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ssmith2010
Reviews
Bunnyman: Grindhouse Edition (2019)
A Unnecessary Disaster
Roger Ebert once defined a "guilty pleasure" as "when you go to a movie and everyone agrees how terrible it was, but you don't know, you kind of liked it." That's the way I feel about "Bunnyman", a 2011 horror flick about a group of 20-somethings stalked and killed by a killer wearing a bunny suit. I don't care what anybody else says, I like the film and will defend it to anyone, anytime. Now the film has been "recut" to produce "Bunnyman - The Grindhouse Edition." I know there aren't a lot of like-minded "Bunnyman Fans" (although it must have been popular enough to spawn two sequels!) but this is a big misfire to us fans.
Make no mistake - a *lot* of work was done to the film, and every bit of it unnecessary and damaging to the viewing experience. Some scenes were re-edited, some deleted scenes were added, some alternate takes were used, and I can't think of a single change that made the film better. In addition, every frame has been altered to look "damaged" and worn. Colors that were bright and clean in the original are now faded and washed out. Scenes that were well lit and clear are now dark and hard to see. Scene transitions are now gimmicky and "in your face" - wipes, split screens (side by side as well as top and bottom). Scenes stop for "freeze frames" in the middle. And that's not to mention the ridiculous gimmicks that were jammed into the film at random locations. An "intermission" with "Buy Refreshments!" commercials. Multiple "Scene Missing" sequences, and in one case they put in a random scene of Bunnyman attacking a girl in a shower. Parts where the film appears to "burn." Weird "stock footage" that sometimes matches the film and other times seems just tacked on, all with goofy overdubbed dialog. And others...
I think some of this must have been a misguided attempt at humor, but one of the things I liked about "Bunnyman" was that despite its concept it was dead serious and didn't try to temper its overwhelming creepiness with humor. On the original DVD (and yes, I own the "Bunnyman" DVD, don't judge me!) in the deleted scenes he notes that he suppressed his urge to be "overly artistic." He should have kept suppressing that urge. If you are like me and liked the original "Bunnyman" you will likely hate this version. And if you didn't like it originally, you'll probably like it even less. If the director wants more Bunnyman, I would totally be up to "Bunnyman 4" as opposed to this!
Hunters (2016)
Extremely unpleasant, but truth in advertising, at least...
"Hunters" is an extreme horror flick that begins with the disclaimer "The following film contains many scenes of extreme brutality and shocking acts of human depravity." This same sentence is on the DVD cover. I'll say this -- this is an accurate description of "Hunters." It is indeed filled with extreme brutality and shocking acts of human depravity. Unfortunately, that's about all the film is.
The film starts back in 1961. A guy driving along picks up a female hitchhiker. Since this is a horror film, we know that this is bad news for one of them, and in this case it's the guy, as the guy is stabbed and killed by the hitchhiker. For some unknown reason, he drove her back to his house, where his wife and baby are there. The hitchhiker headbutts his wife (a "blink and you'll miss her" cameo by scream- queen Mel Heflin) and steals the baby.
We then jump to 1987, where two brothers wearing masks are torturing a couple (we know they're brothers because they keep calling each other "brother"). After that, they attack a random family, kill the father, and kidnap the daughter and mother (played by Scream Queen classic Linnea Quigley, looking pretty good for being in her mid- fifties). Oh, also, at this time the guy from the first couple (who they apparently didn't kill) is now filming everything. And he is stark naked, with lots of full-frontal shots of this guy.
We then meet up with five twenty-something kids who are leaving to make some sort of movie. We think that now, we're going to follow these annoying kids, but no -- we see these kids randomly throughout the film for a minute or two, but the rest of the time is just the two brothers brutalizing, raping, and torturing people while filming it. The film then tries a "twist" that doesn't really make any sense, and it is really just an excuse to be even more nasty and brutal.
I've seen lots of extreme horror films, and there is a line between "disturbing" and "unpleasant." Unfortunately, in my opinion "Hunters" crosses that line. We don't really care about the victims, and the sadism is so extreme that it just becomes unpleasant to watch. And the filmmakers seem to be obsessed with dicks -- in addition to the aforementioned naked cameraman (who we see a lot of), we have two castrations (one is on a dead guy and for some reason, after he died his member swelled to a gigantic size) and a dildo that is approximately the size of a leg.
I can admire the fact that the filmmakers wanted to "go extreme" and they surely succeeded. But unfortunately, "Hunters" really ended up just a catalog of horrific scenes. I'm not saying to avoid it at all costs -- not at all, if you are into extreme horror then feel free to check it out for yourself. But if you're not sure, then I can't recommend it.
Last Girl (2013)
Found Footage Film with Complete Made-Up Synopsis...
Here's the description of "Last Girl" from the DVD box and IMDb:
"Kidnapped and tortured, elite call girl "#12" must overcome her attackers and fight through a post-industrial hell to avoid the brutal filming of her own death. Last Girl builds to a shattering conclusion you won't soon forget."
Sounds good? Maybe, but you won't see anything remotely like this in this film. It sounds like they made the film, realized they couldn't market it by being truthful, and so just made up a synopsis that has some remote connection to the actual film.
"Last Girl" is a "found footage" film. It starts with some guy coming home to his wife, and he is conveniently filming everything on his video camera. He discovers that his wife has been kidnapped by some group of guys. They tell him that he needs to follow their instructions and continue to film everything. He yells a lot of "Where is my wife?!?" type comments, and is told to go to the house of a woman I think he had an affair with, but the credits say is a hooker. He is told to bring her to another house, which he does, where he meets a whole group of guys who were involved with kidnapping his wife. The hooker is threatened, but the guy saves her and the guy and the hooker spend most of the rest of the movies running around the house looking for his wife while trying to avoid the shadowy group (that, might I add, conveniently disappear for most of the film).
Unfortunately, everything that is bad about these type of films is present in spades here. The camera is pointed all over EXCEPT at where we want it to be. We see walls and floors and ceilings and legs and half of people while hearing sounds that let us know that there is something going on that damn, it would be nice to see. Literally 1/2 of the film is walls and floors and stairs while they run around. We never really find out what's going on, and while there's some hint of a snuff film conspiracy that doesn't make sense given what we actually DO see.
It's clearly an independent film and I would have liked to like this film more, but there you are. Maybe the filmmakers can actually make the film they described in the synopsis? That sounds interesting.
Bleeding Hearts (2015)
Another in an endless series of "Hot women torture and kill men" films...
Sigh.
There seems to be an endless stream of films dealing with women serial killers killing men in a "sexy" yet gruesome way. This is just more of the same. The plot involves a group of sexy women who, once a year, kidnap a group of men and then torture and kill them. (yawn) We've seen this dozens of times before, and this is just one more of them. It's sort of odd that the movie-makers somehow think they're being original when they are, in fact, the exact opposite of original.
So if you get off on this sort of thing, enjoy. Otherwise, keep away. There's nothing to see here.
La Petite Mort II (2014)
Torture porn, all torture porn, nothing but torture porn...
Marcel Walz's "La Petite Mort 2: Nasty Tapes" is a sequel to his 2009 film "La Petite Mort." Some filmmaker shy away from the "torture porn" categorization, but Walz's film wears it like a badge of honor. The film follows the working of "La Maison de la Petite Mort", a Hostel-like place where people can pay to either watch someone get tortured to death or can do it themselves. They can also do it over the internet, if they don't want to travel to Germany. The "plot" is this:
1. Two women come on and tell us we're going to see 80 minutes of torture.
2. We see 80 minutes of torture.
3. The two women come back on and say they hope we enjoyed watching 80 minutes of torture.
4. The movie ends.
That's pretty much the movie, guys. The tortures are extremely sick and gruesome (the ones done to the males, anyway) and are interspersed with the staff going about their regular business. Some of the scenes are intended to have some black humor, although I'm not sure how humorous some would find them.
As with most torture-porn flicks, the there are more male victims and the men get it worse than the women, although this film is extreme in that regard. There are 14 victims, and a whopping 11 of them are men. The men get parts of them cut off, stabbed, sewn up, shocked, and worse while they scream and it's all shown in graphic detail. The three women? One is stabbed, one is given general anesthesia rendering her completely unconscious so she might as well have been already dead during her scene, and the third one is killed non-violently in a makeshift gas chamber while the killers pretend to be Nazis and the scene is filmed silently with WW2 music playing (there is a title card that reads, "Cough cough" while she is in the makeshift chamber -- this whole scene is an apparent example of the film's "humor")
So basically, if you get off watching men get tortured, you should seek out this flick. It really seems that that is the audience they're trying to reach. I guess if you are also a die-hard torture porn fan who wants to see how far the German extreme cinema can take this genre, you might also want to check it out. Hard to recommend it to anyone else.
Blood Soaked (2013)
Could have been SO good but... black and white? Really?
"Blood Soaked" could have been a great cult film, if not for an incomprehensible directing decision.
After an expository introduction, we are introduced to Piper (Heather Wilder) arriving at college with her mother. Piper meets one of the RA's, Ashley (Rachel Corona) and despite the fact that Piper has a boyfriend back home, there is attraction. Finally, during a road trip in the desert, Piper and Ashley give in the nature, share a kiss, and begin to talk about possibly being a couple.
But that's about the end of the good times for our heroines -- enter psychotic sisters Sadie (Laina Grendle) and Katie (Hayley Derryberry) who brutally (and I do mean brutally) attack them. Things go from bad to worse as we end up back at the sisters house -- turns out the sisters are not just psychotic, they are also Nazis and have created a bunch of zombies.
Story-wise, "Blood Soaked" does almost everything right. The lead actresses are great in their roles, the story is nasty and never lets up and the story moves in ways that were unpredictable. However, there is a big problem. Just when the sisters attack, the movie -- for absolutely no reason at all -- changes from bright color to bleary, blurry black and white and stays there the rest of the film. There's no good reason for that --- maybe they saved money by not printing in color? Unfortunately, at the same time they stopped paying for color, they also apparently stopped paying for lighting, because not only is the last 2/3 of the film in black and white, it's so poorly lit that at times there just seems to be a series of gray things on the screen. This is especially bad in scenes where seeing what is happening is important -- for example, Piper is attempting a "MacGyver-style" trick on a phone, but it is impossible to see what she is going. It makes the movie virtually unwatchable. I have no idea what could have possessed the director to do this.
Also, as an aside, in addition to not paying for lighting, he apparently also stopped paying for a tripod. Because at times he flings the camera up and down and side to side... you think found footage films will make you queasy? You ain't seen nothing yet.
But all that would have been forgiven is if weren't for the decision to jettison color in favor of poorly lit fuzzy black and white. If the movie stayed in the crisp, clear color of the first third of the film, this would be an 8 or 9 for me. Now, at best a 5 and it kills me to say this because the story and acting is SO GOOD. I have to assume that the black and white was done in post-editing and can be undone. Maybe the director will read these comments and re-release the film in its original color. We can only hope.
Sorority Party Massacre (2012)
Attempt at "horror comedy" falls flat after promising beginning
If you are watching a movie entitled "Sorority Party Massacre," you know what you want -- a mindless slasher filled with scantily clad hot girls, with a healthy dollop of nudity and violence. Pretty simple.
"Sorority Party Massacre" beings very promisingly. A smoking hot girl wearing tiny shorts gets lost going to some sort of sorority competition. In a Scream-like beginning, she is terrorized by phone calls and a masked killer and ends up being killed in a gruesome fashion. So far, so good -- seems like the filmmakers get it. The credits roll, and then we are somehow transported to an entirely different movie.
The movie suddenly switches from a slasher to a really bad "comedy." We are introduced to our hero, Detective Watts, who is getting suspended for having anger issues (pounded a suspect in the balls, destroyed a little boy's bike, and grabbed an ice cream cone out of another little kid's hand and smashed it over the kid's head -- that gives you an idea of what passes for "humor" in this film). His captain (played by Kevin Sorbo) sends him to find out what happened to his daughter (the girl in the opening scene). So he heads out to the sorority gathering the girl was headed to to figure out what happened.
There are several hot girls there, but sadly, most of the film is focused on painful to watch attempts at "comedy" between the Detective and the local sheriff department. The "hot girls in peril" plot is definitely pushed to the back in favor of hysterical jokes like, "I liked you better when you were a mongoloid."
The movie tries to end interestingly by recycling a plot from several older films (I won't tell you which ones they are, because that would be a spoiler) but rest assured it doesn't really make much sense and definitely doesn't make the movie experience any better. Nothing in the film comes close to the quality of the opening scene, and I actually think that scene might have been tacked on a later time since a lot of it isn't, in retrospect, consistent with the rest of the movie. If you're looking for nudity, forget it, there's only a quick shot of an extra's boob. And if you're looking for graphic violence, after the promising opening scene, you'll need to look elsewhere.
"Sorority Party Massacre." Easy film to make, but they blew it. Can't recommend this one.
I Spit on Your Grave 2 (2013)
Quite possibly the best rape/revenge film ever.
"I Spit on You Grave 2" is quite possibly the best "rape/revenge" film ever. Anyone expecting a rowdy good time should abandon those hopes right away -- ISOYG2 kicks you in the gut and keeps kicking until the end.
The "Rape/Revenge" sub-genre is, almost be definition, a sleazy time at the movies. We are invited to watch a woman being degraded and attacked in order to root her on as she takes gruesome revenge on her tormentors. The gold-standard was Meir Zarchi's "Day of the Woman", which was famously re-titled "I Spit on Your Grave" by exploitation master Jerry Gross. The same scenario has been repeated countless times in films since.
The film suffered a remake back in 2010 and was, IMO, a failure since it bowed to political correctness by ratcheting DOWN the violence again the woman (one of the male attackers supposedly did something "off screen" so when she extracts revenge on him we're left to wonder "What did that guy do?") and ratcheting UP the violence against men (elaborate SAW- style traps and tortures). It invited the viewer to just sort of accept the "rape" part and revel in the "revenge" part.
And now comes "I Spit on Your Grave 2" a sequel which I suspect will be labeled by many as "wholly unnecessary." In this film, Jemma Dallender gives one of the bravest performances I've ever seen as Katie, a waitress who is also an aspiring model in NYC. While trying to upgrade her portfolio, she runs across a photographer and his two brothers (his assistants) and, well, let's just say that bad things happen to her. Very bad things. Very, VERY bad things. It is gut-wrenching to watch. There's no titillation, no way to just let it slide, the absolute horror of what she goes is stomach-churning. She manages to get away, and then during her recovery she realizes that just walking away won't satisfy her so she tracks down the people that abused her and takes her revenge.
Look, this is a rape/revenge film, so there's only so much quality to expect. but ISOYG2 gets everything right. The setup is realistic. The attack is horrifying. The explanation of how she went from the attack to the revenge makes sense (right down to a nice piece of foreshadowing at the beginning of the film where she traps a rat). And the revenge is extremely gruesome and gory, but even if you're rooting for the scum to get theirs that can't be "enjoyed" (for the lack of a better word) because Dallender plays Katie as absolutely consumed with rage -- she is not channeling an action movie star taking clever revenge, she plays it as a devastated woman consumed with an anger that she can't control.
And I can't say enough about the performance of Jemma Dallender. She threw herself into this film like nothing I've ever seen. During the attack sequences (and they are long), she fights, struggles, screams, cries... she makes us feel for her makes her with every horrible thing that happens. Post-attack, she makes us believe that the trauma she experienced really could bring her to what happens. And finally, she plays the revenge parts with -- as I said previously -- absolute rage. Not a hint of a smirk, not a wink to camera, not anything that would bring you out of the film.
Bottom line -- it's a rape/revenge flick. But if you're a fan of this particular sub-genre, ISOYG2 is one of the best ever. It's loaded with violence, torture and nudity and not a second of it is titillating. As I said, if you're looking for a rollicking good time, look elsewhere. But if you're ready for a real kick in the gut R/R movie that will stick with you, "I Spit on Your Grave 2" is highly recommended.
The Hospital (2013)
Sick puppy of a movie... and I say that with love...
Let's start with a word of warning -- or encouragement, depending on your tastes. "The Hospital" is a sick little puppy of a movie.
The plot is deceptively familiar -- a student reporter goes to a small town to research a "haunted hospital." The locals warn her to stay away, but she ignores their warnings and goes the the hospital where she is promptly captured by the caretaker, a grotesquely fat creep named Stanley. Meanwhile, a group of twenty-somethings get together to investigate the hospital for one of those "Ghost Investigation" television shows. Once they get to the hospital, they run into Stanley and, of course, end up getting more than they bargained for. But the film lulls you into a false sense of security, because when the crap starts to hit the fan (and hit it, it most certainly does), it does so in a way that is unexpected and jolting.
"The Hospital" doesn't scrimp on nudity, violence, and overall sickness and that is a point in its favor. The acting is, as is typical for a low-budget indie, of varying quality but in general it's pretty good -- the victims, in particular, give very brave and believable performances that give the film some real power. Most of the actresses (with one exception) are attractive and the actors don't look like just they were just a group of the director's friends. There are certainly flaws -- the film meanders at times, there are some attempts at comedy that fall flat, and the filmmakers seriously overreach for some special effects (especially in the climax) that just don't cut it and, to be honest, look a little silly.
One specific warning is that in addition to the violence the film has some pretty strong rape sequences. But in a way that actually adds to the realism of the film since that's what you'd expect a real sicko to do. Adding to the realism is that the original student reporter is a very heavy woman -- almost as heavy as Stanley the caretaker -- and in real life these type of women get captured as well as slender and fit gals. (As an aside, they probably should have rewritten some of script once this actress was cast, since the characters continually refer to her as "She's so pretty!" and "She was the prom queen!" which, despite the brave performance of the actress, is not how anybody would describe her.)
"The Hospital" is not for everyone, obviously, but if you are a fan of sick indie horror and want to spend some time with your mouth agape stunned at what you're seeing unfold on the screen before you, then "The Hospital" is definitely worth checking out.
They All Must Die! (1998)
Can't believe this film actually exists...
I've seen some extreme films but, holy cow, it's hard to believe this flick actually exists.
The film has no credits beyond a title saying this is "An Unauthorized Film by Sean Weathers" and the title. As the film starts, Wendy,a white woman who is a published author, is moving into a black neighborhood to do some research. She is noticed by three black kids, and is met by her landlord and his girlfriend (who are both also black).
This flick then becomes incredibly racist, with a long scene of the black kids going on about how badly they want a white woman. They hit on the author, who turns them all down because she "is here to work." Wherever she goes, the three are there, either harassing her, making racists comments at her, or hitting on her.
Meanwhile, Wendy's new landlord knows her work, and apparently also lusts after her so much he kicks out his girlfriend because he wants to be with her.
One night as Wendy comes home, the three black kids are there and a bit more aggressive. Her landlord rescues her and brings her into the building safely. But when she gets to her room, the three kids are there waiting for her.
Then, for over thirty long excruciating minutes, she is abused and raped by the three thugs. It is racist, violent, and incredibly realistic -- she acts the way you'd think a victim would really act. Very disturbing.
Once the seemingly endless gang rape scene is (finally) over, there is a quick revenge sequence which doesn't turn out they way you'd think, and then the movie unbelievably gets even MORE disturbing and racist to finish up.
As far as extreme films go, this is extreme with a capital "E". I'm not at all sure what Weathers -- who is black himself -- was trying to get at with this film. If you're looking to see just how far a film can go, while leaving any semblance of political correctness far, far behind it, check it out. If you're looking for a "Rape/Revenge" flick, I'd say avoid it since it's pretty extreme and the "revenge" part will probably disappoint you.