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horror

Kat * Martin Schmid (2001)

I guess this is a small, Danish, film with some familiar actors. However the film is based on a novel, the story is rather thin. Some old folks try to summon a spirit, but let in the wrong one. That bad spirit raises hell in a small town. A bit secondary to this story are the personal problems of main character Maria.

The atmosphere is not too bad, but “Kat” is a standard horror with gruely images and shock-effects. The acting is not too bad and the music well chosen, so I find the 3.6 on IMDb slightly too low, but I am not going to rate it much higher coming to a…

The Cabin in the Woods * Drew Goddard (2012)

The box and IMDb suggests this to be a “mystery” and the cover suggests that much, but do not put your money on that! “The Cabin In The Woods” is mostly just another teen-horror-slasher in which a group of youngsters go to a cabin in the woods in order to be brutally slain.
From the beginning there is an uncommon and somewhat sick element that is worked out in a bit too silly way and this does not really raise the film above the teen-slash-horror genre and everything goes very predictable, not unamusing though. Then towards the end two characters open a Pandora’s box which allows the director to pull off every single horror cliché from the shelves and throw in his entire special effects budget. These 20 minutes are highly entertaining.
The film closes with the obligatory ‘intelligent twist’ that should explain all that happened before. Man, what a drag.
Anyways, certainly not a good film, but it is not boring and has one good part.

Nadja * Michael Almereyda (1994)

Yes, this is another vampire film and no, it is not very good, but there are a few reasons to watch it nonetheless.
First; however it is produced in 1994, it looks like an old videotape that has been copied numerous times; especially in the scenes throug the eyes of the vampires. The shady way of filming is alternated with weird, experimental elements. This is not totally unexpected, because no less than Mary Sweeny (the reason that I found this film) and her ex-husband David Lynch have produced this film. Lynch even has a small part in it!
The known story has been relocated to contemporary New York. We mostly follow Nadja from the title, a young woman living through the night. When her father dies, she sets out to find her brother. The story is not very surprising, but the atmosphere and the ‘dirty’ way of filming makes “Nadja” one of those films that deserve to be seen some time.

The Loved Ones * Sean Byrne (2009)

What starts as an alright film about revolting adolescent kids with a lot of metal music soon becomes one of those torture horrors, a genre I do not see the use of.
We follow a couple of kids around prom-day. They are those metal/emo youngsters with big swings in emotion. One of them finds himself at another prom-party than he intended. In some intended “Calvaire” like atmosphere, the director probably aimed at a weird horror, but the film becomes dumber and dumber as it continues. What is more, where some details suggest a though-about story, there are also serious flaws to that very story.
Nope, not my film.

John Dies At The End * Don Coscarelli (2012)

Here we have a difficult film to review. Difficult, because the film is both corny and brilliant. It opens with a marvelous, weird scene and starts off blazingly as a film with the weirdness and wonder of “Naked Lunch” and “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas“. Soon it becomes clear that the story is good in basis, but contains many bad elements. Also more and more teenage-superpower-film-elements creep in which makes some scenes rather annoying. Did the director hope to direct the audience of a film like “Chronicle” to the Cronenbergian way of filmmaking, the other way around, or could he not choose between horror weirdness or teen-film?
One thing is certain: the Cronenberg parts are brilliant and in themselves make this film worth watching. Too bad that the other part take the film down substantiously.
A little bit about the story then. Two young ghostbusters accidentally acquire the power to see all different times and dimensions at the same time and they are part of these different times and dimensions themselves. This leads to amusing scenes with ‘philosophy’ used to add to the unlikely story.
I guess I said enough for you to be able to decide whether you want to watch this film or not.

American Horror Story (series) * Brad Falchuk & Ryan Murphy (season 1 2011)

“American Horror Story” is not a horror show with zombies and vampires. Rather it is a drama series with (quite a lot of) horror elements. The show can be quite bloody, but seldom really scary. A family with a troubled past moves into a massive 18th century house where all previous inhabitents who died there, also still live. Quite a couple of plots and storylines are served to the watcher, a handfull of developing characters and a lot of suspense. The episodes start in the past where something gruesome happened and then returns to the present to make the link with the present day.

The series are quite well written, the atmosphere is descent and the humour alright. Yet, like with most series that I see, I did not find the first series interesting enough to continue to the second. As of now, there are four series and I think the show is still running.

Time will tell if I will ever see more of this quite uncommon show.

Nightbreed the Cabal Cut * Clive Barker (2013)

“Nightbreed” is a troubled, yet famous horror classic. Clive Barker published his novel “Cabal” in 1988 and turned it into a film himself. “Nightbreed”, which he directed himself, went to the cinemas in 1990. There was a problem with the film though. The filmcompany producing the film wanted it to be more like the popular film “Hellraiser” (1987) so they took Barker’s film and turned it into something else. Something which had little incommon with the book, let alone the original script. Barker told everybody who wanted to hear about this hijack and the negative publicity resulting in the fact that the film only found a small cult-audience.
Many years later, a friend of Barker’s, Russell Cherrington, finds two VHS tapes with the original cuts from the film and decides to turn them into the film that was originally intended. Using the first version of the film, the original script, the soundtrack cd and a little help from an actor who had to re-dub his own voice, Cherrington created “the Cabal Cut”. Asking help from the filmcompany who owns all the rights, Cherrington only got the permission to show his version on filmfestivals and so it comes that there is now an actual film-tour of this completely ‘new’ version of “Nightbreed”.
The story is completely different from the previous version. 70% Of the material was not used in that version, so it is save to say that the “Cabal cut” is a totally different film. The film quality is extraordinary poor in that 70%, really like a copy of a copy of a VHS tape. Other parts have been taken from a DVD of the other version and these, of course, look good. Now that over 20.000 people have been “the Cabal cut”, Cherrington received the funds to clean up the images and give this new version a proper release which is due for June 2014.
However I thought otherwise, nothing of this film looked familiar, so maybe I never saw “Nightbreed” after all. The “Cabal cut” is a fantasy love story with a few horror elements and it certainly needs more work to make it look the way it deserves, but I will certainly watch the cleaned-up version when it is available.

Maniac * Franck Khalfoun (2012)

When I was watching this film I thought that it was older. The music, the story, etc… Frank is the maniac from the title and we see things literally through his eyes. Frank repairs mannequins and has some psychological problems that he goes somewhat too far to get the assessoires he needs.
The approach reminds a bit too much of “Dexter”, but “Maniac” is much more a horror and certainly darker. The atmosphere is alright, so it was not such a bad film.

Martyrs * Pascal Laugier (2008)

I do not understand the popularity of the Saw/Hostel type of films. What is the use of watching another film in which the director shows himself sicker than his predecessor? Why do scriptwriters try to overmatch eachother in gory torture? What is more: why would anybody want to watch such a film? Unfortunately I picked out one such title…
The first hour of “Martyrs” is a very bloody horror/thriller in which a troubled girl hunts down her kidnappers together with a friend. All slashing in detail, but the good portion of Japanese-style darkness makes this part ‘doable’. Then the last hour is one big torture scene and I kept wondering what the use of it all is. At some point I started to predict the next method, being right I would turn the film off as both awfull and boring. I was never right though… There is a very thin veil of ‘philosophy’ which the director seems to use to ‘justify’ the cruelty of his film, but which actually makes it worse.
Where it not for the first part of this film which has a few very atmospheric scenes, this film would have come somewhere below 1 out of 5 stars. Now I come to 1,5. Better spend your time on another film.

Sheitan * Kim Chapiron (2006)

“Sheitan” is a teen horror with a typical story, but all the Hollywood variations to the theme look like teen films in comparison to “Sheitan”. After a varying successfull Christmas evening in a disco, a group of youngsters drive from Paris to some remote village where one of the girls lives. As soon a they get near the village, it is obvious that this village is pretty weird. You can almost fill in the rest of the story, but let me say that the youngsters spend Christmas with Vincent Cassel at his most maniacal and when you have followed the carreer of the good man, you might have an idea of what that means. The boys try to get laid, the girls are somewhat interested, but all the attention goes to Joseph (Cassel) who makes himself he middle of all events. Slowly but surely “Sheitan” becomes a horror.
However Cassel is brilliant, I do not particularly like “Sheitan”. I am not much into teenagers in films. The village’s inhabitants are funny though and there is enough horror-humour to make the film enjoyable.