For the latest batch of horror flicks we have some grindhouse, low budget, an anthology and more. We’ll start with All Hell Breaks Loose. I don’t want to call it disappointing because it’s not, but for lack of a better word I will say it’s disappointing in one way, it could have been a cult classic. I liked it and still recommend it, but it had the potential to be an instant cult classic, but it didn’t quite get there. I loved the idea behind it. A husband is brought back to life over and over again by God until he can rescue his wife from a motorcycle gang. It’s a grindhouse film homage and I mean classic grindhouse, 70’s style not what people think of today from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. It’s choppy and has a ton of gore. The picture looks intentionally bad. The acting is bad, but that I don’t think that was intentional. There’s some great death scenes (especially with the husband) and a ton of gore again. I don’t know what it needed to be a cult classic, but overall I still quite liked it and recommend it to genre fans.
Next we have Bad Vs Worse. Another film that had potential to be groundbreaking, but didn’t quite get there. It’s also another movie I liked overall though too. It’s an interesting concept. You have thieves running around breaking into homes and then eventually break into a place they shouldn’t have broken in to. That’s when the film gets really good. What do you do as a thief if you break into a house with a serial killer? It has a good back and forth between everyone involved. The serial killer has more prey. The thieves want to help his victim. It has some good action and once it gets going it has good pacing as well. Not quite sure what it’s missing to be a guaranteed must see, but I still liked it a lot and recommend it to genre fans as well.
Third we have Jonah Lives. It’s pretty much a low budget Ouija. The biggest positives are the make up and effects on Jonah and the actor playing him. For a low budget film, Jonah looks great and creepy. Whoever did the make up and effects is pretty amazing. The film looks like it was shot with a regular home video camera, but Jonah somehow looks perfect. If they spent all the budget on the make up and effects, it might have been worth it. The biggest issue with the film is the acting though. I immediately wanted all the kids in the film to be killed. They were so annoying and blah. You always want someone to survive, but not in this bunch. I didn’t quite understand how all the adults at the key party couldn’t hear anything that was happening, but I guess I can accept it because at that point Jonah was in full rampage mode and he looked great doing it. With better actors I might have liked this a lot because Jonah is cool and you want a cool killer in a slasher flick, but unfortunately the acting is really generic and lame.
Fourth we have Scream Park. Asst. editor Rocky Maxwell watched this one because he’s a fan of the band Skinny Puppy and band member Nivek Ogre is in this. So isn’t Doug Bradley of Hellraiser fame. Unfortunately those are the only positives of this film and they really aren’t positives. Ogre is one of the killers, but has maybe 6 lines of dialogue in the film. You barely see his face because he wears a mask most of the time. Bradley has roughly one scene as the park owner, but there is a cool Hellraiser Easter Egg in the film, the puzzle box from that film shows up on the corner of his desk. Besides those two guys, the rest of the film is pretty generic. The story has been done a thousand times before and the film itself is bland. The film was partially crowd funded, but it didn’t make its goal. You can tell they just didn’t have enough money to make it cool besides the two bigger names in it. There’s too many close up shots when wider shots of the amusement park and scenery would have given it a creepier vibe. The kills lacked uniqueness to separate it from other similar movies. Maybe if it had more budget money it could have met its potential, but we’ll never know.
Last we have The Horror Network. This is an anthology film and like all anthology horror films, some stories are better than others. I really liked the deaf girl part. I don’t know why, but films about people with missing senses really interest me. Her not being able to hear the people around her, being stalked and watched makes for heightened terror. I thought she was a good little actress too and would have loved the entire movie to be about her story. The other stories are ones we’ve seen before, serial killers, a phone call etc., but overall the film isn’t bad. The deaf girl part is worth the entire movie to me though. To be honest, I liked this more than the last V/H/S film.
The Nerds Templar 