Archive for December, 2007
Incubus
Incubus is the story of six teenagers who break into what they think is an abandoned factory to seek shelter.
They quickly find themselves trapped and realize too late that they are not alone. Suspended in a triple locked shatter proof clear cube attached to an observation room is a coma patient obviously being tested and experimented on.
The bizarre sleeper and his horrific powers hold the key to their escape and ultimately their survival.
Maneater
That Gary Busey makes anything watchable is proven yet again with MANEATER, a made-for-TV movie about a town held in the grips of terror.
Antibodies
Antibodies is a German horror film in the same vein as Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs. The film follows the travails of a country cop trying to solve the case of a murdered child. A sick and demented serial killer is arrested and the cop decides to interrogate the killer to see if he is responsible for the murder in his town. The characters enter into a decidedly unhealthy relationship that directly references the relationship between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter. On one hand, the cop wants to know if the killer is the same person that killed the little girl in his town, but on the other hand the murderer is so clever and diabolical that the whole situation is a calculated risk… like jacking off with a handful of glass. The story is compelling, and despite the slow feel of the movie, it never loses its intriguing properties as every scene feels significant.
The Best Horror Trailers of 2007
I spent an entire day looking around for what I thought would be the best trailers of the year. The link is below. Feel free to let me know if there was anything that I missed and I will be happy to add it to the list. I hope you enjoy and have a Happy New Year!
http://www.palaceofhorror.com/the-best-horror-trailers-of-2007/
Sarah Carter in Skinwalkers
A blonde-haired screen beauty whose impossible golden locks wouldn’t be out of place in a shampoo commercial and whose mischievous smile seems to shine right through the cameras, actress Sarah Carter is a model of conventional beauty; her perfect combination of talent and superior genes would make her as much a candidate for the cover of Vogue as a potential leading lady in Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. Read the rest of this entry »
Hide and Seek
Hide and Seek revolves around a widower (Robert DeNiro) and his daughter (Dakota Fanning). They move to upstate and Emily (Fanning) soon creates an imaginary friend named Charlie…but this act takes an unexpected and terrifying turn, where her father and doctor (Famke Janssen) start to worry about Emily’s gruesome habits.
See more of Famke Janssen here.
The Black Cat
Unlike most of the Masters of Horror series, this episode is more of a period piece combining fictional elements with realistic details of one of horror’s most famed authors, Edgar Allen Poe. Writers Dennis Paoli and Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, Dagon) have, with a stroke of genius, placed Edgar Allen Poe in the middle of one of his own stories, combining true elements of Poe’s life with that of one of his supernatural short stories, The Black Cat. The combination is truly intriguing for people that have a literary background, of course, the inverse is probably true as well. If you don’t know anything about Poe or his stories you could find yourself very bored by old timey gothic horror as it is all about tension and atmosphere.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a clever film that spends a lot of time deconstructing the slasher genre. I’m not talking about the kind of deconstruction that is basically a slap in the face of genre fans everywhere, like Scream so successfully managed to do. I’m talking about the type of deconstructionist examination of slasher movie clichés and ethos that are actually handled in an intelligent, respectful and often times humorous manner that doesn’t alienate the people that made the slasher films one of the most successful genres of the 80’s. It is in this respect that this movie achieves. Behind the Mask manages to poke fun at the slasher genre without making fun of its viewers.
American Psycho
American Psycho is a masterpiece of misdirection and confusion that is set in the ‘80s during the materialistic plight of the Reagan era. The film’s very core is soaked with shallow and meaningless trivia and characters which show the effect of these trends upon one particularly unstable individual, one Patrick Bateman. Bateman exists in the year 1987 as a blank slate, a human being devoid of personality and identity who soaks up the trends of the day and manifests his personality through his acquaintances and material possessions. To further enhance his persona, or mask his lack of one, he spouts hilariously vague monologues that clearly sound like memorized bits of news articles. When his world doesn’t quite work the way he thinks it should, or his status in the yuppie pecking order is questioned, he goes on kill crazy rampages and rants about bad ‘80s music… proving that despite all of the clever things he says he has no idea of what it good on his own… seriously, Huey Lewis and the News? What kind of sick fucker would pontificate on the virtues of Hip to Be Square? The type of guy that tries to cram a cat into an ATM machine I guess.
Shattered
Pierce Brosnan and Maria Bello star in this tense thriller about a couple whose daughter goes missing. Read the rest of this entry »
