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.

I tre volti della paura (1963)

Directed by: Mario Bava

Writers: Marcello Fondatto, Alberto Bevilacqua, Mario Bava

 

I tre volti della paura (also known as Black Sabbath) is a horror anthology consisting of three stories directed by Mario Bava and based on literary works of Chekhov, Maupassant and Tolstoy. At least that's what the intro claims, but the IMDb and Wikipedia tell us that these are Ivan (and not Anton) Chekhov and Alexey (and not Leo) Tolstoy and they don't mention Guy de Maupassant at all, so I decided to omit this information altogether and just mention the screenwriters. The stories are as follows:

 

First, Il telefono, in which a woman is terrorized by a series of disturbing telephone calls apparently made by her ex boyfriend who freshly got out of jail (it was her testimony that put him there) and wants revenge, but not before he telephone terrorizes her a bit. He makes various kinds of threats and the woman is out of her mind, so terrified in fact that she promptly calls the polic..., no, sorry, she actually calls another woman, her former friend or lover or something. She begs her to come and make her company, even though they had a falling out long time ago. Some not entirely unpredictable plot twists ensue, resulting in some people dying. While the story is rather well directed, the acting is a bit dated and the score mostly comprises unnecessarily cheerful jazz music which effectively ruins the potential of suspense at every possible step. Watchable, but hardly memorable, it certainly has nothing on classics like When a Stranger Calls and Black Christmas.

 

The second story is called I wurdulak and is the longest and probably the most boring of the three. It is reminiscent of the Hammer horror films and takes place in 19th century Russia, where a young hero encounters an unusual family in some spooky village. They advise him to get the hell away from there because there's an imminent danger of a wurdulak attack. Of course, if he did, that would be the end of the movie, so he falls in love with one of the girls and decides to stay. At the stroke of midnight, the head of the family, played by Boris Karloff, returns after a five days absence - he had previously gone out to kill some Turkish wurdulak. What is that thing, anyway? Essentially, it's an undead creature that combines some features of vampires and zombies. The most prominent characteristic of wurdulaks is that they drink blood of the persons they loved during lifetime. Boris Karloff acts rather strange upon his return, bringing up the suspicion that he might have been wurdulaked himself, but that doesn't prevent the family from letting him stay in the house. As the night progresses, the family members demonstrate progressively more serious lack of common sense, giving the chance to the wurdulak team to thrive at their expense. This story is nicely shot and features some fine locations and it could have been almost good had the wurdulaks been made more scary (or scary at all). Unfortunately, they are a bit boring. The hero shows a serious charisma deficiency and the love story is quite silly, just as the rest of the screenplay, which features some genuine what-the-hell moments. For example, when Karloff had left the house, he had said he would be back in five days. If he's late, he's turned into wurdulak and is not to be let into the house. But he arrives exactly five days later, so his sons are at a loss as what to do. I mean, come on!

 

The third story, La goccia d'acqua, is the one that sets everything right. It's about a young nurse who has to prepare a deceased medium for the funeral, so she goes to her big and spooky house. In the process, she steals an expensive-looking ring from her finger because she won't need it where she's going, right? Wrong! You have probably seen more than enough horror movies to know what happens when you steal from the dead. Strange things promptly start to happen and the poor woman (the living one) is slowly driven to madness. This is a shining example of a haunted house story done right, where spookiness oozes from every corner, the highlight being the dead old woman herself. She is scary and disturbing when you first see her just lying motionlessly on the bed. Imagine what happens later! Don't be deceived by the fact that the movie was made in 1963 - this damn thing is scary.

 

The intro and the outro of the movie feature Boris Karloff, who acts unnecessarily silly, which is in contrast with the dead serious tone of all three stories. Overall, it's a hit and miss, but the third story is a must-see.

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.