Directed by Rudy Gold
May 172012
Dolls of Despair #8 Easter Grindhouse Special: Easter Bunny Kill Kill and Hobo With A Shotgun.
The Dolls are back with their Easter Grindhouse group review podcast, reviewing Chad Ferrin’s Easter Bunny Kill Kill! and Hobo With A Shotgun. They also discuss horror conventions and other various projects they are involved in.
Apr 032012
Drew Daywalt does it again! Starring AJ Bowen (The Signal, You’re Next, Hatchet II) and Kaylee Score.
Mar 282012
Remember how we had this on our wishlist forever and ever? Well it’s finally out! Many thanks to writer Josh MacDonald for sharing this film with us. It was well worth the wait.
Make sure you check out The Corridor on March 30th! It will be available on IFC On Demand, Amazon streaming, iTunes, Xbox, Zune and Sundancenow!
If you live in NYC and prefer to see it on the big screen, hop on down to the The IFC Center over on Sixth street and check it out. ~ girl afraid
Where to start with this? A gentle introductory paragraph to this review seems somewhat out of place since, unlike the majority of films which open quietly and slowly build, The Corridor throws you straight into the action with a body on the floor, a man flipped out of his mind, and a group of guys – who seem to be familiar with both – wondering what the hell to do about the situation. It works, because the viewer is of course just as confused as the bunch of guys encountering the scene, and you’re likely gonna want to know more about what’s going on.
Anyway, the chaos ends and we’re flashed forward – or was that backwards?! It was hard to tell at first, because you see the same bunch of guys, AND the deranged guy, camping together in a cabin in the woods. This film made me shout WHY?! on multiple occasions. Which I think is always a good thing, because when there are questions, a person will naturally pursue the answers. And besides, it does all get answered eventually in the captivating build up that follows, with excellent character development and a good story well told. There is also fantastic cinematography which at several points made me want to go out and find the nearest snowy mountains and pine forests. That is, until the story gets just as crazy as the guy in the opening scene!
The group of friends discover a weird natural phenomenon in the forest, a ‘corridor’ of sorts. And when they enter said passage, they experience strange sensations followed by nosebleeds. But it’s not until they leave and return to the cabin that things get really bizarre. The corridor has clearly had a stronger effect on them than realised, and their following behaviour can only be described as completely mental and nonsensical. Which I love. Why does everything have to make sense all the time anyway. And to top it all off, the mental guy from the opening becomes the only sane one among them.
Things obviously go rather awry for much of the characters after this point, and we enter the final stages of the film. This really was for me the only slightly disappointing part of the otherwise splendid film. I don’t want to give any of it away, but I found the ending to be mostly confusing and, while I like a film to be neatly tied up, this one left me with a lot of things I didn’t fully understand. But this is just my viewpoint (you should see me watching a David Lynch movie!), and I know a lot of other people enjoy an ending that’s open for discussion. And that’s what you get here, a film that keeps you interested throughout, has you asking a lot of questions, answers most of them but leaves a few of them open for debate by you, the viewer.
~ deadbutdreaming
Artwork by Mike Holmes
Feb 272012
Triangle is one of those films that just seemed to pass me by during its’ general release back in 2009, the trailer evidently proving too ambiguous, or perhaps maybe too little ambiguity, to successfully persuade a viewing. At the time, at least. There’s nothing more fearful than the unknown, which could be what swayed my choice an evening recent whilst in the mood for horrour. To watch Triangle, a film that was kind of just there, not doing anything, I knew nothing about it except for a vague recollection of confusion. Completely sinister, if you ask me.
Anyway. The notion that any confusion regarding the plot could be removed simply by watching the movie can be instantly dismissed. This thing needs at least a lengthy wiki written by a genius of utmost insight to fully explain exactly what’s going on here. No, no. TWO wikis.
It basically tells the story of a boating trip, where the crew encounter rough seas which rip apart their ship. They’re left floating until a huge liner sails by, onto which they duly hop. This is where it gets confusing. It appears that they get stuck in some kind of time loop, with the main character going back in time twice to create three different time lines, with three different versions of each character (triangle, get it?). You know who they are, but you don’t know when they are. Plenty of chaos ensues on the ship, which obviously gets repeated for each loop (annoying) but you do see it from a different perspective.
Eventually, the main character appears to break out of the loop. Or at least, one of her iterations does. I’m not sure which. There comes a scene after this which I liked very much. She’s back at her house, where she encounters a previous version of herself, frustrated and borderline abusing her disabled son. So, she goes in, gives her old version the old one two, and takes the child while assuring him that she’ll never behave like that again. And I think this would have been a great end to the movie, like the whole thing was some sort of metaphorical portrayal of the inner workings of her mind. Her realisation of a need to change, each loop being some sort of mental filter removing negative thoughts, beating up a not really there version of herself, out with the old, in with the new.
But no. The movie goes on and you can see this story is far from resolution. and that’s what I don’t like about Triangle. It ends and there is no conclusion, no explanation, going away as quietly as it came. Shame, as the rest of it is decent, and certainly not boring. But I like to see some sort of summit, something to justify the preceding 100 minutes I’ve sat through. Perhaps others prefer their mysteries unsolved though. Thoughts?
~ deadbutdreaming
Nov 052011
Check out our very own Girl Afraid as she speaks to The Austin Post about her three favorite horror films!
Oct 092011
There’s not much to say about Green Lantern. I’m writing this review while watching “The Prince and Me” starring Julia Stiles, and the two movies are starting to bleed together a bit in my brain. Green Lantern wasn’t half the train wreck that “X-Men: First Class” turned out to be, though, so this should be a much shorter review.
First and most importantly: receding hairlines are bad. At least, that’s one of the many takeaways from this film. Almost everyone with a fivehead in this movie turns out to be a murderous son of a bitch, so remember to use conditioner, everybody, and don’t wear that trucker hat so much.
As usual, there aren’t many black people in this movie. The ones that do show up are either guards or civilians. It’s the same thing with “The Prince and Me,” which is set mostly in Wisconsin and Denmark, hotbeds of racial activism. Oh well. Movies are racist. And Julia Stiles has a weirdly shaped head. Discuss. Continue reading »
Sep 282011
‘The Rig’ was brought to my attention by a competition (to win copies of the DVD) which had been running on the website for Frightfest. Not that it was one of the films shown at this years festival – any relevance is restricted to genre alone. One can only assume a surplus of these DVDs fell into their hands with few feasible ways to dispose of them. See where this is going?
I’m certain everyone will agree when I say oil rigs are bad-ass (when they’re not pumping oil into the sea), hence why I felt duty bound to watch the film. Perhaps it was funded by BP to try and engineer a change in perspective towards the whole incident – like ok, releasing oil is bad, but at least it was that instead of a series of vicious monsters hungry for human flesh. Because that’s exactly what this film is about. The drilling goes awry, accidentally causing the release of sea creatures who go after the crew members one by one.
This surely must be as bad as straight to DVD gets. Every aspect of it is laughable – simultaneously it’s worst and best attribute. The plot seemed to have come up somewhat short, in that the ending seemed very hashed together and made little sense. It appeared that having finished the film from what was scripted it was found too short to qualify as a feature, so the ending was made up on the spot. This and that not only did they utilise flashbacks, they took it one step further and did flashbacks of flashbacks makes it pretty conclusive for me. For me it’s like in music, where a singer appears to have run out of lyrics and so will just sing ‘la’s’ or the like to carry a song. If it’s come to that, rethink it, all of it, and if you still can’t think of anything, bin it!
