Monday, November 9, 2009

Lethargic's HorrorFest Part IV

LETHARGIC'S HORRORFEST PART IV: THE ONE WITH THE REVIEW OF PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

48. Zombieland (2009) - We might as well start right off with the stuff that people will disagree with. Zombieland friggin sucks. It's a movie that does nothing but seem desperate to be cool from start to finish. I enjoyed finally seeing Woody Harrelson play a cool character again and I love Emma Stone enough to watch anything she's in but everything else about the movie was abysmal. The worst was this jerk dude who played the main kid. I fully believe the worst day in history was the day Michael Cera was born. He is the most annoying twit I've ever seen with his stupid emo, alternative rocker, too cool for the room, metrosexual non-sense. The way he talks, the way he walks, the way he looks, it all annoys me to no end and he plays the exact same character in every single movie. I get it! You're the shy, quiet, awkward, clumsy guy who always gets the girl because you're so much cooler than the quarterback. Apparently Zombieland was written with Michael Cera in mind and when they didn't get him they dug up some other annoying dork that looks, acts and talks exactly like him. So now I have TWO Michael Ceras to hate!!!

Outside of hating Michael Cera's clone, there are two more things that keep this horror comedy from working. There are two things that you need to make an enjoyable horror comedy. 1 - Horror. 2 - Comedy. This movie has neither. I laughed three times at this movie. At the Titanic joke, at the Garfield joke and at the.....I don't actually remember the third time, but I'll be generous and act like it happened. As for horror....what horror? For a movie called Zombieland, for a movie where the entire world has apparently turned to zombies except for a few people.....where are they? These people travel half way across the country and encounter about 10 zombies doing it. They drive through downtown L.A. and there's not zombies everywhere? Millions of people turned to zombies in a major city...where are they? Napping? If you promise me a movie where the entire world is zombies, I want to see massive amounts of zombies every-friggin-where! 305 million people live in the U.S. If all of them but 5 turn into zombies I don't think those 5 people will be able to go anywhere without seeing zombies every-friggin-where! But on the plus side, Zombieland was only the 2nd biggest disappointment of this year's horrorfest.....

49. District 9 (2009) - The teaser trailer for District 9 captivated me. It looked amazing and laid out the ground work for an entirely original, fresh take on the alien invasion movie. The full trailer wasn't as great as that teaser was but it still looked really cool. I was sooooooo looking forward to it. Yet.....only 10 minutes into the movie I got that bad feeling in my bowels. Honestly at that point I really wanted to cut the movie off because I did not want to be disappointed. I wanted to cut my losses. The person with me wouldn't let me cut it off so I was forced to sit through the whole thing and every second was painful. All my hopes for this movie crushed a little bit at a time with each passing moment. I honestly can't really say WHY I hated it so much. I really can't. It just didn't work for me at all. Everything rubbed me the wrong way. Like I started wondering what the aliens stranded on Earth ate. The movie soon answered my question by showing they ate cat food. That just annoyed me. It seemed so silly. Cat food? At least ALF ate cats. But I guess the main thing that made it such a disappointment was that all the originality I saw in that teaser trailer, never appeared. There was NOTHING in this movie that hasn't been done before. Take Alien Nation and combine it with Enemy Mine and that is District 9. Nothing original, nothing new, just more of the same old stuff with fancier computers.

50. Paranormal Activity (2009) - If there was ever a movie that should have disappointed me, it's this one. No horror movie has been this hyped up since The Blair Witch. The two movies have lots in common. Both were made for next to nothing but ended up making kajillions and both are shaky cam, fake reality movies. They also have plenty of differences with the most blatant being that I think Paranormal Activity completely blows Blair Witch away in every way possible. I'm not 100% positive, but I'm fairly certain, that this is the scariest movie I've ever seen. As you can probably tell I've watched a LOT of horror movies. Thousands. Yet if I sat down and tried to come up with how many times a horror movie actually scared me I don't think I'd need two hands. This movie not only scared me a couple of times but it actually made my heart rate go up. If a movie can make me think I'm having a heart attack I gotta give it two thumbs up.

I kinda hated Blair Witch and found it very over-rated but there were parts I really liked enough where I have watched it multiple times. I wished it had more of the scares and less of the annoying arguments. That's the main thing Paranormal does right. Instead of just having the one big scare at the end of the movie like Blair Witch did, Paranormal has 4 or 5 big scenes like that throughout its running time. The other improvement is the casting. The acting in Blair Witch was fairly terrible, but not in the usual way. They were OK actors, but they were supposed to be real people on a camcorder. I didn't think they were believable in that aspect. The couple in Paranormal on the other hand nailed it. For almost the entire movie I felt like I was watching real people in found footage and not actors TRYING to be real. That lent so much more realism to the movie than the cast of Blair Witch did.

But I know this will be a love it or hate it movie. People will hate it because of the shaky cam, people will hate it because of the hype, and people will hate it because of its success. If you're the type of person who watches ghost shows on TV or watches ghost clips on YouTube and you get that gnawing little creepy feeling in your stomach, you'll love this movie. If you think ghost shows are stupid, you probably won't like this movie. If you spent the 90s laying in bed, pulling the cover over your head and listening to Art Bell talk about aliens, you'll probably like this movie. If you don't know who Art Bell is, this probably isn't for you. If you think going to a movie is the perfect time to annoy everybody sitting around you by crunching on popcorn, rattling candy wrappers and shaking ice around in a paper cup, you'll hate this movie. If you're the type of person who can just sit there, pay full attention and allow yourself to be sucked into the world of the movie and go with it...you'll love this movie and likely have trouble looking at your bedroom door the same way for the next few nights.

Note: I have seen the movie twice. In the theater and in the home. This movie was actually made in 2006. It spent some time going around festivals and what not before finally becoming the big sensation it is now. The version people are seeing in the theaters now is different from the original version. The DVD of the original version has been readily available for quite a while. A lot people claim the movie was made for under $11,000 which isn't entirely true. The 2006 version was, but once Paramount bought it they spent a few more thousand dollars to re-shoot a new ending for the movie. Now, this isn't going to be another Rob Zombie's Halloween rant.....but it does rub me the wrong way yet again to watch the studio meddle with something that wasn't broke. The original ending was the right ending. It worked. It was scary. The problem? It ended the story. Once again, they can't let a movie just tell a story and finish it. They had to re-shoot the ending to make room for the inevitable inferior sequel, already in the works, where they try to defy logic and actually have lightning strike twice. It's just sickening. Just let this movie stand on its own and quit trying to milk it and run it into the ground. Don't make it another Saw franchise.

Even more aggravating is that they changed it to a very hack ending we've seen many times before. Nearly every single one of these friggin shaky cam movies end with the camera falling to the ground and the last scene is shot at an angle. Blair Witch, Cloverfield, Quarantine, etc all ended with that same damn shot. Paranormal didn't, until the studio felt that the movie was a little bit too original so they had to change it. Screw you Hollywood, I'm tired of your shenanigans. Let the talent create their vision and get out of the friggin way for a while.

51. Kemper: The Co-Ed Killer (2008) - Yet another super cheap direct to DVD serial killer movie. This one, based on Edmund Kemper, is probably one of the most faithful to the actual story. But that's like saying Ashley Olsen is the fat one. In real life Kemper killed several girls and then finished with his own mother and one of her friends. While trying to make his getaway he heard a news report on the radio about his mother's murder which discouraged his escape attempt and led to him turning himself and confessing. The movie version of Kemper is shown to be best friends with a homicide detective who he advises on how to solve murders. When the "co-ed" killings start, Kemper pretends to help the police find the killer until he confesses over the phone and then begins a long, drawn out cat and mouse game with the cop like Hannibal and Clarice. I don't understand why the people who make these serial killer movies can't just tell the true story. You don't need to pump up a serial killer. The true story is much scarier than this over the top master criminal non-sense in the movie. If you want to use a true story as the basis of your own fiction, fine, go for it. Make a movie called Franklin: The College Girl Killer and nobody would care that you changed the story. When they made a movie based on the Zodiac Killer and the cop, Dave Toschi, who was trying to catch him and it became Dirty Harry.....did anybody complain that it wasn't faithful enough? But if they had called the movie The Zodiac Killer you'd kind of expect a different movie.

52. Dark Floors (2009) - I picked this movie because it stars Lordi. Lordi is a big, dumb, horror metal band from Finland. They wear big, dumb rubber monster outfits when they play. They're funny so I figured the movie would be funny. I was wrong. It turns out that this movie was very....VERY....serious. It also turns out that this movie was very good. A group of strangers get on an elevator in a hospital, between floors the elevator stops and the electricity goes out. When the elevator finally comes back on and makes it to the next floor, they step out to discover that everybody else in the building has vanished and time has been frozen. The rest of the movie is this little band of people trying to survive and figure out what's going on. It reminded me a lot of the movie Cube which is one of my favorite movies. Eventually the group ends up battling these ghostly monsters played by members of Lordi and that's when everything goes wrong. When I thought this movie would be stupid fun, Lordi made sense. But this movie was really cool. It was pretty awesome. Then these idiots in their rubber costumes show up and just ruin everything. They don't belong. They are completely out of place. I can't fathom why somebody would ruin their own movie like this. It was still worth watching but Lordi pulled at least 2 or 3 skulls off the rating. Though I did get a kick out of how the Lordi ghosts actually showed up in the order of importance in the band. First the keyboard player, then the drummer, then the bass player, then the guitarist, then the movie ends with the big showdown with the lead singer. Even as monsters, lead singers are jerks.

53. Committed (1988) - I hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie.

54. Eden Lake (2008) - A pretty decent and brutal little movie from the UK about a couple going on vacation to the wrong lake. I will NEVER take another vacation in my life. I've never seen a movie where a vacation goes well. These two run into a group of teenage thugs and the kids end up going all Hostel on them. Some truly amazingly violent stuff in this one. Great family viewing.

55. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) - Another great 70s made-for-TV horror movie. Yet another young couple inherits a mansion which just so happens to be the home to little tiny demons. These little things decide they want to make the wife one of their own so they start annoying her. A pretty bad plan for making her want to be a one foot tall demon that lives in a fireplace. At first she just starts hearing their tiny little whispers. Then she starts catching glimpses of them out of the corner of her eye. Eventually she finally sees one and she's all AHHHHHHHHHH!! And then I'm all AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! And then the movie is over because it's only an hour and thirteen minutes. Very creepy little creatures in this one. Unfortunately it's currently being remade by Guillermo del Toro. I'm sure that'll be great. That was sarcasm.

56. Autopsy (2008) - I had high hopes for this when it started due to the fact that my favorite Clutch song was used in the opening credits. I figured that meant the director had taste. Actually it turns out that the song in the opening credits was the only good part. Watching this movie is like watching your favorite hockey team lose 6-1. Then come back and play another game and lose 6-0. Almost.

57. I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998) - Some people will watch this and think it is one of the worst movies they've ever seen. Some will watch this and think it is one of the greatest movies they've ever seen. I would fall in the second category. This is the final movie by Ed Wood.....sort of. He wrote this script way back in his glory years and always felt it was his best work. He was even quoted in an interview once as saying if his apartment ever caught on fire he'd run inside to save two things: his typewriter and this script. John Carradine and Aldo Ray agreed to star in the movie at one point but funding fell through and Ed never got to make what he considered his masterpiece. Decades later, a bunch of geniuses got together and decided to make Ed's masterpiece for him. But it wasn't enough to just make a movie from a Ed Wood script, nope, they really MADE an Ed Wood movie. If you watch enough Ed Wood movies and watch this you will not be able to tell a difference. It looks exactly like an Ed Wood movie. The same wooden acting, the same horrible camera work, the same bad editing, it's all there and it's all fantastic. It kinda shows you just how talented Ed Wood was when you realize how much effort these guys had to put in to actually match Wood's "bad" movies. Right?

58. Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008) - From the director who ruined Saw by making a bunch of awful sequels to it comes Repo: The Genetic Opera aka The Worst Movie Ever. It's almost sad to watch this. The concept and the visuals would lead one to think this could've been the next Matrix-like phenomenon. But somewhere along the way somebody decided that they'd make it a musical. Not like a decent musical like Moulin Rouge or Chicago where they made a movie that contained a few musical numbers. In this musical every....single....word....is.
...a....song. It is amazingly annoying because the music isn't any good. It's terrible. None of the cast can sing very well. Some, Paris Hilton, can't even act. It's just awful.

59. The House on Hooter Hill (2007) - When you collect movies, sometimes you see a title that you just want to have in your collection. Doesn't matter what the movie is, you just need the title. This is one of those times. This was another of Jim Wynorski's T&A horror parodies but I gotta say....light years better than Cleavagefield was.

60. Drag Me to Hell (2009) - Sam Raimi's return to horror started off pretty good. I didn't expect much so I was surprised by how much I was enjoying myself. He literally used every horror trick in the book in this movie and that's where the problem lies. It was cool at first but it kept ramping up and ramping up and getting more and more ridiculous. It went from a pretty decent, old school, spookfest to an over the top Looney Tunes short. I can tell you the exact moment that I officially gave up on the movie. There was a scene where the main girl was being chased by a ghost and she ran into her garage. Luckily, like most people, she had an old school ACME made anvil hanging from the roof. Not only that but she was also lucky enough to be standing right where the rope was and lucky enough to have something to cut the rope with. The anvil falls from the ceiling, bonks the ghost on the head and the girl lives to see another day. At that second the movie officially became dumb. Only in Scooby Doo could you bonk a ghost on the head and it would actually feel it. Only Bugs Bunny or Wile E. Coyote would ever even have an anvil hanging from a ceiling.

61. Man Made Monster (1941) - Nobody will ever accuse Man Made Monster of being one of the best Universal horror classics but that doesn't stop it from being pretty dang awesome. It's hard not to be awesome when you're a 1940s horror movie made by Universal starring Lon Chaney Jr and Lionel Atwill. It's not going to make anybody leave the room in fright or anything but it still has that classic Universal magic and atmosphere.

62. Pale Blood (1990) - This movie was surprisingly decent. Not some great movie people should run out and see but it was certainly better than most things I've watched lately. The plot of a guy pretending to be a vampire getting stalked by a real vampire made me expect some sort of bad 80s style horror comedy, but it turned out to be a serious movie with a pretty cool performance by Wings Hauser. Maybe my expectations have been eroded by some of the other crap I've watched but I liked it.

63. Black Sabbath (1963) - American International Pictures + Boris Karloff + Italian Schlockmaster Mario Bava = Pure gold. Well.....for the most part. It was another anthology movie. The first two stories were very Italian, awesomely creepy and Twilight Zone-ish. The third story, the one with Karloff, was very boring, slow and bland. But two out of three ain't bad!

64. Troll 2 (1990) - I figured since I watched the fake Troll 3 earlier I'd go ahead and watch the fake Troll 2. BEST. MOVIE. EVER. Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyophYBP_w4

65. Devil Times Five (1974) - Also known as Peopletoys and The Horrible House on the Hill. You know a movie is gonna be bad when the title on the box and the title in the credit sequence is different. A awful movie about 5 kids escaping from an asylum and killing a house full of grownups. Features a young and recognizable Boss Hog and Leif Garrett....sometimes. It was very confusing. It seems they only had Leif Garrett part of the time or something so instead of shooting around his schedule they just had another kid in a Leif Garrett wig play the part when he wasn't around. The movie should actually be called Devil Times Five and a Half.

66. Swamp Women (1955) - Just when you think you've seen every Roger Corman movie you find another one. This one had some women and some swamp and a lot of boredom.

67. Who Can Kill A Child? (1976) - An Italian flick about a young couple who go to some island for a vacation where it turns out that all the kids have gone insane and killed all the adults. I don't know what I'm sicker of at this point. Child killers or young couples going on vacation and ending up in horror movies. This is literally the 16th movie about a couple going on vacation that I've watched this month. The movie was really bad and slow. It took nearly 90 minutes before the kid stuff started, up until then it was like watching somebody's vacation video. It did have one really cool scene that I didn't see coming. The wife was pregnant and whatever was causing the kids to kill did the same to her unborn baby and it killed her from the inside out. That was kind of different. Oh, and the answer to the question is the husband. Not only can that guy kill a child, he can kill a LOT of childs.

68. Creepshow (1982) - Watching the inferior Trick 'r Treat earlier made me want to watch the real deal. I still love this movie. This is a movie I can find no fault in. Everything works. It's been so long that I forget many of the stories so as I was watching I was oh, yeah, this segment is my favorite. Then the next one would start, oh, wait, no THIS one is my favorite. I think what happened is that they all tied for my favorite. George Romero sure was a great director before he lost his mind.

69. Monkey Shines (1988) - This is AFTER Romero lost his mind. A killer monkey? Really? Every year I get reminded of how sad it is to watch movies by the former great horror directors of the 70s. What happened? What snapped inside his mind? How does the guy who made Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Creepshow turn into the guy who made Monkey Shines, Bruiser and Diary of the Dead? It's sad. But not as sad as.....

70. Prince of Darkness (1986) - I think I have figured out that this is the movie where John Carpenter lost his mojo. It's a really lame movie about a canister that contains the liquefied version of the Antichrist. Somebody decided it would be a good idea to get a bunch of college kids together to study it. Of course, Antichrist liquid ends up killing a bunch of people and trying to bring his daddy to Earth. How would a liquid version of the Antichrist bring Satan to Earth? By pulling him through a mirror of course! How do you stop this from happening? You push Antiliquidchrist through the mirror and then smash it. Duh! Problem solved!

Everything about this movie is bad. The writing, the acting, the casting. This was made right after Big Trouble in Little China so Carpenter decided to just re-use that whole cast. The problem is that he forgot to bring Kurt Russell along to lead the way. Instead of a personality like Russell we get the charisma-less blonde dude from Simon and Simon as our hero. I had the feeling while watching it that this was the turn in Carpenter's career and I was shocked at how right I was when I looked him up on IMDB. Before this movie Carpenter did not make one single bad movie. It was one classic movie after another highlighted by Halloween, Escape from New York and The Thing. AFTER this movie it was nothing but one terrible movie after another highlighted by Ghost of Mars, Escape from LA and Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Carpenter was famous for his awesome synthesizer soundtracks and it seems his ability to make good movies ended around the same time that synthesizer music went out of style.

71. Infestation (2009) - A direct to DVD horror comedy about Earth being invaded by giant bugs. It's not the greatest movie ever or anything but it is certainly a better horror comedy than Zombieland was.

72. The Alphabet Killer (2009) - Yet another real life serial turned into a wacky movie. Everything about the murders is completely based in complete fact, everything else is made up. The lead detective gets haunted by the ghosts of the victims who help lead her to discover that the killer is actually her best friend. Wow. Who saw THAT coming?? I did, 24 minutes into it. As soon as her friend was shown I was like, well.....here we go again. But for a movie based on a real story, the ghosts and the best friend isn't the most unbelievable part. The casting is. Eliza Dushku as a homicide detective? 75% of what I watch on TV is real life crime shows. Crime 360, The First 48...I love em. Let me tell ya, there's not a single homicide detective in the world who looks likes Eliza Dushku. They're all middle aged fat guys with moustaches, not 28 year old girls from Maxim magazine.

73. House (2008) - And the award for the first movie of Horrorfest that I couldn't get all the way through goes to.......................House. And why is it called House? There was already a much better horror movie called House.

74. [REC] (2007) - One of the first movies I watched was Quarantine. I liked it a lot. But I didn't know it was a remake of this so I figured I'd better watch the original and see which one is better. Besides being in Spanish, they're pretty much the exact same movie. Shot for shot. If you see one, you see the other. Though I give the slight edge to the remake. Never underestimate the power of the Hollywood budget.

75. Buried Alive (1990) - This terrible movie was supposed to be based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe but I don't seem to recall Poe ever writing a story about a killer in a Ronald Reagan mask killing people at an all girls boarding school in 1988. Awful movie only worth watching for Donald Pleasance. I've never seen Pleasance in a movie in the 70s or 80s where he didn't just play Dr Loomis from Halloween again. He played the same character in every movie with a different shirt on. Here he changed his look, his voice and his personality and actually played a character! Why he wasted all that effort on this movie I'll never know. It was also the last movie by ohn Carradine. What a way to go out.

76. Black Moon (1934) - It had to be a real letdown for Fay Wray to go from King Kong to Black Moon in less than a year. Not terrible, but it certainly isn't King Kong. And for a 1930s movie set on a voodoo island, it's actually not nearly as racist as you'd think it would be.

77. Naked Fear (2007) - A young girl gets tricked to move to a small town and become a stripper. Yep, tricked. It's like the greatest practical joke ever. Later on she gets tricked into becoming a prostitute but her first john is a psycho who kidnaps her, dumps her naked in the woods and then hunts her down in a Most Dangerous Game type of way. Mediocre movie but I give full props for this girl running through the woods buck naked for so long. I still don't understand girls. Why are so many girls willing to get naked for movies like this? If I was a girl....I might get naked for a Martin Scorcese movie or something, but if the director's name is Thom Eberhardt and the only good movie he ever made was 1984's Night of the Comet, I'm keeping my panties on.

78. Stump the Band (2006) - I like Diff'rent Strokes. This movie stars Danny Cooksey who played Sam on the last couple of seasons. That's the only reason I watched this. I should've just watched Diff'rent Strokes.

79. Spirit Trap (2005) - Snooooooooore. Snooooooooore. Snoooooooooore. Snoooooooooooooore. Snoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooore.

80. The Killing Gene (2007) - The award for worst performance ever by a very good actor goes toooooo.........Stellan Skarsgard for The Killing Gene. He has been good in 104 movies and in this one he was atrocious. But at least he's honest. He knew this movie was terrible and he wasn't even gonna bother. Just give me my check.

And that is all for part 4. I have 4 more movies to watch this weekend. Then I'll be finishing off part 5 and we'll all be done with this long national nightmare.

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