We trudged up to West Palm Beach today for the first day of Horrorfest, the second annual weekend of horror movies “too scary to show in theaters”. We’d planned to see three movies: Unearthed, Deaths of Ian Stone, and Borderland. Unfortunately due to traffic, we missed Unearthed (the one I was really looking forward to). We walked right in as the lights were dimming for Deaths of Ian Stone which was kind of like Groundhog Day meets the Boogeyman. Ian Stone lives his current life one day at a time until his friends — really brood mates — come to kill him. See, Ian isn’t a human, he’s a “harvester” who feeds off the fear of humans. The movie starts out with utterly horrible camera work, enough to start churning my stomach, something that really hasn’t happened since g-force tests at Space Camp when I was 12. It got better about 15 minutes in thankfully, it was god awful. Almost as if they didn’t rent a steadycam on the first few scenes of the film. It turned into love-ghost-story but was well done overall, we both enjoyed it.
After that was the gory Borderland about a Santeria cult trying to relink Santeria with some ancient African practices to raise a demon. It’s got enough good stuff to make up for a fairly thin story, by “stuff” I mean dismembered limbs and assorted lopped off animal parts. I commented, more than once, that Sean Astin looked like he hadn’t showered since he left the shire years ago, he just grew facial hair in the meantime. See the movie and you’ll know what I mean. I loved this movie because it really fulfilled what I look for in a basic, dirty horror movie: animals and people dying, typically through losing body parts. It was awesome when “Papa” severed Rider Strong’s achilles tendon with a rusty machete and then bit out his tongue. Lots of blood and gore, thumbs up from me — not so much from Jess.
Tomorrow and Sunday bring 6 more movies and more money on gas. Hey, it’s only one time a year right?
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I did like it too! It’s just that my type of movie would be more likely to have Rider in a dress prancing around in a field full of bunnies, rather than both Rider and the bunnies getting brutally tortured.
Thumbs up from me too, even if it wasn’t my type of movie!