Sunday, October 30, 2011

Bloodstained Romance (2009)

Okay, image problems. For some reason, none of the discs in The Horror Collection will play on Windows Media Player, so my reviews for all six films will unfortunately be image free.

Bloodstained Romance is the B-side of the Horror Collection's first disc, the same disc that contains the terrible 'The Kiss', yet despite being very boring in many places, Boodstained Romance is a good film. But it's not good enough to save this disc's reputation from being the disappointment disc of The Horror Collection.

Bloodstained Romance is about Holden (Chris Burchette), a high school kid who sees a girl in the local library, Sadie (Cameron Wright) and he develops an obsession with her that soon turns violent...

The film starts of with a non-linear murder over the opening credits, then starts off from then on following Holden, as his grip on his sanity dwindles. Holden asks friends about Sadie, subscribes to the gym she frequents at and spies on her constantly.

Events come to a head when Holden's best friend Rolen (Keith Brown) goes looking around in Holden's house and finds a diary full of disturbing statements and whole pages repeating 'I love Sadie'; and he finds a duffel bag full of body parts. Rolen-disgusted-tries to escape, but he's caught and knocked unconscious by Holden.

After killing Rolen and a couple of other people and learning that Sadie has a boyfriend, Nick (Adam Anderson), Holden finally decides to make his move towards the girl of his fantasies...

The first thing to say about Bloodstained Romance is that Chris Burchette as Holden is GREAT in his first time role, he totally nails the part! The rest of the acting is good as well. The film had a very low budget, which shows as the film is shot on video. Though that isn't really a distraction for anyone who can get used to films shot like this. The film is very violent and while what we see isn't very convincing, it's not really meant to be given the nonexistant budget. The film's musical scoring is also good.

And a great scene is when Holden is talking to Rolen before killing him. It's very emotional and the acting from Burchette is-once again-great! Now though I have to talk about the bad...

The film has terrible lighting in many places. In these scenes, from Holden's house, to other people's houses, they are nearly pitch-black, lit only by a faint red light. This is effective in a torture scene near the film's end, but everywhere else it just makes the film hard to watch.

Another bad quality of the movie is its pacing. There are long stretches in the film where little to nothing happens, mainly in the horribly lit scenes. And when Holden makes his brutal entrance into Sadie's home, there's still over half-an-hour left of the movie. The climax is further dragged by scenes such as when Holden searches Sadie's house for saran wrap, and we see it almost in real time! This really hurts the film, as all it made me want to do was fast-forward through it. This probably would have worked a whole lot better if it was a short film-about 40 minutes, then it could have been paced better.

The film also lacks any adult characters. The film's characters are all meant to be high school students, yet we never see any parents. There are no parents at Holden's body filled house or at Sadie's house when hell breaks loose. Now I might be wrong and they might be college students or something, but I'm pretty sure that they're high school. The film is also very empty. Holden is parked by a park and he's making no attempt to hide Rolen's bloodied-up body, and when Rolen manages to escape, he runs out into a wide open space in broad daylight yet none of this is noticed.

The film also could have fared better plotwise if when Holden meets Sadie in the gym, she wasn't so kind, but what we get in the film, she says hi to Holden, makes conversation, is kind and the fact that Holden doesn't just keep talking with her and try to get to know her the normal way makes him look like a huge dumbass!

These negatives aside, Bloodstained Romance is a good film that, despite crippling problems, still manages to entertain on several points.

The Kiss (2008)

 Okay, image problems. For some reason, none of the discs in The Horror Collection will play on Windows Media Player, so my reviews for all six films will unfortunately be image free.

Oh boy, it took four movies for The Horror Collection to dissapoint greatly and with The Kiss, dissapoint greatly it has.

The Kiss centres on teenager Jeremy (Lendon LeMelle), an annoying prick who discovers the half-dead body of vampire queen Santa Maria (Lourdes Colon). After reviving her, they fall in love with each other...apparently. Maria helps him get enough self-confidence to make friends and be more popular, but Santa Maria has other, darker things on her mind...

The film starts off promisingly with a cool-sounding opening text, describing several vampire clans for different animals, i.e. the panther clan, the snake, the scarab etc., but the feeling that this might be a good movie falls on its face the moment the opening credits end.

Jeremy has a tough time with his life-shaky relations with his step-mother and hassling at school. All this changes when he hears a mysterious voice, which he follows to an abandoned mansion. In this mansion, he finds his way into HELL...which is just a black-and-white sepia toned sandpit where nothing happens. After Jeremy digs holes for a while, he eventually comes across the (terribly buried under less than an inch of dirt) coffin containing the skeletal remains of Santa Maria.

Horror Film Survival Lesson No. 8791487410000009: Ok, Jeremy, if you ever come across a body in a coffin in a mysterious wasteland inside a house, and it has a stake shoved into it's heart, DON'T pull the damn stake out! How well did that work out in movies like Zoltan: Hound of Dracula? (Uh...yeah, that was seriously the only movie with that situation that I could think of off the top of my head.)

Having no idea what's going on, Jeremy comes to the natural conclusion of taking the rotting, talking corpse out of the coffin and taking it with him to the outside world. He keeps Santa Maria's body in the abandoned house, where she tells him to help her rejuvanate. Jeremy is only too eager to help, as he's fallen head over heels in love with Santa Maria (for no reason).

While Santa Matia rejuvunates, Jeremy's life starts to improve. He patches things up with his step-mom, he loses his bullies, and becomes a full-on pimp with a trio of girls following him around everywhere. Eventually he decides to have a party at Santa Maria's house and invite all of his new friends, which proves to be the mistake of his life...

The Kiss is, simply put, terrible. The acting is mostly okay and decent with Lourdes Colon (who deserves to be in much better stuff than this), and surprisingly, Jack 'Spider Baby' Hill has a small role in the movie (he's fun in this, despite not getting to do much). The pacing however is terrible. Other than a kill in the film's opening prologue (which is totally superflous with the rest of the film) there is not a single death in this VAMPIRE movie until the hour mark! And what happens in that first hour is a mix of boring events and terrible characters.

When I said up there that Jeremy has a tough time with his 'teenage hell', I was just describing what the film thinks the character has. In actuality, the character of Jeremy is an unlikable prick who only has himself to blame for why he's bullied and has no friends. He's sour to people who try to apologise to him, he's annoyingly angsty and he acts like he's the worst off person in the world, when he's just a rude, arrogant dickhead. (And the film doesn't actually feel the need to tell us that his step-mother is just that until halfway through the film-until then, we can just freely assume that Jeremy is disrespectful eneough to call his own mother by her first name.)

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't yet gone into length on how Santa Maria is rejuvanated-I'll do that now. Jeremy has, for no reason, fallen in love with this corpse, so to help her, he needs to get her blood. He does this by, at first, killing a rat, which he decapitates and bleeds out in a wine glass, scored to zany music. That's mean but it's nothing to what he does next. We see a montage-scored to happy music-of this prick casually murdering cats and dogs to feed their blood to Santa Maria. If you took away the music, this would be a good scene...if it was showing us the degredation of this character once he's smitten with a vampire, but it isn't. Dog Killer is meant to be the film's hero throughout!


Did I mention that this film is also meant to be a comedy? Well The Kiss is a "horror"/"comedy" that manages to fail on both levels of entertainment. It's not scary and it's really not funny at all, it's boring. And to top everything else off, it has a crap ending as well.

But what about the vampire makeup? The crux of most-if not all-vampire flicks? It's ridiculously bad! The Santa Maria skeleton prop looks ok, but its mouth never moves when she talks, so that loses it a point. But what loses the film's special effects team the rest of the points is the terrible vamping-out effects, which only look funny rather than scary or convincing.

The film has several other problems, ranging from the character of Carrie (Angela Rachelle), who's the usual love-interest type in these kinds of movies, yet this character has a boyfriend and is never in love with Cat Murderer-she is a completely pointless character who does nothing but talk to Animal Bleeder a couple of times, yet the film features her like she's an uber-important character; a lot of the kills in the film's final act are done with an eye-hurtingly annoying strobe-light effect; the fact that actress Lourdes Colon towers about three feet over Kitten Mangler, making the whole love aspect seem that much more ridiculous; and the characterisation-the character of Santa Maria is obviously evil, and actually admits this to Puppy Basher at the end after killing his friends along with another revelation (which I won't spoil), but Bunny Boiler's character doesn't seem to care, and is pissed off at Santa Maria for about thirty whole seconds before swooning over her again.

Also, at the end of the end credits, there's a joke disclaimer, "No teenagers were harmed during the making of this film". Ha ha ha, that's so not funny, and having a weak joke like that right after the audience has suffered through 80 minutes of boredom will serve only to piss them off-it did with me. Also, there was a moment in the movie where there was a glitch, so I just thought that my TV's digital signal was playing up, like it does sometimes, and then I remembered that this was a movie, not something on TV!

In closing, The Kiss is not funny, not scary and not recommended!

Monday, October 10, 2011

Demon Wind (1990)

 Okay, image problems. For some reason, none of the discs in The Horror Collection will play on Windows Media Player, so my reviews for all six films will unfortunately be image free.

With the release of 1981's horror classic The Evil Dead, a slew of countless imitators washed through the horror scene. Almost among them is 1990's Demon Wind.

Demon Wind is about the usual gate-to-hell-nanigans that happen at an isolated farmhouse in the 1920's. The film starts off with a creepy hymn playing (some stuffed-up song about washing in the blood of lambs). We see a dessicated corpse and a burning body on a cross, then shots of a house filled with religious items. After the song ends, a woman, Regina (Stella Kastner) comes into frame and is deathly worried after hearing voices from outside. She hugs her husband (Axel Toowey) for comfort. Her husband however has been DEMONICALLY POSSESSED, which results in him vomiting yoghurt for several seconds until he grows horns and fangs. He kills Regina and a snowglobe that she was holding crashes to the floor and blows up the entire farm...uh huh...

After the prologue, the films is now 60-something years later and Regina and George's grandson Cory (Eric Larson) and his girlfriend Elaine (Francine Lapansee) are driving in the countryside, head for the farmhouse. Cory has been having dreams about his grandparent's farm after having found his missing father. While his girlfriend is grilling him on why he's been so distant lately, he flashes to the dream he's been having (which anyone Freudian would be VERY interested in).

They get to a gas station and wait for their friends to arrive. Their two carloads of friend arrive and Cory explains to them why he's called them over. He explains that when he found his father, he was a drunk, bombed-out guy who went crazy over something and that he slit his wrists after Cory left. While Cory doesn't explain what his father said, he says that whatever drove him crazy is at the farm. They ask the gas station attendant (Rufus Norris) for directions to the farm, which he says doesn't exists. Cory talks with the man alone and the man tells him about one day when he went to the farm to look for Regina and George and he saw horrifying things. The man gives Cory the directions and he and his friends leave for the farm, all the while a strange little girl some distance away points a stick at their cars and moves it along with them...for some reason.

They arrive at the farmhouse and find the carnage-half buried skeletons and a skeleton on a cross. What they also find is a lone wall standing upright. There isn't a house attached to the wall but its doorway still leads into a house. Being wise characters, they decide to go in the not-house and explore. They find a couple of charred corpses and writing on a wall.

Ok, Horror Film Survival Lesson No. 76984: If you ever see strange writing in Latin alluding to something satanic on a wall that is in a house that is not really real but sorta real, DON'T READ THE WRITING OUT LOUD!

At that show of fantastic intelligence on the part of Bonnie (Sherrie Leigh [credited as Bendorf]) the house starts shaking and things are thrown all over the room. Everyone runs out of the house and after one of them translates the words, they try to start their cars, which are all stalled, so they decide to walk back to the gas station before sundown. On their hike, a mysterious fog flows through thm, transporting them to a couple of different places before taking them back to the farm. "Oh no" says Terri (Lynn Clark) in a tone of voice that TOTALLY suggests the horror of what's just happened. She really says it like she's just seen her two favourite characters on a soap opera splitting up-and she says it again later in the film, in the exact same tone of voice (ever more hilarious seeing as there are about four of her friends dead at that point).

Now that they're back at the farmhouse, three little girls appear out of nowhere to taunt them...And they turn Darwin Award Bonnie into a talking, exploding doll. Since the sun's now going down, they decide to stay in the not-house, which Cory says is protected from the demons. The all decide to get some sleep except for two. The two are a magician type and his best-buddy. They see a naked chick trying to lure them out and instead of going out blindly, they just mutter "demons" exasperately like they've seen these things all the time. In fact, all of the characters seem to grasp the film's unbelievable events pretty easily.

The duo go outside armed with an array of weapons and take out a hella lot of demons before being killed. After that, Cory goes looking in the house and finds his grandmother's diary-which contains spells-and two SACRED IMMORTAL EVIL SLAYING KNIVES, which they lose stupidly in the next twenty minutes. At daybreak, tough guy Dell (Bobby Johnston) and girlfriend Terri decide to go outside and try to escape instead of staying. Needless to say, they don't survive the next two minutes (and even worse is that Cory gave Dell one of the knives, which Dell doesn't use at all before being fingernailed to death).

The group find out that back in the 20's, a psycho priest led a satanic cult in the area and sacrificed three little girls. After this, they were all burned alive by the FBI. Then, everyone in the town giving birth miscarried except for Regina's baby, due to her magic. The reason that the demons have not destroyed the world yet is because when they killed Regina and her family, their youngest son-a baby-was in a hospital and survived-because Regina's family line is still active, the evil can't do anything. Then, while it's still daytime, a THIRD carload of Cory's friends-ANOTHER couple-arrive at the farm.

So come nightfall, after reading some more of Regina's diary, Cory and co. realize that the barn is the centre of the evil activity. They go out to investigate and find a satanic shrine made from a human skeleton and a goat's skull. After some evil-goat-skull-chomping, thay are swarmed by the demons (who, by the way, talk in deep, booming voices ala Evil Dead which makes them sound THREATENING, at the cost of them actually being understandable). The two newly arrived friends are both killed in the goat 'n' demons action and Cory wastes the last knife.

The last cannon fodd...er...friend, Jack (Mark David Fritsche) sees a vision of his girlfriend Bonnie outside screaming and is killed immediately. Then the evil satanic priest comes back to life and absorbs all of the demons into himself, turning him into SUPER-DEMON (which kills the now alive again Bonnie for...no reason), which Cory and Elain can only counter by turning Cory into a bald super angel-something-or-other dwarf...uh huh...

Ok, so, Demon Wind is a fun, and at times atmospheric low-budget horror movie. The acting is fine, the demon effects look great and the special-effects look 80's-tastic! The plot is a good one and it's a fine addition to The Horror Collection (unlike The Kiss, which despite my only having seen bits and pieces so far, I still think it's probably going to be terrible).

So in closing, Demon Wind is almost, but not entirely an Evil Dead rip-off.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Invader (1997)

 Okay, image problems. For some reason, none of the discs in The Horror Collection will play on Windows Media Player, so my reviews for all six films will unfortunately be image free.
Being that the collection is called The Horror Collection: Tales of Terror, that would imply that the films it had were horror movies. This isn't really the case with Invader-AKA-Lifeforce

Invader is about a Viking space shuttle that lands back to Earth-in the Mojave Desert-, something that is impossible due to it not being able to have made the journey so quickly (or at all, it's sketchy). The shuttle is taken to a nearby military (maybe, again, it's sketchy) base, where a scientist couple (I think, they certainly bicker enough to be considered a couple) and their friend examine it, finding it to have been fixed and rebuilt. After the shuttle is decontaminated, the scientists, Case Montgomery (Cotter Smith) and Gracia Scott (Dierdre O'Connell) set about checking it for signs of life. They find nothing until they see an incredibly-in-plain-sight object stuck on the back of the shuttle that they don't notice for several minutes.

They find out that the shuttle is not a hoax and that it's not only been in space, but it's even been on Mars. They hook up the shuttle to their computer to examine its databanks, but instead of them hacking into the shuttle, the shuttle starts hacking into NASA (complete with weird alien symbols appearing on the computer screen).

Since this is set in AMERICA, when the word of bona-fide alien activity hits the military, they swarm inside the base, demanding that the scientist leave the case alone and hand it over to them, because apparently fixing a space shuttle and sending it back to Earth means WAR for the AMERICAN military! While Scientist no. 3 leaves for home, Case and Gracia lock themselves in their lab with the shuttle and try to download all evidence of alien activity from the shuttle and onto their computer so they can get the word out, rather than having the military hushing everything up.

Before they can do this though, the mysteriously added part of the shuttle begins to move, then burst open. While this is happening, the military (led by a low-budget Samuel L Jackson, Colonel Pratt (Robert Wisdom)) have noticed what the scientists are doing and they blowtorch the lab's door open. They destroy the lab's door just in time for the thing from the shuttle to escape.

The building is quarantined and put into lockdown, for fear of the alien escaping and for whatever alien virus it could be carrying. The two scientists and the colonel talk over the situation, then Gracia goes to the toilet. When she gets there however, she sees that there's purple goo all over the room. She calls Case, Pratt and a bunch of soldiers into the room, who go investigating in the room's vents and find a massive purple cobweb/alien thingy which electrocutes a couple of soldiers. After some soldiers spray the ceiling with lead, everyone just walks off and never check the vents again...ever.

While the power intermittently goes off, Case goes into another lab, where it's apparent that the alien has been building something. Case and Gracia examine the pod which the alien burst from and realize that it's an incubator. They also come to the conclusion that not only is the alien intelligent, but it has race memory-any knowledge and anything that has happened to any one of it's relatives and ancestors is immediately ingrained in its head from birth.

Some military expendables go off searching for the alien on their own and find it. One of them however, is killed and the other runs off, crazed. He is eventually found and is seriously ill, attributed to a sickness transferred from the alien. It turns out that the reason for the power going out is that the alien absorbs electricity, and it also steals and ingests the gunpowder from the bullets of the soldier it killed.

Eventually the alien sets up a decoy, which everyone falls for, leaving it alone in the lab with the unknowing Gracia. Instead of killing her, it simply looks at her. Then the military come in and peacefully resolve the situation with the alien, who as it turns out is really on a peaceful mission...just kidding! They fill it with a thousand bullets and leave Case and Gracia to give it an autopsy.

In it they find an egg, and they realize that not only is it going to hatch soon, but there could be others in the building and they will all inherit the just-killed alien's memories and experiences. But of course, continuing on with that storyline would only service the film's plot. Instead it changes focus for the next twenty minutes onto the sick soldier.

So as it turns out, the alien had a bacteria-free body and it couldn't possibly have infected the soldier. Then it's revealed that the soldier JUST HAPPENS to have an entirely unrelated case of appendicitis. So, Gracie tries her best to operate on him despite not being a proper doctor (which shows as she rubs her gloved hand across her forehead, smearing it with blood) and is successful...I think (more on that later).

Then the (apparently only) egg hatches, and the body count goes from a lonely one to a lot more. One soldier is folded to death through a door and another is impaled against a wall with his machine gun. Then Case, Gracie, Colonel Pratt and another soldier come into the room, finding the alien, which has randomly built a disintegration ray!...Yeah, this film does go off the rails in it's final seven minutes!...Or at least it WOULD HAVE if it wasn't for the case of one of the most annoying endings that I've EVER SEEN!

The alien disintegrates the wall, escapes the building, looks wistfully at the moon while E.T. sounding music plays...then the base is suddenly nuked...no send-off for the main characters, no nothing, just a sudden an abrupt mushroom cloud to end the film. Then some military general guy visits Scientist no. 3 (who Case had gotten into contact with earlier and sent him the shuttle's information) and tells him that another shuttle is coming into Earth's orbit and that they need his help. Then a furious and stunned Scientist no. 3 yells at the general for what he's done, revealing that the alien was actually of a peaceful race that just wanted to find out if man was invading Mars. Then the movie just ends!

Ok, the rubbish ending aside, how was Invader? It's a fine film. The acting is good, the pacing is fine and the alien effects look GREAT, especially during the aforementioned autopsy scene! Also, of note is that the film, despite being pretty gory, has apparently been produced by Christians or Concerned Mothers, because there are two hilarious lines in the film where instead of swearing, the characters say sanitized words. A rough, tough AMERICAN soldier has just found an alien cocoon! "What the frick is that?". Gracia has just realized the true cause for the soldier's illness! "The man has goddang appendicitis!" It's hilarious!

Also strange is that IMDb considers Invader to be a remake of Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce, which is totally false. And Ryan Phillipe was in this movie...yes, THAT Ryan Phillipe!

So, In short, Invader is a lot of fun, granted you stop the movie after Ryan Phillipe is disintegrated and just picture Robert Wisdom tearing his shirt off, screaming "I HAVE THE POWER" and footy-tackling the alien into oblivion! Either that or the alien suddenly turning into Chief-Inspector Dreyfus and using the Disintegration ray to try and kill Inspector Clouseau and take over the world!

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Deadly Manor (1990)

 Okay, image problems. For some reason, none of the discs in The Horror Collection will play on Windows Media Player, so my reviews for all six films will unfortunately be image free.

Ok, starting off my Halloween special for The Horror Collection: Six Tales of Terror is Deadly Manor, a 1990 slasher flick by Spanish director Jose Ramon Larraz.

Deadly Manor centres on a group of friends driving through the forest, looking for 'Lake Wapacanopo'. After picking up a shady hitchhiker, the group find themselves off-road. They find a seemingly abandoned manor and as it's getting dark and starting to rain, they decide to camp out in the derelict building.

The film starts off hilariously bad. After the opening credits and shots of corpses by a crunched-up car, we cut to our mains driving. The actors playing them are all very bad and it's very funny (though their acting does get better as the film goes on). Also funny are the dated references and when the music becomes outright zany! It was at this point in the movie-about eight minutes in-that I was gonna be seriously disappointed if it didn't turn out to be a road-trip comedy! Though fortunately or unfortunately (I'm still not sure which), the film does veer off into horror. And apparently, the film's composer(s) couldn't resist doing more zany music for the score, so for a majority of the movie, we don't hear a single bar of music.

So the group stumble upon the old mansion and one of the group, Helen (Claudia Franjul), a wise Latino woman cliche sees one of the house's windows be shut by an unseen person. So naturally she immediately comes to the conclusion that the house is evil. After failing to convince everyone to leave, she runs off. The rest of the group find a demolished car as a shrine, with a photo of a woman inside. They go inside the house just as it gets dark, and while they're under a roof, Helen is not so lucky...

In the house they encounter more oddities. The house is filled with photos of the mysterious woman from the car's photo, one of the walls starts to crack heavily and the shrine-car's horn starts beeping, apparently on its own. And a snake emerges from the cracked wall...yeah...a snake in the obviously cold, rainy weather this movie takes place in. This would make sense if the movie's villains  were supernatural, but they're not. Also found is a copy of the previous day's paper.

Though the characters are fun, they are unbelievably dense! So you've found a dingy house that's mocked up to be a shrine, which has a recent newspaper? Nah, nobody could possibly live here! So this house has coffins in the basement? Well they are empty after all! So you've found a scrapbook full of photos showing several naked, propped up corpses, as well as a cupboard with jars full of scalps? Gee, this house can't be that bad! *facepalm*. And yes, the characters really do only show minimal and temporary shock at the sight of JARS FILLED WITH SEVERED HUMAN SCALPS!

So as it turns out, the hitcher, Jack (Clark Tufts) is really a criminal as shown by the frontpage article on the newspaper. Nobody finds this out though, as he burns the paper (for once I'd like to see a horror movie which has a hitchhiker as a good guy). Then Helen's boyfriend Tony (Greg Rhodes) does some further exploring of the house while everyone else is asleep. He drops asleep himself on a bed, then has dream sex with a redhead. Then whoever's watching this film realizes that the movie's about to hit the hour mark and only one person has died so far!

The film is pretty slow paced, but it doesn't really matter. That first hour builds up the characters (sort of) and builds up the mystery of the house. If anyone was bored however at the film's first hour, then the last half-hour certainly makes up for it.

In the film's last third, everyone starts dropping like flies. One guy gets his neck broken, another gets his throat sliced open, a girl gets her throat slitted and hung upside down, and in a rare break of tradition, the hitcher has nothing to do with the film's killer's (despite his sinister smiling throughout the film) and he himself has his throat cut. At the climax, there's only one survivor left, and it's up to her to find out who these killers are.

The killers turn out to be the mysterious redhead from Tony's dream sex, Amanda (Jennifer Delora) and her husband Alfred (William Russel). They were a happy couple until they were terrorized by bikers and their car crashed. While Alfred was no worse for wear, Amanda was severely disfigured and wore a mask from then on. They soon got their revenge on the bikers and started to kill anyone who went near their house.

They are about to kill the final girl when the cops burst in and fill Alfred full of lead. And then something totally unexpected happens. Amanda, the killer in a slasher film is arrested! Not killed by the final girl, or even killed by the cops, she's seriously arrested!

So, that was Deadly Manor. It was a fun little slasher film that, despite bad (at first) acting and a lot of the film shrouded in darkness, making it hard to see, was still fun. The gore effects were mainly used in the last half-hour and they are fine. Some of the acting is also fun, namely William Russel as Alfred (who was also Ian on (Classic) Doctor Who, which surprised me to no end!).

What was especially good about the film is the unpredictability of who will survive. The wise and possibly psychic Latino woman is the first to die and her boyfriend who has the majority of the screen-time dies as well. In the end, the final girl is one of the characters who's had the least amount of screen-time and dialogue! Also, none of the characters were unlikable (minus the killers), making the film that much better.

What I also liked about the movie was its Scooby Doo ending. The evil throughout the films is implied to be supernatural until the end, when it's revealed to be simply human, not a ghost, demon or immortal super-strong-hockey-player. Also funny is when Amanda manages to even get a "I'll get you, and your dumb dog too" style line at the end as well, before being taken away in handcuffs by the police.

So, that was Deadly Manor. In closing, it was an entertaining slasher film that actually tried to do something slightly varied during the dying days of the genre.







Also, HOLY CRAP! IAN FROM DOCTOR WHO WAS THE KILLER IN THIS MOVIE!!!