What lies beneath the salty waves?

The briny ocean (or even a nice little lake) may seem an ideal spot for a holiday, but underneath the calm surface lurks any number of monstrous and dangerous creatures: giant squid, sharks the size of school buses, minnows trained to kill with a flick of their tiny fins. This week on the Horror Movie Show, Jerry & Mark don their aqualungs and dive deep into the shallow ponds of their tiny minds to talk about all things wet and wild. Hold your breath… lean back… and over we go….

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Dark Woods

In the last few months, Your Humble Reviewer has seen several dozen movies that all, more or less, fit under the heading of Horror. But not one other flick has had the guts to tackle the particular subject of Dark Woods: how much sexual frustration can a man handle?

The story begins with Henry and Susan Branch (screenwriter John Muscarnero and Tracy Coogan) moving into a rustic house on a lake, fairly isolated from the outside world. Susan is dying of cancer; Henry holds onto some small hope that she might survive, but it seems a very small hope indeed.

One evening a wild-looking ruffian walks into their house and fondles the wife as she lies on the couch. Henry walks in and, hardly believing his eyes, orders the man away from the sick woman. The wildman leaves as silently as he came in. Henry reports the incident to the local sheriff (James Russo).

Henry longs for his wife’s loving touch, to be able to embrace her, but she is understandably distant and refuses his advances. Henry grows more and more frustrated.

Wild child

One evening his wife relents, promising Henry a night of passion. She goes off for a much-needed shower and Henry kills the time with a quick jog around the lake. But he interrupts the wildman attacking a young girl. Henry interrupts the vicious assault, brings the girl home. The wife falls into a deep sleep more akin to a coma than any gentle nap.

The girl, Alicia (Mary Kate Wiles), is the niece of the wildman and the sheriff asks if the young teen can stay with Henry for a few days. The girl grows bolder, Henry grows ever more sexually frustrated and Susan remains unconscious. Circumstances more akin to the contents of a Penthouse letter abound. It seems that Henry’s wife will die and he may be able to simply, slickly substitute the young, sexy Alicia for his mate.

But, of course, Henry’s situation is anything but simple and the depth of a man’s loneliness and frustration have rarely been so poignantly and cleverly shown in a motion picture.

The harder they come

The script by Muscarnero and direction by Michael Escobedo make this an above-average movie. Obviously a super-low-budget production, the end result is a highly watchable, sexually charged mix of David Lynch amd Harold Pinter.

Exploring the line between a man’s darkest sexual fantasies, his purest love, his dreams and nightmares, Dark Woods is unlike any film YHR can recall.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Muscarnero looks like a more-serious version of English comic actor Simon Pegg. Tracy Coogan as Susan seems to grow more skeletal, more ethereal in each scene. Mary Kate Wiles as Alicia is frightening, moving in a moment from idealized nymphette to vicious young gorgon. And James Russo offers a most interesting turn as Sheriff Demming, a man that sets up the tragic circumstances, sees the result and washes his hands of the whole nasty business.

Dark Woods is one of the best movies of the last couple of years, a unique thriller that tackles a difficult subject and brings it to a satisfying climax./JE

DVD extras: 2 commentary tracks and a goodly amount of semi-raw, behind-the-scenes video footage.

out of a possible five skulls.

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Resident Evil: Afterlife

Writer and director Paul W.S. Anderson has carved a bloody niche for himself with the inside-out dogs, zombie killers and insane corporate greedheads of the Resident Evil franchise. Unfortunately, the movies have become weaker with each iteration. Only the biggest fan of Milla Jovovich could disagree.

The first movie had some excellent effects and a story that, at least, held together: Alice (Jovovich) and a military team must fight their way through an underground laboratory while battling scores of undead mutants and a vicious supercomputer that gets a kick out of slicing and dicing people. There was plenty of action and a dark sense of humour to the horror.

By the fourth movie, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Anderson is relying almost entirely on special effects (the movie was made in that most modern of obnoxious fads, 3D). Sadly, it’s a bit of a bore.

He’s baaaaa-aaaack…

Jovovich still plays a good heroine, but there are so many close-ups of her big eyes looking all concerned and sad that it made Your Humble Reviewer wonder if she wasn’t contemplating the future of her acting career. How many more of these cash-cows can be brought to market?

The cast includes Ali Larter, reprising her role as Claire Redfield, and Wentworth Miller as Claire’s brother Chris. Miller, best known for his portrayal of the boy-genius in Prison Break, comes into the movie halfway through and seems wasted in this thin bit of nonsense.

Director Anderson wrote all four of the Resident Evil movies, but he only directed the first and the fourth. One cannot help but wonder why he’d return to helm this mess.

Banzai, Umbrella Corp.

The story begins with several hundred clones of Alice attacking the Japanese headquarters of the evil Umbrella Corporation. Not entirely sure why they are attacking it, but it makes for some good special effects. As well, heroine Alice gets to die a half-dozen different ways without actually dying.

From there we travel with the real Alice (we assume) to northern Canada, trying to locate the safe haven known as Arcadia. No haven, but she manages to subdue a crazed Claire Redfield and together the two head to Los Angeles.

Luckily, that’s where Arcadia is; at least, an enormous cargo ship bearing that name is sitting just off the city and Alice and her intrepid crew decide to get aboard and find peace and safety from the inside-out dogs, ravenous zombies and heartless execs.

Or something like that.

The movie is such a mess, such a jumble of images and explosions and slaughter that it’s genuinely difficult to tell what the hell is going on. YHR is about ready to give up on this series.

So long, Milla. It’s been fun… sometimes./JE

out of a possible five skulls.

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Resurrection County

Two couples head off into the backcountry of Arkansas for some fun with their little offroad vehicles. Unfortunately for them, their choice of wilderness is in Resurrection County, home to the extended family of the Preacher. It doesn’t take long before our four city folk have been plunged into a hillbilly nightmare of vengeance and sadism.

Dayton Knoll plays Sam, the serious one of the urbanites. His wife is Katherine (Cassie Self), the nicest of the group. Also along is Sam’s pregnant sister Lucy (Kathryn Michelle) and her boyfriend Tommy (Adam Huss). Lucy is rather passive, always waiting for the guy to look after her. Tommy is a party-dude who is finally ready to take some responsibility, starting with marrying Lucy.

But, this being a horror-thriller sort of movie, their characters aren’t going to be allowed much time to evolve. In fact, the inbred rednecks of Resurrection County don’t believe in evolution. These people are the sort Sarah Palin claims are the Real Americans. (The joke’s on her, though, as most of these hicks are not registered to vote.)

Holy crap

From the moment you cross the line into Resurrection County, the airwaves are filled with the demented end-of-days pseudo-Christian blether of the Preacher.

“The laws that you so willingly follow, they are not always right,” he barks from his bully-pulpit, berating every one of his congregation with his mad monologue of homegrown aphorisms and slogans. It’s like having one of the great philosophers loudly expound his theories if the philosopher had most of his brain removed in some sort of steam-shovel accident.

The big mistake made by the four urbanites is taking their ATVs off the trail and winding up asking for directions at the wrong double-wide. Nastiness swells and in a matter of minutes, Tommy has put a bullet through one young psycho’s throat and all manner of hell descends on our main characters.

You got a real purty mouth…

It’s a grim story of the cracker scum taking out their frustrations — and pent-up sexual energies — on the holidayers. From prolonged mouth-on-shotgun action to having one of the young city-slickers nailed to a hobby-horse with his pants around his ankles, the nastiness just keeps piling up till there is no emotion left but a sick, empty feeling that hope does not exist. As long as pockets of freedom-loving, survivalist-dressing, shaved-headed-fascist, pseudo-religious, incest-lovin’ backwoodsy mental-cases roam free through the wilds of Arkansas, no city dweller with a desire to ride his ATV in the woods is safe.

There’s no humour to leaven this grisly series of vicious encounters — two guys get their heads stove in, which takes a couple of minutes each time, and nobody ever cracks wise, not even once — but anyone who thought Deliverance was a fun documentary about the generous nature of hillbillies will enjoy Resurrection County.

Y’all come back now real soon, y’heah?/JE

DVD extras: Zip, zero, zilch.

out of a possible five skulls.

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Saw 3D

The creators say Saw 3D is “the final chapter” in this very successful franchise. We’ll see. In the meantime, this seventh Saw flick is as nasty as any of them and better than some.

The majority of the movie follows a slightly weaselish dude named Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery), a self-help guru who claims to have survived one of Jigsaw’s tortuous, torturous puzzles. Not only did he escape, but the horrible experience made him a stronger, better person. Yes, Jigsaw is actually a humanitarian.

This gross notion — that the miserable and mean-spirited viciousness of Jigsaw actually has some moral value — was a plot-point in the first Saw movie way back in 2004, when the pathetic junky played by Shawnee Smith turns out to be working with the cruel, vengeance-hungry loony.

Smith isn’t seen in Saw 3D and Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is hardly in the movie at all, just one creepy scene in which he has a copy of Dagen’s book signed by the author. Ah, the great link, without which this movie would just be another series of elaborate tortures.

A stand-up guy

The movie begins with Dr. Lawrence Gordon (played by the slightly puffy Cary Elwes) dragging his one-footed self down a filthy, dark corridor just moments after he cut through his ankle to free himself from his fetters. Thinking on his feet, or rather foot, the good doctor finds a piping-hot steam conduit and presses his bleeding stump to it in order to cauterize the wound. Yowch!

We also have to spend time with the slightly puffy Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) who continues the Jigsaw legacy. In addition to capturing Dagen and his inner-circle of publisher, lawyer and agent, Hoffman is intent on murdering fellow detective Matt Gibson (Chad Donella). It was Gibson who was at least partly responsible for getting Hoffman into trouble.

As already mentioned, the main story in Saw 3D involves the Dagen character. He is confronted with a lengthy series of puzzles, the prize of each being the life of one close companion or another. The movie-makers seem to take pleasure in never allowing a puzzle to be solved.

Good to be bad

The Saw movies are bleak, set in a dirty, shabby world in which the good suffer and the vengeful… also suffer. Nobody gets out of here alive, it seems, and maybe that’s a good thing as there are few truly good people in these flicks.

They can be fun to watch, though, and Your Humble Reviewer has been enjoying them since the first one. Released each year since 2004 at Halloween, there will be plenty of fans wanting another dose of unadulterated sadism come October 2011. We here at hmpod.com will try to keep those fans up to date on new nasties to fill the gap.

Of course, since the filmmakers are wrapping up the Saw series with Saw 3D, it is only logical that the survivor of the first movie should make an appearance. Elwes’ Dr. Gordon plays a pivotal role in the seventh movie and, indeed, all of the Saw movies now that we have a chance to look back at the entire oeuvre.

Unfortunately, this is a review of the 2D version of the movie, so YHR cannot comment on the “eye-popping 3D” effects of the theatrical show. Still, it’s a gory and gruesome movie that lives up to its many predecessors. Fans will love it./JE

out of a possible five skulls.

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