Okay, review time-
Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
After finding a person seemingly immune to a deadly virus, the survivor is whisked away to an island facility, seemingly never to be released again. Meanwhile, a man about to be married and his buddies from when he was growing up head off on a last get away before he gets married...
Featuring a guest appearance from Icebreaker's Rudy! Meh. One of the things important to a horror film is to have characters who you care about if they live or die. And frankly, there was one, maybe two, characters in the cast of about 12 people who was a decent enough human being whom that applied to. Nice makeup jobs for some of the infected. Decent plot twist towards the end. But overall, I just didn't care if these idiots lived or died. Meh.
Hell and Back
After signing a pact with the devil in exchange for a breath mint, a loser working at a carnival is plunged into hell and his bigger loser friends must enter hell to rescue him.
Getting out of the way first- this is a stop motion animation film, with decent animation. It's not Wallace and Grommit levels of work, but it's decent enough. The character models could be better, but there's some fairly nice background stuff that feels a bit like it came from a Tool video. Unfortunately, the script sucks. The trio of main characters includes the loser whose life goal is working at the carnival and who finds a magic tome, the guy plunged into hell who is starting to thing that not working at a carnival might be a good idea, and the fat kid who's a punching bag for the jokes. There's also the devil, a hot angel and Mila Kunis. And sadly, it's just not funny. Too many of the jokes are of the "laugh at the losers" variety or too low brow for my tastes. It wasn't completely devoid of humor like the noun movies, but it's not much of a comedy. One minor exception- there's a running gag on how Hell isn't really well run these days and the punishments are getting rather lame. Forcing people to walk across lukewarm coals, for example. Or forcing them to eat at a Taco Bell/Pizza Hut that's out of pizza. Those running gags were amusing, at least, but sadly the rest of the film is rather meh. Decent voice cast though.
Flight 666
In an attempt to get revenge on their killer, a group of ghosts haunt the passengers on a cross country flight.
I kinda liked this one. Not much of a budget, and most of that went to the ghost effects, but they do the best with what they have. The plot is played straight, with no winking at the camera. The characters act like actual humans with normal human reactions. And the revelation for why there are ghosts on the plane and who they are looking for is decently done. It's a decent little horror film. Worth a watch.
Nothing to say about Ghost Shark 2. Blood Beast? Folks have seen.
Goal of the Dead
A French soccer team with a washed up player arrives in that player's hometown to play an exhibition game, only to receive a rather frosty reception. Oh, and a local doctor who has been doping up his son with steroids accidentally injects him with a Russian bioweapon agent that turns him into a zombie. Whoopsie. Things go badly at the game after that.
Over recent years, I've tried to tried to watch a film every October in a foreign language, just because. This is this year's entry. It's not bad. Played straight throughout. No cheesiness. No winks at the camera. Just some setup and then zombies show up, and these are not only fast zombies, but zombies with some intelligence still. I'm not quite sure why no one in small town France seems to have a cell phone in 2015, but whatever. It's a decent enough zombie films, with a couple of unique beats. 1) The scheming agent (think Burke from Aliens) turns out to be a savate master, adding a nice "Wow. The scumbag is actually useful!" plot element to the film. 2) Midway through, there's, well, I'm not sure if they put in a trailer for another film about soccer players or if they put in a flashback in the film and made it in the style of a French romance film. and 3) during the credits, there's some "comedy" bits that fall flat. Like "SNL segment 15 minutes before the show ends" levels of flat. Still, decent enough zombie flick.
Jigsaw
When a number of bodies begin to appear, the authorities begin to suspect that the serial killer Jigsaw is not really dead and has more people playing his game.
Good lord. Jigsaw must have had a small assembly plant worth of people helping him out. Every blasted film, "Oh, this person was assisting Jigsaw in his crusade..." Anyway, I kinda like the Saw films. They haven't gone silly like NoES or F13 did. Just every few years we get a bunch of folks tossed into complex machines that might kill them for some sort of loose reason that comes together in the final few minutes. This one's fairly typical. The "game" parts are pretty well done. The "rationale" seems a little shakier than usual, although I think I missed the prior film to this, so maybe I was missing some setup. Anyway, it won't win new converts to the series, but it should please fans of Saw.
Topic: October 2018 Horror Movie a Day (Read 553 times)