Horror Queen

Very familiar…

PLOT

St. Mark’s is the kind of school that your parents always threatened to send you when you acted up as a teenager. A group of troublemaking young girls are sent there where the teachers are led by a priest played by Ron Perlman (how the hell did Hellboy ever end up here?), not to mention a mean headmistress who idolizes the father. Not long after arriving, the girls learn that they all have special “gifts” that are unique to them such as telekinesis. There’s also something about how all the girls are virgins, but that’s a little hard to believe.

TRIVIA

Part of the Cutting Edge Films line of movies.

THOUGHTS

I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from this movie, which might be why it ended up not being so bad. I picked it up quite awhile ago, right after Halloween when Wal-Mart tossed a bunch of their overstock horror movies into the $5 bin. I had tried a couple of the other Cutting Edge movies so I didn’t think it would be very good.

I’m not saying that 5ive Girls is the best horror movie in the world, but it really wasn’t that bad. Perlman gets top billing, but he actually kind of disappears after the 30 minute mark. Then it turns to the girls to lead the movie and they actually do a pretty good job. They’re better than a lot of other actors turning up in horror movies lately.

The urban legend come to life.

PLOT

Helen and her friend are working on their thesis project for graduate school. They tackle the legend of Candyman, a figure that frightens residents of a local housing project. The deeper Helen gets caught up in the legend, the more she realizes that it might not be a legend after all. She calls the figure out and realizes that he’s stalking her, and pulling her into his world. Though no one believes her, she knows that he’s real.

TRIVIA

Sandra Bullock was the director’s second choice to play Helen and was their only option is Virginia Madsen had turned down the role.

The makers used real bees in the movie, which made Madsen nervous since she was allergic to them.

Part of the movie was actually filmed in Cabrini-Green.

THOUGHTS

When I was a teenager, people refused to watch this movie at my house because there was a long mirror in the bathroom that covered one wall. They were all too afraid to use the bathroom alone, which always cracked me up. I’ve since seen the movie far too many times to count and I actually own two different versions of the movie on DVD.

Despite the fact that I’ve seen it so many times, I still like it. It’s hard to believe that this movie is over ten years old now because it holds up really well. I watched it with a friend while we were going through a bunch of bad movies and we really couldn’t find anything funny about it.

Kane as a killer.

PLOT

A cop investigating the disappearance of a young girl confronts a killer and loses his arm as well as his partner. He later turns up with another woman and a group of young toughs serving time. The plan is to take the kids to an abandoned hotel and have them help the local preservation agent fix up the place. Once there though the kids learn that the killer is roaming the building and picking them off one by one.

TRIVIA

The first movie co-produced by WWE Films.

THOUGHTS

First of all let’s get it out of the way, I have a strange and unusual crush on the wrestler Kane. Give me an incredibly tall bald guy any day of the week and I’m a happy woman. He’s the only reason why I saw this movie and probably the reason why I own the movie. I know it’s not very good, even for a modern day horror movie, but there’s something about it that I really love. It introduced me to the phrase “tube steak” and lets me drool over Kane for a little bit. See No Evil is something you’ll hate, but it’s cheesy enough that I love it.

Oh. My. God.

PLOT

In a near future Japan, teenage girls are turning into zombies. When they reach the age of 16, they experience a “Near Death Happiness (NDH)” that turns them into killer zombies. A group of other teens form their own mercenary squad, to kill the girls that their families can’t. Another group of people are also killing the teens, while a doctor hopes to find a cure or at least has fun experimenting on the technically dead girls.

TRIVIA

Makes references to both Bruce Campbell and George Romero.

THOUGHTS

It’s been a long time since I saw a horror movie that made me laugh this much, but I couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not. For days after we saw the movie, my friend and I would just look at each other, say NDH and start giggling hysterically. The NDH itself seems like a reference to sex, or at least a first orgasm, but they never identify that for sure. There’s also an irritating subplot about a girl who hasn’t yet turned that just seems to turn up and giggle a whole lot. The ending was ridiculous too and a little creepy or gross if you give it too much thought!

The “story” continues!

PLOT

Francis Gross returns on his journey to show us the “real life” stories. The episode features a suicide jumper throwing himself off a building. It also shows a “snuff” video of a man killing a woman after raping her. He then appears in court to defend his actions. A lot of the stories and segments shown deal with stories that don’t relate to each other, unlike the other movies.

TRIVIA

This particular movie was referenced in an episode of “The Simpsons”.

THOUGHTS

This is the last Faces of Death movie that my friend and I watched together, but I’m just now sitting down to write the review. The movie was easily one of the more lame of all the movies and I’m not entirely sure how I ended up with a copy. We sat down to watch the whole thing, but we didn’t have as much fun as we did with the other movies. This one was easy to distinguish between the real stuff and the stuff faked for the movie.

He’s back yet again.

PLOT

Sarah is a student at a generic college studying psychology. She also happens to be good friends with a girl named Audrey. Audrey as it turns out is the daughter of the doctor played by Tobin Bell in the second movie. When she goes back to the hospital, she encounters the boogeyman who decides to follow her back to the school. Audrey becomes convinced that the boogeyman is following her and is now out to get her.

TRIVIA

The first movie was referenced by clips, while the events of the second movie were mentioned frequently, including a photograph of Tobin Bell.

THOUGHTS

This go around the boogeyman is actually a little more intense than in the other movies. Someone said it looked like the girl from The Ring and that’s kind of true, this boogeyman looks a little too CGI and moves pretty fast. Considering the other movies only showed the character as either a shadow or a human portraying the figure, that’s a little bonus.

However I’m also a little confused. I thought at the end of the second movie that they showed the boogeyman as just a man, one of the former patients that saw his parents killed and was dressing up in costume. Here they show the boogeyman as once again supernatural and as the thing that killed the characters in the last movie. Of course it’s been awhile since I saw the second movie so maybe I’m a little confused.

This was your typical straight to DVD horror movie release, though with a little more blood than I was expecting. It seems like they’re really stretching with the idea of the boogeyman as a villain and while this isn’t the greatest movie, it really wasn’t necessarily bad.

There’s another freaking sequel?

PLOT

Adam has a girlfriend who lives halfway around the world in India, but they maintain constant contact through a series of webcams in their homes. When she gets the infection, she kills herself on camera while he watches. Seven years later Justine from the last movie is living in a refuge camp in Texas where everyone talks about the evils of technology. She finds an old laptop computer that still works and starts talking to Adam. He invites her to the city, where everyone warns her the infection still runs wild. Despite those warnings, she ventures across the state to track down the man she thinks she loves.

TRIVIA

This is supposedly the last movie in a planned trilogy, even though no one from the first movie returned for either of the sequels, let alone the characters.

THOUGHTS

I’m actually a little surprised by this movie because I expected it to be incredibly lame and it really wasn’t that bad. I’ll never say it was fantastic, but it was certainly better than I expected and better than the second movie. The actress playing Justine looks nothing at all like the actress from the last movie and Ryder Strong turning up in yet another horror movie really cracked me up. The ending didn’t really make sense and it left me wondering what the hell happened. Still it’s probably not as bad as some people would lead you to believe!

Get the eff out!

PLOT

A creepy grave digger is working in the local cemetery when he’s attacked by a zombie. Apparently this doesn’t phase him as he never tells anyone what happened. Meanwhile the sci-fi club at a local high school are being ridiculed by everyone else and all the president wants to do is date the cheerleader. Another member fights with his girlfriend because he doesn’t take the prom seriously. When the zombies begin attacking the neighborhood, the sci-fi club have to band together with some of their fellow students to save the world…or at least the school.

TRIVIA

Most of the actors in the movie were cast in Georgia, where most of it was filmed and had no movie experience beforehand.

THOUGHTS

I really, really liked Dance of the Dead. The funny thing is that I’ve seen this movie on the store shelves for a couple of months and kept passing it up. When I finally sat down to watch it, I wished I had seen it earlier. I love when a movie can take comedy and horror and mix it together well, which is exactly what happens here. Seriously, where else can you see a zombie frog jump down the science teacher’s throat? That’s the kind of movie you have here.

If you’ve been passing up on this movie, rent it. I liked it so much that I’ll probably end up buying the damn thing since I didn’t have time to watch the commentaries. This was really a great little zombie movie.

They’re back…kind of.

PLOT

Two guys set up one room in the hotel they run so they can film unsuspecting couples getting it on and then sell the videos to a truck driver. One night they see a man kill a woman in the room and knock him out, but leave him tied up. The truck driver tells them that no one wants amateur porn anymore, but is interested in the video of the man killing the woman. They work out an agreement with the guy and they’re off. Jessica and Caleb are on their way to her family’s house where she’ll be working for her dad. After getting pregnant, they decided to leave Chicago (the “big city”) and come back with his friend Tanner. They stop by the hotel and you can guess what happens next.

TRIVIA

Agnes Bruckner also appeared in the horror movie The Woods.

THOUGHTS

First of all I really hate prequels in theory. You know what’s going to happen. You know that the bad guys are going to get away and the good guys are all going to die. If that doesn’t happen, the first events of the first movie wouldn’t happen. Yeah well this one definitely surprised me a little.

Vacancy 2 isn’t a great movie and I’m a little surprised that I actually ended up liking it. Bruckner is far more likeable than most horror movie femmes, especially as of late. She’s pregnant, but she never does the whole “don’t kill me/I’m pregnant/I just want to have my baby” thing that you’d expect. I’m sure there are a lot of people who thought this was really predictable, but I didn’t. I also loved David Moscow (yes the guy from Big) as the guy who kind of falls into his role as a killer, or at least supporter of a killer. It all somehow kind of works. This could almost have been released as a theatrical movie. Then again I liked the original so maybe I’m a little biased.

Not as good as I was hoping.

PLOT

Casey works as a babysitter while attending college classes. One of her charges attacks his little sister and she hears him say that “Jumpy wants to be born”. When she notices one of her eyes changing colors, she visits the eye doctor who tells her the phenomenon is common with twins. That leads her to her father who confesses that she had a twin brother, but he died in the womb when her umbilical cord strangled him. She starts seeing weird things and finds articles that her mother left behind before killing herself. That leads her on a chase to an older woman who holds the secrets to the weird things she’s experiencing.

TRIVIA

Writer/director David S. Goyer also worked on the Blade movies, the Blade television series and The Invisible.

THOUGHTS

I didn’t really want to see this movie, but a friend kept talking about it and how he couldn’t wait to see it. Cut to a night without any plans and before you know it, I’m watching The Unborn. The movie itself wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t the least bit scary. There was one jump scene, but it was so expected that I couldn’t believe when people actually jumped. And trust me, there were a lot of teenage girls in the theater screaming.

I also want to say that the ending to The Unborn was fairly lame. After the “ending” came, I kept waiting because it didn’t seem finished. It seemed like there should have been at least 20 more minutes left and when I realized that it was the actual ending, I was a little pissed off. So if you want a pretty predictable horror movie with a bad ending, by all means go out and see The Unborn.