Review: Insidious Chapter 3 (2015)

By Tristan Bishop

Quick! How many truly great second sequels can you think of? Nope? Me neither* – as film fans we can doubtless reel off a fairly lengthy list of sequels that improve on the original, but by part three of a series we are generally left disappointed. Whether this is as a result of a successful franchise becoming a cash cow and therefore subject to more studio tinkering, or the film-makers becoming bored with the formula and it noticeably showing is a moot point. What I do know is that the dreaded number ‘3’ suffixing a film title is generally a reason to lower your expectations accordingly. In the case of the Insidious series, the first film, although flawed, turned up at the right time: the wash of torture porn/ordeal horror had reached critical mass by 2011, and those of us sick of the sight of people tied to chairs were clamouring for a new type of fright flick. With Insidious, we got our new direction. Although heavily indebted to Tobe Hooper’s 1982 Poltergeist (itself not coincidentally now rebooted for the new generation), Insidious bought back supernatural scares instead of torturous psychopaths, and introduced the key element of fun back to mainstream horror, and films such as Sinister and The Woman In Black (both 2012) followed the spooky formula into box office success. The violence had been toned right now (almost non-existent in some of these examples), but the ghostly jump scares were given centre stage; instead of wanting to throw up our lunch we were now spilling our popcorn as we jolted in our seats.

By the time we got to Insidious 2, however, silliness had rather taken over – whereas the first film had some unpredictable twists and good laughs, we now had a parade of CGI ghosts and characters visiting spectral worlds. I must confess I don’t remember a great deal of it – I watched it on the same day as You’re Next (2011) and had a great deal more fun with Adam Wingard’s film, but I do remember thinking it was a waste of a good rental. So, I didn’t have high hopes at all for Insidious 3 – and seeing that the usually reliable James Wan had stepped away from the director’s chair to give his long-time writing partner (and actor in the Insidious films) Leigh Whannell his first directing duty made me even more suspicious – although as Whannell had written the previous films (and the first three entries in the Saw series) he might well have been the obvious choice to continue the series in the vein in which it started.

insidious-chapter-3What we have here is actually a prequel. Set ‘a few years’ before the events of the first film, we have sweet teenage girl Quinn (Stefanie Scott) still coming to terms with the death of her mother a year ago, visiting psychic Elise (Lin Shaye returning from the first two films) in the hope of trying to contact the departed. Elise, having apparently had some nasty experiences with demonic spirits in the past, has decided to give up on her gift, but is so touched by Quinn that she decides to try one more reading. Of course, this is quite the mistake, and somehow Quinn ends up haunted by a grim spectre referred to as The Man Who Can’t Breathe (not a snappy name, is it?). After being distracted by a mysterious figure waving at her in the distance, Quinn gets hit by a car and ends up at home in leg casts, looked after by her father (an unimpressive turn by Dermot Mulroney). Of course, the demonic visitations increase, and Quinn and her father, realising how much danger they are in, enlist the help of not only Elise, but also ghost-hunting video bloggers Specs and Tucker (Whannell and Angus Sampson, again returning from the previous films).

There is some fun to be had with Insidious 3 – the meeting of Elise, Specs and Tucker (who of course become an unlikely team) give rise to some amusing lines, but this doesn’t happen until fairly late in the film, and by this time we’ve already had to sit through the pretty uninteresting build-up. The problem is that the central character of Quinn doesn’t even feel like a real character: the film tries to give her some indie cred by putting her in a Pixies T-shirt and having PJ Harvey posters on her wall but unfortunately it just isn’t enough, and she ends up as pretty-but-bland as a Laura Ashley catalogue. In lieu of a main character that we actually care about, we are left with zero tension and the film falls back on jump scares to entertain us – sadly many of these are fluffed (especially the shock ending, which lead a fair few of my fellow cinemagoers to loudly exclaim ‘what the fuck?’ as the credits rolled – an unsubtle but entirely fair bit of criticism, I felt), although one or two certainly hit the mark.

Another area the film could have been improved is in an exploration of the spirit worlds that Elise can enter to confront the demons. Instead we are given some guff about ‘The Further’ which is divided into ‘dark and light’ worlds; an unsatisfying and easily-digested bit of nonsense which appears to be treated so vaguely so not to offend anyone’s idea of an afterlife.

So we’re left with the aforementioned amusing moments (and look out for a James Wan cameo), and a couple of effective jump-scares. However this won’t be enough to justify a viewing, even at a fairly brisk 97 minutes, for anyone but the most undemanding of series fans.

*OK I’ve come up with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and, er, Toy Story 3. Return Of The King doesn’t count.

Insidious Chapter 3 is in cinemas now.

Review: The Nightmare (2015)

Review by Quin

I am no tough guy. Those around me will tell you that I can be a very anxious person. I know this is odd for a guy who reviews horror movies, but I’m actually rarely scared by what I review. When I decided to review the new Rodney Ascher documentary The Nightmare, I figured I’d go all out and watch it right before bed. I know the reviews for it so far have been overwhelmingly positive, pointing out how terrifying it is. But you know what? It just didn’t resonate with me at all. I think it fails as a documentary and it fails as a horror movie.

The film begins with a dictionary definition of the word nightmare – “Late 13th century Middle English (denoting an evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers) Incubus.” As you can see, this definition is rather limiting and perhaps even a bit self serving for the film. The only other information we are given before the barrage of testimonials that follow is a quick explanation that this film is the story of eight people and “what waits for them in the darkness.” These eight people come from everywhere from Torrance, California to Manchester, England. One by one, they delve back into their memories to explain their experiences with a phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. During REM sleep, a chemical is released that prevents you from acting out your dreams. I’ve heard that the human body can do everything asleep that it can do while it’s awake. You may have heard about all of those incidents reported in the news where people on Ambien were sleep driving. The brain knows how to make sure that doesn’t happen. If someone wakes up during REM sleep, they may experience hallucinations. Supposedly this is also where you can control your dreams. I’ve tried a few times, with no luck. I’ve already given you more information than what can be gleaned from The Nightmare. Some of it is from Wikipedia and I also have a friend who is really into dream journaling and something he calls “mining his dreams” which is going back through a dream to see how much you can recall and then using it to enhance creativity.

The Nightmare posterI must admit that the thing I found interesting about The Nightmare was the fact that most of these people began experiencing their sleep paralysis before the internet. So many of these people who knew nothing of each-other – all had experiences with pretty remarkable similarities. However, so much of it just seemed like archetypes that are already in all of our minds. Dream interpretation is nothing new, and if you thumb through any book on the subject, it’s amazing the things that are listed. The symbolism seems far fetched, but it’s hard to deny that it’s really a thing. For instance, the shadow figures standing by the bed, the tapping on the window, the black blobs floating in the air, or the black cat sitting on the chest – these are seen over and over. Not just in the eight from this film, but as far back as the 1781 Henry Fuseli painting The Nightmare. The incubus actually goes back to Mesopotamia 2400 BC. Again, I’m giving you more info than the documentary, but some of the subjects talk about learning quite a bit about their experiences through google searches.

One of the huge problems I had with The Nightmare was the methods which it used to show us what these people had supposedly been through. The most glaring of errors was not defining any clear boundaries as far as what constitutes the sleep paralysis portion of the experience. To me, most of what these people were describing was clearly a dream. One guy talks about getting out of bed during an episode, and having a conversation on his cell phone which ended with him smashing it to pieces. When he woke up, the phone was just fine. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the reason his phone wasn’t broken was because he dreamt all of it up. It reminds me of Charles Fleischer’s character in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when he says, “If you don’t dream, you go…” He means cuckoo, and some of the subjects in The Nightmare are already there.

The Nightmare was directed by Rodney Ascher who previously brought us Room 237, the meditation on several outlandish theories on the film The Shining. I loved that film, for the same reasons I didn’t like The Nightmare. In Room 237, these people were given the floor to talk about their theories uninterrupted. Most of it was completely crazy, but it allowed the viewer to be fascinated and roll their eyes at their own pace. The film didn’t set out to side with these people. It just gave them a place to talk. As batshit insane as most of it was, I found it fascinating and entertaining. With The Nightmare, Ascher admits that he has experienced sleep paralysis. It’s brief, but in a weak stretch of an explanation, he says that during the credits of Natural Born Killers, there is a shadow figure with red light. He actually says the words, “The people who made this have had the same experiences as me. This is a message to me.” And this is where The Nightmare jumps the shark. Ascher should have stayed out of the movie completely. Instead of his occasional question or his personal experience, we should have heard from some experts. I want to hear what psychologists and scientists have to say. Heck, I’d even be interested in getting the thoughts on some spiritual leaders. Anything is better than self diagnosis and babbling about memories from decades ago. Memory is extremely faulty, folks, and when one of the subjects said that sleep paralysis was his earliest memory and his “awakening into the world” I chuckled audibly.

Finally, the re-creations of these sleep experiences (that’s the best thing I can think to call it) are creepy at first. But they become repetitive very quickly. Some of them are pretty cheap looking and others are just comical. But so many reviews will tell you that the film is full of horrifying visuals that put you in the experience. I just don’t get it. I hope this movie gets a second review from Brutal as Hell. I’m sure there will be an opinion from one of my colleagues that is wildly different from mine. I absolutely welcome this, but surely I can’t be the only one who sees through this poorly made mess. If I have somehow angered the shadow people and I start getting these visits, you will all be the first to know. As a famous philosopher once said…unpleasant dreams.

DVD Review: Charlie’s Farm (2014)

Review by Ben Bussey

I just don’t get it. Here’s a new Australian horror movie, relatively low-budget but with reasonable means at its disposal: IMDb lists its reported budget as $3 million (presumably AUS), which was enough to hire the services of three well-known, long-established Hollywood actors, and produce an end product that looks and sounds pretty damn good. Clearly a lot of real effort has been put in here. My question is why? Why would anyone invest a considerable amount of time, energy and not for nothing money into something as lazily conceived, painfully generic and downright tedious as Charlie’s Farm?

Look, I do enjoy the odd dirty backwoods hillbilly horror on occasion, and I realise there’s a strong direct-to-DVD market for it; the Wrong Turn series wouldn’t have endured so long otherwise. But you know, it hasn’t been that long since the last Wrong Turn, and there’s said to be another one – the seventh – on the way. Whether anyone really wants or needs yet another Wrong Turn is debatable (and I think I know where I’d stand in that debate), but one thing I can confidently declare we don’t need is yet another by-the-numbers rural slasher following every cliche to the letter, presenting two-dimensional characters spouting utterly witless dialogue, throwing in side characters in the most forced and arbitrary way imaginable, and ultimately delivering basically nothing that even the most casual horror viewer hasn’t seen innumerable times before.

Seriously, Charlie’s Farm makes the Hatchet films look like a hotbed of innovation. Just take a moment to contemplate that.

Charlies Farm DVD 2D - FINALThe plot, such as it bears repeating (well, it has been repeated time and again, and again, and again), centres on four well-to-do youngish folk (two girls and two boys, of course) who, having no apparent responsibilities, decide out of the blue to take a camping trip – and the boys decide, without telling the girls at first, that they’ll track down Charlie’s Farm, the reported site of a string of murders by deranged backwoods farmers around 30 years earlier. Recalling tidbits of the urban legends surrounding the place as they make their way down, the city folk are warned by the locals to abandon their foolish quest, and the girls – who are the sensible, sensitive ones, of course – urge the boys to reconsider. Obviously they don’t. Obviously they find the place. Obviously it looks like a leftover set from any number of Texas Chainsaw Massacre copycats. Obviously Charlie himself (Aussie muscleman Nathan Jones) eventually shows up – after about an hour – and obviously he’s a towering brick shithouse who brutally and cartoonishly kills them all one by one. The end. Obviously.

I dunno; maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe writer-director Chris Sun is banking on his film reaching a young audience who are not remotely versed in backwoods slasher lore, much as Scream provided an introduction to slashers for the hitherto clueless teens of the 1990s. There’s a moment when an extremely crap joke is made about Charles Manson (to be fair, I think it’s intended to be crap), and one character asks who he is; and as hard as that might be for many of us to believe, it may well be that a lot of young folk today honestly don’t know. Perhaps for them Charlie’s Farm might prove a revelation; perhaps this is why Sun would seem to have gone to pains to follow the conventions of the genre as closely as possible, with so far as I can tell no effort made whatsoever to do anything remotely original, with the possible exception of one or two of the death scenes.

But I rather doubt that’s the case, as they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of getting cameos from Kane Hodder and Bill Moseley (sigh; remember the days when his presence made a film worth seeing?) if they hadn’t intended to sell Charlie’s Farm to existing, knowledgeable horror fans. Now, both these men have played some pretty substandard parts in their time, but these really just take the biscuit. First off, there’s very little explanation of why either of them is in Australia (not that I can hold that against them too harshly, as Americans emigrating down under obviously isn’t unheard of), but the characters themselves – yeesh. Moseley really can do this hillbilly psycho schtick in his sleep, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they woke him mere seconds before he had to shoot his scenes as it’s the same routine as ever, only with an excess of subpar dialogue, and a tied up semi-naked victim screaming at him from the bed. We know he raped her, because she shouts about it, more than once.

But as bog-standard and half-baked as Moseley’s cameo is, that’s nothing compared to how lazily and stupidly they shoehorn Kane Hodder into this thing. Okay, he’s a good guy, which is a surprise – but that’s where the good news ends. Introduced maybe half an hour in out of nowhere as an American boxer our kids are somehow close friends with, who apparently knows something about the Charlie legend, he then disappears until the final act when – prompted by nothing – he gets worried about his young friends and decides to go down to the farm and check on them. And the journey that took them more than a day takes him about ten minutes. Obviously it’s all a set-up for Kane and Charlie to fight, which is a laudable enough goal – but quite apart from the painfully lame-brained set-up to this fight, worse yet is the fact that they opted to shoot it in a dingy, dimly-lit barn with close-up camera work, meaning we can basically see bugger all once the fight kicks off. Yet another instance where I just can’t fathom what the filmmakers were thinking.

And Tara Reid… yeah, she’s just boring, but surely no-one’s expecting anything different.

There are some damn good low budget genre directors doing interesting and unusual work in Australia right now. Off the top of my head, Dario Russo’s Danger 5 gave us 14 episodes of the most unique, outlandish TV of recent years; Daniel Armstrong has blended 80s-style horror with roller derby in Murderdrome, and female wrestling in the upcoming From Parts Unknown; and Stuart Simpson has gone from homaging Russ Meyer and 50s B-movies in Monstro to tackling Taxi Driver-esque psychological drama with Chocolate Strawberry Vanilla (which, although I had my reservations, was a very respectable effort). When I think what any of these guys might be able to do with $3 million in their pocket, and then look at what Chris Sun and company have done with that money… let me say it once more, I just don’t get it. Are people really that eager to see the same thing over and over? Charlie’s Farm not only makes no attempts whatsoever to do anything new, it seems to positively revel in its complete and total lack of originality. I’ve searched and searched for any hint of satire or subversion, any vague chance that the film might be trying to make some kind of point by going through the motions so deliberately, taking no risks of any kind along the way… but I’ve drawn a complete blank at every step, and can only conclude that Charlie’s Farm is nothing more than a complete and total waste of time.

Charlie’s Farm is available on UK Blu-ray and DVD on 22nd June, from Monster Pictures.

DVD Review: Wild Tales (2014)

By Tristan Bishop

The anthology film has had something of a revival in horror circles in recent years, with hits such as The ABCs of Death and V/H/S (both 2012) inspiring sequels and imitations. Wild Tales is a slightly different beast to these multi-authored collections of short films, however; it’s all been directed by one person, for a start, and has been attracting a great deal of praise from the more high-minded areas of film criticism (whereas the previously mentioned horror-based anthologies have had a hard time attracting much praise even from the horror scene). There’s a big name involved here too – although Argentinian writer/director Damian Szifron is hardly a well-known figure on the international circuit, one of the producers is none other than Spain’s foremost auteur, Pedro Almodovar. I’m not entirely sure how much input Pedro had into the film (other than monetary), as he is one of several producers on the project, but his name is displayed prominently on the UK posters at least.

Wild Tales DVDThe six tales presented here, ranging from a short, sharp opening vignette to much longer pieces (three of which last nearly thirty minutes each) all deal with the theme of revenge – a well-explored subject in cinema, but Szifron manages to take a different standpoint from each tale. The aforementioned short piece that opens the film is certainly an attention grabber (and one I won’t spoiler), the outrageous humour of which quickly gives way to the second story of a waitress who realises that the man she is serving drove her father to suicide, although she is rather more hesitant than her boss is to see revenge served cold. This segment, although short and slight, works in some nice moments of tension and humour.

This is followed by the third segment, undoubtedly the highlight of the film for me, which hinges on a highway conflagration between a rich arsehole and a leering redneck (or whatever the Argentinian form of ‘redneck’ is). This is another very simply plotted tale, but Szifron goes for the throat here, as the man attempt to best each other to avoid wounding their macho pride, ending in a blaze of blood, fire, and unsanitary toilet practices. Szifron shows his skill at directing an action scene here, with a sequence as tense as anything in a mainstream Hollywood thriller, and the result is hugely entertaining.

The second three sequences are the longest – from a demolitions expert who seems to be channelling Michael Douglas in Falling Down (1993) when his car gets impounded, to a tale of a man who attempts to buy freedom for his son after he kills a pregnant woman in a drunken hit-and-run accident, to the closing story of a wedding gone very very wrong. These three sections shift in mood, alternately, from ironic, to downbeat to comic – in fact the final section feels the closest to Almodovar’s style, and will no doubt appeal to fans of his more ‘hysterical’ (in the clinical sense of the term) work. Personally, whilst I enjoyed some aspects of this tale I found the denoument a little silly and unlikely – admittedly it IS supposed to be a comic section but I guess this highlights the main problem with the film, and this is a problem that is unique to almost every anthology film ever made (1945’s Dead Of Night, Mario Bava’s 1963 effort Black Sabbath and perhaps Roger Corman’s 1962 Poe-based Tales Of Terror the exceptions): the film just doesn’t flow very well. The opening trio of tales are punchy and interesting (and occasionally hilarious) but by four and five the longer form and more serious tone derail the film and start to feel dull. This is a shame as undoubtedly they all have merit – story five in particular would make a very good feature, especially if the characters were more fleshed out so we would care more about the outcome (the other common problem with anthology films), but here it starts to feel like a diversion from the fun, and by the time we get back to the dark humour with the final segment we don’t feel much like laughing.

As a showcase for Szifron’s talents and range, Wild Tales is commendable, and I’m interested in tracking down his earlier thriller Bottom Of The Sea (2003) on the strength of the ‘road rage’ segment here, but as a piece in and of itself the film failed to blow me away.

Wild Tales is out on Region 2 DVD on 15th June, from Artificial Eye.

Review: Maggie (2015)

Review by Dustin Hall

Another day gone by, and once again, the God-made-mortal-flesh, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the greatest onscreen presence EVER has once again graced us with another film.

The verdict: you probably won’t like it.

That said, Maggie isn’t a bad film. It just really isn’t the horror film it was branded as. Instead viewers enter a world sometime after the zombie apocalypse has happened and been narrowly contained. The infected and undead are being rounded up and placed into quarantine where they are eventually put down when their humanity fades away. In this world, we meet Schwarzenegger’s Wade Vogel, a simple farmer whose daughter has been missing for the last two weeks. When he finds young Maggie, she’s been bitten, and has been hiding lest her family discover the terrible truth. Taking her back home regardless, Wade does his best to make his daughter feel comfortable, and forget the horrors of the thing she will become, while trying to also dodge the frequent visits of the local police who prowl the area looking for infected to drag off to quarantine.

While the film is billed as a horror and set in a zombie-filled countryside, there’s almost no horror or intensity to be found, much to the dismay of many horror viewers. Common comments on IMDB include gems like “Should have had a zombie assault on the farm.” “Needed Arnie fighting more zombies.” and “Needed a bloodier payoff at the end.” I grant you, those would have been very entertaining scenes, but that isn’t this movie. Maggie is honestly more a drama than a horror, and the zombie virus raging through Maggie’s veins could have just as well been replaced with an inoperable cancer, and the movie would have progressed in much the same way, as a family prepares to see their beloved daughter succumb to an inevitable end. In this case the zombie aspect seems to have been added to make the encroaching demise more unique visually, and also to force Wade to be the one to make the choice, ‘Do I put my daughter down myself or let strangers drag her off?’, making his decision very weighty. The horror here comes not from monsters or bloodshed, but from the idea of having to personally take the life of a loved one in pain.

The performances on screen are pretty good. Abigail Breslin’s Maggie is a soft-spoken and relatable teen, and Arnold delivers a quiet, understated, and surprisingly emotional turn as Wade. Going against type really works for Arnold, and he captures every moment he’s on screen, as only this Adonis can. However, Wade is not the main character; despite the trailer’s insistence otherwise, it is the titular Maggie. Her wandering through her home, observing close family and friends as they prepare to say goodbye, and dealing with the trauma of having been attacked, are the real core of this story. Many will find this boring, and the film does move at a slow, deliberate pace. Reviews coming out of festivals were positive, generally coming from art-house film fans and critics. If you have a deep appreciation for leisurely paced, introspective character dramas about families and dealing with mortality, then you have a winner in Maggie. If not, you’re better off watching the frantic and fun Dead Snow 2 again.

Personally I enjoyed it, and Maggie will be a fine addition to my Arnold film collection (I own them all to date!), though I would gladly see him in a large scale zombie killing splatter-fest as well. Perhaps one day…

Maggie is now available on Amazon Instant and in select theaters in the US, and will hit screens in the UK July 17th.

Review: Poltergeist (2015)

Review by Dustin Hall

This is a few weeks late. Sad but true, no one on the BAH staff really wanted to use their time to watch this one. Someone, though, had to take one for the team, and it was me. After being held back for nearly five years, like a school year bully, the new Poltergeist fulfills a lot of peoples’ expectations about it, and not in a positive way. Basically, with this flick having been out in the theaters for about three weeks now, its a bit late to tell you whether or not to see the film, but if you haven’t yet, allow me to assure you, you didn’t miss anything.

Poltergeist 2015 posterThat being the case, let’s not spend a lot of time selling the benefits of the film or decrying its faults in order to sell the film or deter you from it. Rather, I’d like to ponder exactly what the filmmakers were thinking in re-making this film. It completely eludes me. Typically in Raimi I trust, and with him as a producer, I was really hoping that there would be some new flourishes, some creative visuals, physical stunt work, and uniquely dark humor. But if at any point Raimi’s Midas touch was in the film, it was harshly excised on the way to the screen. And while most upcoming directors (this is Gil Kenan’s third film) might want to use new technology to wow us with great visual effects impossible in the original, this installment deliberately avoids any sequences that might be set pieces for such spectacle, with the exception of our brief look into the realm of the dead. What we’re left with is a completely bland, flavorless, voiceless film bereft of interest or any distinguishable purpose. It’s as though the entire creation of the film hinged upon some studio exec being stoned and thinking ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if the guys from Ghost Hunters made it into the house from Poltergeist?’, and then ten years after that show’s relevance had passed, this movie got shat out.

It’s gotten to the point where most of the horror films in Hollywood can’t even attract horror fans, hasn’t it? Most fans cringe at the mere sight of another remake, reboot, or found footage film, and yet here we are, blessed with this, and then the upcoming first person The Gallows. I’m not even a fan of the Insidious franchise, but by comparison to this scare-less, lifeless corpse of a film, it seems goddamn refreshing. Sitting in the theater full of noisy, theater-hopping, vaping tweens who kept exclaiming ‘Aw Hell naw!” every time a ghost doll appeared on screen and got absolutely none of the references to the original films shoe-horned into this reboot, I really had to wonder who was to blame for it all. The assholes watching the film with me, giving it money for cheap attempts at scares? The studio execs who green-lit the damn thing, hoping to wring dollars out of a beloved old franchise? Or we hardcore horror fans for not coming out in droves to see good horror to help it out-gross these lowest common denominator bastardizations?

Either way, Sam Rockwell, I love you, but you’re in a terrible movie. I’m going to go kill myself now and haunt the next tenant of my apartment. It’ll be a more enjoyable experience.

Assuming you still want to see it, Poltergeist is in cinemas now.

DVD Review: Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)

Review by Quin

If the 1973 film Ganja and Hess was ever going to be remade, Spike Lee was definitely the one who had to do it. In fact, he even used Kickstarter to fund the film. I know that Brutal as Hell’s Ben has reiterated time and again how the age of Kickstarter feels like we’re being asked to throw more money in more directions, often with little hope of any sort of return on our investment – and I don’t disagree. However, Spike Lee’s new film Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a film that makes me glad that crowd sourcing is a thing, and even filmmakers with big names and cash and friends in high places can use it to work in their favor. We all know too well that no director is immune to being squashed by the Hollywood system. I bet there’s actually an alternate universe where Pootie Tang is a great movie. Alas, we’ll never know – but we do know that Spike Lee has succeeded with Kickstarter and he’s mostly succeeded with the dreaded medium: the remake. The film does have some issues that could make it hard to please more than a very select audience, but I’ll walk you through it and we’ll figure out together if this is going to be your kind of movie.

Dr. Hess Greene is an anthropologist who specializes in the Ashanti. While at his New England compound, Greene is attacked by a researcher named Dr. Hightower. During the attack his heart is pierced by a cursed dagger, leaving him with an addiction for blood. Hightower, thinking he murdered Hess and now feeling guilty, commits suicide. Hess’ new impulses propel him to start robbing blood banks. He mostly lives a secluded and lonely existence with one butler until Mrs. Hightower comes to town. She doesn’t seem particularly overcome with grief at the loss of her husband, but she’s there nonetheless. In no time, Mrs. Hightower (first name Ganja – and she smokes giant joints) and Dr. Hess Greene become romantically involved. He’ll hide his addiction for as long as he can, but things escalate when he wants his blood fresher and warmer so he starts to hunt people.

This synopsis is probably making Da Sweet Blood of Jesus sound like your run-of-the-mill vampire flick, but I assure you it’s not. It remakes practically every scene in Ganja and Hess, but expands it with more daylight, brighter colors and clearer dialogue. That is not to say that this movie isn’t still a little convoluted at times, but it is so much less abstract than Ganja and Hess – which is a straight up experimental head-scratcher of a film. Spike Lee joked that this movie wouldn’t be a remake of Blacula, but I guess somewhat ironically, it feels a little more like a blaxploitation reimagining of Ganja and Hess. The older film was made in the era of blaxploitation and gets lumped in with those movies, but it’s more serious and less sensational. Spike Lee has added more dark humor and a tone that is at times extremely campy. The conversations don’t feel quite as real, but they are stylized along with the visuals in a way that Spike Lee is a master of. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus also has a lot more sweet sweet lovin’ and tons of nudity.

The opening credits will remind Spike Lee fans of his film Do the Right Thing. But instead of Rosie Perez dancing to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”, it’s a young kid dancing in various Brooklyn locations to a sweet, melancholic piano tune. From the first frame, the cinematography is stunning and it stays that way through to the last.

Fans of HBO’s The Wire will also be interested in seeing an unrecognizable Felicia Pearson (she played gangster Snoop in The Wire) in a small role. I had no idea she was in this until I heard her talk, and that voice hasn’t changed one bit. Elvis Nolasco, who was in an excellent new network television show this year called American Crime, is in the brief role of Dr. Hightower. Even though it’s short, he has a lot to work with. He’s great to watch and I’m guessing we’re going to keep seeing a lot more of him. Spike Lee’s sister Joie Lee also has a brief appearance as a nurse. She’s always great too, and it’s nice he’s still utilizing her talents.

As for the two lead actors, Zaraah Abrahams and Stephen Tyrone Williams, they aren’t quite as effective as Marlene Clark and Duane Jones in the original. But as I said, there is a subtle campiness here and Abrahams and Williams make a fine Ganja and Hess. But if you enjoy this, you’ll definitely want to check out the older version. In that one, you’ll get to see Ben from Night of the Living Dead like you never thought you would. Duane Jones had some serious range and his career was much too short. But enough about Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess; you should read Keri’s review of that, then you can decide which version you think you’d most likely prefer. I, of course, recommend that you see both of them.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is out now on DVD and Blu-Ray in the US, from Anchor Bay Entertainment.

Review: The Hospital 2 (2015)

2013 microbudget horror The Hospital somehow went totally under the radar for us at BAH, aside from the minor controversy it attracted some time after its UK DVD release when a Tesco store in Gloucester withdrew all copies of the film following a customer complaint (yes, just one) that it was too graphic. Unsurprisingly, this story broke in the pages of the Daily Mail, who quoted the disgruntled customer as declaringI love horror films and I am not easily shocked. But I wasn’t prepared for the graphic sexually violent scenes depicted in this film,” before adding helpfully, The quality of the film was terrible in my opinion so I’m not sure why Tesco would want to sell it anyway.” 

As I hadn’t seen the film at the time, I didn’t pay this much mind; after all, if the BBFC had been happy to pass it uncut with an 18, I knew it couldn’t exactly be A Serbian Film Revisited (though I didn’t know then that The Hospital had been pre-cut before reaching the British censor’s office by a staggering 17 minutes and 30 seconds). Still, having since caught up with the film from directorial duo Tommy Golden and Daniel Emery Taylor, I can certainly see where the upset came from; The Hospital is one of those movies custom made to offend just about anyone, with more or less every female cast member (and at least a couple of the men) stripped naked, abused and humiliated on camera before the end credits roll. Naturally a lot of viewers, myself included, will doubtless find this rather unseemly – but even so, the film’s tone is so feverishly over-the-top, heavily loaded with sick dark humour and laughably cut-price special effects, that it’s hard to take very seriously. I find it difficult to look too disdainfully on any movie in which a guy gets killed whilst having sex with a hooker doggy-style, his blood sprays up her back, and she grumbles, “Already? Well, you’re not getting a refund.” On top of which, the film’s twisty-turny structure – blending paranormal investigation, slasher and torture porn, with some genuinely unexpected plot developments and reveals – adds up to something considerably more engaging and unpredictable than most microbudget horror. All in all, then, I confess I quite enjoyed The Hospital – though I obviously couldn’t say whether I’d feel similarly had I seen the fully uncut version.

When I was offered an early look at the sequel, this time directed by Daniel Emery Taylor and co-writer/actor and producer Jim O’Rear, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect; it seemed feasible that it would see a whole new ensemble enter the abandoned haunted hospital of the first film, and delve further into the history of the troubled place. However, it becomes evident early on that the team at Deviant Pictures have other ideas. For starters, though the film is entitled The Hospital 2, at best only a quarter of the film takes place at that location. Secondly, the ghosts who appeared sporadically in the original film are notable by their absence this time around. So what does exactly that leave behind, I ask you…? If you answered “lots and lots of rape and murder,” give yourself a pat (and/or a spray of ejaculatory blood) on the back. It’s not hard to see The Hospital 2 as a Devil’s Rejects to the original’s House of 1000 Corpses: somewhere along the line, it was clearly decided that the thing that worked best about the first film was those fucked-up individuals being generally cruel and despicable, and so for the sequel they decided to trim the fat and just pile on the cruelty. Again, I haven’t seen the fully uncut version of The Hospital so I can’t say for sure how it compares to the fully uncut sequel, but I suspect that if the original upset that guy from Gloucester, he’d almost certainly be driven to nervous nausea by this one.

Spoilers for the original The Hospital ahead…


Viewers of the original may be surprised to learn that Jim O’Rear returns in front of the camera as Alan – alleged paranormal documentarian ultimately revealed to be a snuff porn filmmaker – given that we saw his throat slashed (albeit in utterly unconvincing CGI) in the first film’s finale. However, utilising the time-honoured movie logic that if you don’t see them properly die then they’re not properly dead, it transpires that Alan was saved at the last minute by psychotic simpleton Stanley (co-director Taylor). When we catch up with them five years later they’ve branched out in their snuff business, setting up shop in – brace yourselves – an institute for battered and abused women. Offended yet? I suspect that’s the whole idea. Alan seems reasonably content in this new work environment with new cohort Samantha (Megan Emmerick – I won’t divulge the full nature of their relationship, which is a doozy); Stanley, however, remains fixated on the girls that got away, his first victim Beth (a returning Constance Medrano), and final girl escapee Skye (Betsy Rue replacing the original’s Robyn Shute). Inevitably, their worlds will soon collide again – and, even more inevitably, it won’t be pretty when they do.

The issue of sexual violence in horror movies is a thorny one and always will be. Given this is a movie review and not an academic treatise, I don’t want to dwell too long on the arguments for and against; however, I will say there can be something hugely liberating in breaking taboos, and this is something the horror genre has always reveled in. In the case of The Hospital movies, the whole enterprise is so shock-for-shock’s sake, so knowingly and willfully politically incorrect, that to actually get offended by it seems counter-productive somehow. Sick jokes only work when the person telling the joke and the person hearing it are both well aware that it’s sick; we’re not supposed to think otherwise, and so it is here.

The real problem, however, is the length of the rape scenes and the way they’re shot and edited. Slashers and torture movies have long been accused of having a pornographic structure – swathes of bland plot and dialogue serving no real function but to space out the money shots – and many viewers will doubtless find The Hospital 2 to work along much the same lines, only in an even more directly pornographic fashion. There’s a lingering, clearly voyeuristic emphasis on the women being stripped and molested, and there really can be no question that we’re intended to enjoy this spectacle. The BBFC’s big question about any display of sexual violence is whether or not it ‘eroticises’ and/or ‘endorses’ the activity shown, and I’d have a hard time arguing that The Hospital 2 doesn’t do this. And no, the fact that this time around a female character also has a role to play in all the sexual torture does not in any way defuse the issue.


But then, there’s the matter of what comes up between the rape and torture sequences. The Hospital 2 has a striking number of lengthy (in some cases overly so) dialogue-based scenes dealing with questions of faith and spirituality, from a minister who visits the women’s shelter to preach God’s love, to Skye’s hippy parents (one of whom is veteran scream queen Debbie Rochon) discussing karma. In the midst of all the cartoonish depravity, there do seem to be sincere efforts made here to tackle ‘the bigger picture’; ruminations of how, if at all, human morality makes any difference in the grand, cosmic scheme of things, and whether those that do bad deeds will ultimately see that same harm visited back upon them. Just how well these ideas are handled, and just how much bearing they have on the narrative itself is debatable, and it might easily be argued that such scenes are included in the hopes of somehow excusing the brutal and exploitative nature of the rest of the film. Naturally, by the finale The Hospital 2 does venture into revenge territory – but, to broach another oft-repeated question, does seeing the rapists suffer a terrible comeuppance ultimately justify rape as entertainment?

I’m not setting out to answer these questions – merely to suggest that if you, dear reader, know where you stand on such matters, you might be able to make an educated guess on whether or not you’re likely to enjoy The Hospital 2. As a microbudget horror movie (with all low production values that go with that label) it was never going to be to all tastes anyway, with or without the sexual violence. But of course, as we all know, the words ‘horror’ and ‘to all tastes’ were never meant to go together. I don’t believe it’s the object of horror films to be tasteful; the genre, by its very definition, should deal with upsetting subject matter, even if it is to seemingly make light of it. Equally, I don’t believe a film is inherently misogynistic just because it features misogynistic characters. The Hospital 2 sets out to be by turns grotesque, absurd and deeply unpleasant, and succeeds in doing so; as such, I can’t say it isn’t a success. Even so, I also can’t ignore that it does play rape for titillation, which I find deeply problematic. Again, whether or not you feel similarly might determine whether or not you’ll enjoy The Hospital 2.

Or, to put it a great deal more simply – if you didn’t like the original, you probably won’t like this one either. Got that, Tesco shoppers?

The Hospital 2 has its US theatrical premiere in Lebanon, TN on September 26th, with home entertainment release to follow. Learn more at The Hospital 2 Facebook page.

DVD Review: Killer Mermaids (AKA Nymph) (2014)

Review by Ben Bussey

Ugh. You hear there’s a Serbian creature feature about deadly sirens luring pretty young party people to their deaths on a sunkissed island, and the first impulse is to expect something fun. No, it doesn’t sound like an Oscar-winner, but it does sound like the makings of a good night in with beer and pizza. I dunno – perhaps if the beer is stronger than average and the pizza is phenomenally good, there might still be the potential for a pleasant evening with this one playing in the background – but when taken in stone cold sober whilst wearing one’s critic hat, I for one tend not to be in quite so forgiving a mood.

I guess the first clue of a problem is the rather blunt title change, from the simple and entirely appropriate original Nymph, to the spelling-it-all-out-in-black-and-white-so-there-can-be-no-misunderstanding Killer Mermaids. Immediately this invites nitpicking, as it implies mermaids plural, when in fact there’s only the one; and by announcing her presence right then and there in the title and throwing her front and centre in the marketing (including the – surprise surprise – massively misleading DVD cover art), we’re immediately robbed of any chance at being genuinely surprised by this movie. Not that I can imagine it would have had much impact either way. Call it Nymph, call it Killer Mermaids, call it Soggy Serbian Film; any way you cut it this is a boringly predictable and predictably boring horror movie, doing its utmost to follow a formula for a supposedly sexy slasher format but falling flat on its gym-toned arse.

And, oh yes, there are some very prominent arses on show here, in particular that of second female lead Natalie Burn. Don’t worry, just on the very, very slim chance you miss it in her first very skimpy bikini shot, there are plenty more on the way, and when Ms Burn isn’t in her bikini she’s generally wearing very short shorts. None of this is by any means a complaint; director Milan Todorovic clearly recognised his main selling point when he saw it. But if you’re hoping for more in terms of titillation, you may well be left somewhat disappointed, as beyond a spot of gratuitous toplessness from the first victim, Killer Mermaids is a surprisingly chaste affair, hoping instead to win over the audience with… oh dear… plot and dialogue.

One of the curious oddities of Killer Mermaids is that, despite it being a Serbian production set in the Mediterranean with a largely local cast, it’s shot entirely in English. Okay, so the cast seem proficient enough, but it’s quite obvious that it isn’t their first language, and given the European setting and prevalence of European characters it hardly seems appropriate anyway, resulting in an even greater sense of artifice about the whole thing. The only native English speaker of the bunch is Kristina Klebe, who I must admit I didn’t recognise from her earlier role in Rob Zombie’s Halloween. She proved an inadequate substitute for PJ Soles in that film, and she isn’t exactly the most compelling lead here as American journalist Kelly, vacationing in the Mediterranean with her old pal Lucy (Burn) whilst catching up with another old college buddy, and a one-time flame of Lucy’s – who, without telling them, has gone and got engaged, and brought his betrothed along with him. Tag on one more dude in the hopes of boosting sexual tension, and the gang are off, talking and behaving like your typical horror movie high school kids despite the fact they’re all quite clearly in their mid-to-late thirties.

Anyway, rather than just hanging out at bars and clubs, the ensemble decide to take a boat trip out to a remote island that houses an abandoned prison – even though a painfully wasted and extremely bored-looking Franco Nero warns them not to go out there (yes, I’m sorry to say Franco Nero is now the “it’s got a death curse” guy). Out they all go in a little dinghy, despite Kelly’s morbid fear of the water (gee, wonder if she’ll need to confront that before the end), and naturally things get sour not long after they arrive. There’s a maniacal killer on the island with them – but it soon comes to light that he’s in fact only a puppet for another, ever more sinister threat. No prizes for guessing what that might turn out to be.

Mermaids remain largely virgin territory for horror, and the creature designs on show here aren’t bad at all, with Zorana Kostic Obradovic making for a pretty effective sinister seductress in the Mathilda May mould – so the potential was clearly there for something cool and different here. Unfortunately, Killer Mermaids never manages to rise above formulaic tedium. The script is clearly trying to make things a bit more emotional and character-based than we might expect, but when the characters are as thoroughly unlikeable as this and the dialogue so overwrought and annoying, it just feels torturous. It’s one of those instances when the killing can’t start soon enough, but when it finally happens none of it hits home the way it should, with scarcely a single memorable death: I’m a little baffled that the BBFC (contrary to the art above, which quite reasonably predicted a 15) have slapped this with an 18 for ‘strong violence and gore,’ as it all feels pretty tame by today’s standards. Indeed, by any standards Killer Mermaids is tame, tepid, tedious, with nothing to support it beyond a little eye candy, and most of that is there in the trailer below (they didn’t pick that screengrab by accident); watch that, and go ‘phwoar’ at the butt shots by all means, but the film itself is one to miss.

Killer Mermaids is available to download from 15th June and comes to DVD on 29th June, from Kaleidoscope.

DVD Review: Zombieworld (2015)

By Ben Bussey

One of the ways the current wave of anthology horror stands apart from previous generations is its tendency to employ multiple directors. While there were certainly existing examples of anthology movie which saw different filmmakers helm different chapters (The Twilight Zone movie comes to mind), this was by no means the norm, but since V/H/S and The ABCs of Death well and truly brought the format back it’s de rigeur for any new anthology to be a compilation of numerous directors, oftentimes from all over the world. Unifying themes are often tenuous at best, and filmmaking styles often wildly diverse, lending these portmanteau movies an untidy feel which arguably is key to their appeal; but even so, there does seem to be at least a hint of uniformity from each filmmaker having gone on with the same brief, regardless of their approach.

zombieworldZombieworld isn’t quite the same story. While there’s an obvious recurring theme as each short film is zombie-based, the major difference is that in this case the bulk of the content was pre-existing, stitched together retroactively to fit a framing mechanism devised later. The basic idea is, the world has been overtaken by zombies, and a news station – whose anchorman is slowly but surely turning into a zombie himself – broadcast stories from around the world chronicling the walking dead-induced downfall of civilisation. The fact that almost none of the ensuing short films in any way resemble news footage, plus the fact that several of them quite clearly show a world which has not been overrun by zombies (indeed, there’s one which turns out to not actually feature zombies at all) rather pisses away any trace of verisimilitude, leaving the whole thing feeling a bit half-baked. Factor in that a lot of these shorts can already be found to view online perfectly legally free of charge, and we might be forgiven for regarding Zombieworld a bit of a rip-off. On top of which, the fact that they chose a title so painfully close to mainstream hit Zombieland suggests they’re hoping to cash in on the let’s-swindle-less-observant-consumers market so beloved of The Asylum and their ilk, which isn’t exactly a recommendation either.

All that being said, once I dismount from my high horse I can admit that Zombieworld most definitely isn’t without its charms. Again, the higgledy-piggledy feel of modern anthology horror has become part of the subgenre’s appeal, and there are a few shorts here that are among the most entertaining of their kind you’re likely to find anywhere. Okay, so most of them you can find online, and they could probably do without the framing device, but Zombieworld winds up perfectly effective as midnight movie horror material that doesn’t demand the viewer be at the utmost attention throughout.

The key sales points, to my money, are the two funniest, goriest short films of the last few years: Jesse Baget and Adrián Cardona’s Fist of Jesus, and their earlier short film with Rafa Dengrá, Brutal Relax. Longtime followers of our Horror in Short thread may well be aware of these babies, as we’ve featured them in days gone by (you can read all about them, and indeed watch them, here and here). Expertly crafted slices of comedy horror, they deliver hilariously over-the-top carnage and bad taste humour on clearly limited budgets. I remain astonished the team have thus far been unable to secure funding for their proposed feature length Fist of Jesus adaptation Once Upon A Time In Jerusalem; we can but hope that their involvement in Zombieworld helps raise their profile enough to get them back in business.

Zombieworld opens on a high note too, with Peter Horn and Jared Marshall’s Dark Times, a technically impressive, adrenaline-charged POV short following some fleeing humans in the face of the apocalypse breaking out. The FX are great, the pace is frenetic, and there are genuine surprises in store; it’s a great way to get the ball rolling. Another highlight is also shot in POV, Zachary Ramelan’s Dead Rush. Following another poor soul in a close encounter with the walking dead, it’s a similarly heart-thumping and cleverly edited first-person perspective short, but with a somewhat harder-edged take on the subject matter.

Outside of these, though, things are a bit more hit and miss. Vedran Marjanovic Wekster’s three-parter How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse is a bit nondescript and forgettable, and rather low on helpful advice for how to battle the walking dead (and even if it did, that’s rather well-trod territory these days: Zombie Survival Guide, anyone?) Phil Haine’s I Am Lonely is also a bit feeble, more of a verbose Kevin Smith-type monologue with zombies attached, hinging on a fairly predictable final twist. Cameron McCulloch’s Home is the most sombre entry, offering a welcome change of pace with its more intimate presentation of a bereaved woman dealing as much with the emotional aftershock of the zombie apocalypse as with the zombies themselves; but Luke Guidici’s Certified is a rather mundane, one-joke sketch, again hinging on a not especially surprising twist. Then there’s Paul Shrimpton’s Teleportal, which has a nice central conceit – a gamer gets sucked into his own Resident Evil-type game – but given that it plays out at such a short running time, it fails to develop the idea to its full potential. I daresay a feature-length take on that one would also be welcome.

As for the bridge scenes – the central performance from Bill Oberst Jr as the news anchor is enjoyable enough, as is his gradual decomposition. But again, the whole framing mechanism feels so clumsy, I for one can’t help thinking the whole thing would have worked better without it, dismissing any pretence of a unifying end-of-the-world concept that simply isn’t there. Still, while it’s overall one of the more underwhelming anthology movies of recent years, the presence of Brutal Relax and Fist of Jesus alone make Zombieworld worth the asking price.

Zombieworld is out on Region 2 DVD on 8th June from Image Entertainment.

Comic Review: Leaving Megalopolis

By Svetlana Fedotov

Ever since the dawn of comics, superheroes have blazed a trail across the four square world to the delight of post-war children everywhere. With their “go get ‘em” attitudes and barely there outfits, not even gritty re-makes can damper the belief that at the end of the day, the heroes are exactly who they aim to be: goddamn heroes. Unless you live in Megalopolis. Waaaay back in 2012, the two brilliant and twisted minds of Gail Simone and Jim Calafiore kickstarted a superhero horror title called Leaving Megalopolis. Not only did they meet their initial goal of $34,000, they beat it by a whopping $83,000 and some change! Thanks to the ever loving support of fans everywhere, they released a work that has been hailed as “taking grim and gritty superhero violence to an apocalyptic extreme.” Let’s just say, that sentiment is not far off.

The story swirls around a group of people in the post-survivalist city of Megalopolis. Once considered to be the safest city in the world due to the high concentration of superheroes, it had quickly turned into the most deadliest when a creature from deep with the Earth twisted the minds of every hero in town. And I’m not talking ‘it gave them bad dreams’ kind of crazy, I’m talking ‘kill everything in sight because it’s hilarious,’ type of crazy. As the survivors, led by the hot-tempered cop Mina, attempt to exit the city, they come face to face with heroes, villains, and the blurry line between the two. Will our protagonists escape the city in time or will their corpses litter the streets like so much rubble?

Alright, first things first, this comic is INSANE! Like, Garth Ennis “Crossed” insane. It’s incredibly gory, everyone is super grim, and there are more twists than a crazy straw! Honestly, you could say it was a Garth Ennis book and people would believe you. Leaving Megalopolis addresses the most obvious yet ignored question in all of super-dom, what’s keeping these superheroes in check? Apparently, the answer is nothing. When morals and ethics are tossed aside, the only thing left is a super killing machine and that’s what really makes this comic so scary. Be it the speedster character zooming around ripping off heads or the fire character charring everyone to a crisp, it is unstoppable pandemonium! How do you stop something that is faster, stronger, and more powerful than you? You don’t. You run.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a true horror comic if there wasn’t a human element to it and it’s not only the core group of survivors who have their share of issues. As Mina and her crew traverse across the city, they come across what is left of the once booming populace, now reduced to twisted and scared human remnants. They treat the superheroes as angry gods and quickly turn to human sacrifices as a way to appease their bloodlust. It’s a hell of price to pay for survival, reflecting the human tendency to kill everything before themselves. With our real life world reflecting this dog-eat-dog sentiment, it’s almost hard to blame them, which makes this comic just a tad bit bitter tasting. Speaking of dogs, there are a lot of dead dogs in this comic, so, be prepared to be a little sad.

If you’re interested, and you should be, Leaving Megalopolis got collected into a beautiful, hardcover graphic novel by Dark Horse in 2014. Unfortunately, it ends on a cliff-hanger, supposedly intended to continue at some unspecified point in the future, but as of recently, there have been no news of anymore coming out.