In 3 Tagen bist du tot 2 (2009)

Directed by: Andreas Prochaska

Writers: Agnes Pluch, Andreas Prochaska

In 3 Tagen bist du tot was a completely generic Austrian slasher without a single trace of innovation over the already infinitely repeated formula. I was pretty confused when I heard about the sequel, wondering what could they possibly do to make it even less original than the first film (since, as we know, that's what sequels are for). For better or for worse, Andreas Prochaska decided to make a completely different film. While the first part was about a bunch of teenagers getting offed one by one by a mysterious killer, this one puts one single character in a situation heavily inspired by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and similar films.

 

It's one year after the events of the first film and Nina, the heroine, tries to put the traumatic death of all her friends behind and lead a normal life. However, she receives a mysterious call for help from Mona (the only other survivor, it's the one that impaled herself in the first film, unfortunately without success). She promptly returns to her hometown and finds that Mona and her father have left home, which is now inhabited by some Chinese people. Continuing with her quest, Nina will find herself in an isolated hotel run by a family of weirdos and will have to use all her skills to survive.

 

The first part of the film plays like a pretty nice mystery, with director Andreas Prochaska taking things slowly and using the wonderful Austrian winter landscape to create some memorable shots and accentuate the lead character's isolation and crap like that. However, while this is by no means bad, whoever watched the first film will want to see some killings and it takes almost 70 minutes for the first person to bite the dust. Also, even outside of the subjective perspective of a bloodthirsty slasher fan, the first hour definitely contains some overlong scenes which serve no purpose.

 

Fortunately, things get better. Immediately after the breaking of the ice, people start dying left and right and killings are really gruesome and at times very explicit (shows that Prochaska has learned quite a few things between the two films). Heads are beaten to a pulp, eyes are gouged out and don't even get me started about male reproductive organs (!). Alas, the fun part ends all too soon.

 

While by no means a masterpiece, this is a satisfying movie which even made me think it would be cool if Andreas Prochaska made another horror. The things that lower the overall grade are the aforementioned first half, which is too slow, a scene of full frontal male nudity and a scene where Nina takes a hot bath - with her clothes on! Oh yeah, there's also this cop from the first part. He doesn't run over anyone here, but he's involved in the most unconvincing scene in the film - without getting into too much detail, his car is supposed to be stuck in the snow and it doesn't look bloody stuck at all.

In 3 Tagen bist du tot (2006)

Directed by: Andreas Prochaska

Writers: Thomas Baum, Andreas Prochaska

 

In 3 Tagen bist du tot, or You Will Die A Horrible, Horrible Death In Three Days, You Mofo!!!11 Okay, I did improvise the translation a bit, but the essence is the same. The key part is that you're going to be dead in three days. Three, not seven. Eat that, Samara!

 

Unfortunately for the killer in this movie, he (or she) is a completely ordinary man (or woman) and lacks the cool superpowers like being able to come out of a TV screen and stuff. Oh, yeah, and the movie is crap, which might also be considered a problem in some circles.

 

The only thing that sets this Austrian slasher apart from the myriad of others is that it's, well, Austrian. If IMDb's to be trusted, it's the first one to come from this country that gave us, say, Adolf Hitler. Not that it brings much difference, anyway - the language is different but everything else you've seen millions of times. A group of friends start receiving scary messages! Gasp! They start dying! The horror! They desperately seek for a clue. A mystery! Could it perhaps be caused by something from their past??? Sure enough, after about an hour they finally remember something that should have been so damn obvious from the start (obvious to them I mean, not to the audience, because it's never mentioned in the movie prior to that point).

 

The story sucks, the characters are every bit artificial and annoying as their average American counterparts and even the killings leave a lot to be desired. Many of them are off screen, most of those that we do see are boring, so there are only two scenes that stand out. One is the only nice murder scene in the movie, that includes the neck of a victim and a broken edge of an aquarium. The other is an unintentionally hilarious moment where some stupid bitch tries to run away from the killer, falls off the balcony and impales herself. However, even the impact of that otherwise great scene is taken away by the fact that she survived that. Boring! Another scene that was cool and unintentionally funny is when this stupid cop hits a girl with his car. Unfortunately, the director failed to realize the huge comic potential in his story and decided to make a "serious" movie. A fail if there ever was one.

 

Amazingly, for some inexplicable reason, this thing has a sequel (!) and I'm forced to watch it by my OCD. On the other hand, if you value your time, skip this one.

#HoldYourBreath (2012)

Directed by: Jared Cohn

Writers: Kenny Zinn (story), Geoff Meed

Somehow it happened that I watched another dreadful Asylum movie, I have absolutely no idea why. Perhaps I liked the poster, but I should have listened to the golden rule I'd already mentioned: DON'T watch The Asylum movies! Well, I asked for it...

 

Though I only planned to review two other Asylum movies, as I said in the review of Barely Legal, this one at least happens to be a landmark of some kind - it's apparently the first theatrical release by The Asylum!

 

Not that it makes a whole lot of difference - this movie does look slightly better than the others, but it's so aggressively stupid that it's just impossible to overlook. The story follows a standard group of young guys and girls looking for sex and finding death instead. This time, their doom comes in the form of a particularly nasty ghost of some murderer. There's this stupid urban legend that says you have to hold your breath when you're passing by a cemetery, otherwise you risk being possessed by all kinds of spirits. But - it only applies if you're in a car (!). If on foot, you're safe.

 

Of course, in every single movie of this type there's a stoner guy, and it's him who doesn't follow the rule (he's too busy inhaling) so he's the first one to get possessed. He manages to off a cop before the spirit passes on to another member of the group, the one that looks like a hybrid between Rafael Nadal and Christopher Reeve.

 

The only difference that this body switching creates is that most of the group members get a chance to kill someone. Otherwise, unless we count occasional red eyes (oooh, scary!), there are no body deformations of any kind.

 

Of course, The Asylum wouldn't live to their reputation if they weren't unable to completely mess up even the simplest slasher formula. Throughout its length, the movie fires a cannonade of stupidity at the viewer. First, there's the infamous "give me your cell phones and I will hide them in this glove compartment, that's about to become unreachable when we most need it" plot device. Then, there's a couple that goes to an abandoned insane asylum to have a "quick" hump, while the others immediately decide to follow them for some reason (not of a voyeuristic nature, unfortunately). So they are trying to find them and they're wandering through this huge abandoned building, and yet they never try calling them. Then, that Christopher Reeve - Rafael Nadal character, who happens to be the most irritating of the bunch, gets dared by some bimbo to sit in an old electric chair, which for some reason frightens him so much that he demands a blowjob in return. Dangerous Liaisons, eat your heart out! And to top it off, the movie ends with a ghost fight so ridiculous that you have to see it to believe (but please don't).

 

If there's anything redeeming here, it's a completely gratuitous sex scene and an unusual amount of eye violence - many murders for some reason include gouging out of an eye. However, the usual total lack of competence on the part of The Asylum directors and writers makes for a painful experience of a completely different kind than (but similar in intensity to) eye gouging out.

Cheerleader Camp (1988)

Directed by: John Quinn

Writers: David Lee Fein, R.L. O'Keefe

From David Fein and R.L. O'Keefe, the brilliant minds that brought us... well, nothing, comes this extraordinary tale of, you wouldn't guess it in a million years, a cheerleader camp (!) Admittedly, a story about the place where cheerleaders train for their cheerleading might've been a little boring without being spiced up with a bit of something extra, like for example a murderous maniac on a rampage, or steamy lesbian orgies, or (preferably) both. Well, orgies are unfortunately out, but a maniac is there, so there's at least one good thing about those cheerleaders - they die.

 

The story takes place in, brace yourselves, a cheerleader camp (!) somewhere in the woods. I have no idea what that place is supposed to be and how it works, since the sound was too bad for me to understand most of the dialogue, not that I feel a terrible loss about that. Apparently, some cheerleaders are there either to learn to cheerlead, or to have some kind of cheerleading competition, so there's an expected large collection of cheap bimbos, in addition to which we also have some equally useless male characters, like a fat prankster bastard with a camera, an inept sheriff, the lead heroine's stupid annoying horny boyfriend etc. The least bad moments in the movie were the deaths of these losers.

After the first few bodies are found, they are considered suicides, so the party doesn't stop. We wouldn't want a few minor deaths get in the way of the cheerleading, would we? This means that the characters continue to ignore the killer's presence, giving him the opportunity to increase the score (i.e. body count) without much effort, but it also means that the murders are not shown. Unfortunately, this lack of explicit violence continues deep into the film and poses a serious problem for the movie's integrity. Instead, the director chose to torture us with the lead character's nightmares, which are repetitive, boring and serve absolutely no purpose, except as a setup for the final plot twist, which is simply "meh".

The opening credits look as if freshly stolen from a John Carpenter movie, unfortunately, all similarities end there. This is not Halloween, and the lack of violence (and orgies) is not in any way compensated by tension, uneasiness or anything similar. Boredom is the dominating feeling and the movie is saved from being completely unwatchable only by the two wonderful leads, played by Betsy Russell (Saw III, IV, and so on) and Lucinda Dickey (who played one of the lead roles in Ninja III: The Domination, even though I haven't mentioned it in the review of that movie). Seeing those two beautiful ladies warmed my heart and made all the crap (which comprises pretty much everything else in the movie) almost bearable, but it's still not enough to recommend anything but avoiding this title.

The Sleeper (2012)

Directed by: Justin Russell

 

Writer: Justin Russell

 

 

 

 

Well, for a change here's a new slasher film that doesn't suck! This achievement is made even more spectacular by the mere fact that this is a direct rip-off of Black Christmas, the legendary movie that (almost) started it all (and it also happens to be one of my favourite movies). When you mess with a legend, you can easily get burned. Ask Glen Morgan for example - his official Black Christmas remake was stupid unwatchable crap. So, what did Justin Russell (the writer, director and pretty much everything else here) do to avoid the pitfalls that are usually the death of most of his colleagues?

The most important thing is that he tried his best to make this look like a real damn movie and not like some crappy home video. Most of the scenes are carefully set and there are some really nice establishing shots. The movie actually takes place in 1981 and I can only congratulate the director on the bravery of attempting to recreate the era in such a low budget movie. While he doesn't succeed completely (certainly not as Ti West did with The House of the Devil), you still get a refreshing feeling of something different - the clothes, the music, the interiors, etc. - it's all done very nicely, the only small problem is, as one IMDb reviewer has nicely observed, that the photography is a bit too polished for the time. But that's just a minor objection. One great consequence of this setting if that finally we get a break from listening to teenagers bitching about their cell phones not having a signal.

As I said, the movie heavily borrows from Bob Clark's Black Christmas without an ounce of shame. There's a sorority, there's a lot of girls, some boys, mysterious killer, scary telephone calls and everything else. There are many people here (some would say - too many), which is great for at least two reasons: 1) They don't have enough screen time to "develop" and become irritating, and 2) It's more victims for the killer! Seriously though, except for the two guys, pretty much no one was getting on my nerves too much.

The weak link here are the murder scenes. Russell has obviously studied the classic slashers well, which is evident by his building of the tension through the camera positions, the murderer POV, etc., but the murders themselves are either badly directed and edited, or they are ruined by bad special effects. For example, the first murder features a surprisingly explicit head violence scene - the killer raises a hammer above a completely unaware Jessica Cameron and where most other directors would make a cut and show a wall behind being sprayed with blood, Russell bravely decides to explicitly show how the hammer hits, and ultimately breaks, the poor victim's head. The problem is that the head model is horribly unconvincing which takes a lot from the effect of the scene. The same goes for the beheading scene later in the movie, where the severed head is shown, but again the model looks very bad. Nobody expected Tom Savini, but I'm sure there are people who could have done a better job with the same amount of money. And while I can only congratulate the director on showing almost all of the murders explicitly, the way those scenes are cut, the way the victims and the killer move, it's simply not convincing enough.

As I said above, due to the large number of characters, the body count is significantly higher than in most similar movies and killer is really entertaining with his prank calls and crying into the phone (?!) and similar weird things. Strangely, the killer's face is shown from the very beginning, yet we never learn who the hell he is. I actually like this, it adds a strange feeling of mystery.

The ending deliberately features every single horror cliché we have seen before: the victim runs, the killer walks; the killer is killed, but he isn't dead; the killer (previously extremely efficient) suddenly turns into a complete moron when faced with The Final Girl et cetera - all those things we loved in the old movies. There's also a completely gratuitous dance scene, the weirdest one since Calvaire, yet somehow strangely cool due to the great disco music.

All in all, I am very satisfied with this movie and I'll pay attention to Russell's further efforts. I'm already looking forward to seeing his Dead Stop Holocaust. He just has to pay some more attention to his murder scenes and he's good to go.

The Helpers (2012)

Directed by: Christopher B. Stokes

Writer: Christopher B. Stokes

Some young people are traveling from some place to some other place for whatever reason and they have a car accident in the middle of nowhere. They walk to a roadside motel nearby and it happens to be full of wonderful people who promptly arrange for the car to be fixed and in the meantime offer our friends tons of free drinks, food and shelter for the night, which none of them finds the least bit suspicious, of course. But here's the twist - in the morning some of our friends find themselves dead, while others are tied up and watched via surveillance cameras by some "mysterious" figure. Hey, what kind of a hospitality is that? What kind of people are they? What the heck are they doing? Well, they first help you and then they kill you because they are... The Helpers!

 

I hope you are back in your chair after no doubt having fallen to the floor in shock and amazement by such a daring and original concept. But fear not - you'll soon find yourself on familiar territory when it turns out that everything in this movie has been done thousands of times before. Fortunately, Chris Stokes and his partners in crime bring at least some amount of originality by sheer ineptitude with which they abuse the whole concept.

 

I won't go into too much detail, because this movie is simply not worth it, and besides, you already know what to expect - irritating generic characters played by horrible actors, antagonists that are only slightly less irritating than the victims, dumb plot "twists" (if it makes sense to talk about them in a movie that has no plot), no imagination in killings (for example, they rip off a famous scene from The Hitcher not only once, but twice!), stupid screaming blonde bitches, completely pointless video surveillance scenes, jerk with a camera, et cetera. What stands out is the overall stupidity of all characters, which pushes the boundaries even for this type of film.

 

For example, I've already mentioned the victims' lack of suspicion about the downright weird behavior of their hosts at the beginning. When they have a car accident at the beginning, they simply don't walk twenty meters back to investigate what could have caused it. At a late stage of the movie, a "savior" conveniently appears and some of the survivors readily trust him, even though they had previously seen him with the killers (!). Examples like this are too numerous to mention. Add to that the obscenely absurd and ridiculous backstory (explained thankfully at the ending, when most of the viewers are already sleeping) and you have one heck of a failure. Just don't think that it's so bad that it's good. No, it's so bad that it's bad.