DVD Voice

I didn’t get any time over the weekend to watch anything. And I didn’t get to see the Oscars presentation last night even. This is probably the first year ever that I’ve seen more than 1 or 2 of the contenders. Oh well, next year!

Tonight I watched Audition, Takashi Miike’s horror film from Japan. It’s about a man in Japan who has his wife die of an illness about 7 years earlier. He is prompted by his son that he should marry again, so he decides he will. Not knowing how to meet women, he takes the advice of a friend or co-worker (I could never really tell which) and holds a fake “audition” and views the women. He’s enamored with one and calls her later a few times, they go to dinner, etc.

He comes in to talk to his son one day who suspects right away his father might have a girlfriend. His father confirms it and that they are going off on a trip for the weekend and he’ll ask her to marry him. He also mentions he’ll introduce her to his son sometime soon! (weird!) Anyway, that’s when the horror element starts up. And I thought it was rather creepy, but nothing that would keep me up at night.

After watching it I looked at a few extras and found that this movie ranks #11 of the 100 scariest. Eli Roth and Rob Zombie both declare how creepy it is. That’s when I see a few scenes and realize that the glitches I thought might be effects were the video skipping. So, I missed a hunk of the gory stuff on this DVD. NetFlix sent one that didn’t play right. So, I’m off to their page to report a defective disk. When you report one as unplayable or defective you have the option to have them send a replacement the next business day. I got the gist of this one, so I think I’ll just have them send the next title!

If you like horror and a little gore and want something that is more creepy that your ordinary horror, you’ll like this one. Be prepared to read the Japanese sub-titles as I couldn’t get the English audio track to play – but I’m thinking now maybe it didn’t have that track even though it was listed in the cycle of audio tracks from my remote. Anyway, enough of my problems!

Rated UR (Unrated). 115 minutes (1 hour 55 minutes). Almost zero profanity – at least the parts I actually did see. I saw one scene where an auditioning girl stripped down to her panties and you got a glimpse of her nice boobs. Gore and violence - torture and dismemberment, if that’s your thing.

Last night was fun. Cabin Fever … campers, in the woods, horror, etc. Tonight. Ummm … not so much! Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, is a follow-up to 2002’s Cabin Fever by Eli Roth. This movie is directed by T.I. West – and apparently even he tried to disown it. It has the same contaminated water from Cabin Fever, the same goofy deputy, and the water carries a virus. The similarities stop there. This one was not clever, wasn’t enjoyable and not worth your time to watch it.

It’s a high school, they are having a prom. The school gets a shipment of Down Home Water, the water company who pumps water from Cabin Fever 1’s lake. The kids get to the prom and someone makes punch using the bottled water. Everyone at the prom is carrying a small cup of punch and sipping it. Some people who have had the bottled water earlier in the day are ok all the way until the prom. Others who drink the punch and contaminated water shows symptoms almost immediately. It causes you to forcibly vomit blood and then die. Or lie around painfully watching all your skin swell up and ooze. Then the Feds show up and think it would be a great idea to just lock the school and go inside and shoot everyone. Even after they have chained the front doors, 15 minutes later some kids finally decide to go out the back door which isn’t locked or being watched yet. Ugh.

Like I said – pathetic.

Rated R. 87 minutes (1 hour 27 minutes). Profanity. Lots, because you know its high school kids. Some nudity, for instance topless strippers who are diseased, a couple of butts, and one guy in particular shows everything down below and – well, come to think of it, that is the horror of the movie – makes you want to wash your eyes out with clorox or something. Mostly gorey stuff blood oozing, blood flying, etc. Mercifully the entire movie is short, but not quite short enough.

With the recent release of Cabin Fever 2, I thought it might be a good one to watch, but first I’d like to see the first one of them, so I had NetFlix send out Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever. I believe this was Eli’s first film as a director. I quite enjoyed this – it made for a good Saturday evening entertainment and has me a little stoked that maybe Cabin Fever 2 might be at least partly as good.

Don’t get me wrong, this move isn’t great. It could have been better than it was, but it isn’t bad. It isn’t a typical horror movie, and you figure out what is really going on pretty early. But it does do thing you don’t expect and is entertaining the whole way through. I honestly expected a different kind of cabin fever going in to this – I didn’t read to much about it before hand.

One neat feature is the “Chick Vision” that lets you watch the movie and gray hands will block parts of the movie as you watch it through your fingers. This is for the scarier parts. I would have imagined though that chicks watching this wouldn’t hold their hands up until the scarier parts have already started, but in this feature they start up a little bit early … not totally a bad thing.

Just keep in mind that these guys are camping way out in the middle of nowhere in a rented cabin. The cell phones don’t work and there are all those “eerie” nature noises the city kids encounter. Add on top of this that Eli throws things at you, such as the deer and the dog scenes, will more than likely catch you off guard. Enjoy!

Rated R. 92 minutes (1 hour 32 minutes). Profanity – your typical wild weekend away college kids. You see topless females, but a movie like this kind of felt like it needed a few more – but still, no complaints. Lots of blood and goriness.

Tonight we are back on the movie bandwagon. I was doing some midterm work the past few, sorry guys. Ok, so Stump the Band. It’s a horror/”slasher” movie about an all-girl band who goes touring and ends up stranded in the woods with a group of axe murderers after them to satisfy their foot fetish. One of the group pretends he’s a dog and eats dog biscuits and barks, etc.

Why did I watch the whole thing? I can’t say anything much about it except that this might be a good one for a night when your just hanging out, don’t want to watch anything serious and just want to drink the night away. Maybe?

They are going to the next stop in their tour and stop at gas station for gasoline and directions. The creepy attendants give them both. And after a “I’m driving and turned completely around arguing” episode they run off the road. Way off because the driver’s foot gets stuck and he screams “We’re all gonna die!” repeatedly. Hello? Why not use your other foot on the brakes? Or take it out of gear into neutral? They’ve slid to a stop finally inches away from a huge tree. Everyone gets out, argues, and when they are back in the car the driver turns the key a few times and it doesn’t start. “We must be out of gas.” The next day they frantically search for one of the girls who has somehow gotten out of the car without anyone hearing the loud van doors. That turns into the obligatory in the woods at the pond skinny dipping scene. After more arguments they begin to get picked off by the killers who will drag them back to their cellar, estimate the size of their feet and chop them off. (After putting on eye protection first!).

Ok — enough persuasion that you don’t need to see this!

Not Rated. 88 minutes (1 hour 28 minutes). Profanity. Lots of gore/blood – they do not skimp on the red blood color. Female nudity – topless and skinny dippers which is pretty much the high water mark.

I’ve gone back into the 1900s for a movie for tonight. It’s Born of Fire, a film that can just be described as rather weird and seriously un-fulfilling. Peter Firth and Suzan Crowley star in this tale of a musician who is approached by a woman at one of his concerts. She “knows” he’s hearing the same eerie music she is. He needs to go home to see his mother, she gives him a ride. His mother dies, she attends the funeral. She goes home and while driving hears about a volcano erupting in Turkey and “sees” someone attacking her car, so she crashes. She goes home drinks, a black cat is scared of her, she gets a call from Paul, the flutist who she met a couple of days before and he wants to know if she heard about the volcano eruption. She says she’s cold and is going to take a bath but he should come over, she’ll leave the house unlocked. He arrives, she’s standing in front of the tub just staring — she’s seen an image of a dead woman floating in her tub. He tells her she’s cold and puts her in the bath. She tells him he must go to Turkey and find THE MASTER MUSICIAN. She’s back at her observatory job trying to convince her superiors that the eclipse a few days earlier cause the volcano eruption in Turkey. She leaves to prove it. Meanwhile, Paul is looking through ruins and caves to find the master musician, and rounding the corner there she is, staring at the volcano (no instruments with her so that she can verify her claim). She seduces Paul later and a few days later dies giving birth? While a naked cave dweller who shoots fire out of his eyes lurks around them. In the end Paul must save the world by sitting in a circular pool and outplay the crazy master musician on his musical instrument (dueling banjos anyone?).

Anyway, there you have it. Weird! A waste of an evening. The only reason you may want to watch this is to catch some glimpses of Suzan Crowley naked, its the only redeeming thing in here. Oh yes, and this is a horror movie, just fyi on that.

Rated UR. 84 minutes (1 hour 24 minutes). No profanity – very little dialog actually. Nudity – total female nudity and a naked man in the cave who shows everything, except that his artificially wrinkled skin is probably a skin suit so you may just be seeing fake junk – I don’t know, I didn’t look to make sure. Have at it if you want.

Wasn’t really sure about Triangle. The idea of a movie set in Bermuda has its appeal right about now! So I watched this while the white glow off the snow reflected into the room.

So, its a horror movie, well, supposed to be, wasn’t too much horror – it was more of an attempted clever who-done-it type full of twists and deja-vu moments. Melissa George is a single mother who has an autistic son and though she seems sweet she acts likes she’s stressed out and at her  limits. She’s accepted an offer to go sailing with some friends. While sailing around the winds die down and a storm kicks up capsizing their boat. A large ship passes by and picks them up. Only no one is on the boat – except a killer. As they go about exploring the ship and begin to realize what is going on it turns into a very Bermuda Triangley atmosphere and while seeing the same scenes from different angles you slowly begin to learn what’s going on. Don’t want to spoil it for you.

Bottom line, there are worse movies you could spend the evening watching. This will keep you at least entertained. Then again, there are better movies out there! If you choose to watch it, enjoy it, its ok.

Christopher Smith wrote and directed this film that also has Liam Hemsworth and Rachael Carpani.

Rated R. 98 minutes (1 hour 38 minutes). Profanity. Some bloody violence.

With all the snow coming in tonight and the weekend meaning I’ll be stuck at home all weekend I stopped at Blockbuster on the way home and hunted up something to see. I ended up with Marcus Dunstan’s The Collector.

This looked interesting, sort of, and was done by the people behind Saw IV, Saw V, and Saw VI. It isn’t as good as Saw. In Saw you saw twisted stuff, but at the end of it you sort of understood what was going on and maybe a glimmer of why. It was a morality thing. This movie, I’m really not sure why all this happened or what for. It just happened.

Basically a handyman is working a job and notices where the home owner (a jewelry guy) has a safe. He also happens for be a freelance safe-cracker at night. So he arranges to sell what he gets and goes back that night to get it. He knows the home owner has left town for two weeks. But he hasn’t. Someone has invaded the house, set up loads of traps and is torturing the family in the basement. The thief-handyman suddenly turns good guy and tries to save the family.

Insert tons of gore, blood, hurts, cuts, violence and sadistic torture and that’s pretty much the story. Some of you may really like this, but I’ll just say that it isn’t for many people. If you liked Saw because you felt it was clever, then stay away from this unless you truly love gory stuff. Honestly I watched an episode of the Sopranos afterwards and so my evening wasn’t a total waste.

Josh Stewart stars.

Rated R. 88 minutes (1 hour 28 minutes). Profanity. Nudity (topless female strippers and a almost sex scene with some great boobs – interrupted by a killer, yikes!) Gore and gratuitous blood. Not for the squeamish. I’m not especially squeamish and this amount of gore was almost too much for me.

Today I finally get this blog started. It was a New Year’s resolution to get this thing going again. And what a choice! I get home from work and Netflix has sent The Signal. It’s a horror film, though I didn’t get very scared or anxious, in fact I laughed a fair amount (feel kinda weird about that given all the brutality).

This is a film by three directors, David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry. I didn’t recognize any of the actors. One of them, Justin Welborn, is in Final Destination and one of the Ben 10 TV shows. Aside from that, nothing rang a bell…

So, what’s it about? It’s about a strange “signal” that has invaded the tv and radio and telephone lines. Whoever listens to it, apparently, gets infected as it were and decides it’s a good idea to kill people, or later sees some dead people and thinks they are alive and well. The most clever part to all this mistaken identity is how the filmmakers swapped out the real person with the character they thought they were talking with. Something blocks the character from the camera for a split second and when they come back into the frame it is someone else. Nice.

The other part that I noticed, and you know its odd when you believe you recognize some of the streets or buildings, is that the film takes place in a city called “Terminus”, but actually filmed in Atlanta. Terminus was one of Atlanta’s first names, changed to Marthasville, and then Atlanta. I guess it distracted me to actually see something on the screen that I’ve seen in real life and so I missed a little of the action.

All in all, not a horrid horror movie, lots of blood, etc, gory enough to earn the R rating, but I put this in the category of movies that I will not take time to watch again. There are better things out there so no repeat viewing for me.

One last thing before I go … Interesting that the first movie I end up blogging about is how that television/radio get into your head and make you think what they want you to. Turing me into mush! haha! Also that it takes place on New Year’s Eve, back when I was making the decision to do something creative on the Internet – if you can call this creative! Well, enjoy!

2007 – Rated R. 103 minutes (1 hour 43 minutes). Good deal of blood, gore, killing, profanity, and rear male nudity plus a glimpse of a bottomless female but you don’t see anything.