Fright Night, Fright Night, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Black Swan

Alright internet, lets get this ball rolling. I am finally done being a human pin-cushion, which is nice. I was a test subject in a  research project at UMass Amherst, wherein they worked my left leg until it was a useless noodle and then drew six vials of my blood for a week while tracking its healing progress. Needless to say, this kept me exhausted all week. Capping it off I started Seroquel a few days ago, so more reason to be tired. Having been tired for most of my adult life, this isn't too new though I guess.

Well, enough of the personal life updates, lets talk horror movies. A classic, a remake of the that classic, a structural reversal of an American slasher, and a modern blockbuster that took everyone by surprise. Sounds like fun, but I will keep my rambling to a minimum in the interest of catching up still.

Classic horror poster right here!

Fright Night is just one of those iconic 80's horror movies that you either grew up loving or you just missed the boat, so to speak. It has a master Vampire setting up shop next to our intrepid young hero and horror fan, and of course people start to go missing. Our hero begins to become suspicious and draws a bit too much attention to himself and those around him. Cue disaster and epic showdowns.

Its a fun movie, even now years later. Some of its moments are a bit strange, the sexual frustration of our teenage male hero because his teen Girlfriend won't put out is a bit creepy to watch, and more so when the aged vampire makes his advances on her as well. Sure hes an immortal creature of evil, but hes still being a bit of a pedophile at times with that thread. Otherwise the annoying friend, disbelieving parent, and washed up professional character types are timeless and enjoyable to watch.

"Maybe we should wait to have sex..."

It can slide into static moments of nothing going on at times, but tends to get back on task fast enough. The final showdown in a mansion of the undead is intense and very watchable, but toward the final moments can drag on. The master vampire takes a whole lot of abuse before finally falling, and they smash more windows then any basement should reasonably have. Its a classic movie, and any fan of the genre would be remiss to not have seen this at least once.

You can imagine, seeing just how classic it is, that I was a bit hesitant to see the Fright Night remake. I shouldn't have been, because it may actually be better then the original in many ways. The character updates make for a much tighter movie in the end. The annoying friend is no longer annoying, but rather a sympathetic figure who was abandoned by his friend. Our hero is a geek looking to find more social acceptance, and so his friend is shunned and ostracized as sacrifice for the position.

He is so awesome in this, you have no idea.

When his former friend comes to him for help and starts the suspicion for our hero, it actually personalizes the future action so much better. The friends acceptance of the vampires offer is directly the fault of the hero, rather then being merely something that happens. It raises the stakes much more efficiently. All the characters are effectively upgraded really, and unnecessary ones are dropped. Its just a tighter more focused story all around.

The best upgrades through and through are David Tennant and Colin Farrell, as the vampire slayer and the master vampire, respectively. Farrell brings such a smug and powerful presence with him in every scene he is in. He makes for one imposing and hypnotically likable master vampire. As great as he is though, no one compares to Tennant's performance as an egocentric and drunk coward of the occult. He steals every scene he is in with ease, even when all hes doing is complaining about the effects of leather pants on ones balls. Again, the character is improved upon the original by changing his motivation from that of a wash-up to one of a running coward with personal investment in the situation.

Gotta have faith.

If you are a fan or not of the original is irrelevant, this movie is just a damn good time anyone can enjoy. I saw it in 3D, but I also didn't have a choice in the matter. The 3D was fine, not too distracting, and only campy in a few select locations. I still tend to hate 3D, so see whichever you prefer.


Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is a movie I have been consistently excited about for so very long. I think its been close to a year since I first saw previews for this movie, and I'm so happy it finally got some distribution. The wait was worth it, because its every bit as amazing as I had hoped it would be.

Hunt this down and see it, you will thank me.

We have covered a number of movies where some teens enter some backwoods and find terrible fates at the hands of some hillside hicks/mutants. Its basically horror movie Americana, if your in the backwoods, then you are also within five miles of a murderous killer, almost certainly one with a red neck. Tucker and Dale is all about spinning that on its head, reversing the expectations. The backwoods rednecks are the heroes, and they are just trying to enjoy the good life in a summer home by a lake.


Of course the necessary truck full of teens arrives and think they are creepy killers right off the bat. When one of the girls almost drowns, Tucker saves her and brings her back to their cabin, leading the teens to believe they are going to kill her. They then begin hilariously disastrous rescue attempts, which always end in their own deaths. Teens hurl themselves into wood-chippers due to mistimed tackles, impale themselves on branches while running away, and shoot themselves because guns are confusing.

"Officer, these kids have been killin' themselves all over my property!"

It all culminates in a very fun reveal you would expect in a movie like this, "my god, I'm related to the killer!," style moment. The most aggressive teen becomes our disfigured killer in the final moments, and its up to our redneck heroes save the girl. The writing is witty and filled with little nods to the forefathers of the genre, the deaths are all hilarious and well done, and the pacing is spot on.


This movie loves the genre, and it shows. Its a brilliant horror comedy, and its damn well worth your time to watch. Check it out.

More to it then a lesbian sex scene.

Black Swan made a great deal of noise this last award season, and for good reason what with Darren Aronofsky directing it. Tricking everyone by calling itself a psychological thriller instead of a horror film, it took everyone by surprise. First of all, this movie is incredibly beautiful. The cinematography is masterfully done, every scene is composed in just the right ways, and draws exactly what it needs out of you.


On some levels, I love Black Swan as much as I do for personal reasons. The anxiety and paranoia that comes with passion can be terrifying. The need to do one thing perfectly can be all consuming, and the breakdown of reality can be subtle and damaging. Then you add in the outside world, the pressures of family, the scrutiny of those better then you, and the fear of being replaced can tear you apart at the seams. The movies subtle growth from merely unstable to unhinged when it comes to our protagonist is well done to say the least.

Those of you with anxiety and sleep disorders know how scary this can be.

Minor background objects distort at first, and soon you and the star are both unsure if what you just saw was real or not. By the end you don't even know which characters are real, what has actually happened, or just how sick this drive is making our protagonist. With light touches of the surreal and more then a few toes dipped in the outright horror pool with mocking pictures and paintings pushing our heroine deeper into madness, its a trip of a movie.


Of course all this self destruction builds to a head, and we end with the strangest production of swan lake you could imagine. I love Darren Aronofsky, so I of course suggest this to anyone who likes the stranger end of the movie spectrum, where your never quite certain whats going on.

She must be, like, so high.

I will now resume being forever tired and trying to keep my head above the water. For more reviews and the full list of movies: The 150 Days of Halloween.

150 Days of Halloween: Burke and Hare, The Crazies, Frontier(s), Evil Dead 1 and 2

One day everything will smooth out, and this will get updated once a day again. I look forward to those days everyone. I really do. I'll be doing some horror movie effects this weekend for a short film, which I will hopefully get to post up here sometime after its done. So that is both exciting and preemptively exhausting for someone who can barely get the energy to watch a movie these days.

Anyway, lets hop right into speed reviewing some movies, shall we?

How can you not want to watch this?

First we have a surprise edit to the list in the form of Burke and Hare. Why did this replace a movie? Because I wanted it to, that's why! Also I couldn't find the movie originally meant to be watched, so whatever. Burke and Hare is John Landis' newest movie, unlike the other adaptation of the duo's story, Landis' version is much more of a black comedy. So not really horror, but still Halloween appropriate. Landis' is of course someone we will be seeing again, since An American Werewolf in London is a personal favorite and is also on the list.

I loved it, to be right up front about it. I have always loved Landis' sense of humor, and its here in all its blacker aspects for us to enjoy. Death and dismemberment are served up part droll and part slapstick, with mortality being close to meaningless in the world presented. The upper class of the medical world fight for cadavers to further the sciences, the poor scramble over one another to make enough survive, and out two heroes land right in the middle of it. A market exists, and they intend to supply the demand for bodies, at first via happy accident, and then by murder.

This was my first career choice too.

If you like black comedy, then jump in and have a good time. Simon Pegg is always great, and that remains true throughout the experience. The hapless killers stumbling through the profession always delivers, and Tim Curry waltzes on screen to saw off feet from time to time. You can't lose.

Now with 90% more people killing.

You may recall that I reviewed The Crazies earlier. Well this is the remake. Reread my first review but delete everything about the drama regarding a cure, politics, and the inner workings of the government and military. You now have a very short and boring movie, right? Well, the remake fixes that by filling all this new space with murder. Murder, murder, and more murder. You get all kinds of people dying in all kinds of ways, its a much more typical modern horror movie with gross out scares and jump scares.

Tension is only ever achieved by making you wonder just when a supporting character will snap, or keeping a character strapped to a table while a crazy guy with a pitchfork slowly impaled everyone else strapped to tables. To be honest I actually enjoyed this more then the original. Yes, its predictable and unoriginal, but more happens in surprising ways compared to the original. It holds your attention much more affectingly, and that is entirely due to the aging of the original.

Now that's just good makeup design.

What I can praise unconditionally is the makeup of the movie. They makeup and effects artists did an amazing job of making the crazies look infected, sick, and under intense strain. Muscles and veins bulge and eyes are jaundiced. They look like what you would image radioactive rabies patients would look like, and its an impressive sight to behold. If you want some cerebral contact with your movie, see the original. If you want blood, guts, and a bit of a faster pace, catch this remake.

What is going on in the subconscious of France?!

Frontier(s) is another French film, and it does nothing to alter my understanding of the French being depraved violence obsessed people. Well, that's not true, I don't see them that way, but they certainly love the brutality in their horror movies. This is another film with uncomfortably in your face violence, horrible things happening to people, and a cast of antagonists totally devoid of morality.

Fleeing a bank robbery they pulled at the height of civil unrest and violence in the streets of Paris, our heroes flee to the countryside of France. When this eventually gets remade into an American film, it would be like someone robbing a bank in Austin TX during civil unrest and winding up in the backwoods of middle America where movies tell us inbred killers are constantly waiting. Anyway, they arrive at a shitty little motel run by some creepy people. Can you guess what happens next?

Nazi's were cannibals?

Well, it turns out these people are all inbred Nazi's who worship their father, a surviving SS officer. They kill and eat anyone who enters the area and use any women who are genetically fair enough for breeding and brainwashing. Our heroes all die in terrible ways, and our female character endures mental and physical abuse in preparation for her new life. Once the last of her friends dies in terrible ways, she breaks free and begins killing everyone in an escape/revenge scenario.

Besides its unrelenting brutality, its fairly generic. Characters make terrible choices that get them killed or artificially extend the tension. Like our female hero, she kills a guy machine gun wielding baddie and leaves to reenter a maze of tunnels where more killers are looking for her. Notice how I didn't mention her taking that machine gun? That's because she didn't. She left it on the floor. Next to the dead dude. Of course she gets beaten up more, she left a loaded machine gun on the fucking floor, and not for the first time in the movie either, its like she has a gun allergy.

Example of terrible thing happening to good guy.

Anyway, if you liked the last several brutal French new wave horror films, then of course this if for you.

These movies are CLASSICS. You see them or you are just a bad person.

Evil Dead 1 and Evil Dead 2 I will cover in one go, because 2 is basically a remake of 1. Evil Dead is about a bunch of friends who use a cabin in the woods for a fun weekend. However, they find a mysterious book and a recording of someone reading from the book. This is of course The Necronomicon, one of the most important and dangerous books in the Lovecraftian word, and it releases evil and horrors upon the cabin.

Someone gets raped by a tree in a uncomfortable scene and everyone but Bruce Campbell died in terrible ways and return to make life harder on him. He eventually manages to succeed in killing everything and ending the whole mess.

"Hey bro!"

Which is why Evil Dead 2 is so great, because everyone arrives at the same cabin and the same book/recording disaster happens again. Its either a remake, or this was another dimension where similar problems plague cabins in the woods. The main differences here, however, are in tone. The first movie really tries to be a horror movie, and succeeds in some moments, but is ultimately goofy. For the second movie everyone arrived ready to make that same movie, but determined to have fun doing it.

The horror comes paired with slapstick moments. Tree rape is replaced with a sentient severed hand and a chainsaw replacement for the stump. Campbell is no longer a hapless hero, he is a normal man forced to become an ultimate bad-ass as he fights off the evil. His friends all die off way faster, leaving him with more screen time to react to horrors and monsters. Its just all around more satisfying an experience. It also sets the tone well for its sequel, Army of Darkness, which really embraces the comedy aspects of the series.

Read is autobiography for some really funny onset stories.

The Evil Dead series is required watching by anyone who even thinks the like horror. If you haven't seen them, then you are a bad person until you do.

Micro-reviews like this will be the standard for awhile, at least until I catch up to my list. Or a really crazy movie pops up and surprises me. In other news 30 Minutes or Less was way less funny then it should have been, even watching it in a less then sober state failed to really make it worth while. Cowboys and Aliens is kind of bland in many ways, if you could edit the thing down to just Daniel Craig being awesome and Harrison Ford making angry faces it would be more fun. The aliens were also living, walking plot holes in so many ways. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was actually a pretty competent movie, despite the fact that they mix up some of the science behind how virus and genetic therapy work, but whatever, still more fun then the other two movies combined. Winnie the Pooh is the best one I have seen in theaters out of these four.

Can you win this game? Try!

As always, here is that link. The 150 Days of Halloween. Oh, and we are also hosting a competition over at Nightmare Mode for a free Steam key to Space Pirates and Zombies. So head over to try and win a game.

150 Days of Halloween: Let Me In

So tonight was Let Me In, a remake of Let the Right One In, which in turn was an adaptation of the novel Let the Right One In, which is often marketed in America as Let Me In.

So full circle with the whole name thing.

An American remake of a foreign film? Will it be good? (Spoilers: No)

Some, including the director, have been known to claim that this isn't a remake of the Swedish adaptation. I wouldn't believe that after having seem this version, otherwise they just happened to cut the same material from the novel and just happened to cherry-pick cinematography from the original.

A common complaint of American versions of foreign films, voiced often by myself and others, is that many American directors will clearly value the source material, but will violently do away with any subtlety found in the original. This, and the loss of primary and peripheral character development, are both strong poisons beating in the heart of this film. Which is sad, because I love the novel by John Lindqvist and the Swedish version of the movie by Tomas Alfredson. Would have been nice to have a good American version as well.

Interestingly, they swapped the characters hair colors for the American version.

What do I mean by a lack of subtlety? Well, to avoid specifics and spoilers, there is a moment in the original film where Eli (Abby in the American version) makes a risky move to demonstrate vulnerability in herself and trust in Oscar (Owen in the American) which serves to cement the bonds between them. It's a beautiful moment in the film shadowed by the sinister undertones of what this means to a child compared to the audience. It is also largely unspoken, relying on the viewers to think about what they are seeing.

The American version plays out almost exactly the same way, except that the moment suddenly has a large influx of dialogue as Own explains to the audience just what this scene means. An amazing moment dies at the merciless hands of forced exposition. This of course happens throughout the film, and we can also thank the score for being in your face constantly as well.

"Oh god, I sense needless exposition coming."

As for character development, in the Swedish version of the film the victims of Eli's need to feed have lives we are privy to. We see them go about their days and nights, fight with lovers and drink with friends. We see lives fall apart because of the deaths that happen, and this drives characters into actions and situations that impact the rest of the film. It is a believable and most importantly, a relatable aspect of the film.

They are sadly faceless characters in the American version, we never see the effects of their deaths, and they have no direct repercussions on the rest of the film save for the addition of a soft spoken cop in the American version. Rather then have a grief stricken man, bereft of his friend and his lover to drive the plot, we get a cop who just exists to forward the plot. A man driven by a need to know what ruined his life can break into a home. A cop who lacks real investment who breaks into a home is just a bad cop who just violated the Fourth Amendment.

"Wait... why am I even here?"

Problems like those two weigh heavy on Matt Reeves' Let Me In, and they drag the film down into mediocrity. To be fair and give it some positive praise, Chloë Moretz does a decent job acting, as does Kodi Smit-McPhee. Although I must admit to being more partial towards Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson in the Swedish version. Dylan Minnette, who plays the bully that makes Owen miserable, does an amazing job of being a total douchebag. Seriously, I have never wanted to punch a kid in the face more then I have wanted to punch this kid. Just look at the kid! So, great casting on that one at least.

"Sometimes when I first wake up, I punch my mirror reflexively."

Let Me In tries, it really does, but it falters one to many times to be anything other the forgettable in the end. Another director could have done great things with the story, and had Lindqvist been involved with the screenplay, all of my complaints would have been addressed. Instead we had Matt Reeves directing and adapting the screenplay, and he isn't really well known for being a subtle director.

If your interested in a vampire movie that is truly good and does justice to the oldest stories in our collective culture, then do yourself a favor and skip Let Me In and find a good version of  Let the Right One In. HOWEVER, and this may sound strange, but skip the DVD rental and pirate a version that has the original theatrical subtitles. Why would I tell you to download this movie rather then rent? The DVD release was a botched rush with utterly terrible translations that destroy several scenes, while the theatrical subtitles do a wonderful job. So until the movie gets a proper DVD release, let the publisher know you won't stand for shoddy translations and avoid giving them your money.

If you really want to enjoy an amazing story, then find and read the book. It really is the best and most complete version of the story you can experience.

"Read me!"

Want to know about the other movies in the count down? Check out the list!