March 24, 2010

Review: Pandorum (2009)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
I thought this movie was supposed to be about Pandorum's Box, but I was instead surprised to find that it was instead about deep-space travel and nervous conditions. Who knew?

Two spacemen (aliens for all we know) are woken up early from their deep-space sleep, to find that their ship is dark and deserted, and that they have the shakes, which in space are called Pandorum. One of the space guys, Bower, decides to crawl through a dark and cramped ventilation shaft (which is always a good idea) in an effort to unlock the door they're trapped behind from the other side, but he never quite gets the job done. Why, you might ask? Because of... Pandorum!

Pandorum!
Just kidding. It's really because he discovers that the ship is now populated with insanely strong and agile creatures that want to eat him, and anyone else that isn't one of them. Along the way he meets a Tahitian Ninja, a hot ninja-like German chick, and a black dude that doesn't trust white people. Who can blame him though? I'm white and I rarely, if ever, trust myself. True story.

She trusts no one! That's how she survives.
The other space guy, Dennis Quaid, stays behind in the locked room and tries to help Bower navigate to wherever he needs to go, but he fails too because he finds some crazy guy that wants them to launch themselves into space because he's claustrophobic. I'm not kidding on that one. Guy wants to launch himself into space because he's claustrophobic... I may be wrong here, but floating endlessly through space in an escape tube seems really, really claustrophobic to me too.

"I've got your tube hanging, punk!"
So, Dennis Quaid and Bower both have their hands full, and it doesn't look like either of them are going to be around for very long. Will Bower and his band or ragtag misfits get to the power core and save the ship in time? Will Dennis Quaid launch himself into space on the whim of a madman? Will any of them survive... Pandorum?!? Yes, no , and maybe. Also, the ending threw me for a loop, although it was a pretty cool one.

This is a space waterfall. They actually exist.
I don't know why, but aspects of this movie reminded me of Ghosts of Mars a little bit, which I also loved. That's fairly misleading, as the two movies aren't very similar at all, but the creatures and the way the acted just brought it to mind... although if anything, the movie resembles Event Horizon or even Pitch Black more closely. Pandorum is a dark, interesting little space-monster flick, that didn't make me roll my eyes once, even when the ending threw us it's out-of-left-field twist. It just worked.

This movie is bloody, action-packed and tense, not to mention gorgeous on Blu-ray. I also have a weakness for Horror flicks set in space. Something about the quiet desolation of it all is really effective to me. I also have a weak spot for Dennis Quaid, who usually stars in some lackluster movies, but whom I always like anyway. Here, he does his job admirably along with his cast mates, most noticeably Ben Foster, and I actually liked all of their characters. That's a rarity for me.

Ben Foster is way underrated.
 
The ending made me a bit mad, because it looks like they have more story to tell, and I don't think it will happen since Pandorum underperformed at the Box Office. It was one of those "Oh cool... but... that's it? I wanna know more!" Types of endings, and it will always frustrate me unless we get a sequel someday. Good stuff though.

More!
I personally find it horrendous that this movie came out last August, and I just now saw it on Blu-ray, months after the fact. I don't know why I put it off so long, and I'm sorry that I did. I mean, had I seen it when it first hit theaters, I could have had this creepy little fucker haunting my dreams from that night forward.

Oh how cute, it wants to play.
There was a fair amount of blood and gore, and even some slime. Yes, slime. There was even a pretty good karate fight between a ninja and a space monster, which of course was all bloody and slimy.

Dennis Quaid's stares are gory in their own way.
Nope. We are on a "no nudity" streak as of late with the movies we've been seeing, and it's starting to suck. Pretty soon I'm going to watch some porn and pretend that it's a Horror movie, and just write a fake review... OR... maybe you could just start giving us some boobs, Horror movies!

Dennis Quaid is a little wonky. Always has been. Also, Germany turns out some pretty hot chicks.

I told you, he's got Pandorum!
If you like movies like Event Horizon, Alien(s), Pitch Black, or anything starring Dennis Quaid, you'll most likely dig Pandorum. We here at THC are suckers for the whole Sci-Fi Horror thing, and we pretty much unanimously gave this a big thumbs up. If you haven't already seen it, you should do so when you get the chance. Don't be lame like me and wait for 7 months to check it out, because you deserve a good movie right now!

B+

Pandorum is available now on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INL0XA0/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00INL0XA0&linkCode=as2&tag=thehorclu0a-20&linkId=KWMNB7A5R7UXGVEI

Who is this Friederike Kempter that stole my heart, though she was in very little of the movie? Also, Antje Traue isn't so bad either.

March 19, 2010

Review: The Descent 2 (2010)

"A Descent indeed... into the caves of suck."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1073105/
Cast Members of Note- Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Jackson Mendoza, and some other people that played other parts, whom I'm not going to list.

Picking up minutes after the events that ended The Descent, where Sara escapes from the ground and yells into the sky, she runs off through the woods and proceeds to attempt to car-jack some poor rural rube driving down the road, with the help of a decoy deer... and that is the most interesting part of the movie.

Sara is hysterical, to the point that they have to sedate her and put her out. Seconds after they sedate her though, she's awake and answering questions for the Cops, looking wide-awake and coherent, although she doesn't remember anything. Naturally, with no memory of anything and being heavily drugged, the Sheriff decides to take her out of the Hospital so that she can head back down into the caves to "show them around." Makes perfect sense to us.

She looks fine to me.
So the Sheriff, his Deputy, and a traumatized Sara (along with three rescue workers), head down into the cave system via elevator (?!?), hell-bent on finding survivors. You know that it's not long before the slimy mongoloids that dwell below find them, and start dispatching them one by one, ripping necks and causing fountains of tomato soup to erupt everywhere. I'll say no more (mainly because I have nothing nice to say about this movie), but I will leave you with this: worst ending ever! Alright, maybe not ever, but dammit if the end of this movie wasn't so bad that I wanted to bash my own face off of the nearest wall until I passed out.

I didn't though. I won't give The Descent 2 the satisfaction. Nyah!

Yep, that about sums it up.
The good.. let's see... it ended? This movie was a disappointment on a massive scale for me, and I'm not sure what I can say about it that's actually good, other than it only ran for about 90 minutes, then ended.

Gone is any of the magic that made 2007's The Descent such a great and effective Horror movie. You know, like a tight script, taut directing, fresh and creepy ideas, and near flawless execution? Here, please be so kind as to allow me to rant for you...

Where to start? The premise of bringing a newly traumatized victim of such a tragedy, who is now safe and lucky to be alive, back underground where said trauma took place putting here right back in the face of potential danger, is ludicrous. No Cop on Earth would do that, and if they would, then they suck at being a Cop. "She can tell us to go right or left." Really? You need a wounded, mentally-frayed amnesiac to help you decide which way to turn? Whoever wrote this movie failed. Big time.

The characters were dandy too, though I'm not sure whether their actions or dialogue was more insipid and frustrating. Both were equal, I think. Shauna Macdonald overacted, which may be what she was directed to do, but as the film wore on, the emerging of her tough chick persona became painful to watch. The chick who played Juno (yes, she's alive, and I don't care if that's a spoiler) was even worse, making me facepalm myself several times with her over-the-top insane actions and poses. Again, the script was bad, so maybe it's all on the writing team, but the actors just couldn't get it right. I won't even discuss the Sheriff and his Deputy, as I don't want to sound like I'm being mean just for the sake of being mean.

This face was made 236 times during the movie... by me.
The gore and violence were laughable, though both were really graphic and plentiful. The blood looked like tomato soup, and whenever someone attacked one of the creatures, the way it was choreographed and shot was silly. Even more silly was the way people froze or tried to sneak by the creatures in every other scene; the part where two people magically leap 10 feet into the air, press back to back and climb the walls of the cavern with only their legs was seriously hard to watch. I wanted to laugh and cry, because by that point, the movie was making me sad.

The direction needs to take a shot in the nuts here to, as much of what was on-screen just seemed campy rather than creepy, or even dramatic. The movements and the faces characters made, how certain scenes played out, the jump scares and obvious "It's behind you! Turn around! Oh, you turned around too slowly, and now it's gone..." That happened every 3 minutes.

Yes, the actors actually mugged for the camera.
There wasn't a thing in this movie that wasn't obvious, cliche', or that you won't see coming from about 742 miles away. Who wrote this script? I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but this movie was so far-fetched and ridiculous with most of its actions, that about 30 minutes into it I was checking my watch (figuratively of course) praying for it to be over. *I don't actually wear a watch. You know what I mean though.

Meh.
I can't remember the last time I saw an ending to a Horror movie that was this bad. Where did that lame-ass twist come from, and what was the point? I literally rolled my eyes and laughed at the same time. Wow.

"Whargarrbl!"
They must have thought that gallons of tomato soup-looking blood and a ton of excessive violence would make up for the fact that the movie sucked so bad, because this one is all sorts of gory. Gross even. At least it might satisfy the Gorehounds.

Sequels often suck. Also, this sequel sucked a lot.

Glare at me all you like, you know I'm right.
It's as simple as that. This movie was just bad, and embarrassingly so. How they went for a great, fresh original, to a laughably bad and painful sequel, I have no idea. Mistakes were made. Many of them. This movie played like most Direct-to-DVD messes tend to, but was more painful than any of those end up being, because this one was supposed to be better. It was almost guaranteed to be good, but it just failed.

Go watch the first one, and forget that this debacle even exists.

Not even Shauna Macdonald and her sexy friends could save this one...

March 16, 2010

The 10 Horror Eyes returns!

Is there a Horror movie out there that doesn't offer at least one close-up of someone's eyes during its runtime? We sure hope not, because we just can't get enough of them. They're windows to the soul, you know.

So once again, let us celebrate the ocular images that add that extra tension and emotion to our favorite films. *We mean that as a generality, as these are not necessarily our favorite films. Then again, they're not necessarily not our favorite films either. Could go either way.

Enjoy.

Various Eyes (Amer)
Wikus-Prawn Eyes (District 9)
Taking it From Behind Eyes (Growth)
An Innocent Child's Eyes (Pandorum)
Alone in Infrared Eyes (REC 2)
Crazy, Crazy Bitch Eyes (She's Crushed)