REVIEW: Red Dragon (2002)

So here goes my review for Red Dragon, the remake of the classic Hannibal Lecter thriller Manhunter. This is a silly, often soft-headed flick that likes to think it’s “upgrading” the classic film by making everything less subtle and having a bad guy that likes to flex his pecs naked like a drunk Dragonball Z character. Sound terrible yet? It is. Let’s give it a look.

Director: Brett Rattner

Starring: Edward Norton, Anthony Hopkins

IMDb

…hmmm…well, this is an awkward predicament. Red Dragon…wasn’t too bad. In fact it was actually pretty frigging good. Just like the original Manhunter. It wasn’t, yknow, anything amazing, and it had a few problems, but for a detective thriller, it’s one of the better ones you’re liable to get out of the mainstream examples of the genre. So overall I don’t have any major problems with it.

Well, this is turning into a boring review. What am I supposed to do now? Just talk about how good everything is, and make a few “ehhhh” comments about the plot holes and silly moments here and there? There aren’t even that many problems! It’s gonna be one of my shortest and least impressive reviews if I keep on like this! Isn’t there some other film I could review that has some slight similarity to Red Dragon, so as to keep a little bit of continuity?

Well…Ray Fiennes in Red Dragon had a weird tattoo on his back.

That must mean it’s time to take a look at The Tattooist!

Director: Peter Burger

Starring: Matthew Grainger, Jonathan King

IMDb

A supernatural horror movie about Samoan tattooing culture could potentially be interesting. I think the makers of this movie took that as a challenge to make the most boring thing possible.

So we start off with some kid who carved a pentagram into his arm getting the tattoo cut off by his super-religious Jesus freak father. It’s pretty cliché and boring and actually has about zero actual relevance to the film. Why did I even mention it? Because the film will, twice, so I figure I might as well not skimp on representing the film in the most realistic way possible.

Then we get the title of the movie over the main character’s ass: truly the greatest way to represent your movie.

Apparently this is Jake, a tattoo artist who says he knows ancient voodoo powers that can help heal the sick, or some shit like that. He gets hired by this rich guy who lives in the mansion from Eyes Wide Shut, and even advises the guy to take his sick son to a doctor. But the rich guy says nope! His son needs a tattoo and that will heal his ailing health! So Jake the greatest person who ever lived chooses to NOT call a doctor and leave immediately, and instead just go along with crazy rich guy’s crazy schemes.

Damn modern hippie medicine techniques...

Then later on we see that same rich guy angry that his son died after the tattoo – shock and awe – didn’t end up working. Gee, when even the GUY GIVING YOUR SON THE TATTOO recommended a doctor over the tattoo, you would think that would be enough proof to go to a goddamn doctor!

"I'm mad at you for my own deficient parenting!"

Just add this guy to the Poltergeist/Ring club of horrible horror movie parents, I guess…

Anyway, so Jake gets pushed down by crazy rich guy and cuts his hand on this tattoo instrument thing. Apparently, if you don’t mind me spoiling anything, this means that his tattoos can now kill people. How? This fantastical leap in logic is just so brilliant and well thought out…that it completely escapes me. The mark of any good horror movie, truly.

So he decides he wants to return that tattoo object to the person he stole it from, who lives in New Zealand. I’ve heard of worse excuses to start a horror movie…oh wait no I haven’t. So he goes to New Zealand and I’ll admit I don’t know much about that country. But I really have to say, any country that has a sign like this welcoming people in is cool in my books:

After that, I guess Jake goes and sees an old friend who greets him by insulting him and saying he’s wronged him. They have a weird friendship. Jake does some tattoos for people in New Zealand and gets invited to a party. Then he goes and talks to a rejected member of Bebe’s Kids about how there’s some kind of shadowy figure following him that he can’t see, but is nevertheless there. Amazing. Then we get some other stuff about how Jake isn’t welcome there because he doesn’t understand Samoan culture.

…which is, to be fair, totally understandable. Jake is an asshole! He steals from other tattoo artists and pretends that his tattoos can do things they can’t. He’s a scam artist. In the real world, this guy would be shunned even by the tattoo community in his own country, let alone the sacral practices of an ancient culture!

I just love how no attention is given to the Samoan culture in this movie aside from the tattoo stuff, and even then only to push its BS ghost story. It would be a more interesting movie if we actually had some good characters and writing that accentuated what was so interesting about the culture. But no, we just get a shitty ghost movie with a very light veneer of "culture" spread over it. What a load.

So yeah this is all really dull so far, if you couldn’t guess…why else would I be analyzing the politics of tattoo culture? He goes and meets his friend Sina, who is as generic a horror leading lady as you can get. She’s kind, patient and understanding and will have sex with Jake in about fifteen to twenty minutes. Oops, did I spoil that too? Damn.

They go see some guy who doesn’t like Jake for no reason. Jake decides to give the best first impression ever by poking around the guy’s house uninvited and disturbing his wife in her bedroom. Isn’t he just a class act? The final straw is when he knocks over a bunch of stuff and the guy kicks him out. Sina rewards this stupidity and incompetence by inviting him to come to her uncle’s party, because yeah that would sure really happen…ugh.

There we get some more nonsense about how everyone hates Jake. Yes, we the audience share your sentiments entirely.

Later on there’s a pool party, where some kid gets shoved into a pool and then it kills him for no reason, filling up the pool with bloody ink!

What happens when newspaper comic strip characters piss in the pool...

I just love how the reaction to all this is so normal. Nobody even really freaks out over it. They’re sad that he’s dead I guess, but at no point do we ever get any shock and awe at the bizarreness of people turning into ink. Isn’t that something? I guess these New Zealand tattoo cult people are just desensitized.

Then Jake meets up with Sina at her place where she examines all his tattoos. We find out that Jake was actually the kid in the opening sequence, whose father cut off his pentagram tattoo. So that traumatic experience actually made him want to go into tattoo stuff more? Uh, okay movie, whatever you say. It’s your stupid, illogical world after all.

After that, we finally get something happening as the two of them have sex. I'd post a picture of it if anyone cared, but hey, at least it's still better than endless monologues about how the Samoan culture doesn't like outsiders, which is all that's been happening so far otherwise.

While that’s going on, we see another woman waking up and finding out that her husband has turned into ink splotches and stuff – AND MESSED UP THE CARPET! DAMN HIM!

The next morning Jake returns home to find the angry sister of the kid who died in the pool. She’s mad because the tattoo killed her brother. Again I say – why is she not more surprised by all this? Are their superstitions really that deeply ingrained? I get that she’s distressed and angry. But why is she so nonchalant about the fact that her brother turned into a splatter of ink in the pool? Shouldn’t that be a concern?

Oh well, the movie has no time for that! It only has time for scenes like THIS!

…I don’t think I’m drunk enough for this movie.

Jake goes back to his place and finds angry sister girl in the shower and melting into ink, too. I think the makers of this movie got high while watching the ending of Wizard of Oz too many times. We then get the worst episode of ER ever:

That light is going to blind me if I stare at it too long.

Of course she dies and then Jake has to go save Sina, because he gave her a tattoo as well. She freaks out upon hearing the news and goes back to her father, whose advice is for her to go to church. The funniest thing about this is, it works. As soon as Jake takes her out of the church, she starts getting way worse and vomiting up blood and all kinds of shit, like instantaneously – it starts happening right after she leaves the building. So really, what this movie is saying is that God exists and can protect people from tattoo demons, as well as every other voodoo-level superstition out there, if they go to church. And hey, in fact all superstitions are actually real. Really!

There’s some kind of bullcrap story about some kid who didn’t get his tattoo finished and ran away, and apparently that makes him a ghost who can kill people now because some idiot cut his hand on a tool. How does this make any sense? Jake goes to see that little Bebe’s Kid reject from before and the kid can apparently – get this – channel the spirit of the dead guy, but only when loud rap music is playing and the car is driving over the speed limit.

This is where I draw the line, movie! This is where I stop believing anything you throw at me!

…or some shit, I don’t know, and I don’t care either. They figure out that it was Sina’s dear old dad who committed the crimes and killed the kid who is now a ghost and haunting everyone. So after the most racist thing I’ve ever seen in a horror movie…

…the dead kid’s dad comes back and makes Sina’s father cut his own tattoo off to shame him or something. I guess having him arrested for murder is a stupid idea. Sina and Jake are okay, and because of all this she decides to go back to America with him and everything. There’s an annoying taxi driver bugging them to stop talking about stuff and get in the car because he has many more customers waiting. And I’m not even kidding: this is how the movie ends. With an annoying taxi driver bothering the main characters to get in the car and leave. How is that even a real ending?

You can practically smell the stench of no inspiration seeping out of every pore of this movie’s infected tattoo areas. It’s a bad modern flick with all the clichés the genre is known and loathed for. It’s not as bad as The Grudge or anything, but it’s sure trying. Pointless, slow and boring, with more time spent on the Samoan tribal culture than on an interesting story or scares. The whole Samoan tattoo thing could be interesting, but instead it’s never used to any kind of quality end. So what is there to be gained here? Tattoos are evil, but only if you cut your hand on an ancient tool for making them. Then the only way to find out how to stop the evil is by playing loud rap music and going to church.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Images copyright of their original owners, I do not own any of them.

REVIEW: The Ring (2002)

Oh no! I watched The Ring and now I only have seven days to do this review!

Director: Gore Verbinski

Starring: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson

IMDb

Yup, that's just how it works now. Seeing the movie The Ring is pretty much the same as seeing the fictional video tape featured in the movie. Seeing as I usually do reviews in less than seven days, I guess that won’t be a problem though…

For those not “in the know,” The Ring is pretty much the forerunner to most modern horror movies anywhere. It’s the prototype for all the modern supernatural ghost stories we have, long-haired little girl ghosts with demonic faces and all. But unlike The Grudge, which is unequivocally horrendous, The Ring at least does try to have some good stuff in it. But is it enough for me not to review it? I don’t think so!

The movie kicks off with two girls talking about the evils of television, and how it kills your brain. Assuming that extends to movies as well, I really don’t think it’s that great of an idea to kick off a movie with the reasons why you should turn it off.

"Like, the corporations are out to get us, man."

They play pranks on each other and stuff, lots of red herrings, and talk about boys and evil video tapes that kill you. Apparently one of the two girls has just come back from a weekend vacation where she and her friends watched this tape that is rumored to kill people a week after they see it. Insert your own ‘The Ring 2’ joke here, or any bad movie for that matter. I’m just wondering what kind of movie studio would be so desperate as to use a marketing ploy like this. I mean, a movie that makes people die a week after they see it? That’s pretty hardcore. I’m sure they would find a great audience among the kinds of incessant whackjobs who watch crap like A Serbian Film, however. Or, if they were really desperate…

Oh, okay, I know Lion’s Gate wouldn’t go that far. They did release the SAW sequels, but I’m fairly sure their desire to bring in a profit would stop them from a stunt like this. But I digress. Just when you think nothing is going to happen and the movie will be nothing but boring teenage banter…

Yup, looks like she tried to French kiss a vacuum cleaner. Wonderful. We then switch over to our next main character Rachel, played by Naomi Watts. Her problem is, her son keeps drawing freaky pictures in class instead of letting the United States Education System pound its historically and politically biased dogma into his brain. And that just won’t do!

So apparently, this kid thinks his dead cousin magically turned into a giant when she died. Or maybe he just thinks she was always that size...stupid kid.

I love when the teacher tells Rachel that her son clearly has problems and she just sort of waves it off. She says her son has been missing his cousin who died three days ago, and this is how he’s dealing with it. Because drawing pictures of dead people in class? TOTALLY DEALING WITH IT! At the end of the conversation, the teacher says Watts’ son actually drew the pictures a week ago, even though his cousin died three days ago. Creepy! Cue the “dun dun dun” music. Personally, I think the teacher should be more worried about Rachel's psychotic lesbian tendencies...

If you get the reference, I'll give you a cookie.

In the car, Rachel’s son Aidan says that the cousin – the girl from the opening – told him she was going to die, before the fact. Well if that’s the case, then why the hell was she acting so carefree and normal in the first scene, on the night she died? Did she just forget? Or was she just trying to scare her cousin? Personally, I really wonder what that mental thought process was like. What could she have been thinking?

“Oh shit! I’m gonna die in seven days because I watched a videotape! Hey, cousin, come here…listen, I’m going to be dead soon! I’m not explaining anything else because that would be antithetical to my goal of being as vague and ominous as possible and scaring a little boy who loves me! Hey, best friend, want to go party, talk about boys and joke around? Yeah? Cool. Okay, time to die now!”

Man I hate teenagers…

After that, the funeral happens, where Rachel talks to some teenagers and figures out that the other kids who watched the tape are also dying. So she does some poking around and goes to the cabin where they stayed, and finds the video tape almost immediately. Gee, that’s so implausible I can almost feel it in my teeth. What, she knew it was the right tape because it was the only blank one on the shelf? What if it had just been some homemade porn tape the guy at the counter made? Well either way it’s irrelevant, because by the laws of bad movies, it does turn out to be the correct tape. She watches it and…

So the ladder must represent man's eternal folly of making weak-ass, half-thought supernatural thrillers.

…wow, this is the worst Ingmar Bergman movie I’ve ever seen!

And then, you all know what happens next: she gets the phone call that starts it all, with a whisper that says she only has seven days to live. I personally feel sorry for whoever it is making those calls. It must get boring just having to call people over and over saying the same things…like the worst call center job in the world. But Rachel doesn’t have any sympathy as her countdown immediately begins!

Yeah, the funniest thing about this is that – spoiler alert! – most of their days are completely wasted. They barely even do anything until the very last two days! What an incompetent bunch of morons. But far be it from me to skip over large portions of this movie; no, no…I’ll go through all of it. First we see that apparently, a side effect of the killer video is that it makes pictures of peoples’ faces look kind of blurry and weird:

Man, Instagram wasn't so good in its early days...

Yeah, that’s right – this is a real side effect of the killer videotape. What do you think Satan was thinking when he conjured up that one? “This videotape, the spawn of all evil, will kill anyone who watches it in seven days…oh, and also it will make pictures come out kind of bad…it’s not a lame side effect! It’s, uhhh, just to screw over anyone who wanted to take pictures during their last seven days for their loved ones to remember them by! Bwuhahaha!”

Somehow I don’t think those two punishments quite even out.

Oh, and there's also Noah, Rachel’s old boyfriend, who is probably the coolest character in the movie, for now anyway. He at least knows what he’s doing, which is better than most of these movies ever get. He says he wants to watch the video, and at first, Rachel says no…but after the tiniest bit of prodding, she thinks it’s cool to show a person the videotape that KILLS YOU after you watch it. What a bitch.

He doesn’t think much of it either, and the two spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s up with that freak-ay tape. To be fair, these scenes aren’t too bad, so I won’t really fault them that much. I will, however, fault a lot of the characters for the next few scenes…Rachel wakes up one morning to find that Aidan has watched the tape! Oh no! Maybe she shouldn’t have kept it in a place where her young son could easily get to it and put it into the VCR? Somebody call Child Protection Services on this broad.

"I really am the worst mother of the year! Oh well. At least he hasn't touched the bottle of Jack I keep on the kitchen table while I'm sleeping, or the gun I put under his bed for safekeeping..."

Then we get the big reveal that Noah is actually Aidan’s father. In the car while waiting for Rachel, Noah says he wouldn’t be good father material and so doesn’t come around that much. Great. Because of your insecurities, a little boy grows up without a father. You despicable piece of scum. How about next time actually taking responsibility for your actions, buddy? You asshole. It’s a shame because this guy was actually fairly likable for the genre’s standards, but after this? I just think he’s a pussy. Oh well.

I also love how one of the days this movie chronicles takes up more time with Rachel and Noah arguing in the hallway of his apartment building than it does them actually trying to accomplish shit. Do I even have to say why this is stupid? Oh no, guys, by all means. Continue your argument. It’s not like you have a kid together who’s dying or anything! Romantic banter is always equally important to life-threatening paranormal doom, right? Even Bonnie and Clyde would say these two are being ridiculous.

Somewhere along their research, Rachel finds out that the woman in the tape in one scene is actually Anna Morgan, a resident of some island with a lighthouse that is also featured in the tape. Apparently a long time ago, the horses on the island went insane after Anna Morgan brought home a foster daughter, Samara – who is the girl in the tape, if you’re the two or three people who don’t know that by now. So Rachel goes on a boat, finds a horse, and this happens:

GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO!

Yeah. You just saw that. A goddamned horse went ballistic and threw itself over the side of a boat in this horror movie. Tell me which Grudge sequel has anything that ridiculously cool, and…well, I still won’t watch it, but you see my point!

She gets to the island and meets Brian Cox, who plays Richard Morgan, the lone standing survivor of the Morgan family. He’s a depressed old man who is about as sad about his horses dying as he is his family dying. After some more poking around and researching, they figure out that Samara was locked in an attic for years because Richard blamed her for Anna’s death and insanity. Somehow while locked in the attic, she gained supernatural powers and made a video tape that kills people in seven days after viewing.

Uh, okay. I rarely ever do this. But we need a break for a moment, while I try to process exactly what this complete gibberish insanity is trying to convey here.

…I’m sorry, but I really don’t see the connection there! Even if you’re trying to say she already had the powers before Anna adopted her, it still doesn’t make sense! So she had the supernatural power of making evil videotapes? How does she make the phone calls happen every time? What happens if somebody watches the tape and they don’t have a phone? Movie, I know you’re based off a Japanese film, which basically means you can do away with making any kind of sense, but come on! A little bit of effort would be nice!

Then they go to the cabin again and tear up the floors. The TV falls down the hole and knocks Rachel clean into the open well conveniently still there – not like they would have demolished that when they built the cabin, right? – and seriously, Rachel is that clumsy? It’s like something out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Personally I think the staticy TV had its best day in Poltergeist, and that came out 20 years before this!

Rachel gets stuck in a well with some dead bodies – always a fun time – and then Samara shows her how her mother put a bag over her head and dropped her in the well to begin with. Because, remember, any good horror movie always has to have a sympathetic killer! We can’t just have an evil, malignant force killing off our main characters! It has to be a sympathetic killer we can feel sorry for and know why they are so evil and bloodthirsty. Truly that is the way of good, scary horror movies. Doesn’t dilute the fear and terror at all. What’s really scary is backstories! And remember, for even more of an effect, go the Rob Zombie route and devote half of the goddamn movie to the killer’s backstory. The Ring doesn’t do that, but that’s only because it simply laid the building blocks for modern horror. It would be a few years before the formula was perfected.

But I digress…they get out, and go back home to find Aidan sprawled unconscious on the floor. Because any good parent leaves her child alone and unsupervised when they may not ever come back alive, right?

The floor is his babysitter now. The rug, his comfort. You are dead to him, parents...dead.

…no, I’m done being sarcastic. Will somebody just kill these parents already?! It’s bad enough that the father is a worthless dick-cheese who won’t help raise his son out of his own sense of insecurity, and now we have a mother that forgets to call a babysitter when she goes out on the off chance that she might DIE IN A WELL IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. Please, just send these two to the electric chair.

But fortunately we don’t have to, as in the next scene, Noah gets killed when this happens:

Talk about interactive TV! I wish my TV could do that. Maybe in the future we’ll finally be able to get Scarlett Johansson or Megan Fox out of the screen and into our living rooms.

I’d also like to take a moment to, erm, “thank” this movie for pioneering one of horror’s biggest reference points after it was released – the creepy, zombie-ghost girl with long hair covering an evil looking dead face. This image has been done time and time again in numerous god-awful films such as The Grudge, One Missed Call and Shutter, among hundreds of others. I dunno, is this really what the Japanese find scary? Demonic little girls with too much white-face on? I guess I just don’t get it. But safe to say, even if it was a scary idea, it has been run into the ground SO DAMN MUCH that it would be ineffective either way. So thank you, The Ring…thank you so much.

I love the way Rachel actually doesn’t know what’s gonna happen when she turns Noah’s chair around…lady, haven’t you ever seen a horror movie? If you go into a room and someone is sitting there, not responding, with their back turned, do you think they’re just playing a joke? Oh, how innocent and free it must have been to live in a world where horror movie clichés are only a little bit dated, as opposed to 11 years later, when they’re just run into the ground.

"Maybe he really IS just sleeping! That must be why his chair is suspiciously and conveniently turned around like that, so I won't see his face yet..." Also, the guy's current girlfriend is shown going up the stairs after Rachel leaves. Rachel does not do anything to stop her or even lessen the blow of what the girl is about to see. Our hero, folks.

Anyway, she goes home, tries to destroy the tape, only to discover that they have to pass on the tape to someone else in order to get rid of the whole curse thing. There are some ominous cuts from the video aaaaaand…that’s pretty much how it ends. I wouldn’t even call it an end…more of a cliffhanger, really.

Well, I can’t say this is a terrible film, it’s got a few good moments here and there, and some nice atmosphere. But too much of it just falls into that annoying modern horror stereotype – it invented a good many of the stereotypes we see today, but then, I wish they were done better. It’s weird because these elements – the ghosts, the supernatural storylines, the backstories – could potentially be melded into something good. It’s not like these things are bad simply by their natures, so why can’t anyone string together a good film from them?

Oh, and I forgot, I’m gonna die in seven days because I watched the movie! Oh well. I’ll just keep pondering these questions and mix it up by flirting with people. No big deal.

The images in this review are not mine; they are copyright of their original owners.

Project Hellraiser: Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

Ha ha, holy crap, I’m finally almost done! I’m finally on the last Hellraiser movie I have to review this month, because it’s the last one on the DVD box set I have, and that’s an excuse if I ever heard one! I’m not even doing one of those silly Project Hellraiser Logs I’ve been half-assing for a while now! And who knows? Maybe this, the sixth sequel, will FINALLY BE THE BIG BREAK OUT THIS SERIES IS WAITING FO---oh, no it won’t be.

Director: Rick Bota

Starring: Dean Winters, Ashley Laurence, Doug Bradley

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274546/

Yeah, so this movie starts off…well, about as sprightly as the sixth sequel of any horror franchise could. We get this dorky guy named Trevor and his wife driving in a car. They’re laughing and happy, and then suddenly get serious and say they can work out all their problems. Then they start making out passionately WHILE HE’S STILL DRIVING.

And now on Stupidity News at 12...making out while driving DOESN'T usually help your concentration on the road!

And wouldn’t you know it? They’re fine afterwards! Not even a scratch on them! They’re just fi---oh, no they aren’t:

This should be a promo video in every Driver's Ed class.

I can’t even pretend to be sarcastic anymore. That’s how much I really just don’t care about this movie. Trevor wakes up in the hospital and is greeted by a rather seductive nurse…odd, being that his wife just died, but I’ll chalk it up to the director having zero idea what the flying blue hell he was doing. We learn that his wife was actually Kirsty Cotton from the first movie. If you’re wondering what relevance this has to the overall story, the answer is none, as she barely even appears again after this except in short, nonsensical flashback snippets. I’d make an over the top joke about this but…hell, I just don’t give a crap. This movie’s failure is so complete that I don’t even need to make jokes! The writing itself is a joke! That’s a goddamn miracle.

We see some stuff where these doctors are doing brain surgery on him for no reason and insert a pin into his brain…it’s never referenced again, so hey, it fits right into this asinine abomination of the silver screen.

He gets interrogated by the cops, who tell him the doors were open in his car and his wife was never found, so he goes to his incredibly bland office where he fits like a glove. When he gets there, he talks to his co-worker and then gets raped by his female boss while trying to get a candy bar out of the snack machine…hey, it happens!

The actor is clearly enjoying this more than his character is probably supposed to.

The confusing thing about this is the way the office building has cameras set up to catch everything that happens…oddly Orwellian, but okay. Obviously, they catch the rape in the break room, which Trevor is easily able to subvert by going into his computer file and deleting in like a second. For one, how the hell did he do that? These cameras are set up all over the place but any low-level goon can just log in and delete whatever he or she wants? What the hell kind of system is that?

And two, WHY would the boss character even come onto him like that anyway? I get it, this movie is weird and surreal, but it’s like in The Uninvited – you can’t just use ‘weird and surreal’ as an excuse for a lack of BASIC HUMAN LOGIC. That is shit writing, with no redeemable qualities whatsoever.

Ugh, so Trevor goes home and gets jump-scared by a barking dog right in front of his face, which by all logic he should have seen when he was walking up to his building. But I guess that would be too smart for this movie. Inside, he has convulsions and spits out water plus a big eel thing. Charming. This apparently is the mating signal for this girl:

Ooooh, yay, flirty flirt flirt!

…who also flirts with him and tries to get him to have sex with her. Is he just Casanova all the sudden? Why is everyone attracted to him now? Is losing a spouse the equivalent of really good cologne in this movie’s ass-backwards universe?

Later his boss comes over to his house and strips down to her underwear, and then crushes his crotch with her high heel, which is a feeling this movie replicates quite well actually. They have sex but Trevor then has a crisis of conscience, and pushes her off. Somehow, I guess, there’s a video camera in his living room now, and even after she leaves, it’s still recording the two of them doing it. Only then we see this:

Okay, I admit, this was a good, scary scene - even though she left his apartment a minute ago and nobody is sitting in front of the camera anymore, he still sees them making out and then her dying on the screen - spooky! But it's ruined completely by the fact that the next scene just makes it look like another hallucination and completely downplays it. This movie's knack for doing that makes it incredibly frustrating.

So basically the next hour or so of the movie is just this: we get a few random splices of pointless shit with the cops trying to interrogate him, and one or two scenes in the office with him talking to apparently the only other guy who works there, but mostly it’s just sex. Lots and lots of sex, with people who just come into his apartment and start doing him. So basically it’s just Hellraiser: The Porno. And didn’t everyone need THAT in their lives?

Getting a little old at this point...

And then we get a cameo appearance from Pinhead! Yeah, remember him? He shoves a nail into Trevor’s neck and asks if he likes pleasure or pain better. Weird, being that I thought the whole point of this series was that the Cenobites treated them like the same thing, but hey, if I had a nickel for every inconsistency in these movies, I’d be rich enough to pay other people to review them for me.

Then Trevor makes out with his acupuncture doctor…surprised?

OH MY GOD. Can't this movie do ANYTHING ELSE but show poorly written sex scenes? The first time or two I wasn't complaining, but this is what, the seventh time this has happened in an hour? I think I get it now. This was meant to be a porn flick, but then some idiot stepped in and said "durr, hey, we need a new Hellraiser sequel!" and thus this was born. Christ.

Afterwards, he’s walking home at night when he gets a gun pointed at his head by his old buddy from the office, who tells him they had a plan to kill Kirsty and take some inheritance money from her to get rich. That’s actually an interesting plot point! It could have made for a good movie on its own. So how much do you want to bet it will be mentioned for only about 3 minutes of the film’s combined run-time, and feature very little in the actual “story”? If you would bet money on that…well, you’d be right. Ugh.

Through some more asinine dream-to-reality transitions and jumpy schizophrenic directing, Trevor gets taken in for the murder of some woman and the cops are even less credible than the ones in Hobo with a Shotgun. That’s incredible. They lock him up in the basement of their torture chamber, because yeah, in the Hellraiser films police stations just always have torture chambers built into them, and then we get…well, probably the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in one of these movies:

Two heads...they're the same person...I just...I'm losing my mind at this, I really am.

So then we get to see Pinhead again; how nice of them to give him two cameos in the same movie! He puts chains in Trevor’s face and body and reveals to him what really happened: apparently Trevor was actually an asshole all along who was cruel to Kirsty and cheated on her with a bunch of women, ALSO aspiring to kill her for her money on the side! I love how shocked she is about all of this stuff; it’s like, if a guy was doing THIS MUCH BAD STUFF behind your back, wouldn’t you be able to catch on just a little bit? I guess the answer was no. So she pointed a gun at him and they drove off the cliff, where he died instantly and she was able to get out and survive.

In answer to your questions, yes. Yes, this movie just pulled the whole ‘he was dead the whole time’ plot twist. One of the oldest clichés in the book, but I guess it was good enough for the sixth installment of the ever-so-good Hellraiser series…ugh, was there anyone in the entire world who could have enjoyed this garbage? I don’t think there was. This is the bottom of the barrel, people. No entertainment value, no plot, no characters, just pure crap from beginning to end. The directing is a mess of awful flashbacks and vague transitions and the acting is forgettable as hell, even from series “veteran” Ashley Laurence, reprising her role as Kirsty.

And what is up with bringing back Kirsty in this one anyway? There’s no connection to the other films; there’s no character development from her early days in the first two. She’s just shoved in there as if to say LOOK, LOOK, THIS IS A HELLRAISER FILM. WE HAVE ONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS FROM THE ORIGINAL! Well, it doesn’t work. Not to mention how there really is no story to this thing until the last 20 minutes when we find out Trevor and his friend were trying to kill her to get the money she inherited from Uncle Frank apparently. THAT would have been a cool story. Why didn’t they just make a movie about that? But no, we got pointless dream sequences that even Inception would laugh at, nonsensical sex scenes that didn’t add anything and a bunch of non-sequitur ‘hallucinations’ that are about as scary as your cat’s hairballs.

Yeah, so I didn't like it, but hey, I guess if you REALLY want some softcore porn and can't be bothered to go down the street to the adult video store, this might suffice.

…

So yeah, that’s the first 6 Hellraiser movies. It’s been a wild, crazy, stupid, ridiculous ride and I am glad it’s over. The thing with all of these movies is, they all had potential. Doug Bradley always seemed to be into what he was doing and the stories were all intriguing on paper, but the execution was just SO POOR that it completely ruined any chance of them being enjoyable. I really like a good occult horror movie, but none of these movies were good! They were all either dull, ridiculous or both. I’ve never seen a franchise with so much potential screw up everything in such a monumental way, and for that I thought these movies were worth reviewing. This has been Project: Hellraiser. Glad you’ve been along for the ride.

REVIEW: Miner's Massacre (2002)

It’s a movie about a miner going on a massacre, isn’t that an apt title when you know the plot? I think so. I can’t think of anything else to write in this part so let’s just skip to showing the DVD box cover and the usual info:

Director: That guy who made the 7th Friday the 13th Movie

Starring: Generic white people!

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325214/

"You scared the shit out of me!"

-John Leguizamo Stand In #2 (He's being very literal here...)

This gem of a movie begins with an explosion followed by the title, delivered in cheap looking mid-90s dated computer animation, so you know this is gonna be a timeless horror classic! The actual film itself begins with a guy sitting in a cabin. How exciting this is already; how drawn in I am with this riveting set-up! I guess he really wanted out of this movie fast, though, as he gets killed off quickly by the movie’s ‘miner’ killer…

Oh no, not that guy!! He was my favorite character!

Then we get an extremely poor transition as the swipe of the killer’s ax cuts into someone chopping up onions. She’s one of our main characters, but after the movie ends I still have no clue what her name was, or what her personality was supposed to be. All we know is that she talks to her mom on the phone, has a bland boyfriend and gets packages with tiny gold nuggets in them from her brother. This leads her to deduce that it’s TIME FOR ADVENTURE!

Then we cut to some other characters, one of whom looks kind of like John Leguizamo, and the other who is his girlfriend or something, who argues and whines about everything. I bet she’d be best friends with Bridget Fonda’s character from Lake Placid! She complains that she wants to use a bathroom, but also complains when they find one – yes, it’s in a place that looks like the gas station from Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, but damn, this chick is just NEVER HAPPY!

I especially love this one scene where we meet this crazy old guy who works at the gas station. I can’t even decide what to make fun of here. The fact that the girlfriend openly mocks and is rude to the guy with no reason to be other than that she’s a one note character? Or when the John Leguizamo stand-in has a conversation with the guy alone? Yeah I think I’ll go with that one. The guy tells him this story about the miner-killer of the movie, The Forty-Niner, who apparently cursed his gold, and anyone who tries to steal it will be killed, or something like that…

"Here, wipe your ass with toilet paper I pulled out of my back pocket; that's sanitary!"

The Leguizamo stand-in wants to buy this wanted poster from the guy, who says it’s invaluable and a family heirloom, only to change his mind two seconds later when offered 40 bucks. Allow me to bash my head against my desk in frustration. Oh and the killer gets gas station man right after; I guess his worth in the movie went down to nothing after giving us an info-dump…although we’ll have several more info-dumps later on, so who really knows.

So the couple drives some more and we get some more idiotic arguing about nothing that goes on for way too long, and by the end of it I mostly just want to stab both of them. We cut to some other jackasses screwing in a car! Oh the suspense! What position will they use?

Keep your mouth like that long enough and it'll get stuck that way

I love this conversation right here:

IDIOT GIRL: All you care about is money! (With no reason whatsoever for saying this…)

IDIOT GUY: Hey, we all have our passions in life. Mine is money. Yours is…taking your clothes off.

Is she offended? Yes. Will that stop her from screwing him at least two more times in the rest of the movie, utterly without any purpose? Of course not! Women don’t have any complex feelings or depth! They just want to have sex all the time! Didn’t you know?!

So they all meet up and have great conversations that establish what awesome characters they all are! Nah, just kidding, they bicker and whine about nothing and wander around aimlessly. Leguizamo stand-in meets this chick and flirts with her openly, even in front of his girlfriend. OK, it’s time to put on my psychologist glasses and analyze this.

Come take a seat on my couch.

The Leguizamo stand-in is clearly a rotten piece of dog turd for flirting with another girl so shamelessly in front of everyone else including his own girlfriend. However, can you really blame him when his girlfriend nags him all the time over every little thing, and doesn’t seem to have a compassionate bone in her body? My conclusion is that ALL OF THESE PEOPLE ARE WORTHLESS RETARDS! GOD. THEY DESERVE EACH OTHER ACTUALLY. *sips wine and sits back against satin armchair* Ahhhh.

So the girlfriend leaves and gets killed by the killer, even though I don’t think she had any of the gold or a reason for it. I think the killer just found her as intolerable as we all do. Score one for the Forty-Niner, oh yeah! Oh and the two jackasses who were screwing in the car now go and screw in the barn, amid several torrid and unfunny sexual puns…yeah, I guess their libido is higher than the national debt right now.

They find some gold but can’t carry it all because it’s about to get dark by then. So they go into the woods and party! So yeah, more sex and stupid dialogue! What a shocking plot twist! All I have to say about these scenes is, juxtaposing scenes of people having sex with a guy taking a shit…is a really really bad idea, and whoever wrote that scene should be shot point-blank.

"Oh, I love you, I'm glad I went to that terrible party my sister dragged me to, cause otherwise we'd never be in the blandest of bland white people love we are in..."

Yeah, real nice transition - they just cut right from the above scene to this. Isn't that romantic?

The sheriff of the town catches the Leguizamo stand-in in the woods and chases him around with his (the Leguizamo stand-in’s) pants down from trying to take a dump. Why didn’t the sheriff just approach him rationally and, uh, NOT act like a crazy serial killer? Uh…LOOK, CHEESE!

This is apparently the costliest cheese in the world, Pule Cheese. There, you learned something today! You're now smarter than the people who made this movie.

So then the one guy who loves money suspects everyone of conspiring with the sheriff and pulls out a gun, saying it’s business now, oooh. There’s no motivation for him to do this beyond that one line earlier in the movie about how he loves money. That’s some of the worst writing I’ve seen since Blackout! Second graders could write more realistic characters! He gets in the car, tries to drive away with all the gold, but collides with the killer, and everything bursts into flames for no damn reason. Must be those Firestone tires again.

Then the gang meets Karen Black, a veteran actress who has no place in this film. She tells them the same crap about the killer that we already knew, and then uses her magic powers to give us a dragging, inept 5-minute flashback that is about as scary as a Cabbage Patch Kids doll. We see that the miner kidnapped some blonde girl, threatened people in an over the top and silly manner, and bit off his own fingers and spat them at people. Wait, what?

The dreaded finger catapult spit attack, mastered by none other than the Forty-Niner.

That’s…really strange! Why did he do that? He has a weapon, for Pete’s sake; why couldn’t he just have used that? He doesn't even consider it! His first thought, his very first instinct, is to bite his finger off and spit it at the guy attacking him, no joke. That’s the most random, out of nowhere way to attack somebody I’ve ever seen! He runs around and shouts that he’s cursing his gold for anyone else who ever tries to take it, and since we already knew that, this whole scene was more useless padding, hooray!

So in the real world again, we see the gang mobilizing and doing a bunch of really boring stuff which amounts to basically just blowing him up. The gang is happy and gets ready to go home the next day when the sheriff picks up a stray piece of gold and gets killed immediately after touching it, even though that was never how it worked before. Then the movie ends, and I think we’ve all learned a lesson from this movie. The lesson is that you shouldn’t let the director of Friday the 13th part 7 direct a movie. Ever!

Yeah, this was stupid. It’s really, really poorly written, the characters are cardboard cutouts (well, that’s an insult to cardboard manufacturers around the world) and the story is stupid and makes no sense. It’s pretty much just your average every-day bad 2000s horror movie. It’s a dime-a-dozen slasher that will appeal to no one simply because it doesn’t do anything particularly well. Maybe this was supposed to be a comedy-horror or something, but to be honest that wouldn’t really save it anyway. What more can I say? It’s a bad movie and you probably wouldn’t have seen it anyway, but at least you got a review out of it! Until next time, folks.