Tag Archives: Horror

The Devil’s Rejects

20 Mar

THE DEVIL’S REJECTS

Rob Zombie, Haverhill native and former White Zombie frontman, again roils in ’70s slasher gore with this sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. Serial killers Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), Baby Firefly (Rob’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie), and Otis Driftwood (Bill Moseley) — all variations of names in Marx Brothers films — are dislodged from their dilapidated abattoir by Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe), whose brother was offed in Corpses. What ensues is a cop-killer grudge match with some binding, torturing, and killing of innocents along the way. Rejects is an upgrade from Corpses. For one, it’s coherent, and despite the clichés and the profanity, there are some hilariously wicked moments. The biggest snag in the gritty homage is that Zombie’s heroes are cold-blooded killers. Oliver Stone tried the same trick with Natural Born Killers and almost succeeded, but even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left hung on the promise of victim survival and justice.

BY TOM MEEK

Tags: ,

The Machinist

20 Mar
THE MACHINIST

Brad Anderson, the local wunderkind (he now lives in New York) who made a splash with the romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland, follows up his 2001 psychological thriller,Session 9, with this gripping ordeal about a drill-press operator who hasn’t slept in nearly a year. When we first meet Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale), he’s your typical strung-out Joe: emaciated (Bale lost 63 pounds for the role), disconnected, and running from his past, but just what haunts him is unclear — and that’s the mystery that propels the film. By night, Trevor soaks up his endless existence with a slice of pie at an airport diner, post-coital interchanges with his regular call girl, Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and futile attempts to plod through Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Then Ivan (John Sharian emulating Marlon Brando), the amoral arc welder/specter with a mangled hand, starts popping upeverywhere and things go sideways. As moody as The Machinist is (the Bernard Herrmann–esque score and pallid, blue texturing go a long way in that regard), the final kick is manipulative artifice and predictable to boot. Nonetheless, Bale’s complete immersion into Trevor’s afflicted soul and Sharin’s southern fried freak make the descent into paranoia worth the journey. (102 minutes)

BY TOM MEEK

Tags: , , ,

Ghosts of Mars

20 Mar

GHOSTS OF MARS

photo
GHOSTS OF MARS: Natasha Henstridge and Ice Cube exchange views on the latest from Jay-Z.

Director John Carpenter returns to his slash-and-squirt roots with this Martian horror thriller. On the surface it’s derivative of many a deep-space chiller (think Alien 3, Event Horizon, and Supernova), but it’s really a retooling of his 1976 cult classic,Assault on Precinct 13.

The year is 2176, and Mars has been turned into an atmospherically correct mining colony. Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge, who does the Sigourney Weaver bit in her undies and tiny tank T) leads a crew of rogue and rookie cops on an extradition mission to extract notorious murderer James ” Desolation ” Williams (Ice Cube) from a remote outpost. When they arrive, they find all the inhabitants either missing or butchered in the most unspeakable fashion; yet hanging tight in lock-up are Desolation and a few other wayward souls. In a flash, cops and cons are thrown together as a ghoulish horde of miners turned punk-rock marauders launch a gory and never-ending onslaught. How and why the sadistic berserkers came to be is pure cockamamie, but that doesn’t detract from the campy fun of seeing Henstridge’s babe commando hold Ice Cube’s bristling thug under her thumb while doing battle with the minions of a bloodthirsty incarnation.

BY TOM MEEK

Issue Date: August 30 – September 6, 2001

Tags: , , , ,

Event Horizon

20 Mar

Event Horizon

This dark, eerie, genuinely creepy outer-space thriller is hardly original, yet director Paul Anderson manages to blend the archetypal elements of horror and science fiction into a stomach-fluttering experience that maintains its suspenseful edge from the opening thump to the final ka-bang.

It’s set credibly in the near future, with Sam Neill starring as the creator of the Event Horizon, a spaceship equipped with a gravity drive designed for interdimensional travel. The ship has been absent for seven years, so when it resurfaces, Neill requisitions Laurence Fishburne’s deep-space search-and-rescue unit to aid him in his Ahab-esque quest. At the far recess of the solar system, they encounter the Event Horizon, crewless and dormant. But something unfathomable has returned with it. First apparitions appear and rattle the team’s sanity — imagine The Exorcist or The Shining remade on the set of Alien. Then, after more inexplicable goings on, the carnage begins. The why and what of the destructive force is never quite explained, which is annoying, but this film is really about mood, set design, and crisp editing, all of which Anderson achieves with a master hand. Nothing too inspirational here, just plenty of well-orchestrated frights.

Tags: , , ,

The Descent

18 Mar

The Descent

One word…gore.

By TOM MEEK  |  August 1, 2006

THE DESCENT: Every arterial spray and bone crack makes a point.

Few gore fests (including Hostel and Saw) make me cringe, but this one had my stomach on edge even before the team of spelunking sports babes winds up face to face with albino cannibals two miles underground. It’s everything The Cave (2005) might have been and more. Neil Marshall (who mined similar terrain in Dog Soldiers) works masterfully on a small budget to invoke claustrophobia and paranoia as the squad squeezes through narrow pipes and ultimately gets sealed in. Soon after, a fall results in a shinbone grotesquely protruding through the skin, and the women stumble into a dank ossuary of sorts. The ensuing carnage is ample but not gratuitous; every arterial spray and bone crack makes a point. In such circumstances, it might be too much to ask for character development, though Aussie dancer/singer Natalie Mendoza holds her own as the can-do leader, and Shauna Macdonald prevails as the weak link who finds her inner Ripley.

 

 

 

Tags: , , ,

Newer Entries →