The Eves (2012)

"A Spring Break beach trip turns into a waking nightmare in this indie shocker based on true events. When car troubles lead a group of students to seek shelter in an abandoned lodge, dark forces emerge and blood is spilled."

Ever watched a horror movie just because of the picture on the DVD cover? Yeah, me too, all the time. That's how I ended up watching "The Eves" after promising to only watch good movies from now on. Oh well, as far as slasher clones go, it's not that bad. At least the scene with the shotgun-toting blonde occurs eventually.

Thus, although I was expecting something more like "High Tension" or even "Baise-moi", I ended up with yet another bunch of teenagers breaking down in the middle of nowhere and falling foul of a serial killer (or two) in a movie which shamelessly borrows from "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974) and every slasher made since. Presumably, that's how it's "based on true events".

All the usual clichés are ticked off including cell phones not working, teenagers with entitlement issues getting drunk, doing drugs, and having sex before being murdered one by one, and of course, there's the inevitable twist which I have to admit is nicely done here and not predictable at all. It's not overly original either, but it works.

The funny thing is that I actually enjoyed "The Eves", albeit not entirely in the way it was intended. I've never liked the original version of the "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", and if it wasn't for R. Lee Ermey as Sheriff Hoyt in the remake and its sequel, I wouldn't have watched those. I'm glad I have though, because it amused me to see the same setup being used again by one of these so-called "groundbreaking and innovative" indie horror movies, and my cynicism was constantly being justified.

To give credit where it's due, the acting in "The Eves" is more than acceptable considering that the characters are quite poorly differentiated. Out of the teenage guys, there's a serious one, a quiet one, an even quieter one who looks identical to the previous quiet one, a prankster, a smartass, and all of them are assholes. The three girls are basically two slutty ones (a blonde bimbo who shows her boobs and a kinky brunette who doesn't) plus a more serious blonde who is as normal as any of these stereotypes can be. What their names are doesn't even matter until near the end.

I like the pretty girls.

As in all modern slasher movies, there's exactly enough shown of the potential victims to make you hate them but not enough to allow you to sympathise with them, and then the lacklustre killing spree begins. In fairness, the kills are more realistically handled than having blood spurting everywhere or intestines wriggling all over the place, and the make-up/effects are okay, but there's nothing memorable about them in and of themselves either. The blinding scenes only made me feel a bit bad because they reminded me of a recent news story from China which I wish I'd never read about. "Man's inhumanity to man" is often much worse in real life than anything you'll see in a silly low-budget horror movie although a similar scene at the start of "Borderland" (2007) is just as gruesome.

While "The Eves" isn't particularly scary, some of the scenes manage suspense competently and the background music which accompanies them is complimentary. Unfortunately, nothing here is likely to get a hardcore horror fan's pulse racing. Considering that I am an example of that aforementioned "hardcore horror fan", I watched this movie calmly and patiently without a flicker of emotion whatsoever.

A casual viewer or someone new to the genre might get a kick of "The Eves", but he or she would have to be American and around the same age as the victims to avoid feeling alienated. When all's said and done, "The Eves" is just a cookie-cutter teen slasher aimed at cookie-cutter teenagers rather than someone like me anyway.

Bloody Birthday (1981)

"Lacking consciences because they were born during a solar eclipse, a trio of 10-year-olds embark on an indiscriminate killing spree."

Once again, due to there being nothing new to watch, I'm back to the oldies. I actually watched "Bloody Birthday" at the end of last week during the time when I had no internet connection so at least I got something good out of the tornado

Basically, "Bloody Birthday" was little more than a ripoff of "The Bad Seed" (1956) and "Village of the Damned" (1960), but it was done rather well. The evil kids in this were almost perfect in their roles, and, as someone who can't stand kids anyway, they really made me glad that I don't have any of my own.

Although it was never satisfactorily explained why the kids (played by Billy Jacoby, Elizabeth Hoy and Andy Freeman) decided to go on a killing spree just before their joint tenth birthday and not in all the years before, I think it had something to do with astrology and the alignment of planets. If you believe in that nonsense then, of course, it all makes perfect sense.

If I wanted to be a really harsh critic of the plot then, obviously, the fact that there were no warning signs of psychopathic behaviour before the kids committed the largest crimes possible (instead of working their way up to them) made the story a little bit ridiculous. The trio did a couple of naughty rather than particularly evil things such as spying on the little girl's sister, played by Julie Brown, as she danced naked, but it was too little and in the wrong chronological order to make up for the earlier lack of realism.

A bigger problem was that children of their size simply wouldn't have the physical strength to do many of the things which they did in this movie. Strangling an adult with a skipping rope might be possible, but beating a cop to death with a baseball bat certainly wouldn't be. As for firing a pistol, well, anyone who has ever fired a gun knows that the recoil would have sent the little twerp who was holding it with one hand straight off to the hospital.

Lori Lethin was the heroic eyecandy in all this and she was okay for the time. Although she did her own stunts and had a really nice body, she was occasionally annoying. Running from a car in a scrapyard by staying directly in front of it wasn't exactly smart. I would have preferred it if Susan Strasberg, who played a rather strict teacher for all of five minutes, had been the heroine. She was gorgeous. When the kid with glasses shot her, I thought, "What a waste!"

The kills were very much in the same vein as "Friday the 13th" (which was actually made later but released first) and the other slasher clones. There wasn't a lot to see, but one murder with a bow and arrow was exceptionally well done. I didn't quite understand what the motivation was for it even so. Jealousy, vengeance or some kind of morality warning? Who knows?

I did enjoy "Bloody Birthday" as it played out towards a rather satisfying ending and an even more predictable epilogue. Surprisingly, given its flaws, I'm going to put it in "The Vault". The way the subject matter was treated with such seriousness when a more inept cast could have accidentally turned it into yet another lame comedy made this a lot better than most horror movies from the same time.

Just for the sheer bravery of showing kids as the selfish, psychopathic little buggers that we all know they really are, I'm rating this as a 6 out of 10. This wasn't a "so bad, its good" movie (such things don't exist in my world anyway), but was "so good, it's a shame that it wasn't even better".

Alone in the Dark (1982)

"A quartet of murderous psychopaths break out of a mental hospital during a power blackout and lay siege to their doctor's house."

It was another gloomy, rainy Monday afternoon so I went in search of something not too involving to satisfy me. This time I found "Alone in the Dark" and not the crappy Uwe Boll version either.

Although "Alone in the Dark" was released back in 1982, I never saw it at the time. A lot of American horror movies never made it to Britain either due to their distributors or, more usually, because they were too crappy and the independent video rental stores wouldn't waste their money on them.

Whatever the case, I didn't really miss anything outstanding with "Alone in the Dark" except for the chance to talk about some more horror movie trivia such as the first use of a killer wearing a hockey mask before Jason Voorhees made it his trademark.

Since it was only another slasher in the "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" mould, complete with the usual tropes, abundance of plaid shirts, and a couple of decent yet obviously cloned kills, "Alone in the Dark" was just a very average '80s horror.

Something which made it kind of ironic was having Dwight Schultz, known as "Mad Murdock" to fans of "The A Team", playing a psychiatrist in it. Well, I found it ironic anyway and nothing more than that since the character wasn't very well developed.

Donald Pleasence played yet another psychiatrist who was actually a little bit nicer than his famous Dr Loomis character and was certainly more naive. Of course, it wasn't much more than a cameo role but that could be said about all the big names who were involved in this project.

Jack Palance, Martin Landau, and even Erland van Lidth (later to be Dynamo in "The Running Man") each had their moments of glory as psychopaths. They didn't do a bad job considering that none of them were on screen for very long. Martin Landau stood out the most but that's nearly always the way with religious nutters. Erland van Lidth played a paedophile really well too though.

As for the story, it was basically "Halloween" with four lots of Michael Myers and less than a quarter of the scares. Only one scene around the 50 minute mark, which involved a very frightened (and very nice to look at) Carol Levy being menaced in the bedroom, had any real suspense to it. This also had a very early "meta" moment when it was announced that the noise in the closet couldn't possibly be a cat since nobody in the house had one.

Everything else just plodded along but mostly lagged. A couple of stand-outs in the little girl who played Dwight Shultze's daughter and Lee Taylor-Allan (who very nearly got nude at one point but, instead, provided a very weak jump scare with a Tom Savini created corpse) were the only highlights and they weren't quite as memorable as the characters themselves were irritating.

There was a surprise reveal of one psychopath known as "The Bleeder" who I'd completely forgotten about the existence of by the time it came to pass so I'm happy to raise the rating which I would have given "Alone in the Dark" by a point just for that.

Generally, however, this was all pretty weak in the horror department. Everything was telegraphed so far ahead that when things did happen they weren't a surprise. It was simply a very underwhelming, almost goreless, and badly paced slasher with some seemingly original touches which were actually borrowed from half a dozen better movies.