Revenge – Page 8

Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil (2010)

For anyone, anywhere who relishes a hack-and-stack about nitwit teens and disastrous camping trips, this one’s your Apocalypse Now.

Somehow, against all odds, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil subverts the horror trope of kids-as-kindling and the vicious hillbillies who stalk them, and manages to be funny and charming, while still delivering the gory goodies

As you’ve no doubt heard, the premise depicts Tucker (Alan Tudyk from Firefly) and Dale (Tyler Labine) as virtuous and kindly rural types who want nothing more than to fix up a little cabin in the woods so they can have a getaway for their fishing and beer-drinking weekends.

Enter a carload of snotty college students led by paranoid and delusional Chad (Jesse Moss), who has the hots for sweet Allison (Katrina Bowden), and the stage is set for a riotous epic of blood, lethal misunderstandings, and even a sweet, timid romance. Surprise!

In lesser hands, this might have turned into a gimmicky, unfunny satire (see the Scary Movie franchise), but writer/director Eli Craig really digs deep to bring out the good-natured decency of the titular hillbillies, even while splashing the screen with enough viscera to appease hardcore genre hounds.

Tudyk and Labine are funny and genuine as virtual innocents who have no idea why these preppy campers are freaking out and trying to kill each other—especially after they go to all the trouble of rescuing their friend Allison from drowning.

What the hell’s wrong with kids today? As someone who generally roots for the killer in these films (Look, I hate teenagers!), Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil is a welcome and diverting variation on a theme.

Scarecrows (1988)

Hmmm. I saw this one more than 20 years ago and I seem to remember it being a better movie.

Memories can play such cruel tricks…

Actually, it’s not half bad, but since it was made in the 1980s, you’ll have to overlook goofy haircuts.

Five military trained crooks make off with 3.5 million bucks from Camp Pendleton’s payroll department. The movie opens with the bad guys being flown to Mexico by a pilot and his daughter who are held at gunpoint.

No honor among thieves with this bunch, as one of the robbers, turncoat Bert (B.J. Turner), grabs the loot and bails out, landing in a creepy deserted cornfield.

Deserted by everyone, that is, except for the titular murderous scarecrows, who come to life and bag their limit.

Only the vaguest of reasons are given to explain why the scarecrows rise up and go on a killing spree, so if you’re a stickler for motivation, this won’t be your cup of grue. Suffice to say, the previous tenants of the family farm were into something devilish.

You might notice, too, that Bert’s dialogue seems to come out of nowhere, since we hear it while his lips clearly aren’t moving. Is he thinking out loud or is he a practicing ventriloquist?

Whatever the case, it’s distracting.

Also, the rest of the characters, in their quest to avoid being gutted and nailed to a pole, engage in some monumentally stupid behavior, which tends to suggest that their prowess as paramilitary bandits was more like a momentary stroke of luck.

To give writer-director William Wesley some credit, the cornfield setting is reasonably spooky and the scarecrows themselves are a pretty nasty bunch. Sadly, Scarecrows isn’t the action-packed fright fest that I remember, either.

Must have seen it during my drinking days—which should come to an end sooner or later.

Slaughter Night (2006)

A handful of hard-partying Dutch kids take a tour of a mine where centuries (years?) before, a fiendish killer/sorcerer was executed.

I know what you’re thinking. Why in the hell would a group of reasonably attractive young adults end up in a mine? As Bill Murray once said, “It just doesn’t matter.”

What does matter is the spirit of the sorcerer is alive and kicking, and needs eight victims in order to … something or other. Become human again? Get out of hell? Get a free foot-long sub? See Murray quote.

Oh, and I have some free advice to anyone who happens to find themselves trapped in a haunted mine. Do not play with a Ouija Board. And do not split up so you can cover more ground.

Friggin’ amateurs.

Slaughter Night was produced in the Netherlands, and I will tip my hat to our Dutch Brothers for a well-acted, fast-paced blood letter, with a goodly amount of decapitations.

Once again, we have a case of overt Sam Raimi worship by writers/directors Frank van Geloven and Edwin Visser, as the possessed teens are dead ringers for Evil Dead‘s Deadites.

Even so, things move along pretty well, and the mine provides a suitably creepy and claustrophobic setting.

The film is also subtitled, which I actually prefer, as far too many horror flicks suffer from uneven sound. You know, where crucial dialogue is whispered by two characters, and you turn up the volume to compensate, right as the chainsaws and screaming start.

And that’s when my wife yells at me to “turn that screamy shit down.” So everybody’s happy.

Forget Me Not (2009)

I kept avoiding this in the Netflix cue, and I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it sounded overly adolescent? But after reading an enthusiastic review at Horror Movie A Day, I decided to pull the trigger.

I’m glad I did, because Forget Me Not is an absorbing film that pivots gracefully from a story of childhood betrayal into a gripping revenge-from-beyond thriller.

Sandy (Carly Schroeder) is the smartest, hottest, and most popular girl in school. She and her brother Eli (Cody Linley) are both going to Stanford on academic scholarships.

Along with their sock drawer of goofy friends and lovers (slightly better than stock-character teens) they engage in some post-graduation drinking, smoking, and screwing, before deciding to hit the graveyard for one final game of “Ghost.” It’s like hide-and-seek except if the person designated as the ghost finds you, you become a ghost too.

Last one alive wins.

The seemingly innocent game opens up a nasty can of worms from their past about a cruel prank they once played on orphan girl Angela years before during a game. And when Sandy’s friends start dying, she’s only one who can remember that they ever existed at all.

As her circle of friends becomes smaller and smaller, Sandy’s enviable life gets progressively crappier. Her now deceased friends return from the grave as shimmying, contorting demons that look a bit like dancing Michael Jacksons. Moral of the story: Don’t play vicious pranks on orphans.

Forget Me Not is a very limber horror tale. When the group turns on orphan girl Angela, it’s really heart-wrenching, but totally believable. Who doesn’t have an episode from childhood where a new, cool group of friends becomes more important than someone whom circumstances threw you together with?

Remember the Seinfeld episode when Jerry has to break up with an odious chum from childhood because the only reason they were friends in the first place was because the kid had a ping-pong table?

It’s a morality play that loudly warns against even the most casual cruelty, as it can come back and bite us (painfully) on the ass.

And “youthful indiscretions” are no excuse.

Sam’s Lake (2006)

I’m on the fence about Sam’s Lake.

It’s a slow-burner, but it’s got gorgeous scenery. The body count is low, but the story is fairly intriguing. There’s no bloodletting till around the 43 minute mark, and the carnage is minimal.

Despite all this, I felt compelled to see it through.

Sam (super-cute Fay Masterson) brings a carload of her partying friends up to a remote cabin on the lake where she grew up.

Once ensconced, Sam’s childhood pal and local garage mechanic Jessie (William Gregory Lee) drops in to share a chilling campfire story about a kid who escaped from a nearby mental hospital (there’s always a nearby mental hospital) and wasted his entire family with a pointy stick.

As is so often the case, this tall tale is no legend, as the campers soon become painfully aware.

The “twist” in Sam’s Lake isn’t very twisted, especially since it’s pretty damn obvious from the get-go that somebody here is a 24-carat killer. Even so, the buildup is sturdily constructed and the showdown contains genuine surprises.

Fay Masterson delivers a charged performance as a deviously clever protagonist. On the down side, there’s not much happening on the horny or hacking front. If you pass on Sam’s Lake, you haven’t missed anything. If you give it a chance, your patience will be ever-so-slightly rewarded.

Night of the Scarecrow (1995)

Call it a by-product of living in accelerated times. It’s getting to the point where I look at movies made before the turn of the century as “quaint.” I’m sure this happens to everybody on our relentless trek to the boneyard, but it seems when I watch perfectly good horror films from the ’80s and even the ’90s now, they look like relics from another world that I’ve forgotten.

“OMG, look at that poodle hair! Is that a Members Only jacket? Ned’s Atomic Dustbin?”

With the passing of time the cultural signposts of eras passed start to get a little blurry. I have younger friends who are into movies and they usually won’t rent something more than 10 years old, claiming “it looks cheap and weird,” and “the FX are gonna suck.” I’m still adjusting to being the “old guy” in these situations.

So Night of the Scarecrow is a film fossil from 16 years ago. It’s good. Satisfying, even. It’s like dinner at an old-school steak house after having nothing but rice and tofu for a month. There are no surprises but everything is served just the way you like it; meat and potatoes, a stiff drink, and no sass.

What I appreciate most is that it’s a movie that doesn’t dilly-dally; the plot races along like Richard Petty at Daytona. Within, oh, 15 minutes or so, we know all the characters who live in the nice little town of Hanford—the one with the dark secret.

Over 100 years prior, the town fathers made a deal with a passing warlock (I guess there were warlocks roaming the west during the Ulysses Grant administration). In exchange for fertile soil and a temperate climate, the warlock could do whatever he pleased in Hanford.

The horny wizard turns out to be an advocate of sex magic, luring the town’s women into awesome episodes of debauchery. The menfolk decide that ain’t cool, drug the warlock, and crucify him in the cornfield.

Cut to “modern” times. The warlock, now in the guise of a button-eyed, sack-headed scarecrow, starts slaughtering the Goodmans, descendants of the guy who betrayed him and stole his book of spells.

These include brothers George (Dirk Blocker), Thaddeus (Bruce Glover, Crispin’s dad) and William (Gary Lockwood), who all perish in ghastly fashion, while William’s daughter Claire (Elizabeth Barondes), and her mimbo Dillon (John Mese, who looks like a stand-in for Scott Bakula) try to find the spell that will banish the malevolent mage.

A better-than-average cast helps. Stephen Root (O Brother Where Art Thou, Red State) plays another incompetent sheriff, while John Hawkes (Deadwood, Winter’s Bone) delivers the goods as the asshole delinquent who unwittingly frees the warlock.

But the real scene-stealer is Glover, chewing the scenery like a hungry goat as a weak-willed preacher with a hot-to-trot daughter that gets defiled by Hawkes’ town rowdy. Seriously, Glover’s overacting is almost operatic, maybe a notch below bad Shakespeare. And it’s just another reason to watch this unexpectedly satisfying sleeper.

The Ward (2011)

Talk about a filmmaker who’s dropped off the radar.

John Carpenter is an undisputed genre master, responsible for some of the coolest horror/fantasy films of the 20th century, with a tremendous body of work that puts him in some very select cinematic company.

I mean, come on! This guy gave us Halloween, The Fog, Big Trouble in Little China, The Thing, and Escape From New York, not to mention exemplary lesser efforts like They Live, Dark Star, In The Mouth of Madness, Starman, Christine, and Assault on Precinct 13.

For completists, his 1979 made-for-TV biopic Elvis with Kurt Russell is sensational.

That said, Carpenter hasn’t exactly been pushing himself lately. Since 2001’s uneven Ghosts of Mars, he’s mostly been collecting residual checks for all the lame remakes of his earlier films.

The Ward isn’t a spectacular return to form, but it ain’t bad. It’s a modest little fright film that plays out like a cross between Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor and something decidedly more Hitchcockian.

Set in “North Bend, Oregon in 1958,” (Editor’s note: I used to live one town over from North Bend. This wasn’t it.) Kristen (Amber Heard) is a runaway who can’t remember her earlier life or why she burned down a farmhouse.

The kindly authorities stick her in an asylum run by the mysterious Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris, from The Terror, Dead Man, and Happiness, among other things) and peopled by an oddball assortment of young lady lunatics.

Not only is Kristen forced to endure some unsavory psychiatric ordeals (“Here. Bite down on this or you’ll bite your tongue off.”) but she and her fellow inmates end up getting stalked by the vengeful ghost of Alice, a former patient.

You’ve seen this sort of thing before, and there are a few plot twists too many, but it’s good to see Carpenter, every bit the craftsman his name implies, doing what he does so well in The Ward, namely exiling the viewer to a darkly menacing world where no one can be trusted.

It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To (2006)

There are a thousand things wrong with It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To—and I still dug it.

Director and writer (also editor, composer, and several other titles) Tony Wash had the brass to make his film on a budget so puny you can practically hear the car washes, garage sales, and bake sales (not to mention the ringing of credit cards) that went into the financing.

There are continuity errors, mushy sound quality, community theater acting, and it looks like it was shot on a flip phonw. Even so, Wash and his creative cohorts have some audacity and style. True, it’s a young Sam Raimi’s style, but nonetheless…

Sarah (Adrienne Fischer) thinks her friends have forgotten her 18th birthday. Geez, how could they forget? It’s on Halloween! And that means a costume party in an old house with a sinister reputation.

Part of that reputation, truthfully, should be because of its periodic ability to drastically change size and shape. The interior layout of Burkitt Manor is incomprehensible.

It turns out Sarah’s bland assortment of acquaintances have hit upon the brilliant idea of rigging up the old Burkitt Manor (where in either 1908 or 1930 a despotic husband beat his family into hamburger) as a haunted house to scare the bejeebers out of her.

Who knew kids were so motivated?

After 67 or so slow exposition scenes, the Karo syrup finally starts to fly, as the evil spirit of the house takes possession of young schmuck Travis (Oliver Lucach), and the body count clock is ticking.

Fortunately, we learn (in a training scene that includes a shower interlude—good call, Tony) Sarah is an expert in martial arts and her friends thoughtfully chipped in to buy her a katana! So we get a savage kung-fu showdown—with the plucky Sarah dressed as Elvira—in addition to buckets of viscera and a little gratuitous nudity.

It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To is an amateur production with a capital “A”, even with a Tom Savini cameo. But Wash and his team work hard to get most of the details right.

And he borrows liberally from Raimi (the main creature is pretty much a Deadite), George Romero (The EC Comics segues are straight out of Creep Show), John Carpenter, and even Tarantino, which should be enough for horror geeks to suck on like an all-day lollipop.

It was for me, anyway. Someone give this kid a few bucks, eh?

Beneath Still Waters (2005)

I figured Beneath Still Waters was worth a gamble since Brian (Bride of Re-Animator) Yuzna produced and directed this Spanish-UK collaboration. While there is ample gore and some stellar scenes of Bosch-like depravity, the pace is glacial—endless talky exposition and needless character development.

Nutshell: A town in Northern Spain is flooded after the construction of a new dam. The cover story is that the dam brings jobs, cheap power, and prosperity to the region, but the naked truth is that the “drowned town” was inhabited by a kinky cannibal cult led by a sinister Aleister Crowley acolyte named Salas (Patrick Gordon, as the Richard Lynch-style creepy cult leader).

Fast-forward 40 years later and the ghost or spirit or reanimated corpse of the evil magician returns accompanied by a very small band of fairly scary zombies, and a vendetta against the granddaughter of the former mayor who flooded the town.

There’s a good chunk of memorably nightmarish imagery thanks to the hallucinatory, low-tech, Euro-art school FX (think Méliès rather than Lucas), and Salas’s habit of tearing his victims’ heads off never gets old.

But it’s a pretty slow 90 minutes, most of which look like a made-for-TV movie from the 1970s, so prepare for rough sledding.