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.

It’s The Blair Witch Project meets The Exorcist in the world of Deliverance. I’d name another movie it touches on that would give away the ending.

Gornometer: 2
Terrorometer: 1

The gore is there, but because of the first-person-style camera you never really see it, and somehow religious horror doesn’t do it for me anymore. When I was a kid and a practicing Catholic the concept of capital-e Evil could give me the willies — now it’s things like Fritzl’s wife. This film tickles the notion of “the evil that men do” without much payoff.

The story is good though — a fraudulent pastor decides to exit the profession with a tell-all documentary and everything goes to Hell.

I’ve downloaded an S-load of horror-type movies to scare myself with over Hallowe’en Month. I’ll be doing a review with my old Terrorometer/Gornometer system, plus whatever random cinematic observations I can add now I’ve been to film school.

First up, an easy one: Predators, 2010 produced by Robert Rodriguez:

I LOVE that opening fade from the stars to the trees. This movie doesn’t really count, though. It was on some list of horror films I’ve been processing, not Wikipedia’s, which is better. It’s basically G-rated, aside from language and gore — and there’s not too much of either.

Terrorometer: 0 — it’s hard to build suspense in Predator films, but attempts are made.
Gornometer: 1 — there’s a lot of splatter, but it’s just mainstream Hollywood: the Predators bleed green and the humans mostly just explode. Nothing we haven’t seen before.

So why is this on the Hallowe’en list? Mostly because I had a bad day and wanted to watch something ultra-violent to relax, and then thought I should use it to kick off this series. It’s the perfect movie to babysit a 13-15 year old nephew with.

Watch it in the dark or be prepared to gamma correct the shite out of it (cmd-e in VLC) — someone skipped luma balancing class.