It’s a dark sign when a movie’s heroine is unsympathetic, and that’s just what we’re going to get with Vlog. But the dark sign will prove overwhelmed by some truly impressive twists and turns. Plus, Vlog is so new you won’t even be able to find it in video stores until next Tuesday, so brace yourselves, because this is going to be interesting. The folks out at Anchor Bay sent a copy over for us ahead of release, and the end result is going to be interesting to say the least.

Vlog follows Brooke Marks, video blogger–or vlogger, if you prefer–who’s got a pretty nasty stalker problem. See, Brooke’s made a lot of enemies with her vlog–she sort of got into this “queen of mean” vibe and never let it go. And as a result, someone significantly worse that Brooke decided he was going to go on a rampage, targeting five people who showed up on her various vlogs. But there’s more going on here than you might initially think.

See, the weird part is, I mean that. This movie has a run time of around seventy minutes. It’s going to be quick and very, very dirty. In, out, blam. And that means that not a single minute can be wasted. Thankfully, not a single minute is. It’s a little rough, so for those of you who don’t like the gore, you may want to stay away. There will be a lot of splatter going on here, but most of it is quite relevant to the plot. Plot-relevant splatter is about the same as plot-relevant nudity; not just some titillation, but a genuine component of story telling.

The last ten minutes will have about three or four different twists to them that should really catch you by surprise. And what’s really great about this movie is that you go in thinking its some kind of “message movie” like Megan Is Missing was. Great, somebody with a soapbox wants to tell the kids at home not to put up personal information online. But then what you’ve got turns out to be significantly more than that, and the surprise alone makes Vlog well worth the watching.

Granted, repeat viewings may not work out too well here, given that once you know the twist there’s not much more of a surprise to it, but still, that first watch should be pretty awesome in its own right.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Vlog a full ten out of ten for putting on a short sharp shocker of a production and doing a whole lot with very little.

You know, I love it when the folks out at Lions Gate ship over stuff that got its start on SyFy. They’ve made some pretty peachy monster movies so far, and while none of them will ever be mistaken for a really good movie, there’s nothing like a good monster movie to get the heart pumping and the popcorn munching. Get some friends together and some daquiris and you’ve got a Friday! And that’s just what we’ll get with Goblin, a SyFy Channel Original Movie that’s getting the video release treatment.

Goblin takes us out to Hollow Glen, where a group of villagers just celebrated Halloween by tossing a baby into a fire. Of course, the problem comes in when the baby’s mother, who turns out to be a witch, puts a heavy-duty death curse on the town, summoning up the titular goblin from the fire that her baby was chucked into. The goblin’s purpose? To slaughter every infant in the immediate vicinity. Fast forward just shy of a couple hundred years to the present era, where the goblin’s curse isn’t  as defunct as some might have thought.

This is some incredible cliche, right down to the crazy old man who gives away the entire plot in the first ten minutes. And yet, at the same time, it’s this incredible devotion to the cliche that makes this one a seriously entertaining popcorn muncher. And for all the cliches, there are still some pretty good scares in here. We’re talking about a monster that essentially flies around and is pretty much impervious to small arms fire and the like but for one whole day. It eats babies and kills whatever gets between it and a baby. The thing is not exactly a sympathetic character. If anything it’s a low-rent version of The Creeper from the Jeepers Creepers franchise except it doesn’t make things out of corpses. It just makes a lot of corpses.

The means to kill the Goblin is pure on horror movie logic, that is to say, there is none, but it doesn’t particularly matter because you’re too busy enjoying the various fight scenes. Scenery chewing, irrational behavior…it really doesn’t matter. You knew going in this wasn’t going to be a good movie, but in this case, when it gives up on good, it instead becomes fun. And fun is good enough for most anyone.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Goblin a seven out of ten for sacrificing good on the altar of fun, and the end result is a surprisingly watchable if mind-bogglingly stupid affair.

I have a DVD copy of Scream 4 to give away.

The horror movie is directed by Wes Craven and stars David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Anthony Anderson, Shenae Grimes and Lucy Hale.

The movie will hit the streets on October 4, 2011. The movie follows Sidney Prescott (Campbell), now the author of a self-help book, who returns home to Woodsboro on the last stop of her book tour. There she reconnects with Sheriff Dewey (Arquette) and Gale (Cox), who are now married, as well as her cousin Jill (Roberts).

Unfortunately Sidney’s appearance also brings about the return of Ghost Face, putting Sidney, Gale, and Dewey, along with Jill, her friends (Panettiere, Culkin) and the whole town of Woodsboro in danger.

Here’s what the critics have to say about Scream 4: “Pure genius.” (Richard Roeper, RichardRoeper.com) “The Best ‘Scream’ since the original! Funny, clever and scary as hell.” (Dan Jewel, Life & Style Weekly) “Full of surprises!” (Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald)

To enter, post your name and I will pick the winner October 4, 2011.

It’s Dawn of the Dead meets High Noon in the bloody, action-packed film The Dead and the Damned, on DVD wherever they are sold.

Hot on the trail of a renegade Apache warrior, gun-slinging bounty hunter Mortimer passes through an 1849 California gold rush town, where local miners direct him into the mountains to track his prey.

Following a ferocious battle, Mortimer triumphantly returns to town with his Indian captive in shackles … only to find themselves surrounded by a ravenous horde of the undead. Now the two enemies must band together if they are to escape the horrors of The Dead and the Damned!

The movie sounds like the perfect feature to be watching during the Halloween season. I just hope it is not too scary.

To enter the giveaway, post your name and we will pick the winner September 30, 2011.

We’ve seen a lot of movies involving costumed serial killers over the years, but one that’s going to take a real run at the brass ring as far as that standard goes is Medium Raw: Night of the Wolf. The folks out at Anchor Bay sent a copy for me to review, and it’s going to certainly be something. The something in question is

Medium Raw: Night of the Wolf follows a serial killer known as The Wolf due to his propensity to wear a spiked helmet that looks like nothing so much as a wolf’s jaws. His murderous ways caught up with him, though, and The Wolf was sentenced to life in a maximum security asylum in the grandest Arkham tradition. A massive power failure strikes the prison, and unlocks all the cell doors. Now the inmates are running the asylum, out for blood and vengeance on their keepers, while The Wolf once again prowls.

Sound interesting? Sure it does. We’ve read Batman comics that start like this. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that Parker’s Asylum, the place where the movie is set, looks every inch like an Arkham simulacrum, right down to the aging construction, the manor-house resemblance, and the ultra-secure levels containing some really homicidal characters. For crying out loud, one guy looks almost exactly like Bane, only without the Venom implants.

But sadly, it doesn’t exactly live up to its promises, at least not in the early going. See, this movie has a run time of about two hours. And the first hour or so is going to be almost painfully slow. They’re clearly taking their time about things, setting up for a real Sunday punch, or so you hope. And while there is an absolutely terrific moment toward the end of the first hour, the second hour doesn’t quite have the punch you’d expect of a movie that’s supposed to be about a building full of homicidal sociopaths. Sure, there are some interesting segments, like a cannibal lovingly describing her craft to her psychologist, whom she’s holding hostage at knifepoint. But still, this is surprisingly dull stuff for a movie that should be an absolute horror-action frenzy of a film.

It’s hard to completely revile this one, though, because there are all these lovely bits in it, like silver coins strewn across a great sandy beach, that improve the whole nicely. A twist here, a joke there, all the best stuff. But they’re interspersed in a largely talentless and wholly lacking presentation that leaves me a bit cold.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Medium Raw: Night of the Wolf a medium-good six out of ten. The whole is significantly worse than the sum of its parts, and while there are some little bits of good in here, they can’t overwhelm the overall shoddiness of the presentation.

Well, folks, it took a lot longer than normal, but we’re finally closing in on the very end of the After Dark Originals block for 2011. And today we’ve got a movie that will prove to not be the Horrorfest dog: 51, the second to last of the series.

51 takes us out to pretty much where you’d expect to go, Area 51. And this time around, the government has decided that enough was enough vis a vis all the conspiracy theories and assorted whatnot coming out of the mysterious hunk of Nevada ground, and thus lets in some journalists to do an investigation on what all’s down there. Of course, this being the government, it’s what they’re not showing that you have to be careful of. And in Area 51, what they’re showing may be spectacular, but the three aliens camped out there may be even more amazing…and even more deadly.

51 actually first made its appearance into a wider market on SyFy, making this one of those incredibly rare birds, a SyFy Channel Original Movie that turned out to be extremely watchable. 51 is, if nothing else, very watchable. Sure, it’s not without its flaws: those aliens I mentioned aren’t going to be super well explained, for one, but the end result will still be highly entertaining. It’s a strange sort of title, as we’ll be getting science fiction intermingled with a good old fashioned monster movie (which by itself is something of a rarity as far as the After Dark Horrorfest goes; there have really only been a few full-on monster movies from the Horrorfest, or their Originals derivatives) with a little bit of humor and a few good twists tossed in for variety. When you take all those disparate facets and intermingle them as successfully as 51 has, well, it’s hard to call it anything but a truly impressive piece of work.

51 may not be one of the best in the After Dark Originals lineup, but it’s definitely not the dog of the set. And with only one left, the one I’ve been looking forward to since I first heard about it (the zombie romp Re-Kill), it’s safe to say that we’ve found our dog and the zombie monster movie riot yet to come won’t be it either.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives 51 an eight out of ten–it’s not without its faults, but it’s still a fun, entertaining monster movie with a whole lot of extras to it that make it a much better package than its plotline implies it should be. It’s probably one of the best SyFy Channel Original Movies you’ve ever seen to boot, and that’s enough to make this well worth your time.

We’ve got another one the folks out at Anchor Bay sent over, and it’s so new you’re not going to find it in stores until you get up tomorrow morning. It’s called A Horrible Way To Die, and it’s going to put a lot out there. But can it live up to its vicious little title? We’re going to have a look and see if this is one for you to check out, or pass up.

A Horrible Way To Die follows a murderer who’s just broken out of prison with plans to resume the killing spree that landed him in prison in the first place. His first stop, though, is at his former girlfriend’s house. A recovering alcoholic trying to get her life back in order, complete with a new town and a new boyfriend, the last thing she needs is having the past dredged up, especially when that particular dose of past is a homicidal lunatic of an ex-boyfriend. And it only gets worse when said homicidal lunatic launches off on a new, little killing spree in a bid to find her.

Kind of the worst nightmare for every woman on Earth sort of scenario, isn’t it, folks?

The thing about A Horrible Way To Die is that there really won’t be a whole lot of people doing just that: dying. Oh, there will be a couple deaths, of course, and they won’t be pretty. But A Horrible Way To Die will be jam-packed with foreboding. This thing makes chilling seem like an understatement, an understatement so gross that it’s almost an insult. It’s a bit slow, though you might do better to call it deliberate, in its pacing, but even that just adds to the general sense of foreboding that’s shot through this thing like no tomorrow.

Oh, and by the end of the whole thing, you’re going to get treated to this rather big surprise, that it turns out they’ll be alluding to throughout the whole movie. That may be the best part: when you can look back on the whole thing and see this much larger plot, that was carefully hidden until the very last moments of the movie when it all comes together, well, that’s a reward. And not many movies reward the viewer the way this one does.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this one a full ten out of ten and says it’s well worth a buy. A Horrible Way To Die is not just a good watch, it’s a good watch a couple times just to make sure you caught everything.

We have a winner for this awesome, wild giveaway package for Shark Night 3D.

The winner is Sam Armstrong, who says, “future winner?”  I guess so.  Relativity’s upcoming film Shark Night 3D, which is directed by David R. Ellis (Snakes on a Plane), and stars Sara Paxton (Superhero Movie, Last House on the Left), Dustin Milligan (“90210,” Slither), Chris Carmack (“The O.C.”), Joel David Moore (Avatar) and Katharine McPhee (The House Bunny).

In celebration of the release of Shark Night 3D, this is what Sam Armstrong won:

• $25.00 iTunes Gift Card
• Shark Fin Ice Tray
• Shark Night 3D Keychain
• Shark Night 3D Pint Glass
• Shark Night 3D T-Shirt
• Shark Night 3D Water Gun

Did anyone see the movie this weekend? What did you think?

READ ON »

The folks out at E One sent out a little something interesting, and it’s called Bio-Dead. Now I’ve always been fond of post-Apocalypse movies, and zombie movies, and coupling the two together is often fun, but would this one go like my great classic Romero favorites?

Bio-Dead assumes a really rather limited apocalypse in a place now called the Zone, but was formerly known as Southern California, a popular target for things like this. Anyway, a bunch of terrorists managed to lay hands on something called an “experimental Category A” toxin, which they promptly dumped into the air over SoCal. Four thousand square miles and twelve million dead later, the government sends a team in–apparently both FEMA and the CDC are “under-equipped” to cordon off what is likely the Los Angeles area (and they are; but no one considered the National Guard’s existence in all this. But I digress.) so the government turns to the Eustace-Millard Corporation, who in turn takes over cleanup and documentation.

Bio-Dead looks like the kind of horror movies I used to watch on VHS back when I was fifteen. It’s got the same oddly grainy quality to the video that a lot of them did, and puts me oddly in mind of George Romero’s original iteration of The Crazies. But in this case, Bio-Dead doesn’t so much refer to zombies, as you’d think (as I certainly thought when I went in, as indicated in the above) and is more about ghosts.

It’s a little slow in the early going, which is especially egregious given that the movie itself only lasts a whopping 83 minutes, but it does pick up pretty nicely. Eventually you come to realize just what it is you’re looking at, and you can’t help but smile to know you’re watching a post-Apocalyptic haunted house movie, and the combination proves to be a delightful idea that’s less than properly executed. It’s a clearly low-budget sort of affair, but at the same time, it’s so thoroughly unique that it can’t help but at least be somewhat satisfying.

So if you’re tired of the same old sludge Hollywood is continually churning out, then you might want to give Bio-Dead a try, a taste of something different and truly unusual.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives the relatively original but improperly executed Bio-Dead a seven out of ten for give it the old college try, yet not quite being able to pull it off. A good try, nonetheless, and well worth a look, but probably not the best thing you’ve seen lately.

This is a real treat for me, folks–the crew out at Anchor Bay sent over a copy of Bereavement for me to review, and this is out to be a slasher movie on par with any other. Will it manage to outdo the others? Or will the followup to Malevolence prove to not be a match for the rest of the field.

Bereavement takes us back to 1989–more on that in a minute–where a six year old boy has just been abducted by a stranger. The stranger in question is a serial killer with a taste for teenage girls. But then, why take a six year old boy? Simple…the six year old is set to be the serial killer’s protege, and as such, the killer teaches the boy everything he knows over the span of the next five years. Meanwhile, a teenage girl whose parents have recently died arrives at her uncle’s farm, where she discovers the now eleven year old boy and the serial killer who’s been training him to murder. But will the girl survive her discovery? Or will she live only long enough to regret it?

Yes, that’s right: Bereavement is no sequel, it’s a prequel to one of the better slasher movies you’ll see of late, Malevolence. Sadly, Bereavement can’t keep up, especially in the early goings as most of the time it’s either screaming from captive girls or horrifyingly glib bits of serial killer logic, which as we all know from watching horror movies, tends to only make sense to serial killers.

In fact, there’s a lot of strange stuff going on here, and a lot of it is rather creepy as opposed to scary. Serial killer logic fades in and out, watching a ten year old get trained to be a serial killer is preposterous and horrifying, bu tat the same time, we know what this is setting up. And that’s what Bereavement is all about: setting up. So if you’re bored to tears by this, as I was for most of it (not to mention gravely disappointed by it all), then just remember, all this is going toward getting all the ducks in the row for Malevolence. Oh, sure, the ending will be packed with killing and mayhem, but this almost feels tacked on by comparison. The rest of the movie had virtually nothing scary to it. Anything that might have been scary was too glib to bother with and felt more like torture porn than anything.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Bereavement a six out of ten, not so much for what it is, rather for what it represents. This is the start of something much larger and much more impressive, so viewed in that light, Anchor Bay’s got a winner here. But aside from that, it’s nowhere near as good as its predecessor.