Profondo Rosso (1975)

Director: Dario Argento

Writers: Dario Argento (written by)

Bernandino Zapponi (screenplay)

Tagline: The maker of “SUSPIRIA” now takes you on a journey through the macabre, the bizarre. . . the unnatural.

Plot: A musician witnesses the murder of a famous psychic, and then teams up with a fiesty reporter to find the killer while evading attempts on their lives by the unseen killer bent on keeping a dark secret buried.

Cast: David Hemmings – Marcus Daly

Daria Nicolodi – Gianna Brezzi

Gabriele Lavia – Carlo

Macha Meril – Helga Ulmann

Eros Pagni – Supt. Calcabrini

Review:

Everyone who knows a little about Dario Argento and his movies, knows that the tagline of this one is retarded because Suspiria was made after Profondo Rosso.  But ofc Suspiria was so famous at it’s time that Profondo Rosso was even promoted in some countries like Suspiria 2, a sequel, but no matter. I’m not here to compare those 2, both of them are masterpieces which you must watch if you haven’t already.

Anyways, up to the review. One may ask what does exactly make Profondo Rosso so good? My first reply would be: music! Yeap, the soundtrack made by an experimental italian rock band that goes by the name Goblin. They were one of the best bands from their era and Argento relies on them very much in his movies. They are one more thing you must check out before you die.

My second reply would be: camera angles! Argento uses them in some strange ways which can’t be so easily explained, you have to see them for yourself. They are somehow deep, uncomfortable but you have the feeling that everything is so close to you. It is very hard to retell the emotions which followed my while I watched this.

My third reply would be:  story! Combine the awesome effective audio/video experience with a nice story which is believable and actually make some sense. And here you go, you have Profondo Rosso.  While watching it you’ll have a feeling that you are directly in the movie, it will suck you in!

I hope I interested you a little in watching this movie, I know my arguments may be a little too general or shallow but you’ll see for yourself if you give it a try.

My Rating: 10/10 … A must watch classic!

Lost Highway (1997)

Director: David Lynch

Writer: David Lynch

Barry Gifford

Plot: After a bizarre encounter at a party, a jazz saxophonist is framed for the murder of his wife and sent to prison, where he inexplicably morphs into a young mechanic and begins leading a new life.

Cast: Bill Pullman – Fred Madison

Patricia Arquette  – Renee Madison / Alice Wakefield

Balthazar Getty – Pete Dayton

Robert Loggia – Mr.Eddy / Dick Laurent

Robert Blake – Mistery Man

Review:

I will be very short on this one because I’m really sick and atm I got a headache which is killing me.

I decided to give David Lynch another chance after Eraserhead and it was a right thing to do. Lost Highway just blown me away, it has an interesting plot, a suspensful atmosphere and best of all, an excellent soundtrack.

It also had some of those intellectual moments like in Eraserhead but I didn’t mind them at all.

My Rating: 9/10 … Sorry for the short review, maybe I’ll edit it once I get over this illness.

Now for something completely different

This post won’t be a review.

This post will be a shameless self promotion.

As you may or not know. I do music as Drugs Bunny, it’s a Experimental/Electro project which has some Noise/Dark Ambient/Rhythmic noise/ influences.

Today I released my debut album entitled “Causa Sui”. It is made for a free download and you can do so here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?zkacnodwonz

Or here:

http://www.last.fm/music/Drugs+Bunny/Causa+Sui

Also you might want to check out the official myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/drugsbunnycro

The album was released through Xenologic Records.

www.xenorecs.com

Thank you for listening.

Cube (1997)

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Writer: Andre Bijelic

Vincenzo Natali

Tagline: Fear… Paranoia… Suspicion… Desperation

Plot: 7 complete strangers of widely varying personality characteristics are involuntarily placed in an endless kafkaesque maze containing deadly traps.

Cast: Maurice Dean Wint – Quentin

Nicole De Boer – Leaven

David Hewlett  – Worth

Andrew Miller – Kazan

Nicky Guadagni – Holloway

Review (spoilers):

The thing that I appreciate the most is it’s genuine idea! A group of stranger locked in a giant maze with booby traps! Hell yeah! Bring it on!

But the perfomance of this idea is another thing.

The movie itself starts with a great scene where you see that a man named Alderson (played by Julian Richings) is trapped inside this wierd room and is looking for an exit. But after he enters another room he is suddenly killed by some trap. We are introduced to the cube.  Upon that we are now being introduced by our characters one by one, total of six survivors. Through the whole movie we don’t learn nothing important about their everyday lives nor their characteristics. Every act and move they do, they do in anger or in desperation.  But somehow I felt sorry for them and want them to survive this menace.

They soon try to find out an exit from this maze but are constantly being pulled back by their own problems and anger.  So till the end, almost all kills were made by the mad cop Quentin, not by the maze, which disappointed me cuz I expected more booby trap solving and dying while doing so. After a half a hour or so the movie becomes boring and repetitive. All those ideas which were actually pretty good till now brought us nowhere because I had a felling I am rewatching the same scenes, over and over again.

Now something little about the maze itself. No one knows what is it, where was it built nor what is it’s purpose nor such things are revealed through he movie. So it’s all up to your own imagination to try to describe it and it’s purpose. There are some quotes from the movie which could explain the Cube’s “attitude” but the overall dialog is bad and sometimes cheesy.

But the atmosphere in this movie is great! I liked all the colors and the claustrophobic feeling they have. Masterfully done!

All in all, this movie isn’t bad, far from that, but it just failed some very good ideas. It could have been much better.

My Rating: 6/10 … Somehow average but still watchable.

Carrie (1976)

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Lawrence D. Cohen (writer)

Stephen King (novel)

Tagline: You were warned never to push Carrie to the limits. Now you must face the evil consequences.

Plot: A mousy and abused girl with telekinetic powers gets pushed too far on one special night.

Cast: Sissy Spacek – Carrie White

Piper Laurie – Margaret White

Amy Irving – Sue Snell

William Katt – Tommy Ross

Betty Buckley – Miss Collins

Review (spoilers):

Carrie is just another classic movie which I didn’t like.  Well, it is little better than other “classics” which I reviewed but not good enough.

So let’s get started. This is the famous adaption of a famous book written by a famous writer, Stephen King! I haven’t read the book yet nor I’m actually really interested in doing so but never mind, let’s continue. This is a story about a troubled girl with telekinetic powers which is molested by everyone, her school mates, some of her teachers and even her mother. She eventually somehow gets invited to go the prom with one of the boys from her class, Tommy Ross.  He was forced in doing this by his girlfriend, her real reasons are never fully revealad but we get the feeling that she is feeling bad for doing bad things to Carrie. At the prom, one other girl throws a bucket of swine blood on Carrie and this didn’t go really well. Carrie goes on a rampage and kills everyone. The end.

I somehow realize why is this movie so popular and classic. The scene where she is killing everyone is very famous for a reason. It is very dark, doomy and creepy. You somehow feel her power as you look into her penetrating eyes while she is covered in blood. It is very, very, very disturbing. And also the scenes after the mass killing were nicely done. The last half an hour or so is what actually makes this movie pretty good. So why didn’t I like this movie?

First 60 minutes of the movie make that problem. They are boring. As you see in the tagline and in the plot of the movie everything is directed to the ending, like no one cares about the whole movie, just the ending. So if you ask me, the synopsis could just be: “Nothing happens, then she kills them all”.  So in the first part of the movie, pre-mass killing part, we are introduced to Carrie and the molesting which she goes through everyday. I found this to be overly unreal, it was going ok until her mother shows up, then everything goes downhill. I just couldn’t get into her Bitchy Control Freak character, it was childish and hard to watch. It wasn’t hard to watch because it was wannabe disturbing but because the stupidity and the overall feeling of the plot and the Mother’s character didn’t make almost no sense.

Also through the first part of the movie, Carrie’s powers should have been made a little more scary with a gloomier tone put to them.

This movie has some high school relationships which were done poorly, if you want some of those, rent high school musical rather because this ones were pretty unnecessary.

My Rating: 5/10 … An average grade for an average movie. If you are interested in this one do yourself a favor, just skip to the last half an hour of the movie and watch. Too bad the rest of it isn’t so good.

Eraserhead (1977)

Director: David Lynch

Writer: David Lynch

Tagline: In Heaven Everything Is Fine.

Plot: Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.

Cast: Jack Nance – Henry Spencer

Charlotte Stewart – Mary X

Allen Joseph – Mr. X

Jeanne Bates – Mrs. X

Judith Roberts – Beautiful Girl Across The Hall

Review:

Actually, there isn’t much to say about this movie because it has no plot. Yeap, that is true, the script of it was 21 pages long. So what makes it worth watching? My answer would be: nothing but then I wouldn’t look like an intellectual. Let me explain furthermore:

This movie is made of random images who don’t make any sense nor are connected much to each other but it’s still “art”. I once read a comment from some guy who said: “I wonder how much shit can David Lynch put in his movies and it would still be called art”.  This pretty much sums it all up.

So why is it all popular? Why is it called good? Why is it the classic of the genre? First of all, try to imagine me writing this review in a different way. Writing how the movie was brilliant and awesome, trying to explain to stupid masses. Wouldn’t I look cool and intellectual? I bet I would.  But, actually that movie is dull and stupid, I don’t like the whole “intellectual” and “you have to love it” feeling about it. And I don’t like all the individual attempts that try to find some deeper story behind it.  Just not my cup of tea.

The good side of the movie is the atmosphere which is very good on some parts and worth watching. Too bad the absence of plot and the whole intellectual feeling makes the overall impression so bad. There are also some disturbing scenes which I found enjoyable. Anyways, I recommend the movie for everyone so you could see some original ideas (which unfortunately failed) and the whole atmosphere. Hope you will find it to be much better than I did.

That’s the whole review, I’m out of ideas for this one.

My Rating: 4/10 . .. It had huge potential, Too bad it is so crappy.

Diary Of The Dead (2007)

Director: George A. Romero

Writer: George A. Romero

Tagline: Shoot the dead.

Plot: A group of young film students run into real-life zombies while filming a horror movie of their own.

Cast: Michelle Morgan – Debra Moynihan

Joshua Close – Jason Creed

Shawn Roberts – Tony Ravello

Amy Ciupak Lalonde – Tracy Thurman

Joe Dinicol – Eliot Stone

Review (spoilers):

This movie is RETARDED.  This 4 words can simply sum up my whole review but I’m kinda bored right now so I’ll tell the whole world why is this movie retarded.  First thing is the tagline. One of the taglines for the movie ( as seen on the poster ) is “Where will you be when the end begins?”. When you have some combination of the words “end” and “beginning” on the movie poster you just know it’s going to suck. I also think that Romero knew that this movie is retarded while he was shooting it. ( oh yeah – we have another tagline which says : “shoot the dead”, it is almost as retarded as the end/beginning one ).

The other retarded thing in this movie are the characters. How so you ask? Because there are so god damn many of them! And none of them is important, none of them dies, they are all just walking piles of cliche shit.  I didn’t remember any of their names or their personal life, they are just so unimportant. So here are our characters:

1. The Geek – you always have to have a geek in sucky movies so he can solve trivial problems which other character can’t because they are retarded. The irony is that he didn’t solve any problem in this movie, he made me a problem because I had to watch him through the whole movie

2. The Old And Wise Man Who In One Point Of The Movie Shares A Little Of His Wisdom To Others – Oh yeah! He had an interesting story to tell us all which I can’t quite remember.  Honestly, who the fuck is this guy? Why is he hanging out with other characters all the time?

3.  A Likeable Main Character Who Is Actually A Dipshit – The name says it all. He is holding the camera all the time and just shooting everyone being killed by zombies and doesn’t help them at all. This ain’t a social satire as someone may think, it’s retarded.

4.  Stupid Sexy Blonde – You can’t have a movie without one, can you? Too bad this one doesn’t die in this movie but simply lefts the rest of the group in a dramatic scene. Retarded isn’t it?

5.  The Main Female Character Who Eventually Finds Her Inner Strength – Blargh.

6. The Badass – Oh yeah! He is only one holding the gun! Beware of the badass!

7. The Mummy – This character is dressed as a mummy and is only seen at the beginning and the end of the film. At the end he is still dressed as a mummy, just like in the beginning. Apparently Romero didn’t want him to change his clothes cuz in the end we couldn’t recognize that he is the mummy playing guy from the beginning.

8. Amish Guy – The best guy in the whole movie, too bad he’s total cameo is like 25 seconds.

There are much more characters which I don’t want to speak about. Mostly those who are here just for few seconds and they dramatically die so we should symphatise with them. Boohooohoooo, a stupid not needed characters who I knew nothing about just died. I’m feeling so sad.

I don’t want to go through the plot because there is no plot, just random wtf situations which don’t make any sense.

For an example:

The Main Female Character Who Eventually Finds Her Inner Strength gets attacked her by her zombified brother in her family house. She panics, shrieks, no one helps her, two guys just tape the whole thing we their cameras until The Old And Wise Man Who In One Point Of The Movie Shares A Little Of His Wisdom To Others shoots a bow into her brother’s head. She can’t stop screaming so she runs down the hallway, opens a door from one room, closes the door than return to the room where she got attacked. Wtf?

Oh yeah, we also have a boring part of the movie where they all group with some badass gangsters or something. In that part is nothing actually happening.

The most revolutionary thing in this movie was the camera taping and you see all the movie through the eyes of the camera. An effect that was also used in movies like Rec and Cloverfield. Too bad that the effect was so retarded in this movie.  There is also one more stupid scene I just have to write here:

The guy is taping with his camera, we see everything through his eyes. Ok.  In front of him there is a guy walking. Suddenly, from nowhere, comes a zombie and attacks the guy in the front. The camera guy is apparently disinterested and apathetic cuz he normally says: watch out.  Result: the guy in gets bitten.  The plot holes in this scene are just huge! Why didn’t the zombie attacked the camera guy first because he was closer to him, why didn’t the camera guy yell out something or why didn’t he helped his friend? Answer to this questions is simple: Because this movie is retarded.

My rating : 3/10… There is nothing more to say I guess.

Død snø (2009)

Director: Tommy Wirkola

Writer: Stig Frode Henriksen

Tommy Wirkola

Tagline: Ein Zwei Die

Plot: A ski vacation turns horrific for a group of medical students, as they find themselves confronted by an unimaginable menace: Nazi zombies.

Cast:

Vegar Hoel – Martin

Stig Frode Henriksen – Roy

Charlotte Frogner – Hanna

Lasse Valdal – Vegard

Evy Kasseth Røsten – Liv

Review ( Spoilers ) :

I watched this movie some time ago and I can’t actually remember every character or detail that occurred in it but I still remember the general plot and some memorable scenes.

A group of friends go to a ski vacation where they meet a strange guy who tries to warn them about some frozen nazis & some other bullshit. He has the classic role in horror movies of an old wise man who somehow knows what will happen to those unfortunate kids but somehow can’t save himself from the same fate.  Soon after warning the group he dies. Friends react to his warnings with alcohol and sex.  How unmature of them!

The first thing I liked about this movie are spoken references to other horror classics like  the Evil Dead serial. They even have a horror movie freak, some fat guy who gets laid with a hot chick in an outdoor bathroom, that was one of those memorable scenes I talked about earlier.  Following the sex scene, the nazi zombies attack and all hell breaks loose.  Upon that, there is no much plot to discuss.

As you can see, this isn’t a deep intellectual movie that is based on a complex plot.  It’s just a gory comedy in which you’ll see some zombies, oops, pardon me, nazi zombies get their asses kicked.  When I heard the plot synopsis for this movie I thought all my wishes came true. I mean, zombies are one thing, but nazi zombies! God damn!

The main problem with this movie is that people who watch it don’t realize that they are actually watching a comedy rather than a horror movie. Ofc, there are few scenes which you could call scary but the overall feeling of the movie isn’t.  There are some scenes that were so funny I had to pause the movie so I could laugh my ass off in peace than continue after that. The most hllarious situations were:  A zombie kills the fat guy and after some screaming another guy says:  ” I said we should go to Sunny beach!”. Also I found very funny when that guy was bitten so he amputed his hand, after he did so, a zombie attacks from snow and bites his leg. Fuck yeah! And ofc the transformation of that same guy from a doctor who can’t stand blood to a fearless zombie killer!

This movie is also very gory. We have blood spilling everywhere, entrails falling out, a zombie with his bowels tied to a tree, some chainsaw situations and similar. If you are a gore freak you’ll find this movie very appealing to you.

Because this movie doesn’t have a particular plot you just don’t know in which direction it will take you.  The characters ( except the old wise guy ) have no famous cliches as characteristics so they seem real and believable.  I had no problems with this movie being in Norwegian, on the contrary! I’ll have to check out more independent movies like this one because it was a great surprise!

In the end everyone from the group dies so that was also a nice surprise for me! Director didn’t want to spare noone and they all die in a brutal way! Great.

My Rating:  9/10 … If you find nazi zombies packed in horror gore comedy to be somehow awesome,  this movie will suit you. I didn’t gave it a 10/10 rating cuz the movie could have had some  more plot explanations in it, like how are the zombies frozen, why are they recently coming back to life, etc. But no matter, this movie will anyway give you a 90 minutes of pure fun.

28 Days Later (2002)

Director: Danny Boyle

Writer: Alex Garland

Tagline: His fear began when he woke up alone. His terror began when he realized he wasn’t.

Plot: Four weeks after a mysterious, incurable virus spreads throughout the UK, a handful of survivors try to find sanctuary.

Cast:

Alex Palmer – Activist

Bindu De Stoppani – Activist

Jukka Hiltunen – Activist

David Schneider – Scientist

Cillian Murphy – Jim

Review(spoiler):

In the beginning we have a strange sort of virus which has infected some monkeys.  An activist group of some sort enters the laboratory with those monkeys with an intention to save them or whatever? I didn’t actually care about those screaming bastards and found no compensation for them, it was an irritating scene, after one monkey escapes he bites a person. The end? Unfortunately not.

Now we follow a guy named Jim Who suddenly wakes up from a long coma in which he has been for an unknown period of time. After he exits the hospital he finds out that the whole city is deserted. He aimlessly wanders around it picking up money & stuff. That is the only good scene in the whole movie because we have a nice view of what would it be to be feel/or be alone on the world, the ideas from “last man on earth” are clearly visible here, the mood & the soundtrack are nice, everything is in it’s place, too bad that this is the only good atmosphere we will be watching, the rest is just shitty.

After being chased by infected (who look like zombies but they can ran – no big difference to me but we will call them infected just to please those die hard horror fanatics) from a church Jim teams up with few survivors who tell him what is actually happening (that dialog is filled up with all that apocalypse zombie movie cliche and all that survival bullshit). The tension is slightly falling now but it still seems like it will be a good movie.

Jim now wants to check out if his parents are still alive (although he knows they are dead) and guess what!? Those survivors agree to help him??! What the? I mean, that lady explained a little while ago that every man is here for himself(if I can remember correctly, it’s been a while since I watched it), why suddenly help some bastard to find his parents (which you see the first time in your life) who are already dead? It’s unrealistic. But no matter.

Well in that dead parent group we lose 1 guy from our survival party. From the beginning it was obvious that the poor guy was only cannon folder and he will eventually die and we should feel no remorse for him. Bah. Anyway…I’ll skip some parts because they are boring.

Now our new party is Jim, the main female character, I forgot her name, some new girl and new girl’s father. They are trying to find some military base. After shitloads of zombie movie  cliche like “kill him, he isn’t your family member anymore!” we are in the military facility with some god damn horny soldiers.

As we move more towards ending we less know what’s going on. First the soldiers want the party to join them than they want to rape the girls, than they want to kill Jim , than Jim wants to kill them by using the infected, than everyone kill everyone the survival party vs the soldiers vs the infected etc. It sounds like a god damn fucking soap opera to me.

Well, after all the movie has a happy ending (Who would guess that?!?!).

My rating: 5/10… The movie sux, it is boring as hell, it looks like some soap opera with love/hate stories etc. , and it is horribly overrated 2. I was bored  even by thinking about it while writing this review.  Another movie horribly overrated.

Dog Soldiers (2002)

Director: Neil Marshall

Writer: Neil Marshall

Tagline: Six soldiers. Full moon. No chance.

Plot: A routine military exercise turns into a nightmare in the Scotland wilderness.

Cast:

Sean Pertwee – Sgt. Harry G. Wells

Kevin McKidd – Pvt Cooper

Emma Cleasby – Megan

Liam Cunningham – Capt. Ryan

Thomas Lockyer – Cpl. Bruce Campbell

Review (spoilers):

In the beginning of this movie we have 2 campers who are being killed just before sex(famous cliche anyone?) but the scene was done fine. It gets our perfectly in the mood and we see it will be bloody and gory, fine with me. After that we have a special unit training mission in which we are introduced to Pvt. Cooper and Capt.Ryan and we see there is a rivalry between them. I must admit I laughed my ass off during that scene. It went something like this:

Capt. Ryan: – Congratulations Cooper, you were the best, blahblahblah, now kill this dog!- and points at the nearby barking dog.

Pvt. Cooper’s expression and everything is like wtf?!

Yes, it is completely random and I’d say funny.

Back to the plot: After 4 months (after being expelled from the special ops) Pvt. Cooper has come back to the same place (some woods) with his new military crew on a training mission. They soon fine badly injured Capt. Ryan and learn that his men are slaughtered. Suddenly they are being attacked by some creatures and in their attempt to escape they cross paths with Megan, a biologist who know what attacked them – Werewolves! They drive into some house where they have to survive the night.

Where was Neil Marshall my whole life?! I find his horror movies to be masterpieces! Too bad he only has 2 of them, hope he will do some again soon (fingers crossed). Anyways the movie is brilliant, not as scary as The Descent but it does have it’s brutally funny parts.  Everyone who watched will remember the “Sausages” scene and the dog biting Sgt. Wells scene. I found them to be hilarious.

Actors fit their roles just perfectly. You can picture them as everyday regular guys who just haven’t been so lucky so they missed the ball game and have to fight a bunch of werewolves now. The dialogs are also very nice, there is no fancy, Hollywood speech but slang. I think those elements make it realistic enough for everyone to enjoy.

There is blood everywhere, as I can remember there were some really nice kills and situations out there worth mentioning. I liked how Spooni died, his fight scene also made me smile. He was fist punching a 6 feet werewolf!

The movie is really good! The only things I didn’t liked about it are some parts of the plot which didn’t actually “get”. I should watch it at least one more time to fully understand everything. Ryan wanted those soldiers come on a training mission here so they can be a bait for the werewolves but Megan was a werewolf from the beginning so she screwed them over or whatever? Blah.

I also liked how were the werewolves done. The effects were good, they were pretty realistic but not really scary but that doesn’t matter very much.

My rating:… 9/10 Like werewolves? Sick of stupid cliche and fancy dialogs and just want something different? Dog Soldiers is a movie for you.