Review – Going to Pieces

The sub-title here is “The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Movie,” which is a reasonably apt description. If you genuinely don’t know anything about slasher movies, you might learn a bit from this. On the other hand, you’ll get a slightly skewed version. The emphasis is on movies created by the people who agreed to be interviewed, which means that some genre classics are mentioned only briefly (or even completely ignored) while some relatively minor moments get way more screen time. And if you do happen to have seen a fair number of these pictures, this documentary isn’t going to add much to your understanding. Mildly amusing

Review – Stardust

Imagine something around halfway between The Princess Bride and The Golden Compass. Now imagine that it isn’t as heavy-handed as the latter but not as endearing as the former. This forcefully quirky tale takes its hero into a fantasy realm just over the wall from his boring little English village. Four homicidal princes, three wicked witches, a beautiful love interest, a closeted transvestite sky pirate (Robert DeNiro no less) and a couple of hours later, and we’ve all had a reasonably entertaining time. Kinda hard on the animals, though. Mildly amusing

Review – American Scary

Many of us have childhood memories of late night horror movies hosted by people dressed up as vampires. Mine are of Crematia Mortem, who hosted fright night on one of the Kansas City U’s back when I was a teenager in the early 80s. Usually KC doesn’t get much of a mention in national documentaries, so I was surprised to see some old Crematia clips show up in this, along with some talking head footage of Roberta Solomon, the actress who played her. Of course KC wasn’t alone. This is a fairly comprehensive documentary about fright night hosts, featuring some of the better-known personalities (Vampira, Elvira, Joe Bob Briggs and John Stanley) as well as more obscure acts from smaller media markets. This would have been a better movie if it had devoted more screen time to vintage video from the shows themselves and spent less time dwelling on interviews going on at length about boring anecdotes. The music (a constant stream of low-level retro lounge noise) was also unwelcome. Otherwise this was an entertaining account of a now largely bygone venue for bad movies bracketed by improv character acting. Mildly amusing

Review – BloodRayne 2: Deliverance

If you ever wondered what happened to the guy who played Scut Farcas in A Christmas Story, he shows up here as a bloodsucking Billy the Kid. Actually, I IMDB’d the guy, and apparently he’s been in a lot of stuff since he was a kid. Well, his agent should have steered him clear of this one. Our heroine from the first one (here played by fresh meat) takes to the Wild West to save a town from marauding vampires. Uwe Boll once again makes a movie as cheap and dreadful as he can (and that’s saying something, as the man has a prodigious talent for sucking). The only “deliverance” we get comes 90 minutes later when the credits finally roll. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – To Die For

I was actually impressed by Gus Van Sant’s use of subtle touches in this production. The basic plot is a true-crime retelling of a woman (Nicole Kidman) who uses sex to lure three high school students into killing her husband (Matt Dillon). The twist here is that our anti-heroine is obsessed with becoming a TV newscaster and frustrated that the closest she’s able to come is a nightly stint as a weather girl on a local cable service. Overall the story is dumb and predictable, but it takes an interesting twist now and then. I particularly enjoyed David Cronenberg’s cameo. Worth seeing

Review – BloodRayne

It’s all in what letter you capitalize. If they’d called this movie BlooDrayne, it would have been a much funnier outing. As it was, this is purely a case of Uwe Boll grabbing another video game and making another craptacular horror movie out of it. This time it’s about some kind of half-human, half-vampire midriff who joins a band of medieval commandos in a war against bloodsuckers everywhere. The result is something that’s merely time filler for the Sci Fi Channel (once a couple of extraneous boob shots are cut out, of course). See if desperate

Review – Night of the Living Dead (1990)

I didn’t hate this as much as I thought I would. That’s at least in part because George Romero wrote the script and Tom Savini directed. So with folks connected to the original in control of the remake, it at least stood a chance. The zombie makeup was a lot better, and of course the film stock was considerably less grainy. Technical improvements notwithstanding, the remake still isn’t anywhere near as good as the first one. Mildly amusing