Ahí va el diablo (2012)

Directed by: Adrián García Bogliano

Writer: Adrián García Bogliano

The very first scene in this film has two lesbians banging the hell out of each other. You can hardly imagine a more promising start of a movie, but things get better. After they've finished (and had a boring conversation no one cares about anyway), one of them goes down the stairs to answer the door, only to be brutally killed by an extremely large guy who cuts off a few of her fingers in the process. Her girlfriend then comes down and hits the killer in the head with a heavy object, so he gets really pissed off and leaves. The dying girls murmurs something about "his eyes" before shuffling off this mortal coil. You may think there's hardly a more promising beginning to a movie than a lesbian sex followed by a murder, but it gets better.

The killer, still in a bit of a knockdown, manages to get to a nearby mountaintop, where he opens a sack out of which falls a myriad of severed fingers (!). Then he removes his clothes and proceeds with doing what suspiciously looks like a sexual intercourse. With the ground. Yep. A bit later, apparently on the same mountain, we find a nice little Mexican family with two young children. They spend some time there and then leave, but the kids (a boy and a girl, by the way) want to go back for some reason, so the parents let them go so they can have some hot sex in the car. The parents, not the kids, you sick bastards. The mother gives her daughter a wristwatch and warns her that they have to be back in an hour. Surely, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, as you might have imagined, the kids don't return (surprise, surprise!), the parents are pissed off at each other and some unpleasant family stuff comes to the surface etc. But lo and behold, the following day the kids are back, perfectly unharmed, their whereabouts and doings remaining a mystery. Which, by the way, is not very surprising, as absolutely no one bothered to, you know, ask them where they were. Anyway, long story short, the kids are apparently alright, but soon strange things start happening (details of which will remain undisclosed in this review), and that prompts the mother to think that there might be something wrong with the children. (Cheesy announcer mode on:) What she will discover is that the truth is more horrifying than anything she might have imagined (cheesy announcer mode off).

The screenplay of this film is rather uneven. On one hand, the parts with the (apparently children-related) strange phenomena leave a lot to be desired. We see absolutely nothing we haven't already seen in many ghost movies. Hardly anything interesting happens about that. On the other hand, the movie compensates for that in some rather unexpected places. For example, the parents discover the whereabouts of a guy whom they suspect might have sexually assaulted the kids and they decide to pay him a night visit. Suffice it to say that it ends in a pretty surprising way. 

The story is made on the anything-goes principle, many things are not well explained, some of them are downright illogical and in general it all doesn't make much of a sense. I'm certainly no logic Nazi and I thought a good mysterious atmosphere was more than enough compensation, but still many people will probably see this as a serious fault.

To me much bigger problem were the kids. It seems as if the director had never seen The Omen, otherwise he would have known how a scary kid looks like. These two are not a tiny bit scary, if anything they look more drugged than demon-possessed or something. Don't let that chase you away from the movie, though. With all its faults, Here Comes the Devil is a very nice movie whose atmosphere and occasional extreme weirdness fully compensate for certain shortcomings. Actually, I lied in the first paragraph. Lesbian sex is much better than murder, cutting off fingers and raping the ground.

Decay (2012)

Directed by: Luke Thompson, Michael Mazur (co-director)

Writer: Luke Thompson

This film has not been authorized or endorsed by CERN. It is purely a work of fiction.

 

Is it now? Damn, and I thought all those zombies were real! What a disappointment!

 

Anyway, this is a really horrible horror film that takes place at the infamous LHC in Switzerland - surely you remember that place, a few years ago some kind of apocalypse was supposed to happen there but it failed miserably, as usual. Well, at least in this movie that bloody collider did some good - it didn't create any black holes that would swallow the planet, but it did cause a good old zombie outbreak.

 

I have to admit that I failed to understand anything in this movie. I had absolutely no idea who the main characters were (except that they were really annoying), what exactly was their job at CERN. There was also some professor that was playing some kind of a double game (that might be a spoiler, sorry), but I didn't understand what was his precise agenda. I also didn't understand how all those zombies came to existence. It might have something to do with me watching the movie on 4X for the purpose of this review, but if I remember correctly, I also didn't understand it when I saw it first, last summer. Hopefully it's the bad writing, but on the other hand maybe I'm just stupid.

 

Be that as it may, this movie fails on all accounts. While the story itself is passable (well, it's a standard zombie story, one of the coolest things in the world, you really have to work hard to mess that up), the screenplay is bad. The characters are idiots and in the moments of greatest danger they argue about who slept with who, who betrayed whom, who's an asshole (all of them) and stuff like that. The actors are even worse than in an average low budget movie and among them the final girl (TM) easily takes the cake. Rarely have I seen a creature so tragically robbed of any charisma, not to mention the acting talent. And when she gets all emotional with her new boyfriend and you are aware that it's still a loooong time till the end of the movie, that's a good test of your low budget horror endurance.

 

Basically, these people, who are students of some sort, are running down the LHC maintenance tunnels looking for a way to escape both from the building and the zombies. The writer/director Thompson occasionally throws at us some physics-related mumbo-jumbo to keep us entertained (or to show how cool he is), but it's not much relevant to the very simple plot. The direction also leaves a lot of room for improvement, with most of the scenes intended to be scary ending up being unintentionally funny. Also, I imagine Thompson cared about his characters more than I did, so while I was happy every time someone died, there's a possibility he intended those scenes to be serious.

 

After about an hour of chasing around through various tunnels and hallways, a welcome change of scenery happens at the very end, but it's all too brief to bring any substantial improvement. That ending was probably the only thing I liked in this movie and if they ever make a sequel, I'll seriously consider watching it, even after this train-wreck. Apparently, this movie was made by physics PhD students, which is a bit irritating. What makes them think that anyone can make a movie? It's a process slightly more complicated than "buy a camera and shoot some stuff" procedure. Imagine if some filmmaker who had never heard anything about physics since high school attempted to write a scientific paper. Doesn't work, eh? Well this is not much different.

 

On the other hand, I have to admit that maybe I'm being too much of a bitch here, even though the movie was very bad. First of all, it was made for a budget of 2000 pounds. How the heck did they managed to do that, I haven't a slightest idea. Just the tickets to Switzerland for the cast and crew would probably cost more. Anyway, for such a meager budget, the movie doesn't look entirely horrible and has some decent special effects. Secondly, the movie is free - you can download it from the company's website http://www.decayfilm.com/ Respect for that.

La cara oculta (2011)

Directed by:  Andi Baiz

Writers: Hatem Chraiche Ruiz-Zorilla, Andi Baiz (screenplay), Hatem Chraiche Ruiz-Zorilla, Arturo Infante (story)



If by any chance this is the first time you hear about this movie, immediately proceed with the following steps:

1) Read the rest of this text (it's completely spoiler free),

2) By all means avoid watching any trailers or reading any spoiler non-free reviews,

3) Promptly get the movie and watch it immediately because it absolutely rules!

Here's roughly what happens in the first half an hour or so: This guy Adrian, a young (and apparently very attractive to women, lucky bastard) Spanish orchestra conductor, gets dumped by his girlfriend Belen via a video message. Completely dumbfounded, he goes to a bar to drown his sorrow and there he meets a hot as hell young waitress called Fabiana, whom he promptly picks up, because he can. Lucky bastard. You would think he would spend some time mourning his previous relationship, but noooooooooooooo sir, this girl (whose hotness I can't stress enough) moves with him in what seems to be a matter of days. Lucky bastard.

 

Anyway, what I should mention is that all this takes place in a large house in Colombia, near its capital Bogota, the house which Adrian rents because he prefers the peace and quiet of the country to the city's... whatever the hell is the opposite of peace and quiet. To get back to the story, Adrian may have solved the lack of girlfriend problem, but other troubles kick in. First of all, the police are on his trail - as Belen apparently had never left the country, she's pronounced missing and guess who's the prime suspect? As if that wasn't enough, strange things happen in the house, mainly in the bathroom when Fabiana's using it (which, fortunately for us, she does quite often). Strange noises, water turning hot for no apparent reason, waves in the water in the sink when it should be perfectly still, et cetera, all that prompts Fabiana to think the house may be haunted. That's more than enough to give stress even to someone who picks up women so easily as Adrian, lucky bastard.

 

While this may sound rather mundane, the movie's structure and things that happen after that are anything but. Fabiana is scared of the house, but she also suspects that Adrian may still love Belen, he reassures her, blah blah, and than suddenly we see a ghostly face in the mirror and we are thrown back in time to get the explanation for all that's happening. We see Belen and Adrian, apparently a very happy couple, moving from Spain to Colombia because of his job and renting that awfully big house from some German lady. But that house also has a very interesting secret, which will become known to Belen during a conversation with the landlady, and it will kick everything in motion. Prepare yourself for a wonderfully conceived and directed story that's full of twists, it grabs you and won't let go until the ending, but also be prepared for a big emotional investment. I'm not talking about some teenage melodrama crap - this movie will have characters fall into grave dangers because of completely stupid small mistakes and you will probably very often find yourself rooting for them to overcome them. "No, no, watch that, watch it... nooooooooooooooooooo!!!!", "The mirror, look in the mirror!!! Yesssssssssssssssss!!!", "What the hell are you doing, you stupid bitch!!!??!?!?!?!?!" are some of the comments I made during some of the more tense moments in the film.

 

I simply cannot recommend this movie enough. If the greatly written and original story enhanced by good performances is not enough for you, then two beautiful female leads should persuade you. By the way, if you've seen this film and liked it, by all means check out the wonderful French film with Audrey Tautou called He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, which has a structure similar to this movie (same events shown from the perspectives of two main characters, where the shift of perspectives suddenly gives a very dark tone to what we have seen previously).

State of Emergency (2011)

Directed by: Turner Clay


Writer: Turner Clay

People turning into bloodthirsty monsters because of a toxin of some kind? A small group of isolated survivors fights to stay alive? Count me in! When done right (such as here), this type of movies always brings joy to my heart.

First of all, a small technical matter: I think correct terminology is very important, so it always pisses me off when people talk about 28 Days Later or [REC] or some similar movie and call the creatures that appear there zombies. Those are NOT zombies! Zombies are living dead. Those are not dead, they are just infected and very angry. Basically, you have zombies (which themselves can be divided into two groups - Romero style zombies and fast running zombies, like in the Dawn of the Dead remake) and creatures like in 28 Days Later, which we will call infected. State of Emergency deals with this latter group.

The setting is rather minimalistic, both character-wise and location-wise. There are only four principal characters and two locations. Our lead hero is Jim, a guy who has just lost his fiancee while they were on the run from the chaos. He barricades himself in a barn, where he spends his time in sorrow and anxiety until he receives a call from a nearby warehouse. He goes there and meets another three survivors - Scott, his wife Julie, and a mysterious newcomer Ix, who refuses to talk to anyone (that's a girl, by the way).

Two most important things here are the following: 1) For an infection movie, this one has a rather small body count. Surprisingly small, in fact. Actually, it's so small that the fact they managed to get away with it is a small miracle. Turner Clay has concentrated more on the lead characters and their relationships and while that normally makes me puke, he succeeds against all odds because the characters are likeable, they don't spend every damn second fighting about some stupid crap (like in most low-budget films) and the actors did a very good job, all of them. Of course, the writing isn't always top notch, with lines like

"I lost my only friend."

"Maybe we can be friends."

I mean come on! REALLY???

Fortunately, this is probably the only moment that made me cringe, other than that the dialogues are OK.

2) This movie is much better directed than your run-of-the-mill zombie/infected film. So much better, in fact, that I'm eagerly awaiting Turner Clay's next movie about apocalypse. Instead of violence, he builds a nice atmosphere of isolation and hopelessness, which of course wouldn't have been worth crap if the characters weren't so believable. There are also some great scenes that would've made any great horror director proud. For example, check out the 15 minute mark, when Jim finds out that he had forgotten to lock the barn - suddenly his safe place becomes potentionally lethal. Suspense at its finest.

The ending leaves a lot of room for improvement, but despite that this is highly recommended for anyone who likes low budget horror films, especially of this type.

Apartment 143 (Emergo) (2011)

Directed by: Carles Torrens

Writer: Rodrigo Cortés

This is another found footage horror about a haunting, like Paranormal Activity. Fortunately, this one comes from Spain, and with Spanish horror you're usually in the safe hands. Apartment 143 follows a group of parapsychologists (or at least one parapsychologist and his ghost-hunting team) who try to solve a case of mysterious occurences in an apartment.

 

See, you can spot a difference right there. Instead of a haunted house, we have a much more claustrophobic setting of an apartment. This is by no means a disadvantage - Paranormal Activity and its sequels were never too good in space utilization, while in this movie all rooms serve a purpose. Anyway, our team of ghost hunters responds to a call from a distressed father, whose family (consisting of a five year old son and a teenage daughter) had been experiencing strange phenomena after the death of his wife.

 

Naturally, the investigators install their highly sofisticated equipment (including a bizarrely pixelated thingy whose purpose evades me) all around the apartment and start gathering scary footage, while at the same time the leader tries to pry out from the father the truth about his late wife, which might be the key to everything that's happening.

 

The story is simple, but it serves purpose - it gives enough material for a few plot twists to keep us interested. However, the real treat comes from the way the foreign entity (who- or whatever that might be) communicates with the characters. There's obviously that unavoidable mundane stuff like moving tables, turning pictures on the wall upside-down et cetera, but the real deal is that the thing apparently takes possession of the girl, making her a truly scary bitch in a few scenes. One of the first things the team records is a mysterious image of a woman in the room with the girl, so it's fairly obvious from the start that you won't watch an hour and a half of doors opening and closing by themselves and that you'll witness some more concrete scares.

 

This nice little film shows that the found footage formula is not entirely dead and still can be used to a good effect. It's so unfair that Paranormal Activity, which is inferior in every possible aspect, makes millions, but that's marketing for you.

 

Pandemic (2009)

Directed by: Jason Connery

Writer: Aaron Pope

 

This movie begins with a man riding a horse and then dying a horrible virus-like death. He didn't even live enough to see out the opening credits, which I imagine was very disappointing to him. Soon after that, a young veterinarian Sydney visits a farmer named Spenser, whose filly is suffering a horrible agony, as if something is eating her skin. Spenser mercifully kills her, but that's not nearly the end of it. Soon other similar deaths start to occur all around the small county of Diablo, New Mexico. It's not long before military arrives and quarantines everything, which is the moment you know crap hit the fan. But the truth is even more terrifying than it looks (insert The Twilight Zone melody).

 

First of all, what really sucked about this movie is that it's actually not horror, but a thriller. The infected people simply die, without turning into crazy bloodthirsty zombie-like creatures. The same goes for animals. Imagine if the authors were brave enough to turn this into a movie about zombie horses! One can only dream...

 

Anyway, what happens next is not a large scale apocalyptic pandemic scenario (despite the movie's title), but a rather low key story about two main characters trying to get to the bottom of the things. Was everything just an accident or is the truth even more terrifying? (insert The Twilight Zone theme again) Sydney is calm and rational, while Spenser is an (apparently) crazy conspiracy theorist who blames the Government for everything. Sydney doesn't take him seriously at the beginning, but when the military forces blatantly attack them on the road in the night, she has to at least consider his side of the story. The truth is of course more horrifying than any of us could have imagined.

 

If you visit the IMDb page for this movie, you will see a low grade and a flood of bad reviews, criticising the story, the direction and pretty much everything else. Now, you can't really argue much against it, this is certainly far from the best movie ever made, but I found it a decent time waster. The reason is probably that I'm a sucker for the conspiracy theories and I found the two leads not too disgusting. I also liked the ending, where (spoiler) it turns out that the truth was even more terrifying than a Japanese long-haired ghost (end of spoiler), and for that I even forgave the lack of zombies, or horror in general. But, the problem for the filmmakers is that not everyone is as tolerant as I am, so I think the low grade is probably because the movie didn't feature any zombie horses.

Blood Rush (2012)

Directed by: Evan Marlowe

Writer: Kerry Finlayson

This is simply unwatchable. I don't remember seeing something so profoundly devoid of any talent in a long time. Recently I was very critical of Mr. Hush but compared to Blood Rush, that one looks like The Godfather. Cheap photography, stupid characters, actors that look like they had just failed the audition for a porno movie, horrible special effects... actually, speaking of porno, this entire movie looks like a horror setup for a hardcore scene that never comes.

 

In between the periods when my brain's defense mechanisms took me far away, to a beautiful land where I'm tied to a chair and forced to listen the water dripping, I was able to make out a story about some kind of infection spreading through a small town, but that's really completely unimportant when you're faced with the horrors of filmmaking at its absolutely lowest. This tries to be some kind of horror comedy, with "humor" that's obviously inspired by the Japanese authors like Yoshihiro Nishimura (for example, the gag where we follow the POV of a flying shovel), but they only manage to rip off the cheap special effects, while completely missing the spirit of those gags.

 

After all, see this trailer and decide if this is your cup of tea. As for me, I implore Marlowe and Finlayson never to make another movie. Ever. Please.

 

 

The Facility (2012)

Directed by: Ian Clark

Writer: Ian Clark

Seven people volunteer as guinea pigs for the testing of some powerful new drug. They are taken to a remote facility, far away from any road or city, and have to stay there for two weeks, while the effects of the drug are tested. You won't believe it, but bad stuff happens.

 

One by one, the people start experiencing the horrible side effects of the drug that include, but are not limited to, violent behavior. The beauty of the facility's remote location is that they can't leave, so they have to wait for the next day and hope that someone will come to the rescue (of course, the phones aren't working and there's no Internet access). But that's not the end of it - any possibility of organizing into a group is effectively ruined by the fact that they have no idea who got the placebo and who the real drug, so they can't predict who's going to snap next.

 

The story offers no big surprises and earth-shattering plot twists, but it's believable, the characters (with the exception of one or two) are not irritating and the director did a good job of conveying the feeling of tension and paranoia. This is a low budget movie that uses the handheld camera a lot, but it's mostly justified by the context and the low budget doesn't really show. It seems to me that British filmmakers pay more attention to the cinematography than the Americans (of course, I'm referring strictly to this type of film). All in all, this is certainly no [REC] or John Carpenter's The Thing, but it's a good little debut movie that I think will satisfy most B-horror lovers who, like myself, are tired of the flood of cheap crappy found-footage films that comes our way for the past few years. Never trust the pharmaceutical industry, those people are evil!

The Kovak Box (2006)

Directed by: Daniel Monzón

Writers:  Jorge Guerricaechevarría, Daniel Monzón

Timothy Hutton plays a sci-fi writer who arrives on an island in Spain to participate in a conference or something. Everything's wonderful at first, but strange things quickly start happening. First there's a mysterious and disturbing video sent to him to his hotel room, then the unexplainable suicide of his girlfriend, who jumps off a window for no apparent reason. Just as Hutton's about to leave the island, he meets a young girl who also attempted suicide in the same way as his girlfriend. She claims that someone's after her. At first Hutton doesn't believe her, but then there's another suicide right on the airport, so they join forces in an attempt to find out whoever the hell wants to kill her and discover what the hell is going on.

 

This is one of those mystery movies that are wonderful at the beginning, when there's a building tension, a sense of paranoia, conspiracy and all that stuff. It's also competently directed and the characters are likeable. However, as it usually happens, the mystery itself is much more interesting than its solution. Once we find out the reason behind all that, it boils down to a rather conventional bad guy vs. good guy showdown. Near the end there's a potentially great mass suicide scene that unfortunately wasn't directed very well, so its impact (and the one of the movie itself) was greatly reduced.

 

 

A Haunting At Silver Falls (2013)

Directed by: Brett Donowho

Writers: Cam Cannon, Rachel Long, Brian Pittman

 

This starts off like a fairly standard ghost picture. Our heroine is a young girl who lost her parents, so she's staying with her aunt and her husband and one night she finds a ring that she puts on and can't take off later. Immediately after that she starts having a heavy case of ghost haunting - apparently, she's being chased by the spirits of two long gone twin sisters who want their damn ring back.

 

She's not exactly getting along with her aunt (or anyone else, come to think of it) and her only solace is a her nerd boyfriend who's a spitting image of a teen version of Eli Roth. However, soon it turns out that the spirits that haunt her don't mean harm - in fact, their father had been wrongfully accused for killing them and they are trying to lead her to the real perpetrator.

 

To me this idea was very appealing. With everyone (especially her relatives) acting more and more strange, it soon turns out that the only persons she can trust are - the dead twin sisters. It doesn't happen very often that you root for ghosts against the living people, so this movie has a point for originality because of that. Also, I quite liked the middle part of it, because it had a very nice kind of tense atmosphere where everyone seemed to be after our heroine.

 

However, everything falls apart at the ending, which is confusing and leaves heaps of questions unanswered. It's not the Michael Haneke kind of open ending, where you have to figure out what happened yourself (like in Hidden, for example) but rather a shining example of sloppy writing.

 

Still, this all makes for a rather pleasant and interesting viewing. If you liked this movie (and even if you didn't) I heartily recommend you watch Frank LaLoggia's Lady in White, a wonderful little film with somewhat similar story in a more Stephen King-like setting.

The Demented (2013)

Directed by: Christopher Roosevelt

Writer: Christopher Roosevelt

Last night some of my friends and I were choosing which horror movie to watch. So I'm browsing through my catalogue (I'm using EMDB by the way, wonderful stuff, highly recommended) and I stumble upon this thing. So I start reading the plot outline aloud: "Six college friends..." and I'm immediately interrupted by an unanimous "That's it! We're watching it!"

 

Of course, a movie about six college friends is hardly going to deliver any surprises. These guys (and girls) get together for a weekend, but their amazing fun is interrupted first by a scary-looking and aggressive dog and then by a news of a mysterious attack. It appears to be a biological attack of some sort and people are turned into bloodthirsty homicidal maniacs. Led by a dumb as a doorknob white guy, our group of heroes begins an unlikely fight for survival.

 

The most important mistake made by the author of this movie is that there are no zombies and apparently no contagion. The infected are aiming to kill rather than to infect the survivors, which is really disappointing. We all know that in movies like this the main source of tension is the moment when you're supposed to shoot your dead girlfriend who's attacking you. The Demented has no such moments. Speaking of the infected, one cool thing about them is that they stand completely frozen and only move (i.e. attack) when they're awaken by noise. However, the director completely missed this great opportunity. The attacks are not all that exciting and there are no scenes of women taking off their tops and tying them around their shoes to make less noise. Oh well, I guess I'll have to put that in my screenplay.

 

The beginning of the movie is dedicated to... ahem... some kind of "character" "development". And it's really boring. The aforementioned white guy loves his girlfriend to death, but she feels she's being smothered by his love. Of course, she doesn't tell that to him, but to her best friend. The same guy professes great friendship to some black guy. The host of the party is an irritating moron who cheated on his girlfriend with the girlfriend of that black guy. She finds out about that and gets really pissed off. The girlfriend of our (seemingly) main hero had already told her earlier that she was skeptical about their relationship. And so on. Yet only one of these relations has any consequence on the future proceedings. Talk about wasted time.

 

And their weekend also sucks ass and is actually improved by the appearance of that rabid dog. First they talk about how great it's going to be, the time of their lives, blah blah blah, turns out they spend their time sliding down the grass and shooting one another with water guns. Wow! Massive respect! I must say I support the absence of drugs and heavy drinking, but they could've at least had an orgy or something. All in all, this is not entirely unwatchable, but there are many, many much better low budget movies with similar story.

Evil Dead (2013)

Directed by: Fede Alvarez

Writers: Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues

 

Will you look at that poster? Just look at it. Try to spot the name of the movie. Not easy, huh? Yes, it's down there, written in a rather tiny font compared to ALL THE PRAISE IN CAPITAL LETTERS that takes the whole damn upper half. See, this crap pisses me off. This movie is neither astonishing, nor awesome, nor near perfect. At best, it's bearable. Isn't there some kind of punishment for false advertising?

When it comes to horror remakes, there seems to be a tradition to only retain the original story, while stripping off everything else that gives soul to the movie. For example, the remake of Hideo Nakata's Dark Water didn't contain any of the scary scenes, effectively turning it into some kind of supernatural psychological drama instead of a ghost horror. The movie was still good, but completely different. The remake of Shutter, which happens to be one of the scariest movies ever made, also ripped off all the horror scenes, effectively turning it into a completely unwatchable piece of crap. And here?

First of all, all the characters are idiots. There's a junkie, her brother, a nerdy guy with glasses, a black nurse and some blonde. Their mission is to help the junkie one get off the drugs, by keeping her completely isolated in the wilderness. Can't see how that can go wrong. The junkie's brother has some kind of guilt trip, he wasn't present when his mother was dying, so his junkie sister is pissed off at him. I mean, come on, bitch! Leave this crap to Edward Burns! Screw you and screw your personal problems!

Fortunately, all that is thrown aside when the nerdy guy reads aloud from Necronomicon and summons some evil demon, who promptly takes possession of the junky girl. But here another problem immediately steps in - the junkie girl starts seeing a scary ghost-like being (that happens to be a witch of some kind who was killed in the prologue). She informs the others, but guess what - they don't believe her (!). Would you believe a stupid story like this, coming from someone with abstinence crisis? Of course not. But the problem I'm trying to mention is that these apparitions are completely unnecessary - is this the remake of The Evil Dead or Ringu???

As crap keeps happening, the movie throws at us more and more unnecessary references to some legendary horror films, mostly The Exorcist and the aforementioned Ringu. OK, Fede, we get it! You watched some classic movies! Good for you! Fortunately, while we don't care about characters one bit (the lead guy, the junkie girl's brother, is so insanely irritating that I can't even begin to describe it), the way they hurt themselves and others is more often than not really violent. There are chainsaws, nail guns, limbs chopped off, self-mutilation, all that with buckets of gore and it really looks good. But it would've been even better if the scenes were brighter. I'm not saying the movie is frustratingly dark - we do see quite enough, but when it comes to gore, it's the more the merrier.

The screenplay sucks, with all that drama mumbo-jumbo and the unnecessary witch (or whatever) subplot, but that's partially corrected by Alvarez's competent direction that provides some rather nice images, not only the gory ones, but also the views of the cabin, surrounding forest, etc. However, the movie commits the mortal sin of disrespecting the two key scenes from the original. The legendary rape scene is technically present, but it's turned into something completely different that barely bears (hehe) any relation. And the wonderful scene with cards is completely absent! Who in their right mind would remake The Evil Dead and leave out the most wonderful scene, that in my opinion (and I'm certain I'm not alone in this) is one of the top 10 scenes in any horror movie? And they also left out the "the" in the title.

If this movie had any other name, I would have gladly concentrated on its superiority to the majority of recent horror movies. This way, it's a remake of something that's vastly superior in every possible way, and that has to be taken into account.

When you watch the movie (and I recommend you do that, despite all I've said before), make sure to watch the credits all the way. You'll get a pleasant surprise.



Kairo (2001)

Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Writer: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

When there's no more room for ghosts in the next world, the living will start commiting suicides and turning into black spots on walls, at least that's what Kiyoshi Kurosawa tells us in this slow, atmospheric and frustratingly complicated film. The main problem with this movie is that it doesn't go for the cheap jump scares and shameless exploitation of long-haired ghosts (though it does have some of that), but instead tries to make a clever statement about human loneliness and how modern technology is separating us and crap like that. It also has some features of an arthouse film, like when you have absolutely no idea what the hell is happening and why is everyone doing whatever the hell they're doing.

 

The story begins with a suicide of some guy. But, not only did he kill himself, he also turned into a black spot on the wall. At the same time, some other guy stumbles upon a scary website that promises their visitors interaction with the dead (!). At the same time, there's a scary mysterious room that harbours a horrifying secret. Some friends try to investigate what's going on, but they can do little to prevent the bizarre series of suicides that threatens to make the entire world (or at least Japan) look like Pripyat, Ukraine.

 

I found this movie incredibly difficult to follow. I don't know whether the problem was with the subtitles, or the director in most scenes didn't try too hard to establish the location, or I'm just stupid - anyway, I had mostly no idea who these people were and where did this all take place. And it's all so sloooooooooooooow and sloooooooooooooow and it's bearable for the first half an hour because there's an occasional scare here and there (like the first visit to the Forbidden Room, that one was spine-chilling) and you still have hope that things will actually resolve or something. However, from there on, it just seemed to me that Kurosawa was making some kind of style exercise, for himself rather than for the audience and I almost completely lost interest.

The last part of the movie has some nice apocalyptic images and this is the first movie I've seen that combines a J-horror with an actual apocalypse in such a direct way. It's a great idea, but I would've preferred it to be realized in a more conventional story. I'm not saying this movie was bad, of course. It was just a bit too hermetic for my taste, but if you like the films of, say, David Lynch, by all means I recommend you give it a try.