Now I watched Calvaire (on Film Four - which is now free!) with the mistaken information that it was a Belgian horror film. It was a bit weird but I didn't realise that it was some kind of Christian message film with horrific scenes. Maybe the title should have given it away - Calvary - but I didn't think about anything about Jesus (or the crucifixion) until the "hero", Marc Stevens, was crucified near the end of the film, and even then it still didn't click.

Even the innkeeper turning the pragged Marc into his ex-wife Gloria didn't make anything tumble in my mind. Calvary, Gloria, crucifixion... nope, I kept watching it expecting it to turn into that famous R. Chetwynd-Hayes story in "Tales of Fear and Fantasy" about a weird village of Satan worshippers that a potential suicide ends up in... Manderville. (Trust me, you have to read this sometime! And it isn't the story of ghouls from "The Monster Club" film either though they are similar.)

Anyway, it didn't go that way - a weird bit of bestiality, a bit of torture, the innkeeper dressing Marc in women's clothes, cutting his hair off, crucifying him when he is captured after running away, and then finally Marc getting bum-raped by Belgian hillbillies before escaping across a frozen marsh. - none of it put me in mind of a Christian message at all! So when he didn't do anything at the end, and nothing was resolved, I just felt very let down by the whole film.

Up until the last ten minutes of the film, I was going to add this to my Video Vault with quite a high score, maybe 7 out of 10, but the denouement ruined the whole thing and so I'd give it 1 out of 10 instead. Having to look up what a movie is about on the internet is not how things should be. It seems it is really all about people turning away from God, turning to false animal idols, and wanting Jesus back or something... well, it was way over my head!

Avoid this film unless you are an arty-farty buff who likes to pretend to know more than normal people. And do yourself a big favour and never watch a Belgian "horror film".

I can now happily rate this film as "complete and utter crap".

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Even though the sequels have been heading this way, I didn't expect Seed of Chucky to be a comedy! I also didn't expect it to be quite so good. I am pleasantly surprised... especially as this is a UK and Romanian venture.

It's great. Jennifer Tilly is excellent, as is the puppetry, and everyone did a fantastic job. There's loads of satire about Hollywood and horror buff in-jokes, plus the obligatory cameos... it was the perfect end to the Chucky series. Well,. let's hope it's the end!

For those who don't know, it's supposed to be about Chucky and Tiffany's child. He (or she) is a plastic doll too but unlike them doesn't share their murderous nature. It's like a Pinocchio story but with added Voodoo. The film mainly focuses on Jennifer Tilly though and the way the dolls get involved with her world. In a lot of ways, the dolls are all really incidental to your enjoyment of the film, as Jennifer is the real star here.

Now my only problem is whether or not to add it to the Video Vault. Do you know what, I think I will. I give this 8 out of 10 even though it wasn't scary... it was still funny and was just what I was in the mood for. It was a nice refreshing change.

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This is one of those films that I put off watching because I had the suspicion that it was going to be crap. I wish I had trusted my instincts for the most part too.

It's been 13 years since "Bride of Re-animator" and that was hardly a good film either though it is a lot better than this. I can't quite put my finger on why but it just failed to deliver. Although obviously low-budget, it was a good story, had reasonable amounts of gore, good actors and sexy actresses, but it just had the wrong pace and tried hard for humour when it should have gone for scares. Oh and it's a Spanish production so there are a lot of Spanish actors in it in case anyone wondered. That doesn't always doom a movie to failure but I have noticed a trend...

The story is much the same as the other two in the series. Dr Herbert West is still re-animating bodies albeit now from inside a prison where of course he is encarcerated. A new prison doctor arrives who turns out to be a kid who saw the results of Dr West's experiments when one of them killed his sister. Then a reporter turns up who looks just like the boy's sister and there is a love affair thing going on just to bulk out the plot. The reporter turns out to be more interested in "the experiments" than her original prison story and ends up getting more than she bargained for when she is killed by the evil warden and then re-animated herself.

The new spin on things in this movie is that Herbert has now discovered how to harness the 'nanoplasma' which leaves the body at death and is responsible for human consciousness. Thus begins a lot of body swapping nonsense first with a couple of rats and then between different people.

I kept losing interest when all the "quirky" prisoners were doing their thing and I lost it even more when I realised that I really wasn't going to see Elsa Pataky (also in Snakes on a Plane) get totally naked. There is a minor sex scene and there is one shot of her squashed boob but it was down to the also attractive Raquel Gribler to get hers out instead.

An amusing scene involving a dismembered dinkle soon stopped being amusing though it must have pleased the director because it also continued throughout the end credits. It wasn't that funny.

So, apart from Elsa Pataky, there really weren't any great things to mention about this film. Jeffrey Combs does his usual performance but is just too much of a nice guy to instill anything really sinister into the mix... well, that's if you can call his role as Herbert West, a man who re-animates dead bodies, a nice guy!

The way is left open for a possible fourth film in the series but it I really think it's time to give up on this story now. I can't see it going anywhere else except further and further down in quality. It's a shame because the original "Re-animator" was an absolute genre classic.

Final verdict: Watch it if you want to but don't expect miracles. Herbert West himself could not raise this movie from the dead.

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When "Russian mafia" try to steal what they believe to be uranium from a research lab, they accidentally release an army of giant indestructable scorpions with titanium bodies and human DNA!

"Can Major Nick Reynolds (Jeff Fahey) and his Delta Force team rid the earth of this menace before evolution takes a nasty turn for the worse?" Yes, probably, but who cares? It's a load of old CGI nonsense with poor acting and dialogue anyway.

This was only released earlier this year but the idea is so dated that it even stole the main elements of the plot from "Carnosaur 3"!!! Actually it did more than steal the main elements. Most of the scenes and dialogue are identical!!! And when I say "most" I mean 99.9 percent is identical! Just replace the dinosaurs in "Carnosaur 3" with scorpions and you have this! I now have a bad feeling that there may even be a sequel to this one day too.

I don't particularly like Jeff Fahey as an actor (apart from when he was in "The Lawnmower Man") and I found him to be suitably unimpressive in this movie. In fact, everyone was just going through the motions. Even Jo Bourne-Taylor (from Sky One's "Dream Team") couldn't save it by being a pretty but cold scientist (oh no, what a cliché!)! I was hoping it was going to turn into a comedy at some point but it wasn't even bad enough to be funny.

I really can't find anything good to say about this apart from it had giant CGI scorpions in... and you don't see those every day! You don't see a lot of them here either as most of the action takes place in dark and gloomy warehouses to presumably save on the budget. There are a couple of gory death scenes, one soldier gets sliced in half and another sexy Czech girl soldier gets her head pulled off, but you have to wait until almost the end for those.

Oh well, at least it had Russians in it... briefly You could tell they were Russians by the way they all wore black leather jackets and sunglasses... yup, that's how bad this film is!

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I actually watched this again at the same time as "Scorpius Gigantus" and it is so obviously the same film but with CGI scorpions in the new version instead of animatronic dinosaurs. "Carnosaur 3" was made in 1996, ten years before the scorpion one, but little changed in the remake.

Scott Valentine (from "Family Ties"), who also stars in "To Sleep With A Vampire" (which I have also reviewed and is itself a remake!) is the army colonel in this and does a slightly more credible job than Jeff Fahey in the new version.

All the scenes are the same in both movies though. The "terrorists" here try to steal uranium from trucks containing dinosaurs. In the new version they are "russian mafia" and it turns out to be giant scorpions. In both cases they wear black leather jackets and sunglasses just to show they are the bad guys. lol.

The elite force of soldiers again have to capture the beasties alive. Both films use the same steel box/cage thing which of course does no good at all. Even the "women have no place in the army" scene is the same with accompanying arm wrestling!!!

There's a pretty but cold female scientist but she's not quite as cold as the new version. Well, she is played by Janet Gunn who is actually a lot more gorgeous than her character allows her to be.

Everything happens in the same warehouse, then the same ship, which, of course, they blow up at the end in both cases.

If you had to choose one or the other to watch then go with the scorpion one. Although they are really the same film, I think the remake has a slight edge. Unless, of course, you really like dinosaur movies then you'll enjoy this more!

Personally, I never want to see either of them again.

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There are some films that promise so much in their trailers that you are really looking forward to seeing them. Then, when you do see them, you realise that everything you saw in the trailer was pretty much the entire film. "Population 436" is exactly one of those.

Steve Kady (Jeremy Sisto) is a census-taker who goes to the small town of Rockwell Falls to investigate how they have managed to maintain the same population (of 436) for over 100 years. When he discovers that the overly religious population are a lot more sinister than they first appear, he tries to escape and finds that it isn't that easy.

Yes, there's a pretty girl in it!In a nutshell, this is a lot like Dean Koontz's "Black River" from five years ago. But a few added homages to the infamous Twilight Zone story "The Lottery" (based on the short story by Shirley Jackson), plus bits from "The Wicker Man" and "The Stepford Wives", all make this more of a mish-mash of better ideas than the story can really cope with. The detrimental effect is that more questions arise out of a simple plot than there needs to be and it just leaves too many holes.

For instance, if this thing is all about God controlling the population of a village, what is the purpose? Why should people be murdered or hang themselves if God can just wipe out who he wants anyway? And if they want to maintain the same population, why do the people encourage strangers to come there in the first place? I just didn't get it. Did I just spoil the mystery for you? Probably... but it's nothing that you won't work out after the first 5 minutes of the film anyway!

The acting is ok but not brilliant. It's a lot of stereotypes as usual, most of which are tedious beyond belief. There is, of course, a pretty girl but I've seen better... no, really I have!

It is also all very slow. Sometimes that works if you are actually enjoying the movie or the actors but neither is the case here. It just dragged and dragged even though the ending was so predictable that the whole thing could quite easily have been wrapped up in a half-hour tv episode instead. In fact, it is so much like a "made for tv" movie that I'm suprised that it even got a dvd release. This is more than typical "Sci-Fi Channel" fodder.

I'd like to give it 3 out of 10 for trying to be different but it just wasn't very. I didn't like the main character, didn't feel any empathy or sympathy with him (or anyone else for that matter), and so it was a completely uninvolving experience for me.

Unless you like crappy films like "The Village" this really isn't for you. It's not even gory or scary either. I think it claims to be a horror film but I'd call it sci-fi or fantasy. Unfortunately, when it comes to "fantasy", I need something a bit more imaginative.

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I watched this movie again on the plane going to the States and, although not the greatest movie ever made, it made my journey slightly more tolerable so I'm going to recommend it to you.

You see the biggest problem with a remake like this is that the original is an absolute cult classic. That doesn't really mean that the original Wicker Man movie is the greatest movie ever made either but it does mean that any attempt to remake it will undoubtedly meet with harsh criticism and derision from all manner of people who probably only heard about there even being an original movie yesterday.

I also liked the first Wicker Man but it had some serious flaws. Some of the musical interludes were a bit weird and it was butchered so badly by the editors so that we are luckly to have what is left at all.

This remake gives the Wicker Man a new twist. Now there's a psychotic female led cult (which is much more Wiccan lol) who prey on men outside their community over the years to select victims for the wicker man sacrifice. This is much more sinister than just tricking Edward Woodward into looking for a lost girl for a one-off burning.

The idea was hinted at the end of the original with Edward Woodward asking Christopher Lee, "And what if the apples don't come back? What then?" So indeed these new sacrifices would have to happen.

Nicolas Cage was quite good as the cop in the new version and the addition of some very pretty women including Kate Beahan, Leelee "I'm not Helen Hunt" Sobieski and Ellen Burstyn almost made me forget that I was watching a PG rated movie. There was no nudie dancing against walls though which was a shame.

There was also no gore though a certain amount of offscreen nastiness was implied. The cult break Nic Cage's legs before putting him in the wicker man but you only hear it and don't see it. Well, what's to see anyway?

I enjoyed it mainly because it was fun for me to compare the two movies and see what has changed for the better and what changed for the worse. I don't know why the name of the place changed from "Summerisle" to "Summersisle" though. It was a bit pointless.

I personally think the director should have gone for more adult scenes and made it a seriously nasty 18 certificated movie. But, as it didn't really need any sex or gore to tell the story, he still did quite a good job with the material at hand and made a film that more ages can get to see legally.

This is still no family movie though unless your family is named Manson.

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I just watched this on Zone Horror (again) and, although I'm sure I reviewed it before, I can't find the review so I've done a new one.

The premise of the movie is that "The Paperboy" of the title is a nasty little twisted psycho who kills everyone round him.

In a lot of ways it is derivative of "The Bad Seed" and "The Good Son" (which came out at the same time) but it is just a little bit sicker and without the suspense of the former or the horror of the latter.

This kid kills both his parents, has some kind of pre-pubescent crush on Alexandra Paul (well, we've all had that!), and has an even weirder relationship with the little girl next door.

I'm not going to spoil it for you. You have to see this to believe just how messed up a film like this can become. Little Johnny (played by Marc Marut) may be a psycho but that is no excuse for being totally inconsistent all the way through. One minute he's booing, the next he is whacking things with a baseball bat.... actually that's just how most of today's kids are anyway. He's not the sharpest tool in the box either as everything he does leaves him open to being caught by even the stupidest of cops... so it's a bit surprising that he makes it through the duration of the film at all.

What I mean though is that the character development is a bit weird. You don't know if the kid fancies Alexandra Paul or if he wants her to be his mother or if he is trying to create a new family for himself because his own was so messed up. Maybe it's a mixture of all three but it made me think that there was a great inconsistency to little Johnny's motivation and there are lots of bits that just didn't make sense.

I was tempted to add it to the Video Vault but it was just on the wrong side of average for me. It's not particularly scary but it's one of those you watch as a guilty pleasure, like Corbin Bernsen's "The Dentist", because you want to wonder what will happen next even though you already really know.

It also has Alexandra Paul from Baywatch in it and she's worth looking at anyway. I can't believe this film was made in 1994. How time flies.

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Yet another crappy Troma movie from 1990 showing on Zone Horror this month.

Now not all Troma movies are this dire (some are actually quite funny in their bizarreness) so, when I read the blurb that said that it would be about "nurses in a metropolitan hospital who seduce then murder male patients", I thought I might be in for a minor classic of sexploitation. How wrong I was!

This movie is just so slow! There are a lot of pretty women but apart from a few lingering lingerie shots they don't really do anything. Just lots of lounging around with an overly serious voiceover telling the story of each character as they are introduced.

The voiceovers explaining what is going on are something that really belong in a trailer not the main feature. I kept waiting for them to end and for the real movie to start but they just kept on going! And then some kind of "Battle Royale" subtitle thing appeared as well just to make it even crappier!

I'm sure there is supposed to be a story to this film, but it escaped me entirely. All I got from it was that, when not lounging around, the "nurses" stroll round some woods often wearing thigh-length boots and carrying machine guns... and occasionally shoot each other for no apparent reason. Some heads explode and one bloke gets his feet sliced off but this could never be described as a horror movie.

I don't really see the point of why they are nurses. They don't do any "nursing" as they seem to be more like some kind of soldiers. There was a pointless "operation" scene near the start which I still don't understand so I suppose that's where the idea that they are nurses comes from.

In fact, I didn't understand a great deal of this movie. I am most baffled by why this was even made at all. It's not horror and it shouldn't be getting shown on Zone Horror. It's just crap.

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I've heard a rumour that this appalling piece of Lionsgate produced garbage has now hit American shores so I'm giving you all an advance warning even though the film is nearly two years old now.

Ok, so it's got Billie Piper in it from Doctor Who. But she can't act! She may have got away with it on the BBC but in a film? Not a chance.

Sadly exactly the same can be said for Russian popstar Alsou who also has a role. She may be great at belting out songs on stage but in front of a camera she should really confine herself to modelling as she has no acting ability whatsoever.

Those are my main gripes but "What is it all about?" I hear you ask.

From the IMDB (now known for its absolute accuracy... not!): "In London, four students have a call from the student accommodation office of the local university offering lodging in an old house. The psychic Jenny, the graph design student Nick, and the couple of lovers and drug dealers Tom and Adele are welcomed by the weird Tina. Nick fixes a spirit clock, and sooner Jenny sees the crimes that happened in the house in the past, when two lovers died. Along the two next days, Jenny, Nick, Tom and Adele disclose that each one of them had killed a person on the past and also that they are trapped in the house, since a ghost is claiming a killer for a killer to release the soul of Edmund Joseph."

Yeah, ok, that's pretty much it with appalling grammar and all the spoilers you need too. The students move in, one of them "fixes" an old clock by opening the case and dislodging something which was wedging it (hmm, important!) and then they all run about arguing and getting killed all over the place... but mainly arguing.

The back story is about as historically inaccurate as is humanly possible and the whole thing eventually turns out to be just a poor man's version of "The Skeleton Key".

It's all yak, yak, yak with hardly any action. It's very studio bound and poorly done, sort of like a school play but with more sets. I think there's supposed to be suspense what with it being a "clock" and all but all the timing is way off with this film and the ending is extremely rushed.

There's nothing scary in it, nothing entertaining unless you are a really big fan of Billie or Alsou (and even then you'd find it a struggle to sit through), and it's just crap. Avoid!

I definitely rate this as one of the worst films ever made!

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While there's still lots of gory fun including exploding heads, decapitations, gunshot wounds, eviscerations and other nastiness, "Battle Royale II: Requiem" just wasn't as good as the original.

The main reason is that after all the excitement of the first half an hour or so it all gets very talky with huge boring sermons about how bad war is.

All I wanted to see was Japanese kids shooting each other. That idea seemed to be very promising as, this time round, they all start off with huge machine guns (and rocket launchers!) rather than having to spend most of the film finding them.

The twist is that the kids are each linked to a partner. If the partner dies then the collar they wear explodes. So the body count in the early stages of the film was quite high and lots of characters who could have died in a blaze of machine gun induced nastiness just got blown up - which was a waste! Even the "teacher", who looks a lot like a leather-clad Japanese version of Les Mckeown, makes remarks along the same lines.

So, by my reckoning, if one of the characters in a film commnents how lame things are then it pretty much sums up the state of play.

The other plot change is that in "BRII" they are sent to an island to wipe out "terrorists" who are actually the survivors of the first "Battle Royale". This turned out to be a pretty stupid idea too. Once the kids reached the terrorists they were instantly captured and relieved of their collars and then it all got really dull.

Of course my real reason for liking these films is all the pretty Japanese schoolgirls which is fine as they are all obviously older than the characters they are playing! Only a couple stood out this time and none were as interesting as the ones in the original "Battle Royale" either. Characterisation was given short shrift here in favour of all the speeches by the extremely hairy "terrorists". I just didn't feel involved enough in the story this time round to care one way or another who died.

So, to sum up, 8 out of 10 for blood and guts, 2 out of 10 for the rest of the film. Let's hope BRIII is better.

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The IMDB says: "Long wanted serial killer Gabriel Engel gets arrested in a spectacular police strike. Small town cop Michael Martens travels to the big city to interrogate him. He associates a brutal murder case with the killer's method and hopes to close the case by getting a confession from Engel. Instead the clash of the two totally opposite characters shakes Michael's beliefs to the ground, turning him into a dangerous threat to the people around him."

After a big shoot out at the start, a German serial killer jumps out of a window (landing in a big heap of broken glass and legs!) and says to the arresting cops, "I'm innocent". But is he? Well, that's what the rest of the film is about...

This is an extremely well put together serial killer interrogation movie which, along with Evilenko and Hannibal Lector, really wants to satisfy that niche market who enjoy such things. I always think of these kind of films as being more "cop movies" than "horror" but I suppose a case can be argued for both.

So, anyway, it's really a lot like a German version of "Silence of the Lambs" (and "Se7en") but with the serial killer really messing up the cop's mind so that he eventually starts to think that his own son is the real serial killer.

André Hennicke does a great job as the serial killer but he's not the "hero" of the film like Hannibal Lector was in any way. This is all about the cops not the killer for once and there are no dramatic escapes. This serial killer is locked up and stays there.

I won't tell you any more than this as I often give far too many spoilers away. You'll just have to watch it for yourself and find out.

The movie is subtitled but the acting seems to be top notch and the camerawork is exceptional. A lot of work went into this and it shows.

The only problem is that it's a bit too talky with not enough action for me. It's all about relationships and often goes above and beyond what is necessary to be "intellectual". You won't get any quotable lines or nudie psycho dancing with his dinkle tucked between his legs in this one.

You can also see the ending coming from a mile away but it's not entirely predictable. There's a lot of suspense created along the way but I was hoping for even more of a twist. But, like all "cop movies", this is pretty formulaic stuff. In many ways it is a lot like the American CSI series so fans of that will love it.

If viewed as a horror film it will be disappointing. As a thriller, it isn't too bad at all. It's worth a watch anyway.

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