A trip to the snow becomes a horror vacation for a group of college students. Nazi zombies cause considerable hardship that is bloody frightening. 

The limited theatrical release is June 12, 2009.  Reportedl, a VOD release is occuring on the same day for those who rather watch the scary movie at home.

Dead Snow is a ticklish horror movie. I posted the original trailer some time ago when I found it on Twitch. If you want to compare trailers, click here for the original.  Dead Snow has a unique way to depict the Nazi era — the Inglourious Basterds would’ve had a field day in this movie.

Pandorum is a science fiction horror movie that seems to have come from nowhere and is now the talk of the Internet.  Poster number two is much better than the previous posters that had a rather horrific look to them.  You can see the trailer by clicking on the poster.

The poster is sharp with horrific ideas coming at you.  Final Destination opens in theaters everywhere August 14, 2009.

Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich), an adventurous young couple, celebrate their honeymoon by backpacking to the most beautiful, and remote, beaches in Hawaii.  They have found paradise as they hike into the wild, secluded trails.  

A horrifying murder of another newlywed couple on the island, Cliff and Cydney question whether they should turn back. 

They join up with two other couples, and things begin to go terrifyingly wrong.  Far from civilization or rescue, things begin to look like a threat and nobody can be trusted.  Paradise becomes helter-skelter as a vicious battle for survival begins.

Being a movie reviewer, especially one who is a horror film expert besides by sheer dint of having seen a number of  titles sufficiently large that I’ve lost count, allows you to see some of the worst villains Hollywood can dream up.  Monsters straight out of hell itself and from everywhere in between—even a few sent from heaven!  But out of the many, many such evildoers that I’ve seen in my day, there are precious few who can compare to the sheer insensate evil that was Albert Fish.

So when I heard about The Gray Man, a movie about him, I knew it was going to be an interesting ride, one way or another.

Indeed, that’s what The Gray Man is all about—in 1928, a ten year old little girl by the name of Grace Budd was kidnapped, last seen in the company of a kindly old grandfather figure by the name of Albert Fish.  Six years later, authorities arrest Fish for his role in the kidnapping…but what else they’ll discover is beyond anything they could have imagined.

This is a man who was so evil that he wrote a series of anonymous letters, detailing his crimes, and sent them to newspapers.  This is a man so spectacularly evil by human standards that one of his letters detailed a recipe.  The recipe was for “roasted child ass”.  It involved onions and carrots.

Watching this admittedly dramatized piece about the life of a man whose evil was downright shocking by any standard is at once difficult and compelling.  Getting a look at his family life is also a shocker, as nothing I had ever seen before focused on that angle.  It was a surprise to see these different angles, and they added to the whole thing with a certain depth and clarity that really made this interesting.

A word about actor Patrick Bauchau, the guy who portrayed Albert Fish:  this guy was absolutely amazing, nothing but.  He went from kindly old grandfather to raw meat eating psychopath in a matter of what seemed like minutes.  He could ooze elderly benevolence one minute and project a menace almost too thick and black to see through the next.  His range is beyond belief and must be seen to be truly appreciated.

I’ve seen a lot of horror movies involving true crime figures—the BTK Killer may have the most right now, and everybody from Jeffrey Dahmer to the Alphabet Killer and the Zodiac and all the rest have at least one.  But The Gray Man could easily be the best one I’ve ever seen.  Fuelled by Bauchau’s downright compulsive performance and riding a fearsome wave of source material that’s both brutal and horrifying, The Gray Man may well be one of the scariest, classiest, and most compelling pieces of suspense / horror I’ve seen in some time.  Even better is how, in the end, they actually manage to arrest Fish—but not on murder or abduction charges.

I warn you ahead of time, though—if you have a weak heart or stomach or constitution in general, then you’ll likely want to stay away from this one.  It’s downright brutal, even if there’s not a whole lot of blood.  But if you want to look into the face of an evil deeper than any Cenobite or Cylon or anything else Hollywood can dream up, then The Gray Man is exactly the movie you want to see.

The long-in-development film adaptation of Castlevania, the popular game franchise, is not happening, according to Bloody Disgusting.

It was being written by Paul W.S. Anderson and Ian Jeffers, and Sylvain White was set to direct, though it recently went out to new directors only to arrive in development hell. The film would have chronicled the rise of Dracula and the vampire-slaying Belmont Clan.

Well, that’s another game franchise that won’t be ruined by Hollywood. Hopefully, if it doesn’t rise from the ashes like Dracula does.

Today we’re talking The Devil’s Tomb, a movie that asks some downright unsettling questions.  The really interesting part is, only a handful of them are actually related to the movie.  I know—I’m being all cryptic again, but that’s what keeps you guys interested!  I’m willing to CHALLENGE you!

Anyway, The Devil’s Tomb is a movie about a small squad of elite military sent in to ascertain what happened to an archaeological project that went silent out in the Middle East.  As they plunge into the depths of the project facility, they steadily learn more about what was taking place there—including a special sub-branch that was dealing with an evil more ancient and more powerful than anything ever before seen by man.

I know, the plot sounds pretty simple, but one thing is abundantly clear—there’s more horror and action and thrills and terror in here than I’ve seen generated by one movie in a good long time.

Part of it comes from a slew of actors easily at the top of their game in this kind of affair.  For instance, we’ve got Zack Ward, who was just in this kind of thing with Postal.  We’ve also got Ray Winstone, Ron Perlman, and punk rock legend Henry Rollins.  But that’s not the end of the list; for some strange reason that I wouldn’t even want to speculate on, they’ve got Cuba Gooding Jr. in here.  Yeah, Academy Award winning Cuba Gooding Jr.  Of course, this is the same Cuba Gooding Jr. that was in Snow Dogs, so take that for what it’s worth.

The rest comes from a solid, basic appreciation of horror convention interspersed with action.  This is an excellent—one of the few such, really—example of an action / horror hybrid.  It’s just that good to watch.  The effects are highly realistic, if a bit on the gooshy side as is standard for this sort of affair.  The plot is straightforward, if simplistic, and the performances are all at the very least solid.

But like I said before, it raises questions.  I know this is a Sony project, but still—how did they get this many choice actors this interested in a direct to video project?  And how they got an Academy Award winner to star in a direct to video project isn’t the biggest one.  No, the biggest one is its possible, suggested connection to a video game, Clive Barker’s Jericho.  If you take a look at the two, you start finding a whole lot of similarities in characters, plot and setting.  In fact, if you start changing a few small details around in one, you actually start getting the other.  But this is little more than a nifty aside—the movie is significantly better than the game could ever hope to be.

Basically, The Devil’s Tomb is a tense, hyperkinetic affair with plenty of thrills and action for all.  If you like just one of the two, then this will make an excellent bridge to discovering the other.  Eminently watchable and plenty of fun, The Devil’s Tomb is, in this sense, worth checking out.

Vacancy 2: The First Cut represents part of a growing and unsettlingly awful trend in which movies that really shouldn’t have a sequel are given them, and get them send directly to video.  There is, however, a strange side to this new and growing trend—sometimes, the direct to video sequels are actually watchable.  That may be the scariest part about this suspense / thriller from Sony.

It’s a prequel, in case you weren’t aware, and it’s set several years before the first film, where the managers of the Meadow View Inn have a lucrative but waning side business selling voyeuristic porn to truckers.  To that end, the Meadow View Inn has a network of cameras throughout the property, taping people’s most intimate moments for resale.  But like I said, the porn business is falling off, and that’s threatening to put a serious crimp into the managers’ lives.  Until one day when a random couple takes a room—and the male half kills the female half.  Faced with a strange dilemma, the management decides not to call the cops on the killer, but rather bring him on board to occasionally kill guests and market the resulting snuff films, which have always before been regarded as something of an urban myth.  Jump ahead a little bit, to where a young newlywed couple and their friend are on their way to the bride’s hometown when they decide they’re going to stop for the night…at the Meadow View Inn.

What follows is an onslaught of bloodshed, horror and mayhem.

The thing that surprised me most about this whole thing was that it turned out to be downright watchable.  I was shocked.  I expected this thing to be a warmed-over crap sandwich, but no.  I got a good if somewhat scaled-down romp that featured plenty of interesting plot twists and suspenseful moments.  In fact, what I got was almost a carbon copy of the original.

It’s hard to believe—it’s INCREDIBLY hard to believe, in fact—because I’ve seen plenty of these.  Joy Ride 2, Wrong Turn 2, Urban Legend 3…and every one of them has been a sad and sorry entrant into the overall scheme of things.  I’ve regretted watching every one of them, in all honesty, and this may be the first one that I didn’t actively regret.

I understand how weird this is.  I’m actually going to recommend it if you’re into the suspense / thriller subgenre of movies and doubly so if you liked the original Vacancy because it’s so similar to the original that liking this prequel, which turns out to be pretty much a rehash of the first with new characters, isn’t at all far fetched.

I guess that, at the end of the day, even a broken clock is right twice a day.  Vacancy 2: The First Cut is proof of just that.  Sometimes, not all of these surprise direct to video sequels are completely unwatchable.  Sometimes, there’s a halfway decent one.  Vacancy 2 is one of the rare ones.  Oh, sure, it may not be as good as some, but it will be better than many.  This puts it—and me—in an unusual position, as I can safely recommend this one.

I’ve seen horror movies from a lot of different places, with a lot of different results.  I’ve seen Australian horror, Brazilian horror, Chilean horror, Russian horror, Scandinavian horror—the French are absolutely INSANE with their horror—but it’s not every day the Brits take a whack at the horror genre.  Sure, there’s the 28 (time periods) Later series, and we can’t forget Shaun of the Dead even if that’s a bit more comedy than horror, but when they came out with Mum And Dad, I knew I was in for a doozy.

Mum And Dad starts off simply, with a young Polish woman named Lena who’s emigrated to England after a falling out with her parents.  She meets a chatty young woman, Birdie, and her silent brother Alfie. One night, after missing her bus, she agrees to go home with the duo.  This is where her problems begin as Birdie and Alfie have led her into a suburban nightmare the likes of which are seldom seen, and Birdie and Alfie’s “mum” and “dad” have decided to take Lena as their own.  Lena, of course, isn’t taking this lying down.

Basically, if you want disturbing in your movies, then you need look no farther than this right here.  Because this is quite possibly the KING of disturbing movies—I mean, I thought I’d seen the limit with Japanese lunacy like Crazy Lips and Blind Beast Vs. Killer Dwarf, but I don’t think any of those could quite top the sheer squick factor of watching a fat man pleasuring himself into a chunk of random meat. The worst part is, that’ll happen.  You really don’t want to see such a thing, but there it is.  You don’t want to see MOST of what’s going on in Mum And Dad, but it’s there.  Mum will spend about five minutes carving random whatnot into Lena’s back.  Dad will very nearly rape Lena.  And then Lena will jam a screwdriver into his lung.  Trust me, what I’ve told you about there isn’t even a tenth part of the sheer lunacy and insanity that Mum And Dad will present to you.  You know when some movies promote themselves by saying that they’re “not for the squeamish”?  Well, this is one of them, except this time, they mean it.  If you’re in the least squeamish—if you’re not already pretty thoroughly desensitized—then you’re not going to get very far with this riot of bloodshed and mayhem.

That having been said, they actually did a fair job of preserving the suspense in this one.  Just because it’s jam-packed with bloodshed and mayhem doesn’t mean that this is all the movie has to offer.  No, I was surprised by the sheer watchability of this.  Yes, it was brutal and violent and downright nasty, but it was also suspenseful and a taut thriller.  It was high-tension stuff, make no mistake, and will require a forceful constitution to endure the sheer amount of ordure involved in this piece, but if you can, then you might be able to enjoy it.  Just don’t overestimate your tolerance—this sucker IS nasty.  Make no mistake on that point.  But underneath the nasty, if you can stand it, is a pretty solidly done movie.

I’m just a little put off by what’s standing between me and it.

Mum And Dad isn’t necessarily a bad movie, but it is strong.  It’s very easy to be TOO strong for most, and has probably priced itself out of the market in terms of content.  But if you think you can hack it, give it a try.  You might like it.