The Bay (2012)

My first thoughts when I started watching The Bay were: "oh no, not another found footage film", which was justified considering how many bad found footage films have been made over the last 5 years.

If anything, The Bay is more original and interesting than the other found footage films. The story centers around a small town coastal town located next to an inland bay. The towns folk start falling victim to a mysterious illness, that causes huge boils to form on the skin.  The plot is split between 4 perspectives of the crisis. One is the found footage of a woman trapped on the island and she recounts how everything started and how she came to be trapped. The other cameras mainly focus on the hospital and a doctor there who keeps in touch the local CDC office - keeping survivors to date on the situation.

The other storyline centers upon a family who leave the island on a boat just before the crisis starts who are unaware of the mayhem ensuing on the island behind them. The family return towards the end of the film to discover the town littered with dead bodies.

I like how the film has multiple focus points and storylines which is what makes it unique among found footage films - which usually have a single camera in one location. The special effects were good, with the boils on the peoples skins looking realistic and disgusting.

The flicking the camera  from location to location does make the film seem slightly disjointed at times, and the filming style tends to be more documentary-like rather then horror found footage style. That being said, not a bad effort, not brilliant, but one of the better found footage films of recent years. 

 

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Raze (2014)

Raze is an extreme low budget horror with plenty of over-the-top violence. The film begins with Rachel Nichols being released from a cell in an underground prison. She meets another women in the brightly lit red corridor. The pair soon find themselves in a stone walled circle and it becomes obvious to them both what this area is for - its a fighting ring.

The other women, Sabrina (Zoe Bell), launches a vicious attack on Rachel Nichols, knocking here to the ground and hitting her with punch after punch until her face is nothing more then a bloody mush. The scene is very disturbing especially the wet pounding noises of the punches.

The fact that the best a most well known actress in the film dies within the first 5 minutes, is the biggest let down and most ridiculous part of the film. The rest of the film basically involves scene after scene of the same extreme fight violence, in which Sabrina must fight against the   many other imprisoned woman.

Their captures tell them that the last remaining women left alive in this gruesome fight tournament will be set free. The film is basically one gory fight after another with little meaningful dialogue or character development in between. If pure violence and gore is your thing then this is the film for you. Overall though Raze is a poor effort with a completely predictable ending.

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You're Next (2013)

You're Next is part of the "Mumblegore" sub-genre of low budget indie horror. Recent additions to this increasing popular sub-genre are House of  the Devil , The Innkeepers and VHS. The best way to describe this "Mumblegore" (ridiculous name) is a mix or art house  and old school horror.

Anyway lets talk about the film. The Davison Family decide to have a family reunion at their huge mansion in the country. Tension run high among the siblings and arguments soon breakout during the lavish banquet the family gather for in dining room in the evening.

The stormy reunion is soon interrupted when a group of men wearing animal masks break into the house and start terrorising the family. The masks look really creepy and include a Lamb,Wolf and a Fox.

As the Davison family clan gets picked off one by one by the intruders, one of the family decides to fight back; Erin, the wife of one of the families son's who apparently grew up on a Survivalist Compound (convenient), puts her survivalist skills to use using survival tactics, and setting nasty traps for the masked killers.

When only a few of family remain, a huge plot twist is revealed, at twist that makes Erin's survival even more difficult. The the bloody deaths that Erin inflicts on the intruders are original and grizzly, the best of which involves a food blender being stuck into a mans head.

I loved the whole feel of this film. It was perfectly paced with lots of tension, creepy scenes and atmosphere. Ti West's is quickly becoming one of my favorite horror directors, and You're Next is his best effort so far. Sharni Vinson's performance as the final girl, Erin, was superb, as were the performce from the rest of the mostly unknown cast. 

You're Next is a well written violent gore-fest with some truly memorable kills involving axes, nails, meat tenderizers and of course the infamous food blender scene, and is one of may all-time  favorite survival horrors.

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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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