We’ve got three copies of the new Exorcist: The Beginning DVD to give away. All you have to do to qualify is find the demon that’s been plaguing this website. It appears to be roaming around in some of our older reviews, especially the horror ones. Find the evil creature, click it and you will be taken to a secret page with further instructions.

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Its title referring to the beach and sea where the story takes places, Crustacés et Coquillages (Crustaceans and Shell Fish) is a light-hearted mix of comedy and drama about a family who spend their summer on the French coast. Mom and dad are kept occupied with the thought of their son Charly being gay or not, because he seems to be very close to his friend Martin who recently joined them. Mom’s lover unexpectedly shows up on her proverbial doorstep and the daughter has left with a her motorcycle-riding boyfriend.
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Jack Starks comes out of the first Gulf War in 1991 with major head trauma and a memory-problem. In 1992 he is locked up in a mental institution, because he appears to have been involved in a murder, but cannot remember what transpired. By means of therapy the doctor dopes him up, puts him in a straightjacket and stuffs him in a body-locker in the institutions morgue. While unable to move inside this claustrophobic space, Jack discovers he can travel through time to the year 2007 where he tries to prevent his death, with the help of an alcoholic waitress to whom he is mysteriously connected. Weird? You betcha. Illogical? Absolutely. Great movie? You better believe it.
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The Bloodsuckers Binge: a series of reviews on vampire movies in all incarnations as I look for, and find, any vampire movie I can get my grubby little hands on. The classics, the culty, the really good, the really old and inevitably: movies that suck!

The cover of this DVD said: this is a restored version of the 1931 classic, starring Bela Lugosi as Dracula. It is directed by Todd Browning, it is based on the Bram Stoker book and has a new score by Philip Glass. Needless to say I made a nice big batch of salty popcorn and settled in for an evening of cult heaven…..
However the experience was appalling and boring. For all my expectations, what this movie represents to me is 75 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
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Being a fan of super-heroes and people with exceptional powers, the back flap of Powder appealed to me greatly. After all, a story about an albino boy gifted with exceptionally high intelligence, telekenesis and electrical powers is right up my street. I enjoyed the film but it’s not a good one.
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Going to see Broken Flowers, I was admittedly predisposed to like this film. Jim Jarmusch has been one of my favorite directors over the years and Bill Murray only seems to be taking on even better projects after smoothly moving to the Hollywood A-list on the popularity of Lost in Translation (2003). Yet, when faced with the possibility of this combination there are always the ever-present high expectations that can cause one to be overly critical of what would otherwise be a very good film. Could these two deliver? Well, I thought so, but the audience I saw the film with seemed to have mixed feelings.
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The Japanese have had a longstanding capability for doing horror movies with minimal set changes, and I think I’m beginning to understand why. Japanese horror tends not to focus on story and plot, but rather in the inexplicable suddenly entering the normal world, and the consequences of that entrance. For instance, Japan’s flagship title here in the United States, “The Ring,” deals with a haunted videocassette that, one week after viewing, kills its viewers. By now you’ve probably seen it as the hollow-eyed ragged monstrosity that is Samara lunges out of a television set to kill whoever’s in front of her. And this is pretty standard fare for the Japanese, who seem to have an utter mania for ghost stories. “The Ring,” “Ju-On: The Grudge,” “Shikoku,” and plenty of others make ghosts to Japanese horror what the undead serial killer is to American horror.

Ju-Rei: The Uncanny is one more Japanese ghost story to add to the pantheon.

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Director Michael Bay is known for his action flicks. So why was I expecting anything at all when the first images of The Island hit my retina, I now wonder? Action films – aside from rare exceptions – are meant for a single purpose: pure entertainment. There isn’t anything wrong with that, as long as it’s clear from the very beginning. The problem with The Island is that it starts pretentiously and collapses after half an hour, turning into utter nonsense and predictable highway chases and shoot-outs.
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If you were to list some of the most common horror clichés, you’d come quite far, without actually having to shove a single disc into your beloved DVD player. In fact, you’d be able to tell apart a good horror flick from a bad one within the first couple of scenes. In these times of endless and effortless remakes, sequels and prequels, it is hard to come up with anything that doesn’t bear a slight resemblance to something that has been done before (and usually better). Admittedly, The Skeleton Key, skilfully dodges some of the aforementioned clichés, but suffers from a total lack of suspense, something quite (quint)essential to the genre.
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An alarmingly familiar and alarmingly shoddy production comes to us fresh from The Asylum this month. So what we have here is the story of a mummy brought back to life. And before you start screaming horrified cries of “What, you mean EXACTLY THE SAME WAY AS A DOZEN OTHER MUMMY MOVIES THAT START EXACTLY LIKE THIS?”, well…um….

Okay, I’m sorry. There really IS nothing new here.

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