Staring: Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Jamie Campbell Bower, Timothy Spell
Rating: 3.5 meat pies
Review: The standardised story of this movie, when I first heard it, was rather impressive. Psychotic man poses as barber, kills customers and partner cooks them into pies and is the claim of the town. What could be more amusing? When I heard this was a musical, the whole idea of the Sound of Music plus what wuold be subdued gore was a turn off. But now that I have sat and watched it, I discover it really is the Sound of Music mixed with Blade. There is a lot of blood and psychosis and I cannot pass up the comedy in some of the songs. Like what sort of a pie an occupation makes. Polititian pie is served with a doily because it is very oily.
I had to give credit to Tim Burton on this film, as it really is the height of his darkness in films with flatout blood shed.
I also find it highly amusing that at least 3 villains from the Harry Potter movies are here. Each as dark as the next, and some just as mad.
I had to knock off a point for our ‘hero’ Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower) who is searching for the daughter of Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp). He is so goddamned emo and wangsty and brainless that I have every compulsion to step into Sweeney Todd and knock his block off myself. He just doesn’t get it.
Mrs.Lovett (Helen Bonham Carter) had to be my favorite character however, and Helen played her perfectly, because she is good at playing women with a screw loose. Ironic, since in the last Tim Burton film she appeared in (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) she was probably the one with her bolts in the most. But her story throughout the movie is the most well constructed. You meet her and she is really just a bored goth cooking pies with a song and a big FAIL from the nonexistant OHS inspectors. But with Sweeney Todd to inspire her, she becomes a hardened woman with a cunning plan to keep the man of her dreams. At one point in the movie, you see that she has quite normal dreams of a life of peace and happiness. What she gets is a hot ticket to the hellhouse, which is enough of a clue to work out her fate. But she also demonstrates a motherly side (if you could call it that) for Toby (Ed Sanders), the kid hired to help run the place.
I also took a half point off because of the surprise twist at the end. It is a well rehursed and used story point of what one does and doesn’t say andwhat I say is different to what you understand. But I can’t reveal the full detail. And also what happens to Toby is not totally expected either. He can’t become that hardened within a few hours of realisation. But then again, maybe he could. I’m not a psychologist.
Staring: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Martin Stephens, Michael Gwynn
Rating: 3 Hypnotic Eyes
Review: “Beware the stare that will paralyze the will of the world.”
Ah, good old black and white horror, where it is more based on suspence than psychotic bloodshed. In fact, for the small amount of human life lost, there isn’t a lot of detail. Psycho had more blood shown.
In short, the movie begins with the UK township of Midwich blacking out for hours, and any living force that steps within the area immediutely sacumbs to unconciousness. After three hours, the town returns to normal and the army cannot find out why this has happened. What has happened is that a number of women, including virgins, are now pregnant with fast growning babies. The end result; ten children are born on the same day. These children grow and mature quickly. The local scientist conducts an experiment, showing one of the children how to get into a chinese puzzle box, then shows all the other kids the box, and they can get into it with minimal difficulty. This deduces all their minds are linked, so whatever one learns, they all learn, like a collective consciousness without emotion.
It becomes clear that these kids are not safe, because the eventually display a number of advanced powers, like being able to read the frontal cortex (our immediute thoughts) and they can control people. After a few deaths, it is becoming more apparent that these children of mass intelligence and absolutely no emotion are dangerous. They agree to being iscolated on provision their education is continued.
It becomes obvious that these kids are but one of many groups that are similar. Of about 7 other groups planted across the world, only one other survived in Russia, and then they were wiped out by a missle launch on the town, without warning or survivors.
How do you kill a bunch of kids who can read your mind and control your impulses and actions? Watch the movie and find out.
One point came off because the passage of time in the first part of the movie is not very evident, and that confused me quite a bit. Afterwards it is easy to tell because of the way the child is growing up. But beforehand I was getting very confused. A scene change could mean either an hour or a month had passed, and you didn’t really know until halfway through the scene.
Another point off because the scientist is not as bright as he claims, and neither are the kids. It became obvious to me in a number of ways on how to get rid of them, and why it took so long for the lead characters to work it out is beyond me. And the kids should have known what their own weaknesses were and found a way around it. But no, mass intelligence in movies is usually accompanied by a mass egotism and over-estimation of one’s position. They’ll learn one of these days.
All up, this was a good film and I recommend it for a good midday viewing. Because, hey, you aren’t going to lose sleep on it.
Credit given to the effect of making the kids eyes as freaky as they did. The deepness and darkness of their eyes normally is caused by certain lighting, and the editing crew did all the work to add the hypnotic stare. A lot of it is cut and paste, and it is obvious in one scene, where two of the children are using their powers. The girls hair is moving in the breaze, the boys is not.
Saring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Keith Wayne, Karl hardman
Rating: 4 reanimated corpses
Review: “They’re coming to get you Barbara.” Never before have those words been used in jest to turn around and be literal less than two minutes later.
I first came across this movie in the Medium episode ‘Bite Me’ where Alison DuBois dreams she is in different scenes of the movie Night of the Living Dead. The basis of it seems to be that people are stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere with zombies all over the place trying to get in. Sound familiar? This, in its raw concept, was the preincarnated form of Resident Evil 1 (playstation video game, now popular game series and movie to boot). This takes the idea right back to its original plot point. No traitors (specifically) amoung the people, and no science lab underneath the house. Just you vurses them, and that is how it should be.
The insodent begins (before the movie) with a satellite that was sent to orbit Venus returning with a weird radiation that now poisons the east 1/3 of the USA.
Barbara (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Russel Streiner), meanwhile, are visiting their fathers grave, blissfully unaware that anything is otherwise wrong. Johnny starts teasing Barbara because she is still afraid of cemetaries, even as an adult. Johnny is following her, calling ‘they’re coming to get you Barbara’ when they are jumped by an actual zombie. Barbara does what any brave woman does… lets her brother die and stands there watching. She finds her way to an abandoned house, with one zommbie in persuit. She then meets Ben (Duane Jones) on the run. He boards up the house while she goes into shock and becomes superflus to the plot. As it turns out, the house was owned at one point, by a now half eaten woman at the top of the stairs. The house is not so abandoned either, by the young couple and family of three holed up in the basement.
So for the next hour we are handed the standardised plot points and information dumps common with the movies of the era. The end result is that we learn about the probe, how to kill these things (shot or blunt force trauma to the head or set them on fire) which becomes the slow undoing of everybody at once.
And unlike Resident Evil after it, we actually get to see, in black and white detail, zombies eating people. Although the props suggest it is probably cooked cow meat on the bone. Whatever works.
Actress Marilyn Eastman also proves the power of duplicity. She is a frantic mother/wife within the house, and a zombie eating a bug off a tree without.
Of course the government has acted, and a team of people is hunting all the zombies down. So our last heroes end up waiting for them while zombies are busting in through the windows and trapping the last hero in the cellar. Now, the zombies are a bit intelligent. If they cannot get the food, they will give up or retreat at daylight. Whichever one it is, is not made clear. And our sole survivor went through all that just to… can’t say. Hence why I have not said who has died and who hasn’t. But the ending was a bigger surprise than the whole movie concept in build up.
Now, I took a point off. This is not because the characters didn’t listen to me, because if they did, they would survive. I took it off because of the plain stupidity in what screwed over their major escape plan. Seriously, stupidness! However, this movie has made it to the top ten list, at number 7. An original survival horror film. The only reason it did not take position 6 is because, while both movies are very similar, this movie had information dumping, Splinter did not.
Staring: Andrew Keir, Valerie Leon, James Villiers, Mark Edwards
Rating: 3 ancient relics
Review: One horror plot that I always seem to miss out on is the one about Mummys. I mean, ‘The Mummy/Returns’ was great and all that, but it is hardly the original of the idea. The only one I have een part of is ‘The Awakening’ which had a very freaky intro and a very bland opening half hour, so I am inclined to believe that the genra is highly under-used.
So when the opportunity came for me to actually get my teeth into some Mummy madness, I couldn’t pass it up. After all, it has to be better than some of the things I have been watching in the past while.
The plot of the story is based around a young woman who is born at the same time that her father, an archiologist, discovers the tomb of an ancient priestess. The destiny of this child and the priestess are interwoven. All the people upon the expedition take a relic each; a cobra, a jackel skull, a cat, a ruby ring and a hand that was severed from the dead priestess. The ring is given to the now adult Margaret (Valerie Leon) by her father (Andrew Keir) who is all too aware of his daughters’ destiny. His old collegue and now sworn enemy Corbek (James Villiers) also is aware of what is to happen. So as time goes by, Margaret and her boyfriend Tod (Mark Edwards) observe strange events taking place. Corbek convinces the priestess Teira, who is the spiting image of Margaret and can possess her, to go forth and resurect. So the relics are recovered and the ceremony performed.
This movie is not so much horror as antisipational build-up to an inevitable conclussion with only one obvious way out. What annoied me more than anything was that when the owners of the relics realised that the priestess was coming for them, that they didn’t just take the damned things and smash them to ribbons. It might mean the end of their lives, but at least it also means Teira isn’t being resurected to bring chaos uncontrolled upon the earth. After all, if her corpse can stay fresh for 3000+ years, I’d do whatever I could to stop her as well. But for this lack of brains on behalf of the protagonists, a point was removed.
And for the other point that was removed, it is for simply creating characters that have no guts. Only the main antagonist did, and he gloated forever and ever. But that’s villains. I took the point off because so much time and effort could have been saved at the beginning of the movie. When it was obvious that Teira was attempting to come back to life, why couldn’t SOMEONE just get a bottle of gasoliene and some matches? It wasn’t that tough. It smells bad, but surely that is a small price to pay to save the world?
So who survives? Well, one character does. But even we don’t know who it is. They’re wrapped up like a mummy.
Overall Top 10
1) Silent Hill (4.5) (Own)
2) The Color Purple (4.5) (Own)
3) The Frightners (4) (Purchase)
4) Shortbus (4) (Purchase)
5) The Addams Family (4) (Own)
6) Splinter (4) (Purchase)
7) Night of the Living Dead (4) (Own)
8) Mrs.Doubtfire (4) (Purchase)
9) The Skeleton Key (4) (Own)
10) Sleepwalkers (4) (Maybe Purchase)
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