In a sense, I believe I may have been asking for it when I actually looked at a film from a group of young filmmakers who described their work as a parody of The Mist, shot while bored out of their minds at a church lock-in.  For those not familiar, basically a lock-in is an event hosted by a school or church or the like where kids are invited to spend the night in a building they wouldn’t ordinarily sleep in.  They’re locked in; no one can enter or leave during the proceedings.

But here’s the question–how did this improvised parody of The Mist turn out?  The answer?  Not nearly as bad as you’d think.

You expect a certain amount of low-rent from kids operating out of a church basement, but they actually knew enough about the source material (I get the feeling they’d seen The Mist upward of a couple dozen times at least) to make a pretty fair parody.  Look for stuff like: The Guy Who Won’t Speak And Yet Communicates, Fun With Subtitles, and my personal favorite, The Indecisive Monster.

Okay, so this is YouTube dreck at quite possibly its lowest but I’ll admit even I managed to get some good laughs out of it.  And since you’re seeing this four minute wonder for free anyway, what more can you ask for?

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this shoestring production a full six out of ten for actually trying, and occasionally succeeding.

It’s true, October is pretty much the scariest month of the year, and absolutely prime time for horror flicks.  For the industry,  Halloween is to horror movies what Thanksgiving is to turkey.  So it’s not a surprise that a horror flick might well be set in October, as is the case with the YouTube short, An October Night.

A young man left home alone decides to set up a clandestine party with his friends, but he quickly learns that leaving your door unlocked can be downright lethal.

It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s punchy, it’s actually pretty scary in some parts–sure, it’s a little bit derivative, but for three guys screwing around at someone’s house they’ve actually managed to ramp up the tension here.  They’ve done a fair job as far as that goes, so I’m out to give credit where credit is due.

There is a down side here, however–the ending.  It’s really very poorly put together and suggest more of the film stopping than an actual ending.  I almost wonder if some footage wasn’t cut due to file size concerns.

But still, being as this is about ninety percent of a good movie, the Screenhead Ten Scale hands it an eight out of ten for a surprisingly solid and incredibly low budget title.

Zombie returns to Haddonfield for this Dimension Films sequel that finds the murderous psychopath Michael Myers (once again played by Tyler Mane) out on the loose again.  You can watch the film clip here or go to MSN and see the HD version.  Either way, it’s too scary for me to watch.

‘Halloween II’ Exclusive Clip: “Call 911!”

This might be one of the biggest newsy bits we’ve had in quite some time, folks.  In fact, given who’s involved and what’s at stake this is a huge development.

The studio, at last report, is planning to move the movie Shutter Island from its original release date until sometime in 2010.  The reason given was due to the economy, but whether or not that’s the real case, no one knows.

Here’s the kicker: Shutter Island is a big name for a lot of reasons.  The first of which is its lead actor, Leonardo DiCaprio.  The second?  Its director is none other than the legendary Martin Scorsese. The first ever Martin Scorsese horror movie ever…got delayed a year.  Due to the economy.

Can anyone really imagine a Martin Scorsese movie tanking?  How about a Leo DiCaprio?  Put them both together and this should have spelled box office gold.  But why the delay?  Perhaps,  is there something worse than the economy afoot?  Is something seriously wrong with ShutterIsland?

Sadly, we don’t know.  But keep it here–you never know what we’ll find tomorrow.

You never think of Grandma’s Cookies as the type of thing that could hurt you.  And why would you?  Nothing represents hearth and home quite like Grandma and a fresh batch of cookies.

At least until Grandma’s Cookies, a short film that managed to take third at the New York Monster Mania Killer Short Sudden Death Competition, decided to take a run at subverting that grand old trope.

In this, grandma’s been working hard in the kitchen to produce a new cookie recipe in time for the grand bake-off competition…but what she comes up with?  Now that’s a scary prospect.

All I can say is, if this took third, I’d hate to see the half-assed piece of dreck that took fourth.  This short is godawful, nothing but.

Leave aside the OBVIOUS problems with the plot, like how exactly she manages to get ground meat to LOOK like a cookie instead of a patty of ground meat, and how no one notices that she’s basically serving up sausage patties instead of cookies, there’s still plenty wrong with this one.  There’s some horrible crossdressing going on, the dialogue is lousy and poorly delivered (I tell you, when someone says “Leave us. We’re already dead.” in the same tone of voice that you would use to recite a shopping list, you KNOW there’s a problem) and the effects are the lowest-budget sort of joke.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, in response, gives Grandma’s Cookies a gag-me-with-an-eggbeater one out of ten for failing on virtually every front.

The look and feel of The Wolfman is very good. It’s sharp and clear with just enough dark lighting to give the horrific feel in the movie.  I only hope that the scope of the tragic story comes through on the screen. Benicio Del Toro looks great as a quiet, simple nobleman who changes to a fierce beast.  Watch for Geraldine Chaplin, there is a quick shot of her in the trailer. I can’t wait to see her in the movie. Sir Anthony Hopkins looks as great as ever.

So you’d think a guy who’s done short horror films before might be able to edit wind noise out of his microphones when he’s doing a short film.  But that’s not the case in Behind Closed Doors–the question that remains is, how badly does this affect the enjoyability of the film?  Let’s check it out and see.

When a young lad by the name of Jim finds himself lost beyond all sense and reckoning (how he got lost in the first place is anyone’s guess), he’s left wandering the countryside looking for clues to where he is.  What he finds will be much, much worse than he bargained for.

Worse indeed! It’s only too bad that we have not ONE CLUE just what that something was.  In fact, it seems like Behind Closed Doors will refuse to tell us a LOT of things.  How’d Jim get this abjectly butt-lost in the first place?  What was it that was rattling the closet door?  It’s impossible to spoiler this short in any way because, despite the fact that I’ve just seen it, I have not one clue what actually happened.  All I saw was a string of events that suddenly stopped about five and a half minutes in.

The best part is, you won’t actually care about things like the wind noise because you’re entirely too busy trying to understand what you just watched.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives this thoroughly amateurish time waster a two out of ten.  Clearly, they tried, and it actually LOOKED pretty good, but they’ve got to do something about their narrative sense.

I believe we are at the final Dead Snow trailer because this one is for the DVD release and it is hilarious. For a horror film, I am quite surprised to see how funny these trailers can be with the hard rock music contrasting with the symphony orchestra. It’s actually uplifting.

Dead Snow has its own special way of showing us the Nazi as zombies — the Inglourious Basterds would’ve had a huge party in this movie.

If you are a horror fan, you’ll want to see this movie because I don’t think there is anything like Dead Snow.

I actually saw the original Mother’s Day a long time ago and thought it little more than a sludgy morass of torture and pointless brutality.

The Mother’s Day remake, however, may prove better, if for no other reason than Jaime King’s in it.  This time around, Jaime’s going to play a mother living with her child and her estranged husband.  Meanwhile, two brothers start a killing spree to impress their OWN mother, and Jaime’s family is right at ground zero of the lunatic brothers’ next target.

Jaime’s got a pretty nice horror pedigree, including bizarre horror flick Repo and genre-standard remake My Bloody Valentine 3-D, so she should have the necessary horror cred to pull this off.

This actually seems to be some improvement over the original Mother’s Day, in which the two brothers also did some kidnapping, humiliation and various other nasty stuff to their victims.

Every time…EVERY TIME!…I see something with Rob Zombie’s name on it I’m torn as to whether or not the appropriate response is to break down weeping or fly into a blind rage.

And I had that same horrible conflicted reaction tonight when I got a look at the disaster he’s going to make out of Halloween 2.  Seems there’s a trailer that no one’s really been using yet, and there’s a good reason for it.  It’s going to show, conclusively, the absolute HASH Zombie’s about to make out of one of the three biggest horror icons of the twentieth century.

It’s over here, if you want to take a look at it–keep your eye out for such horrible concepts as “Do As Mother Says, Jaso–uhhh…I mean, MICHAEL” and “Suddenly Doc Loomis Is A Self-Righteous Pedantic Moron Instead of a Self Loathing Hero”.

The worst of it was, as I watched that trailer, I was actually beginning to reconsider.  Maybe, just maybe, the Broken Clock Theory would spring in and save Rob Zombie’s wreck of a career.  And I was almost looking forward to see it when the last thirty seconds kicked in and shot that clear to hell.

All I know is, we’re gonna have a GRAND old time when the movie comes out.