The Video Station: (303) 440-4448 » horror http://thevideostation.com/blog 1661 28th St Boulder, CO (303) 440-4448 Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:01:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 THE THING – Reviewed by Will http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/02/02/the-thing-reviewed-by-will/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/02/02/the-thing-reviewed-by-will/#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:20:04 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5932 It’s a bit surprising to consider that nearly as many years have elapsed since John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi thriller The Thing as between it and its own predecessor, 1951’s The Thing From Another World, directed by Howard Hawks. Both are widely considered to be classics in the sci-fi horror genres, so a third version has a lot to live up to. This new Thing, by first-time Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., is not so much a remake as it is a prequel to Carpenter’s. Fans of that film will remember that the crew of American Antarctic Outpost 31 encounter a helicopter pursuing a lone sled dog and attempting to kill it, later discovering that nearby Norwegian researchers had uncovered an alien spacecraft buried in the ice for eons, and thawed out a deadly alien organism that proved to be their undoing.

This new film chronicles exactly what happened to the Norwegian team, which is conveniently augmented by enough Americans (in particular Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who inevitably becomes a Ripley-esque heroine) to allow most of the dialogue to be politely spoken in English. Winstead’s character, Kate Lloyd, is a paleontologist recruited to assist when the ancient flying saucer is discovered along with its frozen passenger. Lloyd soon butts heads with the snooty head of the Norwegian base, Dr. Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen), who presses on with studying his new find despite her warnings. The creature escapes from its block of ice and proceeds to devour–and perfectly duplicate–its victims.

One compelling aspect of the Thing films, which distinguishes them from a great many horror flicks, is that their characters are educated and rational people, not histrionic teenagers lined up to be chainsaw fodder. The best weapon against the Thing, apart from a reliable and fully-fueled flame thrower, is the Scientific Method itself. As intense and grisly as the creature effects in Carpenter’s film were, it really unfolded more as a logic problem than an action movie. In order to eliminate the alien menace, one had to be cool-headed and methodical in figuring out exactly who was–and who wasn’t–infected by it. This is what provided most of the tension.

Van Heijningen’s prequel follows most of the same story beats as before, and it shows immense respect for the details established in Carpenter’s film. For instance, when Kurt Russell and Co. scouted the wreckage of the Norwegian camp in 1982, they spied a fire-axe embedded ominously in a wall. You can bet you’ll see how and why that axe ended up there. But, despite all of its slavish attention to detail, this one doesn’t really have much tension or menace of its own. The camera drifts lazily across character’s faces without any particular attention or style. The question of who has been replaced by the alien is given its due, even with a couple new and clever twists, but our heroes seem to come up with the same ideas used in the previous film without following the same logical steps to get there. Winstead’s character may be clever, but sometimes it feels like she’s got intuition bordering on psychic powers. Eventually too much time is spent running from room to room chasing after something that very obviously needs to be killed.

Bottom line: if you’ve never seen either of its forebears, some of the twists in this Thing might be effective. If you’re a fan of Carpenter’s version, you’ll probably get a mild kick out of seeing all of the references to it. But the movie taken on its own really isn’t as exciting, despite solid performances and mostly effective creature effects. - [DVD] [Blu-Ray]


Horror/Mystery/Sci-Fi

Rated R


DVD Release Date: 1/31/12
]]> http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/02/02/the-thing-reviewed-by-will/feed/ 0 CONTAGION – Reviewed by David http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/01/06/contagion-reviewed-by-david/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/01/06/contagion-reviewed-by-david/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:33:54 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5815 Director Steven Soderbergh is back in big-budget Hollywood mode with Contagion, a slick and proficient, if largely impassive, thriller about a global pandemic featuring an all-star cast saying their lines and going through very professional motions.

Patient zero is Gwyneth Paltrow, who, soon after returning home from Japan to her husband (Matt Damon) and kids, collapses and dies, as do people in London and Hong Kong. From there Center for Disease Control officials (Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet) and a World Health Organization epidemiologist (Marion Cotillard) try to get a handle on the lethal and fast-spreading virus.

Some may appreciate Soderbergh’s clinical approach to the material versus getting another find-a-cure thrill ride a la Outbreak. I agree it helps make the breakdown of society that occurs feel a little more realistic, and thus more frightening. We learn a few statistics, like how many times a day we touch our faces, and Scott Burns‘ script makes light of things you might never have thought of, like the government running out of body bags and how long it would take to create and distribute a vaccine.

But it all but deprives the film of a soul. We never really come to care about anyone, aside from Damon, who registers the strongest as a man trying to protect his daughter, and provides the film its only true emotionally resonant moment near the end. Cotillard’s subplot not only wastes her talent but gets wrapped up flatly. The only character here who even kind of pops is Jude Law’s bugger of a British blogger who’s out to exploit the epidemic.

I do have to give Soderbergh credit for the technical side of things. His camerawork is crisp, his editing smooth and he moves things along at a brisk pace. (It’s interesting to note how vibrant the colors are in the security camera footage of Paltrow versus the washed out palette of the rest of the film.) As well I liked how he ended things by showing us exactly what led to the epidemic. Yet I imagine what most people will take away from the film is the sight of Paltrow getting her head sawed open. – [DVD]

Horror/Thriller

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 1/3/12

]]> http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/01/06/contagion-reviewed-by-david/feed/ 1 DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK – Reviewed by David http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/01/06/dont-be-afraid-of-the-dark-reviewed-by-david/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/01/06/dont-be-afraid-of-the-dark-reviewed-by-david/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:32:27 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5813 Just so we’re clear, Guillermo del Toro didn’t direct this big screen version of a 1973 TV movie. He co-wrote and, as with 2007’s The Orphanage, produced it. I mention this so you don’t think him responsible for what turns out to be an unscary little horror flick.

It does, however, employ his oft-used theme of children encountering supernatural or fantastical elements, focusing on a little girl (Bailee Madison) forced to go live with her architect father (Guy Pearce) and stepmother (Katie Holmes) in a 19th century Rhode Island mansion the pair is restoring, where she becomes the target of tiny goblin-like creatures inhabiting the ash pit in the home’s basement.

As long as we don’t actually see the creatures, the film really isn’t that bad. Director Troy Nixey succeeds, at least for a while, in making the big old house itself nicely creepy, especially in any scene with Bailee in bed, bathed in the light of her carousel lamp. And he gets a great little actress in Bailee, who convincingly conveys a decent range of emotions.

Thing is, the creatures themselves, when we finally do see them, really aren’t that scary. Oh, they’re ugly, hunchbacked little CGI things who can swarm all over a man and nearly kill him, but they look just a little too adorable. The only time they’re even kind of frightening is in the drawings of them Holmes discovers at one point, or when we hear their whispers emanating from the ash pit.

Pearce and Holmes do adequate work, and the script manages to eke out some genuine emotional resonance with the resentment-at-the-stepmother angle. But we know from the start that the girl will warm up to Holmes. Sigh. If only del Toro himself had been the director. Then I might really have been afraid of the watching this movie, in the light or the dark. – [DVD]


Fantasy/Horror/Thriller

Rated R


DVD Release Date: 1/3/12
]]> http://thevideostation.com/blog/2012/01/06/dont-be-afraid-of-the-dark-reviewed-by-david/feed/ 0 FINAL DESTINATION 5 – Reviewed by David http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/12/29/final-destination-5-reviewed-by-david/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/12/29/final-destination-5-reviewed-by-david/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:15:34 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5779 Just as this enjoyable horror franchise seemed set to go out with a whimper with a lazy and lackluster fourth installment (titled, rather inaccurately, The Final Destination), along comes a fantastic fifth entry to rouse it back from the dead.

For those just tuning in, the films employ a simple, sequel-friendly formula: a character experiences a premonition of a horrendous disaster that he, or she, and a group of other characters are then able to survive, but who are subsequently stalked and picked off by Death itself (whom we never actually see) in elaborately entertaining, and gruesome, Rube Goldberg-esque ways.

The tragedies in the previous flicks involved a passenger jet, a freeway pile-up, a roller coaster and, last and extremely least, a NASCAR race. This one tops them all with a truly terrifying suspension bridge collapse, a catastrophe foreseen by a company drone (Nicholas D’Agosto), who, along with a few lucky co-workers, learns what happens when you don’t die when you’re supposed to.

Beyond that, what helps make this a better installment is the introduction of the idea (via the wonderfully creepy Tony Todd) that the survivors can escape death by killing someone else. There’s no real deep discussion about it, nor is it much of a surprise that one of the characters actually attempts to do it, but its presence nonetheless adds some emotional weight to the gory goings-on.

Speaking of which, a good deal more energy and creativity has gone into how Death takes out the survivors (acupuncture, Lasik surgery, a gymnast really sticking her landing), and the script cleverly plays with our beliefs as to what exactly in a sequence is going to kill a character. There are also some nice little touches that give the movie some personality, like the teddy bear during the Lasik scene.

Director Steven Quale does a solid job for his first feature, wisely hewing closer to the darker tone of the first film, and skillfully establishing a superbly sinister atmosphere (watch as D’Agosto wanders through a restaurant kitchen that now seems to contain myriad means of death). But he and screenwriter Eric Heisserer save the best for last, unveiling during the fiery finale a totally awesome twist, one that I never even considered, and one that proves the franchise still has lots of life left in it. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Horror/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 12/27/11

]]> http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/12/29/final-destination-5-reviewed-by-david/feed/ 0 APOLLO 18 – Reviewed by Will http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/12/29/apollo-18-reviewed-by-will/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/12/29/apollo-18-reviewed-by-will/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:15:09 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5777 http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5714 Having recently turned The Fog and The Hitcher into uninspired rehashes, Hollywood finally gets an ’80s horror remake (mostly) right with its sleek makeover of 1985’s memorable vampire flick Fright Night, an excellent example of how good casting, a sharp script and just the right kinds of tweaks to the original story can result in a redo two generations can enjoy.

The basic plot and characters remain unchanged: suburban teen Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) discovers a vampire (Colin Farrell) has moved in next door, and to battle his undead neighbor he enlists the aid of supposed vampire expert Peter Vincent (Dr. Who’s David Tennant).

But instead of being of a fan of traditional horror films who has to convince others of the supernatural threat, Charley is a reformed nerd with a hot girlfriend (Imogen Poots) who is convinced by his nerdy former best friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as to why high school kids have gone missing. And instead of being a lowly late-night-horror-movie TV host, Vincent is a slick Las Vegas showman.

Normally I’d hate it that someone messed around with one of my favorite ’80s flicks, but that wonderfully gothic horror show is a creature of a different era, one that now, admittedly, feels a little dated. So the changes screenwriter Marti Noxon and director Craig Gillespie make to it here, including setting the action in an isolated Vegas housing tract, are both necessary and surprisingly smart.

It also includes replacing the suave ladies-man bloodsucker played by Chris Sarandon (who makes a cameo here) in the original with perfectly cast Farrell’s sexier, more aggressive model, who not only flirts with Yelchin’s not unattractive mom (Toni Collette), but finds a clever way around the whole a-vampire-must-be-invited-in thing, menaces Yelchin and Collette from underneath their minivan while they’re driving and, in the film’s best scene, coolly tries to talk his way into their house.

The 22-year-old Yelchin (Star Trek) is a good choice for Charley, bringing a certain confident nervousness to the role. Plus, he actually looks like a teenager, at least compared to William Ragsdale, who was Charley in the original. Tennant isn’t quite as memorable as Vincent as was Roddy McDowell, but his is still a cocky and colorful performance that provides a lot of the film’s humor.

And while the film certainly contains smart dialogue, amusing displays of current technology and neat little nods to the original movie, it also succeeds in making the characters’ situations and relationships more interesting and emotionally resonant than you might expect, in particular Mintz-Plasse’s hurt and anger at ex-friend Yelchin, and Yelchin’s stressing over having a hot girlfriend.

I concede I could have done without the occasional CGI jaws, which look even more fake to me than a bad makeup job, or the idea that Tennant and Farrell have met before. Gillespie’s direction lacks style, too, though he does know how to generate suspense, and stages a pretty decent finale in which Yelchin and Farrell flip and fly around as they fight. They both end up getting burned. One just a little more than the other. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Comedy/Horror

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 12/13/11

]]> http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/12/16/fright-night-reviewed-by-david/feed/ 0 A SERBIAN FILM – Reviewed by Edmund “Elizabethan Knitwear” Skittered http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/27/a-serbian-film-reviewed-by-edmund-elizabethan-knitwear-skittered/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/27/a-serbian-film-reviewed-by-edmund-elizabethan-knitwear-skittered/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:35:00 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5485 We’ll start with the premise of the film, then decide if “that conversation” needs to happen again.

Milos (Srdjan Todorovic), a semiretired Serbian porn star, finds it hard to provide for his family on the savings left from his career. A father with a gentle, hangdog demeanor (except onscreen as a “Balkan sex god”), his wife Marija (Jelena Gavrilovic) remains understanding and supportive about his past and they both dote on their son, yet Milos finds he reaches for a whiskey bottle more and more often.

A former colleague approaches him with an offer from an unknown director to create a new kind of pornographic film which would set up a big payday for Milos and be his swan song from the industry. He agrees to perform in Vukmir’s (Sergej Trifunovic) megalomaniacal vision of creating not just a pornographic masterpiece but something truly Serbian, a social critique of past oppressions and present day corruption all encapsulated in the immediate, visceral moment of the sexual act and showing the power and transcendence of the “victim”. Disquieted but thinking of his family, Milos signs the contract. Multiple circles of hell open and he’s engulfed.

Shall we have the conversation now? The one that always comes up about expression and censorship? That negates any reason for not putting something on the screen because it’s art? No, we don’t need that conversation, because we deep down know there’s no carte blanche for artists or Philistines either to three-card-monte our sensibilities.

That having been said… this can be said:

A Serbian Film is vile, rank and ultimately pointless. End of conversation.

If you’ve heard about A Serbian Film you’ll know whether or not you want to view it, and specific scenes don’t need to be described here. What can be described? That the premise of using a horror film to “truly” convey the damage visited upon a country and its people is slipshod and pandering. This piece of celluloid? A mirror of a nation’s identity as a sort of guilt-ridden paranoid/schizophrenic Nietzschean materialism?

Things aren’t what they seem and a wronged man who’s a victim-as-aggressor, his memory wiped by drugs, tries frantically to piece together three lost days until all horrors perpetrated are clarified. It’s steeped in hackneyed Hitchcock/DePalma contrivance and it’s obvious director Srdjan Spasojevic came up with a half dozen brutal ideas for scenes and from there cobbled together a film. The outcome is telegraphed in the film’s first fifteen minutes, but you’ve heard of the atrocities that await, so the “oh I saw/didn’t see that coming” moment blinders itself. That this exercise is slick and stylish counts for nothing.

The unfortunate topper to this sham? The last ten minutes are truly heartbreaking. Then a final callous and cynical afterthought of a joke tacked on for a typical splatter movie rim shot.

So see it, don’t see it. End of conversation… again… until the next time. – [DVD]

Horror
Unrated
DVD Release Date: 10/25/11
]]> http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/27/a-serbian-film-reviewed-by-edmund-elizabethan-knitwear-skittered/feed/ 1 RED STATE – Reviewed by Noah http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/20/red-state-reviewed-by-noah/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/20/red-state-reviewed-by-noah/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:51:29 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5444 There was a time when people thought Kevin Smith was going to change the face of movies as we know them. He didn’t, and as evidenced by his new film Red State, he never will.

Smith has dropped all of the normal scatological humor, making a “horror” film that wishes it was a Peckinpah film, but is really a pale copy of an NBC movie of the week. It starts out with 3 high school kids looking for a woman. They get kidnapped by a fundamentalist church that is stockpiling weapons and killing sinners. When the ATF shows up to serve a search warrant, all heck breaks loose.

Each of the last three sentences represents roughly half an hour of the film.

It was boring. Many things can be said for the typical Kevin Smith film, but boring isn’t one of them. Except maybe Jersey Girl. The only saving grace of the film is that it looks more interesting that any of Smith’s previous. There is dynamic camera movement, and a sense of style that made it visually interesting in places. That’s it, that’s the nicest thing I can say about it.

Red State is a child telling a joke: and then, and then, and then. At no point did I care about what was going on, and if I weren’t writing this review, I would have turned it off about 25 minutes in. – [DVD]

Action/Horror/Thriller
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 10/18/11
]]> http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/20/red-state-reviewed-by-noah/feed/ 1 SCREAM 4 – Reviewed by David http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/06/scream-4-reviewed-by-david/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/06/scream-4-reviewed-by-david/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:51:02 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5385 Scream 4 DVD Where some sequels don’t want to advertise the fact that they’re just another installment in a series of films, director Wes Craven’s surprisingly decent Scream 4 never stops reminding us that it’s yet another entry in the overly self-aware horror franchise.

It opens with a pretty clever variation on the original flick’s hot-girl-on-phone-with-psycho intro before catching up with beleaguered heroine Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who’s back in Woodsboro on the fifteenth anniversary of the original flick’s murders to promote her book. Naturally, her return prompts a new Ghostface killer to start slaughtering people.

Beyond that, the film more or less sticks to the series’ formula: Campbell is menaced by the killer, pretty much anyone aside from her and returning co-stars Courtney Cox and David Arquette is brutally murdered, and the revealed killer explains the details and motivations behind his or her killing spree, all while characters rattle off references to other horror flicks and debate horror flick rules.

The script by Scream and Scream 2 scribe Kevin Williamson (with an assist by Scream 3 writer Ehren Kruger) does a solid job keeping us guessing as to the killer’s identity, at least to the point when there are only so many new characters who are left alive. And the killer’s reasons for killing certainly seem clever enough, as well as timely, taking the Internet and such into account.

And yet the film lacks a certain freshness. Craven still brings good energy to the murder scenes, and makes them plenty brutal and bloody (one victim is left on her bed with her entrails hanging out), but they just don’t have the same punch as before. Apart from one character getting stabbed in his forehead, they’re not even that creative, with most characters simply getting knifed in the stomach.

As well, Williamson and Kruger lay on the characters’ meta-like discussions of horror films a little too thick. Granted, here the talk is more about horror remakes and reboots, so we hear allusions to The Grudge and the Saw flicks. But it’s done ad nauseam, as evidenced by the scene in which Hayden Panettiere desperately blurts out no less than fifteen recent horror titles. (Classic film fans may appreciate the mention of director Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom.)

Among the returnees, only Cox has some snap, but she gets sidelined for most of the film’s last third, while Arquette mainly acts awkward and gets smacked in the head with a bedpan. Campbell does acquit herself nicely in a quiet kitchen scene with Emma Roberts, who plays her niece, but is otherwise relegated to running around, being scared or crying (at which Party of Five made her a pro).

The best thing about the franchise remains Roger L. Jackson, who again provides the phone voice of the Ghostface killer. It’s still a wonderfully vicious and malevolent-sounding thing, and raised the hairs on the back my neck every time I heard it, like when it tells Campbell, “I’m going to slit your eyelids in half so you don’t blink.” In a clever nod to both the franchise and current technology, it apparently is an app on the killer’s cell phone. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Horror/Mystery/Thriller
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 10/4/11
]]> http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/10/06/scream-4-reviewed-by-david/feed/ 1 INSIDIOUS – Reviewed by David http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/07/15/insidious-reviewed-by-david/ http://thevideostation.com/blog/2011/07/15/insidious-reviewed-by-david/#comments Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:03:06 +0000 blogadmin http://thevideostation.com/blog/?p=5028 That Insidious is a frightfully good horror film shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It was directed by James Wan, the Malaysian-born Australian behind the first Saw flick and the criminally underrated ventriloquist-dummy creepshow Dead Silence. Like those efforts, it employs an unusual plot device, refreshingly emphasizes mood over gore and ends with an exquisitely shocking twist.

Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne play young spouses who, along with their two sons and baby daughter, have just moved into a new house. Soon after the older son inexplicably lapses into a coma, the house becomes plagued by supernatural occurrences, and when moving to yet another house fails to alleviate the paranormal problems, Wilson’s mother (Barbara Hershey) calls in a medium to help.

The film starts out as a typical haunted house tale, albeit one which Wan makes truly frightening. Doors creak open and shut, a furnace suddenly fires up and books become misplaced. This gives way to a scary voice on the baby monitor, something standing behind the baby’s crib and inhuman handprints on a bedroom window. And never has a house at night seemed so chilling.

All that is merely build-up to the main show that begins once we meet the medium (Lin Shaye) and learn of a character’s childhood brush with the supernatural. Things do become a little more frantic here, with a wild ‘n’ crazy séance and a nasty red-faced demon, but Wan skillfully keeps the scares coming, and the what-and-why writer Leigh Whannell comes up with is undeniably intriguing.

Wan and Whannell also succeed in establishing a somewhat realistic tone for Wilson and Byrne’s marriage–the way they fight and laugh and generally talk to one another–but it seems to vanish later on when Wilson goes to extreme measures to save his kid. Which is too bad, because Wilson and Byrne are pretty good as the couple, though Wilson is given more to work with.

This being a PG-13 flick, the closest thing we get to gore is a bloody handprint on a bed sheet, while one character gets thrown against a wall and another is choked to death. To counter all that intensity, Whannell and pal Angus Sampson provide some comic relief as the medium’s assistants, though nothing here is funnier than seeing the lady medium in a gas mask as she talks to the dead. – [DVD]

Horror/Thriller

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 7/12/11
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