Salvage

I honestly had no idea what to expect from this movie.  I only knew that it was some kind of creature feature, with a crate washing ashore that may have contained some kind of creature that may now be terrorizing a small town.  the description was vague enough to intrigue me and make me check this out, and I'm so glad I did.  It's a tense little gory horror gem that held my interest from beginning to end.

The movie opens with a teenage girl being forced to spend Christmas with her estranged mother.  She walks in on mom "entertaining" a male guest and storms off.  Just then, something begins to happen in the town.  Helicopters are flying overhead, soldiers are searching houses and telling residents to stay put without explaining why, and there's a lot of confusion and bloodshed and dead neighbors, and no one is sure what is going on.  The woman on the movie poster spends most of the movie worried about her daughter and wanting to know if she's safe, but no one is talking and no one seems to know much of anything.

I'm not going to give anything away, but the gore in this movie is great, and I actually wound up liking the characters and feeling bad for the horrible situation in which they find themselves.  It's tense and grim and riveting from start to finish, and I'm glad I checked this movie out.

Red State

This is my favorite of the "Red State" teaser posters that I saw when the movie was first being advertised around the Internet.  I don't know what it is, but people covered with sheets like this creep me out.  seriously, like scenes in movies that involve sheets being draped over people like this really bother me.  Yes, even when it's supposed to be funny, like in "Beetljuice" (which might be the culprit, since I saw that one when I was little and it gave me nightmares).  So anyway, I saw this picture and had absolutely no idea what to expect from this movie, and this poster doesn't help (which I think was the idea, I think the marketing team wanted to keep people off base, and really, this movie is such a hodgepodge of different genres that I don't know if you could express it in one image anyway).  So this image haunted me, and it made me want to see the movie more, which I already wanted to see it anyway, because it's a Kevin Smith movie AND it's a horror movie, so it was combining two of my favorite things together in one big cinematic experience.

And I honestly don't know where to go from here.  I feel like I owe it to you, my readers, to give you a worthwhile review of this movie, since you bothered to come here and check it out.  I will say that this movie intrigued me, and it pissed me off, and it grossed me out, and it made me wince several times, and it even made me jump (loud noises get to me).  I was annoyed with the three main characters, the three teenage boys who start this movie by trying to hook up with a woman they meet on Craigslist for sex (HELLO, have they NEVER seen a horror movie in their lives?  Or even heard of one?)  I wanted to punch them in the face, but considering the horror that they face because of their idiotic decision, I suppose scolding them would be redundant.  Once the kids run afoul of a religious cult, things start to get ugly.

This part of the movie is the part that pissed me off, and it's not really Kevin Smith's fault.  I like how he at least played it straight here instead of trying to make the religious service "comic relief" type funny.  I would have been even MORE pissed at that, because I kid you not, I heard almost the exact sermon from this movie preached at many of the churches I attended when I was younger, some sentences actually preached word for word like what this pastor says, and it bugs me sometimes when people act like it's funny that people actually BELIEVE and TEACH this stuff.  I sat in on a Sunday school class where the teacher told us that her seven year old daughter asked if God was going to burn the United states like he burned Sodom and Gomorrah because they accepted homosexuality, and she told her daughter yes, and they prayed for God's judgement to come upon this country soon, and she said that she wished we all could have faith like that child.  No, I don't find that funny.  At all.  So yes, that part of the movie was definitely horrifying for me.  I never saw anyone saran-wrapped to a cross, but the churches I attended would be patting themselves on the back because they DIDN'T do any of that "violent" stuff, completely missing the point that rhetoric and words ARE violence when they cut as deeply as some of the messages I grew up hearing.  I still hear them sometimes today, echoing in my head and in my dreams at night.  Talk about horror.

Moving right along, the movie's second act rolls around and we get to meet an FBI agent played by John Goodman, who is one of my favorite actors.  I grew up watching him on TV, and he was the perfect choice for this character.  He is kind of disillusioned but still believes in doing the job he's been assigned to do, even if he thinks the orders are bullshit (because sometimes they are).  The movie falters some here in the second half, because it kind of feels like it's sitting around twiddling its thumbs and not sure where to go next, but it gets back on track, and I never really lost my interest.  I can say this is one movie that kept me riveted, yelling at the screen and pissing off my cat throughout the entire film.  There's enough gore here that I would place this movie in the "horror" category, though it certainly has a lot of action elements and dramatic elements as well.  It definitely paints a bleak view of humanity as well, and while it perhaps relies a little too much on a narrative wrap-up at the end to sum everything up, it's still worth checking out for what it gets right, and it stands as one of my favorite movies that I've watched for the horror challenge this year.

Occupant

This movie was pretty cool.  the description is misleading of course, because it leads me to believe that this is going to be a ghost story, and it's not exactly, but it's not exactly NOT a ghost story, either, so you know.  I wasn't sure what was going on here most of the time because this movie is so off-kilter, and the lead character here becomes more and more unhinged as the story progresses, which was even more unsettling.  He was likable enough that I did feel bad for him, though, so that aspect of the movie worked for me.  Basically, this movie is about a guy who inherits a rent-controlled apartment from his dead grandmother, but from the time he moves in, his life slowly becomes more and more unraveled.  I was never sure exactly what was happening and what to believe, so the movie made my eye twitch and got under my skin, and it's not so long that it becomes tedious, plus the ending is pretty killer, so I enjoyed this one.

Food of the Gods

Having watched as many horror movies as I have, it's inevitable that I'll forget some of them from time to time, but imagine my surprise when I watched this movie today thinking it was the first time and I discovered that I saw it years ago when I was nine.  I didn't remember most of it, and I don't think I knew the name of it because we just called it the "big mouse movie" because of the creatures wreaking havoc in the climax (they're actually giant rats, but whatever, I was nine).  It was amusing watching this movie again with my refined cinematic tastes and still being able to enjoy it.

So on this small, secluded island, a mysterious ooze has appeared that causes animals who eat it to grow to gigantic proportions.  The farming couple who discover the ooze on their property want to sell it to a scientist who wants to use it to make millions, and some innocent bystanders get caught in the carnage when some giant wasps kill a man on a horseback hunt in the surrounding woods.  Soon, giant rats (or "big mice" if you prefer) are running amok, and people are trapped on the island, not sure how to escape.

It's all pretty silly, of course.  Watching the giant rats attack toy cars is fun, and I especially like how they must have run out of money for brown rats because there's inexplicably one white rat among the others who sticks out like a sore thumb.  It' also unclear why everyone on the island decides to let the "hero" take the lead, since most of his ideas are stupid and don't work, and whenever anyone asks him a valid question about one of his harebrained schemes, he doesn't bother to answer.  I dug this movie, though.  It embraced its own stupidity and tried to tell a message about how we shouldn't fuck with nature because nature will fuck back twice as hard, and that message still feels relevant today.  Sue me.  I had fun with this one.

Haunted Forest

Ugh, this movie.  Where do I begin  I suppose it doesn't start off too badly, and for about the first hour I even thought the movie wasn't terrible, but boy does it ever go downhill quickly, and it takes any good feelings I may have had with it as it crashes at the bottom of the barrel.  First, that tagline.  "Only the trees can hear you scream"?  What douchebag thought that one up?  Second, this movie can't decide what it wants to be about, so it's going to be fun trying to write you a plot summary.

Let's see...there's a forest haunted by the vengeful spirit of a girl whose spirit seems to be tied to a creepy looking tree that no one can find even if they search the woods for years, and everyone who spends any length of time in the woods disappears without a trace, so of course our genius characters decide to drive there and go hiking after their friend disappears (sure, sign me up for that doomed vacation!)  They meet up with some girls who are hiking in the woods looking for...um...flowers?  Ones that only grow in these woods?  Why are you looking at me like that?  Anyway, one of the characters in the first group is Native American, and we all know those injuns are all connected, so he has his grandfather's old journal which talks about these woods and the spirit within, and he feels connected with the spirit, only he's not sure why (but I'm sure the movie will give us a long, boring flashback sequence to explain why) so these characters wander around and get picked off one by stupid one until there are only a few left, and then they have to fight the spirit.

Sounds really stupid, right?  Oh you don't know the half of it.  The damn movie just kept getting dumber and dumber, and every time I thought it couldn't get any worse it would prove me wrong.  The Native American guy and one of his friends look so much alike that I kept getting them mixed up, and then near the end they switch jacket for some God-unknown reason, so then I REALLY couldn't tell them apart, and the "explanation" of why the forest is haunted is so asinine, and the "solution" the main character comes up with for solving the problem is so idiotic that I just wanted to fast forward to the end credits so I could track down everyone involved with making the movie and punch them in the face.  Just watch something else.  ANYTHING else.

The Possession of David O'Reilly

People told me that this movie was great, so I expected great, and I was let down, but this movie isn't as horrible as I thought it was back when it was pissing me off this morning, and it isn't as bad as I was prepared to tell you it was when I was first writing this review in my head.  The description of this movie calls it a "shockumentary" about a man who is haunted by demons who goes to stay with his friends and brings the demonic activity to them, but pretty much everything about that description is false.  "Shockumentary" implies that this is one of those "found footage" movies, and that isn't the case (though the camera does stick to our characters closely in the documentary style).  The man and wife who are the central characters here have just moved into a new house when one night their friend David stops by at an ungodly hour with a sob story about his wife cheating on him.  David stays with the couple for a few days, and over the course of those days, things begin to get scarier and scarier as David becomes more convinced that demons are trying to get him.

This is one of those movies where everything is ambiguous.  I counted at least five different plausible explanations for what could have been going on in the movie (well. plausible if you believe supernatural things can and do happen, which in the case of this movie, a good argument can be made either way I think) and a lot of people seem to be in disagreement about what happens during the frustratingly ambiguous ending.  I changed my mind about three times before I settled on my own interpretation of what happened here, but I think other interpretations could be equally valid, and I just don't care enough about the movie to spend time arguing about it, really, but I do think the movie is an interesting little feature that gets people talking, so I guess it's not bad.  I might even watch it again someday.

Vile

I feel like I've seen this movie before, and I have, really.  It's basically the Saw movies all smashed together with the Hostel movies, but I liked all of those movies for the most part, so I don't really mind.  I actually appreciated that an effort was made here to give us some character development so we'd give a shit what happened to these characters when things started going nasty, so that worked for me.  The plot isn't original by now (ten people wake up in a house not knowing how they got there, and they watch a video telling them that they must inflict pain on each other in order to survive the night).  That's right, it's another of the once-popular-but-now-losing-popularity-due-to-overexposure torture movies, but at least the screenwriters of this film gave a reason for the torture that we see onscreen, and like I said, they gave us a chance to get to know the characters, so we actually kind of cared what happened to them.

Of course, as in all movies like this, we get to see people devolve to their basest instincts, which means there's some pretty horrible behavior on display here, particularly from one woman named Tara, and it's horrible having to watch what these people do to each other.  Those who don't want to see people get tortured horribly should probably avoid this movie, since it had me wincing and I've seen a ton of these movies.  It plays with some original ideas, gives us some characters we moight actually like, and has some cool gore, so it was a worthwhile watch for me.