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apparatchik
i love horror movies, i can find something of value in almost any horror film, even it's unintended laughs or the chance to rewrite the script in my head.
Reviews
The Bone Snatcher (2003)
sun, sand and suffering..
first of all, i don't normally bother with plot summaries in reviews, but the plot summary that is currently up for this film is woefully inadequate, so here's mine.
a systems analyst travels from canada to an african diamond mining camp in the middle of the desert for some field work. on his way to the camp he is supposed to be working at, he and the crew he is traveling with stop to look for missing diamond prospectors.
what they find is nothing but the bones of the men, picked clean of flesh in a matter of hours. it quickly becomes apparent that whatever killed the men is not human..
this is a good movie, the camerawork is great, the locations are beautiful and the acting is good. this is a UK/south africa/canada co-production, if it's one thing this movie has a lot of, it's accents.
my only real problems with the movie are with the plot, too much time is spent detailing points that are not essential in any way to the overall story, and elements that are important seem rushed at times. a lot of the scenes suffer from what seem to me to be afterthoughts added because perhaps the director felt that more atmosphere was needed. an example of this would be the witchdoctor character who is for some reason in a mining camp, he stops to perform a ceremony on one of the crew before they leave the camp, it seemed like a pointless addition to a scene that should have been far simpler.
less time should have been spent on the background (was the scene set in vancouver at the beginning really necessary?) and more time could have been spent on the time in the desert after the crew discover the creatures. at one point we discover that two members of the crew are in fact dead, with no real buildup to their deaths which almost seem incidental. the scene would have been a lot more powerful had there been some groundwork laid for it, the same scene ends bizarrely, cutting to morning in the middle of an attack at night.
the ending was predictable, but not painfully so.
if you are willing to deal with a slow start and serious lulls in action, in return for good cinematography, acting and beautiful desert locations, with a fair plot, then this movie is for you.
i find the lack of coverage that this movie has received compared to other, lesser movies that have come out this year surprising. i was hard-pressed to find a review of it anywhere, even with search engines, i think that can be explained by the fact that this is not a hollywood movie.
The Dead Hate the Living! (2000)
patchwork quilt of other movies..
the start of this movie showed some promise, my first thought was that it might be along the lines of "blair witch" only with zombies, and i was curious to see how they would pull that off.
alas, after the first few minutes this settles into not one, but many horror movie cliches. too large a chunk of the first half of the movie is spent on characterisation, which was totally unnecessary. when you populate your movie with genre archetypes, is fleshing them out really going to help them be less one-dimensional?
the people behind the film seem to revel in little in jokes and parody of other movies, while at the same time being very self-conscious and unsure of it. some scenes where you don't expect any humour seem to be building up to a punchline, and then it doesn't come, other scenes are randomly punctuated by jokes that are totally out of place.
the ending is presumably some nod to "the beyond"/"evil dead 2", but it irritated and confused the hell out of me, and seems to be a total clean break from the rest of the plot, which was a patchwork of other movies to begin with.
if you can find this movie at your local video store (big "if" i think), and you like horror B-movies that follow the scream style of self-parody, then go for this.
Dark Walker (2003)
i enjoyed this movie..
but then i like low budget horror.
when a movie opens with a scene that looks like it's set in a school's "fall festival" display (give us back halloween, geeze) you know you are in for a treat.
the plot is not very well explained, the monster looks like a cross between swamp thing and the toxic avenger and the acting is mediocre to poor but i still managed to not only stick with it, but enjoy it right up to the end.
what is it with movies these days and endings? is it a totally lost art?
oh, and another thing, the death loving "goth" girl who drips bile and morbid one-liners? she needs to be a horror standby returned to the props closet, it is so old.
The Order (2003)
major disappointment
"the order" seems to me to be the kind of movie that should have been made in the late 70's or early 80's, along with movies like the omen, the exorcist, etc.
the plot just doesn't stand up in this day and age, the concept is a different twist on an old idea, and just isn't executed well enough to justify revisiting it.
we have an "order" of heretical priests within the catholic church who are essentially demon hunters. why this is such a heretical occupation we are not told, but it is implied that they seek after too much knowledge, and embarrass the more modernised catholic church.
so these two last members of this order have this mission dropped into their laps, instead of the suspicion and wisdom we are told that they possess they blunder blindly into situation after situation. the characters are cardboard cut-outs. we have the fat, drunken, lecherous irish priest (can i cry "racist" here?) who we are told once "fell in love with a whore in dublin", the waifish and damaged, suicidal american girl and the main character, where exactly he is meant to be from we are not sure, but he lives in america at the start of the film, which probably explain why he is allowed to be cool. worst of all, we are told during the course of the film that the cliched nature of the people in it is deliberate, which just makes it all the more insulting in my opinion.
these characters are set against a backdrop in which demons, ghosts, the supernatural all exist, but ordinary people and the church itself are unaware of the fact, even though there are demonic children camped outside people's houses in broad daylight.
the supernatural aspect of the plot is just not properly explored or explained, at times it seems they are trying to replicate the exorcist, and at other times it seems to be almost a straight up homage to blade. another huge problem i have with this movie is the way that the main priest is turned into james bond with a collar. i was waiting for him to crack a joke about wanting his communion wine "shaken, not stirred", we have him running around with guns, reaching for his cross like it should itself be in a holster, taking trips on private jets and hanging out with mysterious underworld characters under rave parties.
the "villain" himself is very bond-ish, offering the hero women (an old bond villain tactic), travelling in style and luxury, living in a mansion, casually collecting rembrandts, etc, etc. the sin eater is also full of throw-away words of wisdom, which i guess are supposed to show us how worldly and experienced he is, but end up sounding like he is reading the contents of random fortune cookies, quoting one line of nietzsche does not a philosopher make. the scenes involving the sin eater become extremely boring, drawn out and overly verbose, you find yourself hoping that he will just disappear and the priests can go back to chasing demonic monsters, which seems to be the direction the movie itself wants to take anyway.
some of the scenes almost seem to have been added because of a check list of some sort that i imagine the writer had ("hanging? check. drowning? check. crucifixtion? check. stabbing? check. shooting? check.."), they add nothing to the plot and simply deepen the sense that this is a movie that had a good basic concept that was ruined by the bells and whistles that had to be bolted on to make it a "proper" hollywood movie. this attitude is obvious throughout the film, and even in it's title, which was changed from "sin eater" to "the order" because it was felt that "sin eater" would have to be explained in the advertising. "the order" is so much clearer? if you are looking for a sterling example of this hollywood mentality at work when watching the movie, the scene immediately following the trip to see the mysterious pagan under the rave is perfect, he asks them to leave and one priest proceeds to slip into a stream covered with gratings where he nearly drowns, quickly followed by the other priest being nailed to a wall, all for seemingly no reason.
speaking of things seemingly without reason, why is this movie rated "R"?
i'd say that if you really like movies about religion with a very slight horror tinge to them then go for this, otherwise avoid it like a biblical plague.