What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Nordicdusk]

Film No.10

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Next up we are off to the land of my father and my father's father and my father's father's father and my father's fa...... you get the pictures we are off to the dangerous countryside of County Leitrim here in lovely Ireland

Martin and his girlfriend Helena are driving through the countryside when they knock a man down standing in the middle of the road. In a panic they pack the body in the back of his car but a few minutes down the road the passenger is less than grateful for the lift and bites into Martins neck. After disposing of the disgruntled passenger Martin sends Helena for help in a nearby farm house. Moments later Helena is attacked by the man she loves but she is left with no choice but to suck his eye out with a vacuum cleaner and escape into the wilderness alone and confused. Outside she meets Desmond the village gravedigger who explains that a local farmer was caught feeding dead animals to cows and since then the locals have gone crazy and started attacking anyone they see.

Dead Meat looks like it was made with a budget of a couple of hundred euro which makes what it accomplishes even more impressive. The people here are obviously not actors it's like they went out into town and pick the first few people that showed an interest in making a few bob and put them into the film and even that works in favour of the finished product. Im not saying the acting was bad and of course im not saying it was good but there is no stuttering through the lines it's just like listening to farmers talking anywhere in Ireland and thats where the humour works with some of the conversations. This is not a horror comedy by any means its totally done straight but there is humour to be found maybe its just because i have encountered characters like these in the real world.

Another impressive aspect of Dead Meat is the gore and kills for a small film with a tiny budget it's all practical gore from killing a cow with a hurley and sliotar ( what would an Irish horror film be without death by hurley ) or decapitating a zombie with a shovel it all looks great. The makeup effects on the zombies is nothing amazing but it does work really well. To be honest i was expecting this to be total shit but i was wrong it's great fun and the characters are very lickable because like i said they just seem like real everyday people no macho posers or pointless freaking out or falling for no reason when getting chased these are people dealing with the task at hand in a realistic way like you would envision it actually playing out if a zombie apocalypse actually happened. At times the score has a real Italian horror sound which was a nice surprise it's a pity they didn't use it throughout the film but when its there it adds a nice creepiness to it.

I loved this film you can tell that it was a labour of love with some great attention to detail not just thrown together to make a zombie film they set out to make a serious film and achieved that goal i would love to see them make something else with a proper budget and see how they could handle that. The influence for the film are plain to see from Romero's the Crazies to Fulci's love of eye horror but nothing felt like a rip off just a nod to the films that influenced the film makers. Dead Meat will definitely get repeat viewings.

8/10

[nosferatu42]

Fight for your life.

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Still ploughing through the nasties when i have the urge, got about 8 left now.

I actually thought this was pretty decent,well shot and adequately acted.
A film that follows the last house/home invasion template but mixes it with a good dose of blaxploitation.
Not as harsh as i thought it would be due to it being on the nasty list, a lot of the grimmer stuff is hardly shown or filmed in a not particularly exploitative way.

The main thing that sticks in the mind is the very racist way the leader of 3 escaped convicts treats the black family, but that's the whole point because we are on the side of the family and when they get their revenge it is pretty satisfying.
The blaxploitation elements amount to some jive talking and a little funky music, the part where the grandma calls the white guy a mutha****a was priceless.

A really entertaining film. 8/10

[keirarts]

Just been to Grimm up North. Watched loads so a few to get through....

Thursday

Let me make you a martyr

Misery porn. Supposed to be revenge western but I suspect everyone involved was sat off set jerking off and crying. Maralyn manson is great in it however.

Broken

Morjana Alaoui frlom Martyrs plays a nurse escaping a dark past who is caring for a tetraplegic man. The client is a complete asshole, constantly doing drugs, complaining, holding partys ect and genujinely making his clients life hell. The private company the NHS has outsourced the care to is unsupportive and slowly the carers mind begins to snap. Nothing massively original but well acted all round and Alaoui has a few shower scenes.

Another evil

Best of the evening. Another evil is a dark comedy about a wealthy family who discover their vacation home is haunted. The husband hires an exorcist who turns out to be a drunken, needy lunatic. Genuinely funny this one had me laughing a lot. The script is terrific and the performances deliver.

[keirarts]

Friday

The unseen

Its rare to see an invisible man film these days. Its even rarer to see one thats not a direct riff on H.G Wells book. This film then was a refreshing change. Possibly not for everyone as its quite slow-moving, its about a blue-collar bloke who trys to reconnect with his estranged daughter. Unfortunately he suffers from a strange genetic condition that is gradually turning him invisible. When his daughter disappears he discovers she has the same condition and shady underground scientists are hunting for them to study.

We then had an interesting collection of short films including Hada, Adam Peiper, Quenottes, under the apple tree, The dissapearance of willir bingham & little boy blue. All fairly solid, little boy blue being the best of the bunch.

The sunken convent

A short Danish flick apparantly based on a hans christian anderson story. Its absolutely baffling. An old bloke works at a garage and drinks petrol. He then heads home and melts metal into freshly made wounds then he heads out into the woods to **** a corpse.

A fathers day

A short zombie flick from the UK with decent effects. A father and daughter reunite as zombies and spend the day together. Good fun with a sweet ending.

What we become

Danish Zombie movie. The residents of a middle-class Danish neigbourhood are alarmed when they are placed under quaranitine after the outbreak of a mysterious disease. Gradually things begin to break down and the family must make plans to escape. Doing nothing new, the film is still solid fun thanks to great direction, well realised zombies and a genuinely bleak tone to proceedings.

My father die

Like let me make you a martyr in that its a southern gothic revenge drama, my father die is an entirely different beast. Its a raw, grindhouse flick with suspense, ultra violence and humour as a deaf mute hunts his monsterous biker father (played by Gary stretch) after hes released early for the murder of his other son. It goes a little Terminator near the end but its great fun, brutal and trashy in a good way.

Directors cut

This is a difficult one to sum up. Essentially its a straight to video serial killer thriller thats been hijacked in the editing suite by a demented crowd funder who has also kidnapped the lead actress in order to make his own picture. Its well worth checking out as its genuinely funny. Penn jillette plays the mad crowd funder and delivers with a dead pan menace thagt really sells his character as a stalker.

Train to busan

Last film of the evening and one of the best. A zombie virus breaks out in south korea, a self centered father and his daughter are heading to Busan on a train when everything turns to shit and he must fight to keep his daughter alive. One of the genuinely best zombie films in many years, its totally unrelenting from beginning to end, has characters that are very likeable and has no qualms in killing them off. The zombies are well realised and move in disturbing ways, they have the ability to pile over each other like in world war Z but this is a much better film than that.

[keirarts]

Saturday


Observance

I need to watch this again. A private detective begins watching a woman for a mysterious client and things get weird. It was tough to follow and it seemed to put the narrative in the head of someone in the midst of a full blown mental break down.

NSFW

A short where a blogger heads into the woods to capture a peadophile and ends up getting more than he bargained for with a neat twist in the tale.

The Burning

Yes, the 1981 slasher. Nice to see it on the big screen. Some technical issues aside the film played well with the audience. It's a solid and entertaining slasher flick that looks great on blu-ray.

The Chamber

Four people trapped in a submarine under the ocean. An exercise in tension and suspense that while not a classic is very watchable

Dearly beloved

Another short. This one is a brutal, well shot tale of a wedding day coming to a brutal end.

Pet

Dominic Monaghan plays a loner who works at a dog pound who becomes obsessed with a girl he knew from high school. After being rejected he kidnaps the girl and keeps her trapped in a cage in the basement of his work. Just when you think you know where you are with the film it then throws a twist in that changes how you see the film. Much better than expected and worth keeping an eye out for.

Trash fire

Richard bates Jr, director of Excision and Suburban gothic continues to the trend of each new film being better than the one that preceeded it. Here a drunken asshole who discovers his girlfriend is pregnant decides to shape up. His first step in being better involves reconnecting with his horrid grandma and his sister who is disfigured by a fire he caused many years ago. The film then shifts gear from acerbic indie comedy to cruel and twisted family saga that get progressively darker as it heads to its conculsion. Highly reccomended.

The tag-along

Asian horror with a great central idea, badly damaged by shitty CGI.

[keirarts]

Sunday

The final day had some of the best films!

Darling

A young woman named Darling agrees to house-sit a New york mansion with a creepy past that may or may not be having a malign influence on her.
Its a no nonsense black & white chiller that feels like a blend of The shining, Rosemarys baby, Ms 45 and eraserhead ( someone else compared it to early Richard Kern in its style) I Absolutely loved it, from its stark black & white style, its soundtrack that moved from 60's style classical score to thrash metal (in keeping with its characters fragile mental state, to the superb performance from Ashley Lauren carter. This is highly reccomended.

Beyond the gates

Feeling like a homage to the types of film Empire pictures used to put out (we even get Barbara Crampton turning up) Two brothers begin boxing up the contents of their missing fathers video store and stumble across a sinster VCR boar game that offers them the chance to cross 'beyond the gates' and save their fathers soul. Not an absolute classic, I still liked this a lot. Great synth score and felt like the sort of stuff I rented from the local video store.

Tonight she comes.

Best film of the whole festival. Imagine It follows if It follows was full of gore, nudity and backwoods satanism. Its a surprisingly feminist horror that plays on male disgust over female bodily functions, especially with a ritual scene that will have at least half its audience wretching. Genuinely entertaining, bloody and beautifully shot it also has a lot of appropriately dark humour. I urge everyone to watch this.

The Rezort

Not really doing anything new for the zombie genre The Rezort manages to be worth it thanks to an interesting central idea (zombies meet westworld) as well as a tackling contemporary issues such as the refugee crises with a horribly plausible end twist. It wont set your world on fire but It'll entertain.

Villmark Asylum

AKA Villmark 2 ( the first is difficult to get but not impossible in the UK) You dont need to have seen the first (but it helps) A group of contract workers must check an abandoned asylum for hazardous waste before the state tears it down. As one would expect in a horror they soon discover they are not alone. Its a solid chiller with a great sense of space and atmosphere that slowly builds itself to a bloody conclusion.

The rift

A serbian Sci-fi/horror that has more ideas than its budget can cope with. A group of CIA operatives head to a remote part of serbia to recover a crashed sattelite only to discover something really weird. Tonally it has a lovecraftian feel to things and has a genuinely dark tone. It was followed by a Q&A from Ken Foree who seems like a genuinely nice bloke.

[Demoncrat]

Originally Posted by nosferatu42

Fight for your life.

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Still ploughing through the nasties when i have the urge, got about 8 left now.

I actually thought this was pretty decent,well shot and adequately acted.
A film that follows the last house/home invasion template but mixes it with a good dose of blaxploitation.
Not as harsh as i thought it would be due to it being on the nasty list, a lot of the grimmer stuff is hardly shown or filmed in a not particularly exploitative way.

The main thing that sticks in the mind is the very racist way the leader of 3 escaped convicts treats the black family, but that's the whole point because we are on the side of the family and when they get their revenge it is pretty satisfying.
The blaxploitation elements amount to some jive talking and a little funky music, the part where the grandma calls the white guy a mutha****a was priceless.

A really entertaining film. 8/10

One of the "better" films on that flippin' list. Nae chance sadly of a UK release any time soon, BU have a decent enough dvd of it on sale....

[Cinematic Shocks]

Just Before Dawn (1981)

***1/2 out of *****

Eyes of a Stranger (1981)

***1/2 out of *****

[Nordicdusk]

Film No.11

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Claire Ward wife of chemical engineer Charles Dexter Ward shows up at the office of private investigator John March hoping to get to the bottom of her husband's strange work and behaviour. Charles works long into the night in his lab from which there are some very strong stomach churning smells. After endless arguing Charles decide to leave and head to an old cabin in the country owned by his family. Charles's peace and quiet is short lived when the locals start reporting the strange smells from the cabin and constant late night deliveries arriving every night to local law enforcement. When police raid the house they find boxes of human remains which Charles convinces them the stuff was delivered to him by mistake. Can John March discover the truth and does he even want to ?

This was a struggle to get through it's just all a bit too boring and none of the characters are likeable i would've expected at least the wife to have some emotions about the whole situation with her husband but like everyone else she was just going through the motions plus the fact its acted like a softcore porn thriller does not help matters. On more than one occasion i laughed loudly with some of the camera work zooming in on peoples faces in an attempt to create some sort of drama but failing miserably.Then when something finally happens most of the scene is in pure darkness with flashlights failing and matches blowing out in the draft only catching glimpses of the gore effects and creatures which was one of the worst stop motion animations i have ever seen. Clocking in at an hour and forty Five this is way too long the final scene is more of what i expected to happen throughout the film but it was too little too late to save this one.

Boring badly acted and waaaay too long.

3/10

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Loreley's Grasp (1974)

Amando De Ossorio's brilliantly atmospheric film from 1974 takes this legend and ups the ante in horror terms. The Loreley in question, played by the stunning Helga Line, needs human hearts for a perverse ritual. Fearing for its students a nearby school for young women (ie -beautiful girls only too happy to wear transparent negligees and bear their breasts at the drop of a hat) hires a hunter, charmingly played by Tony Kendall to track down the Loreley and put an end to the murders.

The film features graphic moments of flesh ripping horror amidst its otherwise beautiful Gothic trappings, De Ossorio bringing a fairytale like romantic feel to the production, lovingly created by his wonderful cinematography. Tony Kendall makes a fine heroic romantic lead and Helga Line is superb in what i think is her best performance as the seductive and deadly Loreley.