Reviews

There are so many things wrong with this movie that I don't even know where to begin. I guess I will start with the format.

I'm not a fan of found footage in general, but Megan is Missing is exceptionally lazy in that it barely even adheres to this conceit. In order for the movie to work we the audience are expected to belief that teenagers in 2007 communicate almost entirely via video chat and that these conversations were recorded and stored. We are also expected to believe that photos and video of sexual assaults and murders were made available to the filmmakers. Since the film is never once convincing as found footage I have to wonder why the writer / director chose to tell the story this way.

The acting ranges from barely adequate to absolutely atrocious across the board. The two main actresses are never convincing as 14/15 year olds and their performances are mediocre at best. Everyone else who appears on camera - the news anchors, the parents, the other friends - is downright embarrassing. They are not helped at all by the largely expositional and tin eared dialogue.

While I am sure there are 14 year old kids out there doing drugs and having sex at random, the portrayal of those types of teens in this film did not ring true to me at all. The pervy, leering tone of the film reminded me a lot of movies I've seen by Larry Clark, where we the audience are theoretically supposed to be wringing our hands over the wasted youth of today etc. but the camera keeps ogling the hot young bodies on screen.

This is particularly true of a scene where Megan recounts being forced to blow a 17 year old camp counselor when she was 10, giggling about it the whole time like it is an embarrassing sexual story and not actual rape. There are several other scenes of unnecessary sexuality in the film including a rape scene that make me feel like the film is implying that Megan deserves what eventually happens to her. That, or director Michael Goi is just a pedophile.

The first 50 or so minutes of the film almost entirely consist of banal, repetitive dialogue and bad acting. Then we get to the two pictures of Megan and the final 20 minutes. This is the point where Megan is Missing shifts from being a terrible after school special and instead becomes a sadistic found footage horror film. These scenes are undeniably a gut punch and the only reason to see the movie at all.

Here's the thing though: To this point Goi has positioned the film as one of those message movies that are supposed to serve as a wake up call to parents. But the film ultimately is pervy and disgusting exploitation. The director's claim that Megan is Missing is about anything other than presenting the highly sexualized torture and murder of its main characters is completely disingenuous and reminded me a LOT of the opening crawl to Chaos (2005) claiming that it was intended to save lives.

The ONLY audience for this film are horror fans looking for something disturbing. That is fine, but I'm just warning you the movie absolutely sucks, nothing happens for the vast majority of the run time and you'll feel like you need a shower afterward. Consider that a warning or an endorsement.

V/H/S combines one of my favorite horror sub-genres (the horror anthology) with one of my least favorite (found footage). Unfortunately, the movie features very little of what I like about horror anthologies with all of the things that I find annoying about found footage tapes.

The best horror anthologies work because many stories only really work in 15-20 minute segments, and even when one story is disappointing it's over fast enough and you move on to the next one. The best of the bunch (Creepshow, Trilogy of Terror, Tales from the Crypt, etc.) also show a creative variety with a variety of different characters, settings and types of stories. I also usually enjoy the "frame" story that provides one overall twist right at the end.

Unfortunately the stories in V/H/S are highly under-developed and rather same-y after a while. Two of the five segments and the wrap-around feature borderline rapist fratboy types who receive a horrible comeuppance; this theme would work in one segment but it becomes repetitive. Like several of the segments, the central frame doesn't come to any definitive conclusion and leaves more questions than it answers. V/H/S may have worked better if the frame wasn't also told in camera POV style.

The film features a lot of gore and nudity but most of it is gratuitous and unsexy. It really doesn't capture the EC Comics feel of a lot of the best of this type of film. Overall I felt that V/H/S was slavishly faithful to its central concept, at the expense of delivering real scares or even making sense. I'll give a real brief review of each segment, with minor spoilers:

Amateur Night: A trio of college aged dooshbags head out on the town looking for women. One of the group is wearing glasses outfitted with a camera, in the hopes of filming one of his buddies doing the deed. Needless to say they pick up the absolute wrong woman. This one features a few legitimate scares and a decent ending but also feels under-baked. 6/10

Second Honeymoon: A young married couple take a road trip to the Grand Canyon. They're stalked and pursued by a masked woman, who films them sleeping in their motel room with their own camera. The violence at the end is shocking but the twist has no context and makes no sense at all. A huge disappointment, given that this one was directed by Ti West, director of the excellent Innkeepers. 4/10

Saturday the 17th: Very dumb "meta-slasher" with a lot of gore but another dumb twist and very annoying main characters. The villain (the Glitch) is interesting but again, really no point or answers. 5/10

The Sick Thing that Happened to Emily When She was Younger: A young girl and her boyfriend, a doctor out of town on his residency, have a conversation about the girl's apparently haunted apartment. This one succeeds in being creepy and the gimmick, showing the story entirely through Skype conversations, was fun. Unfortunately we get more totally unnecessary nudity and the twist, while interesting, makes no sense at all. 6/10

10/31/98: Four guys go to a Halloween party and end up at the WRONG house. This one is by far the most effects heavy and cinematic and really worked for those reasons. Some unanswered questions but overall pretty satisfying. Too bad it came last and I was bored by that point. 7/10

The frame movie: 2/10. Sucked straight through.

Overall an interesting failure.

1. Parents apparently don't ever take Kevin for a psychological evaluation even though he's openly hostile and wearing diapers at what looks like age 6-7.

2. Dad is painfully slow and doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with his clearly disturbed son.

3. People in the town blame the mom for the massacre, even though she lost her own husband and daughter, to the point that they smack her in the face and vandalize her house.

4. Despite the assaults and vandalism, the mom continues to live in the same town anyway.

5. Did I mention that this town has what looks like $3 million mansions on one end and on the other, 1-bedroom hovels right up against the train tracks? 6. Nearly an hour of the film goes by before we learn that these people live in a mansion because mom is a "famous adventurer" who wrote a book about her experiences.

7. We never at any point in the movie ever see the novelist mom writing, even though her book was released when her demon son was a teenager.

8. Son manages to pull off a large scale massacre with a bow and arrow.

A great performance by Tilda Swinton is utterly squandered on what amounts to The Bad Seed. The fractured narrative and wildly over-directed style of the film is employed to no purpose whatsoever, since the material is so flimsy. Entire scenes (like the massacre) are left entirely off-screen for no good reason. The symbolic use of red is so heavy handed and over-the-top that it's laughable.

Mainly this film is The Orphan, only it lacks the balls and integrity to just be an outright horror film and instead relies heavily on film school tricks and a fractured narrative to convince the audience they're learning something. Utterly shallow without even a trace of psychological insight and totally, totally pointless.

Based on the commercials for Black Swan, I walked into the theater expecting to see a film about a career ballerina who is forced to access her repressed dark side in preparation for her role as the swan queen and cracks under the pressure. Instead, the film I saw was about a meek young woman who's possibly schizophrenic and certainly on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the opening reel. There's no real drama because Nina is already broken. All that's left is for the viewer is to watch her become increasingly unhinged.

Black Swan has a lot of flaws: The conception of Nina (Natalie Portman) is a major problem. No woman this childish and meek would ever last in an elite dance company, so it's highly improbable that the company director (Vincent Cassel) would single her out for the prima ballerina role. We keep hearing about how Nina is technically perfect but clinical and restrained, but we never see any evidence of this fact because Portman is filmed mostly in tight facial close-ups during these scenes, probably to disguise the fact that her dancing isn't so spectacular.

The film is utterly predictable in that Nina becomes increasingly unhinged to the point that we, the viewer, no longer know whether what we're watching is "real" of one of her hallucinations, which greatly resemble horror movie clichés: she's stalked by her doppelganger, her reflection moves with a mind of its own, she imagines mutilating herself, etc. None of these images are particularly inspired and they spell out the theme of the story in the most obvious way.

Black Swan was utterly derivative of other, better movies. I haven't seen The Red Shoes but so much of Nina's relationship with her mother was cribbed directly from The Piano Teacher that Michael Haneke could probably sue Aronofsky for plagiarism. Likewise, the whole angle of Nina's repressed sexuality leading to her breakdown was done better by Polanski in Repulsion, and that was almost 50 years ago. Black Swan is mostly a hodge-podge of better films.

Finally, the film is every bit as Manichean as its title, with only two poles for its characters: perfectly pure and virginal white or the sensual black whore. Nina has a few drinks, masturbates and tells her oppressive mother off, and we're supposed to take this as some sort of exploration of her "dark side." Her rival ballerina Lily (Mila Kunis) literally has black wings tattooed on her back. Could you get any more obvious? I'd suggest that Black Swan works best as high camp and there were some unintended laughs in my theater, but the film is so self-serious and artistically restrained that it's not even gonzo enough to be funny. Mostly it's misery porn that wallows in Nina's suffering without giving the viewer a credible rationale for watching.

Look, the film is well-directed, it looks great, the actors generally deliver good performances despite under-written roles. I've seen many worse films than Black Swan. But in this case the hype is so wildly overblown that I'm tempted to rate the movie even lower than it deserves. Truthfully, this is a 6 out of 10 picture and only slightly better than average.

This review will contain spoilers.

So I rented this film On Demand expecting a harrowing but realistic look at BDSM gone awry. What I got was a fitfully engaging film noir with some serious plot holes and a few scenes of sex and violence that weren't even remotely as graphic as promised. On Demand actually has TWO separate warnings (one in the description and one when you buy the film) about strong, graphic violence and sex. Having seen Irreversible, Martyrs, Antichrist, and a number of other legitimately rough indie films, I didn't see anything in The Killer Inside Me that warranted any caution.

The BDSM element is hardly there. Casey Affleck spanks Jessica Alba's bare rear and later chokes her with his belt while they're having sex. I'm not disappointed in the lack of titillation, but this film barely touches on the intersection between sex and violence and doesn't have anything intelligent to say on the subject. The movie actually implies that Casey Affleck is a remorseless killer in part because his mother was a sexual masochist ... huh? Affleck gives a creepy, understated performance but I found his character to be fairly shallow. So far as the violence, there is a beating that might be hard to take for timid audiences, but I don't expect many viewers are going to have trouble watching the film.

The movie looks terrific and it's extremely well-acted, particularly Affleck in the lead role. The supporting actors (Ned Beatty and Bill Pullman in particular) are also excellent. Alba and Kate Hudson are here mainly for window-dressing; their parts were pretty shallow. Some people have complained about the inappropriate rockability music during dark moments in the film but it worked for me.

The big issue is the lack of psychological depth and some serious plot holes. The ending in particular - when a character who "died" early on is suddenly revived for no reason whatsoever - was pretty laughable. I never got the sort of sordid, noir feeling out of this film that the director was clearly shooting for. Overall it was an entertaining enough diversion and certainly watchable, but not even remotely up there with modern noirs like Blood Simple, The Last Seduction, Blue Velvet, etc.

Franchises that go on forever typically start strong and get worse over time. Not so with Friday the 13th - the first two installments are mediocre slasher films but the series really hit its stride with Parts III and IV (and then hit the nadir with Part V ... then got okay again in part VI ... then dumb again, etc.).

In my humble opinion, Part III is the second best of the series right after The Final Chapter. It's a bad film by any stretch, with horrible dialogue and acting, many moments of bad camp and a completely cheesy disco theme. Still, I loved every second of it. Richard Brooker's version of Jason Vorhees as a deformed, murderous hick was by far my favorite - I like it better when Jason is burly like a truck driver and runs around a lot. This is also the film when Jason gets his hockey mask, in a scene that isn't nearly as iconic as you might have guessed. There are some memorably creative / gross kills, and the best damn final chase scene in the entire series. Jason appears without his mask for some of the run time and he's pretty creepy. I even liked the fake / dream ending.

This film is horrible cheesy and stupid but it's a really enjoyable guilty pleasure and a pretty solid example of the slasher genre. I'd sooner recommend The Final Chapter but if you like that, give Part 3 a try. Trust me, plot is not the strong suit of the series and you'll miss nothing by watching them out of order.

I'm always up for a video nasty and Chaos had some buzz around it in (very underground and minor) horror circles so I figured, "What the hell?" and gave it a shot on Netflix. I don't regret having seen the film but I can't find any reason to recommend Chaos, even to fans of extreme horror.

First off, this is a total rip-off of Last House on the Left. I call it a "rip-off" because it's not an authorized remake, even though the entire plot right down to the marketing campaign was lifted wholesale from Last House. It really is amazing that the filmmakers haven't been sued - I guess Wes Craven doesn't want to make his movie look even worse because of its faint resemblance to this cinematic turd.

I'm not a very big fan of the original Last House ... I can see why it's an influential and possibly even important film but it my opinion it's aged in dog years since its release. Still, Last House is an Oscar-worthy masterwork of genius compared to Chaos.

Everything on display here is garbage. The acting almost uniformly sucks and Kevin Gage (who amazingly appeared in Heat) is the only actor who shows even one iota of screen presence. The whole look of the film is cheap, poorly lit, and not even the least bit menacing. The pacing is terrible and the plot cannot even sustain itself through its fairly short run time. Adding to the embarrassment is an intro crawl that claims DeFalco made the film to "educate" and perhaps save lives. Someone should tell Dave that 1) his asinine film actually makes people dumber, and 2) the graphic content is so extreme that no one who could possibly benefit from the biting "Don't take drugs from strangers or you'll end up as rape-snuff" message would see this film in the first place.

There's ultimately NO reason why anyone would want to watch this film, except for the violence. And you know what? The first murder is legitimately gruesome. Chaos (Gage) cuts off a girl's nipple in graphic detail - we can tell that it's latex but it's still rough - chews on it for a minute, then stuffs it in her mouth until she vomits. Then he flips her over, murders her with a knife, and rapes the corpse. Gross. The second murder is also rough but leaves a lot more to the imagination.

That's it. Roughly five minutes of screen time, and that is the ONLY thing you'd want to watch in this film. I'm a serious gorehound so I can understand the appeal but I've got to tell you - the rest of this film is so inept and tedious it's hardly even worth a rental, much less actually buying the DVD.

And there's just no excuse for ripping off other directors' work and not even having the decency to credit them. Dave DeFalco is an untalented plagiarist but I'll give him this much - he at least managed to bait Roger Ebert into an argument, thereby giving his crappy film much more attention than it legitimately deserves.

I'm not going to bother with a plot synopsis since you know what the movie is about and there's almost no plot, anyway. I've seen several reviewers call ISOYG an 'anti-rape' film or even a feminist statement, and I just have to chime in on the galling hypocrisy of these claims.

First of all, what do we see on the cover of this movie? That's right: a shapely woman's behind. Whether it was Zarchi's attempt to make an anti-rape statement - and I absolutely don't believe it was - is entirely beside the point. The film is marketing sex and the titillation of sexual assault and the material is so graphic (everything but actual penetration is shown) that NO ONE but the hard core exploitation crowd will enjoy it.

The rape(s) in the film is uncomfortable, brutal and hard to watch. There's something to be said for presenting a horrible crime in such a brutal light, but there was no reason for this scene to go on for seemingly 30 minutes, none. There was also little character development of the victim and only one of the rapists is slightly developed (mere moments before he's murdered) so the scene isn't at all engaging on an emotional level. Really, it's just presented for the sake of showing extreme sexual violence and you can tell by the movies ISOYG is associated with on IMDb (Caligula, Cannibal Ferox, etc.) that it attracts only the exploitation crowd.

Finally, a few reviewers have commended Zarchi's so-called documentary style and lack of a soundtrack. But considering how inept everything else in the film is (acting, script, etc.) I suspect these were financial decisions and the film looks like a documentary because he literally stationed a camera and let his porn-caliber actors do their thing.

I'm not going to get all up on my high horse talking about the content of ISOYG. I'm all for exploitation / horror and love video nasties. In fact, I'm giving this movie three stars only because it truly does push the envelope so much further than some other films. However, it's also poorly made and after the rape occurs, just downright boring for the rest of the film as we watch a bunch of ho-hum, mostly gore-less murders and wait for the credits to roll.

This is probably worth watching once if you're a hardcore 70s exploitation fan but I'm telling you, the movie is overall pretty bad and not really worth its notorious reputation.

What happened to the horror elements? Although the first two Evil Dead films show some touches of pitch black humor and camp (much moreso in ED 2), the series to this point had gallons of gore and some legitimate moments of grotesque horror. In Army of Darkness, Raimi strips out the horror elements almost entirely, ups the slapstick humor and ends up with a film that feels like Jason and the Argonauts meets the Three Stooges.

On the plus side, this is the film in the series that features the best of Ash's misogynist, cocky and moronic one-liners. Bruce Campbell is such a great screen presence that he carries the film all by himself for a good half hour. The set designs are decent in a crappy Terry Gilliam kind of way and Raimi's visual flare and bizarro camera angles are always welcome.

The problem is the story and the change in tone. Around the midway point though the novelty of seeing Ash in the fantasy dark ages started to wear off and the humor in the film was a little too broad (i.e. juvenile) to sustain itself. I recently let my 9 y/o daughter watch Army of Darkness - she has NO tolerance for horror films and thought this movie was a riot. Army of Darkness isn't scary at all.

If Army of Darkness is the first of the "Evil Dead Trilogy" you've seen you'll probably like it a lot more than I did. I think my love of the first two films has a lot to do with my disappointment in this installment.

Eden Lake is well-directed and acted, with some legitimately suspenseful moments and a few moments of cringe-worthy violence. Unfortunately, the main characters - the lead male in particular (we'll call him Steve, I think that was his name) - act in such a moronic way for no reason other than to keep the plot moving along that my suspension of disbelief was already at the breaking point ten minutes in. This pulled me way out of the story and really diminished the extremely effective second act of the film.

For example: 1. Steve appears to have some money and social standing, based on his clothes and the car he drives. Why the hell would he take his girlfriend to a disused quarry at a construction site to propose? There's nothing special about the titular Eden Lake. It's just a lake.

2. Why would Steve continue to stay at the lake after the kids refuse to turn down their stereo, one of them exposes himself to Steve's girlfriend, and they pop the tire on his jeep? Why would anyone stay there after it's become clear the place is dangerous?

3. Why would he follow these kids to their house and then let himself inside when they don't answer the door? Was he going to tell their parents on them? If so, why did he hide and then climb out the upstairs window when the dad came home? And then go back to the lake?

I won't even get into the fact that the kids' pit bull manages to kill itself by leaping right on top of a pocket knife - riiiiiight.

I'm sorry, but when 1-3 above happens within the first 15-20 minutes of a picture, I have to come to the conclusion that a) Steve is mentally retarded or b) this is a case of really slopping script writing. Since nothing else about Steve seemed "special" I'm guessing the answer is B.

As for the ending ... meh. It was quite a coincidence that the girl ends up at the parents house. Quite a coincidence indeed.

Overall it's just a sloppily written exploitation flick with a few tense moments and some extremely stupid people.

I think the best way to watch Martyrs is to go into the movie cold. I purposely avoided any reviews that appeared to contain spoilers and read very little about the film before viewing it. Say what you will about the movie, but it takes several truly wild plot turns and part of what I enjoyed about the film is the unpredictability. In the end though, I felt like the narrative was disjointed, the themes weren't fully fleshed out, and ultimately the ideas behind Martyrs struck me as the armature on which to support several scenes of cartoon horror violence followed by sadistic torture.

On the plus side, the movie is extremely stylish and I thought the gore effects were very good. There are several familiar elements in the film but they're combined in such a disjointed way that it never becomes stale. Martyrs is certainly one of the more original horror films I've seen in recent years. The direction and acting were excellent for this kind of movie. Even though I felt manipulated at the end of the movie I couldn't help but find the last 15 minutes or so to be strangely moving. I'll never want to watch this movie again but I haven't stopped thinking about it since viewing it last week.

Now, the bad part: Martyrs really does feel like two different films that both go on for too long and don't mesh together tonally. The first half of the film at first seems to have a supernatural element and the violence is cartoonish and somewhat over-the-top. After the initial shooting though, I thought the film stopped dead in its tracks for a good 10-15 minutes while we watch Marie wailing around and cutting herself. This got a bit dull.

The second half of the film is potentially more interesting but far less entertaining. The cult shows up and Anna is imprisoned and tortured. Watching a seemingly typical nuclear family get blasted across the room by a shotgun is fun. Watching a woman forced to sit in her own waste, take periodic beatings to the face, and have her skin surgically removed, isn't "fun." The torture scenes went on for too long and way too grim and distasteful to be enjoyable.

I'm not a prude. I loved (and own) High Tension, Sheitan, Frontier(s), Inside, The Ordeal, etc. I've seen and enjoyed a lot of movies with some seriously rough content. I just personally think a horror film either needs to be harmless escapism OR, if the idea is to strike a realistic tone, the ideas supporting the film need to somewhat justify the graphic violence on-screen.

For this viewer, Martyrs missed the mark. Maybe it's because the Madmoiselle only appears on screen for a few brief scenes, but the cult aspects of the film didn't come across to me at all, so I had a hard time reading this movie as a critique on religious cultism. Martyrs actually seemed to justify their world-view, since the film clearly implies that Anna DID have a vision and one of her tormentors treats her with compassion near the end, which suggests to me that they're not pure evil and somewhat justified what they were doing to the poor girl.

Really, it just seemed to me that Martyrs was banking on scenes of young, attractive women in agony and all the religious mumbo-jumbo was an after-the-fact attempt at "depth" to let the audience off the hook. I found this insulting, just like the flimsy philosophical ideas in Irreversible ("Time destroys everything" -- ooh! That's deep!).

I also think Martyrs opened itself wide open to charges of sexism. At least Hostel had the good sense to have both male and female victims. Martyrs makes the weakest attempt to justify the fact that all its victims are young (and suspiciously good-looking) women. I could practically hear the screenwriter arguing, "See? Just because Martyrs consists of about 90 minutes of female self-mutilation, degradation and torture, that doesn't mean it's sexist!" Sorry folks, but I'm just not buying it. I expect garden variety misogyny in Friday the Thirteen but those movies don't ask me to take them seriously. If you want to make a deep philosophical point, you're going to have to ditch the cartoon violence and other horror tropes.

Overall, Martyrs is well-made and intriguing but the ideology is a total mess and it's not a movie I ever want to see again. That said, I know horror geeks are going to love this one so I'd recommend it to the extreme movie crowd without reservation. Just don't expect a "masterpiece" - Martyrs is far from it.