Darabont’s TV Evil! Buried Alive review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Being a nostalgia fiend has some advantages.  I’m not just rehashing old material you’ve probably seen or read a billion times before, spewing the muck and bile that’s been regurgitated and swallowed down again only to be regurgitated once more.  Hardly do you see another, run-of-the-mill review about Scream, Friday the 13 VIII: Jason Takes Manhatten or Bride of Chucky.  Most horror fans are familiar with the bodies of these works; my realm of interest scratches at the indie circuit and those lesser known films that, perhaps, folks are aware of but never seen, or have witnessed them in the past and their minds can’t piece together what that film was in the present.  The latter happened to me with an old Frank Darabont TV movie Buried Alive.  You know Darabont, right?  He only did some of the most prolific work of the last decade and half adapting works from Stephen King and kicking off the hit AMC TV show The Walking Dead!

Clint Goodman lives a humble town with his high maintenance wife Joanna.  Her love for Clint has been long gone ever since he constructed, what he thought, was their two story dream home in his home town.  Joanna strings along an affair with a city doctor; they plot to kill Clint with a fish secretion that causes a fatal heart attack.  When Joanna pulls off the caper, she collects what she thinks is her dues:  sells the house, sells the business and is ready to leave town to start her new life.  However, Clint awakens.  Trapped inside his own coffin, he manages dig himself out, discover Joanna’s dastardly doings and plans his own revenge against his wife and her lover.

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Werewolf evil? More like Puppy Love! Face of the Screaming Werewolf review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

My mindset on vintage horror flicks goes a little something like this – they’re without a shadow of a doubt all classics.  There will be always be films that are more popular and stand out more than other black and white labeled pioneers of earlier film-hood, but the question begs, have you’ve ever seen a horrible horror movie from the Lon Chaney Jr. or Boris Karloff days?  Before tonight, I can honestly say no.  Then, I had to go and watch Cheezy Flicks version of Face of the Screaming Werewolf starring Lon Chaney Jr. and was directed by three directors.  Remember what I’ve always said about having multiple directors – the shit never works!

Dr. Redding and his team use hypnosis on a Cali girl named Ann Taylor in discovering ancient forms of life in the Yucatan pyramids.  When him and his team go exploring through the deep dark tunnels of the ruins, a living-ish breathing-ish mummy attacks them, but falls when the team fights back.  They also discover a more modern individual also mummified for unknown reasons.  Dr. Redding takes both mummified subjects back to America, but is soon killed and the modern mummy is stolen when Redding attempts to showcase his finds.  When the modern man is revived by a bolt of lightning (Frankenstein reference anyone?), his uncanny secret of being a werewolf is revealed when the full moon just happens to be out at the same time as his revival.  The werewolf and the mummy are both reanimated and walk the city, stalking and killing innocent folk.  Who will stop them?  Hell if I know.

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Is Your Home this Evil? House (Hausu) review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Japanese horror isn’t something I pride myself on having a lot of knowledge of or contain much material about, but I do find enjoyment in what I come across even if the resemblance to an anime style becomes apparent in the storytelling.  I’ll be straight forward with you right here and now, I’m not a fan of Japanese anime.  No, sir.  Can’t say that I am.  However, my latest venture into the J-horror sends me back in time to the groovy year of 1977.  The film is called House and no, not the Steve Miner feature from ’86.  Also known by it’s Japanese name Hausu, House is a simple ghost tale with ambitious and groundbreaking special effects that dared much of the decade to catch up with the times.

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Evil all around! I Saw the Devil review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Every so often, a hole must be filled.  This hole is the deepest, darkness, most horrifying and brutally stricken hole  a single person would imagine if they had the fortitude to ever do so.  The reason this hole needs to be filled lies majorly with curiosity and morbidness.  Human nature is quirky and our senses need to be overloaded with fear and shock when the time calls for it.  Jee-woon Kim’s I Saw the Devil fills that hole and exceeds to overflow it with unmerciful loathing which will haunt you long after the credits roll.

A solitary man rapes and dismembers young women in order to appease his appetite for human suffering, but when when one of his victims turns out to be the pregnant fiance of a secret service agent and a former police chief’s daughter, he may have made a big mistake.  The agent devises a plan to find his fiance’s killer and play a capture and release torture game in order to inflict as much as pain as the killer has caused the agent’s fiance.  What the agent doesn’t realize is that this killer is relentless when it comes to getting even and nothing will stop his destructive path.

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Where’s the hunt for evil? Death Hunter: Werewolves vs Vampires review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

As seductively epic does the title Death Hunter:  Werewolves vs Vampires sounds, the funds for such a grand title don’t support it.  Werewolves and vampires have been the subject of folklore for more than century and to have the two be in the same production needs the backing of the money.  The Underworld trilogy gained much of it’s success and popularity through dollar signs and it’s stardom in the beautifully femme fatale of Kate Beckinsale.  Death Hunter has none of the above, leaving most of it’s special effects to the wolves and creativity helpless to the imagination of it’s audiences.

While lost deep with in the desert, John Croix and his wife Maria stumble upon a den of blood thirsty vampires; the master vampire takes his wife but leaves John to die in the desert and that’s not all.  Werewolves roam the night when the full moon is out; John becomes the victim of a werewolf bite, but he is rescued by a fellow survivor Van Ness who helps John beat his canine physical transformation yet keep all the lycanthrope abilities.  A few months training with Van Ness has John ready for his exact revenge on the vampire clan that stole his wife from him.

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