The Burning (1981)

Rating: R

Country: Canada

Running Time: 91 minutes

Director: Tony Maylam

Starring: Brian Matthews, Jason Alexander, Leah Ayres, Brian Backers, Fisher Stevens, etc.

In the generation and popularization of the slasher genre, many similar films were simultaneously released to cinema to overwhelmingly astounding box-office returns for their often low-budgets. But beyond the legions of the pioneering slasher heavyweights, lied a batch of overlooked and hardly visited gems in the sub-genre. The Burning was one of these that consisted of and inhabited the long forgotten group. This rare little classic kickstarted the acclaimed producers the Weistein Brothers career. The gore FX and effects are superb, with the spetacular make-up artist himself Tom Savini dishing out his famous meal and appetizer of tricks. It also has a genuine and masculine old disfigured killer in the format of Jason Voorhees, although this guy is elderly and more serious. You start to chuckle after seeing him with just a pair of garden shears. But any trace of laughter escapes your body, stomach and brain with he starts hacking everybody up with it. He even kills a revolting and ugly hooker (Thank god he saved us out of ten minutes of even staring at her). Though the device and concept is obviously copied and slammed with the tired gimmick of "If you have sex you will die" approach, The Burning actually works. It carries all the thrills, chills and sheer campiness that I would expect in an 80s horror flick, but it offers even more. You could say it's a bit tactical and precise about its chosen path from beginning to end, and you have to admire that for once. But, beneath its hardened shell and core, The Burning is very weak and useless. As always, the pack of teens remain disregarded and despised. I wanted them all to get burned themselves after the opening. I also hated the electronic soundtrack, a portion of it compromised and recorded by Rick Wakeman, keyboardist and wizard of progressive rock band Yes (Whom I hate). The copy of the DVD I picked up (Manufactured by the company Vipco) is too dark, shady and difficult to view. I'm pretty sure others are having this problem as well. And to add on a fraction more of criticism, the killer's point of view is absurdly pulled off in such a manner I almost rated this a bad score just because of that. But, I restrained myself. Overall, The Burning is a gory, entertaining and superior video nasty slasher that will hold your attention and esteem until the end.

Pros: Nice gore FX, Scary and Cropsy is badass

Cons: Terrible disc I received, bad soundtrack, crazy, perplexing and nonsensical point of view and unlikeable teenagers

Recommended? Yup

6 out of 10

See No Evil (2006)

Rating: R

Country: US

Running Time: 85 minutes

Director: Gregory Dark

Starring: Kane, Christina Vidal, Michael J. Pagan, Samantha Noble, Steve Vidler, etc.

Let me get one thing straight: I like watching professional wrestling (Though most of it is fake and staged). But that didn't disintegrate any hate towards WWE's new film effort See No Evil, starring one of their biggest stars and brawlers: Glenn Jacobs (Kane). Too bad I despise his maneuvers, moves and most of all his finisher move: Chokeslam. Lucky me. Hehas been playing his corresponding tough, invincible tall man role ever since his lame attempt at a debut. I expected him to go on a talking rant for the entire duration of the time, but he only spoke a couple words at the end after a poorly done twist. Wouldn't be too hard to pull off an acting job with that kind of fluency and charisma (Which is 0). The rest of the amateur cast of deliquents were also equally as bad delivering all of their cardboard cut-out, roughly said lines with passionless energy. Plus, their vocabulary generally ranges to many curses and "What was that"
moments. It's embarassing and shameful even seeing them on-screen. I think the main reason people were puking and vomiting on the floor was because of aggressively incompetent and floundering filmmaking being shoved and crammed down their throat. The plotline is very predictable, cliche, unoriginal and maintains the "villian with superhuman strength" chunk of nonsense. He was also supposedly abused as a child as we're led to believe, reflecting off his madness and cruelty. It is only shown in flashy and chopped segments of his past. It annoys me that while in that time he was a normal human, he suddenly became a muscular monster of a person. The script is also improbable, contrived and unconvincing. Some of the situations aren't explained to there fullest, especially how our hero Michael survives Kane bloodthirsty rampage in the hotel. The only redeeming quality of this piece of malicious, ineffective, unproductive garbage is the introduction to the engrossing and enthralling new death mechanics. A woman is eaten by dogs, many men have their eyes gouged out unrelentlessly in huge groups and a young girl having a cell phone forced into her mouth. He also wields and carries with him a dangerous and lethal hook, setting up gruesome murders within the mess of the movie. See No Evil is overall, to describe in a simple sentence and statement: this is an example of Hollywood horror gone completely wrong. Terrible.

Pros: good deaths

Cons: Universally everything else, needs a lot more negative feedback like a 0% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes.

Recommended? Stuff like this should be left on the shelf all alone

3/10

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Rating: R (Originally branded with the rare X rating; heavily edited and cut to hold an R rating)

Country: Canada

Running Time: 90 minutes

Director: George Mihalka

Starring: Paul Kelman, Lori Hallier, Neil Affleck, Keith Knight, Alf Humphreys, etc.

Originally branded with the rare X rating (then heavily edited and cut to undergo and assume an R rating), My Bloody Valentine was shown with approximately 3 minutes altered and emended from it's final decision among MPAA members. Now after 28 years of waiting and hoping for an Unrated DVD version, us slasher fans have finally been transported to our homes. And it's definitely worth the delay and linger. The deaths are more grisly compared to the original copy. Without this footage, you could never tell what was going down when our hacker of choice Harry Warden was slicing n' dicing our teenage delinquents. Now, you fortunately can all in its uncensored and murderous glory. This under appreciated gem from the 80s retains all of the goofy and cheesy cliches of the generation: School dances, usually drunk or stoned young adults and the toned down sex scenes. Everything you need and everything I was expecting. However, I love all of these sleazy, uncompetent conditions. See, without them the slasher genre is pretty much standing on one leg, only to eventually fall down flat on its face. What also propels My Bloody Valentine to the finish line (eliminating any competition in its path), is its undeniably inventive, imaginative, original, over-the-top and extremely macabre deaths (Head shoved into steaming pan, impaled on a running pipe, shot with a nail gun etc.). Although our killer's main weapon of choice is a pick-axe, it is barely used or beneficial during its course. But, one might not pay attention to this fact. Neither do I half the time. It's too diverting to ignore and walk away from. It also has a twisted climax that begs for a sequel. What must would probably hate about this is the killer's identity (Which makes sense, but will surely start up someone's fury and anger) and the disgraceful chase sequence in the mine. That totals up to 7 points (6 for the film, 1 for sheer entertainment). Worth a purchase. It is one of the most popular and best slashers of all time after all.

Pros: Entertaining, nice deaths, irresistible and lovable 80s cliches

Cons: When the killer is unmasked I through a fit, horrendous mine chase

Recommended? you will not enjoy My Bloody Valentine on the first couple watches. You will start to like it further on and out after fully understanding its purpose. Cleary made to entertain.

7/10

The Birds (1963)

Rating: R

Country: US

Running Time: 119 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Starring: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, Veronica Cartwright, etc.

The Birds is one of the most surreal, unconventional and idiosyncratic horror thrillers ever. Never has there been such a weirder and more eccentric concept in film. Even with many doubts and skepticism clouding my thoughts, it managed and conducted to become a pleasant movie. Hitchcock pulls off the impossible with a majority of film elements being handled splendidly. The photography is decent enough, and the final scene with the crowded flock of birds stalking the moving car is astonishing and sensational. Quite epic. The acting is emotionally erudite and cerebral. Tippi Hedren is exemplary and offers possibly her best in this role. The others are okay, but they are outdone by Hedren in all of the departments. The first half hardly holds any scares, where Hitchcock spends much time crafting and developing his personalities and installing their every movement and situation into the viewer's mind. When terror does strike, it comes fast and doesn't let up. Hitchcock here, displays and indicates his signature montage effects and procedures. Layering this is a long, thick mantle of panic and despair truly fitting, blending and combining this in with a flurry of intelligent components and aspects. What holds back The Birds from a 9 or 10 is the absurdity of it's ludicrous and blemished plotline. How Hitchcock made this work is beyond me. It also has numerous occasions of glitches, continuity errors, and deficiencies that are obviously seen throughout its running time. However, it still remarkably holds up today, over the other legions of films released over the years.

Pros: A regular Hitchcockian half followed up with an amazing second half, has Alfred's many motives, decent photography and relatively good performances all around from the cast

Cons: Preposterous plotline, many onslaughts of deliberate errors that can be spotted easily

Recommended? Yes

8/10

Quarantine (2008)

Rating: R

Country: US

Running Time: 89 minutes

Director: John Erick Dowdle

Starring: Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris, Jay Hernandez, Jonathan Schaech, etc

.

After the overwhelmingly positive reception and responses worldwide for Spanish atmospheric, claustrophobic horror film REC (Which I have yet to see), It was a matter of time before us Americans grabbed our greasy hands on the project. Reinvented in the US with an identical, implied sentiment, Quarantine was born. Although obviously not approached and applauded in the same league as its father individual, it mostly hits all the right marks and jubilantly retains the Cinéma vérité format. Now that a sequel has been announced and confirmed, we can surely look forward to REC 2. But for now, we need to boost up our expectations and anticipation with this. To start off, the shaky-cam (And it looks like I'm the only one that adores it) presentation and layout is tremendous. It almost is simultaneously on the corresponding page as a documentary. This formula can also be found in The Blair Witch Project. Anyway, it's incredibly realistic. Also, the infected are vastly detailed and can be separated by their attributes and peculiarity. To add on to my admiration of them, they kill millions of innocent bystanders. Even animals are exposed to the contaminated condition they carry (A big dog assaults a man and resumes to bite into his organs). The violence (The rating is very way off) is pitiless and callously rough. This may be the most violent and bloody film of 2008 in my honest opinion. If you're weak and aren't vomit-resistant, you may want to skip out on this. Flesh is insensitively pulled and mangled apart from bodies, infected puncture into different humans in many places with gory results and guts and bones are literally ripped out of both men and women's physique. I haven't seen REC as stated before, but I'm sure it isn't as bad as this. The cringe-inducing terror built up in the film is thunderous and sends uneasy messages into your mind and stomach to turn it off. Then, it immediately explodes in your face in the last 30 minutes. Everybody (HUGE SPOILER) dies in the end, racking up even more apprehension. Trepidation makes up a big chunk of Quarantine you see, and it flourishes. This is all the good. Now it's time to move onto the ugly. First of all, we have to succumb to 20 minutes of nonsense in a fire station, where we are led to believe this will suck. I congratulate Dowdle from saving us from this disastrous 20 minutes. Next, it becomes so shady at moments you can't tell what's going on. Yes I said I loved this camera substance: the angles, shots etc. But, this counts only as the see able quantitys and components. Last but not least, I hate Steve Harris! I don't know what it is about him. His presence just makes me sick. Aargh! And no, I'm not racist because the cop in this movie was astounding in my view. Overall, Quarantine may very well be the best horror film of 2008, due to massive productions of crap being made by Hollywood and other posers who think they have talent that get noticed by the mainstream while the actually gifted filmmakers don't even get a mention or remark. Hardly superb, but still good.

Pros: Nice shaky-cam style, detailed infected, Grueling and unsettling deaths....Sure! Nice build-up of tension and racks up all the right scares without any sound other than talking and other noises.

Cons: Steve Harris sucks, implausible beginning, Yes the shaky-cam is amazing, but not when too dark.

Recommended? For the most part

6/10

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Rating: R

Country: US

Running Time: 118 minutes

Director: Jonathan Demme

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Brooke Smith, etc.

The Silence of the Lambs is one of the most adequate, valuable and prestigious psychological horror movies ever. It won five Academy Awards including best picture. It was one of the most critically and financially successful, victorious and triumph landmark films to hit the screen. Tactical, strategic, cunning and audacious to any other competition in the overall pathetic and depressing run of 1991, it was sincerely and undoubtedly the best there was. Even after its theatrical plight was over, people continued to rave and discuss the importance, relevance and advantage it possessed over other fine works of the decade. It was truly one of the most unforgettable, menacing, dreadful and delirium evoking schizophrenic nightmares and perspectives and journeys into madness and hysteria since Jacob's Ladder and The Shining. It is unquestionably a subconsciously driving heterogeneous of emotion, aggression, wonder and most frequently: fear. It doesn't hold up for a second. To describe this fully would be severely difficult. to start, it led up to the evergrowing popularity and cultural status of one of the most frightening, delusional, demented and deranged yet rational, acute and manipulative serial killers ever caught on camera. Hannibal Lecter. He is also followed up and disseminated by a groundbreaking and eerie exhibition by Anthony Hopkins, who handles his given role with calmness. From the opening minutes where you first see him in his confined cell in his reflection, you suddenly start to fringe in a frenzy. He is certainly groundbreaking, deserving of all of his recognition and fame. The renowned escape scene especially demonstrates his capabilities, where in its climax you are left with a series of shocks and chills rolling and jumping up your spine immediately after one episode. Jodie Foster is also great, although a step down from Hopkins. She manages to deliver through complications and problems. Where she truly rises is in her conversations and speeches with Lecter himself. The two together are electrifying, the ultimate combo on-screen. They say all of their lines professionally, as if they didn't need a script and spoke only from the deepest regions of their heart. The cinematography is glorious, mesmerizing, hypnotic and simply astounding, capturing the distinctness of each environment and place with much compassion and affection, each one with it's own share of attractiveness. With the soaken layers of enigma and conundrums conveyed into its plotline, it's essentially a mystery that quickly transfers into a full-fledged thriller in the second quarter, then a horror in the last section. It really is remarkable that this was even made. However, while this is heartbreaking too state and claim, it carries a cliche anti-ending and it carries many unstrung holes at times. I congratulate and thank Jonathan Demme for bringing us something this special and new into the world. It has the changed the face of cinematic evolution for us all, and even today scares us to the bone.

Pros: Too many to say

Cons: Holes and bad ending

Recommended? Yes

9 out of 10

Wolf Creek (2005)

Rating: R

Country: Australia

Running Time: 99 minutes

Director: Greg Mclean

Starring: John Jarrat, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, Nathan Phillips

After reading many negative and positive reception from a variety and assortments of sources (Magazines, websites etc.), I walked to my local Movie Gallery and rented this expecting nothing less but to be entertaining. I was neutral, not choosing either sides on the "like it" or "hate it" sections. Marketed with the new "Based on true events" gimmick and claimed to be translated from the true story of the backpacker murders of the 90s at the hands of Ivan Milat, Wolf Creek is not good or bad (At least in the beginning). It comfortably sits in the distant middle. When the opening scene hits, A stage of unpredictability transpires among your eyes. You can't tell if it will suck or be great. To start off, the annoying and amateurishly done foreign accents are interpreted poorly. It's as if they're mocking every Aussie human on the planet, even the British sounds are offensively made. This is where points are immediately taken down. The cardboard cut-out characters are appalling and you want them to get hacked up miserably and painfully. Fortunately, two out of three of them are, saving the only decent, sufficient and tolerable man in the movie to escape from our antagonist's devious clutches. Speaking of that, the enemy of the film (Mick Taylor, a remorseless and ruthless mastermind committing his crimes in a remote Australian desert titled Wolf Creek) is one of the redeeming features that truly embraces the film's promising poster. He's like Norman Bates crossed over with Leatherface. Clever but also ferocious. And, the actual killings are ultimately satisfying after a long await. We even see a mostly severed wreck of a woman hanging from a wall (Supposedly a victim that lasted for many months before dying). Both are proudly displayed in a full-fledged gory format. And to throw in a bonus, A tourist is shot in the head. The terror factor and increase of tension is almost always high, especially in the last half. All of these people don't walk out without injury. Wolf Creek inevitably breaks all of the standard, generic rules and formulaic garbage of recycled, cheap garbage people call horror in this messed up economy. No rules apply to it. It makes its own. This is why I immensely enjoyed Wolf Creek. It very may well be the single most scary, gritty, and realistically traumatizing experiences you'll ever observe and witness that was commercially opened in 2005. However, what hurts and disinegrates any substance of pleasure in this is its lack of facts and common sense. This is a pure work of fiction, while it is citied as being completely true. It is a senseless, pretentious and contrived horror movie that desperately tries to lure in the captured audience but instead throws them back on their heads and decides to throw in another boring and dull element that ruins the fun. Overall, Wolf Creek is like previously mentioned, not good, but also not too bad. Not too bad.

Pros: Nice deaths, Scary, simple and downright amazing in little divisions. Not like other copied products labeled as slashers

Cons: Bad accents, hate the senseless path it takes towards the end and it isn't at all true

Recommended? Yes and no if that makes any sense to anybody

4 out of 10