Pretty in Plasma

Sorry about the delay.  Real life, y'know.

So, anyway, apparently, Australians spend their entire lives in fear.  Maybe it's from being descended from criminals, I don't know, but these are some truly paranoid individuals.

And considering this guy's prom date, they have every right to be.

For those of you who have NOT seen this twisted, little gem, Brent (played by Xavier Samuel) goes all Goth LiveJournal Poetry after a car accident that killed his dad (caused by a beaten and bloody dude just kinda wanderin' into the street (this is important).  He gets asked to go to the prom by Lola (Robin McLeavy), who is not his girlfriend, and turns her down (quite nicely, actually).  We kind of get the idea that Lola isn't quite right when she spies on Brent and his girl making out in the parking lot.

During Brent's daily ritual of brooding, he gets knocked unconscious and wakes up tied to a chair at a tacky dinette set with Lola, her dad (John Brumpton) and Bright-Eyes, their pet vegetable.  Since Lola wasn't invited to the school dance, Dad turned the house into a prom for her.  Complete with paper crowns, disco balls, pretty dresses and cordless drills, knives and syringes full of bleach to keep her date from screaming.  (I STILL want to know where these people get syringes.)

Best Daddy EVER!

And the rest of the night is spent showing us exactly how twisted Pretty Princess Lola really is.  The girl may not be the most creative torturer on the planet but she certainly makes do with the materials she has at hand.  And she's had practice.  A lot of it.

 

Just in case you're wondering, it's kind of amazing what you can do with a fork and a handful of salt.

 

EEW!  Look what you did to my DRESS!

 

 

This is yet another instance of a FANTASTIC first time out for a new director.   Sean Byrne is definitely a director to watch.  The film is flawed but it DOES give us a frenzied blend of Pretty in Pink, Carrie, Prom Night, and Hostel which is kind of amazing to watch.  The comedy elements do kind of shock you out of the horror every so often, but they work.  I definitely rank this up there with Mum and Dad in terms of sheer awesome.

Unless you absolutely cannot stand torture horror, this should DEFINITELY be on your list.

Feral Children: The New Zombie

Hidey-Ho, kids!  Today, on a very special Candy-Coated Razor Blades, we're going to review a very special movie and it's all about mommies and daddies.

Well... mommies...

Well...  one mommy.

Before we get started, you need to watch this:

Andy Muschietti (NOT Guillermo Del Toro, by the way, so get that out of your heads right now) gives us, in three minutes, pulse-pounding fear.  Now take that fear and expand it over an hour and a half.

The story (and since this is new, I'll try not to give away too many spoilers) is that a man during the 2008 financial crisis goes crazy-cuckoo-pants and takes his two young daughters, Victoria, age 3, and Lily, age 1, on what is meant to be their last road trip.  As he enters his last stage of madness and takes aim at Victoria (after taking off her ZOMGSOCUTE toddler glasses so she couldn't see (this is important but I'm not gonna tell you why even though it's only important for a little while)), she is rescued by a very visible otherworldly force.  This force is what will be known through the rest of the film as Mama.  Mama feeds the kids cherries.  Because cherries are awesome.

Fast forward about 5 years and the children's uncle, (Lucas, their father's identical twin) is still looking for them.  He has blown through the entire inheritance he received from his brother to do so.  And while this is noble, I am not that good a person.  (Sorry, kids.  Uncle Bob loves you but he still has to eat.)  Uncle Luke has a girlfriend, Annabel, who is very glad she is not pregnant because that means she can still play in a rock band and eat Apple Jacks and not have to share them with a howling poop-monster because babies are, like, totally gross, man.  Much to Annabel's chagrin, they find the kids on the very day she fails a pregnancy test.

 

This doll was with them.  Because feral children love forest debris.

Enter Dr. Dreyfus, who is caring for the girls and who REALLY wants to get famous on that whole "raised by wolves" angle, and Aunt Jean who's just a raging cunt.  Dreyfus agrees to help Lucas keep custody of the girls if he gets to keep studying them.  Then the fun really starts.  Mama comes looking for her adopted young'uns and she is NOT happy about it. 

Now, I'm gonna say right off the bat that this movie is not perfect by any means but as this is Muschietti's first time out of the gates, I'm willing to forgive a LOT.  

Except cave paintings.

For one thing, we are never under any pretense at all that this is NOT a ghost story/fairy tale.  He left NOTHING to the imagination in that regard.  We started with "Once upon a time..." and we were always dealing directly with Mama and Mama was a jealous, hurting entity.  Muschietti even lets us see Mama's face early on in the film which is kind of a cinematic no-no.  Muschietti, you get a time-out.  Go to your naughty stool.

Next, we're dealing with a director that hasn't, yet, found HIS voice.  While the story itself is original, and refreshing in that regard, almost everything in the film can be traced back to another movie.  We know this is deliberate but it's a little distracting.  About the only thing that was original (and completely awesome) was the fact that Mama moved like all of her bones were broken in multiple spots.  It gave her a definite "I'm dead, I know it and I'm pissed about it" quality.

 Romper, Stomper, Bomper, Boo...

All-in all, though, even without ANY gore at all, because this is a classy ghost story and shit, this is a thrill-a-minute that I would gladly watch over and over again.  Preferably in a theater full of screamers because that's how I saw it the first time and they were GLORIOUS.  Like a hellish choir.  It even got me a few times and I'm not easy to scare.

Also, you might want to bring tissues.  There are some genuinely touching moments which just confirm to me that Muschietti needs to direct more and find his own place in cinematic history.  

I am a marshmallow.

Newsy-Note!

Hey, all!  I've been invited to take part in ULTIMATE GORE_A_THON: A Splatteriffic Extravaganza!

It's gonna be a huge multi-blog event from February 10th through the 23rd and it'll include myself and these most awesome bloggy-blogs!

Blood Sucking Geek - http://bloodsuckinggeek.com/
MK Horror - http://www.mkhorror.com/
At the Mansion of Madness - http://atthemansionofmadness.blogspot.com/
Deep Red Rum - http://initforthekills.com/ 
Gorror - http://goreworld.wordpress.com/
Movies at Dog Farm - http://moviesatdogfarm.blogspot.com/
The info Zombie - http://www.theinfozombie.com/
Disturbing Films - http://www.disturbingfilms.com/

I'll post more info as I get it.

This is gonna be goooooooood.

Yep. Trees Still Hate You.

IT'S WEDNESDAY!  You all know what that means!  Today, I drop ze knowledge.

And today, we cover something that I've mentioned many, many times before.

The Woods and why you should never go there.

A man and a young boy take a walk into the woods.  The boy looks up at the man and says "I'm scared!"  The man looks down at the boy and says "YOU'RE scared?  I'm the one who has to walk back alone!"

Much like darkness, the woods are a location trope that should really be common sense.  They're full of hazards living, non-living and otherwise.  The woods are alive.  They hate you and horror fiction LOVES to make sure you know it.

We can't even really pinpoint an origin for this trope because for eons it was just a rule of thumb.  In wide-open spaces, you can see predators coming and you can see where you're putting your foot.  In forests, not so much.  There are more places to hide and the forest floor can hold any manner of trips and traps. It's because of this that our mothers teach us to stay away from the woods behind the house.

 

There are 150,000 ways to die in this picture alone.

ARMIES aren't even safe from this trope.  Roman General Quinctilius Varus was directly told that Arminius was planning an ambush in the Teutoberg Forest.  Varus led his troops in there anyway and they were decimated.

Like I said, the woods themselves are not generally what we're afraid of.  It's the things IN the woods that scare us.  Lions and tigers and bears and so forth.

Zombie bunnies...

And the path in the woods often leads to something much, much worse.

Welcome to scenic Dontgonearthe Castle.

Long before we get into horror movies, we're exposed to this trope via fairy tales and other literature.  Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods.  Little Red Riding Hood strays from the path.  Snow White is driven there by the evil queen.  J.R.R. Tolkien obviously hates the woods right back, otherwise he wouldn't have given us Mirkwood, Old Forest or Fangorn Forest. 

And once we're old enough to enjoy horror for what it is, the woods are all over the place.  From stinkers like Yellow Brick Road to Friday the 13th to The Evil Dead to Cabin in the Woods, film makers have been using the woods to scare us shitless FOREVER because you know why?

IT'S SO DAMN EASY!  Have you not been reading?  We hate the woods.  We don't want to get eaten in the woods.  We don't want to get stabbed in the woods.  We don't want to get toasted like marshmallows or strangled with tent ropes.  We don't want to sleep on the ground with the bugs and snakes and we don't want to get poison ivy in places our mothers haven't seen since we were children.  We don't want to risk being stuck there with no food, water or shelter and we don't even like to walk all that much so we don't want to have to find a way back to civilization.  Madness, disease, infection, injury and death lives in the woods.

Better not to go there.

Fuckin' woods.

So, THAT'S how they do it!

In the post-Scream world of slasher-horror, I think only one movie even comes close to reaching that perfect balance of horror and self-awareness.  Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is that film.

For the uninitiated, this is a mockumentary along the lines of Best in Show or Spinal Tap.  An aspiring journalist and her team are following Vernon around to discover his secrets as a slasher-type serial killer in a world where killers like Jason, Michael and Leatherface are real. 

He discusses the identity he's chosen (based on a local urban legend) and walks the crew through his paces as he makes preparations to slaughter a bunch of teenagers and face the "final girl".  He introduces the crew to his mentor, shows them how he can move quickly along his killing grounds, discusses his training regimen and tells them how he lures his girl into place using the magic midget from Poltergeist and carefully doctored microfiche. 

 They're heeeeeeere!

He also explains how he believes that he is doing a good thing by getting the final girl to face him.  He believes this will define her as a person and she will be stronger for the experience.

One more important piece?  He introduces us to his Ahab.  The male protagonist destined to follow and attempt to thwart him.  Not all slashers have them. 

 

I'd be concerned about fat jokes, personally.  Ahab...

Now, some folks didn't care for this movie because it's TOO genre-savvy but I dig it.  Its blacker-than-black humor deftly deconstructs the slasher genre and gives us a world where we should all be suspicious of perfect suburbs and "days just like any other", where we shouldn't get too excited over special events and it would probably be safer if we just didn't attend.  A world where sex is a killer, babysitters are an endangered species, the corn is infested with children and the woods really are out to murder you in the face.

A world where I KNOW I would be the victim that gets one line and a sharp implement in the 'nads before the title appears but that's neither here nor there.

This is just an awesome watch.  So... go watch it. 

I Feel Sick.

I made it to 100 posts!  Granted they're not all fantastic or anything but I did it so YAY, me!

Anyhoo.  We're going to celebrate this with a look at a movie I absolutely ABHOR.  2002's Cabin Fever.

Where to begin? 

Well, I suppose I should start with telling you about the story.

A bunch of kids go camping.  They catch a flesh-eating virus and stupidly spread it around everywhere while trying to get help.  Not that the kids would have stopped it because it was in the water supply but, still.  Kids be dumb.

Yep.  That's it.  Eli Roth wanted to give us a brainless 80s teen horror movie with the boobs and the camping and the useless adults.  In that, he succeeded.  In everything else, he failed... hard.  I wasn't sure it was possible to get a Z-minus but he did it.

Red wings?  No, thank you, ma'am.

What kills me is that someone paid for this.  Someone actually handed Eli Roth money and said "Go forth and make a horror movie about a flesh-eating virus."  I'm fairly certain that they did NOT say "Make it suck."

And the thing is, I can't even fault the actors.  Rider Strong was a decent lead and the others played their parts OK.  There was nothing wooden about the portrayals.  The whole PREMISE, though... 

That's it.  Ooze all sexy-like.

There just really didn't seem to be a clear direction and there was some stuff in it that didn't feel like it belonged.  Eli Roth with his cameo felt too much like "Well, hey, man.  Hitchcock did it." and what the HELL was up with pancake kid?  Sorry, buddy, but if your strange, be-mulleted child is known for biting people for no damn reason, you keep him at home.  You don't blame other people for his biting and that kid brought the hideous face-melting on himself.

 

And I understand that they were in small-town America but people really are not this stupid in real life.  I feel like he just spent an hour and a half pointing his finger and saying "dumbass hicks".  Yes, there are other movies that do that but people are still smart enough to say "Hey, get a doctor" not "Hey, let's mow down the sick kids because they got sick and were trying to get help."

Eli Roth.  Bane of Hillbillies.

Every so often I watch this again just to make sure I didn't make a mistake in hating this movie and every time I'm proven to be correct in my original assessment.

This movie would hurt my soul if I had one.