of the story got me intrigued but never enough to go looking for it until, as of writing this, I got my copy a few days ago at a bargain store and it certainly is just the life of a serial killer.

Tony Benson, who spends 20 years of his life unemployed, lives alone in an apartment, watches action flicks all day, hardly socializes, and occasionally lures people into his home, drugging them and then killing them.

It's nothing complex, nor extreme, but a look into a serial killer's life was never an easy experience. What makes Tony an interesting character was that there's very little hints to why he's doing it all; clearly he's a sociopath and a psycho, but why he became this way was hardly clear, making the whole movie in-media-res of his madness and simply places it that he's just crazy.

True enough, there are no clear pattern to not only his murders, but also to this life as he can be seen trying to mingle, get a job, go to gay bars and attempted to do drugs, but his belief that he's different from them all kept him from adjusting, even as far as talking to his reflection and calling himself a "soldier" and then a "pile of shit". At times, he tries to stop the murders but he just couldn't cut it that easily no matter how much he wanted to.

I'm seeing a lot of similarities in Tony with serial-slasher films such as William Lustig's splatter-slasher classic Maniac or the cult-fave Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer, wherein the one of film's biggest strength came from the portrayal of the titular character. Playing Tony is Peter Ferdinando, who's looks and scrawny built made Tony a random psycho that can really appear everyday. He has this calm fatigue but the way he acts shows how confused and desperate his character was, a performance forced a lot of awkward scenarios that's both pathetic and disturbing. There's also some sort of social commentary concerning the underbellies of London, not entirely different from Maniac only Tony focuses more on the day time monstrosities from the homeless to drug pushers, portrayed with a slight sense of grim realism despite it's horror core.

However, in contrast to Maniac, the murders are nothing that extreme. Most of them occurs offscreen, while some are just too tame. Least the camera work was lavishing, and too the cinematography of the film which features some beautiful shots of London.

Another thing that I've felt anomalous about was the missing boy angle; it's there to build tension and forces viewers to guess whether our titular killer did went as far as child murder, but in the end it all lead to nothing, ending on a final shot that's too open for some people's taste.

Tony might be a film of easy pleasure but it's disturbing and perverse enough with some dabbled bits of morbid humor. It's also a film worthy of attention but I wouldn't say it is going to be for everybody.

Bodycount:
1 male asphyxiated in a plastic bag taped over his head
1 male seen dead
1 male seen dead
1 male brained to death with hammer
1 male strangled with cord
total: 5