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Reviews
El monte de las brujas (1973)
For Patty Shepard fans only
There may be a more coherent version of this Spanish-made "spooker," but the version that circulated on VHS and TV in the 1970s is a mess. A photojournalist befriends a writer, and rather than drive down to Madrid and have a nice, safe, pleasant romance they hike into Witch's Mountain where the writer eventually joins with the witches and / or becomes a witch. The ending in keeping with the whole movie is unclear. Director Artigot proves his inability of telling a story by staging important dialogs and possible emotional states of the characters in long shot, and saving his closeups for lovingly composed visions of Miss Shepard's face. As the writer cum victim, Shepard isn't given much to do but her presence is the only thing worthwhile in this stinker.
Breaking Her Will (2009)
Somewhere in New Jersey....
BREAKING HER WILL gives us one of your more deviant rape fantasies crossed with a mad psycho kidnapping plot and female crucifixion.. It's the kind of scenario that Ray Dennis Steckler was doing in the 80s and 90s. A female hitchhiker is kidnapped by Beer Gut, a sweaty psycho who chains her up in his cellar and spends an interminable hour or so of your time putting her through initiation rites to become his slave. He even calls in a willing female(!) assistant to help get the poor lass raped, bound, gagged, tortured, humiliated, ad naseum, ad infinitum.
The dull fact is that while the list of perversions presented herein goes on and on... there is no passion or artistry of any kind in the presentation. An obvious one-take wonder, the movie plays like a Japanese pinku movie but set in the director's dingy basement somewhere in New Jersey. The noxious dialog is either blubbering or blabbering, with Beer Gut spouting unintelligible invectives played in eye rolling fashion by a non-entity. BREAKING HER WILL would have been more entertaining as a hardcore porno, which it threatens to become at times, but the result is sub-porno. The entertainment value is fairly easy to measure when we're dealing with so many negatives.
House on the Hill (2012)
Well-directed Horror Flick Suffers From Low Production Values
The case of serial killer Leonard Lake is one of the most notorious in California history. Along with his equally psychotic partner, Charles Ng, Lake was an ex-Marine and survivalist responsible for kidnapping, human exploitation and murder during the 1980s. They took their victims to a secluded mountain hideaway for ransom, torture, sexual assault and finally murder. Lake also videotaped activity with his victims, and taped himself describing for the camera why he wanted to commit these atrocities. This latter video came into the possession of director Jeffrey Frentzen, who constructed this middling "terror" film around frankly astounding testimonial footage.
The loosely constructed plot tells the tale of the two killers in flashback form, as a fictional survivor Sonia (Naidra Dawn Thomson) recalls to a private detective (Kevin McCloskey) the horrors of being one of Lake's captives years prior. The detective is seeking the whereabouts of another Lake victim who disappeared around the time Sonia managed to escape from the house on the hill. The flashbacks show Lake and Ng as somewhat unskilled kidnappers who tried to build a money making enterprise around their murderous exploits. They would enslave the female victims, keeping them in grungy prison cells, and were not above kidnapping relatives and people they just didn't like.
Frentzen, here a first-time director who also co-wrote and edited, had helped produce several low budget direct to video genre flicks with German expatriate filmmaker Ulli Lommel between 2005 and 2008 (with title such as KILLER NURSE, DIARY OF A CANNIBAL and GREEN RIVER KILLER). Superficially, HOUSE ON THE HILL is reminiscent of these earlier productions by virtue of also having been shot on HD cam under what could charitably be called tough, small crew conditions in claustrophobic rooms. Unlike most found footage disasters, this movie's low-end video look actually complements the grainy testimonial footage of Leonard Lake. The reportedly extreme sexual violence was toned down for U.K. and U.S. release..
HOUSE ON THE HILL is fairly well directed by Frentzen, who constructs gruesome set pieces, such as the drawn out killing of Crystal Nelson, Laura Leigh's death by baseball bat, and the murder of an entire family. Although the movie occasionally drifts into the same territory as John McNaughton's HENRY PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, the disjointed flashback format sadly keeps characterization to a minimum. As soon as we start to know the victims they are dispatched. The concept of showing the two murderers as incompetents that try but cannot seem to make a profit from their killing spree is a different approach for a serial killer flick.
Though ultimately done in by low production values, a grating music score but offset by decent acting from a small cast of unknowns, HOUSE ON THE HILL shows off a solid directorial debut and proves once and for all that serial killers should choose their victims carefully if they expect to make any money from their exploits.
Crash Site (2011)
Potentially exciting thriller slowed down by plodding melodrama
Tyro Canadian director Joseph Bourque and the Passer family have ejected CRASH SITE, a seemingly high powered melodrama in which spouses attending a family event at their country lodge are stalked by assailants. Although it begins and ends on a note of corporate espionage,, the bulk of the movie follows the couple's survival and marital disintegration in the wilderness, following a car crash in which their Jeep had been sabotaged. Borque and his scenarist Joseph Passer have likewise sabotage their vehicle by portraying the Sanders as unsympathetic and aggressively self-centered -- and in her case, stupidly impulsive. Without a likable character in sight, the story degenerates into tedium. The finale generates some excitement but the denouement is dreary and clichéd. One could say the parallels generated in the story are interesting to consider -- such as the cataclysmic auto wreck that the Sanders miraculously survive, occurring right after Dan Sanders' financial firm begins faltering under a hacker's siege. And some effort is made to convey the Sanders' upper class status and the business life of Dan as a purveyor of great banking wealth, who is helpless and hapless, hobbled and without a compass in the forest. But the twists and turns in CRASH SITE are not engaging enough because the leads are insufferable whiners.
My previous exposure to Bourque was the not-bad SyFy Channel programmers DOOMSDAY PROPHECY (2011) and TERMINATION POINT (2007). CRASH SITE is advertised as a thriller with horror elements, with horrific scenes credited to human led carnage (mostly off-screen) that occurs during the final act and the potentially exciting but underdeveloped subplot of hungry wolves that follow the hapless Sanders couple through the outback. These mild horrors are rendered microscopic compared with the film's score, an obtrusive cacophony of poor library music that always threatens to sink this delicate project into even muddier mediocrity. As the "battling bickersons," Sebastian Spence as Dan tries hard but is submerged in a weak characters, while Charisma Carpenter as the wife has all the charm of a snake in a sleeping bag. The remaining cast was perfunctory and unmemorable.
Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title (1966)
Don't worry, they didn't think of a movie
This was a lost film for decades, until someone at Turner and United Artists resurrected it for a few TV showings. Apropos of all the other reviews here, unless you enjoy 60s culture as viewed by middle-aged men of the period, the movie will leave you at a loss. Morey Amsterdam, who co-wrote and produced, and Rose Marie are alternately embarrassing and silly. Morey's one-liners were dinosaurs on the vaudeville circuit and would have been rejected immediately for the Alan Brady Show. A low-budget and unfunny pastiche of bad jokes that simply painful to sit through. However, there is some amusement in seeing Richard Deacon try in vain to rise above the material. A few of the cameo roles are of historical interest. A bomb at the box office when first released in 1966, this film is best left in the vault.
Absolute Evil (2009)
Lommel Can't Not Make a Bomb
German film director Ulli Lommel dedicates this abortive flick to his mentor, the well-regarded Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Though Fassbinder is probably turning somersaults in his grave at the idea of being associated with this cinematic tripe, the dedication is instructive in knowing where Lommel's head is at. Lommel, who has operated out of the US for decades, continually tries to gain some recognition in his own country as a genuine auteur. But the Germans think he is a joke. ABSOLUTE EVIL absolutely will not help his reputation, either, which has bottomed out after he aggressively directed a rash of poor horror movies, such as KILLER NURSE, DUNGEON GIRL, THE TOMB, and GREEN RIVER KILLER.
ABSOLUTE EVIL is the work of an artist who has no original ideas and so imitates what he believes will sell -- a bit of horror here, a bit of western "homage" there, and other bits and pieces of ideas from other movies. The film, which looks like every other Lommel movie and is shot on a camcorder -- is a junker of a movie that ka-clumps along in tiresome fashion, made with the conviction of people who possibly had a large mortgage to pay off. The movie may attract you because of David Carradine's presence in an undistinguished cameo role.
In this revenge story, a young woman chases down the killers of her car mechanic father with the help of a boyfriend, who may have helped the killers.
Lommel also wrote the banal dialog that is painfully under-rehearsed by the actors, and prior to its screening at the Berlin festival, he touted this production as more substantial than the progressively awful wave started in 2004 with ZODIAC KILLER. However, even with a little extra money in the budget, Lommel defaults to his trademark poor camera-work, one-take direction, terrible acting, slow pacing, and disjointed editing. In the style of all Lommel films, footage is repeated ad naseum and to the point of distraction. Worse of all, he gets a lousy performance out of Carradine! What a sad waste this is.