May is a young woman that leads a fairly interesting but yet non-eventful life.  She has a full-time job as a vet assistant, she goes home everyday to greet her best friend, of whom is a porcelain doll, and she spends most of her free time sowing her own clothes.  Does that draw you in?  No?!?…well, while May is very lovable, she is also PAINFULLY shy and more than just a little awkward.  In social settings she is a complete wreck, yet her fellow patrons excuse this and tend to see her as a very sweet and sensible young woman.  Bettis displays all of May’s traits brilliantly and never fails to make every conversational frame the most awkward and unnerving segments of the film.  To the films advantage, these segments are welcomed and at often times funny and entertaining.  These qualities are amounted by Bettis’s performance.  It will draw you in, guaranteed, and you will be biting your nails the whole way through.

The key to this film is how May’s friends and coworkers relate to her.  Some are turned on by her innocents, some think she’s a freak, and some feel she’s just too “weird”.  May also wants nothing more than for her piers to see her for who she really is.  Who does May think she REALLY is?  Or better yet, what kind of person  is she capable of becoming???

Throughout the film, it’s as if May is feeling love and friendship for the first time, and throughout most of her personal encounters with other wonderful characters, she reacts to her complete ignorance in the most frustrating and violent ways.  It soon becomes more than May can take, and that is exactly where the film turns into a common slasher, but only at a first glance.  While May seems to take part in a rather tiresome plot switch to slasherhood, our director, Lucky McKee, has an even grander trick up his sleeve.  It isn’t until the films final moments that the pieces literally fall into place.  What we’re left with is a horror film that is incredibly original as a slasher, a drama, and a dark comedy.  More importantly, it is highly entertaining and very thought provoking.

See this film.  It has climbed into the ways of my top ten.

A link to a nice horror short by Robin Kasparik.  It’s gotten much appraise in all the right places and most importantly…it’s kind of creepy!  It reminds me of A Drop of Water, a famous Mario Bava short.  Enjoy this!

“I think it is really first rate work – direction, designed, acting, all worked.”
Tony Randel, director – Hellraiser II

“Terrific job.”
William Malone, director – House on Haunted Hill

Cornered is essentially about a group of half a dozen convenience store workers that are trapped in their store/apartment with a killer that is hell-bent on murdering convenience clerks throughout the city of Los Angeles.  One by one they realize that they are locked in the store with this brutal serial killer, and they each have their own personal encounters with him, as short and as bloody as those encounters may be.  The killer does have a motive, but it is weak and hardly justifiable.  You’ll spend most of your time waiting for the kills to begin, and as the story progresses, the kills become more and more frequent.  Can everyone last until dawn when the store is scheduled to open its doors?  Absolutely not.  Will the only likeable character make it too the end of the film?  Probably not.   Will you enjoy Cornered???  I’m guessing…not…

Most of Cornered’s ideas run completely flat.  Our six “innocent” characters each read about the convenience store killer and verbally tell each other how they themselves would kill the killer if they were to ever encounter him.  Well, they each have their own time with him, but the killer finds it humorous to actually slay each character in the ways in which they, jokingly, wanted to originally kill him.  Sounds interesting, but it also makes the action sequences become much too predictable.  This, and many other plot devices will surely keep you scratching your head while you wonder why the writers increasingly throw in and uncover so many underwhelming mysteries.

Cornered contributes nothing new to the genre, but it does give us a welcomed amount of character development.  Yes, the characters are a bit trite and overplayed, but they each carry out themes that relate very well to everyday living, as sleazy as it may be, and eventually their deaths mimic their qualities in the most ironic ways.  Still, it would help to have a killer that had more of a sinister presents.  This guy doesn’t even get enough camera time for you to even notice most of his qualities.   As a result, a few thrilling sequences offer some well placed jump scares, but for a horror film, Cornered offers little else.

Cornered isn’t even a “good try”.  It’s just a cheap and lazy slasher film, and nothing else.  In some regards it is worth a watch for its few decent qualities, but I wouldn’t go too far out of your way to find out what those qualities are.

The two-disc set from Anchor Bay. Disc one has an anamorphic Widescreen (1.78:1) transfer and an good Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. DVD extra on the first disc are the extended interviews on the actors/stunt man who played Jason. Disc two includes “Final Cuts” interviews with the directors of each film (expect Steve Miner, who directed “Friday the 13th part 2 & 3 and Ronny Yu, who directed “Freddy Vs. Jason”), “From Script to Screen” interviews some of the screenwriters of the series, fan films, two hidden features and much more

Enter Near Dark.  It’s a tale of family, young love, and dusty street dwelling vampires.  The creatures of the night have invaded many sleepy towns in order to dine on human blood, and while they travel from town to town for what is implied to be 100’s of years, they become closer and develop their own type of family values.  Heck, even though they are all well over a humans life expectancy, they still manage to have a father figure (Lance Henriksen), a mother (Jenette Goldstein), an older brother (Bill Paxton) and a innocent young daughter who is played by Jenny Wright.  The values are not of a typical family, because they are vampires after all, but the interactions between the members are sometimes comical do to the fact that these people are not blood related but still act as the closest of family members.  Funny, what brings them together is not their biological blood relations, but for their thirst for blood itself.

Caleb, played by Adrian Pasdar, is a young man who likes to travel about his dusty country roads in order to escape the quiet life on his family farm.  One night, Caleb runs across the lovely Mae, a seemingly innocent girl who unwillingly starts to tickle the fancy of Caleb’s affection.  What he doesn’t realize is that Mae is a blood thirsty vampire and that she is not looking for a “good time” more than she is looking for what easy prey the night may bring her.  Well, Mae seems to take to Caleb’s charm and doesn’t kill him, but instead, turns Caleb into a vampire by only biting his neck, not sucking his veins dry, which would surely lead to a foreseeable death.  Throughout much of the film, Caleb is committed to join the family of vampires.  The struggle lies within his ability to adapt to such a lifestyle.

Near Dark is constantly pulling you from one family to the other.  During the middle acts of the film, Caleb’s family is also looking for him as their son has been missing for more than just a couple of nights.  This means that the group of vampires are dealing with a new member, and Caleb’s family is dealing with the search (and possible death) of their only son.  The family values of both parties are constantly examined and compared until the gap between a vampires socialistic idealizations are almost one and the same with a humans.  Sure, there are huge differences, but what makes Near Dark such a fantastic film is that it creates these themes so well, and without compromising a progressing story that is a ton of fun to sit through.

Near Dark doesn’t come with a lot of gore or bloodshed, but it’s a rarity that vampire films aren’t as elegant and discrete as the creatures of whom they examine.   There is a rather entertaining scene, thanks to Bill Paxton’s wonder performance, that is violent but there is not a segment in the film that will make you wince do to its graphic content.  This is the 80’s after all.  Be prepared to have fun with Near Dark besides being horrified by any of its bloody sequences.

Near Dark is as great as 80’s horror gets: the characters, the story, and the script are all, with a lack of better terms, wonderful and fulfilling.  It should sit right next to your copies of Fright Night, Demons, Nightmare on Elm Street, Stage Fright, and…man…the list goes on.

Let’s face it…it all happened in the mid-80’s.

Get this film!

ZOMBLIES Official Trailer from Realm Pictures on Vimeo.

Our two main characters (Paul and Barbra) are on a small but sturdy passenger boat in the middle of only god knows where.  They are on this mini vacation with a middle aged couple that are also good friends of theirs.   It’s time for them all to relax and forget about work, the stock market, and their busy lives on the main land.  While they relax, a storm approaches with incredible abruptness, and it is soon time for our young couple to abandon ship and flee toward a nearby island.   It is evident that the older couple that they have sailed with was left behind in the wreckage and they have most surely drowned in the unforgiving sea or died of injury.  Once our couple safely arrives at the mainland, they find that the town is occupied by uninviting townsmen.  Our characters are soon separated, and throughout most of the picture, Paul is determined to find and reconnect with Barbra.  Along the way he soon finds out many of the secrets behind the island and the villagers that inhabit it.

Dagon unfolds like a tale you’ve read as a child.  As the film progresses, as do the vibrant color schemes and dramatic elements in both the plot and Paul’s struggles with love and personal identity.  At no point does the film’s progressions and themes seem at all mature or thought provoking.  Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli (screenwriter) have no intent to convey this hidden world as a complexity of science and religion.  More so than anything, they aim to tell a story about a man’s journey in finding his identity and true belonging in such a preoccupying world.   The man being Paul, the geeky yet lovable boyfriend turned hero.  This was probably not Lovecraft’s intent of the story.  Still, Gordon has followed Lovecraft’s bare-bones structure and still managed to create a world that is not just violent, sadistic, and biologically strange, but also created a place in which someone can discover identity and meaning.  In Paul’s case, a world that doesn’t revolve around probability and foreseeable outcomes , because in a world that is ran by Dagon, anything is possible.

Watch Dagon for its story and atmosphere.  They both progress within a horrific dream that will both captivate and entertain.  Gordon brings the film to a climax that seems a bit halfhearted, but still fitting.  Some will find that after its first viewing, Dagon is nothing but a skillful production with an unusually silly and possibly lazy outcome.  Fans of Lovecraft might even be upset by Gordon’s translation of the original work, but it is very necessary to keep in mind the films intent and Gordon’s usual themes.  If you let the story grab your attention and you except the film for the tale that it’s trying to tell, you will not be disappointed with any of its aspects.  If anything, something that is so violent, simplistic, yet vividly so dreamlike is very welcomed by this film viewer.  If you have enjoyed the rest of Stuart Gordon’s collection, you will undoubtedly hold Dagon to heart, even if you are a fan of the short story of which the film pays little resemblance.  If anything, Dagon and Reanimator are his most well-rounded productions.

Enter Hatchet. A short little slasher flick that’s about a small group of young Americans who are on vacation, wander off the beaten path, and start to get picked off one by one. What makes Hatchet different from all the other teen horror flicks is the sense of humor that it has in response to the same old tired stereotype characters and predicable plot twists that we see in too many American horror films.  It takes those characters and extends and exploits those stereotypes to a whole new extreme.

The plot of Hatchet is much of the same as what I’ve previously mentioned, and if anything, it tries so desperately to be incredibly straight forward in terms of your typical slasher film plot. You guessed it; a group of young Americans are on vacation, they get sidetracked from the fun, get lost in the middle of nowhere, and for some reason somebody or something wants to kill them. Hatchet can certainly be admired for making us laugh at it’s overly stereotypical characters, over the top killer lunatic, and humorous plot advancements, but in the end, Hatchet is still JUST THAT…another Hollywood Horror Film with very few tricks up its sleeve.

So if Hatchet won’t surprise you, it can most definitely make you grin. It does manage to be very clever. When most of our characters are still alive, their interactions and self conflicts can be amusing, to say the least. Adam Green, the films writer and director, simply takes material that is not at all original and tries to use his witty script to his only advantage. As a result, the characters will keep you interested in the film and you might even find yourself feeling a bit disappointed when some of your favorites get the axe…errr, i mean…hatchet.  You won’t necessarily miss them for the duration of the film, but you might find that the film was far more humorous  when all the characters where alive and well.

So this is a slasher, right? So it’s got some good kills, right? YES! If you think that you’ve seen it all (you’ve got some nerve!) then you are dead DEAD wrong. The killer in Hatchet is a HUGE man-beast that slays our main characters in the most satisfying and almost always humorous fashions. Nothing is incredibly realist here as far as blood and guts are concerned, but lets just say that due to all the buckets of gooey red stuff that were spilled, my jaw dropped in glorious wonderment on more than one occasion. If you are watching the film with a friend you will undoubtedly be saying “DID YOU SEE THAT???” after countless kill scenes. The funny thing is, of course he saw “that”,…i mean…he’s sitting in the seat RIGHT next to you. Dumbass! Still, you know what I mean.