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From the IMDB (with a few spelling corrections but not grammatical ones!): "Somewhere in Romania; Clementine is finishing off her day of teaching the local kids French, on her way home she spots an abandoned vehicle beside the road. She continues on unaware of what occurred to its occupants a mother and her teenage daughter the night before. Not that it matters as tonight she'll find out first hand along with her writer beau Lucas, as they're awoken during the night by strange phonecalls and the TV downstairs being turned on, but this is only beginning of their nightmarish night of terror as the phone lines go dead; the power goes out, their car goes missing as they're stalked and set upon by THEM!"

Yes, it's a French thriller supposedly based on a true story set in Romania... and it's a good one. I wasn't expecting much from a film with a slightly predictable plot and a running time of only 77 minutes but I got a nice surprise.

The first ten minutes were by far the best and could easily stand alone as a short. It reminded me a bit of the ending of "A ma soeur" but without the sexual nastiness. I found the Romanian language quite intriguing too. You don't often hear a lot of Romanian spoken in horror films (in spite of the location of Transylvania) and, as another romance language, I found it quite easy to understand without subtitles (though of course I still had the subtitles on). It's sort of like French in structure but the words are pronounced differently if that makes any sense. Obviously that's why the main character later is supposed to be a French language teacher. ;o) Well, it wouldn't make a lot of sense for a French actress to play an English teacher in a Romanian school, would it?

The rest is pretty formulaic but is shot and acted exceptionally well. Olivia Bonamy (Clementine) is great to look at and, after a short (15 minute) break following the first murders to build up some sympathetic characterisation, the action is real edge-of-your-seat stuff which doesn't let up until the end. The suspense is mostly created by the reactions of the two main characters to various bumps and noises as their house is invaded. Until the final 10 minutes you don't really see or find out who the "them" are. What makes it worse is that it's all very believable!

Some people have said that "Ils" isn't gory. I don't know what film they were watching but there are lots of blood effects and very realistic woundings. Realism is the key word here. You don't need buckets of fake blood thrown over everything (or a huge budget) to make a scary film anyway. "The Blair Witch Project" proved that years ago. Even if the "true story" isn't, it'll still give you something to think about.

I'm giving it 6.5 out of 10 and it will be going into the Video Vault as soon as I do my next website update. The film does have a few weaknesses, especially in length and denouement, but the overall effect will make you think that you've just watched something with an 8 out of 10 rating if you aren't quite so critical as I happen to be.

Yes, I recommend this film!

From the IMDB: "HELL HATH NO FURY is the new film from Creepy Six Films (Vampires vs. Zombies; Human Nature) - A horror anthology that's a balls-out bloody and erotic mix of stories in the style of horror anthologies like The Hot Blood Series and Tales form the Crypt. Spiced with liberal -and very gory- doses of wicked inspiration from classic revenge films like Ms. 45, I Spit on Your Grave, Irreversible, and Last House on the Left, Creepy Six Films' Hell Hath No Fury is a funny, sexy, gory, disturbing and exciting ride into an insanely twisted world where the women scorned exact their vengeance like never before."

Well, you can ignore that load of nonsense for a start. "Hell Hath No Fury" is yet another Canadian cheapie that looks as if someone just got a video camera for Christmas and decided to make a horror movie... or in this case half a dozen of them!

I'll give them credit though. The two hours of stories are mostly quite entertaining. As a portmanteau with a wraparound it was just as hit and miss as all the other anthologies I've ever seen but when it was good it was very good indeed.

Unfortunately when it was bad it was truly awful. Three stories failed abysmally. The first story "One Night Stand" doesn't make a whole lot of sense and has no real ending. "Kim the Psycho Girlfriend" was also a pointless three or four minute short that just had a girl discovering her husband's love letters from his secretary and going suitably berzerk. Of course it gets bloody but it just seemed to be a waste of film. "Three Degrees Kelvin" was presumably meant to be a piece of comic relief in the middle but I just found it boring. Some guy gets a visit from his future self but there's no real purpose to it at all except to say that all relationships break down eventually. I didn't see how it fitted in with the rest of the "horror". If "Hell Hath No Fury" lost these three stories, it would improve things considerably.

Forget also the wraparound "Night Shift at the Coffee Shop". That's only there to join things up and, although it provides a nice ghost story at one point, is pretty disposable even when coupled with the vampire story that mercifully ends it.

But back to the good ones. "Anna Lynn" is a tale about a retarded girl who is unwittingly forced to kill her beloved brother. She won't let his spirit go so he ends up possessing one of her new "friends" to get his revenge on his real murderer. I enjoyed the performances in this one. It reeked of acting school classes but isn't that always the way with these things? I just found the girl being a dog quite amusing though.

Then there was "Prey". This story had a neat ending to it. The cop who gets raped is also a hypnotist and (while being raped) puts her assailant under so that when he is "triggered" he ends up cutting off his own dinkle then stabbing himself in the neck. I didn't find the sex scene all that erotic (though parts of it were meant to be in spite of the context!) but I did really fancy Jennifer Angiers for some reason. She's not the most beautiful woman I've ever seen or anything but she was quite sexy even when covered from head to toe in blood.

The biggest and best story though is "Torched". It's another rape story with the victim getting revenge and is like a mini version of "I Spit on your Grave" but even gorier. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so nasty since "Baise-Moi" even if, technically, the effects aren't up to much. The nurse (Michelle Boback) who gets raped isn't all that attractive either (unlike her co-worker - Tamara Pender) but that's besides the point (as rape is supposedly a power thing and has little to do with lust). Her revenge on her assailant is terrible. When she is attacked a second time, she tazers the would-be rapist, ties him up, blowtorches him all over, throws syringes in him, gives him a hard on and sticks more syringes in his dinkle... and blowtorches his bollocks! If that wasn't enough, she then gets a junkie with AIDS to come round and bugger him!!! Then she finds out, after he dies, that he isn't even the one who actually raped her to start with! Oh dear...

The gore scenes in "Torched" sound better than they were. Flesh melting like candlewax gave away what was actually used to make it look that way - as it probably was candlewax. Lots of goopy fake blood was overused too in every segment to hide things like heads getting bashed in rather than to emphasize them. It just didn't look at all realistic. Some of the make-up effects were quite good though so, once again, it was all swings and roundabouts...

The main problem with the whole movie was the overuse of flashbacks and flashforwards which made the good stories a bit confusing and rendered the bad stories even more unintelligible.

Characterisation was pretty much incidental except in the case of "Torched" and even that was uneven. A damn good try was made at it though by Michelle Boback. Generally the acting was ok for what everyone had to work with. Let's face it, this movie was hardly ever destined to be a classic.

I think, if you have the patience, you'd enjoy "Hell Hath No Fury". Because it was so inconsistent I can really only give it 3 out of 10 but it kept me amused for a couple of hours and that's what really matters.

Yes, 65 "B movie" reviews on one page!!!

The Bloody Bs

I'd like to see my rivals beat that!

So, I finally finished my B movie section with the worst kind of HTML coding - everything on one really long page! I may adjust it into individual pages later but it's not as if we don't all have Broadband connections now is it?

Then check out www.UHMN.com. This site is fantastic.

From Melissa Bacelar: "If you make independent horror on any level (writer, actor, makeup artist, special FX) or if you watch it..The Underground Horror Movie Network is for you. It's a combination of MySpace and a Video Store. Seriously, you create a free profile and you can talk to other fans, review films, meet the filmmakers!!! It's a great way to Network and to find movies that you can't find anywhere else. There are 100's of films in the libraries and you can download one for free today. Alice Sweet Alice!! It's a classic. The best part is you can download and watch it on your I Pod..But the quality is so good you can also watch it crystal clear on a big screen TV!!! This site ROCKS!!"

I've joined up and it's exactly what Melissa says it is!!! It makes my site look a bit shit now unfortunately... oh well...

I had fond memories of this movie from 1989 and was going to include it in the video vault until I watched it again. What was I thinking? This film is absolutely crap!!!

From the IMDB: "Puppet maker Andre Toulon shoots himself at the Bodega Bay Inn before his Secret of Life can be stolen by the Nazis. 50 years later in 1989 the secret is discovered by Neil Gallagher. Soon he sends messages to his psychic friends Alex Whitaker, Dana Hadley, Frank Forrester and Carissa Stamford who arrive to find his wife Megan who claims Neil to be dead. As the night goes by, the murderous puppets are awakened and unleased on the group, only for them to discover that evil comes in all sizes."

It appears that this film has a cult following (presumably made up of people my age who saw it through a drunken haze back when they were in their late teens too!). In comparison with a lot of other killer doll movies which came out at the same time this is still awful but I remember it being heavily promoted by Blockbuster... which is why we all watched it. What suckers we were!

The tagline for this film is "This is not child's play!". Obviously "Child's Play" is a far superior story and pretty much set a precedent the previous year anyway.

"Puppetmaster" is a Charles Band film and that pretty much tells you all you need to know. I think the only decent film that Full Moon ever made was "Phantoms" (aka Meridien) and that was only because Sherilyn Fenn got nudie in it.

It is badly directed, the acting is average, there are huge plot holes where things are not explained at all, and the stop-motion puppet effects are really dated now.

The worst thing about it is the pacing though. It takes absolutely ages to get going. The first 10 minutes of the puppets getting hidden away are a complete waste of film and the nothing else happens of any importance until almost three-quarters of an hour later. When anything does happen, the scenes are so drawn out that it all just becomes boring.

It's not very gory, isn't scary at all, and there's only one nudie bit. Kathryn O'Reilly (I think that's her name!) plays a sexy blonde and she's probably the only good reason for watching this at all. Barbara Crampton is in this film too for a few seconds but to see her getting sexy you need to watch "From Beyond" instead.

The puppets themselves were nicely thought out but are completely wasted: "Blade" is barely seen in action, "Pinhead" just likes to strangle and punch women in the face, "Tunneler" has a drill coming out of his head but doesn't really get to do a lot with it except kill the only pretty woman in the whole thing(!), "Leech woman" takes ages to spew out leeches from her mouth (and provides the ruination of the film's only sex scene!), and "Jester" looks worried a lot but just doesn't kill anybody!!!

It doesn't even have a proper ending... obviously leading to the half dozen even crappier sequels.

My rating? 1 out of 10. I wouldn't waste my time watching this again.

The blurb: "Set in 1960 in France, House of Voices explores the twists and turns of what happens when a woman is sent on a mission to find out what spirits are occupying a thought-to-be empty home for children."

Ooh, a ghostie one!!!

This tried so hard to be a French version of The Others that I almost expected Eric Sykes to join the Hattie Jacques-lookalike Russian school matron. It's beautifully shot but it should have been dubbed or subtitled. Allowing the original actors to use their own 'Allo, 'Allo style accents made the dialogue incomprehensible at times, and at those times when it was the most important.

Aside from the laconic dialogue, there are also very few bits of plot development that make any sense. The lead character is at first terrified of the "Scary Children" and then seems hell bent on summoning them for no reason at all. Similarly to Creep, there are lots of clues to explain why things are as they are but nothing is fully explained. The conclusion just leaves the audience wondering what the hell they just watched. What was the point? Were any moral purposes served? Did any characters get what they deserved? What the hell was it about? I'm sure the director could put all those answers on the back of a postage stamp.

This really didn't stand a ghost of a chance!

Half Light is very reminiscent of such paranormal chillers as "The Haunting Passion" and "The Haunting of Seacliffe Inn" but the added psychological thiller aspect here makes this something a little bit different.

When successful novelist Rachel Carson's (Demi Moore) five-year-old son drowns and she separates from her husband, a friend rents her a cottage in a remote part of Scotland where she can rest for a while and get to grips with her grief. Nice friend, huh? You can see that this film had a big budget though as everything looks very idyllic and cheerful which of course is not quite how things are going to turn out.
Unfortunately, the death of her son is not the only thing haunting Demi Moore! She soon wonders if she is going mad before finally getting involved in a life or death struggle which mirrors events of many years before... and even manages to have a love affair along the way!

It's not particularly scary for a ghostie film but it does have a great storyline and everything, including Demi Moore, looks great. Her face seems to have changed shape over the years but that's the same with most of us to be fair. I know how haters like to pick on her for having cosmetic surgery but I think she looks good. I'm probably biased though as I've always fancied her. It's just certain aspects of her personality that I don't like.

She certainly does a good job though in this film. She's a little bit vulnerable but with hidden strengths and her role will really annoy people who think of Demi Moore as just a pretty face. She really has learnt to act. As she is the main character with serious amounts of screen time, this is one of the best vehicles for getting her career back on track after some of the rubbish she has been in since Disclosure. I was a bit disappointed in the minor sex scene half way through but you can't have everything can you?

Nor it seems can Demi Moore's character. At the start she really does seem to have it all, the handsome English husband, the precocious young son, the big house, the multi-million dollar book deal, the expensive London house etc., until she is bereaved. It isn't really shown but presumably the kid's death helps to cause the separation with her slightly envious husband. The signs of the rot are there in the beginning so it's no great surprise when certain events happen later in the film.

When she gets to Scotland though, we see the now deflated side of her character just trying to get away from things for some peace and quiet, maybe a little bit of writing, and certainly no big shot American. She's just nice, one of the good ones, which makes everything that has happened to her and will happen to her even more unfair.

I really liked this film. The supernatural elements are kept to a minimum and the bulk of it is a love story with a twist. To tell you what that twist is would it for you so I won't. It was kind of like a good stand alone episode of Afterlife or Sea of Souls at times and, as I also rate them quite highly too, I happily give this 7 out of 10. And yes it will be going into the Video Vault!

This is just one of the best paranormal/psychological thrillers out at the moment and girls will love it!

Forget Shaun of the Dead, actually it's very easy to, this is the best British horror-comedy ever made! Really it is!

The story is basically about a group of co-workers from a weapons firm going on a team building exercise somewhere in Eastern Europe. When the boss upsets the coach driver they find themselves left to their own devices. They find their supposedly "luxury lodge" where they are going to start doing all the trendy team building nonsense but then sinister events start happening and people start getting killed...

It starts off with the kind of humour you'd get in something like The Office (or one of those trendy Sky One presentations) and then turns into a fully fledged survival horror film... but still with humour here and there. It just works. It really shouldn't work but it does!

The boss figure is played by Percy from Blackadder (Tim McInnerny) who is also a very credible straight actor so he adds a touch of class to the proceedings. The "hero", if you can call him that, is the guy from "Is Harry on the Boat?" (Danny Dyer). I never watched the series or the film but I vaguely know who he is and he always plays the same kind of character. He was suitably funny and laddish throughout and I enjoyed his performance even if I didn't totally like his "stoner" character.

There are some really funny scenes, which I believe American reviewers call "Gross Out Comedy" nowadays. It just shows the thin line between vicious horror and vicious humour is even thinner than you realise. Well, the makers of MASH realised that years ago but this is a British film and it really does everything perfectly. The comedy is funny and the horror is horrific. It's true horror-comedy not a light mix of each.

From the credits I believe the film was made in Hungary and on the Isle of Man. Why not just in one place? I have no idea.

The two Hungarian escorts in the film are suitably gorgeous so there's really nothing for me to complain about in this film at all... except I wish it had been longer.

It was funny, gory, nasty, realistic, and silly all wrapped up together. It's a cross-genre horror-comedy classic. And you can quote me on that one!

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