aka Zombies/The Children/100 Years Later
⭐️⭐️1/2
A small family (mom, annoyed teen daughter and younger/better daughter) relocate to a small Pennsylvanian town where a mine collapse in 1913 trapped dozens of child-workers alive. Recently widowed, the family moves in to the dead husband’s family home in the middle of a deeply forested nowhere. The isolated area has an unsettling amount of missing persons and a few shady characters the three gals can now call neighbors. The huge property has been vacant for awhile and will definitely need a whole lotta fixing up but it’s home for now. Sure there’s creepy stains, rats, questionable plumbing and electric but there’s also a horde of homicidal zombie/ghost children hanging around so... well, yeah, it’s bad. The goofy-ass spooky kids take a shine to the youngest daughter and mama slowly uncovers the truth behind the area’s urban legend and her late husband’s connection to the weirdness. Disposable characters get disposed of and the film’s boogeymen elicit more giggles than gasps. Chloë Grace Moretz proves that she’s been talented probably since popping out of her mama, Geoffrey Lewis classes shit up as a local handyman who provides some exposition for our curious hero but makes his exit far too quick, Lori Heuring is fine as the young mother thrown into a shitty position, Scout Taylor-Compton pulls off the tricky balance of angsty teen who loves her family even though her world completely blows goats at the moment and Ben Cross hams it up as a bug-eyed forest-dwelling kook who knows the score. It’s nothing exciting but it’s got a surprisingly solid cast and enough of the red stuff scattered into a mildly absorbing story to keep things interesting and the climax does feature Mr. Cross blowing away zombie/ghost children with a shotgun.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
In a dead-end Midwestern town sometime during the 1960s (1963 in the book, if my memory serves me right), an annual fall ritual holds the key to escape. Each year Sawtooth Jack rises from the cornfields and makes his way to the town’s church. Violent gangs of young men await the supernatural being in an attempt to take him down before midnight hits. The winner of the event gets a ticket out of the nothing town (not to mention the town’s respect for bringing about a fruitful harvest for the year)… but you’re more likely to meet your maker by the hands of the pumpkin-headed nightmare. Richie Shepard’s brother actually completed the task and now he’s looking to break out from his shadow and do the same, even though he’s not supposed to because there are rules in place. There’s your usual mixture of asshole jocks and reluctant boys joining in on this year’s hunt. Richie joins up with a new girl who works at the local theater named Kelly. She also wants to escape the place and have some excitement in her life but the tradition is off-limits to girls. But as Richie says “Fuck the rules”. The night hits, and chaos erupts as the starved and riled up youths get to hunting and meeting nasty ends. As usual, there’s a bigger secret at play and our heroes are on a collision course with some dark revelations. Jeremy Davies and Elizabeth Reaser add some class as Richie’s distressed parents and Adam Fuckin’ Brooks shows up as the town pastor… and I’ll never complain about that. Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest gets a solid adaptation to film and manages to keep the ever-important fall atmosphere front and center for an interesting creature feature with a solid cast.
⭐️⭐️1/2
Teenagers refurbish an old opera house and are picked off by a murderous clown who ties into a past tragedy at the location. This tragedy was the murder of a lead actress who just so happens to be the birthmother (she never knew her) of one of the youthful idiots cleaning up the joint by the name of Kate. Kate’s been convinced by her friend (the super-cute Tatyana Ali) the way to cure nightmares she’s been having since learning about her mother is to work in the building where her mother met an untimely death. Sure. Whatever. It’s Tatyana Ali, so it sounds right coming out of her beautiful face. There’s a bitchy diva there, her football-stud boyfriend, drama teacher Margot Kidder rocks a necktie, James Duval plays an FX artist bad boy, a couple other likable theater geeks hang around and Christopher Plummer collects a paycheck and puts way more effort into his role then the movie deserves as the theater owner who fills the kids in on the troubled history of the joint… he also has a pretty big secret. Kate keeps getting visions of her mother’s death and freaks the fuck out. Sexy James Duval starts crushin’ on the possibly insane Kate and the old-ass high schoolers get locked in the building and get themselves perished. The Canio costume from Pagliacci is one freaky-ass look, there’s one of the laziest montages I have ever witnessed, followed by an incredibly lame sex scene, our hero sucks, the acting definitely fits the whole inexperienced-theater-kid vibe and Margot Kidder gets an axe to the noggin. It’s kinda lame and kinda enjoyable in unison and Plummer gets to cut loose as the film winds down.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Hammer excellence opens with British archaeologists unearthing the tomb of the princess Ananka and paying for it with their lives. An attempted warning from the devoted Mehemet Bey is ignored and after the desecration leaves the leader of the group insane, the tomb is eventually sealed by his son and brother. Three years pass and Mehemet arrives in England with the towering mummy Kharis. He uses the Scroll of Life to resurrect the mummy and knock off the violators. A wrench is thrown into the plan when the son’s wife is revealed to be the spitting image of Kharis’ love, Princess Ananka. Christopher Lee is my odds-on favorite mummy and definitely the most terrifying version of the shambling corpse. Cushing is perfect (as usual) as the young archeologist confronting the living dead but the whole thing is Lee’s show. There’s your customary flashback revealing the origin and an excellent atmosphere expertly handled by Terence Fisher. A classic.
aka Travis/Paper Dolls/Black Forest
⭐️⭐️1/2
A lake house party near the Canadian border leads to the deaths of seven local students. One year later, celebrating their high school graduation, Travis (who was at the party) and his buddy Nate embark on a trip through Canada. We know shit didn’t go well because following some recorded footage from the fateful party, we open with Travis in an interrogation room, laying out what happened on the trip. They were given a route into Canada down an old logging road by a creepy gas station attendant, which the adventurous Nate ate right up. Bad move. The best buds get their asses attacked by some big and hairy somethings. They grab Nate and flee when they set off the car alarm. Travis manages to get ahold of Nate’s brother, Chris, and tells him what went down. He makes his way back to the gas station and the weirdo attendant fills him in on the Sasquatch legend but Travis is sure they were just people in furs. Turns out the gas pumper used to be a professor and an expert on the subject and he shows him a video of one of his seminars (in a scene that gave me some Night of the Demon vibes). He had a theory that Francisco Vázquez de Coronado abandoned some slaves near Canada and they became what we know today as Sasquatch. Chris comes for Travis and they both head to the spot of the abduction, looking to find Nate. Chris gets got and Travis escapes in his truck... which brings us back to the interrogation room. One officer believes Travis is full of shit, the gas station attendant doesn’t back the boy’s story and Travis’ journal paints a picture of a disturbed young man betrayed by his best buddy and his girlfriend. There’s some iffy acting, which distracts slightly, but it still has a nice streak of originality pumping through its veins. It’s not great but it ain’t all bad either.
⭐️⭐️
Sam Mason seems pretty relaxed for a man looking into the abyssal eyes of death. His final seconds in the electric chair don’t seem to bother him much and it turns out there’s a good damn reason for that. He may have been prevented from killing the classically handsome Terri, but it would seem he was able to get his thirteenth victim to complete some kind of immortality-granting satanic ritual. Terri, now with aspirations to be a reporter, has agreed to write an article on Mason for a local newspaper in a macabre celebration of the one year anniversary of the serial killer’s execution. After watching a segment on the show Super Natural, she decides to attempt to catch the ghostly voice of the man that tried to kill her by placing a microphone’s tape recorder on his grave. Unfortunately, a scuzzy grave robber comes across the device and decides to steal it. He listens to the recording and is possessed by the undying spirt of Sam Mason. What follows is a sluggish chase that fills up the majority of the film. There’s some violence but we’re more-so treated to B-Roll and some of the worst delivered dialogue this side of a Canadian head trauma ward. There’s a shit-ton of padding but it is an interesting look at the gestation of what Hugh Gallagher would bring to the table with his essential Gore Trilogy. It also lacks that sexy insanity that the best of the brain damaged SOV would provide. It’s a little fun but all in all it could have used some cutting of nearly half the runtime.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Folks disappearing into thin air is a crisis plaguing national forests worldwide. I’ve read the books. Written by a man with questionable morals. So it all must be true. McKenzie’s sister Marylyn has become a number in that troubling statistic but McKenzie is not going to sit back and take “We can’t find her.” for an answer. Along with her brother Martin (a knockoff Stephen Dorff), Martin’s fiancée Darcy, Darcy’s brother Edgar who has just gotten out of the hospital following a manic episode and Gerrik, their British pal who supplies comic relief, the group journey into the Cinder National Forest to find the missing girl. Marylyn had left a journal behind which featured some odd claims about doorways to different dimensions and nature not behaving as it should. These claims are enforced by a local named Leon who knows a thing or two about the high strangeness of the area and was in communication with the missing girl before she apparently slipped into the void. McKenzie figures this all sounds insane and thinks it best to keep this from her search party companions. Leon provides a couple vials of red liquid which he says will fend off the hallucinations that are definitely in the groups future. So it’s into the wilderness and into the paranormal clutches of things we humans could not possibly comprehend. May the forest Gods bless a solid cast and gorgeous filming locations because it gives your film a nice head start while it works towards revealing its cards. Family drama, suspicious claims and mystery motivations serve as building blocks but the odd woods quickly begin to play with the group almost immediately after entering the park. Ghosts and monsters haunt ‘em all, starting with the unstable Edgar so the hikers have a reason to doubt the growing uncanniness at first. An unsetting sun, an opening murder, woodland sex (dirt and leaves getting where dirt and leaves should never be is not an erotic scenario), hallucinations of something inhuman, possession and a central mystery that works well enough to keep you focused while it picks apart our group of heroes. Yeah there’s some predictable bits and yeah the British guy gets on the nerves every so often and yeah there’s some questionable story paths and sure there’s some eye-rolling thanks to overblown melodrama but it’s more intriguing than grating and the paranormal threat is given some thought as opposed to just slapping a cgi monster into scenes and spraying blood on the wall. It’s like a tame Evil Dead with a science fiction twist produced by a disgraced CW writer as an extended two-part pilot for SyFy… and that’s alright in my eyes.
