Reviews – Page 31 – That Was A Bit Mental

Rasen (1998)

Published on January 5, 2011June 22, 2011 by Chris ScullionLeave a comment

Director: Joji Iida

Starring: Koichi Sato, Miki Nakatani, Hinao Saeki, Hiroyuki Sanada

Also known as: The Spiral (UK)

“You can’t even slit your own wrist. How are you supposed to perform an autopsy on me?” (Ryuji, Rasen)

(Spoilers for Ringu below)

While both the Japanese and American versions of The Ring and its sequels were big successes among horror fans, Rasen became the black sheep in the series. The sequel to Ringu, both films were oddly released on the same day because the story was already well-known in Japan (imagine they’d released the first two Harry Potter films on the same day: this was the Japanese equivalent). Ringu became a huge worldwide success while Rasen died on its arse and was forgotten about, to the extent that a different sequel to Ringu (Ringu 2) was released a year later.

Rasen takes place immediately after the events of Ringu. Pathologist Dr Ando has been assigned the task of performing an autopsy on his friend Ryuji to determine the cause of his death. After finding a message on a piece of paper secreted in Ryuji’s stomach he soon uncovers the mystery of Sadako Yamamura’s curse tape which kills people seven days after they view it. However, after watching the tape, it soon becomes clear to Ando that Sadako has other plans for him. Joining up with Takano Mai (Ryuji’s student girlfriend in the first film), Ando tries to solve the tape’s riddle.

Rasen pic — "My jacket zip was caught on something, so I just yanked it down. Last time I do that"

Despite the critical blasting Rasen has received, I didn’t think it was too bad. It certainly goes in a different direction from Ringu, with Sadako having plenty of screen time and having chats at times with some of the characters. She even has a sex scene, so that should give you some idea as to how her character has changed. Anyone expecting another chilling Japanese horror film will be bitterly disappointed with Rasen, and I think this is why it has received the unfair treatment it has.

Granted, it’s no Citizen Kane, but it’s a nice little film that gives an alternative progression of the events after Ringu. It was good to see Sanada returning as Ryuji, even if it was only for the occasional flashback or dream sequence. I suppose you can only do so much with a corpse.

One thing potentially troublesome about the film however is that the classic ending to Ringu is practically forgotten about. The conclusion is made at one point that the tape transmits a strange smallpox virus to the watcher, which takes seven days to kill you. This is emphasised by a number of characters throughout the film coughing and getting rashes on the backs of their necks. It’s somewhat strange that this never happened in the first film, though it’s probably a good thing because we’d have missed out on that classic TV-crawling scene.

Also odd is the ending. Perhaps it loses something in the translation, but I was left confused and ultimately having to come to my own conclusions as to its meaning. Although it is sometimes not a bad thing for a film to have an ambiguous ending (Donnie Darko springs to mind), this is not the case for all films and in Rasen it just felt bewildering.

Still, despite this it’s probably one to see if you’re a fan of the Ring cycle, if only to see what Ringu 2 could have been had this received more praise when it was released.

Scream Bloody Murder (2000)

Published on January 4, 2011January 11, 2014 by Chris Scullion3 Comments

Director: Ralph Portillo

Starring: Jessica Morris, Peter Guillemette, Crystalle Ford

Also known as: Bloody Murder (USA)

“Misery comes in lots of forms… it’s all miserable.”
(Drew, Bloody Murder)

Once in your life you experience a film that is so bad you have to tell the world. This is what happened to me when I saw Scream Bloody Murder for the first time.

Everything about this film made me laugh in a way that I’m sure the director didn’t intend. As a result of this, when I was a younger chap at the sprightly age of 18 I decided to analyse every single second of the film in a 28,500-word essay. Look, it was a lonely time in my life.

The plot is a white hot rollercoaster of emotion. A group of camp counsellors turn up early at Camp Placid Pines to prepare for the children arriving. While there they learn about the legend of Trevor Moorhouse. Soon the counsellors start dying one by one. Surely Trevor can’t be behind the killings? Actually, he isn’t, so it’s up to Julie (one of the counsellors) to find out who’s actually doing it.

From the get-go, Scream Bloody Murder does a great job of highlighting the sheer ineptitude of the director, screenwriter, crew, special effects department (Trevor’s chainsaw isn’t even on so instead of cutting down leaves and branches, he hits them out of the way as if he was using a wooden stick) and actors (the idiot playing Trevor walks like a drunk and the first victim runs in an S-shape through an open field while falling over three times).

Once we meet the counsellors, we realise quickly that they fit into the stereotypes we all know and hate (virgin girl who we know immediately will live, her boyfriend who we know will turn out to be an asshole and die, probably cheating on her in the process, and so on). Ironically, the film can’t even do this properly, because the stereotypically zany teenage boy who happens to be a horror fan and knows all the rules of horror films (a not-so-subtle nod to Scream and every film made after it) has a worryingly poor grasp of horror trivia.

And then there’s Trevor. Without a doubt, Trevor Moorhouse is the single worst slasher movie bad guy of all time. He is an amalgamation of rip-offs from every corner of the horror world: his hockey mask is from Friday The 13th, his boiler suit is from Halloween, his chainsaw is from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, his walk is from Drunken Master. And the name sounds enough like Jason Voorhees to make it lear it’s a rip-off, but different enough to be the least terrifying name in motion picture history. Trevor is not and never will be a scary name (Trevor Jordache from Brookside aside, of course).

The acting is consistently wooden throughout. The lead female walks like she’s got a cactus lodged in her drawers, her friendship with the stereotypical black female best friend is so unconvincing it unwittingly verges on lesbianism, and the boyfriend character is so obviously going to be unfaithful at some point in the movie that he might as well have been played by Ashley Cole.

The story isn’t any better. It’s filled with gaping plot holes that you could drive two tanks through side-by-side without fear of scraping the edges, and once the “killer” is revealed you can’t help but laugh because chances are you thought it was him in the first place but dismissed it because it was too obvious. Finally, the ending is meant to provide a great shock but instead caused me to piss myself laughing for a good few minutes.

I’ve shown Scream Bloody Murder to many of my friends and they more or less all agree that it’s an almighty piece of shit, but an entertaining one at that. If you’re judging it on its technical merits you might as well buy a bag of frozen peas, sit it on a table and watch that for an hour and a half. If you’re judging it on entertainment value though, get a group of mates together and take the piss out of it and you’ll have a great time. If Ed Wood had made this film, he’d have been mortified and burned it. Look, just watch the trailer below (complete with fake Chemical Brothers music) to see what I mean.

trev_new

The Evil Dead (1981) (Video Nasty review #1)

Published on January 3, 2011January 12, 2011 by Chris Scullion12 Comments

Director: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker

“Kill her if you can, loverboy!” (Cheryl, The Evil Dead)

Since a large part of this blog is my quest to watch and review all 72 video nasty films, it makes sense for me to start with arguably the best and inarguably the most famous of the lot. Of course, had the Director of Public Prosecutions not been on the arsehole pills in 1984 I probably wouldn’t be reviewing The Evil Dead as part of this list because, as anyone who’s seen it will agree, there’s no way it should have been considered a notorious and dangerous video nasty. After all, it’s far too silly to be taken seriously.

For those still to enjoy its daft delights, The Evil Dead tells the story of five young chums who decide to spend the weekend in a cabin in the woods (sound clichéd? That’s because this created the cliché). When they get there they find the Book of the Dead, a book that when read can summon sleeping demons to possess the living. The good news is that nobody can read the book, the bad news is they also find a tape recorder with a tape of an old historian reading the book’s contents aloud. As they listen to the tape the demons are summoned and it’s up to the five friends to survive until daylight.

As the film progresses and the various teens are possessed, it becomes clear that the hero of the day is to be young Ashley, the shy and innocent one of the bunch played by Bruce Campbell in his first role. Nowadays Campbell is a bit of a cult icon among horror film fans and this is more or less solely thanks to the Evil Dead films and his performances in them. Ash takes a kicking throughout the majority of the film and there’s something satisfying about seeing the underdog getting splattered with gallons of blood, getting pinned under bookcases that are apparently much heavier than they look and generally not having a nice time of it. Even the movie’s final scene shows that he just can’t get a break.

What’s perhaps most impressive about The Evil Dead is that so many people look on it with fondness despite it on paper being, for want of a better word, nasty. One character is stabbed in the ankle with a pencil, after which the viewer is treated to the sight of them twisting it around in unflinching detail. Another has their head caved in with an axe. Then there’s the film’s infamous ‘tree rape’ scene, in which Ellen Sandweiss’ character wanders into the woods to investigate a noise she hears, only to be assaulted and violated by the woods themselves (this scene was cut for a long time by the BBFC and was only recently allowed to be shown uncut). Yet despite this, the film’s charmingly low budget and its combination of likeable characters and laughable creatures means it’s still fondly remembered as a fun movie.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing The Evil Dead yet I urge you to hunt it down, along with its sequels Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn and Army Of Darkness. Ash is one of the greatest heroes in horror history and this film shows the seeds of his creation. I guarantee laughter, I guarantee entertainment and I guarantee you’ll feel smugly satisfied when you tell your mates “I’ve seen a video nasty” while conveniently forgetting to tell them the one you watched was probably the least nasty of the bunch.

HOW NASTY IS IT? – It’s not terribly nasty but the tree rape scene, in which Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) is violated by some branches, is a little uncomfortable if a little silly in theory. Anyone who watches it though will probably come to the conclusion that it should never really have been banned because it’s far too daft to corrupt.

Nightbreed (1990)

Published on January 1, 2011January 1, 2018 by Chris Scullion3 Comments

Director: Clive Barker

Starring: Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby, David Cronenberg

“Miss Winston, everybody has a secret face.” (Decker, Nightbreed)

Despite being one of the UK’s finest horror minds (having written the likes of Hellraiser and Candyman), Clive Barker’s Nightbreed doesn’t really get much love in the UK. Maybe it’s because it’s not really as scary as the stories he’s better known for, or maybe it’s because it’s the horror movie equivalent of Fraggle Rock, I suppose we’ll never know.

The story’s your typical “boy meets girl, boy has been having weird dreams while his shrink tells him he’s a serial killer when he isn’t really, boy goes to a cemetery and is killed but then becomes part of a weird underground-dwelling group of undead monsters” plot you’ve seen a million times before. It emerges early on in the film that Boone, the lead character, isn’t actually killing the families he’s been led to believe he has and that instead his psychiatrist (played with just the right amount of cheese by genius director David Cronenberg) has been doing the killings while hypnotising Boone into believing it was him instead.

Due to his dodgy dreams, Boone finds himself drawn to a spooky graveyard where he is shot dead by police, but not before encountering a group of undead chaps and ladies who live under the ground and are generally keeping themselves to themselves. Boone’s quack discovers this and decides to tell the police, leading to an almighty clusterfuck later on where loads of cops fight hundreds of monsters in their underground lair.

For the most part Nightbreed’s acting does the trick but I was a bit unconvinced by Craig Sheffer in the lead role of Boone. Watching him change from a human to monster (as he does numerous times in the film) just isn’t believable because he doesn’t seem bothered by it, and though it isn’t his fault I was also distracted by the fact that every time he turns into his monster form he reminds me of a bad Kurt Russell lookalike:

To be fair, he’s not the only one to evoke such a reaction. When Not-Kurt-Russell eventually finds himself in the monsters’ underground lair, the film more or less turns into a game of Oh Look, It’s A Celebrity Lookalike. “Oh look! It’s metal icon Rob Zombie!”

“Oh look! It’s Vanessa Feltz! (though she’s in everything these days so it’s no surprise to see her making yet another appearance)

“And oh look! It’s Sportacus from children’s televsion keep-fit shitefest Lazytown! Well, a bit.”

Once you get past that, Nightbreed is actually cheesy fun. David Cronenberg is clearly the star of the show as Decker, the mental serial-killing psychiatrist, and his mask is fairly creepy too:

Meanwhile, as you’d expect from Clive Barker, there’s also plenty of gore and nudity to be had (even though the former is about as realistic as Aberdeen’s chance of winning the Scottish Premier League and the latter is courtesy of some terrifying monster women) and Danny Elfman’s music helps give a Burtonesque feeling to certain scenes.

The best bit though is probably the scene where female lead Anne Bobby (who coincidentally shares her names with both my aunt and uncle) first enters the underground tomb, since this is the first opportunity viewers get to see most of the film’s countless weird and wonderful monsters. This was also the scene that gave me Fraggle Rock vibes (as explained at the start of this review), because it basically shows a bunch of muppets living under the ground.

There are times when the plot gets a bit mindless, and while the film clearly wants the audience to be on the side of the monsters it can be tricky when some of them are pricks (such as the pervy one whose face is falling off or the one who looks a bit like Knuckles from the Sonic games and is generally a wanker to Not-Kurt-Russell). This may be partly due to the fact that the film was savagely cut and edited by the studio shortly before its release, something that irked Clive Barker according to later interviews because he didn’t get to tell the story the way he wanted to. Despite all this however, it’s still a good laugh to watch if a little disjointed.

Unfortunately Nightbreed is only available in Region 1 DVD in America and can’t be bought on DVD in the good old U of K, but if you can find it somehow (nudge wink elbow guffaw) then it’s well worth a watch for the cheese factor and the monster designs. Three out of five skulls, I reckon.