Robots and Vamps

Editor’s Note: We received a copy of The House on Sorority Row directly from Liberation Entertainment to review.  This is a special 25th Anniversary Edition which advertises that it is a high quality transfer from a recently discovered pristine 35mm print.  The bonus content includes Trailer, Photo Gallery, Commentary by Mark Rosman, Eileen Davidson and Kathryn McNeil, Storyboard Comparisons, Alternate Ending Presentation. So if you are a fan this is the edition you will need to own.

The DVD Release Date is January 12, 2010.

Reviewed by Scott

I am guessing that either Ron Jeremy has a stake in Liberation Media, or the folks at Liberation Media are HUGE Ron Jeremy fans…because once again this DVD kicked off with an ad for Ron’s faux horror movie entitled “One Eyed Monster”, whose premise appears to be that Aliens have abducted his penis and have turned it into a brutal killing machine…but I digress.

Sorority House begins like any of the other sorority horror movie in this genre, with scantily clad teenaged girls and liquor. I don’t know if I expected a giant all girl orgasmatron-2000 (self trade marked sex toy name, so don’t steal the idea Ron!) shower scene or what, but there was surprisingly less flesh in this movie than the cover of the DVD insinuated. So in the absence of this, I paid attention to the story. An evil head sorority mom, an evil clown (you are welcome Christel), and lots of stabbing, impaling, deaths. A prank goes horribly wrong and leads to an outbreak of brutal, bloody retribution. As the sorority sisters find out once they pledge Theta Pi, they DIE!

This movie is a sign of its time, the candy red pig blood from Carrie can be seen interspersed throughout the flic, making me wonder when “real” fake blood made its debut in cinema. 80’s horror movies are great for seeing cheesy hairdos, tacky outfits, and awful American cars that looked old when they were still new. This movie offered plenty of all three.
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Opening night I went to see New Moon with my friends from my “book club” (Book club now in name only). This time I went with great trepidation. After getting my hopes of for Twilight and having them dashed so completely, I was a little wary of this movie. Twilight was the cheesiest movie that I have seen in a long time. And while New Moon was not exactly Oscar worthy, I will say there has been improvement since the conversation montages, the terrible stunts and visible wires of Twilight.

Now, I am not saying this movie was without its cheesiness. The dialog was mediocre at best and there was one scene of future Edward and Bella running through the woods that I can only describe as absurd. But still, it was an improvement.

New Moon is the part in Bella’s story where we meet the Werewolves. As a reader of the novels, I was never into the Wolves and in fact, I almost hated them. Jacob was a whiny immature teen who seemed more of an annoyance than a potential suitor. I guess this just spilled over to the other wolves and put me on Team Edward for sure. At least until I SAW the wolves on the big screen. Those wolves were cool! They were huge, and kinda menacing. In the movie they seem to be much more formidable rival for the vampires than they did in the book. And in their human form, the wolf boys are buff! They are big and strong and most of the time the run around with out their shirts.

Then there are the vampires. Vampires in name only. These vampires don’t have fangs, they don’t drink human blood, they can go out in the sunlight, and…… they still sparkle. I am so over the sparkling. I thought it was silly when I read it, I thought it was even sillier when I saw it the first time, and now I think it is ridiculous. When something that is supposed to be menacing starts to sparkle, it kinda takes all the danger right out of it. I’m just sayin’.

Edward was not in a lot of this story. This really is Jacob’s movie and it shows. I remember when I read about Edward leaving Bella in the book. I was angry and I even cried. Seeing it happen on the screen, made me start to get angry all over again. Edward really is kind of a jerk in New Moon. He says he is doing it for her own good, but he is so mean about it and then he tries to off himself when he thinks she is dead. So he takes his brooding self to the Volturri and asks them to do it for him. When they refuse, he tries to force their hand. He takes his shirt off and attempts to step into the sun and make himself known to the humans, but Bella arrives just in time to save him. She jumps on him with a bear hug and covers his pasty, skinny self before any real damage can be done. I am thinking Edward shouldn’t be showing his chest in a movie where big buff werewolves are running around showing theirs. I mean, seriously! This movie just made Edward look like the whiny, skinny, little teenage boy. If I hadn’t read the books, I would probably be Team Jacob now for sure!

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The Volturri were pretty cool and very creepy! Michael Sheen as Aro, Jamie Campbell Bower as Caius and Dakota Fanning as Jane were creepy enough but Marcus….shudder… Marcus really creeped me out! And if he looked familiar, that’s Christopher Heyerdahl who played Alastair on Supernatural. So I guess he has lots of practice at being creepy! Felix and Demetri were tough enough and the fight scene between Edward and Felix was good. No cheesy fast-forward motions, they made their speed more believable by blurring their movements. Nothing irritates me more than vampires moving in fast-forward!

5 of us went to the movie and we all agreed that this still an average movie, but much better than Twilight which was well below average. We all liked the fight scenes, whether they be vampires fighting or Werewolves fighting and we all enjoyed the sprinkling of humor that lightened the darkness of the story. The movie follows the book rather closely keeping the integrity of the story intact, sometimes to the movies detriment. Books do not always translate well to the screen and this just may be one of those kinds of books. But we will keep watching and they will keep filming, so only time will tell.

Reviewed by Scott

This movie was all sorts of crazy, and pretty good at the same time. Tokyo follows three different stories about people living in this hyper populated Japan megalopolis. To tell anything about any of these stories is to give them away, so this review will tread lightly.

The first story follows a young couple as they attempt to find their way in the city. One of the humorous parts of the story is the lead male’s movie that he has been working on. It is the ultimate in cliché shock art films, mixing shots from the inside of a woman’s womb, to the rabbit she bears, to a Nazi symbol shadow on the wall. A nod at eugenics gone horribly awry? Who knows, it is only briefly shown in the movie, but hilarious none the less. The story really follows his girlfriend and her struggles to find a place to fit in.

The second story is insane. It follows a crazy red bearded, one eyed, French terrorist that lives in the sewers. Now I know what you are thinking….”A what now?” Exactly! This story is nutty for sure. Again, there is a funny part when he is captured and the news media attempts to guess at his origins, including their telling that the US government swears they have seen him in an Al Qaeda training video. Really? Al Qaeda? Is there anyone they won’t let climb on their monkey bars? Regardless, the story degrades as it continues, the beginning was promising with the shear craziness of his travels across the street and his odd interactions with the populace before returning to the sewers, but after he is captured the story turns into a court room drama that John Grisham would be proud of.

The last story was perhaps the best. It follows a loner, a guy that has withdrawn from society. In fact, he orders delivery food so that he does not have to go out in public. Moreover, he abhorrently refuses to look anyone in the eye, in fact he espouses that he has not done so in well over eleven years. His apartment is full of carefully stacked pizza boxes, pyramids of empty toilet paper rolls that look more like art than an episode of A&E’s show about Hoarders, and towers of he assures us, read novels. Secure and safe in his seclusion, he orders pizza as he always does and is shocked when he looks at the delivery person’s lower half to see the silk outcropping of a garter belt. Suddenly unable to control his notoriously stubborn eyes, he for the first time in eleven years looks into someone’s face and it is a beautiful young delivery girl whom he instantly falls in love with. The remainder of the story follows his endeavors to face his fears of public, sunlight, and other things to find this delivery girl once again. Once again mixing in subtle humor that was perhaps accidental, the Japanese delivery girl’s skin is home to English text tattoos, seemingly answering the age long joke do Asian people have English script tattoos like we have Kanji tattoos?

So Tokyo! Was pretty cool I thought. It was very original and deserved the 4 stars I give it.

NOTE: This entire movie is in Japanese and is subtitled in English.

Editor’s Note: RaV received a double feature DVD featuring 80′s horror cult classics Mutant and Uninvited from Liberation Entertainment.  We asked our resident horror master, Scott, to take gander and write a review.  This week he will review Mutant and next week will be Uninvited.  Both sound like a good movie for Halloween and are available now.

Reviewed by Scott

My journey through this DVD began inauspiciously. I opened the plastic case and slipped the disc into the computer which is cabled up to my TV to serve as my DVD player. So remembering that I was sans appropriate B Movie watching beverage I headed into the kitchen to get a drink. Meanwhile in the adjacent room the movie previews began, and my welcome to this movie was an advertisement for a faux horror movie staring porn legend Ron Jeremy called One Eyed Monster. After laughing hysterically for a few minutes I began to become concerned about the quality of movie that I was getting ready to watch.

Having said that, the movie started with a familiar horror movie scene and premise, two city kids run afoul with a pickup truck of country hicks straight out of your worst confederacy nightmare. The altercation ends with the heroes’ (Wings Hauser and Lee Montgomery) car drowned in a creek. So begins their journey to a southern town that seemed thirty years left behind. The Mutants (or Zombies) aren’t really mentioned during most of the first half of the movie, rather the story seems to follow these two brothers and their altercations with the meanest of the outsider hating townsfolk. However, eventually the mutants do come, and they take their cues from the slow moving zombies of old Romero flicks.

My only complaint is the zombie’s blue makeup that reminded me of the same greasy face paint that I used to pull from the shelves of K-mart and slather on my face to go trick or treating when I was a kid. However, in that vein, I do realize that 1984 was a far different time in terms of Special EFX than today, so I am willing to look past that in reviewing this movie.

This movie had what I’d call an interesting take on the zombification of the town’s citizenry. A chemical company (read petroleum company) was pumping a oozing, bubbling chemical into the earth, which to me brought parallels to an old B movie called “The Stuff” where if memory recalls properly was about a chemical company pumping pink stuff out of the earth that tasted like candy but melted people’s brains,…something like that. So the ideas were similar, uncaring industrial company creating chemicals that kill people but that makes them boat loads of money, not really that difficult of a concept to believe.

One of the most endearing qualities of this movie for me were the perhaps unintentional jokes that seemed buried just below the surface, for instance, in one scene town doctors are attempting to examine a dead body and in the background one of the presumed dead doctors is rising to his feet a zombie reborn, all the while a giant ad for DRAMAMINE is on the wall behind them. I don’t know why, but that seemed pretty funny to me. Another seemingly accidental joke is the over the top machismo attitude employed by the lead character played by Wings Hauser when dealing with a comically hysterical woman in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. I half expected him to slap her in the face to stop the hysterics as demonstrated by many mid fifties leading men.

So in the guise of this being described on its cover as a B Movie, I am compelled to rate it as such.

Below is a film clip from Mutant:

Reviewed by Matt

This movie was Frakkin’ awesome and J.J. Abrams is now officially a god. This is one of the best reboots of a storied franchise. True Star Trek purists will not be happy as the movie does stray from Gene Roddenberry’s original vision and lines up more up the new type of Sci-Fi action movies. But I suspect there is enough in the movie that even they will come out smiling. I will try to stay away from spoilers but it is hard to talk about this movie without giving away some of the plot.

First things first, do you need to read Star Trek Countdown before going to see the move? The soft answer is no but to gain a deeper understanding of Nero then I highly recommend reading it before you see the movie. Nero’s background and motivations are lightly touched upon during the movie but there is not enough to justify his total blindness for mass genocide. In addition, his total hatred of Spock is somewhat discussed but not I was not 100% clear as to why he had it out for him. Star Trek Countdown goes over this ground and provides necessary explanations into Nero’s motivations. Essentially, I enjoyed the movie better due to the fact I read the graphic novel before seeing it.

As reboots go this one is pure genius. J.J. Abrams comes up with ingenious plot device that allows all of the original Star Trek adventures to remain intact and at the same time will allow him to make movies within his new universe. Again, this is pure genius and shows a respect of the source material and his reluctance to mess with Star Trek canon.

The cast for the most part is spot on. Chris Pine as James Kirk and Karl Urban as Bones are dead on perfect. Zachary Quinto is close but you get the feeling he trying to act like Leonard Nimoy as he would in the role of Spock. He needed to relax and quit trying so hard to be Leonard Nimoy. The rest of the crew is fine but relegated to bit parts. But I do have to say that this is the first Star Trek movie in which I enjoyed Chekov as a character. In the past he always been kinda of annoying, at least to me anyway.

The main focus of the movie is the relationship between James Kirk and Spock. It follows them from childhood into their current assignment aboard the Enterprise. This was a good tactic as both characters need each other to be at their best. At first, they hate other but eventually learn that they need each other to become better people and officers. When Leonard Nimoy says, “I have been and always shall be your friend, Jim”, you will get chills down your spine. To me, this was the heart of the movie and is what made it special.

The special effects are mind blowing. I saw it on an IMAX screen and it is just incredible. The redesign of the Enterprise is well done as it is a mix between old and new. I also like the fact that the laser cannons can now swivel instead of only fire in a fixed position.

There is really only one scene that really bugged me. They cover Kirk’s defeat of the Kobayashi Maru test at the academy. Once Kirk figured out how to beat the system he played the whole test off as complete joke. This was just plain stupid as it is a defining characteristic of James T. Kirk in that he does not believe in a losing situations as he is always considering every option to get out of impossible scenarios.

Lastly, something that I have not read about much in the other reviews is the humor. This movie is full of inside jokes for Star Trek fans and personally, I do not remember laughing so much during a Star Trek movie.

Overall, I really enjoyed this movie and is easily the best movie I have seen this year. I will definitely be going back for a second viewing but this time I will take my wife (she has threatened me within an inch of my life).

Star Trek ranking – I put it behind Wrath of Kahn (one of my all time favorite movies) but on the same level as First Contact. So in my book, it ranks as the second or third best movie in the franchise.

Reviewed by Ceara

I am now completely convinced that Jason is a ninja. No, wait… He’s an Omnipresent ninja. You can’t be over 7 feet tall and sneak up on people without them hearing you unless you’re a ninja. Especially when you’re running through woods, or climbing in windows that someone as big as Jason would struggle to get through. I also want to know how it’s possible for Jason to scale a 2 story cabin without anything to use as leverage and without making any noise and accomplishing that feat in about a 2 minute time period. It also seems as though Jason can be in multiple places at once, seeing as how he could be at one end of the woods killing someone and then 2 seconds later can be at the other side of the woods killing someone else. I think it has something to do with the lightening. Every time lightening flashed in the movie, Jason just happened to pop up out of thin air behind someone. So obviously, Jason is either an omnipresent ninja, or he’s magic. The practicality of the events in this movie are so massively absurd that I laughed through the entire movie. A horror movie. And I laughed. The whole time.

Please keep in mind that it was not my idea to go see this movie. It was my brother’s. And yes, I did inform him over and over again how much of a loser he was for even suggesting we see that movie. Any movie that’s been re-made 11 times is bound be be horrible after about the 3rd re-make. When they got to the point where Jason was being put in ridiculous scenarios (like space) they needed to just throw in the towel. Give up. Sing kumbaya and move on. Just please, don’t torture us anymore with awful Jason movie re-makes.

It was, however, the typical Jason movie. Kids go out camping, tell a scary camp story and then they start dying. No surprise there. Only this time, the group of kids just happened to rise to a new level of douche-baggery. If there was a Grammy award for ‘Biggest douche-bag in a film’ they would all be taking home a trophy. The guys were bigger jerks, the girls were bigger sluts and there was just an all around higher level of idiocy.

For example, in one of the last scenes, the two remaining kids are running for their lives through the woods and the guy is dragging the girl behind him when he spots a barn and says to her, “C’mon, hide in here!” … Please understand that just 30 minutes earlier a guy had already been killed there. So I’m sitting there in the theater, watching all this take place and I just couldn’t help myself. Loudly enough for anyone within a 3-4 foot radius to hear me, I say, “Oh, sure… because hiding in a big, creepy, red barn in the middle of JASON’S WOODS is obviously the most intelligent option available…” I mean, really? Really? Needless to say, everyone around me cracked up.

Please, PLEASE do not go see this movie unless you have a strange desire to lower your IQ level by at least 50 points. It doesn’t really matter in the end anyway. Everyone dies except Jason. For some odd reason, the big moron just can’t seem to be killed. No matter how many times he’s been drowned, burned, fatally shot, or stabbed through the heart, Jason just won’t die. Shame, really….

And now, I will leave you with the award winning line from the movie… (this is the actual line; no joke…which proves my entire 3rd paragraph)

“Dude, you’re boobs are so juicy.”

Thank you, and goodnight.

Reviewed by Ceara

Total. Awesomeness.

That’s really all I should have to say. But for the sake of the website (and Matt) I will write an actual review…

But seriously, it was freaking awesome! I went to see the movie the night it came out and almost went and seen it again on Sunday just for the heck of it. Now, I know that my opinion might be slightly swayed by my love for the first two movies, but I just can’t help but praise this movie.

The fight scenes in the movie were everything I expected them to be. Intense with blood, gore, and violence to the point that I wanted to scream out at the screen and cheer Lucien on to victory.

Rhona Mitra played the roll of Sonya wonderfully. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to her before the movie came out, but I was pleasantly surprised. She fit the bill dead-on (heh, s’cuse the bad pun). Lucien (played by Michael Sheen) was, as always, nicely played. The only actor I have a problem with is Bill Nighy, who plays Viktor. Now, I understand that Viktor is probably supposed to be a more pronounced character seeing as how he’s one of the elders, but I get a little irritated with his sudden bursts of spittle-filled huffs of air or whatever it is that he does. It just seems a bit goofy to me.

I liked that we finally got to see the Lycan point of view and understand why Lucien held such a grudge against the vampires. Being the overly-sensitive person that I am, I wanted so much for Lucien and Sonya to be able to be together, and I cried when the inevitable happened. However, I was a bit disappointed with that particular scene.

If you think back to the first movie and you see the flashback of Lucien chained to the chamber floors as he watches Sonya die, She was a petite blonde and she screams out as the sunlight hits her and her skin begins to burn, while Lucien screams out for her and shifts into a Werewolf, breaking his chains. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it happens in this movie. I won’t tell you how it happens, but if that’s what you’re expecting, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

But overall, I still loved the movie and can’t wait until it comes out on DVD so I can own the whole collection. I will definitely be watching again as soon as it does. That is, if I don’t end up going to see it again in theaters!

Roll the trailer:

Reviewed by Matt

The Reaping is a good example of what disappoints me most about Hollywood. This movie had so much potential and it was squandered by the third act. Initially Warner Brothers set the USA release date to August 11, 2006. It was then pushed back to November 8, 2006 and later March 30, 2007, and pushed back yet again just one more week to April 5, 2007. After watching it the other night, I wish they would have pushed it back until 2075.

The Reaping stars Hillary Swank (who is good, but out for a paycheck), Stephen Rea (also a paycheck baby), Idris Elba (Stringer Bell, it is good see you back), David Morrissey and AnnaSophia Robb as the female version of Damien (queue the music). The movie was directed by Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2 – yeah, Lost in Space – boo).

Roll the Trailer:

The plot of the movie is pretty simple. Hillary Swank, missionary elite, takes her family on vacation to the Sudan (bad idea) to convert those heathens. Well, unfortunately her arrival also sparks a never ending drought which causes the local Shaman to go batshit and kill her husband and daughter. Ok, a bit of advice, when fanatical people who spend waaaay too much time in the sun start blaming you for acts of nature, it’s time to take the first bus out of Crazy Town. Anyway, Hillary says, “Suddenly I don’t believe in this whole God thing anymore, oops” . She turns her back on her faith and spends the rest of her life disproving miracles or at least until the end of movie, which ever comes first.

I am also not sure what the purpose of the Stephen Rea character was, except pick up the phone and say, “Hillary you are in trouble, run away, run away” and “I know that you served God at some point in the movie but now you forgot what the bible says, being a missionary and all, but (here it comes, wait for it, wait for it) Satan is bad, so, run away, run away.” (nailed it, paycheck please)

Cut to the present day, Hillary is recruited by the southern town of Haven (no foreshadowing here, run away, run away) to disprove some recent developments, namely the 10 plagues happening in their own backyard. Again, crazies in the sun mixed with the 10 plagues equals first bus out of Crazy Town. Some movie characters never learn. Of course, the cutest little girl from this side of Deliverance is to blame for all of it. Off with her head, off with her head. Then comes the big surprise ending that changes everything. Ohhh, ahhh.

As I said in the beginning, this movie had potential and it was totally wasted by the ending. The first two-thirds of the movie were fairly decent and the tension was building nicely. Then one too many busy bodies got their fingers in the pie and screwed it up turning this flick into a future Mystery Science Theater 3000 candidate.

Reviewed by Scott

Your Vice is a Locked Room…and only I have the key (1972)

Sex. Lots and lots of innocent 1970s Italian sex. You can tell when watching this movie that the director was hoping to push boundaries, but looking back, the melodic crescendos that lead into these rendezvous give the movie a late night Cinemax film when viewed under today’s lenses. However, keeping in mind the early 70s audience that this was playing to, I’m sure that the sex scenes seemed salacious, particularly the scene involving the wife and her twenty year old niece. But the sex, while abundant, perhaps isn’t gratuitous, it is really used as a tool in this film, a tool of power and manipulation. This story is of love, betrayal, murder, and greed. This film was listed in the horror segment, but was truly a murder mystery with a nod to Edgar Allen Poe’s “Black Cat”. I enjoyed this movie for its decadence and its twisting storyline.

I give this movie 3 stars.

Reviewed by Scott

Disturbing. That’s the best way to describe this movie. Suicide is a mock documentary that follows the film maker’s attempts to interview the despondent and film their inevitable deaths. There are probably ten such attempts throughout the movie. Some are very personal and sad, like a man with terminal cancer taking a lethal injection while sitting in his study, all the while expounding his beliefs that a state offered final solution should be available so that his family wouldn’t have to come home and find his body.  Others were messy and ill conceived, like two teenaged girlfriends that mixed vodka and sleeping pills leading to a messy, vomiting death. And finally a few of the suicides seemed warranted, like the man that seemingly couldn’t live with the consequences of whatever he did to the little girl that he discussed in little detail before leaping into a lake with a backpack full of rocks and his hands cuffed behind his back.

Throughout the journey the film makers get more and more personally involved with the suicide attempts and soon reach a point of no return. I really enjoyed this movie for its very personal feel, while watching you feel like these suicide attempts are real and that this is in fact an actual documentary. Note: The entire movie is in German with English Subtitles.

I give this movie 4 stars.