Chris: This movie felt like a good place to start the journey into this era of horror films, mostly because it has a number of “firsts” going for it: first color (and how) Hammer Films monster movie, and the first mainstream color horror movie with red blood…and lots of it.
After the jump, it was alive Continue reading →
In honor of October, the spookiest month of the year, I’m going to share with you some of my scariest moments. These are tales fraught with horror, so beware ye faint of heart. Also, fraught with a grown man screaming and running away, if that does anything for you.
After the jump, more jumping Continue reading →
October has always been my favorite month. It’s the month of cool weather, awesome clothes, and sleeping with the windows open. It is long shadows and the magic hour in prime time. Thanks to Halloween, it’s also the month I love to dive deep into spooky stuff in all kinds of media, from horror story collections to favorite scary video games.
After the jump: “You wanna see something REALLY scary?” Continue reading →
It’s been a long time since director Renny Harlin dropped a screaming blonde woman down a chasm, sucked Cary Elwes up into a tornado, and fed Samuel Jackson to a shark. Those were the days. And what is he reduced to now? Giving cameras to good-looking talentless actors and letting them traipse around the wilderness for yet another half-assed Blair Witch Project found-footage wanna-be. Welcome to Devil’s Pass. You might think Harlin could wring some local flavor out of the story’s attempt at a Bermuda Triangle in the Urals, where the characters ponder whether they’ll face a yeti, UFOs, or Russian secret experiments. But all you get is 90% dull travelogue — “Whee, we’re in Russia!” — and 9% Grave Encounters rip-off in which CG monsters shriek at the camera in that familiar night-vision green. The remaining 1% is a CG avalanche. At night. Dark Pass’s real accomplishment is making Chernobyl Diaries, another horrible movie about found footage in secret Russian installations, look good. You’re better off just reinstalling STALKER, where the abandoned Soviet military bases are free of annoying actors and poorly shot found footage.
Dark Pass is available on VOD. Don’t bother.
The early parts of Alyce Kills are pretty grating as pretty Alyce and her prettier friend Carroll descend into a vapid rabbit hole of partying, girl angst, faux improvised dialogue, and more partying. I don’t necessarily recommend sticking around for the twist. You’re better off watching Angela Bettis in May or Charlize Theron in Monster or Beatrice Dalle in anything. In fact, just go ahead and watch Jennifer’s Body. But soon enough, the middle act kicks in. As guilt spirals into self-destructive behavior, the movie wisely focuses on the better actress, Jade Dornfeld as Alyce, doing her level best. Some gruesome special effects make an appearance, along with a fascinating turn from an actor named Eddie Rouse as slightly more than your average drug dealer. In fact, the scenes between Alyce and this drug dealer belong in a better movie, minus the tedium, the thin but forced Alice in Wonderland angle, the caricatures that pass for other characters, and whatever political point is made by having Alyce masturbate to news of war in the Middle East. But then, about twenty minutes before it’s over, Alyce Kills comes alive with some wickedly black humor that shows off what Dornfeld and director Jay Lee could have been doing all along. Where was this movie during the other 70 minutes?
Alyce Kills is available for video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it here.
Note: Phantom Leader designer Dan Verssen asked if I would take a look at a prototype version of a game he’s publishing, which is in the middle of a successful Kickstarter campaign. Since the game is basically finished in terms of the design, and since this sort of thing is definitely in my wheelhouse (i.e. horror, tabletop, solitaire!), and since it’s H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday, I happily took him up on the offer. Fortunately, it didn’t suck, so I’m happy to also write about the game here.
The Cards of Cthulhu is a solitaire game with a healthy amount of die rolling as you try to keep the boards from filling up with nasty Lovecraftian creatures. The overall vibe is holding back evil tides pouring through dimensional gates. Anyone who’s played Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror knows the feeling. Plug one hole and two more pop open. Before you know it, you’ve got byakhees in your basement, old ones in your attic, and Cthulhu dragging himself out of the Pacific. It’s not easy holding back elder gods. It’s even less easy holding back four of them. This is what happens in The Cards of Cthulhu and I’m pretty sure it’s not realistic. There is no HP Lovecraft where four gods come knocking at once. But I suppose I can make an allowance for a fantasy tabletop game.
After the jump, full house, deep ones over fungi from Yuggoth Continue reading →
No One Lives is so obvious and predictable. A couple is passing through. They stop for dinner and get waylaid by a band of murderous thugs. You can see where this is going. The couple is going to have to fight to survive. There will be screaming and stabbings and whatnot.
But it makes an early misstep that doesn’t bode well. There’s a serious problem with the casting. The most psycho of the thugs sits down at the table to intimidate the couple. The thug is played by a pretty TV actor who’s shaved his head to look hard. And the man in the couple is played by Luke Evans. The chiseled god-like Luke Evans who has played Zeus, Apollo, and the best Musketeer. As the lightweight TV actor attempts to cow him, it becomes clear Evans’ is going to have to defend himself. His fingers inch tentatively towards a steak knife on the table.
“Don’t,” his girlfriend says softly. They don’t want any trouble.
“Yeah, don’t,” says the pretty TV actor. “You’re not the type. Trust me. I know the type.”
But Evans, as an actor, is totally the type. He played Zeus, Apollo, and the best Musketeer. He has faced down boys as pretty as Paul Walker in Fast and Furious 6. He would eat this latest guy for breakfast. He wouldn’t take any guff from him and he certainly wouldn’t need to fumble for a steak knife to do it. Who does this movie think it’s fooling?
Me, for one. Because No One Lives isn’t obvious at all. It’s an entertaining danse macabre of reversals and unexpected turns, and it’s cast very well. Among the other actors is the always reliable Lee Tergesen as the aggrieved leader of the thugs. Lindsey Shaw, who voiced the wholesome Trip opposite Andy Serkis in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, talks about someone getting a “deep dicking” and then engages in a very unladylike fight scene with Bitch Slap’s America Olivo. Michelle Williams doppleganger Adelaide Clemens is a formidable partner in the series of escalating pas de deux mind games.
Director Ryuhei Kitamura got his start in 2000 with Versus, a movie about a bunch of dudes out in the woods fighting each other. Way back then, he showed an eye for choreographed action and gore. No One Lives affords him plenty of opportunity for both. There’s not a character here whose face isn’t sprayed with blood at some point. And that’s about the only thing that’s predictable.
No One Lives is available for video on demand. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
A lot of bad horror movies start with teenagers heading into the woods for a vacation. Very rarely, good horror movies also start this way. Such as Sebastian Silva’s Chilean tale of missed social cues, superstition, paranoia, madness, and worse. Magic Magic is partly one of those “foreigners are evil” movies, about the strangeness of Chile through an American visitor’s eyes. But the foreigners here are the Americans, which is the exact opposite of Eli Roth’s crassly ignorant stories of otherness, where he couldn’t care less if it’s South America or Eastern Europe. Silva’s intimacy with his own country, and particularly the way he conveys menace in the mundane, gives Magic Magic its power.
Next to Silva’s insidious direction, the key to Magic Magic is Juno Temple. This is the sort of fiercely discomfiting and fearless performance you expect from, say, Gena Rowlands. It’s hard to watch. She’s a fascinating actress, singularly committed in a way that’s all too rare for actors of her generation. And although it might give you pause at first, Michael Cera’s role is perfect. He’s just Michael Cera, but he’s in exactly the right place doing exactly the wrong things right. To Cera’s credit — he’s one of the producers, along with indie heavy hitters Christine Vachon and Mike White — he’s not forcing himself into new types of roles so much as finding unexpected and appropriate places to situate himself. This Is the End, for instance.
The rest of the cast is exemplary, with actors far more talented than the usual horror fodder playing roles that transcend the slut, jock, virgin, and nerd archetypes that venture into the woods. Director Silva’s brother, Agustin Silva, is the movie’s scruffy heart. The icily Latina Catalina Moreno (remember Maria Full of Grace?) is its voice of reason and perhaps its villain. One of my favorite shots features Moreno in the background and out of focus, and it’s a sign of Silva’s skill as a director. And the ageless Emily Browning, looking more 14 than ever, is all heart and empathy. Finally, if you’re going to shoot a horror movie in a mysterious foreign country, who better for a director of photography than the amazing Christopher Doyle to bring the color alive and shine shards of light into the dark? All told, Magic Magic is an almost magical concoction of Hollywood talent and arthouse horror storytelling.
Magic Magic is available on video on demand. Watch it here to support Quarter to Three.
“Did Napoleon Dynamite do the artwork for this game?” my friend asked as I was explaining Rise of the Zombies, a tabletop co-op zombie survival game. The developer, Dan Verssen, is known mostly for a dogfighting card game called Down in Flames and a solitaire game about air strikes in Vietnam called Phantom Leader. I’m currently addicted to Phantom Leader. There are other versions of Phantom Leader involving Hornets, Warthogs, and U-boats. You can even play it on the iPad. Don’t get me started or we’ll be here all day. Verssen isn’t known for lavish production values. I didn’t even need to use the word “lavish” in that last sentence.
“I think this is supposed to be a liger,” my friend mused, studying one of the zombie cards.
He has a point. Rise of the Zombies, a card game with a tiny smattering of chits, doesn’t have much, uh, visual punch. I hate to ding the artwork for such an obviously modest project, but there’s no style to these sketches. There’s no color. Literally, and figuratively. And who picked this wretched font? As near I can tell, the zombie herd is actually a zombie hero.
As a design, Rise of the Zombies doesn’t seem very well thought out. The interface, as it were, is a sometimes incoherent sprawl with little thought for how to relate the cards to each other. The manual recommends that if players want to fight each other, they should make it dramatic. Like a movie. Which is one of the dopiest things I’ve ever read in a rule book, which should instead contain rules. But what Rise of the Zombies does right is the stuff that really counts.
After the jump, no one gets left behind except the guy who made the Napoleon Dynamite crack. Continue reading →
Rodrigo Gudino is the founder of a horror enthusiast magazine called Rue Morgue. Those aren’t really the credentials I look for in a director. So I can hardly blame you if you suppose his latest movie, The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh, wouldn’t be worth watching, even though he somehow finagled Vanessa Redgrave into lending it her stately voiceover. But rather than read anything I have to say to the contrary, watch this minor masterpiece of tableau. Seriously. Just watch it. It’s only six minutes. And it’s the six minutes that sealed the deal for me wanting to see Gudino’s latest movie without knowing anything else about it.
Last Will and Testament presumably stars Aaron Poole — I know him from Ed Gass-Donnelly’s fascinating Small Town Murder Songs — as a man staying in his mother’s house shortly after her death. But the real star of the movie is the production design for the house. If you watched the short I linked above, you’ll see in this movie’s set the same amount of lovingly eerie detail. You’ll also see the camera once again as an active participant. Gudino uses it to prowl the house with otherworldly intention. Is he showing us things? Is this someone — or something — looking at things? Is this a ghost’s point of view? And how does he explain Redgrave’s voiceover? Although it’s ultimately more mood than plot, I’m convinced it all makes as much sense as it needs to make. And although it’s slow, creepy, and subtle, it’s perfectly willing to be shocking. There are at least two “what the effing eff did I just see?” scenes, including one where I couldn’t see half the scene. But when Gudino wants to show you something, he sure knows how to show it.
The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is currently available on VOD services. Watch is here on Amazon.com to support Qt3.
Zombies!!! (punctuation theirs) is a competitive zombie apocalypse boardgame in which players set up a city one tile and one turn at a time. Eventually a helipad appears and everyone scrambles to reach it. Until then, the objective is staying alive with very limited ammo, very limited health, a handful of cards to tweak the action, and the brutality of six-sided die rolls. Now Zombies!!! is also a terrible iOS port.
After the jump, zoinks, gadzooks, and ah-ooh-gah! Continue reading →
It’s been too long since indie horror director/producer Larry Fessenden made his own movie. The Last Winter, his clumsy bigger budget attempt to follow-up on the sublime Wendigo, came out in 2006. And now Beneath completes the trajectory from sublime to clumsy to ridiculous, plopping into a tiny lake and barely making a splash.
Beneath starts with the usual beats for a crappy horror movie. Stereotypical smirking teens going out into the woods, their bewilderment at not getting cell phone reception, an elderly harbinger warning them away, a cat scare, and so on. You might think Fessenden — once a smart, subtle, insightful filmmaker and even actor (in the movie Habit, the bathtub explanation about his missing tooth is a memorable heartfelt instance of non-acting acting) — is doing this stuff knowingly. You might think he’s going to cleverly subvert it.
No such thing happens, perhaps because Fessenden is working from a script by two guys who wrote Bird Flu Horror. I didn’t see Bird Flu Horror. I’m confident I don’t need to see Bird Flu Horror. I’m also confident that Beneath has more in common with Bird Flu Horror than with Wendigo, Habit, or even The Last Winter. Because once the giant catfish shows up, everything plays out exactly like any other crappy creature feature, inept even in its half-hearted attempts at titillation and gore. You might be inclined to applaud a horror movie that relies exclusively on practical effects, but you can only get so far dragging a big rubber bug-eyed catfish through a small lake. These are the kind of practical effects that make you long for a little CG.
If you want a movie about people trapped by something in the water, see Black Water. Actually, see Black Water anyway. And if you want to see what a brilliant filmmaker Fessenden can be, you’re going to have to go back to Wendigo.
Beneath is currently available on various video on demand services. If you must watch it, support Quarter to Three by using this link. Or, better yet, this one.
Unlike many open-world games, State of Decay ends decisively. You can always go back to your saved game just before the last mission. But once you do that mission, you leave Trumbull Valley for good. The credits roll. There’s no going back and doing fun activities. State of Decay is over.
Fortunately, developer Undead Labs is working on an open-ended sandbox mode. How will it work, given that Trumbull Valley is seeded with a limited amount of resources when you start playing? Community manager Sanya Weathers passes along some details from an online chat with Undead Labs founder Jeff Strain.
Jeff said, “The goal of sandbox is to provide an unbounded experience, one with no victory condition that ends the game. The way we do that is to continue to have a world with finite resources, but find out ‘how long can I stay alive.'”
Without going into too much detail (although details are coming within a week), you start in the world, build your community, clean the valley out – and when it runs dry, you can leave with some portion of your community and go to “the next valley.” The next valley is the same map, repopulated with resources…but harder. More zombies. More difficulty. Just…more.
How many Trumbull Valleys can you survive? Find out later this year, since Undead Labs has promised the sandbox mode will be out this year.
Tom Chick talks with State of Decay designer Richard Foge about the past, present, and future of Undead Labs’ brilliant zombie apocalypse game. We discuss the combat, the scavenging, the stealth, the character builds, the economy, the storytelling, the march of offline time, and more. And what’s the deal with co-op plans? What are the challenges Undead Labs faces with the upcoming sandbox mode? And in the event of a world culture reboot, find out which three movies Foge would pick to preserve zombie mythology for future generations.
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If you’re like me and you’ve been waiting for the patches for State of Decay to finally come through Microsoft’s certification process, you’re now cleared for some zombie apocalypse this weekend. The latest update adds a whole mess of fixes and revisions, including the ones from the first patch fumbled in a previous update that also went through Microsoft’s certification process.
Of course, if you haven’t been playing while you waited, you might have trouble in store. The simulation in State of Decay runs in real time, whether you’re playing or not. Your characters will go on missions, eat your food, expend your ammo, and sometimes come to dire straits. When I started the game today after applying the update, nearly half of my survivors had gone missing. So far, I’ve found one of them. Marcus, my most powerful character, is still AWOL and I don’t see a mission yet to recover him.
I adore this game, but I am absolutely mystified about a design decision that punishes players for not playing. That should be the exclusive domain of subscription-based MMOs.
