Don't Look Up

When an American horror director starts to receive visions of an unfinished 1920s Romanian film makers work he sets out to re-create the lost masterpiece and hopefully resurrect his stalled career.

Channeling the spirit of Bela Ort, who is played by Eli Roth in the briefest of cameos, and convincing a small crew to re-open a long abandoned film studio when a series of bizarre consequences begin to fall on the movie set as the spirit of a gypsy curse is reawakened. Which is just as well as no one films anything beyond one take, the crew take to running around smashing cars or knifing each other and there is a lot of howling and flies buzzing about and a bizarre Romanian location scout with the worst accent since Cate Blanchett tried to be Ukranian in the fourth Indiana Jones movie. And there's some stuff about and old guy hanging around with a baby growing in his neck tumour.

When a horror movie carries the name of respected Asian horror directors like Fruit Chan and Hideo Nakata you would be expected to be treated to something unexpected and probably actually scary. Instead DON'T LOOK UP is such a disaster it adds competence to any Uwe Boll film you may have seen. Horrendous acting turns, a disjointed "plot" and a couple of set pieces cribbed from Nakata's original RING and even a few from the TOMIE movie discredit any horror movie honour these two may have gained.

DON'T LOOK UP should be renamed Don't Look At All and is hilariously bad in the level of the equally inept GIALLO.

Flaccid, floppy and inert.

Shelter

Julianne Moore plays a hardened psychiatrist and profiler who does no believe in multiple personality disorder. Her father likes to challenge her opinions and introduces her to a patient who not only displays multiple personalities but can also manifest physical aspects of the people sharing his head. The pursuit to discredit the patients condition descends into a struggle with belief and faith.

Writer Michael Cooney (Identity, The I Inside and eh... Jack Frost) is on familiar territory as his story slowly unveils a psychological conundrum that unfortunately veers sharply into a crackpot, mystical hodge-podge where one of the major plot conceits relies on that unobtainable Hollywood power to have a computer do impossible tasks very, very quickly. This reeks of rewriting burying the original script under layers of Hollywood BS. It's like way him a Dark Castle film without the fore warning of the logo to let you know your about to watch a piece of crap.

It goes to show that it's not just remakes that are bereft of ideas but original productions also. Does the fault lie at the hands of the writers, the directors or the money men? Certainly not the audience who stayed away from Shelter in droves. This is a confused, uninspired film that feels more like a business deal and a bunch of paychecks than an actual attempt to rouse any scared or chills.

I'm left flaccid and floppy

The Last Exorcism

Reverend Cotton Marcus is, by his own admission, a fraud. He has invited a documentary film crew to follow him as he unveils the tricks of his trade and his fall out with faith that he has been preaching since he was ten years old. Cotton takes a an exorcism case which should be no more than a cathartic exercise for a deeply religious family. The Reverend will finally confront what he has chosen to deny.

Any exorcism movie is going to draw comparison ro William Friedkin's seminal classic but director Daniel Stamm and co have re-invented that genre for the digital age. This is a 70s era premise given a very millennium spin and the result is bone cracking, body twistingly good. Characters live and breathe onscreen with a couple of Oscar worthy performances and the documentary style helps enhance the immersion in the events which turn and push you in one direction and then take you in another.

Director Daniel Stamm was a natural choice for the faux documentary style movie after he showcased his talent in the form with A Necessary Death and though this style had it's detractors (and why? Would you say close-ups and wide masters, cranes, dollies and steadicam have been overused as well?) with REC, Paranormal Activity and now The Last Exorcism the Point Of View horror film is very much in vogue and is very much still effective at delivering a good old fashion scary movie.

Total erect and once more I ejaculated.

Burning Bright

Burning Bright sounds like a SyFy Channel premise; a tiger loose in a house stalking a college aged girl and her Autistic brother but it's execution is far superior than any of the nature amok films that are churned out for cable and DVD every month. Genuinely suspenseful and utilising a real tiger (take that CGI!) the simple story avoids being bogged down too much in melodrama and the very attractive husky voiced Briana (Step Up 2 The Streets, Sorority Row) Evigan makes a good show of herself all sweat soaked and running about in her pyjamas.

There are flaws, though minor compared to some larger budgeted films, and as no film is perfect they are forgivable. The editor does a good job of tying the shots together to keep the feel of the tiger and the actors in the same environment though gore hounds will be inevitably disappointed by only one on screen mauling, but for one "F-bomb" this could easily be rated PG.

A very enjoyable distraction that has Happy Horror Hard On suitably errect.

Splintered

Independently produced British horror Splintered has been floating around since its debut at the Grimupnorth festival last year which is finally getting a brief theatrical run this September followed by DVD a week later and late night showings on cable in the US.

The obligatory group of five teens head off into the woods in the search of a Welsh local legend, a mysterious beast that has been attacking live stock and has now escalated its preying to humans. Camping out in the woods pseudo goth chick Sophie wanders off pursuing the mythical beast and finds herself trapped in the ruins of an orphanage by feral psychopath. Sophie's friends try and find her and will find out the truth behind the story, is it man or beast or possibly both?

Although Splintered certainly won't set the horror world alight it is pleasingly competent, well acted and produced and is the sort of film that rises above the expectations of the direct to DVD and late night cable market. On it's limited and wholly independent budget as well as it's minor deviations on cliched plot twists Splintered is a film to have fun with for any horror fan to pass the time on a slow night and a safer bet for a "date night" horror film than most recent extreme fare.

A good stiffy.

Piranha 3D

Joe Dante's PIRANHA was launched by uber B-movie producer Roger Corman off the back of the success of JAWS. John Sayles blackly humourous script and Dante's gleeful malignant film have long been a cult classic. Followed up by a sequel helmed by non-other than king of the world James Cameron and remade again, for Television, in 1995 it seemed only right that in this age of remakes, and with the relative success of Corman's remade DEATH RACE, that the time was right to dip once more into the blood infested water with the killer fish.

Spring Break at Lake Victoria, Arizona brings twenty thousand hot young things down on mummy and daddy's boats to party the summer away. A freak earth tremor has cracked open a subterranean lake which has unleashed a pack of prehistoric piranha. When the two meet it's a hell of a mess. Plot, characters? Who needs them. If you go into PIRANHA 3-D looking for a cultural character study you're in the wrong theatre. This is for the fun crowd and we like our laughs bloody and tasteless served with a side of hotties.

Writer / Director Alexandre Aja pumps his film full of beauty, blood, boobs, blood, action and blood. It's a ramped up hyper-feast of fun, fun, fun in the sun as the rampant killer fish tear the revelers into little pieces and the excess of enjoyment is not hampered by the poor and mostly ineffective 3D post-process.

PIRANHA is a horror party movie, see it with a crowd who will cheer and laugh, jeer and giggle. It's a sleek, sharp-toothed thrill ride that offers good unsavoury summer fun that you'll return to again and again. Let's hope there's another shoal of deadly fish ready to come our way in the form of a sequel and this time it is filmed using 3D.

Full on erection and ejaculation.

A Serbian Film

Some films attract controversy through their exploitative handling of material and normally those films gather notoriety resulted from scaremongering drummed up in press and media. It is doubtful that most people that speak out against those sorts of films actual see the whole film. This will be the issue with A Serbian Film.

If I were to describe to you scenes and plot involving pornography, rape, child abuse and necrophilia you would immediately think of a poor quality, shot-on-video limited appeal film that is produced to sate the tastes of societies underbelly. And no matter how you approach it any description of A Serbian Film will invoke this. What it will not tell you that this is a superbly crafted, glorious photographed, strongly acted and fully committed film that explores a world of violence that is entirely possible and conceivable. It will also not tell you that rather than being a voyeuristic thrill show the makers of A Serbian Film have a point to make, mostly related to disillusion with their home country. They have chosen to do so in the package of an extreme horror film that will jar, excite, sadden and sicken.

To understand A Serbian Film you have to see it. You will be surprised at how palatable the film is. You'll find humour and horror. You'll find the most important horror film of recent years. I encourage you to make up your own mind, your own decisions and see it, maybe just the once, if you can take it.

The normal Happy Horror Hard On scoring system may be in poor taste or entirely applicable: full on raging erection and ejaculation!