Tag Archives: After Dark Horrorfest

Perkins’ 14

The last Horrorfest review has been delayed, by virtue of the fact that I am a lazy bastard and finally didn’t have a big stack of behind staring at me. A little behind, that’s okay! Um. To be clear, I am referring to my having a backlog of reviews to write, not to Baby and the positive and negative aspects of her back-capacity. Of course, now I’m all distracted by the Jonathon Coulton music in my head.

So, anyway, I saw the last movie, right? Right. Perkins’ 14 has barely a shell of a plot, if you look at it very closely. There’s this guy who kidnapped a bunch of kids ten years ago, for, you know, some reason (which may or may not have been made clear), and now they’re all back to destroy the town they were stolen from, which they do mostly by running around, grabbing people, and eating them. But I’m pretty sure they weren’t zombies. The inexplicably dark and/or flickering sets make it difficult to be sure, of course. And there’s a cop with a dark history related to it all who’s trying to atone for a crime nobody but he believes he committed. A metaphorical crime, you understand. At least, now that I’ve told you. Because, honestly, that would’ve been unclear, right?

But it’s the mood and the philosophical underpinnings that make it work. I read the Thomas Covenant books sometime during early high school at the latest, I think, and almost nothing has stuck with me, except that one book in the second trilogy was too depressing to read, white gold is cooler than yellow gold, and of course the infamous and somewhat inexplicable rape scene right at the start. But what did stick with me was a line from early in… well, one of the books, probably the start of the second trilogy. It explained that there’s only one thing you can do to hurt the man who has already lost everything. You give him something back, but broken. So, one of the things I liked about the movie was that it was entirely based on that premise. It may have actually not had anything but that, so if you don’t find that this resonates with you, the rest of the movie probably won’t work.

Also, though, it kept reminding me of playing Resident Evil 2, and that’s always cool. ‘Cause, you know, chased into and through a weirdly laid out and defectively lighted police station, by things that want to bite you and kill you. So.

The Brøken

Horrorfest III, day 2 opened with The Brøken, starring modern Sarah Connor as the daughter of an American embassy worker in London who wanders the city in a cloud of foreboding and dramatic strings instrumentation. Things happen, for sure. Like, there are doubles climbing out of mirrors to wander around confusing people about one person being in two places at once. And there’s a mysterious car crash where nobody seems interested in the other victim. And most important for our purposes, Lena Headey is pretty sure that her boyfriend has been replaced by a duplicate. Which, considering the mirror-people, is a bit more plausible than anyone around her thinks.

Mostly, though, we have foreboding thoughts, weird flashbacks, dramatic strings, and ominous London backdrops. Let me throw out an example that is representative of what I’m talking about: Lena is going somewhere on the Underground, only she gets scared by an ominous bag lady who is saying foreboding things about the other passengers right before staring at Lena in ominous confusion. So, Lena gets off at the stop, only to discover it’s closed at the surface, the only notice being a handwritten sign at the locked gate. So she wanders around the hallways, easily getting lost despite claims from people I know that the London Underground is easier to navigate than John Doe’s family tree, because that would be the ominous thing to happen. Except for the bag lady perhaps giving a clue about the mirror people, nothing else of plot- or character-advancing status occurs in this entire three-to-four-minute scene. I’d never watch it again, but there’s something very compelling about waiting and waiting and waiting to determine whether there’s a movie buried under all the ominous, strings-laden foreboding.

Hood of Horror

I have such a headache right now. I’m going to assume that it’s from reviewing too much too fast, and wrap this up as quick as I can. Assisting me in that task is our final movie of the festival, Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror. Because, well, it really wasn’t that good. Ironically, the framing device was the best part of the picture. Well, that and the rapping. When I think about, um, Snoop’s production acumen and choice of projects, I keep coming to the same conclusion: he’s a pretty good rapper. (And okay, like a lot of rappers, a pretty good actor too.)

So yeah, framing device good. Unfortunately, what it framed was several substandard streets-themed short stories you might find in Tales from the Cryzypt. In the first, a local girl learns an important lesson about the applications of power as they relate to tagging. Despite some topless hos, it was godawful. Most noteworthy, the terrible acting from the young version of Posie. In the second, a spoiled heir takes over the tenement where his father’s army buddies lived, and starts trying to drive them out. Eventually, they get fed up and turn the tables on him. This one wasn’t so bad, but it was also a ripoff of one of those old Tales from the Darkside or Amazing Stories or some such. In the third, a rap artist promises to be a good guy if God will only give him a big break. Predictably, he fails to fulfill his end of the bargain. I wonder if he’ll get some kind of comeuppance?

Oh, well. At least it had buckets of blood and gore to make up for a small fraction of the rest of the badness. Oh, and Billy Dee Williams. He makes everything better.