A film set entirely inside a coffin. I’ve thought Ryan Reynolds was awesome since Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place.

Terrorometer: 4

Gornometer: 0

No gore, and a satisfyingly disturbing plot — the terror of putting your life in the hands of jobsworths. The filmmaker took the situation of trying to get anything from a large organization and made it life or death. Textbook awesome horror.

In fact, I’m going to bump this up to a four, and let’s call El Orfanato a five. I’m harder to scare than I used to be, so the scale needs to come down a bit.

The design of Buried‘s poster is great too — the whole thing screams Hitchcock.

Continuing the skier hate from Fritt Vilt:

Terrorometer: 1

Gornometer: 3

Some kids get stuck on a lift, discuss movies, and die horribly.

Feral cannibals learn to love… and hate.

Terrorometer: 2

Gornometer: 4

The film builds audience animosity towards a family of violent, overbearing males (and the women who support them) and then explodes in retributive violence. It is the feminism of a horror director.

Smart and poppy. Smarter, certainly, than Hatchet, which I gave the same gore score. It gets terror points for being disturbing over outright scary, but it has that too.

A zombie film with no zombies:

Terrorometer: 2

Gornometer: 3

I’d seen this one before, but it got caught in my trawl net. A military plane carrying a biological agent accidentally infects a small town. “Population destabilization” follows, along with military cleanup and, of course, quarantine breach.

It’s a fine outing. I’m left wondering more about the computer controlling the military though.

F-Horror is the new J-Horror.

Terrorometer: 3

Gornometer: 3

Not a film for dog lovers, this one is about a woman terrified of dogs, a UN doctor in Yugoslavia. She and some off-duty comrades are taken captive one day by some (sounds-like) Russian gangsters.

The terror works with the gore, which is as it should be. It’s quickly evident what’s going on, but that just makes it more disturbing.

Finally a scale-tipper. That said, I have been getting nightmares. These films are working on some level.

Hatchet is a horror-comedy shlockfest with lots of tits, jokes, and ultraviolence.

Terrorometer: 0
Gornometer: 4

Gory and stupid.

A solid slasher out of Norway, the beginning of a series:

Terrorometer: 2

Gornometer: 3

It’s remarkably close to The Shining, sans supernatural elements. Basically Scream for skiers. Just hacking people up isn’t scary though — as Halloween approaches I am still looking for an El Orfanato to scare my pants off.

The thing about the original Saw is that it was actually really good — the shitty shitty shit-ton of sequels have obscured that. The creators attempt something different here, a traditional psychic-psychological horror flick:

Terrorometer: 1
Gornometer: 2

The gore is restrained and effective, awesomely so given Saw, but the terror just isn’t there. Supernatural horror, again, just doesn’t do it for me.

There are some nice creepy jumps, and the monster is good, and if astral projection and psychic stuff freaks you out then, hey, it’s worth a shot. The sound design is pretty fantastic, the writing is ABC, and the cinematography is stunning. My copy needed gamma correction though.

Watch behind the Dad in his classroom to see a Saw Easter Egg, IF YOU DARE.

In plague-ravaged England a young, unsure monk skives off his pestilential monastery to chase a girl by guiding Sean Bean’s ragtag adventure party to investigate a town that, mysteriously, is devoid of plague.

Black Death is a mid-14^th-century, deeper, The Wicker Man.

Terrorometer: 2

Gornometer: 3

The scares in this, aside from the grossness of the plague and general medieval life and combat, arise from the situational lack of knowledge the characters base their decisions on. There’s no science, and no one knows what’s happening. People’s personal philosophies matter, and save and destroy many lives.

There’s a lot of shouting about God, atheism, heresy, and witchcraft, and the feeling that everyone is either wrong, duped, “evil”, and/or doomed is set up and then sustained throughout. You can feel the tension between two sides, both of which think the other is the anthropomorphization of “evil”, and know that both cannot be wholly “good”, like the vase-or-two-faces field-ground problem. The characters’ inability to understand the false dichotomies they create ends in tragedy for all. I’d call it existential horror, but it’s not very scary.

Perhaps the best review is the old quote: “with or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

The best horror movies involve classic fears. In Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark a kid’s family splits up and she moves to a new house. While exploring the basement she finds a disused fireplace.

Gornometer: 2

Terrorometer: 2

It has some good jumps that also work with childhood fears, and some nice gore. The monsters get screen time, but probably too much (I complain both ways because the balance is delicate). The film also trades on the idea that, at some point in the past, the Catholic Church made a deal with the fairy kingdom to leave the humans alone — which I quite like. These fairies eat teeth.

The film’s mythology is a bit confused — what happens to Katie? Why? — so it loses points there. A truly scary film is internally consistent enough to “reward” thinking about it again later with more shivers.