WARNING! Avoid "Spirits of the Fall" Like it Was a Rabid Porcupine Telemarketer

Writing a negative review of a zero budget horror flick is kind of like punching a little kid. Sure it's easy and fun, but eventually your arm gets tired. Back when I was writing Killer B's on DVD over at Cinematical.com, I reviewed some fun low budget flicks as well as some that were flat out excruciating. On a certain level you have to respect these auteurs for completing and distributing a film with next to no cash, so even with the worst of them I would strive to find something positive to say, even if I was panning the film.

I just finished reviewing Spirits of the Fall for The Phantom of the Movies Videoscope magazine, and the movie has stuck with me like a particularly tenacious intestinal parasite. Any sympathy for the small time film maker has evaporated. The film has zero interest in entertaining and consistently fails on every level both creative and technical. I won't review the movie again here, but I'm putting this out there as a warning: this movie does not deserve to exist. Please avoid at all costs.

QUARANTINE: Movie Review

Quarantine has taken a lot of crap, being slammed as an unnecessary remake of the Spanish film [REC], but I think such statements are short-sighted. I would love to have seen [REC] on the big screen, but a subtitled film's chance of getting a wide theatrical release in the States are about as good as a guy in a red shirt making it back to the Enterprise in one piece. No, this doesn't say much for the attention span of the American film-going audience, but [REC] had no chance of getting big theatrical play here. Let's move past it, people.

So that leaves us with Quarantine, a film which does pretty damn well on its own. Jennifer Carpenter of the way cool Showtime series Dexter plays Angela Vidal, a TV news reporter shadowing a group of Los Angeles firefighters on the overnight shift. The entire film is seen through the eye of her camera operated by Scott Percival (Steve Harris). The evening gets off to a slow start so we see Angela sliding down the fire pole, flirting with a firefighter named Jake (Hostel's Jay Hernandez) and lamenting that the whole night might be a washout. Finally a call comes in and the paramedics are called to an apartment building to aid an elderly woman who is infected with something that is contagious via contact with bodily fluids. To borrow a phrase from Shaun of the Dead, the old girl is a bit bitey and her violent and murderous nature quickly spreads among the tenants. Before Angela and the others can flee the building has been surrounded by operatives of the Center for Disease Control, and the space suits they're wearing and their readiness to shoot anyone that tries to leave doesn't bode well for our heroes.

Like 28 Days Later this is a zombie film without zombies. No one is coming back from the dead, but victims of this infection quickly degenerate into slobbering lunatics, not unlike what you see in Walmart on the day after Thanksgiving. After a beginning that is intentionally slow to build suspense, things ramp up with the film balancing action and exposition nicely. As with any of these pseudo documentary films like The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield the question of why are these people still filming while they're running for their lives is a valid one. Director John Erick Dowdle (who also helmed The Poughkeepsie Tapes) does a respectable job of keeping the gimmick believable. Occasional bits are inserted to provide a reason for the fact that Scott is still shooting, but it isn't overdone as it was in Diary of the Dead, in which George Romero's frequent references to the fact were just distracting. Dowdle might have further aided the illusion by casting unknowns, but recognizable faces are presumably a necessity in getting financing, even if we're not talking about huge stars.

The Spanish version will likely hit DVD around the same time or shortly after Quarantine does, and the publicity surrounding the remake will have a trickle down effect, bringing far more attention to the U.S. DVD release of [REC] than it would have gotten on its own.

DEATH NOTE - DVD REVIEW

I'm a bit of a latecomer to the whole Death Note phenomenon, but in the last few weeks I've read several volumes of the manga, caught a few episodes of the anime TV series and now, for the purposes of this review, I've had a chance to screen the 2006 live action film.

Melding the elements of both horror and detective stories, Death Note is the tale of Light Yagami (Tatsuya Fujiwara) a brilliant law student who has grown disillusioned with the legal system because of a widespread conspiracy concealing just how many criminals are going free. Light finds a notebook that says whoever's name is written in the book will die. On a lark, he jots down the name of a murderer who has escaped justice, and Light watches as the killer dies in exactly the way he described in the notebook. Light is soon visited by Ryuk, a shinigami or death god, a CGI construct that looks like a shaggy goth circus clown. Ryuk explains the notebook was originally his, but is now Light's to do with as he pleases. Whoever possesses the notebook can kill anyone by writing his or her name while picturing his or her face. If no cause of death is written the victim will die of a heart attack.

A human who uses the death note can enter neither heaven nor hell upon his death, but Light looks past that little glitch, planning to use the book to make the world a better place by eliminating violent criminals. As murderers, rapists and snotty convenience store clerks around the world start dropping dead in droves, people start to take notice. The media gives the name "Kira" to whoever is striking down these criminals and Light becomes a hero to many. To the National Police Association, however, Kira is the greatest serial killer of all time and a task force is formed to capture him under the direction the mysterious L (Ken'ichi Matsuyama). At first L only communicates with the task force via digitally scrambled audio, but he is finally revealed to be a young androgynous sugar junkie with a genius level talent for deduction. Light and L are cut from the same cloth, it seems, making for an interesting cat and mouse game.

In a bent sort of way the premise reminds me of Harry Potter. Both stories spring from an adolescent form of wish fulfillment. Harry is a put upon orphan who learns he is in fact something special — not just a wizard, but one of the greatest wizards of all time. Death Note rings of a darker adolescent desire in which the victimized youth starts keeping a list of peers who have done him wrong and deserve to die, representing the seamier fantasies of the post-Columbine generation.

Light is more humanized here, at least at the beginning of the film, which makes it difficult to account for some of his actions. In the comic Light starts out as a remorseless sociopath, so when he ends up using the Death Note to kill innocent people to prevent his own arrest it's not that big a stretch. In this version, the decision to murder innocents seems jarring, making me wonder if posession of the Death Note is supposed to have some side effect on human personalities.

With a few exceptions, the film is quite faithful to the manga. Director Shusuke Kaneko (the man behind the marvelously titled Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack) does a decent job of packing a lot of the comic's elements into just over two hours. The comics are quite detailed, giving every nuance of Light's reasoning and L's deduction process, so streamlining the story for film was a necessity. Unfortunately, just as we're getting into the thick of the L/Light sparring match, the movie comes to a somewhat abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion. The sequel Death Note: The Last Name was released in Japan in 2006 and was presumably shot back to back with the first film, so I imagine that one picks up where this one leaves off. Still, Death Note has an intriguing premise and some interesting characters. Definitely worth a look.

THE ILLUSTRATED MAN: DVD Review

To get a good idea how much science fiction cinema changed in 1977, take a look at the genre films that came out in the decade prior to Star Wars. I believe Logan's Run was the last big budget sci-fi flick to come out of Hollywood before George Lucas, for good or ill, changed the rules. Psychedelic science fiction was common then, with John Boorman's Zardoz being a perfect example. 1969's The Illustrated Man is plenty trippy too, and a film that has really stayed in my head in the few days since seeing it.

Based on a book by Ray Bradbury, which was essentially a short story anthology with the title character binding everything together, the film stars Rod Steiger as Carl, a drifter wandering the rural countryside somewhere in depression era America. He crosses paths with a young man named Willie (Robert Drivas) who is making his way on foot to California. The two men share a campfire and eventually Carl explains that he's looking for a very specific house in which resides a woman he plans to kill. This woman is responsible for the skin illustrations (Carl bursts into a rage when Willie calls them tattoos) that cover nearly every inch of his body from the neck down. The illustrations are alive, or so Carl claims, and they offer glimpses into the future.

The narrative leaps back and forth between Carl's flashback of how an enigmatic and beautiful woman named Felicia (Claire Bloom who I remember best from Robert Wise's The Haunting) came to give him the tattoos... sorry, illustrations to begin with, the story of Carl and Willie around the campfire, and three tales of the future. These stories deal with a futuristic family whose children have developed an unnatural obsession with their holographic playroom, a crew of astronauts who have crashed on an alien world and are seeking shelter, and a man and a woman dealing with the fact that the world will end in less than a day.

Oddly enough, I find it both compelling and infuriating that some things are just never explained. Carl and Felicia appear in all three future stories with no explanation as to why. Are these reincarnations, or perhaps since the stories are coming through pictures on Carl's body they're being filtered through his mind somehow? Why does Felicia give Carl the illlustrations? Like I said, it's trippy. There are some charmingly outdated visions of the future here, like the single color uniform style clothing, and a very simple looking crashed spaceship that I would bet is a recycled prop from the previous year's Planet of the Apes. The film uses a more leisurely pace than most modern films, but rather than boring the audience, director Jack Smight uses the time to deepen characterization. They definitely don't make them like this anymore, but I sure wish they did.

SNAKES ON A PLANE DVD Review

A searing indictment of man's inhumanity to man displayed amidst the turmoil of the age-old conflict of man against nature. No, wait. My bad. It's about motherf***ing snakes on a motherf***ing plane. The sheer simplicity of the film's concept is its greatest strength. Snakes On A Plane is its own built in excuse; whenever something preposterous happens, the viewer just shrugs and says, "Hey, it's Snakes On A Plane. If I wanted gritty realism I'd have rented Mean Girls." Historically, the film recalls not just the airline disaster movies of the seventies, but the nature gone amok genre from the same period, represented by Frogs, Fer de Lance (snakes on a submarine, if you will), and a seemingly forgotten tale of bats going bats in a subterranean complex called Chosen Survivors, to name but a few.

Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips ) witnesses a mob hit on Daniel Hayes, a prominent prosecuting attorney from Los Angeles. Hayes has been laboring to put mobster Edward Kim behind bars, but for his troubles Hayes is beaten to death with a baseball bat. Sean is taken into protective custody by FBI Agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson ), and arrangements are made for Sean to fly to California under FBI protection to testify against Kim. Why exactly he needs to fly to California to testify about a murder that occurred in Hawaii is not mentioned, but hey, it's Snakes On A Plane, if I wanted a lecture on legal jurisdiction I'd rent High Noon. The FBI sets up a decoy private jet, while actually transporting Sean on a commercial 747. All the other passengers are forced to travel coach as Flynn has commandeered the first class section for his passenger. Kim's goons are not fooled, though, and they manage to get a large container filled with poisonous snakes from all over the world stowed in the luggage section. The flowered leis the passengers are given have been treated with snake pheromones, making those slithery bastards all the more aggressive.

Screen time is split between the live snakes and they're more energetic but far less convincing digital stand-ins. Once the vipers are loose the plot rarely takes a second to breathe, with snakes putting the hurt on the passengers at a breakneck pace. Even the heartiest of souls will cringe when they see the "snake on snake violence" as some poor schmuck just tries to take a leak. These cold-blooded belly-crawlers present not only an immediate threat to the passengers and crew, but they play hell with wiring and ventilation. Sean is relatively safe in the first class compartment, but he doesn't need to be bitten if the snakes can bring the entire plane down into the Pacific. One might ask why Kim would go to all this trouble. Surely a small but powerful explosive could do the job more efficiently. True, the plan is as convoluted as anything the worst James Bond villain could concoct, but hey, it's Snakes On a Plane, if I wanted realistic plotting I'd rent Capote.

The film's simplicity carries over into its use of characterization. Everyone in the movie has a personality that can be summed up in a few words: arrogant rap artist, bubbleheaded socialite, snotty British guy, etc. Even our hero Agent Flynn is a career cop with a failed marriage, and flight attendant Claire Miller (Julianna Margulies) is making her last flight before leaving the job. Introducing the characters as they board the plane is also a convenient shortcut which will seem familiar to anyone who has ever seen The Love Boat.

In the months prior to Snakes' theatrical release, there was buzz on this flick all over the internet. Not since The Blair Witch Project has a film's online promotion campaign so threatened to outshine the film itself. A catchy no BS title, a fast paced script, and the involvement of Samuel L. Jackson, and you've got one good time at the movies. The film also performs the difficult task of being predictable without being boring, and of being preposterous without insulting the viewer's intelligence.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MANDVD Review

This is the third film in the Marvel Animated Features line to be released by Lionsgate Films, following in the wake of Ultimate Avengers and Ultimate Avengers 2. Never having had a big time live action incarnation -- or even a particularly notable animated one -- Iron Man lacks the immediate name recognition of Spider-man, X-Men, or some of the other leaders of the Marvel Comics pantheon. I'm sure all that will change once the big budget Iron Man film starring Robert Downey, Jr. hits screens in Summer 2008, but for the moment, this direct to DVD animated feature is old Shell Head's chance to shine (with the aid of a little Turtle Wax).

Billionaire industrialist Tony Stark has been channeling a lot of his company's funds into a pet project in China. He hopes to literally raise a long buried city, though a group of Chinese terrorists, fearing the return of an ancient emperor known as The Mandarin, attack the excavation. Stark's friend and overseer of the project James Rhodes is taken hostage, and Stark is injured during a rescue attempt. With Rhodes' help, Stark builds a high tech suit of armor with advanced weaponry, and the two manage to escape. Upon returning to the U.S., Rhodes learns that the armor he and Stark built together was only a crude version of a project Stark has been working on for some time. In a secret area of Stark Industries there are dozens of similar suits, each designed for a specific purpose. This is fortunate, as the raising of the Chinese city has awakened four superhumanly strong creatures, each mastering one of four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. They travel to the four corners of the earth in search of the five rings that will raise The Mandarin from the dead. Stark realizes that this is his fault, and perhaps the only one who can stop these creatures is Iron Man.

The back story receives a much needed revamping. In the comics, Iron Man's origin took place in Vietnam in the early 1960s, and his amazing armor was built with those miracles of modern technology known as transistors. You didn't see it much, but I bet the suit had an 8-track player too. According to an interview on the disk, the idea was to use a mystical adversary to counter Stark's advanced technology. While a sound theory, the elemental villains do little to grab my imagination, and the fact that their faces never change expression doesn't help either. The Mandarin is an imposing enough character, but he's saved for the film's climax. The film does a good job of incorporating terrorist leader Wong Chu and The Mandarin, two characters from the comics, but I think a high tech villain along the lines of The Crimson Dynamo or The Titanium Man would have been a better match for Iron Man. Characterization is often flat, particularly with Wong Chu, whose emot-o-meter is stuck on asshole. This can be attributed, in a large part, to the unremarkable voice talent, though I did like that Marc Worden reprised his role as Tony Stark/Iron Man from the Ultimate Avengers features.

In the plus column, the action scenes work very well. The elementals may not make for interesting characters, but in a mindlessly fun super hero brawl they get the job done. Iron Man's battle with The Mandarin's servants in a live volcano is a real stand out, and the climactic showdown with The Mandarin himself does not disappoint. When I first saw Stark in the familiar red and gold armor I got a fanboy chill down my spine. The film mostly uses traditional 2-D animation, though the elementals and Iron Man himself are rendered using 3-D computer animation. The design of the Iron Man character lends itself well to this process and it works quite effectively.

I enjoyed The Invincible Iron Man, though not nearly as much as I had hoped to. Perhaps a sequel not bogged down by the origin story will be more to my liking.

VOODOO MOONDVD Review

Over at Night of the Living Podcast (the coolest podcast on the Net, by the by) they have an ongoing feature called "Straight to Video Russian Roullette." That's kind of how I feel every time I check out one of these direct to video horror titles. These are the modern equivalents of drive-in movies, so this is where tomorrow's B-movie classics will come from. Every time I watch such a film, though, I run the serious risk of taking a bullet to the head (calm down, people, that's a metaphor). Let's face it, during the drive-in era, for every Night of the Living Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre there were twenty films like Movie House Massacre or Curse of the Screaming Dead. I doubt Voodoo Moon is in any danger of being called a classic, but it didn't fire hot lead into my brain pan (metaphorically or literally) and despite a few disappointments it's actual a fun little bit of B movie hokum.

Twenty years ago a young brother and sister were the sole survivors of a demonic slaughter in a small town. The brother, Cole, has spent the years since fighting Daniel, the demon responsible for the murder of his parents and hundreds of others. His sister Heather (Charisma Carpenter) is a successful artist with a habit of sketching things before they happen. When Cole learns that the entity that killed their parents has resurfaced, he recruits Heather, as well as a handful of others who have helped him fight the demon in the past. Cole and his followers congregate at a boarding house near where the mass murder took place, though Cole and Heather's home town is now at the bottom of a man made lake.

Watching Voodoo Moon gave me a sense of deja vu. At first I assumed I had watched the trailer, but I eventually realized I'd actually seen the movie before, or at least parts of it. Voodoo Moon ran on the Sci Fi Channel awhile ago, and I watched several minutes one day while channel surfing. This seems odd, premiering a film on basic cable before releasing it on DVD, but it's become a common practice for the Sci Fi Channel.

I've always loved Charisma Carpenter's name. It sounds like it should belong to an exotic dancer who can build a wicked awesome set of bookshelves. Carpenter was one of the stars of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off series Angel, and her character of Cordelia was an important part of the Buffy-verse. That's why it's so dissatisfying to see her in this role. She's got plenty of screen time, but aside from functioning as a confidant to the hero, damsel in distress, and eye candy, the part has no substance.

Eric Mabius is a bit hard to swallow as Cole, with his soap opera star prettyboy looks and scar over one eye. It makes him look like a comic book character. Rik Young as Daniel seems a bit too young for the role. Sure, I suppose a demon can take on any form it wants, but I think an older actor could have better portrayed a sense of ancient malice.

In the plus column, Reanimator and Star Trek vet Jeffrey Combs is terrific as Police Detective Frank Taggert who is murdered before he can answer Cole's summons, but doesn't let a little thing like his own demise stop him from helping his friend. John Amos, best known for his participation in The Beastmaster and 70s sitcom Good Times plays a biker named Dutch. Amos is one of those actors whose presence can only improve a film and he does not disappoint here. There's also some decent zombie action, killer corn stalks, and the expression "a murder of crows" will take on a whole new meaning after you've watched this. As I said, not a classic, but an enjoyable time-killer.

THE OTHER (1972)DVD Review

Where is the baby, Holland?

Based on a novel by Thomas Tryon, The Other was an early entry in the creepy little kids sub-genre that dominated horror movies and novels in the 1970s. On a more personal note, I remember it scaring the hell out of me when I saw it on television as a kid, and its recent release on DVD represented my first chance to see the film in several decades.

The setting is rural Connecticut in 1935. Niles and Holland Perry (played by Chris and Martin Udvarnoky in their only film appearance) are living on the family farm with their mother and extended family. Diana Muldaur, veteran of two generations of Star Treks, plays the twins' mother. She remains traumatized from an event sometime in the past, leaving her emotionally distant and unable to fulfill her duties as mother, though for a bed-ridden depressive, her hair and makeup are oddly perfect.

With their mother emotionally absent, Niles has bonded with his Aunt Ada. The two are fond of playing The Game, which Ada believes to be an exercise in imagination, but Niles regards as something more. While playing The Game he seems to find himself in the body of a bird flying overhead, and he uses it to learn a trick being performed by a carnival magician. Niles compulsively carries a small tin box containing a ring that should have been buried with his late father and a mysterious little item wrapped in cloth. Director Robert Mulligan obviously wanted the viewer to remember the box because it is constantly heard rattling around whenever Niles is onscreen. Niles is apparently the only one of the pair born with a conscience, with Holland usually getting both of them in trouble. When bad things start to happen like the twins' tattletale cousin being "accidentally" impaled on a pitchfork, Hollands true nature becomes evident.

As one might expect, the creep-o-meter didn't go nearly as high as it did when I nine. The acting is consistent with the style of TV melodrama from the period, which is probably why I incorrectly assumed for many years that this was a made for TV movie. Mrs. Rowe, the old bitty from next door who runs afoul of the twins' mischief, is played ridiculously over the top, reminding me of Una O'Conner's comic relief character in Bride of Frankenstein. This kind of silliness makes it harder to appreciate Mrs. Rowe's ultimate fate. The twins, particularly Niles, are played with often nauseating sweetness (when Niles asks his Aunt Ada for a butterfly kiss I nearly hurled). Most importantly, though, I can now see that the big twist late in the film is obviously telegraphed early on.

Still, this is a movie worth seeking out. The Other represents the more subtle horror of its time. Gore and exploding heads have their place, but this movie scares more with what it implies than what it actually shows.

THE TOOTH FAIRYDVD Review

"What are you gonna do now, Chuck?"
Of all the mythical childhood icons, the Tooth Fairy is the hardest to pin down visually. Bunnies are easy enough to visualize, and Santa has pretty much every retailer in the Western Hemisphere working as his PR agent. As a child I would visualize the Tooth Fairy as a variation on the Disney rendition of Peter Pan's Tinkerbell. The restraining order I received from Disney's legal department put a stop to that, effectively bringing my childhood to an end at the tender age of thirty-seven. To realign my visualization of the Tooth Fairy, the Disney folks sent along an eight by ten of Bea Arthur in a leotard, tutu, and wings. I have not been quite right since.

The Tooth Fairy we meet in this film is quite a different take on the character. More of a witch than a fairy, she's riddled with tumors and murders children. TRY TO TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, DISNEY!

Peter Campbell (Lochlyn Munroe) is fixing up an old country home into a bed and breakfast with the aid of hunky young handyman Bobby (Jesse Hutch). Peter's former fiance Darcy (Chandra West) and her daughter Pamela (Nicole Munoz) come to visit for the weekend. Pamela makes friends with a little girl named Emma (Jianna Ballard) that no one else can see. Emma warns Pamela about the evil witch that used to live in the house and was known for taking the local children's last baby tooth and delivering gory lawn and garden tool death in return. She places the children's teeth in her magic music box, condemning their souls to wander the earth. After a spill on her bicycle, Pamela loses her last baby tooth and becomes a target for the witch.

The Tooth Fairy doesn't seem quite as selective as the legend would lead folks to believe. She starts whacking characters left and right--starting with Bobby who telegraphs his own demise when he says he can get that old wood chipper working again--then working her way through the cast. Genre vet P.J. Soles plays Mrs. MacDonald the next door neighbor who gives Peter and Darcy the secret to defeating the witch, and Peter's freeloading rock star wannabe pal Cole is played by Steve Bacic who played the pre-blue-furred Hank McCoy in X2.

Now, I've seen a lot of bad movies in my day. A film can go wrong in just about any area, but The Tooth Fairy commits probably the worst sin that a film can commit: it's cripplingly mediocre. Nothing is cringe-inducingly bad, which would at least make it memorable. Instead we have a cluster of reasonably talented actors playing some not terribly interesting characters in a film that I really find it hard to care about. Further whittling away at the film's credibility are a series of missteps, including an ultra dorky dinner montage sequence with cheesy pseudo pop music on the soundtrack, the fact that Darcy's near rape experience is practically ignored, and perhaps worst of all the use of one of film and television's most cliched lines used by an estranged couple, "we always did make a good team." Come on, people, who the hell says that?

The clunky use of expository dialogue trades believability for brevity. Pamela describes Peter as, "Peter Campbell. He and my mom used to be engaged. He was a doctor then. Now he quit. He just writes short stories." And when Stephanie (Carrie Fleming) introduces herself to Peter she tells him, "I used to dance down at the Grease Monkey in town, but I've saved up enough to retire from show biz so I'm going to veterinary college." To reinforce this she spots some humming birds and recites the Latin name for their species. Characterization that has been distilled into concentrated pill form does things to my gastrointestinal tract that one doctor told me was reminiscent of the Ebola virus.

Add to it all an historically inaccurate interpretation of the Salem witch phenomenon, and you've got another direct to dvd film that needs to be purged from your Netflix queue.

Santo y Blue Demon Contra Los Monstruos (Santo and Blue Demon Vs. The Monsters)(1968)DVD Review

Wow. Um, OK. This is… or rather that is… Wow.

This was my first Mexican wrestler/monster movie. I've read about the genre and seen clips here and there, but this was my first chance to partake, and I must say I was truly not prepared. In strictly clinical terms, it's pretty whacked.

Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask, is one of Mexico's greatest wrestlers, and has starred in countless films, often alongside his fellow Luchador Blue Demon. In this adventure Dr. Bruno Halder, a recently deceased scientist, is returned to the land of the living by his hunchbacked midget assistant and a small army of green-faced zombies. The good doctor wants revenge against Santo and Blue Demon for some reason or other. To accomplish this he creates an evil duplicate of Blue Demon and revives a pantheon of classic movie monsters to do his bidding.

The monsters themselves are a wonder to behold. Frankenstein (sic) sports the classic Universal Monsters look with a bad case of bed-head and facial hair presumably to add a Latin look to the creature. The vampire (not sure why they shied away from calling him Dracula) strongly resembles the John Carradine take on Stoker's character, despite a pair of ridiculously oversized bat ears. The mummy resembles an emaciated old dude who has had a tragic accident with a very large roll of gauze, while the wolf-man is little more than a befanged gentleman with an overgrown beard. The Cyclops bears a slight resemblance to the Ray Harryhausen creation of the same name from The 7 th Voyage of Sinbad, but swap the awe-inspiring stop motion animation for a big guy in a foam rubber suit. There's also some little bug-eyed guy with an exposed brain running around Halder's lab.

Halder's master plan is never made clear. He sends his creatures out to do away with Santo. They engage our hero in pro-wrestling style fisticuffs, get their asses kicked, and return to Halder's lair… repeatedly. Now and then the monsters prey upon random innocents. The order of the scenes seems almost arbitrary, and rearranging them would probably not alter the film in the slightest.

For some of the U.S. import versions of these movies Santo was renamed Samson, but Santo y Blue Demon Contra Los Monstruos retains the original Spanish soundtrack. The DVD menus are entirely in Spanish, and my unfamiliarity with the language required some trial and error before I could find the subtitles. Frankly, the movie probably works better without them, adding an additional layer of confusion to an already incomprehensible movie.

It's interesting to note that even though this film was made as recently as 1968, it apes much of its style from the Universal monster classics of the 1930s and 1940s. It's silly as hell to be sure, but after a fairly slow couple of reels, the pace rarely falters. A few beers certainly couldn't hurt, but even sober Santo y Blue Demon Contra Los Monstruos is a fun experience and worth seeking out.

Superman ReturnsMOVIE REVIEW

Pity the poor Man of Steel. He comes back after a five year mission, boldly going where no earth-raised Kryptonian has gone before, only to find that the love of his life has written a Pulitzer-winning editorial about why the world doesn't need Superman. Oh, and she's shacked up with one of the X-Men. Bummer.

Five years ago astronomers reported they had located what remained of the planet Krypton. In hopes of finding others of his kind, Superman (Brandon Routh) left earth in a ship of Kryptonian design. The ship returns as a blazing meteor, crashing to earth on the Kent farm in Smallville. Martha Kent (Eva Marie Saint) welcomes the return of her adopted son, but he reports that his mission was a failure. Krypton is nothing more than a graveyard, and he is indeed the last son of Krypton. Clark resumes his job at the Daily Planet, where he learns that Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has moved on. She has a son now, is engaged to Richard White (James Marsden) nephew of Daily Planet Editor Perry White (Frank Langella), and seems to be getting along just fine without Superman.

Time has not stood still for Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) either. Luthor has spent several years in prison, but when Superman was not available to testify at Luthor's appeal, the follically challenged arch villain was freed. Luthor still has a passion for real estate schemes, and he plans on builing an entirely new continent with some help from Kryptonian technology stolen from Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

It isn't long before a crisis strikes that requires some super heroic action. A space shuttle piggy backed on top of a 747 full of reporters (including Lois Lane) runs into trouble, and as one might expect, this looks like a job for Superman.

Director Bryan Singer has crafted an exciting and faithful return to cinematic greatness for a character that he obviously has a great deal of affection for. Superman Returns is essentially a sequel to Superman and Superman II, but at times it also functions as a remake of the first film. The action scenes kick some serious butt, but the heart of the story resides with the characters. Superman must come to terms with being the last of his species and losing the love of his life, while Lois must figure out if life without Superman is really what she wants.

I've long wondered if any other actor besides Christopher Reeve could wear that costume without looking foolish. Reeve played the character with a grace and dignity that made you forget you were looking at a grown man in long underwear and a cape. Lois and Clark star Dean Cain never quite pulled it off, playing Clark Kent far more believably than Kent's alter ego. Brandon Routh studied Reeve's portrayal of Superman and seems to be channeling him quite effectively, carrying a similar degree of believability.

The film is peppered with in-jokes and nods that only Superman fans will get. When Martha Kent tells Clark that his father would never have allowed him to go on his Krypton quest, a photo of Glenn Ford, who played Jonathan Kent in 1978's Superman can be seen on the mantle. When Superman picks up an out of control car then lowers it safely to the ground, Brandon Routh strikes the same pose the Man of Steel held on the cover of Action Comics #1 (June, 1938).

So many summer blockbusters have left a bad taste in my mouth that it's easy to forget the formula can actually work in the right hands. As with the first two X-Men films, Singer proves that he understands the right blend of story and eye candy. A great time at the movies, so long as you can overlook the notion that an award winning journalist like Lois Lane would be fooled by a pair of horn rimmed glasses.

Darkness—The Vampire VersionDVD REVIEW

Sifting through every horror film that comes out--or even a good chunk of them--is like fishing a wedding ring out of a septic tank. You have to swim through a lot of shit to find that little piece of gold. Leif Jonker's Darkness is indeed that piece of gold, and considering the number of crappy films I've seen lately, it's presence in my DVD player is a truly wonderful thing.

The plot is sheer simplicity. A vampire named Liven is slaughtering everyone who crosses his path in a small American town. His victims rise from the dead with a powerful thirst of their own, and soon there are vampires everywhere. A young man named Tobe has lost his family to the vampire plague, and now his only desire is to destroy Liven. Tobe soon joins forces with other survivors and they find themselves on a path to one of the goriest climaxes in the history of horror cinema.

Darkness accomplishes the seemingly impossible by making vampires scary again. These are not the aristocratic goth chic vamps of the Anne Rice books or the action movie villains from the Blade movies. The undead of Darkness are more like the pack-hunting animalistic vampires of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. There are no fangs or capes here, just the walking dead with a raw, animalistic thirst. Jonker's vampires are not above using weapons to bring down their prey, and while I'm sure a stake could kill them, a bullet through the heart does the job just as well.

This is a remarkable film for a number of reasons. Predating the no-budget success of Kevin Smith's Clerks by a year, Darkness sprang from a similarly impoverished budget in 1993. Darkness started life as a film with a nineteen year old director who recruited friends as cast and crew (The age range of the players, with one or two exceptions, is limited to late teens to early twenties). Furthermore, the film was never intended to be shown to the general public. It was created as a feature length demo to show to potential investors, much like Sam Raimi's Within the Woods was used to raise funds to produce The Evil Dead. While Clerks went on to become a more or less mainstream success, Darkness became something of an underground film.The fact that it is now available in such a mainstream establishment as Best Buy is quite astounding.

The acting ranges from fair to poor and the film never looks slick by any stretch, but that's not the point. The raw look is one of the film's greatest charms. The soft, grainy 8 millimeter image enhances the dreamlike quality of the film, much the same way as black and white photography does. You're not so much watching a movie as you are experiencing a nightmare. The simple but effective synthesizer score usually consists of a melancholy dirge that loops continually, not unlike the kind of music you would hear in a horror-based computer game.

Not all the gore effects work as well as they might--there's a chainsaw to the hand gag that really shows Jonker's reach exceeding his grasp--but the sheer volume and enthusiasm of the gore forgives a lot. The Evil Dead influence is especially obvious when our heroes are doused in the blood of the vampires they dispatch. The red stuff is just everywhere in this movie, and it's done with style.

This two disk DVD set represents The Vampire Version of the film. Jonker has finally been able to make the final cut that budgetary limitations didn't permit back in the early nineties. The image has been digitally remastered, and there are some great side by side comparisons on the disk to show just how profound the difference is. Jonker's original release version of the film, transferred to video from film via a camcorder and a projector in his kitchen, is included on the second disk. There are also several audio commentaries and sundry extras to keep you busy for awhile.

A real triumph of talent, enthusiasm, and perseverance over budget, and one of the best horror films I've seen in quite awhile.

Room 6DVD REVIEW

Amy Roberts has some issues. Hospitals terrify her, thanks to a childhood trauma, as does commitment. When her live-in boyfriend Nick gets down on one knee to propose she coldly asks him if they can discuss this later.

On the way home from work that day, Nick and Amy's car is side swiped at an intersection. Nick's leg is badly broken and he is taken away by some sinister looking ambulance attendants. Amy is not allowed to accompany him, and the attendants seem to have forgotten to tell her what hospital they're taking Nick to. Lucas, the driver of the other vehicle is unharmed, but his sister is taken away under similarly sinister circumstances. When she can't locate Nick at any area hospitals, Amy and Lucas go to the police, but are turned away on the rather nonsensical assumption that it's all a prank.

Meanwhile, Nick finds himself in a hospital being cared for by several beautiful but obviously evil nurses. They draw blood from Nick and two other patients with uncomfortable frequency, and are evasive when answering Nick's questions.

Amy is a school teacher and Melissa, one of her students, has been drawing pictures of the creatures she's been seeing in her nightmares. These creatures bear a strong resemblance to the one's Amy begins to see in real life. Seemingly normal people will inexplicably morph into nightmarish hellspawn. When Amy asks Melissa for help, Melissa tells her Nick can be found at St. Rosemary's, a hospital that burned to the ground decades earlier amidst rumors of satanic shenanigans.

I've seen a lot of direct to DVD horror flicks lately. These films can be a chore to sit through, but that's the price you pay for being a horror completist. I had some hope for Room 6. The cast is quite competent. Amy is played by Christine Taylor who played Marcia in the Brady Bunch movies. While she seems to have escaped the typecasting suffered by the original Brady cast, my Marcia, Marcia, Marcia alarm goes off everytime I see her. Jerry O'Connell, who has come a long way from being the fat kid in Stand By Me, plays Lucas. Even the smaller roles are peppered with familiar faces. Nick's fellow patients at St. Rosemary's include John Billingsley, probably best known for his portrayal of Dr. Phlox on four seasons of Enterprise, and Jack Riley who has made a career of playing a patient having played Elliot Carlin on The Bob Newhart Show and St. Elsewhere. And, though you won't recognize him without the hockey mask, longtime Friday the 13th star Kane Hodder appears as a homeless demon.

What cripples the film is not the cast but the script. Amy repeatedly sees people turning into demons. These visions seem to be randomly inserted to keep the scares coming, but other than shock value they add nothing to the story and soon become tiresome. The idea of getting help from the police is dismissed too quickly to be believable. Apparently police involvement didn't fit in with the sceenwriters' plans, so the idea is ignored via a flimsy plot device. On principal I have nothing against such things, but the naked lesbian nurse foursome (I am not making that up) just seems forced and out of place.

Characters are drawn with a ridiculously broad brush. Melissa's white trash mother is irritatingly over the top, and the Catholic priest from whom Amy seeks counsel is nauseatingly angelic – at least until he turns into a demon. The notion that a priest in this day and age would address an adult as “my child” is laughable.

The worst is saved for the end. The film's climax is a slap in the face to anyone who dedicated 94 minutes to sitting through Room 6. While the ending theoretically explains away the disjointed nature of the film, it is a cop out of the worst kind, and one of the horror genre's worst cliches.

I suggest viewers skip Room 6 and rent Jacob's Ladder, a film with a similar plot that has the advantage of being infinitely more watchable.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)DVD REVIEW

Tim Lucas recently reported on his Video Watchblog that director Val Guest had passed away on May 10 at the age of 94. Guest was a British writer/director with such films to his credit as The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass 2, Casino Royale, and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, among many others. Guest's end of the world masterpiece The Day the Earth Caught Fire, has long been a personal favorite.

Guest humanizes his apocalyptic tale by eliminating the genre stereotypes. The end of the world epics of the 1950s usually featured a scientist, a square jawed man of action, and a damsel in distress/love interest. The Day the Earth Caught Fire is told in the form of a newsroom drama, from the point of view of Pete Stenning (Edward Judd of Island of Terror and First Men in the Moon), a reporter for London's Daily Express. Stenning, once a great reporter, has given in to alcoholism and despair in the wake of his divorce.

The film opens with ominous images of a drought-stricken and seemingly deserted London, made all the more effective by two brilliant touches of subtlety. This portion of the otherwise black and white film is tinted orange, giving the viewer a vivid sense of the extreme heat, and even as the opening credits roll, we hear not a single note on the soundtrack. The world seems to be ending with not a bang, but a whimper.

Stenning makes his way from the sun blasted streets into the offices of The Daily Express. His typewriter has succumbed to the heat, so he gets a copy boy on the phone to take his story as he dictates it. “It is exactly thirty minutes since the corrective bombs were detonated,” he says. “Within the next few hours the world will know whether this is the end or another beginning.”

As Stenning speaks, the screen wavers into flashback, the orange tinted film giving way to glorious black and white. In the offices of The Daily Express sunspot activity and earthquakes fill recent issues, while the U.S. Hydrogen bomb test in the Antarctic ten days earlier has become old news. Some are blaming an unnatural increase in natural disasters on the bomb, though such ideas are dismissed as poppycock, that is until news comes over the wire that the Soviets have detonated a bomb in Siberia that is 20% more powerful than its U.S. counterpart. A quick comparison of dates shows that both nuclear tests were conducted more or less simultaneously, which makes for one hell of a news story.

Amidst all this, Stenning makes a new contact at the Meteorological Center. Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro of The Crawling Eye and Disney's Swiss Family Robinson), who first finds Stenning an overly aggressive boor eventually sees a worthwhile man beneath the booze and the bravado. The romance between Jeannie and Stenning provides both hope and tragedy in the face of humanity's possible extinction.

Conditions around the world worsen with rampant flooding, droughts, tornadoes, and a solar eclipse that occurs several days ahead of schedule. Science editor Bill Maguire (Leo McKern, star of the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey) has a hypothesis, backed up by information leaked from the Meteorological Center by Jeannie. The combined force of the twin nuclear tests have shifted the earth's axis, creating a new equator and shifting climates worldwide. The situation becomes even more grave, when Russian scientists announce that not only has earth's axis changed, but its orbit has also been altered, and the planet is heading toward the sun.

The distrust of authority seen here is not the sort of thing one would have seen in an American film from the period. Films in which the U.S. government lies to its citizens would not become common until the post Watergate period. The rapid fire speech common to newspaper films (His Girl Friday comes to mind) combined with the variety of British accents can make some of the dialog difficult to make out, but that's why you have a rewind button. Adding greatly to the realism is the casting of Arthur Christiansen as the editor of the Daily Express. Christiansen, though not an actor, was a recently retired London newspaper editor.

Special effects are minimal, with many of the worldwide catastrophes being portrayed with stock footage. It's the characters that sell this story, and they sell it well. The film's climax is haunting and is guaranteed to stay with you.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire's entry at IMDB.

Dead Birds (2004)DVD REVIEW

This film automatically gets points for attempting and pulling off a Civil War era setting with a budget of only $1.5-million. It seems unlikely that Dead Birds will become any kind of classic, but it’s a competently made low-budget chiller with a strong cast, some good scares, and some way cool creatures.

A gang of bank robbers dressed like Confederate soldiers makes off with a large quantity of gold. The gang’s leader William is played by Henry Thomas, best known as Elliot from E.T., and despite the beard he sports here, he doesn’t appear to have aged much in the intervening years.

During the blood-drenched bank heist William’s brother Sam, played by the equally baby-faced Patrick Fugit (star of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous), takes a bullet to the shoulder. The thieves remain otherwise unscathed, which is more than can be said for the occupants of the bank. The gore effects are both ambitious and effective, though I’m fairly certain a civil war era pistol would not shear a man’s skull in half.

The thieves make for the old Hollister Place, an abandoned plantation where they plan to hole up for the night before making a break for Mexico. Just outside the hideout, though, a nightmarish beastie that no one can identify as human or animal attacks our anti-heroes. Once inside the house, it soon becomes clear that something evil resides there. William and Todd discover a book with an incantation for raising the dead. Sam has several spectral/demonic visitations, but are they merely a product of his infected wound? Soon, though, the others are also seeing things that just aren’t right, and the desire to hang onto the gold they’ve stolen must be balanced against the value of their own lives and perhaps even their souls.

One of the movie’s biggest assets is its cast. William’s girlfriend, the razor-wielding Annabelle, is played with pluck and homespun sex appeal by Nicki Aycox of Jeepers Creepers II fame. Isaiah Washington, currently appearing on the TV series Grey’s Anatomy plays Todd, the gang’s only African American member. Given the time period, Todd’s ethnicity adds tension to an already shaky group dynamic. Michael Shannon and Mark Boone, Jr. respectively play Clyde and Joseph who comprise a gang within the gang, and their goals are not necessarily in line with those of their compatriots.

The disk features some nice extras. Commentary buffs will rejoice at the inclusion of two audio commentary tracks, one from director Alex Turner and one from the cast and crew. There’s also a fascinating “making of” featurette in which we see members of the production staff getting drunk in hotel rooms, arguing over creature designs, and detonating 8 squibs strapped to a 90-year old man.

All in all, a nice little scare-fest that seems a little reminiscent of William Wesley’s Scarecrows (1988). Not all questions are answered, notably the meaning of the title, but this leaves a feeling of mystery even after the end credits have rolled.

Dead Bird's entry at IMDB

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