Halloween Picks 2009 - Wild Zero (2000)

Asian cinema is a wonderful thing. When you think you've seen it all, asian cinema comes around and kicks you in the ass with all kinds of weird stuff you never thought you'd see in this lifetime. I've had plenty of "WTF" moments related to asian cinema - notably with Takashi Miike's trilogy Dead or Alive, or with any of Takashi Miike's movies, for that matter - but I don't think any of those were as much fun as Wild Zero.

This movie is just unbelievable from start to finish. It's a rock and roll movie with zombies, aliens and everything else in between. There's no real point in explaining the plot, because that doesn't really matter. Guitar wolf and his band just basically walk around being the coolest, most bad-ass guys ever. Besides, this movie is so over the top that it's not constrained by vague notions of plot. It laughs in the face of good editing and logical continuity. All you need to know is that this movie has loud music, cheesy acting, zombies, aliens, exploding heads, guitar swords and shuriken-like guitar picks. To quote a reviewer from Spill.com: " It honestly doesn’t get better than this! It’s like watching Rock 'n Roll High School if the filmmaker was on acid while directing". It is stupid, yes, but the good kind of stupid. It'll make you laugh and it'll make you wonder just what the hell you're seeing. And that's why I recommend it - while it's not a horror movie, it has horror elements (the main element of the "plot" is a zombie plague, after all) and it's pretty hilarious and crazy, so it's a guaranteed good time. I give it 3.5 out of 5 guitars.

ROCK AND ROLL!

Halloween Picks 2009 - Demons (1985)

Well, it's that time of the year again. The temperature drops, the leaves fall and you start feeling an uncontrollable urge to watch horror movies. Yes, Halloween steadily approaches, and, seeing as last year my Halloween Picks section was somewhat successful, I decided I'd do it again this year. Except I'll just make one recommendation per post - time is a precious thing, and this days I haven't had a lot of it free to spend blogging. So let's dive right in into the first recommendation, which is...

Dèmoni (in english, Demons) Lamberto Bava's 1985 classic.
The story is quite simple: a group of people go to the cinema to see a movie about a group of young adults that find a tomb and, with it, a prophecy to the end of the world. The catch is that what is happening on screen, soon starts happening in real life, and these people find themselves trapped in the theater, with more and more of them turning into revolting, violent demons (one bite, one scratch was enough to turn anyone into a demon).

Simple enough, and maybe that's why it works. We never get an explanation as to why these people turned into demons in the first place, what's behind the strange mask in the lobby or how exactly they got trapped in the theater in a matter of minutes - but none of that matters. The action on screen is so unrelenting that all this never crosses your mind. It's just craziness on top on more craziness. This is a splatterfest in the best sense of the word, the gore level is crazy: it's a rollercoaster of mutilations and gross-out moments, with pus and blood flying everywhere on screen. This movie preceded some of my favorite humorous gorefests, like Evil Dead 2 and Braindead, and it's easy to see that those movies drew some kind of inspiration from Demons.
The characters are an interesting blend of people: we get the somewhat likeable main characters (the two girls, Cheryl and Kathy, and the two boys they meet at the cinema) , and in addition to them we get such colorful characters as a bickering couple, a blind man and his cheating, shameless wife, and, my favorite, a pimp that I swear is straight out of a grindhouse movie. His acting and his lines were always delivered in such an over the top way that he was incredibly funny and I found myself rooting for him to stick around for longer.

The plot is, of course, sort of ridiculous, but the movie is so repulsive, hilarious and exciting that it doesn't really matter. It's rare this days to see a horror movie so incredibly fun an entertaining (Drag me to Hell is the most recent example that comes to mind, despite it being fairly tame when compared to Demons), so this is a welcomed trip back to the non-sensical hilarity of the 80s.
If you like gore and 80s style horror - look no further. I guarantee Demons will be right up your alley. It gets 4 out of 5 Demons from me.

Halloween Picks - The Descent (2005) and Young Frankenstein (1974)

Well, here are the two last movie picks for Halloween 2008. It hasn't been easy to narrow down all the movies I wanted to recommend to this little list, so I might just keep recommending horror movies every once in a while - after all, Halloween is like Christmas, you can have it everyday.

1. The Descent (2005)

I consider The Descent to be one of the best horror movies of the last years, and I'm sure time will make it a classic.

Directed by Neil Marshall, The Descent tells us the story of a group of 6 women who go spelunking 1 year after Sarah, a member of the group, lost her daughter and husband on a car accident. Juno, Sarah's best friend, leads the group further and further into a previously unexplored cave, and it soon becomes apparent that they won't all make it out of the cave... if anyone will at all. Revealing more would be a little sinful.

The plot is tight, and the characters are very well fleshed out, making it very interesting to see their relationships change, tear and fall apart. The suspense keeps building from the beginning, and when the action unfolds it's truly like a rollercoaster ride. The cave and the tension make this movie crazy claustrophobic, and if you're anything like me, you'll feel like you're out of breath inside that dark, ominous cave along with the 6 characters. There's a constant feeling of dread and foreboding. The Descebt will make you uncomfortable, and it will scare you, which is not something a lot of horror movies successfully pull off. If you're looking for more than a couple empty jumps, for Halloween, go with this one.

2. Young Frankenstein (1974)

Ok, so, this is not horror. It's a comedy movie - but it's a parody of some of Universal's earliest and biggest classics (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and so on), and it's definitely worth a mention. And, more than 30 years after its making, it stands as one of my favorite comedies of all time.

Young Frankenstein gives us the tale of Dr. Frederik Frankenstein (ir's pronounced Fronk-en-steen!), a somewhat crazy college professor who happens to be the grandson of famous mad scientist Victor Frankenstein. His grandfather passed away and left Frederik his castle in Transylvania. He travels to Transyvalnia to claim his inheritance and stumbles upon a book detailing his grandfather's earlier projects of trying to create life from dead body parts. Despite deeming his grandfather insane in the earlier parts of the movie, he decides to give Frankenstein senior's projects a try. Along with him for the ride are the iconic hunchback lab assistant, Igor (pronounced Eye-gore); a young nurse named Inga, and the castle's scary caretaker, Frau Blucher.

Mel Brooks has made some of the funniest comedies ever (notably Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights), and Young Frankenstein ranks high on my laugh-a-palooza list. Once the laughter starts, it's hard to stop it, not only because of a great script, but thanks to the brilliant acting by the cast, particularly Gene Wilder, who is perfect as Frederik Frankenstein, and Marty Feldman, who delivers a truly hilarious performance as the hunchbacked Igor. Shot in black and white and using a lot of the same props made for 1931's Frankenstein, the movie successfully reflects the style of the Universal classic, while at the same time being side-splitting hilarious. It's one of the best spoof movies ever made, and I guarantee it'll make for a really fun Halloween night.

Well, these were my suggestions. Let me know if you choose any of these movies to keep you company tonight, and have a kick ass Halloween!

Halloween Picks - Re-Animator (1985) and The Faculty (1998)

Once again, as promised, here are a couple of fun suggestions for your Halloween Night.

1. Re-Animator (1985)

As you can see on the poster, Re-Animator is the adaptation of one of H. P. Lovecraft's tales. I am a big fan of Lovecraft's horror writings, but I never got to read Re-Animator, so I'm not in a position to judge its faithfulness to the source material - although I would risk saying it detours from it a whole lot. Lovecraft's writing is not exactly filled with the kind of gore and nonsense you find in this movie.

Directed by Stuart Gordon (a man who directed at least two other feature film adptations of Lovecraft's tales, plus two episodes of Masters of Horror, also Lovecraftian stuff), Re-Animator tells us the story of Herbert West, your token mad scientist, who found out a way of re-animating dead tissue, and is itching to try it on humans, instead of on little lab animals. Brilliant as he is, he's not very modest or personable, and after he lands on Miskatonic Medical University, he immediately makes an enemy in Dr. Carl Hill, when they disagree on the subject of brain death. Herbert ends up moving to the Dean's daughter house, that she shares with her boyfriend Dan, and uses their basement to further his research. In need of a helper, he takes a chance when Dan's cat dies, and re-animates it in hopes of bringing Dan to aid him in his quest. Hill ends up stumbling on West's experiments and finds them an excellent way to put pressure on the genius: he threatens to blackmail him if he doesn't hand over the secret of his re-animating serum. And the rest is history.

The movie is pretty twisted, perverted, and gory, but everything is so over-the-top and cartoonish that it gets really funny. The script is great, and so is the directing and the pace of the film (that by the way, at under 90 minutes in length, is pretty short). Jeffrey Combs performance as Doctor West is brilliant, he has to be one of my favorite mad scientists to ever grace the screen, and the rest of the cast is pretty solid as well.

It's so difficult to find a movie nowadays that makes you cringe and laugh at the same time, but Re-Animator successfully does so, without dumbing the viewer down. Give it a chance, or you'll be missing out.

2. The Faculty (1998)

When the teen horror genre resurfaced in the nighties, some movies were lost amidst the Scream and I know What You Did Last Summer franchises. The Faculty was one of those movies, and while I don't consider it to be "all that" when it comes to horror movies, I'm picking it mostly for nostalgia-based reasons. See, I was a wee teen when this movie came out, and I have to tell you that the possibility of my teachers beings aliens was something that lightly crossed my mind at times. Since that is the premise of this movie, we shared a bit of a kindred spirit.

Directed by the "too cool for school" Robert Rodriguez, The Faculty whirls around an unlikely group of students that come together to fight an alien invasion taking place in their high school. As the alien's posess more and more teachers, it's up to them to find the origin of the infection and stop it, before it overruns their whole town and, eventually, the world.

Think Breakfast Club meets Invasion of the Body Snatcher's - kinda cool, huh?

The movie doesn't get too extreme, gore and scare-wise. In my opinion, the lack of scares can be because an high school isn't exactly the most terrifying setup you can think of for an alien invasion - although it does offer a nice, palpable sense of paranoia. It's also a very stylish movie, and that's what appealed most to the young crowd: the cast is made of clean cut, pretty-face actors, who face the everyday problems of high school... plus aliens; and they actually make a good job. The script is solid enough (penned by Kevin Williamson), with nice dialogue, a pronounced sense of humor and various references to sci-fi material that inspired this movie.

As a horror movie, it doesn't do too much. But as a teen horror movie, it's a few notches above most of the stuff that came out recently, and it's worth at least one viewing. So if you feel nostalgic of simpler times and are looking for a thrill or two, look into The Faculty and it may just be the kick you need.

Stay tuned for the two final recommendations tomorrow! Oh man, I wish it was Halloween every week.

Halloween Picks - Hatchet (2006) and Tesis (1996)

I had fun yesterday thinking about these Halloween picks, so why not be a little generous and sugest two movies a day instead of just one? I know, I know, I'm too cool, so here go the TWO-for-one picks of today.

Keep in mind that I'm trying to think about movies that aren't tool well known, and that's why I'm not refering the classics - I don't think anyone needs to recommend The Exorcist, The Shining or Shaun of the Dead, because everyone already knows they're brilliant. Read on!

1. Hatchet (2006)

You know, the tagline pretty much says it all. Hatchet is a movie that takes you right back to the 80's american slashers: it has a deformed, inbred gigantic and inhumanly strong killer; it has
the same teenage characters we've seen in these movies over and over again (poor sap dumped by his girlfriend and trying to forget her, drunk jocks, token black guy, slutty cheeleader types, and the one girl who knows too much) and the plot is entirely forgettable. So why am I suggesting this, you ask?

Because it actually WORKS. Hatchet knows what it is, and makes fun of itself at all times. It doesn't take itself seriously, the director knows this is not the next big thing in horror, but he wants people to have a good time watching it, and Hatchet delivers.

The plot, forgettable as it is, revolves around a group of people that go on a tour of a supposedly haunted swamp in New Orleans. That's where things go awry, after their boat crashes and they find themselves stuck in the swamps with the unwanted company of a mutant serial killer.

The cast gets picked off one by one, in a lot of different, violent, gory ways - we're talking impalement, dismemberment, blood squirting in impossible amounts, the whole deal. Interestingly enough, Hatchet features cameos by famous stars of horror movies, like Robert Englund (Nightmare in Elm Street), Kane Hodder (Friday the 13th) and Tony Todd (Candyman), providing little Easter Eggs for horror fans.

I can't say anything about this flick is fresh or original, but in my opinion, that was the whole point: poking loving fun at the slasher genre while keeping things interesting with splatter comedy and mayhem. It's a B-movie and it knows it, and it works very well as both an homage and a parody. Best watched with a group of friends you can laugh along with.

It's been successful enough to warrant a sequel: Hatchet 2 is supposed to hit screens next year.

2. Tesis (1996)

Moving on from a goofy movie to a more serious one, Tesis is my second pick of the day. Despite being more of a thriller than straight up horror, it's a great movie and deserves to be better known.

I am a big fan of spanish horror movies (the best horror movie I've seen this year was [REC], and it's spanish, as I'm sure you know), so I was pretty curious when I heard of this earlier work of Alejandro Amenábar, who more recently directed The Others - one of the best and most chilling supernatural horrors I've seen. Tesis was Amenábar's debut movie, written while he was still in college. And what a debut it was.

Tesis tells us the story of Ángela, a college student who is writing a thesis about violence in film and in the media. Helping her is Chema, a classmate who because of his obsession about horror movies and extreme films, has a massive collection of said material, that Ángela uses on her research. Meanwhile, Ángela's thesis advisor, Prof. Figueroa, discovers a snuff film where a girl is beaten and brutally murdered on camera, and he dies while watching this film. Ángela and Chema get their hands on the movie, and Chema recognizes the dead girl as a former student of their university. Together, they set out to find out about the snuff underworld and who is murdering people on camera to satisfy a sick fascination with violence.

The movie is very suspenseful and successfully keeps a mood of building tension, without resorting to extreme gore and violence (like some of the earlier picks I made). Intense directing, great cinematograpy and solid performances from the cast are a couple other reaons that make this movie stand out, in my opinion, and definitely worthy of a recommendation. Go get it.

Keep enjoying Halloween's week, and don't forget to check back tomorrow, when 2 new suggestions will be up.

Halloween Picks - Braindead (1992) and Dead End (2003)

As you may have noticed, I've been a little absent from the blogging world lately, and while that has happened before for reasons connected to my rampant lazyness, this time it's nothing like that: my computer had to go to the PC Doctor a couple of weeks ago, and I still haven't got it back, and that's pretty much a pain in the ass (it's delaying about half a dozen works I should have ready by now).

So I've been computerless, but this is HALLOWEEN week, and I had to find a way to post on this baby and give you guys some movie recommendations for your Halloween night. Hopefully you'll find some movies you haven't heard of here, and have a good scare at their expense.

I'll post two today, because I meant to have started the list yesterday and keep it up at one suggestion a day until Halloween.

1. Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) (also known as Dead Alive in the USA).

That's right. Before Peter Jackson gave us the best epic fantasy movie trilogy ever, he made movies with far less elves, and much more zombies. Braindead was his 3rd movie. It became a cult favorite, and gained fame as the goriest movie ever made, and to this day, it holds its own as one of the funniest splatter-fests of all time.

Braindead tells us the story of young man Lionel, who lives with his smothering, controlling mother. In his attempt to have something that resembled a normal life, Lionel starts dating Paquita, much to the grief of his mother. When he takes Paquita out for a walk in the local zoo, his mother decides to follow them, and gets bit by a strange creature called the Sumatran Rat Monkey. The bite causes her to start falling apart and, eventually, die, but that's not the last we see of her, as she comes back to life as controlling and obnoxious as always, but this time with a taste for human flesh. It's up to Lionel to try and stop his mother from spreading the undead infection, while maintaining a normal household as much as possible - unfortunatelly he doesn't really succeed, and next thing we now, that little kiwi town is overrun with blood thirsty zombies, and the fun starts!

The gore in this movie is something I guarantee you've never seen before. Literally gallons of bloods and guts of all sort keep flying around the screen, and the corpses decompose in a miriad of disgusting ways. In the final scene of the movie, over 300 liters of fake blood were used. 300 liters. That is a shitload of blood, and if that's not awesome, I don't know what is.

It borrows a lot of the splastick seen on movies like Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn and exagerates it even further, to levels I never thought possible. Zombie sex, zombie babies, a nazi veterinarian, a kung-fu priest and body parts with a mind of their own are only a few of the things you can expect to see in this crazy, over-the-top gorefest. It's hilarious, it's bloody, it's violent, it blew my mind away when I first watched it and it continues to do so. I couldn't recommend it more.


2. Dead End (2003)

Directed by unknowns Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, Dead End is a pretty straightforward movie about a family on their way to a Christmas dinner at their grandmother's house. There's a little tension going on, and the dad, anxious to shorten the drive there, takes a shortcut, something he had never done in 20 years. We soon learn he would have done better to keep with the traditional road, because the new shortcut is apparently never ending, and filled with unexplainable forces, out to cause the family harm.

The set-up is pretty simple, and I think that's why it ends up working so well, since it helps to keep the focus on the characters and the situation. The atmosphere of the movie is great, very dark, very bleak and eerie, and as the movie develops, you get the feeling of hopelessness of that family, as they realize they won't make it out of the shortcut. That was my favorite thing about Dead End, because scarewise I can't say it scared my pants off or anything (most of the times, when something happened, you could see it coming a few minutes in advance), but there was such a dark mood that I was unsettled for most of the movie, even getting a few old-fashioned chills, the kind that make the hairs on your arms stand up. Don't expect much gore, because most of the horror is actually unseen - being, in my opinion, all the more effective. It really lets you use your imagination and doesn't spoon-feed your brain.

There are some moments of deep weirdness and even humor, as the family turns out to be a little more dysfunctional then you thought they would be, with the humor actually providing a welcome balance, at times. The cast works very well here, and the dialogue is witty and above average for a horror movie. I have to say the ending failed to captivate me, but I definitely enjoyed the ride and I forgive the less than perfect ending.

I confess: after seeing this movie, I was creeped out when I saw a black car on the road at night, and if you give this a try, I think you might be too.

These are the suggestions for today, stay tuned for a brand new one tomorrow!