Arachnophibia (1990)

As an arachnophobe myself this film always used to give the creeps. I'd always be looking around checking for spiders in the house after watching it.

Starring Jeff Daniels as a doctor who moves from the city to a small country town to take a job as the towns doctor. Soon after his arrival he learns that one of the locals was recently killed during a south American rain Forrest expedition, and the body has been returned home for the funeral - accompanied by a nasty hitchhiker.

The spider soon starts reproducing, and its offspring start killing the towns folk. After an elderly resident is killed, an exterminator is called in - Delbert McClintock (John Goodman).

Delbert is a comic relief of the film. He's a bubbling oaf who sees himself  as some kind of insect expert. He is soon accompanied by a professor and his assistant, who together try to prevent the spread of the infestation, and the search for the spider's nest. The film is a fun comedy creature flick, with colorful characters and a solid script.

The death scenes are really creepy and involve the spiders entering the bodies and draining the blood of their victims, and the biggest of the spiders is huge and give me the chills.

The only weakness in the film is the acting from some of the minor characters, and the special effects are looking a bit dated now. That said, Arachnophobia is a classic, and will remain one of my all time favorite b-movie horrors.

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Let Me In (2010)

I've been putting off watching Let Me In because I've always thought it to be an unnecessary remake. Adapted from the Swedish horror novel  Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, which was earlier adapted into a Swedish film of the same name. Let Me In is a vampire romance in which a young bullied boy befriends a vampire girl.

The mysterious girl, Abby, moves into the same apartment block as the little boy, Owen, and a their friendship begins. Abby has a carer, a hard-faced middle aged man, who kills people and drains their to feed her.

Local people begin to disappear and a detective begin investigating. Things eventually go wrong during one of the mans blood-letting expeditions, and to prevent exposing abbey and to prevent him being identified by the police, he burns his face off with acid. Abby is left alone with only one person she can confide in - her new friend Owen.

Though the film is similar to the Swedish film, there have been slight alterations made to the story, which is a good thing - no one wants to watch a carbon copy of the original film with the only difference being the language. The dark, dreary, melancholy atmosphere that made the original unique is present, and the chemistry between the Owen and Abby is perfect.

I personally still prefer Let The Right In, but there isn't much between the two films for me. Let Me In is an entertaining, well directed remake, and is probably the best horror remake since Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead; its also at the opposite end of the remake spectrum to the terrible Carrie.

I told you to get your hair cut..but you wouldn't listen!

This scene is a stomach churner - throat cutting scenes always go through me though. The claret is flowing throughout the film, there are some nice burn-gore scenes as well.

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Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)

This film picks up from where the last film left off, with clairvoyant,  Elise, stuck in a trance trying to free Josh Lambert from the other world, while her two assistants Tucker and Specs, and fellow clairvoyant, Carl, try to figure out how to bring them back.

The plot has just too many holes and was poorly put together. To be honest, I thought about turning it off a few times, it was just predictable and boring. The strange overuse of bright colors on the sets didn't add atmosphere, but rather made the film feel childish and unconvincing.

One of the few high points in the film is the scene where Carl tries to draw out the evil spirit that's possessing Josh Lambert, and the ensuing fight between Josh, Carl, Tucker and Specs.



The only scene I found really creepy or scary was the scene when the girl ran out of the boys closet, and started talking to him through the string and can. The acting from Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne was pretty good, as is the case in the other films they acted in together in. The special effects were good, just poorly used, as the films contained no big scares of any kind. If a third film is in the pipeline things are gonna have to improve, James Wan really dropped the ball with this one.

Come on James Wan you can do better than this!

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Big Ass Spider (2013)

Compared to the recent b-movie horrors released in the last few years - Big Ass Spider! is one of the better ones, with half decent CGI and some pretty good laughs along the way.

The film starts with a scene of apocalypse, with a gigantic spider destroying skyscrapers in downtown L.A. The only thing that stands in the way of the city being destroyed is Alex Mathis, an exterminator played by Greg "Heroes" Grunberg. After the premonition of destruction scene at the start, the film really starts when Alex Mathis is bitten by a spider while on a job. He's goes to the nearby hospital and has an injection of  anti-venom. Just as he is leaving the hospital, the fire alarm goes off..

The alarm was raised by a pathologist who claims to have been attacked by a huge spider that hatched out of corpse he was working on., Alex is called upon to hunt down the spider.

It soon becomes apparent that this is no ordinary spider, and the military soon arrive to quarantine the hospital. The spider gets bigger and bigger with the more people that it kills and soon escapes the hospital, and goes on a rampage around L.A, followed closely along the way by Alex Mathis and a security guard he met at the hospital.

During his attempt to kill the spider Alex meets an attractive blonde army Sergent - in fact all the women in this film are attractive and have big tits . The death scenes mostly evolve scantly clad women being crushed by the spider. The rest of the film is made up of: swimsuit models running about screaming with their tits bouncing around and cheesy one-liners are what make this film so ridiculous but at the same time so entertaining.

Big Ass Spider! is probably the best b-movie horror of the last five years. A quick popcorn action comedy that shouldn't be taken too seriously. 

Major Braxton Tanner: "Good God!"

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Carrie (2013)

The worst pile of stinking, poisonous sludge ever to be dredged up from the deepest, darkest depths of cinema - and that's being kind!

The director did nothing new with the source material: the film was a clone of the original, except with crap acting, dialogue, music, and I'm shocked that Julianne Moore had anything to do with this turd. The acting from most of the characters was awful, especially the cheerleader and jock.

Chloe Grace Moretz's performance was passable.. I cannot, however, find any real positives in this abomination. 
A short review is all this film deserves, as it is probably the worst horror remake ever made.

A bucket of blood and a few standard horror deaths.

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Phantoms (1998)

Part of the 90's teen horror fad, Phantoms is one of the best teen horrors released in that decade. Starring a young Ben Affleck,  Liev Schreiber, and Joanna Going. The film is set in a small mountain town in Colorado. 150 of the towns folk are dead and 350 are missing. Joanna Going and her sister return to the small town (their home town) to find the place deserted. They soon find Ben Affleck (the towns sheriff) and Liev Schreiber his deputy.

The group roam around the small town trying to figure out has happened to its population. The film reminds me a bit of The Andromeda Strain -- with the eery , dark atmosphere of the deserted town. Strange things start happening to the group of survivors, they start finding piles of jewelry that appear from no where, receive strange phone calls, and a giant bat-like creature attacks them. 

Eventually the army arrives, along with Peter O'Toole. O'Toole is a journalist and paranormal investigator of sorts, he believes the town is infected by an ancient evil for that has existed inside the earth for million of years . 

O'Tooles performance, as always, out classes the rest of the cast. Affleck is good as well, and Phantoms remains my favorite Affleck performance. The army send a team of scientists and marines in to try and kill the creature. Things soon go wrong and the creature starts to infect the scientists by injecting them with a  black oil like goo that turns them into pawns of the giant melevilent creature. 

The special effects are quiet good, with some decent CGI for the time. The script was original and the acting from all is very good (for a teen horror anyway) O'Toole eventually comes up with a scientific method of killing the creature. It's a race against time for the few remaining survivors to kill the creature before the it escapes the town and spreads.

A few gory moments here and there but nothing to write home about. The film is more atmospheric then an gore-fest.

 

 

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V/H/S 2 (2013)

Unlike previous horror anthologies like Creepshow and Trick 'r Treat ,V/H/S 2 fails to deliver on what was a good idea.

Found footage films are usually cheap, low budget affairs, and must be done right to have the desired affect; not many films have achieved this, with the exception of  REC, REC 2, The Blair Witch Project, and The Last Broadcast. V/H/S 2  takes found footage and anthology horror and puts the two together. The result is the horror equivalent of  "You've Been Framed".

The film is basically made up of four found footage shorts, the of which is a tale about a man who has an experimental eye implant that makes him see ghosts, which is all shot in the first person perspective of his eye implant. The hole thing feels like you're playing a survival horror video game, the ghosts look like the ghosts in games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill. The digital interference that keeps cutting into the display of his implant video, is cheap and video game looking. The film just follows him around his house trying to get away from the comically bad looking ghosts that aren't scary at all. Its just a really silly and boring film.

The second film is basically like a bad episode of  The Walking Dead, in which a man (conveniently wearing a helmet cam) sets out on a bike ride through the woods, and is suddenly attacked by a pack of zombies.  To cut a long story short,  he gets bitten, becomes a zombie, and runs around the woods infecting unsuspecting bikers and hikers before taking part in a blood bath at a camp site, where he and the pack of zombie tear apart a group of people celebrating a birthday party. Its all predictable, boring, and some of the acting is truly zombies-like.

This third film is about a team of journalists who go into a monastery school of some kind which is run by mad man. It turns out the loon and his followers are all devil worshipers, and intend to kill all of the journalists, besides a pregnant one, who they intend to use as a sacrifice so the devil.

I quite liked this one. Its the best episode in the film. The special effects were "ok" with some truly stomach churning moments. When the devil eventually surfaces and is let loose from the monastery, he takes chase after the only surviving journalist. When he finally catches up with him, the devil himself looks like a cheap donkey costume with horns on the head, its really comical. Overall though, this one wasn't bad at all.

The final short film, is set in a lake side house in which a group of middle-class teenagers are having a sleepover/party. The camera work is done by one of the kids as they document their exploits. They start playing pranks on each other during the night. During one such prank, a bright light suddenly engulfs the house -- coming from the direction of the lake. The house starts shacking, the lights flicker off, and then suddenly aliens with extremely long fingers burst into the house, and start terrorizing the group of teens. The aliens don't probe the idiot teens, but instead display their staggering ineptitude when it comes to kidnapping. They are within two feet of all of the group many times, but instead of grabbing or fingering them, they lightly stroke them and dance like homos. In the end no one gets fingered, the aliens go away and book some dancing lessons.

At the end of the day, V/H/S/2 is three poorly made low budget short films and one passable one. I hope the current surge of found footage films ends with this terrible example, because the fad is wearing a little thin. Don't be in a rush to see this one.

The NHS keeps getting worse..


Despite being mediocre overall, there are some great gore moments in this film, especially in the monastery episode. The zombie film also produced some good blood spurting and flesh eating moments as well. A solid four gore-bucket film.

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