review

Few films run into the monumental production hiccups that have plagued The Wolfman from day one. With directors leaving, budgetary concerns, the firing and rehiring of Danny Elfman, and an emergency clean-up editing session after an LA screening it's not hard to understand why so many people considered this project a sinking ship. I have been following the woes of The Wolfman for some time but despite what I had read, possibly despite my better judgment, I went into the theater optimistic as a die-hard fan of the Universal monsters. Interestingly enough, this film is so patched together, so broken and stitched, that it more closely resembles Frankenstein's monster.

The tragic story of Lawrence Talbot is timeless. Here is a man cursed for reasons beyond his control; victimized by fate in the tradition of the protagonists of Shakespeare or Euripides. He is a man who becomes a monster upon the full moon and commits horrible atrocities that fill his heart with regret once the transformation is reversed. Lon Chaney, Jr., who played this role originally in several Universal films, brought so much sympathy to the part, particularly the scene in Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman wherein he is begging for someone to find a way to kill him, it was heartbreaking. You feel for this man and, though he is also a monster, you make an emotional connection.

I was not a fan of Hatchet, Adam Green's debut horror film. While being touted as a return to old-school American horror, it managed to do nothing to distinguish itself from other contemporary slasher flicks. The characters were contrived, the plot cliche and the gore unimpressive. My experience with Green's first horror film notwithstanding, I was excited for his next horror film, the "stuck on a ski lift" thriller Frozen. My interest in the film grew as many lauded the film's ability to invoke levels of tension unheard of in contemporary horror, and while I still had the dreadful Hatchet burned in the back of my head, I kept an open mind and went in expecting a solid thriller. Sadly, the hype got the best of me, and Frozen proved to be obscenely mediocre.

Frozen is ostensibly Open Water on a ski lift. Dan and Lynch are childhood buddies who spend every weekend hitting the slopes. Much to the chagrin of Lynch, Dan has been bringing along his girlfriend Parker, whose inability to snowboard and overall intrusion on their friendship has started to become more and more apparent. With lift tickets being a bit too expensive, offering the lift operator a hundred bucks for a day of skiing and snowboarding seems like the ideal situation. After spending the day watching Parker fall on her ass, our unfortunate trio attempts one more run before the mountain is closed due to inclement weather. The lift operator reluctantly lets them go up for one more run, and due to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings the ski lift gets shut down, the mountain closes, and our three protagonists are forced to fight off freezing temperatures and hungry wolves in an effort to survive.

The Revenant is not a zombie movie. A half hour in you might be tempted to think it's a vampire movie, but that notion gets thrown out the window in favor of a little used word used to describe a corporeal being that has risen from the dead yet needs blood to survive. This allows writer/director/producer Kerry Prior to construct his own mythology regarding those nefarious of nightwalkers, which he does so with glee.

The eponymous character is Bart, a soldier killed in a gunfight in Iraq who left behind a devoted girlfriend Janet and best friend Joey, rises from the dead. Dealing with death every sunrise and the uncontrollable urge to projectile vomit black bile, Bart and Joey try to make sense of the situation and figure out just what the Hell is going on, all while enjoying the benefits that come with being unable to die. Chris Wylde looking like a Matrix reject ensures.

The first half of The Revenant is incredibly strong, showcasing Kerry's witty dialogue between Bart and Joey while taking jabs at the likes of Scientology and race relations in seedy LA. Unfortunately, it falls victim to what most horror comedies fall victim to: a strong start, laced with ample amounts of humor and clever dialogue, but ultimately becoming more serious until most of the humor simply disappears. This "problem" is merely subjective, but in the case of The Revenant it manages to be just bothersome, due in no small part to its incredibly long running time. In the end it just plods along, though thankfully culminates in an ending that, despite the transition from buddy comedy to pseudo-serious thriller, is incredibly original and a perfect setup for a sequel.

Zombie comedies, heretofore known as "zombedy," are all the rage these days. Zombieland tore up the box office and resulted in a weird cult of Woody Harrelson (I still say his best role is as Woody on Cheers), while Doghouse, though relatively unseen outside the festival circuit and the U.K., blew me away with its unique brand of humor that failed to miss a beat. Kicking off the new decade with a slot on After Dark's 8 Films to Die For is Kevin Hamedani's Zombies of Mass Destruction, a zombedy with a political bend it wears on its blood-soaked sleeve.

Zombies of Mass Destruction takes your standard "group of people trying to survive a zombie outbreak" trope and layers it with a heaping plate of social and political commentary. Iranian-American Frida has recently returned home from Princeton to only be met with ignorant yet neighborly racists and her devoted Muslim father. Meanwhile, couple Tom and Lance have arrived from the big city to reveal to Tom's mother that he's gay. To make matters worse, a zombie outbreak has inexplicably cropped up. As they struggle to survive, the zombies become the least of their worries as they face rampant racism and religious persecution that has come to typify the small town they tried to leave behind.

Troll 2 is not a good movie. It's not even a bad movie. It is an entity unto itself, a conundrum of film-making that rivals Plan 9 from Outer Space in terms of its ability to invoke unintentional laughter and unforgivable groans. No other film is worthy of the phrase "so good it's bad" than Troll 2, so perhaps this is why it has become an unlikely cult phenomenon, attracting thousands of viewers to special screenings across the country nearly two decades later. This is what Michael Stephenson, child-actor and star of Troll 2, wanted to explore in his phenomenal documentary Best Worst Movie.

Although ostensibly about George Hardy, the Alabama dentist-cum-cult celebrity who portrayed Stephenson's father, Best Worst Movie focuses heavily on the cult status of the film and the impact it has had on those not just involved with its production but the devoted fans around the country who fill packed theaters, hold Troll 2 parties, and even get tattoos in celebration of the 'best worst movie' ever made. Stephenson and Hardy travel the country visiting film festivals and interviewing fans in an effort to answer the question "Why is this movie so loved?" Through this they reconnect with the original cast members, including the director and writer, and through candid interviews and a myriad of screenings we're given an intimate look at the impact this seemingly forgetful low-budget monstrosity of a film has had not just on their lives, but on the very nature of fandom as a whole.

The influence of Lars von Trier's latest magnum opus Antichrist reaches far and wide. The overarching theme of the film, "chaos reigns," became the unofficial slogan of Fantastic Fest, and although recently cancelled to legal issues, CHUD.com and IFC sponsored a "make your own Antichrist poster" contest so that similarly disturbed individuals could artistically express their love for what has come to be, for me, one of the worst horror films of the year.

This sort of reaction is not what I would have expected from such a brilliant filmmaker. My experience with the film prior to viewing it was simply reading the words, "Lars von Trier to make a horror film called Antichrist," and that was all that was needed to get the anticipation flowing through my veins. What we have here, then, is another example of the hype machine working its magic, instilling in me expectations that can in no way be met or exceeded.

Antichrist features all of two people throughout its muddled storyline. A nameless couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, are grieving over the loss of their child Nic, who fell out of the window while the two made love. Although He has begun to come to terms with the death of his child, She has trouble moving on, collapsing at his funeral and waking up in the hospital. From there He, a therapist, decides to take her care into his own hands. Eventually they end up at a cabin in a forest named Eden, which turns out to be the focal point of her fear and the location at which She, along with her son, spent time working on her thesis, which focused on the subject of gynocide. Once there strange things start to happen. Genital mutilation ensues.

By Eric Snider -- 5/3/09 -- Cinematical

The House of the Devil is a great name for a movie. It hearkens back to the days of grindhouse horror, when a film's title and its trailer told you basically everything you needed to know. Yet it's different from those movies, too, in that it prefers slow-building tension over frequent bloodletting and mayhem. You have to wait for "The House of the Devil" to deliver on its promises -- but when it does, holy crap. I know that isn't a very scholarly analysis, but seriously. Holy crap.

The film is set in the early 1980s, apparently, with appropriately synthesized rock on the soundtrack and lots of freeze-frames in the opening credits. Our perky young heroine, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), is a college student who's sick of living in the dorms and is preparing to move into an apartment with her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig). Eager to earn some money to facilitate the move, Samantha responds to a flier posted on a campus bulletin board looking for a babysitter. Rather suspiciously (to me, anyway), the flier is blank except for a phone number and the words "BABYSITTER WANTED."

The clients are the Ulmans -- Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan) is a tall, gentle-voiced man who uses a walking stick; his wife (Mary Woronov) is old-school sophisticated, a woman whose evening wear requires fur. Samantha learns when she arrives at the house -- a huge old isolated place, I needn't tell you -- that the babysitting duties will be slightly different from the norm, but it's not a deal-breaker. And the Ulmans are offering a lot of money.

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By Peter Martin -- 3/16/09 -- Cinematical

Don't f*** with old ladies, especially if they have bad teeth and an evil curse up their sleeve. If there's anything new to be learned from Drag Me to Hell, director Sam Raimi's return to horror, it's that loan officers will have hell to pay if they dare to foreclose on your mortgage. It's a lesson that should make everyone stand up and cheer.

The film screened as a "work in progress" late last night at the completely packed Paramount Theater in Austin to a loud, raucous reaction. Some of the finer technical points clearly remain to be tweaked (sound, visual effects, maybe a little editing here and there) and end credits need to be added before its wide theatrical release on May 29. And in its present version, the ratings issue is still cloudy -- PG-13 or R?

But this much is clear: Raimi has made a joyful romp through his personal horror playground and come up with a very entertaining horror-comedy that gets back to the basics. By that I mean creepy shadows on the wall and things that go bump in the night: all the odd, unexplained sights and sounds that keep anxious children awake at night, hiding under the covers. Any inkling that Raimi's soul might have been irretrievably chewed up by the Hollywood studio machinery -- a well-founded concern after the disappointing Spider-Man 3 -- quickly evaporates once the story gets underway.

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By Eric Snider -- 1/26/09 -- Cinematical

The main thing Dead Snow wants you to know is that it's a splatter film about Nazi zombies. You like zombies, and Nazis add kitsch value, so you're sold. But once you get past the relative novelty of it (they're ZOMBIES, but they're also NAZIS!!), Dead Snow is only so-so. The only thing that separates it from the zombie movies you've already seen is that it's in Norwegian.

It's from director Tommy Wirkola, who, with co-writer Stig Frode Henriksen, had a huge hit in Norway with the 2007 Tarantino parody Kill Buljo. Dead Snow offers more proof of Wirkola's fondness for Tarantino, and you get the feeling he's seen plenty of Sam Raimi and George Romero, too. Those are all good ingredients, but without some kind of new spice all you're doing is serving leftovers.

Hungry now? Good. Let's talk about flesh-eating zombies. These ones are Nazi officers and soldiers whose frozen bodies, long hidden beneath the snow of Norway's hinterlands, have now been reanimated for reasons that Wirkola barely bothers to explain. Their victims are a group of college students who have trekked to a remote cabin for a weekend of wintertime merriment.

More here!

By William Goss -- 3/13/09 -- Cinematical

As a culture, we tend to recycle our stories, and no, not always out of laziness or a need for one big opening weekend (though that plays an increasing part). No, the old and the familiar play out time and time again because their conflicts and themes resonate across generations, and because the scenario at hand might lend itself to more apt commentary as time passes and people change. In terms of genre, rarely does this seem more common than with tragedies, and in turn, horror films in particular have a habit of bringing the boogeymen back to haunt us. That's the reason zombies won't stay dead. That's the reason body snatchers insist on invading. And that might be the reason why a fourth incarnation of The Last House on the Left is now willing -- and able -- to force itself upon our collective conscience.

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