Hallows' Eve (2013)

"Years after a tragic accident leaves a young child scarred for life, the people responsible pay - with their lives."

When I saw that Danielle Harris had top billing, and then noticed the huge similarity between the little girl (Isobel Rose Costello) who gets run over by a tractor in the opening scene and Danielle Harris at the same age, I expected something a lot different than the horrible mess that "Hallows' Eve" turned out to be. It may sound too predictable, but I honestly thought that Danielle Harris would be all disfigured like she was in Rob Zombie's "Halloween II" and be revealed as the psycho killing the now grown-up bullies in revenge for her face.

Maybe that's one of the red herrings which is designed to sell the mystery element of this feeble attempt at a slasher movie, and I've probably already spoiled the ending for you by telling you that it isn't how things play out, but I don't care. "Hallows' Eve" is so bad that it doesn't deserve to be watched by anyone, and is certainly not worth renting or buying. Unless you've recently become the recipient of a brain transplant operation involving a drunken chimpanzee, the lack of a cohesive story is excrutiating to get through. Even my cats who have brains the size of walnuts couldn't cope with this and left me to it.

There are too many characters to keep track of, and as usual, there's not one of the "teenagers" who isn't such a nasty piece of work that you don't just want him or her to die horribly, but the story jumps all over the place and is completely unsatisfying. Lots of boobs and blood, and an incongruous dream sequence half-way through which adds more gratuitous nudity, is nice but doesn't help matters. It's almost impossible to follow what's going on until the very end, and by that point, you'll be unlikely to care.

Don't worry, babe, you can still get a job in indie horror movies.

Among the cheap gore effects, uncreative kills, and bad camerawork lurk several horror c-listers including Ashley C. Williams and Tiffany Shepis, plus a bunch of male "actors" who are harder to recognise. Apparently, one of them was in "Pumpkinhead" (1988), but the rest vary from being hangers-on in the "indie scene" to fully-fledged TV actors who have some actual talent. Who's who or and who plays who, I couldn't possibly tell you even with the cast list in front of me. They all have generic character names like Nick, Todd, Dave, Brad, and whatever the female equivalents might be. I may be wrong about this because I was bored out of my mind, but I don't think that any of them call each other by name other than the disfigured girl being Eve.

How and why known genre actors get involved in half-arsed projects like this which can do them no good is the biggest mystery. There may be a very small financial reward, but no big-wig is going to look at their work in "Hallows' Eve" and think, "Oh, I really must hire that one for my next muti-million dollar blockbuster!" In fact, it's more likely to be the opposite. Movies like this kill careers, they don't make them! The only excuse anyone can use is that you could put Oscar award-winning actors in this low-budget trash and they would still come away from it reeking of shit because of the script. Having said that, Tiffany Shepis gets the best of the bad lines, and Danielle Harris doesn't have enough screen time to disgrace herself.

The only good thing I can say about "Hallows' Eve" is that setting it in one of the "Haunted Attractions" which a lot of farmers tend to set up every year in America is an original touch. I've been to a few of these Hallowe'en events, so the location felt real to me, and I liked it. Sadly, that's all I enjoyed about this movie other than what you can see in the image below and the bath scene which preceded it.

Definitely a long-leggedy beastie!

Three more weeks to Hallowe'en, Hallowe'en, Hallowe'en. Three more weeks to Hallowe'en. This film sucks ass.

Blood on the Dance Floor made a horror video!

Not only have Dahvie and Jayy made a mini horror movie for their new song 'Damaged", but they've made it as an extreme horror movie with some lovely torture at the end too. Bloody brilliant! This'll keep the haters busy for a while!

From some of things Dahvie Vanity has been saying on Twitter, and knowing his taste in movies, I had a feeling that he would do something like this eventually. It was still a nice surprise to see it actually happen though.

Directed by Rob Zombie's cinematographer Patrick Fogerty, "Damaged" boasts some impressively mean-spirited gore which is above and beyond what you'd normally see in a music video. The CGI fire and blood splatter effects give away that "Damaged" isn't a big-budget production, and it's a bit tongue-in-cheek (or tongue-in-a-pair-of-forceps to be precise), but posting it on YouTube is bound to be controversial.

Although a more cohesive storyline would have sorted out the slight incongruity between the style of the song itself and the visuals, the practical effects are used well, and the message that the boys want to get across is pretty clear. The "Bad Blood" album is very much Blood on the Dance Floor's love letter to their critics, and their fans will love this!

I don't expect "Damaged" to be available on YouTube for long until some prude or hater flags it, so watch it while you can!

Also check out Blood on the Dance Floor's official website at www.ilovebotdf.com.

Hatchet III (2013)

"A search and recovery team heads into the haunted swamp to pick up the pieces and Marybeth learns the secret to ending the voodoo curse that has left Victor Crowley haunting and terrorizing Honey Island Swamp for decades."

Gore, gore, gore, gore, gore, and even more gore! Yes, "Hatchet III" delivers what everyone has been craving for a very long time!

Three years after the instantly forgettable "Hatchet II", where Adam Green failed, BJ McDonnell's debut as a director breathes new life into a series which most of us had written off. Having said that, this is still Adam Green's baby and, unfortunately, there are places where it shows.

The thing is, you shouldn't be able to go wrong with a slasher film anyway. All you need is a group of people and a monster with supernatural strength to hack them to pieces in the most painful-looking and bloodiest ways possible. Who cares if "Hatchet III" has a thin and formulaic plot? The practical effects are absolutely lush with brutal dismemberments and blood gushing everywhere.

Where the previous "Hatchet" movies went wrong is that they had too much humour and none of it was funny. "Hatchet III" isn't perfect either although the balance is much better this time. It's still meant to be a "fun movie" rather than something to be taken seriously, but at least it is actually fun rather than a chore to sit through.

This is not a SyFy channel movie!

Not to spoil the big surprises for you, but all the usual convention circuit suspects apart from Tony Todd appear again. As Victor Crowley, Kane Hodder proves that he can still do a lot more than sign his autograph, which is nice.

Zach Galligan makes a decent attempt at playing a sheriff, Parry Shen turns up as a paramedic primarily to deliver an anti-racism jibe, and Derek Mears adds the visual in-joke of two former Jasons fighting it out for anyone who cares about remakes. The confrontation between Hodder and Mears could also be taken as "Victor Crowley is better than the new Jason" which, in this case, he really is. In many ways, "Hatchet III" is what the "Friday the 13th" remake should have been.

Even the acting is better this time although I doubt that the target audience of teenagers and "Friday the 13th" nostalgists will notice or care about such subleties. I noticed, particularly in the case of Danielle Harris whose scenes would lag if she wasn't so good in them, and I'm grateful for it.

Now approaching middle-age, Danielle Harris looks really good in this movie too apart from showing her huge, disfiguring tattoos in a hosing-down/shower scene which would be moderately erotic otherwise. At first, I thought she had some terrible wound inflicted on her by Victor Crowley, but then I realised what she'd done and it threw me right out of lust with her. What a shame. I'm sure she'll recover though.

Probably best if you keep your tracksuit on in future, babe.

I'm not going to go into further detail because I know that you'll want to see "Hatchet III" for yourself. I highly recommend that you do so as soon as possible before the usual negativity hits whatever message boards and Facebook pages you're subscribed to. "Hatchet III" is easily this Summer's best horror movie no matter what the "negative Nancies" might have to say about it.

It's taken three attempts, but we finally have a "Hatchet" movie which lives up to the original's tagline of "Old School American Horror". The third time really is the charm.

Hidden in the Woods (2012)

(AKA "En las afueras de la ciudad")



"After their abusive father is jailed, two sisters being raised in a remote area of Chile find they have to answer to their uncle, a drug kingpin who wants his missing product back."

Yeah, I'm back again but only briefly. I've had another non-eventful birthday (apart from James Herbert dying on it!) last week, finally figured out how to turn off all the annoying random characters that were being added to the names of the images I uploaded to Photobucket, and I've been spending way too long playing on Twitter. Let's face it, as much fun as Twitter is, I'm primarily a blogger so I can't be confined to 140 character limits forever.

Anyway, I missed out on Patricio Valladares' "Hidden in the Woods" last year so I watched it yesterday. I can't say that I was overly impressed although it's certainly gory enough for most people and has a couple of nice-looking Chilean girls in it.

Thanks to "Hidden in the Woods", I had to look up where Chile was on the map. I always thought that Chile was an island somewhere near Portugal rather than a long, straggly country in South America so I learnt something. Geography has never been my strong point, but I had to Google where Chile was after watching this film so that I never accidentally go there. It's probably a great country, but this film makes it look like a horribly uncivilised place to be. There are too many trees and violently insane people living among them for my liking.

Siboney Lo as Ana

The real trouble with "Hidden in the Woods" though is that despite all the shock scenes and gore, it isn't so much a horror movie as just another rape-revenge, "faux-grindhouse", exploitation movie with a ludicrous crime story forced into the mix. I'm not a big fan of this subgenre and always fail to see the joke. That's assuming that this was put together as a bit of fun and not meant to be a serious drama. "Inspired by true events" doesn't seem that likely unless Chile really does contain so many rapists in its sylvan areas or have police even more useless than the ones in "Inside".

Paradoxically, acting and filming wise, "Hidden in the Woods" isn't a bad movie as such. It's obviously ragged in places, but it doesn't reek of someone trying to intentionally make a "so bad, it's good" abomination (although a few comic touches particularly during Ana's short career as a prostitute may make you wonder). I liked the gore effects and almost got into what Patricio Valladares was trying to do about two-thirds of the way through, but by then, it was too late. Homaging dozens of better horror movies (including "Spider Baby", "The Hills Have Eyes", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "Frontier(s)" and even "The Woman") isn't so clever when there's hardly any originality used elsewhere.

Having willingly suspended my disbelief during the schizophrenic tonal changes and poorly realised plot, I can't easily put my finger on why the story didn't work for me except that the lead female characters were either too flat or too inconsistent and didn't really evoke any kind of sympathy. It's pretty hard to sympathise with an inbred family of hillbilly cannibals anyway even if you imagine that the girls might clean up rather nicely. The men in this film are all one-dimensional and despicably vile as well.

Carolina Escobar as Anny

Basically, "Hidden in the Woods" is a misogynistic tale of murder, rape, incest, prostitution, cannibalism, drug dealers, torture, and even more rape and murder. If any of those combined elements interest you then knock yourself out. If you want to actually feel something for the victims in a mean-spirited movie then I recommend watching something else such as "I Spit on Your Grave" or "The Last House on the Left" (either the originals or the remakes). Even "A Serbian Film" has more pathos than "Hidden in the Woods".

The "Reservoir Dogs" ending just ruins any time invested in trying to get involved with the characters, thus leaving the experience unsatisfying and forgettable. In fairness, the characters are such damaged goods that no happy ending is possible, but it still feels like a cop-out especially with the clunky twist during the end credits.

Inevitably, there is already an American remake planned which will, surprisingly, also be directed by Patricio Valladares. With a few changes, it might be okay, but I highly doubt it.