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Movies
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Written by Sameerah
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Thursday, 02 May 2013 |
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I like a shitty b-movie as much as the next girl, but Stripped is so bad that it tests the limits of my patience. The kills are fuckinging horrible, the characters are a bunch of unlikable douche bros and the the plot makes no sense whatsoever. It’s is the retarded, bastard love child of The Hangover, Very Bad Things and Hostel. Expect not funny or gory.
The first 20mins of this film were so boring I made dinner. So I can’t really tell much about how it started. What I can tell you is that some dude bros are going to go to Vegas to get fucked up for what is either someone’s birthday or a bachelor party. It is a really bad sign for your film if I would rather cook and do dishes instead of watching your setup. What made the intro so unbearable was the characters. It’s a cast nondescript boring dude bros that don’t seem to be able to do anything but flash their abs (and their abs are nothing to write home about). The fat kid who can't get laid is the only highlight in the cast. But only because all he has to do is trip over himself and be fat. It’s just a bunch of alright looking dude bros ed hardy t-shirts and some chick whose only purpose seems to provide a non stripper related vagina/damsel in distress. Once our crew gets to Vegas it is painfully obvious that the people behind this film have never been to vegas in their lives. Nevada is only of the few states in the union where prostitution is legal. Its so legal that there are dudes standing on corners up and down the strip handing out flyers to brothels, escort services, dancers you name it. If paying for pussy is your thing vegas is the place for you to be yo! With hookers so readily available in the city of sin why anyone would decide to go to the brothel behind the abandoned truck stop is beyond me. I’m all for people being murdered while they fuck, but if you’re going to set your film in Vegas, your brothel needs to have glamor and glitz. No one goes to Vegas to kick it a stank ass brothel behind a truck stop. They go to the Bunny Ranch for some glamourous strange. After such an abysmal set-up I was ready for some blood. But once again Stripped has disappointed me. During a lap dance some chick starts stabbing fatty for no reason. While I was happy to see him go, his kill was wholly unsatisfying. Few things are more annoying than when a horror film cops out on it’s kills. I’m used to films that go weak on murder when the victim is a kid, but when you have a film that is all about frat boys and strippers there is no reason not to give up the gore. From the first slice to the last each and every kill in Stripped is a cop out and a waste of fucking time. No guts, very little blood and no gore. If you can’t get any of those things right, why the fuck are you in the horror business. And that brings me the the doctor. He appears out of nowhere and not in the good way. I’m sure they’re going for something menacing but the dude they got looks like a cheap version of Larry Drake in Dr. Giggles. But unlike Larry, this guy isn’t menacing or funny. His presence is an insult to what is already a pretty shit film. He has no backstory, they never say what he is doing in the brothel other than awkwardly lurking in corners. It would have been nice to know how he was related to the strippers or what his end game was, but Stripper pays no attention to things like plot or characters. Just throw together some shitty sex scenes and some half assed kills and call it a movie. Bang, brilliant, game over! It’s a sad state of affairs really. Hookers and psycho killers generally work well together. Bordello of Blood, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, and Monster all work hookers and murder together brilliantly. For some reason, the people behind Stripped forgot the cardinal rules of horror writing; write characters that people will care about , and if you’re going with a threadbare plot the kills better be fucking good! In the end kids this is another example of me watching bad movies so that you don’t have to. You’re welcome.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 02 May 2013 )
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Written by Sameerah
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Wednesday, 06 February 2013 |
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Gut 4.0 It’s always sad and annoying when you have an old friend that can’t let go. We all have at least one of these people floating on the outer edges of our social circle; the friend from high school that doesn’t understand that you have a day job and you can’t spend your days smoking pot in vacant lots anymore. The elementary school friend that doesn’t seem to understand that past a certain age sleepovers are just a little odd. Every now and again you throw these folks a bone, meet them for a drink and indulge in a little mutual nostalgia of your misspent youth. When the night is over you go back to your real life. Gut examines what happens when old friends can’t take no for an answer and shit gets real. Tom and Dan have been best friends since high school. Back in the day they filled their days and nights with an endless stream of zombies, gore like so many of us did before we were getting laid. Fast forward 20 years and the pressures of being a responsible adult are beginning to wear on Tom. Married with a kid and a soul sucking job, Tom spends his days thinking of ways to get himself out the rut that is his middle 30s, out of his hometown and onto something new. Dan on the other hand is content to spend his nights watching endless hours of gore with the horror films of his youth. The only difference between Dan at 15 and Dan at 35 is now, he can buy beer. But Dan isn’t a total waste of space and tries to cure Tom’s ills the only way he knows how; with beer and a night of classic gore. But this isn’t just any old gore-fest. Tonight Dan unveils his latest find; an untitled film that showed up in his PO Box after he posted on an horror forum online. The guys watch as a pair of hands reaches out with a curved blade, cutting the woman on the table. His hands sliding into the wound feeling what is inside. Dan thinks the whole thing is a laugh, but Tom can’t shake the feeling that this is real. It gets stranger when more films show up. Each film has a new victim on the slab, and with each cut Tom wonders if his need to hold onto their past has driven his best friend to the unthinkable. I know we’re only a little over 30 days into the new year, but Gut has just made the top of my list of best movies of 2013. Being that Gut is about snuff films I was expecting it to have a lot more gore, but I found myself enjoying the lack blood. A silver blade slicing through flesh, a small pool of blood and a hand is all we get. With torture porn films raking up cash at the box office I’m sure it’s tempting to go all out and throw entrails all over the place. But resisting that urge to focus on creating a taut thriller is definitely a mark of of what a good writer/director Elias is.Throughout the film your mind is more on the interaction between Tom and Dan than killing. Leaving out a lot of the gore makes the few kills we do see more impactful. Making Tom and Dan normal helped drive the plot for me. Neither of these guys are anything special. They’re in that limbo that so many of us find ourselves in; too old to get into the shit we did in high school, but young enough that we can’t be content with a boring job and the daily grind of adulthood. Everyone can relate to that feeling of melancholy that sets in when it feels like your life isn’t turning out the way you always dreamed it would. When it hits we all long for some form of excitement just like Tom. The thread of longing that hangs over Tom and the desperation that Dan covers himself in makes the circumstances that they find themselves in more horrifying. If you’re looking for a good thriller that keeps your mind racing and just enough gore to satisfy your blood lust, give Gut a shot and you will not be disappointed. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 30 November -1 )
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Written by Sameerah
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Friday, 16 November 2012 |
I have decided that the only thing Vile about this film is that someone actually paid money to bring this shit into existence.That’s right kids I suffer so that you won’t have to. You’re welcome. Vile is another of these direct to DVD Saw torture porn rip-offs that have fallen into favor over the past few years. But where as the Saw franchise honors the long held horror tradition of starting off strong and get progressively worse over the years “Vile” starts shitty and stays shitty throughout.
Vile starts as these things so often do with a bunch of conventionally attractive kids in the woods being trapped in an evil torture conspiracy. Sadly the evil mastermind in this films isn’t some charming freak who uses a eerily cute puppet as a doppelganger; this time our baddie is some broad with bad teeth doing the bidding of a twisted drug company. In theory the evil corporation should be the hook. It isn’t too big of a leap to think that our corporate overlords have come up with some sort of insidious plot to use the masses as guinea pigs because the price of lab rats has started to cut into their bottom line. But alas this movie fails to do anything with the one plot the device that could make this film interesting. Their attempts at fleshing out the details of the end game is clumsy at best. And by the time they get to the big reveal you’ve already quit caring about who is trying to kill these people or why. You just really need them to all be dead. All I got out of the actors stammering is that there is a drug company the needs the chemicals the brain produces when you’re in pain for something that I quit giving two shits about 30 minutes into the movie. Again interesting, but poorly done. Now I don't care.
Once the thing that was supposed to be the plot out of the way I figured things couldn’t get any worse and I would be treated to 1001 new ways to cause human suffering. But once again Vile proves to be a steaming pile of disappointment. They may as well change the name of this film from Vile to “extreme cooking accidents”. All of the torture in this movie involve cooking accidents. 45 minutes of people sticking their hands in boiling water, stove burns and cheese graters.. All things that are painful, sure, but nothing that anyone with a kitchen hasn’t already experienced at least once. I got a bit of a thrill when the resident bitch got her teeth knocked out. Not because punishment was awful but because anyone who is that bad at acting deserves to get their fucking teeth knocked out.
When all is said and done I can’t really say anything good about Vile. There aren’t any good kills or innovative tortures to keep the gore hounds happy. The story isn’t good enough to make anyone happy. And the acting is so bad that everyone involved should be killed. The only people who will be tortured by Vile are those of us who wasted an hour of our lives watching this shit. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 16 November 2012 )
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Written by Sameerah
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Saturday, 10 September 2011 |
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Saturday afternoon and I have nothing better to do than to watch movies seeing as 2:30pm is too early to start drinking, even for me. So after putting it off weeks I’ve finally gotten around to “The Reef” and after 2 hours of water and screaming, I have decided it is never too early in the day for a cocktail. The only thing that makes “The Reef” even remotely scary is that it plays on our primal fear of being eaten alive by giant fish. But once you get past that this movie is like so many other “Jaws” wannabes over the years. Just a lot of stock footage lifted from National Geographic and wet people screaming.
“The Reef” starts out as these things often do, with a pleasure cruise gone horribly wrong. Five attractively forgettable Aussies pile into a yacht for a few days of drinking and shagging on the Great Barrier Reef--a favorite vacation spot for fish, crabs, sharks, sting rays and nature photographers. Full disclosure; I don’t know a lot about boats, or the Great Barrier Reef, but taking your boat out to a place known for well rocks and reefs seems like you’re just setting yourself up for failure. And failure comes quickly when the yacht runs into some reefs, pops a hole and capsizes in what can only be described as the most predictable boating accident in nautical history.
The boat tipping over leaves our band of attractive nobodies are left with two choices; either sit on top of the sinking ship in hopes that someone finds them before they’re either drowned or eaten, or take their chances swimming 12 miles to a small island where they can be eaten in the process. So four attractive people set off for the island leaving an attractive blond man with the boat to take his chances alone. Their swim starts out easy enough until a great white shark turns up to munch on the swimmers. Picking them off one by one with it’s massive teeth. I will say this for “The Reef”, the footage they used for the shark was much better than the stuff that they normally get for shark films. Usually these movies rely on footage lifted from “Shark Week” and stock stuff from National Geographic. But the shark they used for this one was surprisingly good, without using too much CGI. As impressed as I was about how they handled showing the shark, I had a bit of an issue with how they decided to introduce the devil fish. They try and fail to use the “Bruce the Shark” technique used in Jaws. But they fail to realize that introducing Bruce the shark in “Jaws” was a cluster fuck of mechanical failures that resulted in a happy accident that resulted in one of the greatest openings in modern film. It’s not the kind of thing that can be repeated.
As “The Reef” comes to a close it’s shark 3 people 0. Only one of the forgettable ladies escapes being chum, the rest of the swimmers are left to marinate in the belly of a massive, scary fish.. We never find out what happened to the blond guy that stayed with the boat. I suppose there were worse ways to spend part of my afternoon, but “The Reef” isn’t worth spending too much of your time on. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 30 November -1 )
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Written by Sameerah
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Monday, 18 July 2011 |
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Few things are as shitty as a movie that starts out being entertaining and leaves you with a cop out ending. And thus is the case with “The Dead and The Damned”. The basic premise behind “The Dead and the Damned” is zombies in the old west. A concept that I don’t think I’ve seen before and looked like it would be good times. But alas, for everything that I liked about this movie the ending just ruined it for me.
Zombie horde by way of infection is among my favorite ways for the zombie Apocalypse to spread. In the case of “The Dead and The Damned” the virus is spread when a pair of dimwits find a rock that glows green and bring it into town. Now because it’s the old west they don’t have science or anything like that so it stands to reason that the locals think that the creepy green glow coming from within the mysterious rock are emeralds or some other kind of fantastic riches. So like the rubes they are, they attempt to break open the rock to get to the sweet, sweet riches inside. But instead of emeralds the towns folk are infected by a green cloud that turns them into flesh eating zombies.
As the town succumbs to the zombie infection, a nameless cowboy strikes out to catch a Native American chief that is wanted for the rape and murder of a white woman using a young blonde as bait. Before the cowboy can celebrate capturing the chief and collecting his bounty the trio is attacked by the zombie horde and now have to sort out how to escape the undead and fight their way out of town.
What I like about “The Dead and the Damned” was that these zombies had a lot more on the ball than I was expecting. They were fast, strong and not completely aimless. The best zombie scene in the movie was when the blonde girl goes up against a blind zombie. The make up on this zombie was spot on, and the way they had her stalk the blonde was creepy and fun. This scene also marks the only time that the blonde does anything that is even remotely close to being useful when she takes a machete to the zombie. But even in the process of zombie killing she proves to be utterly useless, as she knocks herself out mid kill. And she doesn’t so much kill the zombie as she does deliver it a serve blunt trauma wound. Not nearly enough to kill it on the spot, but intense enough that the zombie bleeds out before eating her leg. So yeah that works out nicely.
For the most part I thought “The Dead and The Damned” was pretty entertaining despite the blonde, but the ending just killed it for me. After a little over an hour of what were some pretty decent zombie kills, the cowboy and the Chief are dead, leaving just our annoying blonde surrounded by zombies with only bullet left in her gun. As the scene closes, my heart leapt because I thought she was going to take the now dead cowboy’s advice and kill herself. But alas my hopes were dashed and she was saved by a German cowboy that had two minutes of screen time in the beginning of the movie, that I had completely forgotten about. A total cop out ending to what was overall a decent film.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 18 July 2011 )
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