October Horror Movie Challenge, part 3

I’m up to twelve so far. Almost halfway there.

Vanishing on 7th Street (2010)
Anakin Skywalker keeps running out of flashlight batteries. Croatoan. The ending was good.

The Dead (2010)
Hey, have you been reading about how the Ebola dead are resurrecting in West Africa? So this is pretty much like what it would look like if Ebola was a zombie virus. It’s set in west Africa, Sierra Leone. The zombies operate on Romero rules. Slow, cannibals, dead, stopped by a shot to the head.
The characters are capable, and don’t do anything overtly stupid. Its nice to see a zombie movie that isn’t set in the white middle-class suburbs of the United States, though the effect is ruined by making the main protagonist a white American man. This isn’t a great movie, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not unwatchable. Apparently there’s a sequel set in India.

 

Killer Story (2007)
Well, it’s got Joe Estevez in it. He’s like a poor man’s Gary Busey. “You’ll be a female Gene Hackman.” A character actually said that line in this movie. As a compliment. To a woman. ಠ_ಠ
I wish there was something to recommend here, but there just isn’t. The plot is asinine and transparently confessional, since both stories in this anthology are about men who are complete failures. The filmmakers apparently had never heard of “continuity” or “color correction” and they don’t have any friends in bands, judging from the atrocious casio synth score. Utterly inept on every level. This is the movie you can make if you have $10k, and you give $5k of it and a bottle of tequila to Joe Estevez for an afternoon of work.  Just terrible.

 

Final Draft (2007)
Dawson’s Creek stars in this movie as a writer who’s trying to write a story about a killer clown. I felt sympathetic to Dawson’s Creek actually; as a person who dabbles with creative writing now and again, the idea of locking yourself in a room until you finish the thing you’re working on is a familiar sentiment, one I can identify with. The story here is one of those sort of meta things. The guy is writing the screenplay and seemingly living it at the same time. The sound on the DVD release was mixed really low, sadly, but other than that, it was reasonably good.

 

MV5BMTY1NzYzNTU5Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODc2ODQ5MQ@@._V1_SX214_AL_Splinter (2008)
Best line of dialog: “It’s ok. We’re cutting your arm off.”
This is a creature feature in the best sense, and oh my, what a creature! Reminds me of that fungus that infects ants, and makes them crawl to a high spot in the tree branches, where the fungus eats through the ant body, and then releases its spores onto the forest floor, to infect more ants. It had lots of echos of The Thing and Alien Raiders. Good and scary, with a fair amount of disturbingly realistic gore. One plot complaint: it would have been easier to make an ice suit than to lower homeboy’s body temperature. Simple is the best solution. Some of the action scenes got a little shaky-cam, but I can live with that. Totally solid movie.