Foreign Horror

I've written quite a few words chronicling my excitement for the French zombie film The Horde. The idea of a group of crooked cops and tough guy criminals teaming up to fight zombies is one those high concepts that totally captures my imagination. So, when news of Koldo Serra's Perros Muertos (Dead Dogs) turned up in yesterday's Variety, I immediately got interested.

Director Serra previously helmed the Gary Oldman vehicle Backwoods. Nava Entertainment will produce the zombie action flick, which has a budget of roughly 4.8 million dollars. Read on for the brief plot blurb...

"Perros" has a petty criminal, Cocacolo, pulling a Barcelona bank job and fleeing south, just as a family leaves Northern Spain for holidays. The motley group join together in the Spanish countryside to battle a zombie outbreak sparked by the locals' consumption of adulterated rapeseed oil."

Rapeseed oil is a real thing and has nothing to do with rape, apparently. Thank god for the Internet--otherwise I might have said something really crass there.

Variety also states the screenplay is completed--which means things should be moving full speed ahead sometime in the not too distant future.

I regularly complain that there are way too many zombie movies out there, not because I don't love a good flick about the walking dead (because believe me, I do), but because so many of them are derivative of the best films in the subgenre that can't be bothered to even try to bring anything new to the table. I don't need every zombie film made to reinvent the wheel, but I do appreciate when a filmmaker and screenwriter take the time to try to add some subtle new wrinkle to the undead universe.

When I caught this new trailer and brief synopsis for Irish filmmaker Bing Bailey's Portrait of a Zombie, (thanks to our friends over at Twitch) I immediately knew it was something I had to pass along to the masses. It's a nice example of what I was just talking about--adding new elements to the kind of zombie films we all know and love.

Bailey, who wrote, directed, produced, and edited this film, is set to bring us his own low-budget take on the zombie apocalypse. Read on for a brief plot synopsis.

"Zombies roam the streets of Dublin. An American Documentary crew come to Ireland to make a documentary about the Murphy Family, whose eldest son Billy has turned, but the family still choose to care for him, much to the chagrin of the neighbors and the local crime boss. The Documentary crew soon become enthralled in the proceedings as Billy's story unfolds...."

Sounds kind of like Day of the Dead or even Survival of the Dead (the whole trying to "keep" zombies angle) mixed with Behind the Mask's faux documentary aspects merged with your standard zombie gore. Nothing too complicated, there, but just different enough to pique my interest.

Click the read more button to view the trailer.

I'm not sure what the popular consensus on Roar Uthaug's Norwegian slasher film Cold Prey aka Fritt Vilt was, but I think we can all agree on one thing: Roar Uthaug is quite possibly the coolest name this side of Max Power. For what it's worth, I liked Cold Prey. It's a simple slasher flick, but there are evenings where I want little more than a group of generic people killed in horribly gruesome ways by some maniac. Cold Prey delivered that.

The sequel (which I haven't seen) keeps the story going (picking up right where the first film ends, only with Uthaug replaced by filmmaker Mats Stenberg) and generated a surprisingly positive critical and commercial reception for a sequel to a slasher film. Naturally, this means a Cold Prey 3 is in the works...

Our friends at Twitch have the early skinny on the latest installment and a nifty (although slightly spoiler-ific) teaser clip for the new entry. Rather than try to bring the killer of the first two films back for a third go-round, Cold Prey 3 is instead set up to be a prequel and origin story highlighting what led up to the events in the first film. So you know this, they've shot the trailer backwards and stuck a subtitle on the film that translates to "Beginning".

You can check out the film's official site (which, like the trailer, is not in English and does not feature English subs) or view the teaser clip beyond the jump.

I'm a sucker for Asian horror movies, though admittedly most of my experience is spread between Korea, Japan and Thailand. Over the last few years, however, Indonesia has been trying to get in on the horror game, though most of their ghost-related entries were crippled by a cultural barrier I, unfortunately, couldn't surmount. But now with Waterfall Bride set to premiere in the country in December, it looks like Indonesia finally has a movie a little more up my alley; and man do I love this trailer.

Not because I've been craving more horror movies out of Indonesia. Not because the first half of this trailer consists of shots of bikini-clad beauties on beaches (24 Frames Per Second tells us the star is a local pinup model). And Not because its deranged killer is either deformed or wearing a bizarre mask (or perhaps both).

No, the reason I love this trailer for Waterfall Bride is because it features the most out-of-place Wilhelm scream I've ever heard used in a trailer. To even mention it is there kind of ruins the surprise, but I'll leave it up to you to discover where it is on your own below.

I'll be honest, I'm not the world's biggest Hideo Nakata fan. I hold the filmmaker personally responsible for essentially ruining Japanese horror with his film Ringu. Before Ringu became a sensation back in 1998, Japan was heaven on Earth for gore fans. The Guinea Pig films, Kazuo Komizu's Entrails of a Virgin, The Eko Eko Azarak movies, and Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap were titles that sprang to mind when the topic of Japanese horror cinema was discussed--and there was nary a single pasty, dark-haired, pissed-off girl ghost in any of those movies.

The Arrival of Ringu changed all that (for the worse, in this critic's opinion) and it's only now, roughly a decade later, that Japan's horror scene is finally starting to get back on track with films like Tokyo Gore Police.

That being said, I'm willing to give Nakata another chance to wow me. I realize blaming him for everything that came in the wake of Ringu isn't entirely fair. However, news of his latest project, The Voice From the Stone, isn't exactly convincing me that he's broadened his narrative horizons...

Variety broke news of the project last night. The film's based on an Italian novel of the same title and focuses on "a female psychologist who takes on the case of a young boy who made a promise to his dying mother to remain silent until her spirit returns. The psychologist begins to realize that the boy's dead mother has manipulated her in order to take possession of her body so she can be reunited with her son."

A dead mother's spirit is technically a girl ghost. I'm not getting a good vibe here. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if Nakata is just Japanese for Shyamalan...