Now this is one I’ve been looking forward to tackling for quite some time. It’s Stake Land, a copy of which the folks out at Dark Sky Films sent out for us to review. And if you like your movies big, loud, bloody and post-apocalyptic, then brace yourselves, because this is probably going to be the one for you.

Stake Land takes us to an America that’s seen better days. In fact, this America is a downright disaster, with economic collapse and civil order collapse and then, somehow, on top of it all, vampires. Now, with the America we know and love a blood-drained wreck, the only safe place in North America seems to be, for some reason, Canada. And a group of folks are on their way there, but first they’ll have to go through not only vampires, but also a gang of religious zealots calling themselves the Brethren. It’s going to be a long hard trip to Canada, but will anyone make it there alive?

Even just looking at the box art, you can kind of tell what you’ll be in for, and indeed, the movie itself will not let you down in several key points. There will, as the man once said, be blood. There will also be gunplay and violence and fistfights in a shattered world full of horror. It’s like The Road, if The Road had been, you know, entertaining, as opposed to a complete downer.

If you liked Daybreakers, then I can just about guarantee you’ll like Stake Land, which is a lot like a lower budget but higher energy version of same. In fact, it brings to mind all the best parts of John Carpenter’s Vampires, even though this was itself a sad sorry sight against the original novel. But either way, nothing here will sparkle, and no one will get angsty, so that puts Stake Land in the top tier of vampire movies as far as I’m concerned.

Zombie apocalypses make for fun movies, but the vampire apocalypse is a bit more depressing. Where in a zombie apocalypse you might hole up in a mall and enjoy some relative measure of peace, a vampire apocalypse depends a lot more on you moving, apparently, and this makes the whole thing a bit, well, sad. A bit depressing, even, but only just a bit.

But still, for action, bloodshed, violence, and a look at a world where the worst comes to pass, well, Stake Land will do it for you.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this frightful action blockbuster a nine out of ten–a vampire apocalypse is a bit depressing against, say, a zombie apocalypse, but it’s no less action packed.

What has become of John Carpenter? The indie director who shaped the horror genre of the 80’s with his iconic 70’s output (Halloween, The Fog) has fallen far from grace. While his 70’s films appear dated, in the 80’s he made the brilliant The Thing (the Carpenter-less prequel is due out this year. Expect it to flop), Escape from New York, and Big Trouble in Little China. Indeed, 3 of his films were remade in the past decade. But ever since his botched remake of Village of the Damned the master of horror has been failing miserably. And his new flick The Ward is no exception.

Set in 1960’s US, a young woman named Kristen (Amber Heard) is found burning down a house. She’s taken to a psychiatric institution and joins a group of disturbed young ladies. Kristen attempts to escape when she realises that the girls are starting to disappear under suspect circumstances, and a strange, distorted female figure is seen creeping around. Her appeals to a sympathetic doctor (Jarred Harris) go unnoticed.

The Ward in a way is a throwback to the kind of horror the 80’s were full of. But while audiences lapped that up like a MacDonalds milkshake at the time, they’re more sophisticated now. An uninspired film like this will offer very little. Indeed, so uninspired is this hack job that on almost every front the film falls flat. Heard is unconvincing (as are the other gals, especially the otherwise promising Lyndsy Fonseca), she doesn’t even look remotely like she’s from the 1960’s (the 80’s clothing doesn’t help either), and most of the cast use modern-day vernacular. Why set it in the past if you’re not going to bother?

But these gripes are nothing compared to the plot. READ ON »

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The Ward is directed by John Carpenter. He directed such classics as Halloween, The Fog, The Thing and The Mouth of Madness.  The trailer looks good, and I don’t think he will disappoint his fans.

Those who happened to catch John Carpenter’s The Ward at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival  might or might not appreciate that the movie is releasing in the UK on January 21, 2011. The director hasn’t secured US distribution rights yet.

The poster looks pretty simple with the key character Kristen (Amber Heard), a beautiful but troubled young woman, who ends up bruised, cut, drugged, and held against her will in a remote ward of a psychiatric hospital.

She is completely disoriented, with no idea why she was brought to this place and no memory of her life before being admitted. All she knows is that she isn’t safe. (No one is safe in a psychiatric hospital.)

The other patients in the ward—four equally disturbed young women—offer no answers, and Kristen quickly realizes things are not as they seem. The air is heavy with secrets, and at night, when the hospital is dark and foreboding, she hears strange and frightening sounds. It appears they are not alone. One-by-one, the other girls begin to disappear and Kristen must find a way out of this hellish place before she, too, becomes a victim. As she struggles to escape, she will uncover a truth far more dangerous and horrifying than anyone could have imagined.

Despite the fact that it’s been fully nine years since the last time a John Carpenter movie emerged, most of Carpenter’s fans (guilty!) have been waiting eagerly for a resurgence. And resurgence has been made thanks to The Ward, marking the first time a Carpenter movie has shown up in almost a decade.

A quick recap of the plot: a young mental patient back in the sixties finds herself locked up in The Ward, home to lots of other crazy folk like her.  She makes several friends, but there’s someone walking the halls that doesn’t quite belong.  And as our young mental patient discovers the truth, things only get more terrifying.

You can see why Carpenter’s fans have been looking forward to this for some time, and it’ll get its big premier at the Toronto International Film Festival, whose website happens to be holding several stills.  Release dates from there are a bit sketchier, though–hopefully sooner rather than later.

Man, if you love Carpenter like I love Carpenter, then do I have some absolutely awesome news for you–the prequel to Carpenter’s fantastic sci-fi / horror epic of mistaken identity and alien conquest finally gets rolling this March!

Yes, just two short months away until the prequel finally begins.  Speaking as someone whose Christmas Eve tradition involves watching The Thing (what?  It’s set in Antarctica, for crying out loud.  Why would I not want to see this on a night with lots of cold and snow?), the thought of more of this is incredibly welcome.  Even if I’d sooner see a sequel rather than a prequel just so the question could FINALLY get settled as to who got out of there alive.

Good news, Ron Moore of Battlestar Galactica is still handling the script.  Bad news, they’ve still got neophyte director Matthjis Van Heijningen handling the helming.  But frankly, a new director shouldn’t be too much problem IF the script’s in good shape and the actors are half decent, and Ron Moore suggests good script.

Good script indeed….

I’m terribly happy about bringing you this chunk of news because it features one of my personal all-time favorite directors, John Carpenter.  He’s not as out of it as a lot of folks thought, as evidenced by the fact that we’ve actually got stills, a synopsis and more coming out of Premier Pictures with his new The Ward, which we discussed here some time ago.  Here’s the synopsis:

THE WARD is an intense psychological thriller set in a mental institution where a young woman, Kristen is haunted by a mysterious and deadly ghost.   As danger creeps closer, she comes to realize that this ghost might be darker than she could have imagined.

Kristen, early 20′s wakes to find herself bruised, cut, drugged and held against her will in a remote ward of Chamberlain Psychiatric Hospital . She is completely disorientated, with no idea why she was brought this place and no memory of her life.

The other patients in the ward, four equally troubled girls, offer no answers and Kristen quickly realises things are not as they seem. The air is heavy with secrets and at night, when the hospital is dark and foreboding, she hears strange and disturbing sounds. It appears they are not alone.

One by one the girls disappear and Kristen must find a way out of this hellish place before the ghost comes for her too. As she struggles to escape, she will uncover a truth far more dangerous and horrifying than anyone could have imagined.

Sounds like trademark Carpenter to me, folks–this sucker’s slated for a release date sometime in 2010, so you know we’ll be keeping watch on this one for anything new as it emerges.

I knew, going in, that Rob Zombie’s second foray into the Halloween series was going to be godawful.  I’d seen the trailers.  I’d read the interviews.  It was common knowledge that a sequel almost never outperforms its predecessor and based on how bad the first one was, Rob Zombie was definitely not going to manage to pull off the brass ring of a superior sequel.

I knew it was going to be bad…but just how bad I couldn’t possibly know until I actually got in and watched the whole thing go skipping off merrily to hell itself.

First, of course, we must discharge the duty of a plot summary, as Laurie Strode will learn the truth about her origins and once again tangle with massive maniac Michael Myers.  Thankfully, that actually is most of the plot–leaves me more room to actually talk about the movie itself.

I had never left a theatre with such a massive hate-on as I had for this pile of steaming cinematic dung.   What Rob Zombie has done to the Halloween series, I would not do to a dead dog with leprosy.  He has managed to single-handedly destroy one of the great horror films of the twentieth century by systematically stripping and altering all of its greatest features and then loudly declaring the final work an improvement.

He took one of the world’s greatest nightmares–that one day, a little boy much like any you might find in any small town, would just snap for no clear reason and turn into a gruesome killing machine that would have so little connection to the world that he seems to feel no pain–and reduced him to a white trash child abuse case.

He managed to so thoroughly botch his iconography that he confused and conflated Michael Myers with Jason Voorhees, giving one the attachment of his mother where it was so clearly not supposed to be.

He managed to create an anachronistic time scale so horrendously confused it is impossible to properly tell what era we’re in, as The Moody Blues sing Nights in White Satin on a black and white television show in one scene while we watch a CNN-analogue on a flatscreen only a year later.  Is this the seventies again?  Are we in the twenty first century?  Who knows?

He even managed to thoroughly bungle the characters–Doc Loomis was never a fame-seeking status-chasing glory hound out to sell books.  Doc Loomis relentlessly blamed himself for his involvement with Michael Myers; to suggest otherwise is an insult so catastrophic as to be unparalleled.

Let me be abundantly clear on one critical point: Halloween II is a mockery.  A sham.  A miserable, hollow imitation so pale that the name is not worthy to be attached to it.  If I can keep just one person from handing over their hard-earned money to this horrendous con job of a film, I will have done good in the world sufficient to qualify me for sainthood.

I do make one point, though…had Zombie actually made this film, and its predecessor, using his own characters, he might have wound up with something worthwhile.  Nothing great, of course, but certainly not something that would inspire the kind of wrathful sorrow that this one does.  By attaching the Halloween name and characters to it, a grotesque travesty has taken place.  Had he taken Carpenter and Hill’s original title and dubbed his version The Babysitter Murders, I might well have been a little less horrified.

But this is not Halloween.  This is Rob Zombie’s ill-conceived, half-baked version that will give little joy to horror fans everywhere, especially those who remember the greatness of the Carpenter work.

Rob Zombie has torn apart the Mona Lisa to make a collage for Mommy.

The Screenhead Ten Scale spits on this empty husk of a great legacy and gives it a full one out of ten.  This insult must not go by unchallenged.

Director John Carpenter has returned to work by signing on to direct ghost story The Ward as an independent movie.  

Pineapple Express actress Amber Heard is set to star as a haunted woman in a mental institution. Since the movie is taking place in a mental institution, it shouldn’t be too hard to make the movie scary.

Nicolas Cage and director John Carpenter might be working together soon on a prison thriller called Scared Straight.

The story centers on a troubled youth who’s sent to prison off the Scared Straight crime-prevention program, which imprisons delinquent teens for a short period in the hopes of deterring them from a life of crime. While the teen is there, a riot breaks out and the prisoners take him hostage. A lifer, played by Cage, is forced to help the young man out.

The start date might be October.