Blood Fest

A bunch of friends take a moonlit stroll through the woods.

(2018) Horror Comedy (Cinedigm/Rooster Teeth) Robbie Kay, Seychelle Gabriel, Jacob Batalon, Barbara Dunkelman, Tate Donovan, Zachary Levi, Olivia-Grace Applegate, Owen Egerton, Isla Cervelli, Paul Ogola, Nicholas Rutherford, Samantha Ireland, Tristan Riggs, Rebecca Lynne Wagner, Chris Doubek, Carl Thomas, Lynn Andrews III, Jessica Polk. Directed by Owen Egerton

 

Horror has rules. That has been drilled into the heads of fans throughout the annals of horror films; at least since Wes Craven’s Scream outline most of them for us. Still few genres have as much structural similarities between films as horror does. That has made for some pretty nifty self-referential meta films that remind us that virgins have a better chance of survival and never ever go into the basement by yourself.

Dax (Kay) loves horror movies, a love instilled by his mother (Ireland) who promised him that horror movies give us the opportunity to realize that we are stronger than our own films. Of course, she tells him that moments before she is brutally murdered by one of her husband’s (Donovan) patients who has a similar love for scary movies.

Flash forward fifteen years and Dax is eager to go to a major horror event called Blood Fest promising haunted attractions, panel discussions with filmmakers and horror icons, and a rave-like atmosphere with a horror movie theme. However, his dad won’t allow it (and tears up his precious ticket before his very eyes after a similar warning from his sister (Wagner): “Blood Fest is going to suck.” Little does he know how right she is.

Dax manages to get his hand on a precious wristband and makes it in for the big event and at first it’s everything he hopes it would be as he and his best friends Sam (Gabriel) and hacker Krill (Batalon) at his side. The MC is a well-known horror producer (Egerton) but he has plans for the revelers. You see, the horrors at Blood Fest are real and it will take all of their knowledge of the rules of horror films along with all their resourcefulness and courage to survive the night.

I’m not a big fan of horror comedies. Few of them succeed in balancing the screams with the laughs and this one is no exception but it is more successful than most. The fact is that they don’t go for the over-the-top laughs that bring the comedy into spoof territory, and spoofs are as far as I’m concerned the lowest form of cinematic humor. The scares are never particularly over-the-top either but there’s enough energy in the pacing and from the performers that the movie keeps your attention other than a few points where some exposition is going on.

The performances by the fairly low-budget cast are solid and professional. Chuck star Zachary Levi (also from the upcoming Shazam) has a thoroughly enjoyable albeit brief cameo, while the female cast is mega-sexy without any nudity which is quite a feat when you consider there’s at least one obligatory shower scene and a lesbian vampire make-out scene. Still, that’s just further proof that a woman doesn’t have to show her boobs to be sexy.

The writing is a bit spotty; the reveal is early on in the movie and while the mysterious partner behind the murders is kept hidden until near the end (and veteran horror fans should be able to figure out well before then) and while some of the plot points stretch the boundaries of plausibility to the breaking point (and beyond), for he most part the writing is pretty decent for this kind of film. The dialogue sounds authentic and there is a good deal of affection for the genre and those who love I – and obsess over it. This is a pleasant gem that will probably find a long shelf life on VOD and home video.

REASONS TO GO: Entertaining and generally well-paced.
REASONS TO STAY: A few plot points lack cohesion.
FAMILY VALUES: There is plenty of violence and gore, a good deal of profanity and some sexual innuendo.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Rooster Teeth is a content supplier mainly for YouTube; this is their third feature after Lazer Team and Lazer Team 2. It is actually however the second film released as Lazer Team 2 hasn’t yet received a release date.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, Fandango Now, iTunes, Vudu
CRITICAL MASS: As of 9/1/18: Rotten Tomatoes: 58% positive reviews: Metacritic: 54/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Scream
FINAL RATING: 6.5/10
NEXT: Support the Girls

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Six Days of Darkness 2014

It’s time once again for Cinema365 to review movies that speak to that need in ourselves to be scared out of our wits. This is our fifth annual edition of the six day movie review marathon of horror film reviews; it is also the second straight year we won’t be offering any short stories inspired by the films we’re reviewing. Once again this year, time has gotten away from us here at Cinema365 and for that we do apologize. Hopefully the stories will return somewhere down the line.

The graphic this year should give you a hint to the movies that we’ll be reviewing this year. Today’s movie, Dracula Untold is something of a bonus seventh day of darkness this year. The movies we’ll be reviewing for the Six Days include two of the most popular horror films of the last few years, a classic haunted house film, a remake of a cult classic, a horror comedy from a director who went on to become one of the most popular names in Hollywood and one of the greatest suspense films of all time. Hope you enjoy reading these as much as we enjoy writing them.

Six Days of Darkness 2012

Yes my friends, it is that time of year again, where pumpkins sprout grinning faces, where little trick or treaters walk around the neighborhood demand candy and adults can indulge their inner sexpot or inner child. Yes, it’s Halloween and we tend to associate that with scares and spooks and movies that celebrate those things.

As you may know from years past I have a soft spot in my heart for such things and each Halloween season for six days leading up to October 31 itself we at Cinema365 publish not only a review of a different horror movie each day but also a short story inspired by the movie reviewed that day.

Usually we try to keep the movies that are being reviewed a surprise but we decided to buck tradition and tell you in advance which ones we’re reviewing. You can find them on the headstones in this year’s banner logo, which will appear on all 6 Days material. There is, however, one exception – a last minute substitution of a film playing down here at the Enzian over the weekend which I thought merited a mention in our 6 Days celebration. That film will replace one of the other six films on the banner – we just won’t tell you which one. That’s this year’s trick.

Hopefully you’ll find the stories and reviews to be treats. The page with the all-time highest number of hits for our site is a 6 Days story – Inner Demons to which you can find a link on the front page at the bottom where the most popular pages are listed. Feel free to check it out along with all of our 6 Days stories.

This is the third year (wow!) that we’ve undertaken this and it is clearly a labor of – if not love, then madness. It literally doubles are workload for a week. But that’s okay – it’s worth it if you love Halloween as much as we do – and we suspect, as much as you do.

As usual around here we’ll be ending the year with a bang. While November is relatively quiet in terms of special features, we have our celebration of Christmas movies, the Holly and the Quill, running from December 21-25 and one of my favorite special features, the Annual Preview which this year of course gives us a look-see into the year in movies for 2013 is currently scheduled for publication on December 31. Our top ten listing for the year in movies 2012 should be out about two weeks after that.

And, of course, the holidays are a time for Hollywood to make one last big rush of some of the most anticipated movies of the year as we head into Awards season. Expect our coverage of major releases to continue as well.  So expect the first installment in this year’s edition of Six Days of Darkness to go up later this afternoon.

As always thanks for reading and Happy Halloween one and all from your spooky cinemaphiles at Cinema365!

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Michelle Yeoh finds that checking out books at the Ancient China branch of the library can be problematical at best.

(2008) Action Adventure Horror (Universal) Brenan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh, Luke Ford, John Hannah, Isabella Leong, Chau Sang Anthony Wong, Russell Wong, Liam Cunningham, David Calder, Jessey Meng, Tian Liang.  Directed by Rob Cohen

Movie monsters may come and movie monsters may go, but you can’t keep them down for too long. That, at least in my estimation, is the lesson generated by the first two movies of the Universal Mummy reboot.

The third installment of the series starts off very promising. Evil Chinese emperor (Li) plans to take over the world, but falls in love with sorceress Zi Yuan (Yeoh) who only has eyes for the emperor’s right hand General Ming (R. Wong), which cheeses off the emperor enough to kill his best field general. The emperor apparently never learned not to piss off a sorceress, so on the pretense of making the emperor immortal she instead curses him and his soldiers to turn into clay, and as such they are entombed for four thousand years.

That is, until Alex O’Connell (Ford) comes along. A young, promising archaeologist excavating in China stumbles upon the tomb, one of the most important finds of the 20^th century, but in doing so accidentally awakens the emperor who has plans to resume his world domination scheme after a slight delay. Those darn Chinese emperors!

Alex’s parents, Rick (Fraser) and Evelyn (Bello, replacing Rachel Weisz who chose not to return to the role) have been living in wedded bliss for more than a decade since the events of The Mummy Returns. However, they are both unspeakably bored and who wouldn’t be? Anything after a life of danger, adventure, exotic places and of course the undead would seem a bit dull by comparison.

Given the opportunity to return a rare gem to the Chinese people as a gift from the British government, the O’Connell’s head to China to reunite with their son, choosing a bar in Shanghai owned by Evelyn’s ne’er-do-well brother Jonathan (Hannah), which is a mistake in itself. There they are attacked and helped out by Lin (Leong), who turns out to be the daughter of the sorceress and General Ming who inherited her mom’s immortality. Thanks mom!

After witnessing the truly evil nature of the mummy and his human henchman General Yang (C.S.A. Wong), the O’Connell’s realize that they are the only people equipped to deal with yet another outbreak of mummy-ism. They are in turn aided by the sorceress and her yeti pals. This all leads to a big battle by the Great Wall in which the emperor’s soldiers are opposed by the slaves they murdered to build the wall (brought back to life conveniently by the sorceress) and the emperor, who morphs himself into a formidable fire-breathing three-headed dragon. The odds are against the O’Connells and their allies but if you know mummies like they know mummies, you won’t be worried about the whole day-saving thing.

Cohen takes over from Stephen Sommers who helmed the first two movies and does adequately. Cohen is no stranger to big movies, having directed xXx and the original The Fast and the Furious among other things but he doesn’t get to use Vin Diesel here.

Instead, he gets Brendan Fraser and the actor utilizes his considerable charm to make Rick likable despite being a bit of a whiner here. The chemistry between Fraser and Weisz is sorely missed and although Bello is a terrific actress in her own right, she really isn’t right for the role. Quite frankly, her English accent is a bit too upper class for Evelyn, and she comes off as a bit phony. She does look good in the fight scenes at least.

Alex O’Connell has gone from an annoying child in The Mummy Returns to an annoying adult here, so the less said the better. Hannah provides comic relief nicely, but for me the real attraction here is Li and Yeoh. Li is one of the greatest martial artists ever in movies and while he doesn’t get as much time demonstrating his prowess (he’s much too busy being a CGI mummy or dragon), he shines when he does. Yeoh is in my opinion an incredibly gifted actress who is shamefully underrated here in the States. She is, as always, one of the best reasons to see this movie.

There is plenty of eye candy to go around and the action sequences make the movie at least palatable. However, a lot of the sparkle and gee-whiz fun is missing from this movie where it was present in the first two. You get the impression this was just a paycheck for most of the people involved, who are sufficiently talented enough to make this entertaining, but without the spark that would have made this amazing. It’s one of those things where you have good talent, a great concept and skilled filmmakers but it doesn’t add up to the great movie it should have been. Instead, it’s merely adequate.

It’s not good form to compare a movie to the one that you think should have been made, but the movie disappointed me so here you have it. It’s certainly worth a look if you haven’t already seen it, but don’t expect to have your socks blown off. Your footwear is quite safe this time.

WHY RENT THIS: Spectacular effects and some amazing fight scenes. Any chance to see Li and Yeoh is worth taking. Fraser is as charming as ever.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Bello is miscast somewhat. The story is a bit weak compared to the first two movies.

FAMILY VALUES: There is some action movie-type violence and a few disturbing monster images that might be a bit much for the younger set.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The tomb and the terra cotta warriors are based on the actual tomb of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty in Xi’an, China. The excavations have been going slowly for decades, partially because of traps left by the builders of the tomb, some similar to the ones depicted in the movie.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: There is a featurette on the actual terra cotta warriors, as well as a trivia track and a U-Control feature called “Know Your Mummy” that compares this movie with the previous two Mummy flicks, the latter two being only on the Blu-Ray edition.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $401.1M on a $145M production budget; the movie made money.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

TOMORROW: Beginners

Amusement

Jessica Lucas hear's her master's voice.

(Picturehouse) Keir O’Donnell, Katheryn Winnick, Laura Breckinridge, Jessica Lucas, Tad Hilgenbrinck, Reid Scott, Rena Owen, Kevin Gage. Directed by John Simpson

When a movie, which has been marketed for a theatrical release complete with release date and trailer, goes direct to video, there’s usually a reason. Sometimes it’s because the distributor goes belly-up, but mostly it’s because the movie is really bad. This is particularly true in the horror genre.

Shelby (Breckinridge) is returning home to Cincinnati with her boyfriend Rob (Hilgenbrinck) who has an inexplicable love of driving in convoys. After she bitches to him about driving too fast, they wind up filling up at a gas station with a guy who has been convoy-ing with them for several miles (O’Donnell) and a friendly trucker. The trucker tells them he heard on his CB that the Interstate was a parking lot and that the smokies were out in force laying bear traps, ten-four.

So of course they wind up driving down this deserted road in the middle of nowhere because those kinds of roads are always the alternative to Interstates and Shelby is nervous because she’s sure she saw a terrified woman in the cab of the truck. Rob is skeptical right up to the point where the terrified woman becomes a projectile that goes straight into his windshield. The other convoy guy and Rob try to find out what’s up with the trucker except of course the trucker kidnaps both the girls and Rob and the convoy guy have to rescue them…except we find out that the convoy guy is the real maniac. Jokes on you, Rob.

Tabitha (Winnick) is babysitting the unholy terrors that are her cousins at the spiffy new digs of her aunt. Everything is mostly okay except that her aunt has a thing for clowns and there are dozens of clown dolls everywhere, including a life-sized creepy clown that sits in a rocking chair and stares at Tabitha, particularly when she gets naked (why is it that none of my babysitters ever got naked?) or takes a nap. When her aunt calls to check up on the kids, it turns out that Auntie Clownlover has no life-sized clowns in the house. It turns out that Soylent Green….is peeeeeeeeeopullllllll or at least life-sized clown dolls are people. Either way you slice it, it’s bad for Tabitha, particularly since the guy in the clown suit is the same guy who went all convoy on Shelby and Rob.

Finally, there’s Lisa (Lucas) whose roommate has disappeared with a guy who apparently is staying in a hotel on the edge of town. Worrywart Lisa sends her boyfriend Dan (Scott) in to investigate and he winds up having a close encounter with a Victorola that has a very nasty speaker system. In the meantime, Lisa waits two hours and rather than call the police, decides to go into the spooky hotel where nobody has emerged from since she started watching it and find out for herself what’s going on. It’s brain-dead thinking like that which keeps the horror film industry alive.

Of course, by now you know that the guy in the hotel is the same guy who kidnapped Shelby and Tabitha…that’s right, kidnapped not murdered…and now they are trapped in his insane revenge game that goes back to some terrible event that happened in the fourth grade, which should teach you kids to be nice to everyone because you never know if they’ll grow up to be a homicidal maniac.

The problem here is that the script is just plain awful. Each of the three stories in this kinda sorta anthology has the exact same twist and by the third time around you’re finding much more interesting things by staring into the pattern on your Pepperoni Pizza than you are onscreen, which is quite a shame. Director Simpson actually has crafted a very good-looking movie with a competent cast that had they been given a better story to work with might have actually come up with a pretty darn good little horror movie. Unfortunately, there wasn’t, they didn’t and you shouldn’t.

WHY RENT THIS: Very nice production values and the three leads are nice to look at.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: The script is a mess; the three stories all have the same twist and quite frankly by the third time around there’s not a lot to hold our interest.

FAMILY VALUES: Not a lot of gore per se, but there is a good deal of violence and bad language. Like most horror movies, mature teens and older only.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The movie was initially slated for wide release but when New Line shut down their Picturehouse division, it was left on the shelf for almost two years before being released on video.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: None listed.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

TOMORROW: Sugar