Darkest Night

IMDb
A family gathers for a happy reunion and marriageannouncement on Christmas Day at an isolated mansion in the Philippine mountains only to encounter a series of bizarre, demonic, and tragic events.


BestHorrorMovies

Darkest Night begins with a news reporter standing in front of what is supposed to be the ruins of a house. Found in the ruins is a video tape and so we are then treated to an edited version of said tape to show us what happened to the family that was there. The tape shows a Christmas celebration, as an extended family gathers to catch up, enjoy good food and spend some time together. Everything is going swimmingly until after dinner the house appears to be hit by an earthquake. An inky-black darkness descends upon the house and anything electrical ceases to operate except for the video camera and the TV that keeps showing fuzzy images of people even after being unplugged. At first the family does not suspect too much is out of the ordinary until family members begin to act strangely and even disappear. Things quickly escalate until the family’s terrible secrets are revealed.

If that plot synopsis seemed vague, there is a good excuse. This movie is almost incomprehensible for much of it’s run time. Why is Darkest Night so difficult to follow? Firstly, the film has practically no lighting once the power goes out. Forced to use oil lanterns, we see things pretty much exactly as the characters do. Now while this might provide some authenticity to the footage, it also makes things very difficult to make out, especially when there’s any amount of motion involved. Characters are running around yelling and screaming and the camera doesn’t even attempt to keep up. Even when going for a faux-home movie style you’re still making a filmand the viewer needs to be able to follow what’s happening. What makes matters worse is this movie has a surprisingly large cast for a found footage offering, which muddies the waters further. There are so many bodies running around in the dark, disappearing and reappearing with little rhyme or reason, that it is impossible to know whether the fate of each character is eventually known or not. If the director wanted to confuse the crap out of the viewer then mission accomplished.

There are all of these bizarre inconsistencies that make one wonder if this film was originally written to be found footage or just became that because they only had one camera. There are scenes where characters stand side-by-side looking at each other delivering boring and pointless exposition to each other which don’t even attempt to give the appearance of being “organic” as we have come to expect in found footage movies. There are also random scenes where a character’s dialog is subtitled, sometimes it is because the character is speaking French but there were also scenes where the dialog is muffled but in English and it is subtitled. However there are then other scenes you can’t hear what anybody is saying properly but they don’t bother subtitling it. The film also does a poor job of establishing one of the key requirements of a found footage movie: justifying why everything is being recorded. A character named Chelsea is carrying the camera at first but then it is passed to a teenager called Justin after about 15 minutes. I believe reference is made to the fact that Justin doesn’t talk much and they weren’t kidding! Justin witnesses people vanishing before his eyes, he quietly watches characters get killed and there’s never a peep out of him to any other character he sees. Is Justin possessed? Perhaps. Does Justin just hate his family and wants them all to die? Having sat through this whole movie this would be very understandable

Darkest Night then commits what some may consider a cardnal sin, it has music. The whole point of Found Footage movies is that the viewer becomes a participant in the horrors on-screen because it’s not viewed from the traditional “safe” third person view of a film camera. So why ruin this stripped down experience by adding “scary music” right before anything happens? It stops this movie from managing ANY scares because the musical cues make sure you know they’re coming. Not that you can even really see most of the scary stuff due to the non-existent lighting and the one time you do get a clear view of something happening it is unintentionally hilarious.

Whatever reasons exist for why this movie is such an incomprehensible mess, the fact that it uses the found footage genre as a way out of having to put any care into it’s production is a very poor excuse. Darkest Night attempts authenticity but instead just induces headaches and boredom. Perhaps it’s time this whole sub-genre gets put in timeout for a while.

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Among Friends

IMDb
A group of friends get together for a murder mystery party, but things take a dark turn when one hijacks the evening and is out for blood


Rotten Tomatoes

MOVIE INFO

Scream queen Danielle Harris steps behind the camera to direct this horror comedy about a group of young friends who are drawn together for a murder mystery party that quickly becomes a bloodbath.

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The princess Bride

I loved this movie growing up. I found it fun. Cary Eweles is a hot mess. Didnt know Mandy Patinkin was in it till a friend told me Hes Rue on Dead Like Me



Rotten Tomatoes

MOVIE INFO

Robin Wright and Cary Elwes star in this fairytale adventure about a beautiful princess and the gallant hero who rescues her from an evil villain. Directed by Rob Reiner, it's an enchanting classic the whole family will love!

RogerEbert

"The Princess Bride" begins as a story that a grandfather is reading out of a book. But already the movie has a spin on it, because the grandfather is played by Peter Falk, and in the distinctive quality of his voice we detect a certain edge. His voice seems to contain a measure of cynicism about fairy stories, a certain awareness that there are a lot more things on heaven and Earth than have been dreamed of by the Brothers Grimm.

The story he tells is about Buttercup, a beautiful princess (Robin Wright) who scornfully orders around a farm boy (Cary Elwes) until the day when she realizes,thunderstruck, that she loves him. She wants to live happily ever after with him, but then evil forces intervene, and she is kidnapped and taken far away across the lost lands, while he is killed.

"Is this story going to have a lot of kissing in it?" Falk's grandson asks. Well, it's definitely going to have a lot of Screaming Eels.

The moment the princess is taken away by agents of the evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), "The Princess Bride" reveals itself as a sly parody of sword and sorcery movies, a film that somehow manages to exist on two levels at once: While younger viewers will sit spellbound at the thrilling events on the screen, adults, I think, will be laughing a lot. In its own peculiar way, "The Princess Bride" resembles "This Is Spinal Tap," an earlier film by the same director, Rob Reiner. Both films are funny not only because they contain comedy, but because Reiner does justice to the underlying form of his story. "Spinal Tap" looked and felt like a rock documentary - and then it was funny. "The Princess Bride" looks and feels like "Legend" or any of those other quasi-heroic epic fantasies - and then it goes for the laughs.

Part of the secret is that Reiner never stays with the same laugh very long. There are a lot of people for his characters to meet as they make their long journey, and most of them are completely off the wall.

There is, for example, a band of three brigands led by Wallace Shawn as a scheming little conniver and including Andre the Giant as Fezzik the Giant, a crusher who may not necessarily have a heart of gold. It is Shawn who tosses the princess to the Screaming Eels, with greatrelish.

Another funny episode involves Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, a heroic swordsman with a secret. And the funniest sequence in the film stars Billy Crystal and Carol Kane, both unrecogizable behind makeup, as an ancient wizard and crone who specialize in bringing the dead back to life. (I hope I'm not giving anything away; you didn't expect the princess's loved one to stay dead indefinitely, did you?)

"The Princess Bride" was adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, which he says was inspired by a book he read as a child, but which seems to have been cheerfully transformed by his wicked adult imagination. It is filled with good-hearted fun, with performances by actors who seem to be smacking their lips and by a certain true innocence that survives all of Reiner's satire. And, also, it does have kissing in it.

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Iron Wolf

IMDb
Lost in time, it lurks in the darkness, only to return again.


PutLocker Review
 Short Review: A Russian attack destroys the lab, but the weapon - buried underneath the ruins - is immortal. Lost in time, it lurks in the darkness, only to return again. 2012: Punk-Rock legend Spike Jones leads a group of friends into the ruins of the old Nazi Lab....



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The Canal

IMDb

• Film archivist David (Rupert Evans) has been having a rough time lately, as he suspects that his wife Alice (Hannah Hoekstra) has been cheating on him with Alex (Carl Shaaban), one of her work clients. This stress is compounded when David's work partner Claire (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) gives him a reel of to-be-archived footage that shows that his house was the setting for a brutal murder in 1902. Becoming progressively more unsettled and unhinged, David begins to believe that a spectral presence is in his house and ends up following his wife to a nearby canal, where he discovers that she is indeed having an affair with Alex. When Alice goes missing shortly afterwards, David contacts the police- only to become the prime suspect in her disappearance. As the police grow more convinced that David has murdered his wife, he struggles to find proof of his growing suspicion that something otherworldly was instead responsible.
  - Written by via Wikipedia

Rotten Tomatoes

MOVIE INFO

Sitting in an empty theater, a film archivist watches the grainy footage that will be his undoing. David and his wife are perfectly happy-or so he believes. When he finds out the home he shares with his wife and son was the scene of a ghastly turn-of-the-century murder, David dismisses it as ancient history. That is, until the sinister history ripples into the present and casts a shadow over life as he knows it. And when a looming secret shatters his marriage, David can't help but suspect thedark spirits of the house are somehow involved. In his drive to unveil the shadows hidden in the walls, David begins to descend into insanity, threatening the lives of everyone around him. Through ghastly imagery and a chilling score, Ivan Kavanagh's The Canal is an Irish ghost story that will leave you with a fear of the dark and a dripping chill down your spine long after the film's conclusion. (C) The Orchard

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Sinbad: The Ffith Voyage

IMDb
When the Sultan's first born is taken by an evil sorcerer, Sinbad is tasked with traveling to a desert of magic and creatures to save her.


Rotten Tomatoes

MOVIE INFO

When the Sultan's first born is taken by an evil sorcerer, Sinbad is tasked with traveling to a desert of magic and creatures tosave her. -- (C) Official Site

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The Machine Girl

NYTimes

The Japanese obsession with cavorting ninjas, cunning hardware and comely young avengers in abbreviated plaid skirts reaches some kind of climax with “The Machine Girl,” a riotous blend of arterial spray and grindhouse glee.

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The Machine Girl

Playing Ami, a basketball-loving high schooler whose beloved brother is killed by bullies, the soft-core starlet Minase Yashiro blazes through the movie like a vengeful hall monitor. Seeking justice, Ami confronts the parents of the lead bully, who respond by pan-frying her forearm — an extremity that will later be replaced by a machine-gun prosthesis. Like Rose McGowan’s character in “Planet Terror,” Ami is retrofitted for revenge.

Written and directed by Noboru Iguchi, “The Machine Girl” playto the balcony with schlocky effects (the camera lens frequently suffers collateral splatter) and visible roots (a terrifically cheesy 1970s title sequence). As Ami tackles a bewildering array of adversaries — including a bunch of bereaved parents known as the Super Mourner Gang — faces are flayed and eyeballs impaled in an escalating rush of inventive mortifications.

Offering her fans only a teasing glimpse of pristine white panties, Ms. Yashiro remains aloof from the screenplay’s sleazier moments. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the movie’s scariest villain, a yakuza mom only Tarantino could love. What she does with her bra is worth the price of admission alone.

THE MACHINE GIRL

Written (in Japanese, with English subtitles) and directed by Noboru Iguchi; director of photography, Yasutaka Nagano; edited by Kenji Tanabe; music by Koh Nakagawa; production designer, Yasuo Kurosu; visual effects supervisor, Tsuyoshi Kazuno; produced by Yoko Hayama, Yoshinori Chiba and Satoshi Nakamura; released by Media Blasters Releasing, Fever Dreams and Tokyo Shock. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Minase Yashiro (Ami Hyuga), Asami (Miki Sugihara), Ryosuke Kawamura (Yu Hyuga), Nobuhiro Nishihara (Sho Kimura), Kentaro Shimazu (Mr. Kimura) and Honoka (Mrs. Kimura).

TheFlickChick

Review: The Machine Girl (2008)

Director: Noboru Iguchi
Starring: Minase Yashiro

So, a little back story on this one: sometime last year my brother found the trailer for this movie online and we both thought that it was a parody or something and then discovered that it was an actual, bona fide movie and became determined to find some way to see it. Having now had the opportunity to see it, I must confess that words aren’t really adequate to properly describe it, but I’m going to do my best to apply a few. I haven’t bothered to assign this a star rating because movies like this one really defy the concept of a star rating, being as it is so shamelessly and awesomely ridiculous.

The plot of Machine Girl... actually, let me back up a bit. There’s something you need to understand about Machine Girl before we even get into the plot. She is pissed off. I mean, reallypissed off – like, imagine the most pissed off you’ve ever been and then multiply it by about a million. She’s also lost an arm and had a machine gun fashioned to fit over the stump, leaving her other hand free to wield another weapon. These facts we learn in the prologue but then the film doubles back, showing Machine Girl (aka Ami, played with admirably manic energy by Minase Yashiro) in a simpler time... kind of.

Ami and her brother are orphans, their parents having killed themselves following allegations of murder. The Ami of these early scenes is kind and caring, just as long as you don’t get her angry (you wouldn’t like her when she’s angry). Unbeknownst to her, a group of bullies has singled out her brother and his friend, and eventually torments them to death. When it becomes apparent that the bullies won’t be punished, Ami decides to take matters into her own hands and make them pay. During her quest, she loses her arm and almost dies but is saved by Miki (Asami) and her husband, the parents of the other dead boy. After several bloody battles, Ami and Miki storm the compound of the ringleader of the bullying, a little psycho who, judging by his parents, comes from a long line of psychos.

Machine Girl isn’t for everyone, but it might be for you if any of the following apply:

1. You like every wound to result in a fountain of spurting blood;
2. You’re curious regarding the aesthetic appeal of a bra fashioned out of drills;
3. You’ve ever wondered what it would look like if someone vomited up their intestines;
4. The words “flying guillotine” capture your imagination.

A lot of blood is shed in this film, but the violence is of such a cartooney variety that it’s difficult to take seriously. And lest you think the film is entirely devoid of cinematic value, rest assured that there is a moral to this story, voiced by Machine Girl in the final moments, regarding the importance of standing up for yourself or some such thing. At any rate, if simply standing your ground doesn’t work the film does have many creative suggestions for inflicting bodily harm on your enemies.

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