First things first guys, I’m not on my own computer, so I won’t have an image up until tomorrow. A lot has happened lately, losing my apartment for one, so I didn’t get the chance to put you up yesterday, I hope you’ll forgive me for that.
Today I watched Outpost, and was surprised at how much I liked the movie. It’s a good mixture of horror and action, and there isn’t enough of those these days, at least not enough done right.
The story follows a group of mercs who are hired to escort the client to a bunker in the middle of a war zone. What’s so important about the bunker, and why is some one willing to pay top dollar to get there?
SIMPLE! Nazi technology! We all know those pesky little Nazi were up to some no good experiments, but who knew they made invincible ghost like soldiers. Hard to shoot, and harder to kill, these bad boys are brutal, some times even getting torture porn levels of brutal.
Now, something I don’t talk much about in my reviews, but the lighting in this movie was amazing. It was the first thing I noticed, and throughout the rest of the movie, it held up. Every shot has perfect lighting, and really good use of back lighting. A+ guys.
The characters were quite fun too. For a group of mercs they were all quite varied and it made for a fun time. It is hard to tell what some of them were saying due to accents though, and I found myself having to use subtitles.
Hey guys, Star here again filling in for Zack. I really do hope you all enjoy my posts, so leave a comment if you’d rather just the classic HorrorDaily! Anyway, today I’m reviewing An American Haunting, another haunted house movie (as you all should know by now, they’re my favourite!). It is based on true events, which just make it that more awesome in my opinion. Anyway, I’ll just jump right into the review, thanks again for putting up with my reviews when Zack is too busy.
An American Haunting is your classic haunted house movie (of course, I mean, look at the title). At the beginning of the movie it shows a young girl holding a knife to her bedroom door, which is rattling, you’ve all heard it before. It then quickly switches to the young girl’s mother waking her up, oh guess what? It was just a dream. How original. Anyway, after the mom finds this broken porcelain doll in her daughters room, which the daughter found in the attic which is apparently off limits. Mom takes a shot of Absolut Vodka, (I love finding product placement in movies) and it suddenly switches to the 19th century,with new characters and more fucked up shit going on.
John Bell, the father in this new 19th century setting, is in the court room, settling a dispute about property theft. The case held in court isn’t important to the plot, but after the jury has made their decision, the woman on the other side of the issue, who was heard of to be a witch, told him as he was leaving the courtroom that she was going to curse him and his precious little girl, Betsy Bell. He kind of just shrugged it off until Betsy started being attacked at nighttime, she’d get thrown across her bedroom and her hair being ripped out; and in the daytime she was having visions of another little girl who would just disappear at random. Her family, an extremely religious friend and her school teacher all team up to try and get rid of the evil spirit that now lay upon their house. Good fucking job you damn witch.
Now read over that paragraph about half a dozen times. This film does get pretty repetitive with the attacks and such, getting worse and worse until Betsy is pretty much a lifeless doll, but there wasn’t much variation in the attacks, the visions and nightmares about attacks the family was having had more action and were more interesting than the real attacks themselves. Another thing that bothers me is how damn perfect Betsy looks throughout the whole movie. I mean, if I was up all night being fucking attacked night after night and seeing shit I would not look the same. Betsy should have looked haggard as fuck even halfway through the movie. Maybe I just have watched too many exorcism movies, but it just didn’t convince me at all.
It didn’t scare me at all, which was another disappointment of the film. I would have liked a little jump scare now and again. It appears as if they tried but it wasn’t effective at all. And I’m an anxiety-stricken pussy so for a real horror fan it would have been even less impressive. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy this movie, it had a disturbing twist which I cannot and will not reveal in this review, it just has some flaws that I could not avoid stating. It’s worth watching for sure if you can look past the flaws I mentioned, I’m just very picky and notice little things about that.
All in all, I’m going to give it a relatively decent score because the storyline was amazing, they just could have paid a little more attention to the little things that I have noticed.
Year of Release: 2007
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.9 / 10 Level of Awful: Medium
WHAT IT’S ABOUT:
OK, first of all, before we dive into what went on in this little treat of a movie, let me just say that the ‘Dimension Extreme’ label is misleading since there really isn’t anything all that extreme about this movie (discounting how hard and fast naked breasts are thrown at you). As a good bad movie it works spectacularly and gives you everything you could want: drunken sorority sisters stripping down in a string of initiation tests, drunk and drugged guys having sex with said sorority sisters, a seriously pissed off Native American ghost with an axe and a budget that allowed for plenty of fake blood to be poured all over the place.
Our story goes a little something like this: a group of friends are heading up to a house in the middle of the desert under the guise of helping one of the friends out with initiating her sorority pledges. Our group is made up of Zane, a regular guy on prescription meds who was just kicked out of college, his cousin Rene who is in charge of the initiation, Rene’s boyfriend Danny who is jockish in appearance but fragile as a flower, Phil the computer geek who just had his first beer and ecstasy tablet on his way to the house, and pledges Laura and Julie. Needless to say nobody hikes out to the middle of the desert to stay in a house just so that their cousin can initiate two bimbos into a sorority. Zane has a much bigger plan in mind: back in the day his grandfather owned the house and the land it sits on and he made his fortune prospecting for gold which he found in abundance. When the old house burnt down that gold was never found and Zane intends to dig it up.
Thrown into the mix we have Lester, a care taker by day, gold thief by night and all-round crazy loon. Lester’s job is to look after the old house while Zane and his family aren’t in it and he wasn’t expecting Zane to be there so his plans to steal the gold in the ground have kind of ground to a halt. That’s not to say that he won’t be rewarded for the inconvenience because the initiation’s about to get underway! To warm up you have the obvious humiliations and making people wait on you hand and foot but, as the day leads into night and drugs and booze are consumed, the clothing must come off. Never before has the desert been so teeming with perky breasts bouncing through its hot sands as the girls have to jog from the house to Lester’s trailer on a scavenger hunt.
But enough of the fun and games, this is a horror movie after all and somewhere there needs to be a demon spawn of some sort to give this movie purpose. Enter our ghost with no name who has been stalking Zane since they first set out on this little adventure. Turns out she’s the first wife of Zane and Rene’s great-grandfather who buried her alive with a whole lot of gold. Having taken her revenge many years ago she managed to off the great-grandfather, the second wife and 3 of the 4 children from that marriage. Zane and Rene’s grandfather was the only child to escape. Evidently grudges don’t die easily and the spirit now sees an opportunity to finish what she started with bloody gore and occasional background music.
It’s certainly not a movie to be taken seriously and within about 15 minutes of watching it it’ll all be forgotten but for an hour and a half’s worth of mindless, gory entertainment it’s worth it.
LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:
Making out is a perfectly acceptable way for cousins to say hello.
Blondes think rabbits have antlers.
Baths full of blood are portals for malevolent spirits.
Beer is now considered to be food.
Risking other people’s lives is a fun way to forget about the Native American ghost that’s trying to kill you.
Stiff nipples are very important when looking to get into a sorority.
Trust exercises involve a lot of stripping.
Native American ghosts are remarkably solid.
Naked jogging with a dead rabbit is an excellent way to burn off those unwanted pounds.
Part of the Ghost House Underground pictures, and the prequel to the pretty alright Reeker, No Man’s Land, starts out good, with a pretty sweet car kill, and then goes downhill fast. The characters act down right stupid, a cop who is arresting the killer, gets startled and THROWS AWAY HIS GUN, how fucking stupid can you get.
So the story is based around some guys who robbed a casino, and come across some cops at a gas station. Shots are fired, and the station blows, rarely poorly tho. Quite alot of nothing happens for some time, but the dialog and event were leading me to believe the twist was going to be the exact same twist as the first one.
The acting is quite bad, the dialog is quite bad, I honestly don’t believe I finished watching this movie. I had hopes for it too, cause I thought the first one was quite well done, it was a cheap film, but it worked with what it had and it did it well. This one feel like it’s trying to be too much, without being anything really, and completely ripping off the first one. There’s nothing new here.
There’s really not much that can be said about it. Just skip over it if you can.
The year is 1981, horror is in full bloom, Tom Savini is killing teenagers left and right, while Rick Baker is working with the wolfs, leaving with us the single best transformation scene filmed today. Written and directed by John Landis ( who’s in every horror documentary I’ve ever seen, despite this being his only horror film) An American Werewolf In London ( AWIL) is a shinning example of why 1981 was such a good year for horror. So with that out of the way, let’s get down to it.
While on a walking trip through out Europe, David and Jack get attacked by a beast, leaving Jack dead, and David in the hospital, the report saying they were attacked by an escaped lunatic. David starts having some seriously fucked up nightmares which lead to a few fun death scenes. Jack comes back throughout the film as a zombie looking ghost, to warn about the werewolf’s curse. The werewolf’s blood line must be cut out, and theres only one left. David.
To say the werewolf genre is sad would be an understatement, almost all werewolf tales are in truth tragedy. Unless it goes through the same style that say vampire movies do, the main character is turned, so you kill his creator. Thankfully in the case of AWIL, the creator is killed, but the sickness still passes on.
About an hour into the film, we get our first scene of what I`d call real terror, sure some scary shit happens, but nothing is as memorable as the Werewolf transformation. It looks so painfully real, Rick Baker invokes the spirit of body horror such icons and David Cronenburg became famous for. It hits fast and hard, while not gory or even bloody, it is truely sickening to watch. In this case, I think waiting so long makes it that much better, your kept waiting for it, and when it delivers it really delivers .
There`s another transformation at work here as well, that`s the Zombie /Ghost transformation. Every time we see Jack, he’s been decaying over the course of the movie, and we get to see the rotting remains step by step over the course of the movie.
Well done werewolf film, amazing special effects, and some half decent laughs. Check it out
