After Dark Horrorfest 2010: 8 Films to Die For IV

[Angra]

Originally Posted by ChronoGrl

I'll make it my #1 priority. But just for you.

But of course. :cool:

[ChronoGrl]

So this is coming a little late this year as the boyfriend and I couldn't make it to the theater to see all 8 films...

HOWEVER, they are now available for rent and/or purchase and we have begun our annual After Dark Festival watching... From the comfort of our own bedroom.

For those of you are unfamiliar with this Festival, here is the website, outlining the line up for this year and previous years:

http://www.horrorfestonline.com/

For those of you interested in my detailed review from last year, here is the thread (I have also bumped it for your convenience and also to satiate my own narcissism):

http://horror.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47161

Before I start reviewing, I thought that I'd throw in


ChronoGrl's Reflections on the After Dark Horrorfest Films to Date

As I've mentioned before, I feel as though, to be a horror fan, there is an unspoken agreement that you must enter into with the Horror Industry - I call it The 70/30 Rule: If you go into your average horror movie without knowing ANYTHING about it (i.e. "Hey, Honey, let's just pick a random horror movie to watch tonight - I want something I've never seen or heard of before!"), there's about a 70% chance that it will just be awful... A 2.5 or lower on the 5-point scale... I consider myself lucky if I stumble into a movie that is a solid 3, because it's only about 30% of the time that you see a GOOD movie, and only a fraction of that, a movie that you would want to recommend to a friend...

Unfortunately, the After Dark Horrorfest Films are no exception to The 70/30 Rule. Over the course of the three years, there have been some absolute DOGS that I find UNWATCHABLE:

• Nightmare Man
• Tooth and Nail
• Lake Dead
• Perkins 14

For the above, I IMPLORE you, avoid them at all costs.

However, there have been some pretty damn good films that have come out of the festival. All of the below I have repeatedly recommended, though I have found that the response is generally mixed:

• From Within
• Voices
• Autopsy (most people hate this one)
• Crazy Eights
• Mulberry Street
• Borderland
• Reincarnation (Rinne)
• The Hamiltons

The remaining films are not that bad; Watchable, but not necessarily movies that I need to see again.

Most of the horror fans that I talk to tend to shrug off this festival as "crap." I, personally, tend to have more of a sympathetic and patient view of the films, as I really want to support Horror Festivals. It's what you do if you're a horror fan; Support the genre!

But anyway. Let the reviews for this year begin...

Please add any of your thoughts on this year... I love to hear what people think.

[ChronoGrl]

(Thanks for combining threads, V! Forgot about the one you started! :o)

ANYway...

I'm not sure whether or not it was a GOOD thing that we kicked our 2010 Horrorfest movie watching with The Graves...





Why it might have been GOOD to have seen this movie first: The movie was so abysmal, there is no way that the rest of the festival could be that bad.

Why it might have been BAD to have seen this movie first: This might be a preview of what is yet to come...

GOD I hope not.

...

In case you couldn't tell by the above, The Graves was simply awful. Before seeing the movie, sure, the plot didn't really get me going (basic urbanoia/evil town story: Two Girls go to a town in the midwest US and EVIL things happen), BUT, I thought that with Bill Moseley (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects) and Tony Todd (Candyman as THE CANDYMAN), this might be kitsch fun.

I was wrong.

Also: I am starting to doubt that Bill Moseley has any talent outside of Rob Zombie movies... After watching Dead Air and Repo! I think that he should just stick to being Otis Driftwood.

The direction is horrible - there is absolutely no sense of dread at all. The writing is deplorable - I really could care LESS whether or not our victims live or die. And the movie is just overall unimaginative. The Evil Rural Town routine has been done and done and done. If you're going to do it again, try to put SOME kind of spin on it.

Oy.

The one redeeming factor: Our heroines are ridiculously RIDICULOUSLY hot. But you can just Google them without having to put you through this waste of time.

PLEASE, After Dark, DO NOT tell me that this is an omen of movies yet to come. If so I have a loooooooooooooooooooooong horror-watching ride ahead of me...

1/5 (slightly better than After Dark's Nightmare Man, Lake Dead, and Perkins' 14, but not by much).

[neverending]

I almost rented this on demand the other night. Thanks for saving me the trouble.

[ChronoGrl]

Nooooooooooooo problem - Glad I saved you from it. I, unfortunately, paid the $5 rental fee from Blockbuster because I was too impatient to wait until they came in from Netflix... I wonder if I can ask them for my money back... :cool:

I didn't know that they were On Demand; I should have checked there first; would have saved us from driving all over the place to actually FIND a Blockbuster near me (apparently all Blockbusters in a 10-mile radius of my house have been closed).

I also have Dread and Kill Theory at the house; I'm hoping to get to one or both of them tonight.

[neverending]

Yah- they're all in Movie Collections>Horrorfest

[_____V_____]

If you want my ranking -


Best - ZMD (absolutely loved this one!)

Pretty good - Lake Mungo & Hidden. (both are a bit slow but pretty novel & engaging)

Worth a watch - Kill Theory & The Reeds. (repetitive themes)

Worth skipping - Dread & The Graves. (wastage of time)

Haven't watched - The Final. (yet)

[ChronoGrl]

Originally Posted by _____V_____

Best - ZMD (absolutely loved this one!)

Pretty good - Lake Mungo & Hidden. (both are a bit slow but pretty novel & engaging)

Worth a watch - Kill Theory & The Reeds. (repetitive themes)

Worth skipping - Dread & The Graves. (wastage of time)

Haven't watched - The Final. (yet)

Oh, good! I was looking forward to ZMD... I mean, with a title like that, I figured that it would either be AWESOME or awful. I'm glad it's AWESOME.

I had a concern about Kill Theory - The description combined with the images on the back of the movie box really turned me off... And you KNOW that's bad when that happens... The teaser images are supposed to make you WANT to rent the movie... Oy................

BUT - I trust your judgment. I'll watch it tonight instead of Dread... I don't think I can stand another dog. I find it just... Depressing.

[ChronoGrl]

I should stop being lazy and start this back up again... I've watched a few more and have not yet posted...

Here goes...

Kill Theory





It's interesting. I watched Kill Theory after the boyfriend and I had watched End of the Line, a surprisingly successful little indie cult/supernatural film that we picked up on a whim at Blockbuster. The reason why I call out End of the Line here is that what made it "surprisingly" successful is that it managed to create an incredibly believable sense of dread with a plot line that I honestly didn't think I would be able to believe... But the writing and acting were so solid that the film sold me into believing the dread, the helplessness, and the horror of the situation...

And then there was Kill Theory.

Basic Plot Line: Whilst celebrating a graduation at a secluded vacation home, a group of college students find themselves targeted by a sadistic killer who forces them to play a deadly game of killing one another in order to survive.

OK. Sure. We've seen that before: Battle Royale, the Saw Franchise to a certain extent... It's been done successfully in both of those cases (while I'm not the biggest Saw fan, it's undeniable how incredibly popular those movies are), and I was expecting the same here: A derivation that I was hoping would "surprise" me...

Nope.

What makes the aforementioned End of the Line and Battle Royale so successful is that you are able to suspend your disbelief and truly emphasize with the helplessness and the horror that our victims are going through... You also accept unquestioningly the Power of their victimizer(s) and the dread of the situation because the movies are so artfully done that you have no other option but to get drawn in...

Not so with Kill Theory. Right off the bat, our Killer is set up like a Jigsaw knockoff, complete with video tapes and a bad voicebox... I understand that Jigsaw was iconic, but COME ON - A little originality would have been refreshing.

But silly killer aside, even without his voice box, I honestly had a difficult time believing what a true threat he was to our victims; I had a hard time allowing myself to believe that they were truly "trapped" by him - The writer/director did not really do a whole lot to build up what a "threat" our victimizer is (or SHOULD be - I mean, he captured EIGHT PEOPLE in a house - He should be pretty damn BADASS if you ask me!!); I spent a lot of the time thinking of ways that they could evade him, but they repeatedly made poor decisions that, in my mind wrote their own deathnotes...

So, in short:

• Bad pacing
• Unsuccessful mood
• REALLY poor writing (a line from the film: "Their love will kill us all!")
• Uninspired plot and story
• Victims making repeatedly stupid decisions in attempts to save themselves from a Killer who wasn't successfully developed as a threat in the first place.

2/5 (though I have to admit, I didn't even FINISH this one; I turned it off... ugh... Better than The Graves, but only slightly... I can see fans of that particular sub-genre being more sympathetic to it than I was)

[ChronoGrl]

Next up...

The Final





NOTE: THIS REVIEW DOES CONTAIN SPOILERS; THE MOVIE WAS SO DISAPPOINTING I CAN'T BE BOTHERED PARSING THEM OUT


Ok. So this movie actually started out pretty promising... The production value was pretty high, the direction and lighting were solid, and the acting was good, considering that we have an entire cast of Kids (read "Kids" as "meant to look like high schoolers)... Not to mention, I thought that the plot was pretty poignant, especially after this story of a girl who committed suicide after being chronically bullied by her peers.

Basic movie plot: A group of high school bully victims come together to trap and torture their oppressors.

Could be good, right? Should cater directly to every torture/exploitation flick fan, not to mention Horror Nerds who were tortured in high school... Right?

But unfortunately, The Final FAILS:

• Our trapped victimizers-turned-victims hardly show any fear for their predicament... If our victims aren't scared/horrified/shocked, how can you possibly expect the audience to be? FAIL on mood.
• THERE'S NO BLOOD - The whole point of trapping the school bullies is to torture them and even though they utilize a captive bolt pistol to drill into someone's face and industrial clippers to shear off fingers, THERE IS NO BLOOD. Come ON - I understand the restraint of a small budget, but horror directors have ALWAYS found a way to splatter their victims. FAIL on special effects.
• The only prolonged torture scene is ripped directly from Audition. I'm not kidding: Apron, pins, everything except the "eeeee eeeee eeeee." FAIL on originality.
• TWO of the FIVE main villains are killed twice. TWICE. SERIOUSLY. FAIL on continuity.
• Once we have our victims trapped, most of the dialogue are extended diatribes about how violence begets violence. Well, DUH. Our main Villain spends more time monologuing than torturing. FAIL on writing.
• Oh, and did I mention that the torture scenes suck? One of the torture devices is supposedly an acid-like cream that melts your skin... But we don't actually see any skin-melting (or even off-screen screaming for that matter!). FAIL on horror.

Going in to writing this review, I was actually going to give the movie 2/5, but now that I've taken the time to catalogue its F's, I don't think I can give it even a 2... WOW, what a dog.

1.75/5.