Zombie Cupcake: lazy review

Showing posts with label lazy review. Show all posts

The Borderlands / Final Prayer (2013)

2018 has been the year I don't quite understand what the fuss is about. See: Revenge, Hereditary (though that wasn't helped by a shitty viewing experience) and now that I've finally seen The Borderlands, this is the latest.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate or even dislike any of these movies. I just didn't seem to get from them what the vocal majority did. I know we're all allowed to have our own opinions, but it's pretty frustrating to be aware of a tidal wave of excitement over a movie that personally left you feeling more like "...that's it?".

So here we are at The Borderlands, or Final Prayer as it's been renamed for the US market. An English found footage flick and feature film directorial debut of Elliot Goldner (who also wrote it).

It follows a team of Vatican investigators as they set up camp in a small town to try and disprove a "miracle" that took place in the local church. The core group is made up of Deacon (Gordon Kennedy - always a pleasure to watch), Gray the tech guy (Robin Hill) and Mark, an uptight priest (Aidan McArdle).

They set up cameras all over the place and wear head-cams, so all of the footage we see is supposedly from these sources.

Which is fine... but the found footage aspect of this film seems more technique than theme, to be honest. There's no narrative book-ending or explanation as to how these cameras were found (a big question, given the denouement) or who edited it all together and/or what the purpose is of us watching it. I guess there doesn't always have to be a Blair Witch Project intro screen for these types of movies, but something to explain some context would be nice?

Nevertheless, we follow the investigations of these men as they scrutinise the church and hang out at their rented cottage. During the day there are weird happenings that Deacon and Mark, the most explicitly religious members of the group, are cynical of and try to explain away. Gray - who took this job purely for the money, and told a white lie about his faith - is way more spooked.

At night, more unsettling things happen, until ultimately the group find themselves performing a ceremony which doesn't exactly go to plan... culminating in a deeply uncomfortable final sequence.

The main problem I had with this movie was that the gradual climb of the first two acts was too repetitive and slow. Despite definite moments of creepiness, the building of suspense just didn't hit the mark. The payoff here literally comes within the final few moments - rather than the entire film working as a whole in laying the groundwork, with an alarming finale as the cherry on top.

Perhaps on a re-watch I might feel differently?

Something The Borderlands did do successfully was make me miss the English countryside. We are shown a fair amount of it as the team drive around and traipse through fields. It gave me pangs!

I rented this one on Google Play, and I think it's available on Amazon, also. Give it a watch and tell me what I'm missing.

Sorority Row (2009)

Shot with dark, grainy, frenetic abandon (like an early 2000's music video) and, a mere 9 years on, pretty fucking gross and insanely obvious in its male gaze, Sorority Row is a remake, based on the script for the 1983 horror film The House on Sorority Row. For a film supposedly about sisterhood, the directing and writing team were all men. And you can tell.

There's frequent, pointless lack of clothes from sorority sisters who looked so similar I had no idea who was dying and who was surviving; jokes about how it's okay to be roofied; questionable doctor/patient power dynamic sex in exchange for meds... Just, no. The kills were not good enough to redeem all this.

There's far better out there. Best thing about this entire mess was Carrie Fisher in a bit part.

Triangle (2009)

Triangle really keeps the audience on its toes; seeming to be one thing before becoming something else entirely.

Written and directed by Christopher Smith (the man who also brought us solid British horrors Severance and Creep) and starring Melissa George and Liam Hemsworth, this takes us on a journey from shore to sea and back again - and there's a palpable sense of unease and doom the entire time.

Mostly empty yet symmetrical shot compositions are my jam.

I went in knowing minimal details and that really was the best way, so I'm keeping this short and sweet. This one is confusing and curious, with several moments of breathtaking beauty and grimness (in a good way!). There's also some questionable CGI, but just go with it, trust me.

For fans of horror of the mind-bending variety. Streaming on Shudder now.

No One Lives (2012)

From director Ryûhei Kitamura (Midnight Meat Train), No One Lives is a nonsensical, nasty little WWE production that has everything you'd expect from such (truly terrible dialogue, fight scenes involving a lot of throwing, tits) and it may have solidified my aversion to the output of this studio. I've now seen this and See No Evil, which was similarly just about okay.

Um... and the killer totally lets someone live at the end, so the title is a big fat lie.

Killing Ground (2016)

Killing Ground is an Australian Eden Lake, only with some timeline quirks, rape, baby violence, and a dog that actually survives (as far as we know).

To be honest I'm currently experiencing some fatigue from depictions of rape on screen. The moment I realised just how toxic the toxic males in this film were, it was downhill from there. Once that veil drops, that switch goes in their eyes (and credit to the actor Aaron Glenane for portraying this so well here) that's it, we know what comes next.

It's hard watching women sexually brutalised over and over, y'know? No matter how well it's done, no matter if the story sees the survivor exact revenge. It's still a narrative choice that depresses and drains. I wouldn't have knowingly chosen a "rape film" the night I watched this, and yet there I was, again, watching one.

So... I'm sorry, I'm tired. This is going to be a quick/lazy review. Here, have a look at some of the different artwork used for this movie...

I'll admit that first image was the one I saw and that's mostly why I gave this a chance. As these images suggest, Killing Ground is a nasty, competently-told tale of really awful shit happening on a camping trip.

It's written and directed by Damien Power and it's streaming on Netflix now.

Black Christmas (2006)

I'll never underplay how much I love the original Black Christmas, so when this remake was announced, I was not interested in the slightest. To the point of being offended that they were even bothering to try. I turned my nose up at the mere thought of it for years.

I am now older and wiser (well, older at least, etc etc) and realise that boycotting for these reasons - especially 11 years later! - is pointless , because y'know what? Sometimes remakes are all right.

That's a good word to describe this movie: alright. It's an interesting watch for fans of the original, and it's certainly got gore aplenty (which is a complicated aspect, as I'll explain later) but it never becomes anything more than an explicit and un-scary rehash of a classic.

Let's break it down...

The Good:

An actress who played one of the 1974 sorority girls plays the 2006 house mother.

Andrea Martin was Phyllis in Black Christmas (1974).

There's a moment where the sound of Billy slurping down prison food is overlapped with the slurping of a couple making out in a car.
Visually, it looks great, drenched mostly in a colour palette lifted straight from Christmas lights.
There's a really awesome shot that pushes through the branches of a Christmas tree, to reveal Billy lurking behind it. Really well done.

Someone dies by having a giant icicle fall on their head.
In amongst some pretty pedestrian eye violence, there's a moment that made me say "oh, jesus" 👀
This shot:

The Bad:

The drunk/lush character is truly awful. Even without comparing her to Margot Kidder's Barb, she's the worst.

I have never enjoyed Lacey Chabert in anything.
This is an incredibly early 2000's version of this story...
...Meaning almost all of the cast are sarcastic ad-campaign-pretty sorority girls (did anyone else have trouble telling them apart?).
...And cell phones are EVERYWHERE. I want to watch this again and do a shot every time someone is shown with a flip phone. #motorolarazrlife
It's light on suspense, heavy on jump scares and splatter (the studio demanded extreme gore: the director didn't want that. Always a winning recipe - see below).
Billy's backstory is told - often through clumsy exposition - in full. It's really messed up, which is pretty cool, but it also eradicates any sense of a terrifying unknown threat.

Oh, and he's yellow.

Being a sorority house, they hammer away at the sisterhood thing like mad, but it never really sticks. There's no sense of love or bond between this group of women, despite their insistence otherwise.
Billy is obsessed with ripping eyes out?! The one thing they don't explain about him.

You see, this movie doesn't make it easy to sit back and attempt to judge it on its own merits. Even though there's a lot added to the story, there are just too many things either lifted straight from, or heavily nodding towards Black Christmas (1974). I honestly tried to take it at face value, but it ultimately suffered from my knowing the original so well.

It's not worth actively avoiding, but considering its roots, it's an unremarkable, predictable stalk and slash.

The making of Black Christmas (2006) and what happened afterward, seems complicated and rather sad. Apparently director Glen Morgan was good friends with Bob Clark (director of the original) and had him come aboard as an executive producer, remaining on set for shooting. Clark saw the finished product before his death, and even though IMDb doesn't state what he thought of it, this interview suggests he was at least very happy with the backstory elements that were introduced here.

However, as mentioned above, the extreme gore was a matter of some dispute between Morgan and producer Bob Weinstein. Bizarrely, the film was marketed using multiple shots that weren't - and were never going to be - included in the final film. Morgan reportedly stated he stayed attached to protect as much as he could about the original idea, but Weinstein "urinated" all over the movie, trying to cash in on the torture porn craze. The end result is what we see today. Morgan never made another film after this one :(

A damn shame, all of it. I wonder what the intended film would have been like?

The Prowler (1981)

There's so much to love about the look of the killer in Joseph Zito's The Prowler. It was the artwork that initially caught my eye; so greasy-looking, so 80s!

(I was later to learn the reason behind the sheen on everything is because this is taken from an actual shot in the film, where a woman is being killed in the pool, so everything's wet).

Anyway, the exploitation-y artwork; the WW2 uniform; the startling, no face = no humanity look of the Prowler himself...

Something SO unsettling about his darkness against the pink of the walls!

...I was INTO this film about a mysterious military-clad figure, stalking and slashing its way through a graduation party. I was excited to watch it.

So I don't know if it was the wine I'd had, or the film itself's fault... or maybe a combination of both, but when I did watch it, I very nearly fell asleep. A couple of times.

To put it bluntly, the problem with The Prowler is the downtime between kills. There's no tension, and not too much in the way of engaging plot development either. It's all pretty boring until we see him starting to stalk another victim, and then things start to get interesting.

And the kills themselves? Coming courtesy of Tom Savini, they are by far the best thing to come out of this. Knives plunge into neck meat, eyes roll back to white, heads explode...! They are chilling, and they are incredibly impressive for 1981.

Bless you, Tom, and all of the work you have blessed this genre with. We're lucky to have you!

In conclusion: if you can make it through the slumps, the death scenes are worth sticking around for.

Black Sheep (2006)

Take one of the least scary animals you can think of, throw in some mad scientists and some animal activists and let's have a party!

"There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand... and they're pissed off!"

Black Sheep is basically a zombie movie. Genetically engineered sheep escape and spread their murderous virus through the flock and onto human visitors and workers of a New Zealand sheep farm.

Bitten humans don't have long before they are sporting hooves and big teeth, eventually transforming in terrifying "weresheep" (and mint sauce burns them like holy water!). One of these transformations is pretty reminiscent of the standard-setting one from An American Werewolf In London and it was no surprise to learn that Weta Workshops were behind the FX for this. They are LEGIT.

Bad news: There is, obviously, scenes of animals getting hurt in this movie.

Good news: They aren't real ones. Aside from a bunny being gutted for dinner (it's already dead) all of the attack sheep are just really realistic looking special effects.

I have to confess that much of my enjoyment came from simply watching the real sheep act. Seeing their adorable woolly bodies running around and being made to look like they were scoping out their kill was so much fun.

...But that isn't to say that this doesn't entertain in the way it was intended though, because it does. As the premise suggests, it's a ridiculously over the top movie, but it's a lot of fun. And I was initially hesitant, as (and I'm hoping this doesn't get my gore hound card revoked) I never made it all the way through the bloody rubbery insanity of Braindead, and this movie is that meets Evil Dead.

Beyond The Gates (2016)

Beyond The Gates definitely gets points for originality and then extra points for nostalgia value.

This weird little movie taps deep into the nostalgia for the videotape horror game craze THAT I ACTUALLY REMEMBER from the 80s/early 90s.

In fact directly after watching this, I jumped on Youtube and found the exact video my family played one Christmas...

Beyond The Gates borrows some choice things from this game - the message at the start of the tape, the gorgeous neon colour scheme of pinks, purples and blues to name but two - and so perhaps those of us old enough to remember the "source material" may find more to love about this film than those who don't.

My biggest complaint, is probably the dialogue. In the 'downtime' moments it's natural to the point of actually being dull. You know how normal, human conversations just don't translate to the screen? It's too mundane and too awkward. This film has a lot of those, more than it needs.

Nevertheless, this is certainly the most unique horror film I've seen in a while - and yes, there's also plenty of gore!

Turn the lights down and the sound up :)

The Last Exorcism (2010)

From here.

I normally eat up found footage horror. Even when others whine that it's just another variation on the The Blair Witch Project (putting aside for the moment that The Last Broadcast went there a year before the Witch did) I'm the one who still gets terrified by this stuff, because it seems so much more real. I don't know that this sub-genre breaks the fourth wall exactly, but it presses more firmly against it that any of the others. Therefore, it makes sense that where horror is concerned, it can lead to some frightening results.

The thing is, for disbelief to be fully and successfully suspended, the viewer really needs to be in the cinema, or at least ensconced in a dark room with no other distractions.

The problems I found with The Last Exorcism, despite some very creepy, very tense moments, were that (a) I wasn't in a cinema (not the film's fault, of course) but had I been, dear reader, I probably would have shat my pants, and (b) Even I could see the stain of Blair Witch all over this one - at the very end especially.

Could have done without Eli Roth's pointless "introduction", too. However I did choose it from the DVD menu, so I suppose I best take responsibility for that as well. Silly old me thought it might be something interesting or relevant to guide us into the story, not a big smug face basically stating "Hi. Here's the film". Cheers Roth, never would have made it to the opening credits without you.

All this said, The Last Exorcism stands up, albeit shakily and with a right crick in its neck. If you're partial to faux documentaries, naturalistic (sometimes naturally double-jointed) acting and shaky camera-work, you could do a lot worse than to spend 87min in the company of this one.