Wrong Turn 5

I don't know what's more depressing; the fact that the Wrong Turn series is still around despite sucking the roof off for 3 entries now, or the fact that I keep watching them despite all of their....roof sucking. It's comical how not only is Wrong Turn 5 easily one of the worst movies of the year, possibly even the decade, but what's also humorous is that it outblows part 4 by a lightyear.

Wrong Turn 5 takes place in West Virginia (which is about the only similarity to past entries) and it's about a bunch of kids on their way to a festival that's in the same area as where the mutants are having a party of their own. And during the process, the leader of the mutants is locked up in the local jail where he proceeds to taunt the head officer with death threats the whole time about how she "won't live to see tomorrow". Good times.

Wrong Turn 5 is such an epic failure that listing every fault is like listing how many rocks are on the ground. The performances are equivalent in talent level to people who have a pulse and are willing to embarass themselves on camera. The story managed to get even more paper thin then the last entry which is quite the feat. The effects are even worse than the last one, the creatures now look like Orange, overtanned, masked monsters and in some scenes you can even see their "faces" crumbling off. Add in a complete lack of scares, humor, or fun, and you have a movie that will make you feel as if you're missing a chromosome or two by its dismal ending.

0/4



Silent Hill: Revelation

One thing that's become pretty apparent to me these days is how strong of an indicator the preview for a movie is in showing how great/terrible the movie will be or not. If the preview is busted, then the movie will probably be busted. If the preview is great, well...then there's still a chance that the movie will be busted. Not learning from these lessons has resulted in me suffering from cruel and unsual punishments, like a viewing of Silent Hill: Revelation for example.

Silent Hil: Revelation stars Adelaide Clemens as Heather Silva, the daughter of the mother in the first movie who is stuck in Silent Hill as a result of her attempt to keep her daughter away from all of the dangers that reside in Silent Hill. Well, the residents of Silent Hill want Heather back, sending several people from the cult that run Silent Hill to kidnap her father in order to lure her back to their town. Along the way there's demons created by Alessa who want Heather dead.

Silent Hill is such an utter disaster it's really hard to determine where the blame should go to. Every performance is dull as dirt and as authentic as the creatures running amok in the movie. The story feels like it was pasted from 10 other movies put together, often resembling one of the many busted Nightmare on Elm Street sequels as opposed to a stand-out movie that's only the second one of its' particular franchise. It's completely sleep-inducing throughout, there's nothing scary or remotely interesting going on from beginning to end. And the effects are terrible, it's like your watching a bizzare combination of a cartoon, a video game, and a pack of Crayola created creatures. Add on a completely routine and uninspiring sequel that hints at a third entry into the series, and you have a movie that makes you feel as if you were rotting in Purgatory about a thousand times more than any character in this movie would ever had to endure.

0/4

Sinister

Most horror movies today seem to bring the gore and the guts, but lack the spirit and the fun over why horror movies are such a good time. Not many these days bring both elements to the table keeping a good balance between the terror given to your eyes and the terror given to your mind. Sinister is quite the exception actually, showing that you don't need shit splattered every two seconds to give a good scare.

Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as Ellison, a writer who gets his buck off of writing novels about graphic murders. He's presented more material than he was ready for by investigating his new case, where a little girl goes missing but the rest of her family is found hanging around in trees....literally. After discovering tapes of previous graphic murders of entire families, he realizes that the cases are connected and that the culprit is a lot closer than originally imagined.

Sinister can be quite bonechilling at times. The scenes of the previous murders will easily resonate in your memory for weeks, possibly even months to come. Families are tied to chairs that are being pushed into pools, families have their throats slit, are burned alive in cars, and in easily the most disturbing of them all....you watch a family have an unpleasant, very close encounter with a lawn mower. Weirdest thing is that you rarely see anything on the films, but they hit you as if you were watching a local news story depicting a graphic crime. Creepy shit.

Sinister also doesn't overcomplicate things which is a large strength that plays to the movie's success. There aren't 10,000 characters that show up in 1 scene just to be slaughtered, there aren't 1 million other subplots, and the story doesn't feel the need to overcomplicate things just for the saking of confusing the hell out of everyone. There is a big twist at the end (which is also quite thrilling), but the movie still manages to stay on track as opposed to falling off the cliff at the very end.

I do have some minor nitpicks about Sinister though. They are very minor, but I felt if these things were quite different, the movie could have been even stronger. At times, the movie feels like a dead ringer to The Ring (no pun intended). Evil videotapes with monsters that pounce after a certain amount of time is certainly a creepy idea, but at times it almost feels like a spin-off of The Ring as opposed to a fresh idea. And, I felt that the movie took a bit of time to kick off. It goes from about 20mph to 90mph, just when you feel like it's going nowhere, Sinister begins to slay. Despite these nitpickings, Sinister still proves that if the talent is present, a simple idea can really deliver on the premise of creating pure evil.

3/4



Paranormal Activity 4

It's no secret that I absolutely loathed the first two entries into the Paranormal Activity series. I found them to be quite slow, very flat, not scary, and just unintentionally hillarious. Then part 3 comes around, and low and behold....I was actually quite impressed! My standards for part 4 were surprisingly high and unfortunately, I felt the movie fell a bit short of what I was hoping it would be.

Paranormal Activity 4 begins with where previous entries left off. Katie (Katie Featherton) has stolen her sister's child; Hunter, after killing her sister, her sister's husband, and her own boyfriend as well. The two are now located in Henderson, Nevada where Hunter (who now goes by Robbie) begins spending a lot of time with the neighbors. As unsurprisingly, the more "Robbie" is around, the more unexplainable events begin to happen to the family.

The performances in this entry are quite stronger than previous entries. Kathryn Newton holds her own, as Alex, the teenage girl who is on the receiving end of most of the spirits' mischief. She keeps the audience interested in her character and actually plays the role quite naturally. Katie Featherton once again shines as Katie, the girl who you know is up to no good. Every scene with her is bonechilling, Featherton milks every moment to its finest.

There are some pretty solid thrills here as well. It's not 100% terrifying from beginning to end, but a lot of the "Gotcha!" moments pay off and there some quite impressive visuals on display in this one, especially the scenes with the Wiiconnect playing as a camera to monitor all of the ghosts' whereabouts. And as usual, the last 20 minutes are easily the most frightening as all Hell breaks loose and it becomes a guessing game of who, if anyone will live to tell the tale.

Now for the negative; one of my biggest disappointments with PA4 is how little it explains to the audience. Part 3 left you with a lot of cliffhangers about the unlucky family's past, how this is happening, and why no one has noticed that more and more people just happen to be possessed by demons who give them the strength of Superman. PA4 provides little answers and doesn't seem to concerned with tying up the loose ends that previous entries have started having us think about.

But, my biggest issue with PA4 is just how similar it feels to past entries. Granted, it's much superior to the first two, but still, I didn't feel like this one really presented anything fresh to the series. It's pretty much the same ol' stuff, just with different people. Certain scenes seem like carbon copies of scenes that were used in the first three, and if they were creepy the first time....seeing them repeated in this one just makes the material feel stale at times. Paranormal Activity 4 had the potential to be stellar but instead it just decides to lay down and play dead.

2/4

High Tension





 It seems like foreign horror movies receive the reputation of either being absolutely gruesome, a million times better than American horror movies, or both of the two options. And I have to say, High Tension easily lives up to both of these standards. It’s bloody as hell but still quite effective at being very spine-chilling at the same time.

High Tension is about two semi-lesbianic (yes I’m aware that isn’t a word) friends named Marie and Alexa. While staying at Alexa’s parents’ house one weekend, a male intruder breaks into the house, murders all of Alexa’s family, and then kidnaps her, all of which was viewed by Marie who was hiding under the bed the entire time. Marie is determined to save her friend as she chases down the killer while viewing all the carnage and death he leaves behind him.

                High Tension pulls no punches when it comes to the blood. Every murder pretty much ends in an explosion of blood which is awesome, and from what I’ve read, a few scenes were edited down which actually makes me quite sad that we could have seen worse. But I digress, High Tension doesn’t back down when it comes to showing the gruesome shit on screen, there is very little left to the imagination. People are slashed, throats are slit, people are beheaded by furniture, kids are shot, heads are used as masturbatory aids, and you get the point. This is a huge positive though, gorehounds aren’t into using their imagination to picture what a death in a movie looks like, and they want to see it happen.

                Even though High Tension easily earns its’ R rating in the gore department, I actually would feel like the movie would feel quite menacing without it. The direction is quite clever actually, placing the viewer in the seat of Marie as she is following the killer and her kidnapped friend while he is doing all of this terrible shit to people. It actually makes the viewer feel like they’re in the back of a rollercoaster like Marie would feel in this movie and that’s something easily worthy of recognition. High Tension is solid at making the viewer feel like they are actually there watching everything occur in front of their own eyes.

                As for the controversial ending, I was actually pretty sold by it. Granted, it was completely ridiculous and was taking a similar path to many horror movies today, I still was a fan. This type of resolution is something that can really be sold if the actors are into it, and Cécile de France (the actress who plays Marie) sells the hell out of it.

          High Tension is a solid, thrilling, gruesome film from beginning to end, sold by the direction and strong performances along with a great pace that never lags. Sure it’s ridiculous as hell and if you pick it apart, it doesn’t really make a lick of sense. But that’s what the genre tends to entail, and for utter lunacy, High Tension is a great bet to put your money on.

3/4

Primal

These days I'm convinced that climbing Mount Rushmore is accomplished with less trouble than making a horror movie that keeps my interest from beginning to end. Failing to provide the goods, is Primal, a horror movie which really should stayed in the stone age and never came to this one.

Primal is about six friends on a camping journey in the wildnerness. When one of them falls sick after skinny dipping with leeches, the other five panic as her condition goes from worst to monster-worthy. She begins her "illness" by bleeding and ends it when she's completely deformed and hungry for anything with a pulse. She attacks, which then brings up the question of whether or not the others can kill a friend or not. Most of them seem to get on board, but others (mainly the boyfriend), are a bit less for the idea.

Primal unfortunately provides very little of merit, but I guess one thing I would consider satisfactory is the makeup. The creatures actually look really swell and I was impressed that that the monster/cavemen creatures weren't styled as shabbily as most movies of the genre tend to look. Granted, this is probably one of the few things I enjoyed about this movie, but still, could be worse I guess.

Now for the dreadful; and there's a bundle of problems worthy of being mentioned. All of the characters are ridiculously unlikeable. They behave in such stupid and barbaric ways it's hard to imagine there's something less intelligent running around. All five of them could have been killed at once and it would have been easy to not give a shit at all. The movie just feels routine and bland at all, created without any sense of fun or fright. Add in a routine finale and a movie that leaves you with more questions than answers, and you have something that is as substantial as a movie that was made by cavemen for the cavemen.

1/4



A Series of Unfortunate Events

When I think of movies geared towards children, I think of optimism. Lighthearted movies (mainly animated), where you know everything will be just fine and that there really isn't any present danger to the main characters. Here to kick that idea in the groin is A Series of Unfortunate Events, a movie that makes the ending of Bambi look like casual fluff in comparison.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is about three children; Klaus, Violet, and Sunny (most recognizable being Emily Browning from The Uninvited as Violet) whose wealthy parents were recently killed in a fire due to unknown circumstances. They are then sent to live with a distant, strange relative by the name of Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), and least can be said is that he has other things planned for the children besides a trip to the zoo. In the event of all of their deaths, Count Olaf gets bank. He is determined to get the mentioned bank, no matter how many others need to be offed in the process. Happy kids' movie right?

A Series of Unfortunate Events shines in many categories, but one of the movie's biggest strengths is the appearance; absolutely astonishing. It's as if the movie was the distant stepcousin of a Tim Burton creation, minus the Johnny Depp part of course. Every scene is shot to perfection, the colors are brooding and menacing, the setpieces are astounding. The movie really does create a successful atmosphere of melancholy.

The performances from everyone are really stellar, but Jim Carrey surprisingly nails it, I would easily consider this one of his best performances. He displays an unsual amount of uneasiness and terror for a PG rated movie, yet he hams it up when needed in the scenes where he depicts Olaf as a caring relative that couldn't love the children more. It's Carrey's show here and he really keeps your attention in every scene that he is a part of.

Though it's certainly not something I would call terrifying, A Series of Unfortunate Events is actually quite creepy which is shocking considering the low parental rating of PG that it received. Count Olaf really is quite a menacing guy who will take down anyone in his path. Granted, you aren't able to see any of the murders, but still, I was pretty impressed by the effective thrills that this material provides. It's like the children's movie that is geared for everyone. I just really hope this isn't the type of movie that will inspire 10,000 sequels. Because that is the type of event that is quite unfortunate, and will make the orphan's journey feel like a walk in the park in comparison.

3/4