The 13 Best Horror Movies to Watch on Halloween

Halloween is the most fun holiday of the year. Candy, costumes, there's just a feeling in the air and if you can't enjoy the holiday spirit then you need to call the proctologist and ask them to remove the tree. One of the best things to do at this time of year is of course get together in small gatherings of friends. The question is, what do you watch? "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Halloween" have both been done to death and while movies like "Ernest Scared Stupid" and "Poultrygeist" are classics they'll also likely get you ostracized by your friends and possibly committed to a special facility.

So here is my own personal list of the 13 best horror movies to watch with your friends on Halloween.

13. The Monster Squad (1987)
Directed by: Fred Dekker
Starring: Andre Gower, Brent Chalem, Ryan Lambert, Michael Faustino
Plot: 12-year-old Sean Crenshaw and his best friend Patrick are die hard monster fanatics. Along with their friend Horace (nicknamed Fat Kid),junior high tough guy Rudy, Sean's kid sister Phoebe, and little Eugene they come together and talk monsters. But when Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Gill Man, and The Mummy come to their small town to get an amulet to control the world, Sean leads his friends into action to protect their town from the forces of evil. Taken from www.imdb.com.

It doesn't matter how old you are, you are never too old for "The Monster Squad." Picture if you will "The Goonies" meet the Universal Monsters. This is a movie that would never pass as PG now, it's a kid's movie that, much like the wolfman, has nards. Not to mention it's incredibly fun. It's bloody, it's rude, and it's one of the movies you loved as a kid that's stood the test of time.

12. Tremors (1990)
Directed by: S.S. Wilson
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross, Reba McEntire
Plot:A small town gradually becomes aware of a strange creature which picks off people one by one. But what is this creature, and where is it? At the same time, a seismologist is working in the area, she detects _tremors_. The creature lives underground, and can 'pop up' without warning. Trapped in their town, the town-folk have no escape. Taken from www.imdb.com.

Quite possibly one of the greatest monster movies ever is S.S. Wilson's "Tremors." The tale of subterranian monsters attacking a small town of colorful rednecks is nothing if not fun and memorable. Filled to the brim with one-liners, well-done gore effects, and memorable characters it helped to fully launch the careers of Kevin Bacon, Michael Gross, and Reba McEntire beyond what they had been at that point. It manages to be slightly scary but mostly just fun and enjoyable and perfect for a diverse crowd.

11. Dog Soldiers (2002)
Directed by: Neil Marshall
Starring: Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee
Plot: A squad of British soldiers on training in the lonesome Scottish wilderness find a wounded Special Forces captain and the carnaged remains of his team. As they encounter zoologist Megan, it turns out that werewolves are active in the region. They have to prepare for some action as the there will be a full moon tonight... Taken from www.imdb.com.

Before Neil Marshall was famous for "The Descent" and his glorified "Escape From New York" remake "Doomsday" he made a little film called "Dog Soldiers" about a group of British soldiers on a training exercise who run afoul of a family of werewolves. The film, heavily based on the Zulu military campaign, but played out like a meeting between "The Howling", "The Hills Have Eyes", and "Evil Dead." It's campy, it's gory, the werewolves look surprisingly good in fact there's high budget werewolf movies that haven't had werewolves this realistic looking *cough*"American Werewolf in London"*cough* It manages to inject enough humor into a very serious situation to make it one of the more fun werwolves. It doesn't concern itself with the quirks of being a werewolf, nor what it feels like to be one. It's a monster movie and once the action starts its only interrupted by brief periods to either be humorous or build tension. Not to mention Spoon (Darren Morfitt) is probably one of the most kickass characters in a horror movie ever.

10. Event Horizon (1997)
Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill
Plot: It is the year 2047. Seven years have passed since the mysterious disappearance of Event Horizon, a spaceship that was sent to explore the outer limits of our solar system. Now, it is the time for a rescue mission that will find the ship and bring back the survivors; if any... Taken from www.imdb.com. "Event Horizon" isn't a cheesy movie (with the exception of the character Cooper.) In fact this movie scared the ever loving bejeezus out of me, never have I actually been afraid to walk outside and get in my car to go home. It's equal parts "Alien", "Hellraiser", and "Doom" (the game not the movie) and indeed it does seem to channel a lot of the feel and atmosphere of Ridley Scott's most popular movie that isn't "Blade Runner." Laurence Fishburne manages not to be a complete doofus for once in his career and Sam Neill gives a typically wonderful performance, maybe even chaneling a bit of that good old Damien Thorne magic from his early days.

9. The Blob (1988)
Directed by: Chuck Russell
Starring: Kevin Dillon, Shawnee Smith, Jeffrey DeMunn
Plot: Remake of the 1958 horror sci-fi about a deadly blob which is the spawn of a secret government germ warfare project which consumes everyone in its path. Teenagers try in vain to warn the townsfolk, who refuse to take them seriously, while government agents try to cover up the evidence and confine the creature. Taken from www.imdb.com.

When I was little, "The Blob" (1958) was my favorite horror movie of all time. It was a wonderful movie and I was understandably worried about a remake of the movie. Fortunately what it lacks in Steve McQueen it makes up for in great special effects, gore, and genuine terror. Ignore the teenager struggling against the strawberry jello mould above, the effects in this movie are top notch. Sure you can clearly see that what you're watching is stop-go animation superimposed over the top of actual film prints but the stop-go animation is incredibly well done. This movie does for "The Blob" what John Carpenter did for "The Thing From Another World" The effects in this movie are on par with John Carpenter's the thing and between the haunting images of the blob shooting around after people and seeing people literally melted on-screen it's wonderfully rendered. It actually manages to make the blob terrifying and has just enough camp to elevate it to near masterpiece status.

8. House (1968)
Directed by: Steve Miner
Starring: William Kat, George Wendt, Kay Lenz
Plot: Roger Cobb is a author who has just separated from his wife. He moves into a new house and tries to work on a novel based on his experiences in the Vietnam War. Strange things start happening around him; little things at first, but as they become more frequent, Cobb becomes aware that the house resents his presence. Taken from www.imdb.com.

This movie deserves more credit than it gets. "House" is by no means a masterpiece, it's not "Jacob's Ladder" but it also doesn't try to be. It's a cheesy haunted house movie with a lot of bizarre creatures, doors that open into different worlds, and Norm from cheers shooting a big sickle-clawed hump-backed thing with a harpoon gun. The sequel is also noteworthy if for nothing more than a business card that a character hands out that lists his job title as "electrician/adventurer." "House" is a great deal of fun.

7. Slither (2006)
Directed by: James Gunn
Starring: Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henry, Michael Rooker
Plot: This blend of black humour and unnerving horror, with its nineteen fifties parodies pays homage to the great B-Movie Sci-Fi genre. Set in modern small town America, when an unsuspecting meteorite drops by and its tiny slug shaped parasitic pilot infects the local inhabitants, then all hell breaks lose, literally. Turning their infected hosts into Zombie type aliens, this is a battle of the fittest, this is the battle to save Mankind, this is pure B-Movie magic. Taken from www.imdb.com.

This was my vote for the best horror movie of 2006. It's a nice stroll down memory lane of the 80s hearkening back to everything form "The Blob", "Shivers", "The Thing", "Tremors", "From Beyond", and "The Evil Dead." The dialogue is always entertaining and the characters are all well fleshed out and likeable. It's a beautiful love note to campy 80s horror movies and is full of one-liners, memorable moments, and great special effects. Plus "Firefly's" Nathan Fillion is the main character.

6. Willard (2003)
Directed by: Glen Morgan
Starring: Crispin Glover, R. Lee Ermey
Plot: Willard is a social misfit who is made fun of by his co-workers. When he is squeezed out of the company started by his deceased father, his only friends become a couple of rats he's been raising at home. However, when one of the rats is killed at work, Willard goes on a rampage--exacting revenge by using his rats to attack those who have been tormenting him. Led by the unusually intelligent, and deadly rat, Ben, an army of rats descends upon the office, committing a series of grisley murders. Taken from www.imdb.com.

A remake of the 1970s film "Willard" that was based on the book "The Ratman's Notebook" it improves a great deal on the original film. Crispin Glover finally found a weird enough character to complement his jerky weird-as-hell acting style and indeed Willard Stiles was the character Glover was born to play. (I mean, other than Willy Wonka and The Joker, but we won't go into that now.) It's a beautifully stylized dark comedy that's both funny and creepy at the same time with great performances by Glover and R. Lee Ermey (in a complete change of pace for Ermey he plays a loud mouthed guy who yells and curses a lot) and Ben, the antagonist of the film is the creepiest rat I have ever seen. This is a great party film and just a great film in general, I can't reccomend this enough.

5. Murder Party (2007)
Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Chris Sharp, Macon Blair, William Lacey
Plot Summary:A random invitation to a Halloween party leads a man into the hands of a rogue collective intent on murdering him for the sake of their art, sparking a bloodbath of mishap, mayhem and hilarity. Taken from www.imdb.com.

If Kevin Smith made the movie "Napoleon Dynamite" as a horror movie you might have something like "Murder Party", quite possibly the single greatest indie-horror comedy I have ever seen in my life. The humor is all off the wall and there's a lot of slapstick as well as well done dialogue and visual cues. The dialogue of the the art students as they debate over how they should kill Chris Sharp's character in various overelaborate artistic ways is increasingly better and is ultimately topped off by Paul Goldblatt's line "When the coroner's report comes in it will read 'cause of death: art.' We'll wait until the witching hour and then we'll all stab him... we'll stab him until he dies." There's a scene where Macon Blair douses Sharp in acid only to find out that the type of acid he used is actually vinegar. The dialogue is outrageous and the movie takes its time getting where its going but by the end the film lives up to its title with plenty of blood and gore for everyone. The standout role here though is William Lacey as Bill, a truly fucked up individual who seems to steal every scene he's a part of. See this movie, I don't care how, just do it.

4. Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Directed by: Dan O'Bannon
Starring: Clu Gulager, Miguel A. Nunez, Linnea Quigley
Plot:When a bumbling pair of employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally release a deadly gas into the air, the vapors cause the dead to re-animate as they go on a rampage through Louisville, Kentucky seeking their favorite food, brains. Taken from www.imdb.com.

"Return of the Living Dead" is THE ultimate 80s movie. It set alot of precedents for gore, campiness, it made running zombies cool, this movie is the reason why zombies are always portrayed as hungering for brains, not to mention Linnea Quigley spending the first 3rd of the movie nude brought a lot of adolescent boys to manhood. This movie is fun no matter how many times you watch it and it almost helps you forget the string of long bloody and increasingly worse abortions that the sequels are.

3. Dead-Alive/Braindead
Directed by: Peter Jackson
Starring: Timothy Balme, Diana Penalver, Ian Watkin
Plot: Lionel, a Mama's boy has the unwanted honor of having to look after his overbearingly evil mother. He ends up falling in love with a local woman who believes that they're destined together. In a moment of intentional sabotage of one of their dates, his mother is bitten by a mysterious creature that ends up zombifying her. It's only a matter of time before she rises from the dead a powerful, bloodthirsty zombie. It's only a matter of time before she starts infecting residents of the town and Lionel has to stop her...and them. Taken from www.imdb.com.

Back before Peter Jackson was best known for hobbits and apes he did low budget splatter films with the slightly good "Bad Taste" and the hilarious muppets piss-take "Meet The Feebles" under his belt he culminated all his best elements into this film. "Dead-Alive" (or "Braindead" for everyone who isn't American) holds the record as the goriest movie ever made it's a zombie movie that laughs in the face "Cannibal Holocaust" and makes "Evil Dead" squeemish. The difference is that while the gore is aplenty, it's also pretty much the punch-line. The splatter is all part of the charm with this movie, it takes bad taste humor to a high only reached occasionally by Troma movies. You get desensitized to the sheer ridiculous amount of blood and guts early on and from there on it doesn't really effect you anymore and by the time Timothy Balme busts in the door to a room full of zombies with a lawnmower hoisted over his shoulder and utters the line "Party's over" as he pulls the cord you're giggling with malicious glee. It's a wonderful mix of slapstick and horror, though the real scene stealer is Ian Watkin as Uncle Les, a fat, perverted, sleazeball with a lot of VDs who tends to get hit in the balls a lot. If your guests can shed whatever delicate sensibilites they have for 2 hours then there's not reason they can't enjoy this film.

2. The Thing (1982)
Directed by: John Carpenter
Starring: Kurt Russell, Keith Davids, Willford Brimley
Plot: An American scientific expedition to the frozen wastes of the Antarctic is interrupted by a group of seemingly mad Norwegians pursuing and shooting a dog. The helicopter pursuing the dog crashes leaving no explanation for the chase. During the night, the dog mutates and attacks other dogs in the cage and members of the team that investigate. The team soon realises that an alien life-form with the ability to take over other bodies is on the loose and they don't know who may already have been taken over. Taken from www.imdb.com.

While "The Thing" is a remake of "The Thing From Another World" it's actually a much more faithful adaptation of the story "Who Goes There" that both films were based on where the thing is more of a shape-shifting germ than a monster. The special effects for this movie are still amazing to this day with not a single bit of computer or stop-go animation present it is seamless and perfectly done. The characters are every single one of them memorable and the tension in every scene is so thick you can cut it with a knife. This was easily John Carpenter's best movie and a true classic that's fun as well as scary.

1. Army of Darkness (1992)
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Starring: Bruce Campbell, Embeth Davidtz, Bridget Fonda
Plot: In this sequel to the Evil Dead films, a discount-store employee ("Name's Ash. Housewares.") is time-warped to a medieval castle beset by monstrous forces. Initially mistaken for an enemy, he is soon revealed as the prophecised savior who can quest for the Necronomicon, a book which can dispel the evil. Unfortunately, he screws up the magic words while collecting the tome, and releases an army of skeletons, led by his own Deadite counterpart. What follows is a thrilling, yet tongue-in-cheek battle between Ash's 20th Century tactics and the minions of darkness. Taken from www.imdb.com.

To say that "Army of Darkness" is the best film to watch on Halloween is an insult. "Army of Darkness" is the best film to watch any time. A movie so outrageous, so memorable and fun that the only person who can't enjoy it must be some soulless bastard too stuck up their own ass to know nirvana when they've found it. (The feeling, not the band.) Sure there have been better made films, but none has ever been so endlessly enjoyable, quotable, rewatchable. I've seen this movie at least 70 times, and I'm sure I'll see it 70 more without ever getting tired of it. It is the ultimate party film, the ultimate halloween film, and the ultimate film ever. Don't agree with me? Suck a dick, motherfucker. I slash prices....

Saw V (2008)


Directed by: David Hackl

Starring: Costas Mandylor, Tobin Bell, Scott Patterson

Plot: Following Jigsaw's grizzly demise, Mark Hoffman, the final apprentice to the serial killer is reigned a hero. Meanwhile, Agent Strahm is tested and puts the pieces together. While Strahm realizes that Hoffman is helping Jigsaw, five seemingly unconnected people face a horrible lesson of teamwork. Strahm follows all the leads he can get off Hoffman, including the death of his sister and why he joined Jigsaw. Hoffman and Strahm circle each other until it boils down to a gruesome and bone-crushing finale. Taken from www.imdb.com.


Trapped somewhere in-between the events of Saw U and Saw W is "Saw V" the fifth in a series of films that have a title with nothing to do with anything in the actual movie and a roman numeral to make them seem edgier.

Now it should be said that unlike the rest of the internet, I don't hate the "Saw" films. The sentiment on the interweb is that everyone hates these movies. (Which is why it's the most profitable series of films ever made.)

The fact is, despite the gore effects that grew increasingly gimmicky with each film, "Saw" is a pretty good series. A more apt name for the series would have been "Jigsaw", which is really what this series is. It's a big puzzle that we're slowly getting more and more pieces to and you have to admit, you never see the ending coming.

Now, with that said, "Saw III" was shit and was only good because it came out in a year where there were a remarkably small number of good horror films. Of course this series of films is like a season of "Lost", miss one episode and you'll have no fucking clue what's going on.

"Saw III" continues with the freaky Quentin Tarantino-ish timeline and we spend this movie on the same motherfucking day we've spent the last two movies, so the latest point in the series that we have seen is the beginning and ending of "Saw IV."

This time Donnie Wahlberg and that stupid doll are gone for good and even Jigsaw and the traps take a backseat for the story of Mark Hoffman, the man revealed to be Jigsaw's second apprentice in the last film. The only person who seems to have put it together that is Agent Strahm who promptly ends up in a trap of his own with his head encased in a glass box full of water.

Fortunately for Strahm, even though Hoffman took his wallet, his knife, and his gun he left a pen in his pocket which Strahm quickly gives himself a tracheotomy with. So Strahm, Hoffman, and a little girl are the only survivors of the "Saw III/IV" clusterfuck.

Well now we have the cat and mouse game between Strahm and Hoffman which is more akin to a psychological thriller than most Saw movies, but don't worry you knuckledragging mouthbreathers, we have a parellel story of 5 strangers in a series of traps ala "Saw 2" to feed your love of gore.


Tobin Bell is back as usual, but sans being a corpse, he doesn't appear in anyhting other than flashbacks that go back to before and around the time of the first "Saw." Tobin is as usual strangely likeable while still being creepy but I applaud the director for having taken focus off the character that's been dead for the last 2 movies.

This leaves us with Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) who is honestly has much better screen presence than even Tobin Bell. He has very intense eyes and conveys a sort of angry apathy in every moment he's on screen. I'm not sure how many more roman numerals we're in for but if Mandylor is playing the villain I'm all for it.

The 5 people in the traps are superfluous and so are their performances. None are badly acted, but none are well acted either.


Finally somebody turned the gore down a notch in a "Saw" film. It's not as dissappointing as in the first one but it's not overdone and stupid like in 3 either. There are a couple scenes, particularly the opening where they're trying to appeal to the sick fucks in the audience but they're a bit more subtle than usual which is a much welcome change.

The traps are still inventive (even if the first one in the movie is stolen from an Edgar Allen Poe story) and seem more like deadly games than torture devices. In fact, people actually do survive in this movie as opposed to the usual.


The story is finally taking a change for the better now that Jigsaw, Marky Mark, Darren Lynn Boseman, Amanda, and that creepy fucking doll are out of the picture. Hoffman seems to be an even better maniac than Jigsaw ever was and I like the more thrillerish angles the storyline is taking as well.

Of course, my favorite thing is the big surprise at the end. The big surprise is that there is no surprise! Oh sure the music still plays and we see a montage of scenes but this time the twist is something that a blind, deaf, orangutan with down's syndrome could've picked up on.

This literally is the best movie since the first one. I've heard a lot of people say it's "just for the fans." But no, the fans hate it, it's only for the fans because anybody else who hasn't been watching this series religiously is going to be confused as shit. (To be honest I need to get in the habit of watching the previous movie prior to seeing the new on in theater as I'm having trouble keeping track of everything.)

In fact the only real thing wrong with this movie is how it tries to please the die hard fans as well as everyone else. The side story with the five people in the trap is great and all but it LITERALLY has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Of course there's a possibility (and in fact a large probablity) that the significance of that lot will be explained in the next film.


This movie does a nice job of filling in some pieces of the puzzle while giving us others to look for. It's a lot more intelligent than the previous 3 movies and really looks to be heading in the right direction. Darren Lynn Boseman pissing off was seriously the best thing that ever happened to these movies.

I give "Saw V" a 4 out of 5. It's a good movie and would maybe be a definite buy if it would just quit its whoring ways.

Max Payne (2008)

Directed by: John Moore

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Milla Kunis, Beau Bridges

Other Actors of Note: Donal Logue, Ludacris

Plot: Coming together to solve a series of murders in New York City are a DEA agent (Wahlberg) whose family was slain as part of a conspiracy and an assassin (Kunis) out to avenge her sister's death. The duo will be hunted by the police, the mob, and a ruthless corporation. Taken from www.imdb.com.


For those not in the know, "Max Payne" is another of those tiresome video game movies joining the ranks of "Wing Commander", "Resident Evil", "Silent Hill", "Mortal Kombat", "Street Fighter", "Bloodrayne", "Alone in the Dark", "House of the Dead", "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale", "Postal", "Doom", "Tomb Raider", "Dead or Alive", and "Double Dragon."

Now as you can see, the above list is a cavalcade of suck which features movies that are at best mediocre and at worst likely to cause you to go sterile and tear out your eyes with a plastic spork. Now, I'm glad to say that "Max Payne" is not spork-worthy in fact it's actually quite good.

It's the story of Max Payne (who'da guessed?) a loose cannon cop on the edge after the death of his wife and child. Max spends long hours trying to solve the case and find out who killed his family by being a vigilante overnight and blah, blah, blah, revenge, blah, blah, bullet time, blah, blah.

If you're wondering: Yes, it is essentially "The Punisher." But I'm sure it's an homage, not at all a ripoff. *cough*bullshit*cough*


Mark Wahlberg manages to do everything right that he did wrong in "The Happening." Sure, Max Payne is a mostly taciturn emotionally retarded guy who is constantly boiling with apathetic rage, but Wahlberg manages to play this off without seeming like he's constipated (which is more than can be said for the game version.) He brings a 2-D character to a solid 2-and-a-half-D. Wahlberg plays much of the role silently and that's how he really brings out the intensity of the character.

Mila Kunis is far too much of the ditzy high school type to play the character she does. She comes as close to the sleek dark-eyeshadow wearing hitwoman as margarine does to butter. (Close, but there's a slight aftertaste that may or may not give you cancer.) She does as best she can, but still sounds too much like the annoying chick who cried when she didn't have a homecoming date in high school to be believable.

Beau Bridges plays the usual nice guy/evil businessman. He's almost a straight-up carbon copy of brother Jeff Bridges in "Iron Man" earlier this year. Though honestly, Jeff was a bit more menacing but on the other hand Beau seems less like a complete prick from the beginning.

Ludacris is part of the long standing tradition of hiring rappers to play roles that are miles beyond their acting capabilities. You may remember such hits as LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, Ice Cube, Ice-T, and a host of other famously godawful performances. Ludacris is no acception with bland line delivery and is about as convincing as a piece of wax fruit trying to play Citizen Kain.

Donal Logue is your typical side-kick type that he always is. He plays Max's former partner Alex Balder, he's less of a joke than he is in most movies. He actually seems to do much better as a serious character than as the comedic relief. Sadly, Logue doesn't get much screen time. Which is sad as he's better than a lot of people who we have to put up with for most of the movie.

Amaury Nolasco plays a big scary guy with machete/sword thing. He mostly just looks creepy and hits things. But... see, he does it really well. 'Tis not the size of the part, 'tis how you play it. Ultimately his character also doesn't get much screen time in favor of more of Beau Bridges and Mila Kunis' dry, weak performances.


One thing that "Max Payne" has never been well-known for is its stunning storyline. It was more about running into a room full of people and taking six and a half hours to work the pump on your shotgun before Max finally thought about pulling the trigger. Upon pressing the fire button you had time to go make a sandwich, watch Peter Jackson's "King Kong", and earn at very least your brown belt in karate before having to worry about even aiming at anything.

The game was clunky and slow but "revolutionary" for its time. As bullet time was still "fucking rad" at the time and it was totally cool to turn the noir meter up to 12. (For reference, Frank Miller's "Sin City" was about a 9.)

Fortunately (or unfortunately if you're a fanboy) the director threw all this stupid shit out. Is there bullet time? Yes, there is one instance of bullet time toward the end that last all of 30 seconds. Is there noirish narration? Yes, but only at the beginning and the end of the movie (where it belongs.)

Now of course fans of the series have been rewarded. Wahlberg is the splitting image of Max Payne (or at least "Max Payne 2's" Max Payne, the one from the original looked like a mix between the "Grand Theft Auto 3" guy and a constipated Johnny Knoxville.) the story remains fundamentally the same except its been changed to give it a finer cinematic quality. Also the drug VALKYR in the film is said to give a small 1% super-soldier abilites, rendering the user nigh-unkillable which works to explain why Max can contain more lead than the lining of a fallout shelter and still walk around all broody whilsty shooting anything that moves.

Max isn't the ass-kicking bullet machine in the game, in fact you'll find that much of the movie involves Max getting his beat up, shot, or running from other people until the climax of the film. (which is also not quite what you'd expect.) But worry not, Max has a 9-millimeter pistol that holds roughly 5000 rounds per clip and apparently fires buffalo shot.

The honest fact that everyone needs to come to term with is that this is not an action movie. "Max Payne" is a film-noir drama that just happens to feature action. It's a revenge movie, but more "Walking Tall" than "Death Wish."

If anyone kills peoples' enjoyment of this movie it will be false expectations. Most people went in expecting an action movie which will result in a lot of disappointment. A lot of people also apparently thought that this movie was going to have to do with killer angels or something due to the Valkyries seen in the trailer that appear as a hallucination as a result of taking the drug VALKYR. Why anybody would be disappointed that a stupid concept like "vengeful cop meats scary bird women" wasn't real is beyond me, but then again "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" was a box office success, so I guess I'm just underestimating the collective stupidity of American audiences.

One of the strangest things (and this is mostly just the fault of the game) is the references to Norse mythology. The angel things being Valkyries, the drug VALKYR, pharmacutical company Aesir, Max's former partner Alex Balder, the Ragnarok club... If half expected Max to call his gun "Mjolnir." (Hey, it's more catchy than "Ebony" and "Ivory" Screw you, Dante.) This never made sense to me as its really nothing more than a tiny mcguffin that has nothing to do with anything in the game.

But enough about the game. The visuals are stunning, remaining so dark and ashy that it brings a solitary tear of joy to Tim Bradstreet's eye. It's always either snowing or raining in Max Payne's city, but in backgrounds and at the triumphant ending of the film the sun comes out and everything is bright and sunny. Sure its a visual style that's about as subtle as a dumptruck backfiring in a nitroglycerine plant, but it still looks good. The shots of the fiery drug-induced Valkyr world, the night club, and the icy river are equally as entrancing.

The sets are all in some form of disarray, either looking trashed or old. Max apparently got his cavernous single bedroom apartment from the same building as the black cop from "Saw IV." Really the only acception to the rule is the Aesir building which is always polished and sterile looking.

The storyline is fittingly dark and compelling while not getting too complicated. Mila Kunis could have been crammed in as the usual side-romance story, but mercifully that gets saved for another film (watch after the credits.)

"Max Payne" is not a perfect movie. It has its failures, most of them being from where the director tried to appeal to fans of the game. Ultimately people need to just accept that this movie is not like the game at all, it has vastly surpassed the game in every way shape and form proving that a turd apparently can be polished into something fairly nice.


Don't take it as a video game movie, that will only hurt what is otherwise a great film.

I give "Max Payne" a 4 out of 5. It doesn't need to be on your shelf, but you should definitely see it.



That 3rd picture is totally from "Shooter", my bad.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) Review/Retrospective


Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf

Other Actors of Note: John Hurt, Ray Winstone, Neil Flynn

Plot: During the Cold War, Soviet agents watch Professor Henry Jones when a young man brings him a coded message from an aged, demented colleague, Henry Oxley. Led by the brilliant Irina Spalko, the Soviets tail Jones and the young man, Mutt, to Peru. With Oxley's code, they find a legendary skull made of a single piece of quartz. If Jones can deliver the skull to its rightful place, all may be well; but if Irina takes it to its origin, she'll gain powers that could endanger the West. Aging professor and young buck join forces with a woman from Jones's past to face the dangers of the jungle, Russia, and the supernatural. Taken from www.imdb.com.


Never in recent history can I recall somebody pissing and moaning about a movie this much when it was exactly what they asked for in the first place.

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is the fourth in Steven Spielberg and George Lucas' "Indiana Jones" series following "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" in 1989.

Much like the "Call of Duty" people, Spielberg and Lucas realized that they couldn't dwell on the events of and leading up to World War 2. This is considered sacrilege to most fans, but I prefer to call it "a good idea."

So anyhow, in this new adventure Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is kidnapped by a group of Russians along with one of those new pals with a history pulled from nowhere he seems to pick up in every single movie, Mac ("Beowulf's" Ray Winstone showing that he is, in fact, a fat dumpy Englishman in real life) and taken to Area 51. Here they are met by evil Russian psychic/swordswoman Col. Dr. Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) who, after having failed to capture Rocky and Bullwinkle, has set her sites on finding El Dorado and the key to ultimate wisdom.

Naturally Indie escapes in an overly elaborate scene involving a whip that magically wraps around anything it's cracked at and escapes via a manner that kills at least 3 nameless soldiers.

After escaping he's questioned by a couple of government agents and gets put on suspension from his teaching job because he's a suspected communist sympathizer. This is where we meet Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), a greaser who's looking for his adoptive father (John Hurt) who was last seen looking for the crystal skull.

Well shit goes all crazy and eventually Indy, the Russians, Mac, and former Indiana Jones love interest Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) arrive in South America to find El Dorado, and sword fight on duck boats, and other such things.


It's good to see Harrison Ford back in the saddle as Indy. Ford seems to have fallen right back in where he left off with "The Lost Crusade" nearly 20 years ago. Ford certainly shows his age at 66 but manages to pull it off as the same character he's always played.

One of the details of Indy's character are the subtle changes and similarities to his father (Played by Sean Connery in "The Last Crusade") Indy is still who he always was but has that certain tendency to go into lecture mode and the grizzled and a bit clueless old man demeanor that Connery had in the previous film. It's not so much what he does the same as what he does different that truly shows how brilliant of an actor Ford truly is.

Karen Allen is strangely cuter at 57 than she was at 30 when "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was filmed. Sadly she doesn't particularly get much to do in this movie, then again she also doesn't get to be as annoying as she was in "Raiders" so I guess it's as much a good thing as it is bad.

Shia LaBeouf despite everyone's insolent whining is actually quite good as Indy's rebellious illegitimate greaser son. I don't know what peoples' problem is with the character of Mutt. It's certainly not that he's annoying, you fucks put up with Short Round. It's definitely not that he's a bad character, Indy has certainly had a slew of worse sidekicks in the past. What it pretty much comes down to is, people don't like Shia LaBeouf. I have no clue why, sure his face is certainly out there and he's certainly a tad over-exposed but this doesn't discount the fact that he's a damn good actor. LaBeouf is only getting better in his acting and let's face it, he wasn't bad to begin with. It's really just due ot personal bias that Mutt is so hated.

Ray Winstone is as always sub-par and his character is pretty much wholly unnecessary in the film. His role is essentially the exact same as Beni from "The Mummy." You spend pretty much the entire movie going "when is this guy going to hurry up and die?"

Cate Blanchett is decent but sounds like a bad imitation of Natasha from "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" and remains the typical emotionless tight-ass and martial woman with a thick European accent.

John Hurt does a whole lot of nothing, he's crazy for roughly 5/6 of the movie. It truly makes you wonder why in the hell they got such a good actor to play such a small insignificant part.


Alright fuckheads, let's chat. If I hear one more person bitch and moan about "OMG they use bad CGI in this movie." You know what? Fuck you!

Aside from some peoples' faces melting in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", Indiana Jones has NEVER been known for good special effects. And the "bad" CGI is still better than the bad conventional effects of the last 3 movies combined. So quit your fanboy whining!


There have been a lot of complaints flying around about how this movie went tonally. These complaints are usually targeted at 7 major areas.

1) The film took away the realism of Indiana Jones and made it too Sci-Fi.
Are we really arguing that the concept of aliens is unrealistic in a movie series that has featured: Ghosts coming out of a holy relic and melting nazi faces off, a priest that can tear the heart from someone just by pressing his palm on their breastbone, and an actual knight from the crusades alive and well in the 1940s looking not a day over 60? What this really comes down to is that the film is set in the 50s as opposed to the 40s and the change of scenery means a change in plot because in the 50s, nobody gave a flying fuck about the Holy Grail, or the Ark of the Covenant, or that one shiny rock thing those Indian people worshiped or whatever. The 50s were all about aliens and government conspiracies. Harrison Ford just looks far too old to be convincing as the same Indy from the 40s so it was necessary to proceed to the future (in this case, roughly the same amount of time has passed since the last film in the story as well as in real life.) It pretty much comes down to accepting change, learn to live with it, we're done with the motherfucking Nazis!

2) Indy doesn't do anything in this movie.
Since when is jumping across rafters while dodging gunfire, beating up a big ass Russian guy roughly 20-30 years your junior twice, climbing out of a moving vehicle onto the back of a motorcycle, killing some crazy ninja tribesman with his own blow dart,

3) The nuke scene
In "Temple of Doom" Indy jumped out of a plane using a life-raft as a parachute.

4) Mutt and the monkeys
In "Temple of Doom" Indy jumped out of a plane using a life-raft as a parachute.

5) Russians? But Indiana Jones always fights Nazis!
Seriously, am I the only person in this fucking world that has seen "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?!"

6) The tone and style of this film is different from the other Indy movies.
Go back and watch the old ones. The tone and style is different for each individual movie, they feel less like a series and more like 3 entirely seperate films that happen to have the same main character, in fact props to this movie for actually having a sense of continuity.

7) Where the snakes at?
This is actually pretty much just my gripe, but seriously. One fucking snake? I don't care if it's a big snake, we need more! The snakes are more integral than Nazis or fedoras!

Ultimately "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" doesn't try to be what the series has been. The last 3 movies have thrived on being new and different each time and this is what happened here, the difference is it's been 20 years and the original trilogy is a nostalgic childhood memory so this naturally pales in comparison.

If this had been release in 1991 only 2 years after "Lost Crusade" came out people would be fine with it, but because it was everyone's iconic trilogy growing up suddenly it's sacrilgious. The characters are no weaker or shoddily put together than the last 3, the plot is no less hokey then the last 3, and the special effects and dialogue are certainly no worse than in the last 3. But it's different.

Point out to me 1 thing that this movie did wrong that at least one of the others didn't in some way shape or form.


Ultimately the hate over "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is EXTREMELY biased. The characters are relatively unspectacular, the story is decent, the stunts are great, the special effects are mediocre, and the ending leaves a bit to be desired.

But you know what? It was fun. I had fun sitting in the theater and watching one of my childhood idols return to the big screen. That same feeling of joy and excitement I got watching the last 3 movies as a child returned here. Indiana Jones movies were never high quality to begin with, they were fun escapism directed primarily to children ages 8-13 but now all those kids have grown up and expect something more out of it.

No, it's not as good as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and it's certainly not as good as "The Last Crusade", but you know what? It's still better than "Temple of Doom" and there is a lot to love about this movie if you just watch it with an open mind. Call me crazy, but you rabid fanboys can continue foaming at the mouth while I relive my childhood for an hour and a half. Ask yourself who's truly "won" here?

I give "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" a 4 out of 5. Just shy of being great unless you're a rabid fanboy fuck, then it will just rape your childhood.

But lets be honest, little fucker doesn't put up much of a fight...

Iron Man (2008)


Directed by: John Favreau

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow

Other Actors of Note: Terrence Howard, Samuel L. Jackson

Plot: Tony Stark is the complete playboy who also happens to be an engineering genius. While in Afghanistan demonstrating a new missile he's captured and wounded. His captors want him to assemble a missile for them but instead he creates an armored suit and a means to prevent his death from the shrapnel left in his chest by the attack. He uses the armored suit to escape. Back in the U.S. he announces his company will cease making weapons and he begins work on an updated armored suit only to find that Obadiah Stane, his second in command at Stark industries has been selling Stark weapons to the insurgents. He uses his new suit to return to Afghanistan to destroy the arms and then to stop Stane from misusing his research. Taken from www.imdb.com.


In the wake of the mediocre "X-Men: The Last Stand", the criminally underrated "Ghost Rider", and the overly-hated but disappointing sequel "Spider-Man 3" Marvel studios said "You know what, you bastards have been fucking up our properties for years and from now on if anybody screws up movies based on our characters, it's gonna be us!"

The first movie coming out of Marvel studios was "Iron Man", a movie that by all right should suck large amounts of ass. I mean, it's a comic about a rich prick who develops a super electronic armor that effectively kills a lot of people, he has no memorable villains beyond the most blatant Chinese stereotype since Nicholas Cage played Fu Manchu in "Werewolf Women of the SS", and it's done by the director of "Elf."

However, facing against all odds, "Iron Man" accidently ended up being great. Director John Favreau stayed true to the comics (despite the fact that in current comic continuity Tony Stark is a gigantic asshole.)

I know I kind of missed the bus on this review, but this blog was started too long after I saw the movie in theaters. So now with the new DVD release I've decided to review it. Don't like it? Bite me.

Of course it's the story of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), a millionare playboy/mechanical prodigy who builds weapons. When he is kidnapped in the Middle East and realizes his company is double dealing he builds a suit of armor to help him escape.

Upon getting stateside Stark ask for two things, an American Hamburger (for some reason he goes to Burger King for this, which is not unlike going to Australia and eating at the Outback Steakhouse) and to call a press conference where he announces that Stark Industries will no longer make weapons.

Of course this pisses off his double-dealing business associate Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) who already seems to have it out for Tony (presumably because he pissed on his Persian rug, which really tied the room together.) And ultimately it ends with a robot suit fight awesome enough to make a Japanese nerd cream in his pants.


Robert Downey Jr. was made for the role of Tony Stark. Looking back I don't know how I ever pictured anyone else in the roll. He captures the witty sarcastic womanizing drunken charm of Tony Stark perfectly and there's not a line spoken by Downey Jr. that is not wonderful. Seriously this movie could have been Tony Stark talking for an hour and a half and I would have enjoyed it.

Jeff Bridges is good once you get over the fact that he looks entirely different from any other movie he's been in, but you get used to it. This is Bridges first time as a villain and he plays a sufficiently menacing character, a sort of behind the scenes menace who is doing all the evil deeds behind the unknowing figure head's back. So essentially he's Dick Cheney. (HAW HAW POLITICAL HUMOR! Okay I'm done.)

Gwyneth Paltrow is charming and lovable as Pepper Potts, Tony's assistant and halfway romantic interest. It was refreshing that she never crosses the threshhold over to becoming the actual romantic interest, the relationship is explored more subtly than usual and it was nice to see. However Paltrow isn't particularly wowing in the role, she was good but there was nothing particularly memorable about her performance.

Terrence Howard was as equally a good choice for the role of James Rhodes, the man who would ultimately become War Machine. He's a perfect straight man to Downey Jr's off the wall antics and it really is a shame that he won't be returning for the next movie. I'm sure Don Cheadle will do a fine job but I'll still miss Howard in the roll in the same way I miss Sam Elliot as General Thunder Bolt Ross and Michael Gough as Alfred Pennyworth.

Samuel L. Jackson seems just as gimmicky in the role of Nick Fury as the likeness of Samuel L. Jackson seemed in "The Ultimates." Maybe Jackson will change my mind on the subject, but right now I think I still prefer the made-for-TV David Hasselhoff Nick Fury to Sam Jackson's rendition.


As I said, director John Favreau really did an excellent job bringing Iron Man to life. The suit looks wonderful, obviously borrowing more from the Ultimate Iron-Man look with just a touch of the classic.

The Mark-1 Suit trul does look like ther original Iron-Man suit brought ot life and it was one of the more impressive things in the film. The CGI is well done and looks as close to real as one can reasonably expect.

The Iron Monger suit is the real showpiece here, though. Contrary to popular belief Obadiah Stane and The Iron Monger were in the comics. Though the Iron Monger more closely resmebles the Parnell Jacobs War Machine Suit than the design its based on.

The fight between the two suits is incredibly reminiscent of the fight between Murphy and Cain at the climax of "Robocop 2" in fact, many of Iron Man's big fight scenes are somewhat reminiscent of "Robocop" in general.


Now enjoying this movie, I couldn't help but draw parallels to "Ghost Rider" which I rather enjoyed but most people hated. Indeed pretty much every problem listed by critics for that movie is present here.

The CG looks real but not real enough, there's not enough appearances by the title character (I think Ghost Rider actually appeared more than Iron Man), the love story is dull an uneccesarry, the villain is a second stringer and not terribly interesting, there's a build up that the title hero will be helped by a second character similar to him only to be let down (Caretake in "Ghost Rider" and War Machine in "Iron Man") and the final battle is a bit anticlimactic at its end.

I think what it comes down to is Downey Jr. is just a far better actor than Nicholas Cage. Cage was undoubtedly the main problem with "Ghost Rider." (In my opinion the only big problem.)

As I said, Favreau brought the character into the movie perfectly. Hearkening back to the comic's beginnings with the Mark I armor and having the theme song from the old 60s "Iron-Man" cartoon appear 3 times (In the casino, on Rhodes' phone as Tony's personalized ringtone, and during the awards ceremony)

Some of the choices I found questionable, like Jarvis now being a computer system as opposed to a knock-off Alfred Pennyworth and Yin-Sin now being middle-eastern as opposed to Asian and having his name changed to Yensen, but I got used to it.

Though I found the same problem with "Iron-Man" the movie that I found with "Iron-Man" the comic. Tony Stark's whole rise to glory hinges on that he is tired of being a merchant of death and wants to stop all the killing, but the fact is, he kills a lot of people in this movie. Granted all of these people are clearly labeled "enemy" but it still seems a bit hypocritical. But that's not Favreau's fault as the comic always had that problem as well, the movie just moves on and pretends not to notice that Iron Man is blowing up terrorists like there's no tomorrow.


It's a fun movie that's very faithful to the comic. It doesn't try to be more than it is, it doesn't come off as pretentious or overstylized and manages to stay true to its roots. In retrospect I found this movie on the whole to be more enjoyable then DC's golden boy this summer "The Dark Knight."

I give "Iron Man" a 5 out of 5. Buy it, watch it, love it.

Quarantine (2008)


Directed by: John Erick Dowdle

Starring: Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris

Other Actors of Note: Jay Hernandez, Jermaine Jackson, Doug Jones

Plot: Television reporter Angela Vidal (Carpenter) and her cameraman (Harris) are assigned to spend the night shift with a Los Angeles Fire Station. After a routine 911 call takes them to a small apartment building, they find police officers already on the scene in response to blood curdling screams coming from one of the apartment units. They soon learn that a woman living in the building has been infected by something unknown. After a few of the residents are viciously attacked, they try to escape with the news crew in tow, only to find that the CDC has quarantined the building. Phones, internet, televisions and cell phone access have been cut-off, and officials are not relaying information to those locked inside. When the quarantine is finally lifted, the only evidence of what took place is the news crew’s videotape. Taken from www.imdb.com.


My generation can fuck right the hell off.

I went into this movie and found that the audience was all 20-somethings around my age and gave out an annoyed sigh. You might wonder why I would be so dissappointed to find that I was surrounded by people roughly my own age. It's mainly because I've found that they are (at least the ones I encounter most of the time) ignorant, annoying, and functionally retarded. (For reference I am working on getting a lawn so that I may tell children to get off of it.)

The reason I mention this is because "Quarantine" is one of the most unnecessary remakes I think has ever been made, seeing as the movie it was based on, "[REC]", came out in November of 2007. So why are we being treated to this remake of a movie that's not even a year old? Because of the aforementioned tweeny fucktards who are about as deep as a drop of piss on a toilet seat and would refuse to watch anything that isn't in English. And they won't read subtitles, because that would totally interrupt their texting.

Fortunately we have the lesser-quality dumbed-down remake that spells everything out and won't interrupt their texting. Though to be honest "Quarantine" is still too good and too smart for them as evidenced by the fact that A) I liked it and B) None of the pink popped collar assholes that felt that the rest of the theater wanted to hear their review of "well that was retarded" did.

Once again we meet Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter), a reporter on a late-night tv show this time set in LA instead of Not-Madrid Spain (I suck at geography, fuck you) where once again her and her cameraman, named Scott (Steve Harris) this time instead of Pablo, are shadowing some firefighters. They get a medical call and then head to an apartment to find a crazy old woman who takes a bite out of a policeman's neck and then they come back downstairs to find that they've been quarantined in the apartment building.


Jennifer Carpenter is a perfect choice to portray Angela Vidal. She is equally as if not cuter and more charming than Manuela Velasco (the actress who played Angela in the orignal film.) One of the finer points is that that Carpenter's Angela doesn't feel the need to talk as fucking much as Velasco's did. Carpenter communicates the same emotions through actions whereas Velasco wouldn't shut her goddamn mouth for five fucking seconds. If anything Angela is an improvement in this case.

Another character that has improved in the remake is Jake (named Manu in the original film), one of the firefighters who Angela and Scott are shadowing. Manu was fifteen shades of twenty, but Jake is easily twenty-five shades. Jay Hernandez showed definite potential in 2005's "Hostel" and here it seems he's come close to realizing it. Much like Carptenter, Hernandez conveys his thoughts and emotions very well through actions and facial expressions. This is also helped by the fact that Jake is just all kinds of awesome. He kills 3 zombies with a sledgehammer (one of them being a fucking German Shepard!) and then gives another one the Steven Seagal neck-break.

Now of the 3 main characters, Scott is the dissappointment. This is not to say that Stever Harris does a bad job, in fact he's just as likeable and realistic as Pablo Rosso in the original. Much like Pablo, Scott is the real main character of this film, we see everything through his eyes but this movie tries too much to make Scott seem like less of a passive observor by bringing him into the action more. This involves him commonly dropping or setting the camera aside (which gets more than a little annoying), there's also a scene of him killing a rat, and then one of him beating a zombie to death with the camera. I'm sure the latter is supposed to be traumatic or scary but it ends up being more funny than anything.

The rest of the characters are annoying and unimportant. That's one of the bigger dissappointments of the film as while the tenants weren't a big part of the original film they felt less like extras than they do here.


The effects in this movie are fair. Aside from Scott stomping on a rat the effects all look rather real but the problem is that Scott seems to shy away from every damn scene of violence and special effect in the whole movie.

This is the big problem, the camera seems to not want to focus in on anythign that makes the movie scary. Apparently the director decided he wanted to try and be fucking hitchcock and not give us a good look at ANYTHING. Even the newspaper clippings at the end that explain whats going on aren't seeable because for the brief moment Scott actually lingers on them the fucking lense is out of focus. The camera is always going in and out of focus and the light on top is flashing on and off like a fucking strobe and its terribly annoying.

Which brings me to the next problem. Everything is too fucking dark! "[REC]" to its credit was very brightly lit and everything was very easy to see until the power went out toward the end at which point it was supposed to shock and scare you and make things hard to see. However the shock is gone this time and honestly I didn't even notice that the power had gone out until Jay Hernandez said it had (but yet they still manage to use the electric elevator...?)

And finally, I know George A. Romero put a couple cracks in the 4th wall with "Diary of the Dead" but to his credit you could tell what was going on, and to be honest "[REC]" did a pretty fair job too. But just like "Cloverfield", "Quarantine" seems to have been filmed by a cerebral palsy sufferer sitting atop a paint can shaker.


Let it be said that "Quarantine" is by no means a waste of film. Unnecessary though it may be, for the most part it seems to meet or in some cases even surpass its predeccessor in quality. yes okay the darkness thing is annoying and the tenants are all vague stereotypes but the lead characters are wonderfully done and the authenticity of the film's opening is outdone in the American version. All parts are played perfectly and you really feel like you are watching real footage shot by people as opposed to characters in a movie.

The movie holds its own despite all the stupid flaws and comes out close to as good as the original....

That is... until we come to the end.

The following should only be read if you've seen "[REC]" or don't care if the ending is spoiler for you, otherwise skip past the next picture. But honestly if you can't figure out or at very least venture an educated guess as to what happens to the main character after watching any number of the other "first-person camera" movies then you truly are an ignorant dipshit.

The ending of "[REC]" was the big cherry on top of the sundae. The movie had been nothing but good all the way through. But the last 15 minutes were where we were taken out of a nightmare and plunged straight into hell.

Things happen roughly like they did in the original, Angela and Scott are the only ones left and they enter the penthouse apartment (called "the attic" in this movie because apparently Americans don't know what penthouses are, that's news to me.)

So anyway in the original we were treated to newspaper clippings and explanation that the zombie virus originated from a girl named Niña Medeiros who was supposedly possessed by a demon. It is revealed that the owner of the loft was a priest who was trying to cure Niña and had apparently been giving the virus to small children for trial runs.

Then the attic door swings open and Pablo puts the camera into the attack to look around, whereupon an infected child makes us all shit ourselves and breaks the light on the camera, thus forcing Pablo to turn on the night vision.

It is at this point that we see the silhouette of Niña coming down the hall on wobbily legs looking like some sort of otherworldly creature coming down the hallway nothing but skin and bones clad only in a pair of soiled panties and clutching a claw hammer. The shots of Niña looking around the apartment still to this day haunt me in my nightmares, that is probably the creepiest shit I have ever seen and when she finally turns on the cameraman you will most likely have a mild heart attack.

The director apparnetly looked at this masterpiece of a scene and went "nah, fuck that." The possession has been replaced with a strain of super rabies released by a doomsday cult. Apparently once again the producers were concerned about religious overtones in much the same way they were with "Doom" and decided to opt for biological instead.

I swear if they remade "The Exorcist" today Regan would've been bitten by some sort of radioactive woodchuck and Father Merrin would exorcise the mutation from her by beating her into submission with is gargantuan pectoral muscles.

Basically, this time around the owner of the loft is a member of the doomsday cult and he's injected rats as well as several small children with the virus. It tries to play coy and pretend to be mysterious by not spelling that out for you in this scene but with the rat trying to attack Scott earlier and the shot of a child running through a vent in one scene you will be able to easily figure this out if you're not busy texting at the time. (So it was pretty much just me.)

Then the same thing happens with the attic door but we get too good of a look at the child and it kind of takes away from the fright factor. The camera lingers for too long. But now is the moment of truth, Niña is coming, right?

Wrong. Replacing Javier Botet as the tall annorexic scary as shit zombie Niña Medeiros is Doug Jones as "Thin Infected Man" basically a thin guy in a diaper with a hammer. Now the dissappointment of this is no fault of Jones' he does a brilliant job.

The problem is that we don't get to fucking see him. Rather than watching the awkward and very disturbing movements of "Thin Infected Man" the camera focuses on Jennifer Carpenter looking scared and obscuring our view. There was a point where I just wanted to scream "GET OUT OF THE WAY BITCH I WANT TO SEE THE MONSTER!"

Unfortunately we never get a good look at "Thin Infected Man" and any sort of creepiness or inhuman movement done by the brilliant Doug Jones is all for naught as we only see bits and pieces of him before he beats the shit out of the camera. Even the scene of him eating on Scott's corpse lasts only a split second and then the movie ends.

Now the director was quoted suggesting that the movie ended a different way than the original which made it okay that they spoiled the ending in the trailer, so that makes it all right, right? Wrong. The director, it turns out, is a fucking liar. So not only is the ending shown in the trailer, it's shown ON THE FUCKING POSTER!


As much as the glaring fuck-up that was the ending pissed me off, it still wasn't as infuriating as the first "That was retarded" coming from the big sunglasses wearing Paris Hilton wannabe cunt in the top row. The term "pearls before swine" came to mind and the sad thing is it wasn't even a particularly good pearl, it was a decent looking but still lackluster pearl but it was still too good for these stupid bastards who undoubtedly list the "American Pie" movies as "THE BEST MOVIES EVAR OMGZ!!!" on their facebook account right under the picture of Soulja Boy.

But hey, for an unneccesarry remake "Quarantine" was a very good movie, now look for the remake of 2011's "Spider-Man 4 coming out sometime in 2009.

I give "Quarantine" a 4 out of 5. It's not as good as "[REC]" but still worth checking out.

Now get off my lawn before I turn on the sprinklers you damn little hoodlums!

Feast II: Sloppy Seconds (2008)

Directed by: John Gulager

Starring: Diane Goldner, Jenny Wade, Carl Anthony Payne II, Tom Gulager, Hanna Putnam

Other Actors of Note: Clu Gulager, Martin Klebba

Plot: HA!


While Horror is easily the genre with the most traumatic tone and stories there's still a certain safety to horror films that we know in some way shape or form things will be okay. Occasionally a film comes along and challenges that like "The Mist" and "Cannibal Holocaust" that takes what we've known to be rules and throws all that out the window.

And then there's "Feast".

A 2005 movie by John Gulager, "Feast" was all the bad taste and gore of Peter Jackson's early films with about half the quality and humor. It was a movie that was pretty decent but fell flat when it came to being what it wanted to be.

Now comes "Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds", unlike its predeccesor, this sequel actually does have something resembling a plot: Biker Queen (Diane Goldner), the sister of Harley Mom from the first film (also played by Goldner), stumbles on the bar and finds out her sister got exploded in the last movie.

She kidnaps The Bartender ("Return of the Living Dead's" Clu Gulager) who apparently didn't die of a heart attack last time and goes to kill Bozo, Hot Wheels, and Tuffy who are responsible for her sister's death (it doesn't matter who plays them, they don't appear in this movie)

So they go to the town near the bar and happen upon Slasher (Carl Anthony Payne II), Greg (Tom Gulager), and Secrets (Hanna Putnam), as well as two midget wrestlers Thunder (Martin Klebba) and Lightning (Juan Longoria Garcia) who try and break into the only secure building in town: The Jail. Unfortunately the jail is occupied by Hobo (I can't find a credit for this guy, so i don't fucking know) who doesn't want company.


Good acting isn't really important here so I'm going to go solidly on entertainment value here.

Jenny Wade returns as Honey Pie (the chick who drove away in the beer truck toward the climax of the first movie) she keeps getting put out like she's supposed to be the lead of the movie and I really have no clue why. Honestly I was just waiting for her death but it never came, though watchign Clu Gulager beat the everloving shit out of her (and I'm talking like "They Live" levels of ass kicking here, he bites off her fucking ear!) is quite satisfying. I can only hope she bites it next time around.

Diane Goldner gets a much bigger role this time around. Biker Queen is apparently much better built for the task at hand than Harley Mom was. She's your typical stonefaced angry lesbian biker type person. Her and her gang of tattooed cannon fodder sidekicks don't do much more than look intimidating and shoot things but it works.

Martin Klebba and Juan Longoria Garcia are your typical "OMG MIDGETS LOLZ" characters but they manage to make it seem less gimmicky than it should be. Their small stature isn't brought up as much as you would think and the characters are actually both quite well-done for what any other movie would have as bit-parts.

Hanna Putnam plays Secrets, a character who apparently read the book "The Secret." She's pretty much a bit-part and serves about as much of a purpose as Grandma did in the first one. She's almost as annoying as Honey Pie.

Tom Gulager plays Greg, he's a ne'er do well, and he has a moustache. That's all you need to know about him. Greg just keeps fucking up time, one of the more memorable times being during the obligatory autopsy scene where every character present except him and Slasher get covered with either shit, vomit, blood, or monster semen and we never learn a single thing about the monsters except not to poke their organs and they have a big creepy eye in their chest cavity for no apparent reason.

Carl Anthony Payne II is fucking magnificent as Slasher. A double dealing car salesman with a gold tooth who keeps trying to dispatch Greg because his wife (Secrets) is cheating on him with Greg. He doesn't sound that entertaining but he truly is, eventually devising a plan to launch Thunder and Lightning onto the jail roof using a catapult powered by a motorcycle engine and testing it using the wrestlers' grandmother who has been mostly decayed by monster puke (just like the Beer Guy in the first movie) which features the line "Nope, too heavy, we need to lose some Grandma" also his introduction features the line "Suck a dick, motherfucker! I slash prices!"

But of all the characters, hands down the best is Clu Gulager in his return as The Bartender. Anyone who's seen "Return of the Living Dead" knows that Clu went to waste in the first film, not having many lines or things to keep him busy. This time around Clu has plenty to do and the aformentioned Honey Pie beatdown is one of the more entertaining gags in the film. Hoepfully he'll have an even bigger roel in the 3rd film but the ending is rather ambigious.


The effects in this movie are sub-par. Remember how in my Jack Brooks review I said that the conventional effects looked much more polished than the cheap CGI used by the rest of the Dimension Extreme titles? Well this is the perfect example of the bad CG I was talking about.

Most of this film is shot on green screen and it shows. Everything looks fake and digitized and it kind of hurts the feel of the movie. No less I guess you can only expect so much from a film of this calibur.


John Gulager has prides himself in doing the exact opposite of what we as viewers would expect. Plot? "Fuck that?" Character development? "That's for fags!" The autopsy scene is the perfect example of this, in any other movie the autopsy scene gives us some sort of information on the monster, we learn things about what they are, what they're made of, and how they work. In this case, everybody just gets covered in some kind of projectile goo and we walk away knowing even less than when we started.

The problem is after a while the breaking away from expectations becomes predictable. We as the audience know when things aren't going to work out, it becomes painfully obvious. The movie seems to know this and tries to make up for it with bad taste gags. While the cat rape and puker gags manager to be mildly entertaining many of them are just stupid and one particularly gag involving a baby just goes a bit too far.

Another problem is with the cinematography. The text profiles of the characters have been dropped this time around and replaced with the characters giving their own profile. It seems less entertaining and more unneccesary.

This time aroudn Gulager opted to do all sorts of tricky lenses and transitions like night vision, black-and-white, and slow-mo shots that make some gags just go on for far longer than they should (especially the aformentioned baby gag which seems to last 20 fucking minutes.)


It's ultimately better than its predecessor in just about every way but "Feast II" is still a long way from being a good movie. It does a lot of things right but it also does a lot of things wrong that other movies like "Dead-Alive/Braindead" and "Re-Animator" did so much better.

I give "Feast II: Sloppy Seconds" a 3 out of 5. It's entertaining but your life isn't going to be any emptier for not having seen it.