Dir: David Bruckner / Dan Bush / Jacob Gentry
A signal is sent across cell phones, radios and TVs that makes people go crazy and kill. Or does it? The problem is in knowing who's crazy and who isn't. Do you kill the person next to you because they're crazy and, if so, does that make YOU crazy? This is the eternal dilemma faced by all the characters in this wickedly original paranoid headfuck movie. Evoking early Cronenberg, early Romero and David Lynch at his finest, "The Signal" is an anarchic, stylish and deeply disturbing shock to the system. I don't want to say too much more, for fear of giving away too many of the (continual) surprises in the screenplay, but just go see this. Its raw brutality is made into a thing of beauty by the intelligence with which it's handled. It's amped-up Theatre Of The Absurd; I was laughing throughout a good half of it, yet still came away feeling frightened and shaken. When people talk about evoking the spirit of 70s horror, it's usually just an excuse to make something seedy. "The Signal" actually takes the true spirit of 70s horror and makes a progressive and smart movie that's also extreme and unpleasant. It's even got a Matt Skiba song in it. Repeatedly. Awesome, awesome, awesome. One of the best horror films of the decade. ****
Showing posts with label Virus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Virus. Show all posts
Sunday, 26 August 2007
Wednesday, 18 April 2007
Nightmare City (1980)
Dir: Umberto Lenzi
Truly atrocious Italian zombie fare that hits new lows even for a subgenre reknowned for them. I love, say, Fulci's trash as much as the next guy but Lenzi's shot at the formula is nothing short of embarrassing. A winged Trojan horse full of zombies arrives at a city airport in the form of an unmarked plane. They burst out, running, jumping and using weapons to trash their rather too athletic way through the population. The zombies just look like people in mud packs; their faces are made-up but not their necks or arms, although these other things are visible beneath their cheap shirts and dodgy cardigans. They move way too fast (I HATE running zombies - HATE HATE HATE) and there's just no story or characters or, well, anything to tie together all the scenes of incoherent, barely watchable mayhem. Attempts are made to intersperse the dime store gore with Mel Ferrer camping about in an army uniform, but this is not of interest to the sane. The ending - an unapologetic "it was just a dream" scam - should be illegal. Dull, dull, dull. EL BOMBA!
Truly atrocious Italian zombie fare that hits new lows even for a subgenre reknowned for them. I love, say, Fulci's trash as much as the next guy but Lenzi's shot at the formula is nothing short of embarrassing. A winged Trojan horse full of zombies arrives at a city airport in the form of an unmarked plane. They burst out, running, jumping and using weapons to trash their rather too athletic way through the population. The zombies just look like people in mud packs; their faces are made-up but not their necks or arms, although these other things are visible beneath their cheap shirts and dodgy cardigans. They move way too fast (I HATE running zombies - HATE HATE HATE) and there's just no story or characters or, well, anything to tie together all the scenes of incoherent, barely watchable mayhem. Attempts are made to intersperse the dime store gore with Mel Ferrer camping about in an army uniform, but this is not of interest to the sane. The ending - an unapologetic "it was just a dream" scam - should be illegal. Dull, dull, dull. EL BOMBA!
Sunday, 5 November 2006
Infection (2004)
Dir: Masayuki Ochiai
Messy in several senses of the phrase, this deeply strange Japanese film is set in the worst hospital ever. The doctors and nurses complain about being short-staffed, but seem to have no time management skills whatsoever. A patient who falls over demands the attention of at least two or three of them and, when another is accidentally killed, almost the entire staff (bar the only vaguely capable doctor who is, of course, sleeping) run around panicking before deciding to slowly cook the body in an empty ward (and then they complain about there being no bed space!). This unintentionally hilarious nonsense (think "Scrubs" on mogadon) ensues for some time before the infection in the title hits and everyone starts turning to green goo and bursting. But fear not, because an army of about five hundred increasingly incoherent twist endings is on hand to fix things and make it all right. Maybe. *
Messy in several senses of the phrase, this deeply strange Japanese film is set in the worst hospital ever. The doctors and nurses complain about being short-staffed, but seem to have no time management skills whatsoever. A patient who falls over demands the attention of at least two or three of them and, when another is accidentally killed, almost the entire staff (bar the only vaguely capable doctor who is, of course, sleeping) run around panicking before deciding to slowly cook the body in an empty ward (and then they complain about there being no bed space!). This unintentionally hilarious nonsense (think "Scrubs" on mogadon) ensues for some time before the infection in the title hits and everyone starts turning to green goo and bursting. But fear not, because an army of about five hundred increasingly incoherent twist endings is on hand to fix things and make it all right. Maybe. *
Sunday, 20 August 2006
The Crazies (1973)
Dir: George A. Romero
A plane carrying a biological weapon crashes near a Pennsylvania town, releasing a highly contagious virus into the water supply. Next thing you know, the inhabitants have gone bonkers and are killing one another, setting fire to their houses and having sex with their kinfolk. Much like Romero's zombie films, the plot depicts a fight for survival against not only the crazies, but also the shoot-to-kill military goons out to control the epidemic by any means necessary. The script is characteristically paranoid and loaded with angry allegory but, unfortunately, it never quite engaged me and just felt a bit uninvolving and loosely structured. There's frenetic editing, a lot of brutal action and explosions, but it still drags. I'll give it a bonus point for having so much of Lynn Lowry in it, but otherwise this is fairly average by Romero standards. **
A plane carrying a biological weapon crashes near a Pennsylvania town, releasing a highly contagious virus into the water supply. Next thing you know, the inhabitants have gone bonkers and are killing one another, setting fire to their houses and having sex with their kinfolk. Much like Romero's zombie films, the plot depicts a fight for survival against not only the crazies, but also the shoot-to-kill military goons out to control the epidemic by any means necessary. The script is characteristically paranoid and loaded with angry allegory but, unfortunately, it never quite engaged me and just felt a bit uninvolving and loosely structured. There's frenetic editing, a lot of brutal action and explosions, but it still drags. I'll give it a bonus point for having so much of Lynn Lowry in it, but otherwise this is fairly average by Romero standards. **
Monday, 15 May 2006
The Ravaged House (2004)
Dir: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Another Hideshi Hino adaptation from those nice folk over at Pony Canyon Distribution. This one is set in rural Japan and tells of a boy who, somewhat inexplicably, contracts a horrible flesh-eating disease that eventually turns him into a bulbous, worm-like lump of drippy stuff. As usual with Hino, the main story's focus is a gradual destruction of the human body but unlike, say, "Mermaid in a Manhole", the onscreen grue is kept to a minimum, occuring mostly beneath bandages here. Instead, Kazuyoshi Kumakari's sympathetic screenplay turns the attention to the reactions of the boy's family and his fellow villagers. Although mildly interesting, this never develops far enough to fully arrest the viewer which is a pity since the direction here is fantastic. The atmosphere is stark and eerie - reminiscent of Shindô's "Onibaba" or "Kuroneko" - and the photography is some of the most convincing Digital Video stuff I've ever seen. It's great to see that films that look this good can be made on such a low budget but I just wish they could've done a bit more with the story. **1/2
Another Hideshi Hino adaptation from those nice folk over at Pony Canyon Distribution. This one is set in rural Japan and tells of a boy who, somewhat inexplicably, contracts a horrible flesh-eating disease that eventually turns him into a bulbous, worm-like lump of drippy stuff. As usual with Hino, the main story's focus is a gradual destruction of the human body but unlike, say, "Mermaid in a Manhole", the onscreen grue is kept to a minimum, occuring mostly beneath bandages here. Instead, Kazuyoshi Kumakari's sympathetic screenplay turns the attention to the reactions of the boy's family and his fellow villagers. Although mildly interesting, this never develops far enough to fully arrest the viewer which is a pity since the direction here is fantastic. The atmosphere is stark and eerie - reminiscent of Shindô's "Onibaba" or "Kuroneko" - and the photography is some of the most convincing Digital Video stuff I've ever seen. It's great to see that films that look this good can be made on such a low budget but I just wish they could've done a bit more with the story. **1/2
Saturday, 15 April 2006
Rabid (1977)
Dir: David Cronenberg
Inane and tedious shocker from Cronenberg's early years that fails to ignite in the way his previous effort (the claustrophobic and perverse "Shivers") did. Marilyn Chambers plays a girl who gets injured in a motorcycle accident and goes under the knife for an experimental skin graft. It goes wrong and (get ready for this), next thing you know, she has this weird, dripping red penis/vagina thing with a spike on the end growing out of her armpit. To makes things worse, it wants to go stabby-stabby on people and, when it does, they turn them into green-faced, foamy-mouthed pseudo-zombies who run around chewing on all and sundry. The government gets involved, men in white suits appear and, dear Lord, for a movie that's supposed to be about an epidemic, Cronenberg completely fails to generate any suspense or urgency out of this disastruous concept. To make it harder on the viewer, we have to suffer seemingly endless encounters between Chambers and various people whom she hugs to death (she has to hug them for her armpit pet to latch onto them) which is, frankly, too ludicrous for my poor eyes to bear. "Rabid" is by far the weakest of all Cronenberg's genre efforts and I'm struggling to think of a single nice thing to say about it. Thank God he went on to make "The Brood" straight afterwards. *
Inane and tedious shocker from Cronenberg's early years that fails to ignite in the way his previous effort (the claustrophobic and perverse "Shivers") did. Marilyn Chambers plays a girl who gets injured in a motorcycle accident and goes under the knife for an experimental skin graft. It goes wrong and (get ready for this), next thing you know, she has this weird, dripping red penis/vagina thing with a spike on the end growing out of her armpit. To makes things worse, it wants to go stabby-stabby on people and, when it does, they turn them into green-faced, foamy-mouthed pseudo-zombies who run around chewing on all and sundry. The government gets involved, men in white suits appear and, dear Lord, for a movie that's supposed to be about an epidemic, Cronenberg completely fails to generate any suspense or urgency out of this disastruous concept. To make it harder on the viewer, we have to suffer seemingly endless encounters between Chambers and various people whom she hugs to death (she has to hug them for her armpit pet to latch onto them) which is, frankly, too ludicrous for my poor eyes to bear. "Rabid" is by far the weakest of all Cronenberg's genre efforts and I'm struggling to think of a single nice thing to say about it. Thank God he went on to make "The Brood" straight afterwards. *
Tuesday, 28 March 2006
Shivers (1975)
Dir: David Cronenberg
Canadian auteur David Cronenberg's first 'proper' feature film is a suitably nasty precursor of things to come from the king of 'venereal horror'. The basic premise is that a man-made, fast-breeding parasite (it looks like a phallic turd!) invades an all-mod-cons apartment block and infects its way through the residents, turning them into sex-crazed zombie lunatics. What sounds like typical B-Grade grindhouse fare, archetypal of the era, is elevated by Cronenberg's remarkable screenplay. The film plays like a hyper-paranoid Freudian nightmare, a taboo-trashing tornado of unpleasantry and obsession quite unlike anything else around at the time. As horror debuts go, "Shivers" is one of the most memorable, subversive and icily atmosphere I can think of. There's also an amazing shot, towards the end, of Lynn Lowry ascending from the water that must rank amongst my favourites of all-time for being so simultaneously creepy, dangerous and erotic. Recommended. ***
Canadian auteur David Cronenberg's first 'proper' feature film is a suitably nasty precursor of things to come from the king of 'venereal horror'. The basic premise is that a man-made, fast-breeding parasite (it looks like a phallic turd!) invades an all-mod-cons apartment block and infects its way through the residents, turning them into sex-crazed zombie lunatics. What sounds like typical B-Grade grindhouse fare, archetypal of the era, is elevated by Cronenberg's remarkable screenplay. The film plays like a hyper-paranoid Freudian nightmare, a taboo-trashing tornado of unpleasantry and obsession quite unlike anything else around at the time. As horror debuts go, "Shivers" is one of the most memorable, subversive and icily atmosphere I can think of. There's also an amazing shot, towards the end, of Lynn Lowry ascending from the water that must rank amongst my favourites of all-time for being so simultaneously creepy, dangerous and erotic. Recommended. ***
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