Rec 3 Genesis

The third of the Spanish Rec franchise which the American film Quarantine came from, though I don't normally like modern remakes or any for that matter it's one of the better Americanized films.The found footage motif is not the films primary focus, but it maintains the smarts of the other movies. Once the chaos starts it switches into a more cinematic mode.

Here a zombie outbreak takes place at a wedding reception held at an isolated resort like estate. The guests all fall prey to ... well we all know what happens in zombie movies, but this film take its chances with some of the conventions and upholds one of my golden horror rule. They don't pull punches a bunch of kids get eaten while trapped on a bus, though the scene is not very graphic, the thought that yes they went there worked for me.

The gore is in some ways plentiful, the imaginative amputation which takes place post zombie bit to stop and infection is a oh shit moment. This isn't trying to be Dead Alive but it takes it's self less seriously than the 28 movies. The main terror here is the survivors allowing sentiment and emotion to get the better of themselves and compromise their survival instinct. The Newly weds romantic inclinations brings them trouble more often than not, and goes to show all you bitches waxing romantic on your relationship status one moment then posting about a zombie Holocaust the next are all going to die should one ever occur outside of the whole salt smokers.

I had been looking forward to this one and it did not disappoint. The religious theme established in the 2 movie continues here. Plenty of smart camera work and the blood is bright and pretty. Sometimes the zombies are faster than others and their make up looks good but isn't over the top as they are pretty fresh and blood vomiting so consistent with the other movies, though if you haven't seen the other films while they are recommended just on the basis of being good movie, this movie can be seen as a stand alone.

A horror movie with the message true love doesn't last forever because once you are dead you just want to eat them, is very up lifting though there are times in the movie where the main girl you just want to slap and tell her to get it together , though she makes up for it by taing a chainsaw to the train of her wedding dress. Highly reccomended

the Rites of Spring

Director Padraig Reynolds first full length film Rites of Spring for the most part works well with it's meager budget thanks to camera work head and shoulders above what normally gets pumped out in the low-budget straight to video fare. Reynolds would have found it beneficial to turn the screenplay over to some one better skilled to handle it as the dialogue is hard on the ears. Budding scream queen Anessa Ramsey from the Signal and Yellow Brick road has one of the better performances here though it seems the director just let her default to ad lib standard victim dialogue and her character shows strength not really believable for a 5'1" 90 lb woman to posses.

Supporting actors preform in varied shades of bad, the gangster of sorts sub plots could have lent it's self to more opportunity for torture... or actually any I mean if you are trying to humiliate a guy and you have his wife tied up next to him. The monster motives were little iffy...ok a lot. So we have a red neck out in the middle of no where, who must be a pagan of some flavor holding a poor man's wicker man like ceremony to appease gods or what not, and if you know me you know i pay extra attention to the occult details when they pop up in horror, the mythos here was bland and unexplained which made every thing else that followed less believable.

The monster, while i am glad to see an ancient something that is not your run of the mill monster, was a slasher who carried a farming implement and had less of a personality than the thing from Jeepers Creepers which is what this movie most closely resembled to me. Some of the standard conventions were broken as the wander off and get picked off one by one stereo type wasn't prominent. The gore could have been laid on thicker. I mean if you are making a horror movie in this day and age , you gotta know the bar has been raised when you have shows like True Blood on tv.

This elevated it self on a production scale to be a greater quality than some of the hideously low budget efforts I come across online, so it's watchable and not bottom of the barrel though , Anessa aside the acting is on the weak side and the writing lacks any attention to detail. if you like low budget horror and are one of those people who has a hard time finding anything new, then it was more watchable than Midnight son, but not very compelling and never scary. The boobs quota low though there is one scene where a girl gets her clothes cut off as she hangs in a barn with a goat mask on that i thought was the films best moment. Otherwise I would say the movie was a let down.

50 Shades of Grey : 120 Days in Boredom & A Look at BDSM in Horror

50 shades of Grey despite is humble beginnings as Twilight fan-fiction might be on the far outskirts of what I would cover here, but BDSM has thematic relevance in horror, I find the Hammer Horror Spanish Inquisition themed movies to be more my flavor of BDSM, than the Sweet Valley High version of it in the current New York Times bestseller. From Twilight I would think a girl would graduate in Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series, we have angst ridden paranormal romance with a bite and some do though they tend to be girls more entrenched in geek subculture, who also grew up with Buffy.

Vampires are depicted as the forbidden fruit in paranormal romance, a sub genre which sprung from vampire themed romance, even pre- Twilight, the ground where the Sookie Stackhouses sprung from. Beauty and the beast is a common concept in Horror ...King Kong, Hunchback of Notre dame and Creature of the Black Lagoon all have this element to varying degrees. Sexuality has been demonized since man needed religions to provide security, so fiction has had its monsters to embody them. Over the years the aesthetic of the beast has been more keenly preened. The monster now sparkle and the vampires appear more like bodice ripping hunks, something Bela Lugosi was not.

The Male lead in 50 Shades, shares most of Edward Cullen's qualities, an enigmatic past and while seductive is the forbidden fruit as a Millionaire who is only willing to have contractually bound BDSM relationships rather than the fairy tale romance the female lead wants. I'm not sure how this is a conflict as his ideas seem like a good plan to me and like Bella, this Anna girl is a drama queen who gets scared away by a big climatic spanking she asked for so Anne Rice your Sleeping Beauty books have nothing to fear, nor does any of the Post-Obsidian Butterfly Anita book. In fact the sex is pretty vanilla the same thing it just moves from a bed to bathroom and other domestic locales. Anna could be paranormal a fey or succubus because she has the power to make a guy cum the first time she ever attempts a blow job, so I guess more is revealed in the later two books which I have no intent in reading.

I prefer my torture porn.It's more honest. The control is the factor where this fanged chick lit is more the fantasy of being controlled. It all comes from the very pulpy source called the damsel in distress. This goes back to ancient mythology where Perseus saves the princes who is chained to a rock to be sacrificed to the Kraken , you know it got horribly re-made a couple years ago. In the Middle ages after St George and the Dragon, we got Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Snow white, Disney made these iconic to little girls everywhere. Then 1001 Abrabian Nights featured many of these damsel in distress themes, which Ray Harryhausen would give these proper treatment well before he got around to the Kraken.

It wasn't until Marquis Desade's 1791 story Justine, that the repressed sexual element of this was explored and if any of you ladies out in the inner webs found yourselves fapping to 50 Shades then you need to look into Desade's work to get a better point of reference after all sadism is named after him and it's safe to say the author of the chick lit you think is so kinky isn't going to face the last 13 years of their lives in prison for writing it.

Then the slew of silent films featuring in the "Perils of Pauline" mustache twirling villains tying the helpless female to railroad tracks, leading to King Kong and Nosferatu. King Kong made the woman tied up in a loin cloth whisked away by the ape popular and theme of pulp for years, though this to some extent was racially based metaphor for black men and white women, it still played on a fear and spear chucking natives more often than not sacrificed a blonde woman to the beast.

Nosferatu is as ugly as a vampire could get yet there was more sexuality in his feeding than all the Twilight books combined. This served as a metaphor for venereal diseases running rampant during this time period and no surprise the resurgence of the sexy vampires in Anne Rice's homo-erotic tomes became popular at the height of a.i.d.s awareness.

From here as sexuality became more explored in western culture, these iconic themes remained in horror and sci-fi to the masturbatory glee of erections everywhere. Universal monsters marched back to their castles and swamps with buxom beauties draped over their arms in mass.

Then Psycho came out and every thing changed, women were naked in showers and getting slice and diced everywhere. It was a very Freudian study in mother issues being displaced onto victims and one of the best movies ever made. Marion Crane wants to break away from being an office drone and runaway with her lover, tries to steal money and is punished by taking a shower in the Bates motel. It was 1960 so slut shaming was at it's peak.

Putting an end to the summer of free love the more debasing element of rape came from the grind house films of the late 60's and early 70's in some way as a call and response to the booming feminist movement. Interestingly to feminist who get up in arms about this sort of thing some of the hottest movies of this time period like Ilsa She-Wolf of the S.S and any of the women in prison films feature more Woman on Woman debasement, granted geared towards a male audience. As a student of this sub-genre I own a file of the 120 greatest grind house rape scenes which i pause and rewind to get a better comprehension of the art form. My studies show most of these films are about the forced stripping of the victim as the primary mode of debasement. By the late 70's the slasher genre took this and ran with it in a way still emulated by those movies today. From there we have the Devil's Rejects.

Rumor has it Damsel in Distress has become a popular sub-genre of fetish related porn known as did, of course my exploration into this would be for research purposes only as I am an avid church burner...I mean church goer.

So what are the chances any of the Twilighters or Grey Shadeys willing come over to the dark side and start watching Visitor q or a Serbian film styled sadism, well that is largely in the hands of film makers, if things like the straw dogs re-make, where the rape is apologetically filmed like a sex scene from 500 days of Summer rather than a 120 days in Sodom, then it looks grim, but the closet sadists in Hollywood need to unite and take over, reclaim their balls and say we are making this for our inner 15 year old, then things might be looking but I think foreign film is more likely to make this happen i'M looking at you Korea...come on Norway put the trolls away I know you got this in you lets see some Nazi themed slashers I know you have been repressing as you try to put all out that behind you. Submissives have the victim power on their side and it will always be catered to as it requires only estrogen to fuel it, yes male subs you are emasculated, but not to worry there's still another Twilight movie on the way.

Despite the popularity of the Rubber-man in American Horror story , where rape was the key plot point and side from Nurse 3-d, there's not a lot of horror coming out at all Zombie wouldn't surprise me if he included some naked bound chicks getting sacrificed in Lords of Salem. So let the gimps go hungry and and here's hoping for some real sadism in print or film. I won't start plugging my book "Obsidian Rex" xoming out this fall yet, but there could be ugly vampires into bdsm in it just saying.

True Blood Season 5

In juggling shows the excitement leading into the kick off of True Blood season Five was not as feverish as previous season. While the show has succeeded in bringing blood-splatter to small screen ans some suspenseful moments , like the Harris books it rides the line of dark fantasy rather than horror, but these days we take what we can get.

Spoilers Ahead...



This season picks up where it left off even recapping slightly as to the logistics of the killings that ended last season. Pam is really being stepped in her dialogue and will be a show favorite by the middle of the season if she isn't already. Lafayette goes from a break down to having an attitude all in the span of taking a bath. Sookie is well.. the least developed in the this episode and the tone of the show seems the sub plots take more precedence over her , namely her brother Jason as his interactions with the turn preacher now scorned gay lover of sorts as well as Jessica's fleeting affections. So there soap opera element is dialed up in this regard.

Bill and Eric seem like they are going to be juggling the big bads and leaving Bon Temps to deal with Vampire Tara, which like the Vampire Diaries both shows seem to be falling into the trap of turning every one into something , which makes being a monster less unique, granted Vampire Diaries is jumping the shark with it where Ball is still holding the back woods charm and knows the human element is the shows bread and butter ...up to a point.

If you are expecting Russell or any of the big bads to come busting into this season guns blazing don't hold your breath as the tone is basically being set here.

Sam and the were-wolf thing is so far re-moved from the book I could careless and while I like his character makes it more appropriate to go grab a diet coke and check my email , much like some of Tara's subplots in earlier seasons.

Jessica doesn't have any competition as to being the hottest character on the show by far, Bill doesn't seem to be aging a gracefully as a vampire should, Eric is too thin and appears to have lost substantial muscle tone, and Sookie has become increasingly bland as the series continues. Even Ball himself has stated the aging actors as a reason for the show to wrap by next season. Right when it seems the writing finally got where it needs to be . My hopes for the season aside from Jessica getting naked is some of the threads from the books are realized like Lafayette getting killed,the witch room mate and aren't we supposed to have the were- tiger by now? Not to mention Bubba.

Prometheus

Prometheus is the pre-quel of sorts to the "Alien" movie, though a little connect the dots is needed and we are looking at the "Space-jockey". The familiar tone of the whole things aren't going as we planned in space is also similar to the Alien franchise. There is the almost human android, but over all it feels more Isaac Asimov and the first hour and`5 minutes is hard sci-fi. The horror elements creep in with a pitter patter and the movie never goes for the throat like "Alien", which creeped you out before any chest bursting. It's o.k that in space no one can hear you scream, because the screams are minimal. The tension and sense of claustrophobic danger from the first films isn't present, even when people go wandering off it caves. The almost Tangerine Dream like soundtrack doesn't help with it's blips and groans to build tension.

Fassbender despite his nefarious programming is the most likable character.I like his study of movie to learn to be a human, sure "Short Circuit" did it as well but unlike Five he does not want to be alive. However some of the characters ambiguity leaves you to expect things to no be as they seem.
I can where the appeal of seeing it it 3-d on the big screen would have its appeal is the first twenty minutes or during the observatory simulator.But the actions scenes are so quick I don't think the manner in which they are presented benefits from 3-d. There are even some cgi elements that make me suspect it would even cheapen it. So do you go to see movies for the spectacle of it ? Are you easily lured by bright shining things that go boom? If so then I'm surprised you are reading if not more surprised you are still reading this blog. But similar to Inception , I going to to question the cinema savvy of any one who says this is the most amazing movie ever or anything paralleling that moronic view point. This is not to imply the film is not well crafted , it is and the acting accomplished what it seeks to do, you find yourself disliking Charlize Theron as intended.

There are some well did I how did he just figure that out holes, but they are more or less forgiven, though one of the more glaring reveals at the end may or may not irk you depending on the size of the magnifying glass you are holding the movie up to. This is going to be one of the main hurdles the movie has , it living up to the first to films. The expectations leave it in a place to do damned if they do damned it they don't, distancing it's self from the other films is not the movies strong points, yet in comparison to the other films it drags depending on what you want it to be. A good question to ask yourself before throwing down the 12 bucks is "did i Like 2001 Space Odyssey?" Because it closer in pacing that those films,The closest to horror isn't when the creature appear, their first appearance remind me of the trash compactor monster from Star wars, but when Noomi Rappace's character induces surgery on her self in a device that is heavily foreshadowed.

While my hopes were perhaps a little elevated, I wanted more from the films front end, though the agnostic questions the premise asks were enjoyed , in the same way I see the His Dark Materials series as the agnostic answer to the Chronicles of Narnia. Lets face it a lot of quality sci-fi that's not a big dumb Will Smith vehicle targeted for a simpleton audiences shoveling the pop corn away are few and far between so we should be thankful for what we get here. So it's a mixed bag, I feel it's success is in asking the more philosophical questions for most great sci-fi asks these...Ender's Game, Stranger in a Strangeland, Neuromancer. But I wanted a horror movie.

Either torture porn has jaded me or this just doesn't seem as repulsing as "From Beyond" when it comes to the creepy crawling, though I love Stuart Gordon and would like to see what he could be if given this kind of budget...can we say "At the Mountains of Maddness"?...Ridley Scott knew what to do with the budget and after the trailer for Agento's Dracula 3-d , this will be the only "Horror" movie (and I use the term loosely) worth seeing. The craftsmanship is the only quality that keeps the first half from being a bogged down bore. The bottom line is it's excellent work that could have used the same balance of horror the first film benefited from to be the classic it wants to be.

The Pact

So after a Sun Dance appearance the Pact went to straight to video on demand, which is a shame because this movie has potential if a studio marketed it properly, and changed the name. As I never saw any indication of a pact being made . The Killer in the Walls while more fitting would not put butts in seats either. While on a sparse budget writer/director Nicholas McCarthy made the most with what he was working with using lighting and the tension of silence to create scares. The story has a familiar Lovely Bones them of I'm haunting you til you find my killer/body/bury me peacefully theme. The little blood is negligible.This one clocks in at only two scenes of bloody violence. As far as boobs go normally not into blonds Caity Lotz runs around well in a confused break down wearing her under pants and has a tied up over head shot of her as a damsel in distress. I can't seem to place her 3 episode role in Mad-men, but remember her from the Mtv mockumentary style horror reality show about vampire killing cops . Haley Hudson does a good job of playing a spooky meth'ed out psychic. The concerned buddy cop role, is left cut in card board, but that is one of the movie's few flaws. This movie is smartly made the typical soundtrack builds precluding the boo! moments are non existent and even with some of the Paranormal Activity moments stays pretty realistic, unexplained disappearances not included. So fans of the haunting sub-genre of horror will find this worth there while, even though a serial killer plays a plot point role, true crime gore-hounds need not apply. Sure without Sam and Dean's zaniness at times it might feel like a across between Momento and Supernatural. Sure we get the twists coming from a mile away and the plot shift occurs earlier than you would expect, but was handled well and takes the tension up a notch. The film has enough creep and supernatural to be horror, though leans in the direction of thriller.Not unlike metal fans who expect double bass and growls in order to be metal, this movie plays it with restraint so rigid genre fans might not classify this as horror. The happily ever after ending in my book doesn't help it's case as a horror movie.But I was on the edge of the bed with the no don't go in basements for a few seconds here and there, though I'm a sucker for a haunting.

Chernobyl Diaries

This makes up for Dark Shadows, and I'm always a fan of movie monsters that aren't Zombies, in aside from World War Z, I think I'm done with zombie movies though I'll give rec 3 a shot. The deceptive trailers made this appear to be a found footage movie and it's not. Though it does have kind of raw cinematography to it that bring to mind 28 days later, Cloverfeild or Monsters. The premise is a little more Hostel at the beginning, the escapades of tourists in Russia. I assumed it to be a little more Silent Hill and though in tone that element is present in some ways it has more grit and not based in supernatural. Sure some mutant on tourist rape would have been a wonderful addition, what it doesn't show you is whats scary, the director plays his cards very close to his chest While the characters fall into the don't go into the basement victim cliches, the claustrophobic tension is maintained, not unlike the Descent. The scares are smart and effect minimal. The acting is convincing enough, even though only Devin Kelley's character comes across as likable, however, Olivia's Dudley's cleavage could have used higher billing and more of a starring role, here's where the mutant rape could have been put to good use. The gore is minimal, and the deaths happen off screen. The creatures for the most part are kept in the shadows and this plays to a effect than if they had shown up looking like the Toxic Avenger. The movie's atmosphere and the feeling of the characters peril is the movie's selling point. The only flaws really lie in how annoying some opf the characters becoming when they are coming unhinged, but perhaps his was what the director was trying to illicit. Considering the competition as far as horror goes this film is with out peer in the current market...unless you count Cabin in the woods, which almost seems like a different genre in comparison. So if you are a fan of horror who has been starving by the current drought of movies, then don't miss this ...as how sure can we be Prometheus is going to be horror and not sci-fi? Does Abraham Lincoln Vampire hunter even count ? All these questions and if the Apparition is going to be worth a damn will all be answered by the summers end.