Hospitality (2008)

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The one respect in which Hospitality rises above other low-budget, direct-to-video horror is in its ambition. This is not a cabin-in-the-woods slasher, nor is it a gory zombie movie: Hospitality is an attempt at a slow-burning, suspenseful cat-and-mouse thriller, in the vein of films like The Strangers and Funny Games. It's rare to see a horror that goes for suspense instead of cheap gore and kills, and even rarer to see any film that's shot primarily in black and white. Although director Tony Ducret has bigger ambitions and more vision than most first-time horror directors, Hospitality truly is a failure on almost every level.

After a wild night of partying, Teddy wakes up to find his ski house completely trashed. While cleaning up the seemingly endless amount of beer bottles and used condoms, he finds two guests passed out in one of his rooms. After waking them up, he hits it off with them and eventually finds himself cooking them breakfast and detailing his pastime of crea... read full review

Doomsday (2008)

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If you ever want to see what sheer stupidity looks like on celluloid, look no further than Neil Marshall's latest outing Doomsday. After a promising start with his impressive debut Dog Soldiers and the claustrophobic spelunking nightmare The Descent I had high hopes for his venture into apocalyptic action territory. Unfortunately Doomsday is an jumbled mess of a film that is as schizophrenic as they come. It has no clue what it wants to be and just comes across as ill conceived and poorly executed, in fact just thinking about it gives me a headache. No joke, this makes Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome look like a masterpiece.

Doomsday has no shortage of ideas and a few of them are even good ones. But a plethora of ideas does not a good film make. Starting out in present day, a deadly virus (deemed the "Reaper virus") rages through Scotland decimating the population. The government is forced to quarantine the country and contain the virus before it spreads, abandoning the people who ... read full review

Last House on the Left (1972)

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Wes Craven's first movie, Last House on the Left, begins with an idyllic shot of ducks on a lake, an cozily autumnal country road, and then a shot of a solidly middle-class house. The camera then focuses on Mari, our main character, as she showers. The camera work here is gauzy and romantic, much like the opening of Brian De Palma's Carrie, where the camera lingers lovingly on girls' bodies. In Carrie, the blood and horror soon start, jarring you from the hazy scene, but in this film, we spend almost a solid half-hour with the characters before anything even remotely violent happens.
As Mari, our main character, emerges from the bathroom, we meet her parents, a handsome middle-aged couple, seemingly good-hearted and concerned about their daughter but convinced of her basic intelligence and goodness. Although none of these actors seem like professionals, they have a decency about them that the gives the movie a documentary-like feel—they are all a bit awkward and bashful in front... read full review

Midnight Offerings (1981)

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Ah, the made for TV horror film. It's slowly fallen on hard times over the last 10 years or so, excluding the crap-fest that the Sci-Fi channel pushes out every other week. Unless you count Lifetime's movies as horror, of course. Which I do, but for all the wrong reasons.

'Midnight Offerings' was one of my favorite horror films when I was a young lad. I first caught it around three in the morning or so on the Late show, and being around twelve, thirteen or so at the time, I was instantly enthralled. I mean, it had a Walton, a Ingalls and Richie Cunningham's mother all in it. Television royalty. at least for the late 70s/early 80s. Plus it was set in a High School, filled with cliques and school royalty. I remember really regretting not taping it. I did catch some late night re-runs, but never from the beginning. And after a while, the late shows, Night Flights and USA Up all nights disappeared, and so did this film.

Thank god for the Internet. read full review