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29th February 2016, 11:13 PM
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 Wolf Town (2011) Kyle, a shy college student finds himself and three of his friends trapped in an old western ghost town by a pack of ferocious wolves and has to overcome his personal fears to confront the wolves and lead his friends to safety. This only gets a pitiful score of 3.1 on IMDB which i think is rather unfair. It has flaws, flaws are practically a given with low budget film making and Wolf Town is very low budget film making. On occasions the script is sloppy and the acting by at least one member of the four piece cast is ropy to say the least. However it's not all that bad to be honest. The people behind the camera do at least show some flair. Fine camera work and editing help make this film work. It would have been far easier to computer generate some cheap looking wolves and chuck it out there, but credit where it's due, the film makers opted to use real wolves or at least dogs that look like wolves. I'm not sure how many wolves were actually used in making this film. Five at most i think but seemingly just three in the majority of scenes. The film does have plus points. The decaying western town is an atmospheric setting and the score is a delight. Not just some ropy songs but a proper musical score to the action, meaning that together with innovative camera angles and editing, a simple shot of a wolf walking on a balcony was made to seem like an intense piece of cinema. So whilst the mauling of bodies was perhaps not very effective suspense was built via other methods. Reading the comments on IMDB is soul destroying, especially those comparing it to the CGI blockbuster The Grey. It just beggars belief sometimes. Making a live action horror film with real animals on a tiny budget cannot have been easy, so with low budget efforts such as this i really applaud the film makers for attempting something different.  |
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29th February 2016, 11:24 PM
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Demdike@Cult Labs likes this.
__________________  Teddy, I'm a Scotch drinker - you know that. I just have the occasional brandy when I'm not drinking. |
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29th February 2016, 11:27 PM
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The room. With so many stories over the years about ppl being kept prisoner and sexualy abused and having kids, this could easily be based on a true story. The film might be a slow burner but thats also the case of the film as well. It captures a lot of possibility of real life if was in that situation, you can also feel her and her sons heart felt pain as well. The film is made so good in many ways its nice to see a film like this that actual deserve nominations and amongst the best films of the year, because when the stats come out for best and worst we always disagree to some of them and this is a case of you cant. Its a heart warming film that you can feel their suffering and pain. Only minor downfall i have of this film is i thought it would have shown more of her being hounded by the media for her story, and the suffering she has to go through giving evidence in court for the blokes trial. |
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29th February 2016, 11:51 PM
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| guineapig66.jpg There is no story here just a mother and daughter are abducted and mutilated but i didnt stop by for a deep story i wanted to see how well they could pull off the gore effects and way Flower of Blood and Flesh managed to do 30 odd years ago. I mention Flower because this is really just a copy of that with two victims rather than just one. Shot using 8mm cameras it gives it a more amateur grimy look but i think this was also used to cover up some of the suspect effects that they couldnt quite pull off. Running at just around the hour mark the first 20 minutes really drags taking most of the time just to cut off the cloths of their victims with one of the cameramen telling the guy doing all the cutting to slow down so he can get "hard". This cameraman is constantly talking throughout the film which is very annoying because the things he is saying really takes you out of what you are watching. If he is trying to sound sick and twisted he is failing miserably he just sounds like an idiot another example is oh i had to change my underwear  All in all it was decent and some of the gore effects are great and with a small budget they really pulled it off well but like i said they could of done without the talking. These films are not for everyone but if you are a fan of the original Guinea Pig series you may enjoy this one and i am genuinely interested to see where they take the series from here. 6/10 Gets a 6 just for the effects and loses points for the talking.
__________________  |
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29th February 2016, 11:58 PM
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| Scorned Annalynne Mccord plays an unhinged young woman who discovers her boyfriend (Billy 'stop phoning my house' Zane) is cheating on her with her best friend (viva Bianca) Luring her mate out, pretending to be her fella she spends the evening indulging in little cruelty that quickly spirals out of control into full blown murder. Scorned is a fun little film in spite of its many flaws. Directed by Mark Jones, director of a personal favourite of mine Leprechaun delivers a trashy revenge picture that moves a little to much into 'torture porn' territory. Mccord however delivers a great, eye rolling performance as the scorned woman and for a couple of quid in a charity shop the film was worth the punt IMO. 13 Eerie Another cheapie, this was a whole quid and money well spent. Essentially it nicks the premise for the underrated Renny Harlin flick mindhunters as a group of trainee forensic investigators head out to the middle of nowhere to do a little live training with real bodies. Unfortunately the place is a disused prison where the government had been doing some clandestine experiments with the inmates and left behind loads of barrels of toxic goop that has a pesky habit of resurrecting the dead. Eerie 13 is no classic, and the opening 25 minutes or so are a little dull, with some underwritten characters. A real shame in that regard as we get some decent talent in the film including the lovely Katherine Isabelle. Once the film finds its feet its actually pretty entertaining with some decent bloody effects work including some bloody deaths and fairly well realised zombies/mutants. Worth picking up. Blue blood A bit more retro for the last film of the evening. Set in Longleat where the BBC had the long running wild animal park show, the film comes across as a mixture of upstairs downstairs & The wicker man. Derek Jacobi plays the lord of the manor, a decadent drug fuelled fop who seems to love shagging about in order to get as many sons as possible. Fiona Lewis plays his long suffering pop star wife and Oliver Reed plays the menacing cokney butler (whose accent occasionally sounds south African!) The butler seems to be the one holding the household together and seems to have some level of bullying dominant power over his ineffectual boss. In to the mix comes a German Nanny who seems to be aware of some possible satanic influence the Butler possesses with constant visons of weird red tinted rituals Ollie is holding. Worse still the lords two children are showing signs of abuse. Blue blood is a difficult film to pin down. Large portions of the film are dedicated to the day to day running of the stately home, mixed in with undercurrents of real menace. The film seems to deliberately unravel as things progress with booze and drug fuelled debauchery, rape and violence with the butler seemingly at the centre of it all. It also feels a little like a really pitch black comedy of manners, as if the film was some kind of test run for Chris morris's JAM. Its an odd bird of a film but worth catching if you can. Last edited by keirarts; 1st March 2016 at 07:49 AM. |
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1st March 2016, 01:51 PM
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SEPTIC MAN – I approached this with hesitation, having read some on-line reviews which had kind of put me off. Well, in this instance it's a case of don't believe the (negative) hype, because 'Septic Man' is one of the most original and freaky horror flicks I've seen in quite a while, and I do seriously recommend it. It opens in nowheresville US. A non-specific infection is destroying the town – various illnesses are cited, but no-one really knows what's going on. Flashes of news footage show locals going zombie and being dispatched by SWAT teams in true and tested fashion. Anyway, all of this is just a backdrop, and hardly features in the bulk of the film, which is about a sewer operative (?) who is persuaded by some kind of shadowy executive to investigate and resolve the cause of the outbreak. So sewer guy heads down there and ends up trapped. He meets a dim witted but kindly serial killer (!?) and a rather more vicious dude called 'Lord Auch', who has filed teeth, rat like mannerisms and a chainsaw. The film is really about the changing dynamics between these three, which develop in parallel with an infection sewer guy has contracted. Again, I really liked it. I wasn't sure how things would pan out after the first 25 minutes – after an opening which seemed to promise a whole lot of technicolour shitting and puking, 'Septic Man' shifted gear and settled into some slightly dull build up, and I was fearing the worst just as it blossomed into ever intensifying oddness from around the mid section onwards. There's a reasonable amount of gore, and the pustulent make up fx work on sewer guy is satisfyingly icky. But my abiding memory of it, and the main reason I like it, is just that it's so off beam. It's not a film for those who demand reasonable explanations for all the horror stuff, and in truth there could be something in the opinion of those who've written it off as disjointed and nonsensical. I think though that the same people were maybe a bit resentful that something so left field wasn't given the broad kind of Troma treatment the material seemingly cries out for, whereas I was way more into the fact that, beyond an undercurrent of black humour, all of this is taken seriously, right up to the tragic denouement where the sewer worker pretty much embraces his new identity as a monstrous turd-man. Go and see it if you like messed up indie horror with room for originality as well as rancidness. WRONG TURN 5 – As I've mentioned before, I don't like horror sequels all that much. Having said that, along with the 'Final Destination' series, I have a soft spot for the spawn of 'Wrong Turn'. They consistently deliver in their trashy direct-to-video kind of way, and so thwarted expectations rarely come into it. This one delves further into the cannibalistic clan's back story, and pretty much sets up the first film chronologically. It's set in a town which is celebrating a 'Burning Man' type festival, and features the obligatory van load of kids who find they have to join forces with the law in order to stave off the menace posed by the ugly trio, who are here joined by Pinhead himself (nice to see he's still getting gigs). On one level it's perfunctory tat which doesn't really do anything apart from regurgitate what's already out there. On another level, it's a pretty good time. I had fun with it, anyway. It gets to the bottom line (i.e the gore) quite quickly, probably the most important consideration for a film like this, because, speaking personally, any messing about and it'd be straight out of my laptop and into the trash. Actually, beyond the exploitation elements, there are one or two moments of interesting stylisation, the most striking being the graphic evisceration of one of the 'heroes' to the strains of The Moonlight Sonata cheesed up with soft rock guitar. That kind of thing sticks in the memory. The rest of it can't hope to scale those heights, but who cares? It moves swiftly, doesn't waste time serving up the grue, and then of course there's the ever watchable Mr Bradley to dignify and enliven the proceedings. THE JAIL: THE WOMAN'S HELL – As a self confessed Bruno Mattei fan, of course I had to score a copy of this when I heard it'd come out on Intervision. It's from Mattei's last purple patch before his demise, a time when he made a load of dirt cheap shot on video exploitation films in the Philippines. Those ones issued by Intervision have been reliably crazy, featuring the horrible plastic look of bad video production and oodles of shit dubbing, awful dialogue, sleaze and gore. The stand outs for me have been 'Mondo Cannibal' and 'Island of the Living Dead', films so screwed they really have to be seen to be believed. 'The Jail' isn't quite up there with them, but it isn't far off. It is what it sounds like – a WIP movie, in this case updated for an era that frankly doesn't care much for that kind of stuff anymore. It throws in all the staples of that disreputable genre – forced nudity, opportunistic same sex in a rapey context, sadism, evil prison camp director, an escape bid, tables turned etc. The first half of the movie concerns the prison experience of three women, none of whom have been furnished with any kind of meaningful back story which might get in the way of them being the subject of various predictable degradations. I found this bit of the movie to be a bit dull to be honest, and was expecting it to be a little more full on without particularly wanting it to be. There were some potentially nasty scenes (the one with the snake, for example), but nothing all that boundary pushing, just the usual cliches ground out to greater or lesser effect. Things picked up after the escape from the prison, when the film veered more towards 'The Most Dangerous Game' type territory and gave some good gore, some of which was quite vicious and sexualised. Throughout all of it, I was hoping for the disturbed unreality of 'Mondo...' or 'Island...' to shine through, but it didn't, quite. Those films were made strange by their warped technical aspects, and, whilst the dubbing, backing music, cinematography of 'The Jail' are all lame enough to be mirth inducing, they just don't have the delirious quality of some of the other films by Mattei from this time, which leads me to believe that he was consciously exaggerating and twisting aspects of that other stuff. Anti-aesthetics aside, 'The Jail' is sickly low rent trash which will satisfy many unwholesome cravings, at least a bit. |
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1st March 2016, 02:27 PM
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Zombies: The Beginning is still in my DecemberDike* drawer so unless it's replaced by something better which in all probability won't be so hard, it won't get watched for 9 months. Can't you keep your dodgy Mattei reviews to yourself Frankie? I mean hula dancing zombies! Really, come on!!!  Obviously i'll have to pick up Jail: The Woman's Hell won't i.  *copyright Bizarre_Eye. |
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1st March 2016, 02:46 PM
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I watched Ken Russell's Valentino last night, a very fun biopic of Rudolph Valentino that has sumptuous visuals and great soundtrack, some absolutely gobsmackingly awkward set-pieces which made my skin crawl so in that respect were very succesful - however there is some niggling thing that tells me it's not an entirely successful film. Therefore I have awarded it a 3.5/5. Definitely worth watching and the 128 minutes flew by. It's the oddest film I've seen Felicity Kendall in too. 
__________________  Triumphant sight on a northern sky |
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1st March 2016, 07:16 PM
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Demdike@Cult Labs and keirarts like this. |
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1st March 2016, 07:18 PM
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| ImageUploadedByTapatalk1456859464.556504.jpg A alien spacecraft dumps it's waste which lands in back woods swap, mosquitos feed on the blood of an alien body that was in the dumped container, the blood has the effect of greatly increasing the size of the mosquitos, whom go on a killing spree at a near by camping site. Dreadful acting but has some pretty good special effects for a film of its low budget, a film that falls into the so bad it's good category. Has to be the only film were a mosquito gives someone an ass raping 6.9/10 ImageUploadedByTapatalk1456859804.308629.jpg ImageUploadedByTapatalk1456859810.995895.jpg ImageUploadedByTapatalk1456859817.347460.jpg ImageUploadedByTapatalk1456859824.981311.jpg ImageUploadedByTapatalk1456859835.075870.jpg ImageUploadedByTapatalk1456859844.868222.jpg ImageUploadedByTapatalk1456859858.827971.jpg |
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