Showing posts with label Mutant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mutant. Show all posts

30 Jun 2012

Night of the Demon: Will's Review

I hate to rag on micro budget movies, getting a film finished and out there is no mean feat, but for some things there's no excuse; There are plenty of good actors who will work for guild minimum, and a coherent script costs no more to write than, say, Night of the Demon...

You see, the film starts at the end, and is told in flashbeck, a common enough method, only there are several flashbacks along the way - flashbacks within flashbacks, and while many of the scenes do not feature the main character (the one doing the flashing back) the sub-flashbacks almost all have no survivors, and in one case the guy doing the main story wasn't present when the nested (and witness free) flashback was recounted! So he is recounting the recounting  of a tail which no one could have known about and which he didn't even hear!


That might sound a bit nitpicky - and it might have been, but for the fact that the film is so disjointed that it is at times borderline incoherent. Sometimes chopping a back story into portions and telling out of order is an interesting way to have us share in a protagonist's confusion or gradual discovery, (Memento, A Serbian Film) or to hide an important fact until its reveal would be more dramatic (Sixth Sense) - here it's seemingly done randomly, as the entire back-story would have been better presented in one go as the films second act. It still wouldn't have been a great film (or even an good one) but it would have at least been easier to watch.

Spoilers follow, but I wouldn't recommend you sit through the movie unless you're some kind of freak with OCD that has decided he HAS TO watch the whole DPP list, so I wouldn't bother avoiding them:

Our focus is a group of anthropology students who are investigating reported Bigfoot sightings. It turns out that Bigfoot is real, and once raped a local woman, impregnating her with his mutant offspring. Her father, a priest who witnessed the rape, killed the baby, believing it to be of demonic origin. The woman has lived on her own in a cabin in the woods ever since, and seems to get used in some rape ritual carried out by her late fathers followers, who now worship the Bigfoot. Our students basically emotionally abuse this poor woman and exhume her child's grave(!), without giving it a second thought, until Bigfoot kills all but one of them. The survivor is declared insane.


Effects wise, the deaths are terrible, but the creature himself isn't too bad (for a film of it's age and budget):


It's so patchy and non-linear that it kind of defies review beyond this, So I present an equally patchy and non-linear collection of clips and comments:


Remember that they are in this woman's home:





"Nevermind" ???? NEVERMIND??? Really?


Bigfoot think's he's Jason now apparently 
(He uses an axe on a couple of occasions too):


Best Kill in the movie:
(also the best clip in VNAW history)

Mmmm, those clips make it look better than it is; sorry about that.

AVOID!

Body Count: 13
Boob Count: 1 pair
Dead Animal Count: 0
Most Memorable Kill: see above.


Please use the comments bellow only to comment on this post - to write your own review, please comment on the main post for this movie.

3 Mar 2012

The Funhouse - Will's Review

A fairly mainstream entry this week, distributed by Universal, and with creature makeup design by Rick Baker, this is NOT the kind of movie you expect to see sandwiched between  Cannibal Holocaust and Faces of Death. It has an innocuous enough title, and even the box art isn't particularly menacing (the wonderful deformed mouth of the theatrical poster is replaced with a jack-in-the-box that I don't think even appears in the movie).



If fact, the only thing that could possibly have red-flagged this movie to the puritans is the director - this is Tobe Hooper's 2nd entry on the list (after Week 18's Death Trap), but even that doesn't make sense as his most famous (and nastiest) work The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is conspicuous by its  inexplicable absence from the DPP list.

Still, here it is; so enough about why...

SPOILERS FOLLOW


Looking the film up online, you'll find it tends to get listed as a slasher, although I'm not sure there's enough actual slashing for it to qualify; that said the atmosphere is pure 80's slasher movie, so I'm willing to class it as one on those grounds.

Plot wise, 4 teens go to the carnival and decide, for reasons best known to themselves, that the funhouse (ghost train) would be a good place to spend the night, so they buy a ticket and bail out of the cars to get themselves locked in.

While inside, they peer down into the basement (how a traveling carnival has a basement to its rides I don't know) and see one of the ride operators pay the fortune seller for sex - except he finishes early (way early) and loses his temper (with fatal consequences) when she won't refund him.

Said ride operator, by the way, communicates in grunts and wears a pretty cool Frankenstein mask, which he refuses to take off even for his paid-for rumpy-pumpy. Predictably enough, when the mask finally does come off (while his father, the barker, is beating him for killing 'one of their own') he is hideously deformed.

I have a problem with this; if you are a carnival barker, and your son is a 2 nosed, gnarl toothed albino, why on earth would you cover that with a Frankenstein mask? He could preform his job just as well as-is, and have people assume it's a mask or (even better) teach him how to eat lightbubs or bite the heads off of chickens and stick him in the freakshow! It seems like to great of an opportunity to miss!

But no, his father dresses him up as a different freak and sets him to work loading people into funhouse cars... Whatever...

Anyway, the father realises that our teens have witnessed the murder, and so sets his son to work getting rid of the witnesses.

The monster makeup is, I have to say, disappointing; his 'real' face looks more like a mask than the mask he covers it with! I expect better from Baker, and can only assume that the budget didn't allow for much time or great materials.

The funhouse itself offers a nice claustrophobic setting, although it gets a bit limited after a while, and it might have been nice to see the action spill out into the carnival grounds.

All in all not a bad little movie if you like low-rent 80s slashers, not the best film we've seen so far, but far FAR from the worst!

Body count: 6
Boob Count: 1 pair (plus 3 more with nipples, but only nipples, covered)
Animal Body Count: 0
Most Memorable Death: Electrocution on screen, seizure in your living room!  


Please use the comments bellow only to comment on this post - to write your own review, please comment on the main post for this movie.