Happy Birthday Ray Harryhausen!

Happy Birthday Ray Harryhausen!  I love you and your scary stop-motion creatures!  Enjoy this compilation, set to the music of Tito Puente:


Check out his official website for more goodness: http://www.rayharryhausen.com/index.php
Man is 90 years old!!!

Friday the 13th Part 2: the Eighties were awesome!

It's my day off, its hot as hell, and I am super LAZY!  Perfect day to watch the little known gem, Friday the 13th Part II.

For some reason I have been hearing a lot about this flick lately, and its like the horror Gods wanted me to watch it.  I had seen it when I was a kid, but I only had hazy memories of the chick from April Fool's Day being in it and a guy in a wheelchair getting killed.  This film is so much more!  It features one hell of an awesome Final Girl, an overlong flashback sequence, and a guy in a wheelchair getting killed!

Amy Steel plays Ginny, a camp counselor/psychology major who is probably saved from getting killed in the first 20 minutes because she is on her period.  Ginny and her boyfriend Paul, who runs the camp, are training a new group of counselors.  The only thing they should really train them is "Don't have sex" and "make sure when you hit a guy with a machete that the fucker is dead!"  But they don't train them these things.  They train them to push each other in the water and have cook-outs.  It's awesome!  Paul tells the counselors the story of Jason and Camp Crystal Lake, which is nearby.  Paul thinks Jason is an Urban Legend, as do the rest of the counselors.  Ginny is not so sure.  It doesn't take Ginny long to get proven right as Jason (sans hockey mask, that comes later) starts killing left and right. 

My favorite part of this film is the Eighties fashions.  All the guys look like they are dressing for the Gay Pride Parade and all of the chicks look like they stepped out of an American Apparel ad.  Shorts that tight are not comfortable!!

I don't think I need to explain much more about Friday the 13th Part II.  It follows, and in many cases pioneered, many familiar horror tropes. There are a few good jump scares, a few to many red herrings, and very little gore.  But I loved it like I love most slashers.  They are like comfort food to me.  Bless you Steve Miner and Amy Steel and Betsy Palmer and everyone else.  You made my hot lazy day.

The Final Destination: 5 bucks poorly spent

I don't want to hate on Final Destination.  I love these movies!  I think they are inventive, and they often give me heart palpitations: waiting for the death to finally arrive is major stress!  So, I really was looking forward to the 4th installment: The Final Destination, aka Final Destination 4, aka We should have made the third film in 3-D because how cool would it have been to call it Final Destination 3-D but the technology just wasn't there so now we have The Final Destination 4 (in 3-D.)  I had such faith in this franchise that I purchased said film, sight unseen, for 5 bucks. 

Well, it sucked.  Bad decision.  All of the elements are there: the long, tricky death sequences, the "is that dropped quarter going to kill her" suspense, the over the top gore.  But all of this means nothing if you just don't give a shit about any of the characters.  And I didn't.  I was rooting for most of them to die.  And that didn't even bring me the joy that it usually does.

Some kids, I can't tell if they are in college or high school but they seem to have no jobs buts lots of money, are at a racetrack.  Cute but approachable Boy Number 1: Nick, has a premonition that the shit is going to hit the fan.  He drags his over-yoga-ed girlfriend Lori and their two friends, Cute but douchbag Boy Number 2 and totally dispensable chick whom we are hoping gets killed in a really weird way, like maybe getting decapitated in a car wash, out of the stadium just in the nick of time.  And we really know the rest of the story.

The deaths are pretty inventive but after 4 films, the bloom is off the rose.  I did like Krista Allen as a MILF who gets it in a hair salon, and the aforementioned car wash scene was pretty groovy, but done better in The Crazies.

As for the 3-D I was totally lame and didn't see it in the theatres.  It looks like it was pretty cool and it would have probably upped by enjoyment level of this film.  I think, and hope, this is the last of the Final Destination series: don't continue to beat this dead horse. 

Cat toy- from Hell

I already bought the Orange Menace a $50 water fountain- One Hundred Bucks for this is a little steep! But: IT IS SO AWESOME.  Check it out: http://www.etsy.com/listing/49972327/the-human-centipede-cat-toy
Thank you Peaches!

Survival of the Dead

I love George A Romero- I love Night and Dawn and Day and even Land.  Diary had it's moments as well.  His latest, Survival of the Dead is the first of his Zombie opus that left me cold.  Gone are the scares, the feeling, the social commentary.  What we are left with is a poorly paced, kind of confusing film that adds almost nothing to the genre.

I say almost nothing because Romero does pay homage to the Westerns he loves and, oddly, the Hatfields and McCoys.  Somewhere in all this are Zombies, who are treated as nothing more than annoying distractions. 

The rogue National Guardsman (seen briefly in Diary of the Dead) are looking for somewhere isolated to sit out the apocalypse.  They see a You-Tube type video posted by some old Irishman inviting them to come to "Plum Island" off the coast of Delaware.  Little do they know that the Irishman, O'Flynn, is a castoff from the island and is only inviting strangers there to piss off his arch rival, Muldoon.  See, the O'Flynns and Muldoons have been the only two families to inhabit Plum Island for, well, ever as far as I can tell.  They are also bitter rivals.  They all also speak with Irish accents which is strange because they have lived here for so long.  And who do they mate with?  Each other?  These are the kind of questions that distracted me from the zombie action.

The Guardsman, accompanied by O'Flynn, arrive on the island to find Zombies chained to post, brainlessly going through the motions of what they used to do in their "living" life (a concept introduced in Land of the Dead.)  Muldoon, who now runs the island, is against killing the zombies.  He wants to "rehabilitate" them, to teach them to eat something other than human flesh.  O'Flynn just wants to kill them, even kinfolk, and make the island a haven for the living.  I am with O'Flynn, as are the Guardsman.  Muldoon will have none of it, and we are treated to a good old fashioned Western shoot-out with the added bonus of slow-moving zombies.

Problems are numerous.  We really don't get to know any of the characters that well to care about them.  Even the Guardsman, who we know from the previous film, seem like nothing more than zombie fodder.  The pacing is terrible.  The great shoot-out at the end goes on and on.  It's a relief when the zombies finally start eating people, but even that sequence goes on too long.  Romero also relies heavily on CGI, which is understandable given the budget and time constraints.  The only problem is that it is bad CGI: totally unbelievable.  Good things about the flick: the Cinematography is amazing: Plum Island is beautiful: I would go there for the zombie apocalypse.  There are a few interesting set pieces, such as the zombies in the cars, but even that seems ripped off from Max Brook's "World War Z." 

The biggest problem: the film is not scary.  I had nary a zombie nightmare last night.  Even Diary gave me a nightmare. I still love Romero however, and I will keep seeing whatever he throws our way. 

Zombies and Cats

Happy Father's Day!

My Father is Awesome!  These guys, not so much.  Happy Father's Day to Dads everywhere!

The best film about a Dad ever.

The Last Exorcism: More Cat Trauma

Looking forward to this. Will actually have to drag my ass to the theatre to see it because if my cat sees one more horror film where one of his brethren gets killed he is going to be really pissed. Then I will have to watch these films all by myself. Or get another cat.

Back from Vacation: not eaten by Bears.

Yeah!  I am back from Vacation--back to work.  Wonderful.  I actually got back a few days ago but I have not had time to indulge in anything Horror related (except work).  I did watch True Blood but I am still trying to recover from seeing Eric naked and the Bill/Sam dream sequence.  Horror related post coming soon-promise.  In the meantime, enjoy this video I stole from DListed:

Vacation

Going to Yosemite for a few days, will try not to get eaten by bears. Catch y'all next week.

Sleepaway Camp 1983

Dude-I can't write about Sleepaway Camp.  Remember that scene in Contact where Jodie Foster, upon seeing the Alien world or whatever the hell it was, says "They should have sent a Poet."?  That's how I feel about the prospect of reviewing Sleepaway Camp.  I don't have the words...

Instead check out this groovy review of the film which really sums up the awesomeness: http://mmmmmovies.blogspot.com/2010/04/sleepaway-camp-1983-or-can-80s-fashions.html

Speaking of 80's fashions: get a load of the short shorts.  This is either the gayest horror film in the world or the most homophobic: I can't figure it out. You could write a thesis on this.  The director, Robert Hiltzik, only made this one flick, plus a direct to video sequel.  I will be renting and obsessively watching every sequel, just like I spent the last 3 hours on the Internet reading Sleepaway fan sites.  If you haven't seen it you really must put it on your list.  Try not to read to much about it and spoil the surprise at the end.  Of course I knew the "twist".  The film would have pretty much blown my mind if I hadn't.

The Walking Dead

Life just keeps getting better....

True Blood-coming soon

Thank Gawd "True Blood" is starting soon! Last night I was in mourning over "Glee" being over soon, and then I remembered that Sookie and the gang will be back June 13th!! Happy day.

Thanks to Perez Hilton for posting this. I couldn't find it anywhere else!