The Grudge 3 Movie Review–A Colossal Waste On All Fronts

When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born. The curse gathers in that place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury. Those who survive will carry the curse with them…until it is reborn.
If that sounds familiar, especially to horror buffs, there’s a good reason—it’s pretty much the plotline of the last two Grudge titles, and now, thanks to Sam Raimi and the crew at Ghost House, there’s a third. I bucked convention with this series, with the belief that the second was, in a limited way, just as good as the first one. I felt it was a lot more authentic, and not having Sarah Michelle Gellar around for long to Buffy her way through really perked things up, making them a whole lot less “action hero”.
This time around, we’ll be back in the apartment complex we left in the second installment. The young survivor of the last installment managed to get locked up in an insane asylum, where he was promptly and messily killed by unknown forces. Of course, we know EXACTLY what those forces were—homicidal wackjob ghost extraordinaire Kayako and her squatting harbinger, son Toshio.
Meanwhile, the young survivor’s doctor (played halfassedly by Shawnee Smith) has gone to Chicago in search of answers, and that’s when the killing starts up again.
Frankly, watching this thing was a disaster. They took all the worst parts of the first two—shoddy explanations, some for-no-clear-reason style killing, plot elements they clearly just pulled out of their asses—and introduced them all into one. The Grudge 3 isn’t as atmospherically scary as the first one, nor is it as implicitly scary as the second. All The Grudge 3 can do is do a whole lot of killing of characters we really don’t care about because we barely know who they are.

Bride Wars Movie Review–Guys, It’s Not That Bad. Really. You’ve Seen Worse.

I take my chances today, folks, as there’s a pretty solid likelihood my membership in the International Fraternity of Guys is going to get at least censured and possibly revoked, because I’m willingly going to cover a movie called Bride Wars, just recently released to DVD.
And in this one, nigh-permanent BFFs Liv (played by Kate Hudson) and Emma (played by Anne Hathaway) have been—like most women, apparently—planning their dream wedding since they were little girls, and as they grow up, it soon becomes time to make those dreams a reality. And both has longed for just one thing—a wedding at New York’s magnificent Plaza Hotel.

With a little judicious planning, both manage to save a date there. But a clerical error soon causes trouble as both weddings are slated for the same date. Who will walk away with all the marbles? Who will have her dream wedding while the other is forced to attempt a likely disastrous date switching procedure? Will the duo even emerge friends afterward?
Now, when I slapped this sucker in, I confess my expectations were wide and varied. Was this going to emphasize the “bride”…or the “wars”? The trailers certainly suggested both would be possible, but which would come out ahead? As it turns out, it’s both.

Lakeview Terrace Movie Review–Like A House Afire

I’ll kick this one off with a little warning: I’m extremely biased in favor of Samuel L. Jackson. Sam Jack is good in pretty much anything, one of only a handful of actors who can say the same, at least as far as I’m concerned. So when I laid hands on a copy of Lakeview Terrace, I was expecting him to bring a solid performance. How was the rest of the movie around him? More on that directly—but first, plot recap time.
When a young interracial couple moves into the neighborhood on Lakeview Terrace in sunny California, they think they’re really moving up in the world. At least until they run afoul of their next-door neighbor, a racist cop who doesn’t approve of their relationship. He’s also a stern disciplinarian of a single father, and the police precinct at which he works has a whole host of question marks on his record. So when this unstable cop goes up against this young couple, in the midst of wildfire season, no less, it’s only a question of who will survive the encounter.
After all…when your psycho neighbor’s a cop…it’s hard to call the cops on him.

End of the Line Movie Review–A Long Awaited Hit

This one’s actually very interesting for me, folks—it represents something that’s been a long time in the making, and only recently managed to show up. Today I’m talking Maurice Devereaux’s newest, End of the Line, and what’s special about this is how long it took between his efforts.
Particular horror buffs among you may already know what I’m about to discuss, so for you, please bear with me so I can fill everyone else in. See, way, way back in the depths of 2001, Maurice Devereaux came out with a movie called $la$her$. And no, that’s not a typo—the S’s have all been replaced with dollar signs to reflect its nature as being about a killer game show. And it was a terrific movie, despite its clearly ultra-low-budget nature, there was a lot of action in the horror and was a move well worth repeating that had not been done often. So finally, he’s released another one after a long string of delays, and it’s called End of the Line.
End of the Line features a young nurse working in a psychiatric ward who’s starting to have some deeply unpleasant visions. But just when she thinks she’s about to head home for the night and sleep off said visions, she boards the last subway car home…and it stops in the middle of a tunnel.

Dark Secrets Movie Review–Threadbare And Ragged

I love MTI, I really do—they try harder than pretty much anyone in the business. It’s really only too bad that when they try, they just can’t get a lot of results.
Every time I pick up a new MTI title (and I stick with them because I always hope they’ll manage to pull off improvement) , like today’s little pick, Dark Secrets, (which will be available for you folks to pick up April 7th) I’m always a little impressed and I get me a nice shot of hope injected like adrenaline directly into my heart. Yeah, just like in Pulp Fiction. But anyway…like I said—I take a look at that creepy box art and that well put together back of the box description and I usually end up thinking, wow, this could REALLY be awesome.
Sadly, the actual movie never seems to live up to the incredible promise that MTI puts out. And I’ll sum up why.
In Dark Secrets, there’s trouble afoot for celebrity A-listers Darryl and Lori Van Dyke, whose daughter has just recently disappeared under what can really only be called mysterious circumstances. Two detectives are put on the very high-profile case, but neither can shake the feeling that they’ve seen this somewhere before. In fact, the kidnapping of the Van Dykes’ daughter looks oddly like the work of a serial kidnapper who has struck twice before, but with noticeable differences. With no clues, no ransom note and no motive, the detectives race against time to find the kidnapper and his victims before it’s too late.

The Mist Movie Review–Creepy Fun On Several Levels

I’ll admit right off the top of the bat this time around that I’m very fond of the work of Stephen King. Generally King knows how to craft a good, horrific story and his movies, under normal circumstances, reflect this. In fact, when they first announced that his novella The Mist would be hitting theaters I was really excited to see it hit.
And after seeing it, my excitement was no less dimmed for the experience.
Basically, The Mist deals with a thunderstorm in New England. This by itself wouldn’t mean so much, except for the fact that the storm has done a real number on the power lines, and also brought a hefty quantity of thick white mist into the area. And even this wouldn’t be so much of a problem except for what’s in the mist; namely, gigantic bugs. That’s what’s in the mist–gigantic bugs. Gigantic person eating bugs that easily out mass a human being by a factor of at least fifty to one. So you can imagine the kind of panic disorder this creates to a bunch of townsfolk left stranded in the local supermarket surrounded by this midst containing the giant person eating bugs. No one knows exactly where they came from. No one knows exactly when they’ll leave. No one knows exactly how to stop them… but what everyone does know is…not much. And when human beings don’t know much about a disaster that’s facing them they’ll tend to lean defend their own explanations which may or may not resemble the truth. This is exactly the case with The Mist.
The key thing to note about The Mist, is that strange tendency people have to fill in the blanks when they don’t know much about a situation that might kill them. When a situation contains as many blanks as a giant wall of opaque mist, then the explanations become suitably outlandish. And yet in this case those explanations may well wind up getting as many people killed as a giant person eating bugs do.

Midnight Meat Train Movie Review–I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This.

I have to admit…I’ve never liked Clive Barker movies much. Historically, I’ve found them incomprehensible, gore-soaked pieces of garbage that didn’t deserve to exist. From my earliest horror days, I counted the Hellraiser series as a test of endurance—how much bloodstained misery could I take before jamming my finger on the eject button in frustration and getting out of it entirely? Turns out, I could take a lot.
But then…then I got my hands on a copy of Midnight Meat Train—you know, that lesser-known, even lesser-seen movie that most horror fans are still venting their collective spleen over? And I began to wonder, was this it? Was this the exception that proved the rule? Was this, heaven help me, a GOOD Clive Barker movie?
More on that directly, but first, the plot: It’s basically about a photographer chasing what he believes to be a butcher who happens to be, in his off hours, an immortal serial killer who’s been hard at work for the last hundred years or more. No one’s ever found that out, of course, because this immortal serial killer butcher is functioning as a delivery service for a race of humanoid creatures that just love the taste of people. The immortal serial killer butcher, who goes by the name of Mahogany, renders his victims into usable cuts which are offloaded on a regular basis, and all on a subway car.