So Horrorfest’s over for us

November 11th, 2007 • chatter, movies
Tags: horrorfest, movies

And today wasn’t a total disappointment. We saw the last two movies we had on the list: Tooth & NailNightmare Man. Boy, was Tooth & Nail a let down. It had a somewhat star-laden of Robert Carradine, Michael Madsen, Vinny Jones, and Rider Strong (who died, again). It was a post apocalyptic movie set in Philadelphia and there are two kinds of people: foragers and rovers. Rovers are cannibals — and looked like any actor from a medieval movie — and foragers who were everyone else. It was 94 minutes of slow moving story and very little interest in the characters. all of whom except one had no back story. The only character with a back story was Neon (all the foragers are named after car models) and even then, hers was not terribly interesting. I want my $9.25 back for the movie.

Nightmare Man was, much to our surprise, the campy cheesy horror movie that I thought was missing from the line-up (Horrorfest 2006 didn’t have any) and it delivered on all levels. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, start to finish. It was very campy and cheesy and even had Tiffany Shepis of Troma fame as a somewhat major role in the movie. I’ll be buying this on DVD because it was that enjoyable. The story is a possession/revenge story that has a good twist at the end (and a cameo from Richard Moll!).

Top 3 favorite movies:

Borderland

Nightmare Man

Mulberry Street

Last day of Horrorfest

November 11th, 2007 • chatter
Tags: horrorfest, movies

Today is our last day of movies for Horrorfest and we’re only seeing two movies: Nightmare Man and Tooth & Nails.

We saw Mulberry Street and Lake Dead. The latter was just a boring incest/slasher flick that I’ve seen before and it was MUCH better the last time I saw it, and it was called Blood Ranch (yes a different movie). Lake Dead was a nice attempt but frankly was very predictable and boring. Mulberry Street was the night favorite for both of us. It was a virus outbreak/infection movie with a psycho twist. The story wasn’t very thcik but given that the movie takes place over 2 days, there’s not a lot of time for plot development and deep character interaction. It was a more sci-fi movie than a real horror movie but it was much better than the other two we saw.

Mulberry Street did everything right for me from the homemade/hi-8 look down to the bad camera angles and a good twist on the outbreak genre. A number of people in the theatre said they didn’t like the movie and wanted a refund but these are the same people that walked in 45 minutes after the movie started and missed the entire set up. These same people walked right out and walked into IMAX Transformers and walked right out because they’re looking for movies they don’t want to pay for.

I’m looking forward to the last two movies and this year we’ll have seen 7 of the 8, with Unearthed being the only one we haven’t seen. That’s better than last year when we only saw 4 of the original 8 movies.

Can’t wait till we go to the theatre in an hour or so.

just saw Crazy Eights

November 10th, 2007 • chatter
Tags: horrorfest, movies

3 movies down, 5 more to go. Crazy Eights is one of the psychological terror movies at Horrorfest and it was a let down. 85 or so minutes of Traci Lords shouldn’t be this boring!

Given the budget of this movie, I think they spent most of it on their cast and not on competent writers who can write a “ghost gets revenge” movie without a ton of plot holes or ended up leaving most of the important parts on the director’s cut.

Next up is Lake Dead, starts in 7 minutes!

Horrorfest, day 1

November 10th, 2007 • 1 comment chatter, movies
Tags: horror, horrorfest

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?