J*A*S*M

While watching The Whore, I thought that I Spit on Your Grave shouldn’t have been only the beginning, but also the end…

If you value your time but still want to watch Surviving Evil, my advice is to skip the entire first half. It’s the classic introduction, where a group of people (this time a TV crew) arrive at a certain place (an island) with something dangerous lurking that they are unaware of, but the viewer knows it (some sort of humanoid demons). After some time, they stumble into some unsettling artefacts (an empty aboriginal village) and they decide whether to stay or leave. Unfortunately, Surviving Evil is not particularly well made or acted, so you can easily ignore those 45 minutes. After that, it’s quite an entertaining forest massacre that doesn’t deviate from the ranks of B-movie average (comparable, for instance, with After Dusk They Come). PS: I would love to finally see the premise of visitors to an island inhabited by bloodthirsty monsters in the hands of someone competent! :-(

This could have been an amazing cult movie and the beginning of a great post-apocalyptic science fiction franchise that viewers would love to go back to, like today we do with Terminator. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Scott Stewart is not a particularly incompetent director, but he should refrain from writing. The biggest conflict of the entire film is how silly it is in many scenes versus its efforts to look relatively serious. It’s not that bad as an action B-movie with monsters, but when the information you got a year before made you look forward to the ultimate angelic apocalypse, it’s impossible to not to be disappointed. 5/10

Epic period horror with a badass atmosphere, nice make-up and good actors in the main roles. That’s a pretty good calling card, but The Wolfman is unfortunately missing a few key elements. It’s unable to generate fear or tension, it isn’t entertaining, or disgusting, or shocking. It just quietly wanders about in the background in a way that you can barely register, let alone remember. It’s not bad, but it’s a shame that with the money spent on it, you could get quite a few young, unpretentious filmmakers who’d be able to make about dozen better movies.

The current trend to make horror films look as realistic as possible has reached its peak. If Lake Mungo was a tiny bit more realistic and restrained, it would be a documentary. This type of filmmaking has is advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it’s not badly made or acted, and certainly not too silly, but it’s far from a feast as it only follows the re-enactment of “real events”. I like the documentary format of Blair With and REC (where the characters are filming), but the exaggerated style of Lake Mungo and The Poughkeepsie Tapes (interviews using “archive footage”) is becoming tiring and I sincerely hope filmmakers will soon get bored of it.

I’ve been avoiding for quite some time horror films when it’s clear at first sight that their quality will be in negative figures, but I let myself be fooled by The Graves. AD Horrofest has never been a showcase of excellent cinema, but they’ve always held somewhere between two and three (or four) stars, which is watchable. The Graves, unfortunately, isn’t watchable, actually, together with Hercules 3D, it’s the worst film I’ve seen since the beginning of the year. An abandoned mining town somewhere in the desert is a fine horror destination (like, for instance, in The Hills Have Eyes or Disappearance), so it’s surprising to see how they managed to ruin it.

Decently made but awfully annoying horror for kids. I don’t know how the book tells the story, but I would have preferred it to be adapted in any other way than in this adolescently superficial one. Besides, this type of overcooked fantasy where anything can happen because there are no rules pisses me off in general.

Goodness is dead, long live the dwarves! Herzog’s vision had a bigger effect on me than most other films, but I still refuse to give it a higher rating. This film almost killed me. It’s an incredibly depressive and wretched look at something that maybe represents humanity. Is the handicap of all the characters only a means to generate a more oppressive atmosphere or a belief that we are all like that? Dwarves that are handicapped – not physically but mentally. If the characters were “normal”, could we take the film as a celebration of the struggle for independence against an oppressor, instead of monsters attacking a defenceless caretaker? Depends on your point of view, and on what would be more agreeable to you. The film is not bad or stupid, but I can’t forgive what it made me go through while watching it.

I enjoyed Spring Fever more than Roth’s first part. Starting from the animated opening credits (which could have replaced the introduction but didn’t) until the end, the film alternates comedy with atmospheric, brutal, and disgusting scenes, with everything working out passably well (unlike Roth’s) and, what is more, the resulting mix holds together (unlike Roth’s). Even though West didn’t have creative freedom as director (in fact, he wanted to distance himself from the film), he did a pretty good job. Just like The House of the Devil felt like occult horror from the 1970s, the sequel to Cabin Fever feels like a (funny) American B-movie from the 1980s, though it’s not as precise and perfect as the former.

Poor hero! He ran up those stairs… I looked forward to The Collector and I can say it didn’t disappoint me. Unpleasant atmosphere, a lot of brutality (really a lot, quite possibly, the most brutal film of the year), a surprisingly high body count, and a score that helps generate a feeling of hopelessness to such an extent that if I’d listen it more, I’d go mad. On the other hand, it has one of the most unrealistic plots I’ve ever seen – it’s something that could never happen in the real world. There’s no point fretting about how it’s possible that several characters have been moving around in a mid-size family house for such a long time and yet manage to constantly miss each other, or why the killer makes his work so unnecessarily complicated, why he’s risking so much… This is how things work in this film, and if you’re willing to accept the rules, you’ll get a solid torture porn experience.