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10 Cloverfield Lane. David Trachtenberg. 2016. A young woman heading to her parents place following a break up is involved in a nasty car accident somewhere in upstate NY and wakes to find herself in an underground bunker with two men who claim the outside world has been hit by some sort of unknown attack. For the most part this is just three people in a room and as such works quite well. John Goodman turns in another excellent performance as Howard a conspiracy theorist and possible nutter. Unfortunately towards the last twenty minutes it all becomes a bit unstuck as if it has exhausted the potential of its scenario and has to resort to bigger things just to confirm what we already knew. Not bad but not really anything to get excited about. Wolf Creek 2. Greg McClean. 2013. Mick Taylor returns to massacre more tourists in the Australian Outback. Not just a retread of the fantastic original as this sequel does mix things up a little with a bigger budget and a bit more twisting and turning in the plot. And cutting fingers off is one thing, but grinding?!? I really enjoyed this and Mick Taylor is a terrifying creation. |
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The initiation A college girl with amnesia is plagued by a disturbing dream of a man attacking her father before getting set alight. She's currently trying out for the campuses sorority house and is going through various initiations (hence the title) unaware that her parents are keeping several dark secrets from her including a breakout at a lunatic asylum that has them worried. Naturally people start getting brutally murdered and the film climaxes in a showdown in an empty shopping mall. While the various ingredients to initiation don't quite gel as they should, its still a fum little slasher romp with an entertainingly bat shit ending that makes the film memorable. Being that i watched the Arrow Blu-Ray it felt weird not to follow it on with the appalling mountaintop motel massacre (comes double billed on my DVD) but non the less it remains an entertaining slice of schlock. |
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Slaughterhouse (1987) A lesser slasher film about the owner of an old slaughterhouse in Nowhereville, USA, about to be put out of business, who instructs his Neanderthal like son to kill those who want to take his property from him. Slaughterhouse is one of those dumb comedy like slashers where the characters do the daftest things. I mean, the son is hugely overweight, one girl, who is fit as a fiddle, decides the best thing to do would be hide in some farm equipment rather than just run away given she has a head start and he's about 25 stone. There's also a hell of a lot of chatter early doors, chatter and looking at pigs which will drive you to distraction. Where the film does achieve some success is the gore effects which are well done and gloopily effective. The location of an actual slaughterhouse also works giving the film a lot of credibility rather than just running round in the pitch black, the place is nicely atmospheric, although due to the script and stodgy direction the film is unable to create any sort of tension and the stalk and slash sequences are scare free. |
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To be honest it's the second time i've watched it and it's really a bit tired. It's sort of third tier slasher material at the arse end of the 80's slasher genre. It really is only the slaughterhouse location and decent gore that make it worth a watch.
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THE GHOST AND THE GUEST (1943) A new married couple inherit an old farmhouse and move in on their wedding night. Soon, the house becomes crowded with a dead body, gangsters, a hangman and the police! Then people start thinking that they see ghosts.... Comedy old dark house mystery. The film travels along at a great pace with almost non stop one-liners. I thought this was a great little B movie and spent the whole film with a smile on my face. Yeah...good fun. |
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Death Race 2050 The purpose of good science fiction is to shed a light on the wold as it is. Predicting the world as it might be is difficult and ends up getting more things wrong than right. The original Death race 2000 used science fiction and satire to depict an exaggerated and darkly satirical look at lat 60's - 70's America and the direction it was headed in. As a piece of speculative science fiction it got a lot of things wrong (not everything mind) but as satire it worked admirably. Given how much has changed since the first film came out DR2000 is more an interesting social document than a depiction of the world as it has become. Its nice to see then that we now have a Death Race remake (its not a sequel) that takes the humour and aesthetic and dark humour of the original and uses it to take a side swipe at an America polarised on issues such as Race, gender and politics, an America that is seeing its working classes and middle classes rendered seemingly irrelevant by technology. If you have never seen Death Race 2000 and are only familiar with the Stath/Goss films then this might not be your cup of tea but if you liked the original then this definitely comes recommended. |
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Quote:
__________________ The Church Of What's Happening Now. |
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Amsterdamned. A scuba diving serial killer is stalking Amsterdamn, using the city's innumerable canals as a hunting ground from which to stalk his victims. This late 80s Dutch thriller starts off really well and is very entertaining for the first hour or so, but goes on well past its welcome and also gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. Average.
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