The Devil's Carnival (2012)

"Lost souls enter The Devil's Carnival where they are each faced with the sins they committed in life."

Yeah, I know "The Devil's Carnival" is a musical and isn't my kind of thing at all, but I was challenged by the Real Queen of Horror to watch it. Once I discovered that it had the beautiful Emilie Autumn (one of my favourite musicians from the heyday of MySpace) and Briana Evigan in it, the idea didn't seem so bad. Challenge accepted!

Unfortunately, apart from providing the opportunity to lust over Emilie Autumn in a very small acting role as Painted Doll, the movie doesn't have a lot going for it.

It all looks very nice, but the three Aesop's Fables underneath aren't used to convey exactly the same moral messages as they were originally intended to. Moral messages are redundant if the recipients are already in Hell, but that little detail never bothered the Amicus anthologies much so I'm willing to make some allowances. The songs which unnecessarily repeat the same tales again are absolutely dreadful though.

"The Dog and his Meat" or "The Dog and her Shadow" doesn't quite match the original apart from being about greed. Let's be brutally honest here, Briana Evigan is far from being a dog! It's nice to see her get topless for a split second although it would be better if she turned round while being whipped. Boobs and blood are sadly lacking throughout.

The second story comes closest to "The Frog and the Scorpion" by showing the danger of trusting someone who is unable to control his nature, but it's still a bit of a stretch. Jessica Lowndes looks amazing in her '50s-style green dress, but her character, Tamara, is the one who can't change her nature to trust people too easily rather than the Scorpion (Marc Senter) who is nothing but a liar.

I can't even place the third story, "The Devil and his Due", among Aesop's Fables, but it's been many years since I last looked at them (plus there are over 650 of the buggers anyway). It could be one of Aesop's Fables or it might possibly be a conflation of any other fable with a Faustian theme. The punchline seems to be from "The Monkey's Paw", but it could even be from one of the fairytales by the Brothers Grimm. Whatever the case, Sean Patrick Flanery is okay in it but not exceptional.

The Devil or Lucifer, played by Terrance Zdunich, is the best of a bad lot. Having a slightly similar appearance to the late Andy Hallett from "Angel" apart from the green is no indication of talent though. Lucifer is no Lorne, and his sing-talking is worse than Ke$ha's.

As with all musicals, I can't help but feel that 'The Devil's Carnival" would've been a lot better without the music. The lyrics of most of the songs are hard to decipher and some don't fit the tone of the movie whatsoever. I doubt that they took more than five minutes to compose, and if they did, they were meant for something else. If you've never seen a musical like this before, just imagine a really crap pop video of a song you've never heard before which has been coupled with burlesque images that don't match the lyrics, then multiply it by twelve, take away the number you first thought of, and try to lick your own elbow.

Even though it's short, the film exceeds in self-congratulatory padding to show off the make-up, sets and costumes. Mercifully, this does limit the number of songs involved but still allows the ones that do exist to be unintelligible and boring. At least there are some pretty girls in bikinis to ogle.

It's no great surprise that "The Devil's Carnival" is from the same director (Darren Lynn Bousman) and writer (Terrance Zdunich) as the equally horrible "Repo! The Genetic Opera" (2008). What does amaze me is that anybody likes this kind of thing or that it has any commercial value outside of a very small niche. Netflix subscribers beware!

For me, "The Devil's Carnival" was 55 minutes of absolute torture compounded by the fact that I also spotted the loathsome Hannah Minx from YouTube as an extra. Yeah, she's pretty and everything, but why have such a talentless waste of space in a movie? Oh, because she has enormous boobs, obviously. Gah! You have to laugh that she's wrongly credited as "Hannah Jinx" instead of her YouTube moniker or real name. Aw, how sad.

After that segue, I'll end this review with an ungrammatical YouTube comment which sums things up almost perfectly: "It's just a bad musical with corny songs, corny dancing with a bunch of girls walking around with their tits hanging out."

Zena, if you truly enjoyed this, what the Hell is wrong with you?

Next!

Penny Dreadful (2005)

"Jessica and David Clausen are an upstart couple who come face to face with the supernatural after inheriting a beautiful townhouse in New York City's West Village District."

I usually start my reviews with a YouTube trailer, but unfortunately, there isn't one available for this version of "Penny Dreadful". There is a trailer for it on the IMDb, but it was put up so long ago that the resolution is pretty bad. As you know, I'm all about quality on this blog.

You probably also know that I absolutely loathe and detest most horror movies which aren't either mainstream or borderline mainstream. Basically, if it looks like it's been made by amateurs then I won't even bother with it unless I've been bribed to watch it. Fortunately, "Penny Dreadful" is an award winning horror short with great production values. No bribery was necessary, and I even went out of my way to buy a copy of it.

From the scan I put at the top, it may look like a bootleg copy, but I can assure you that this is the real deal and purchased from the director, Bryan Norton, through eBay (back from when the postage rates didn't make buying a DVD from a private seller somewhat ridiculous). He even signed it in gold-coloured ink!

If you need further proof that this is real, I also scanned the back cover as well. The DVD case is a clear slim case. I would have preferred a standard DVD case, but this is what I got. It came with a postercard inside which I have also scanned to make up the rest of the pictures for this post. The only part I didn't scan was the DVD itself because I didn't want it to get scratched.

Anyway, I suppose you want to know what this is about since it's not the 2006 "After Dark Horrorfest" movie by the same name starring Rachel Miner. Suffice it to say that it's a haunted house story with a twist.

I'd actually forgotten about the somewhat rushed twist at the end until I just watched it again, but in fairness, it has been nearly 5 years since I last saw it. It's not a bad thing that I only remembered it for the great characterisation and acting talents involved.

Emily Vacchiano (now known as Emily Vaughan) did a really fantastic job of looking scared and screaming when necessary although, apart from one previous indie drama, she was one of the least experienced actors in this. Her only IMDb credit since has been for a bit part in an episode of "The Sopranos", which is a shame.

Sebastian La Cause, who played her onscreen husband, had an enormous body of work behind him, albeit mainly as a dancer, but he was pretty good as well. Even in the small amount of time he had on screen, the chemistry between him and Emily Vacchiono made their relationship a bit more realistic than it could have been in such a short movie.

The big selling point here though was Betsy Palmer playing a psychic. She was as over-the-top as you can imagine, and to me, she stood out in a bad way compared to everyone else. She was almost as out of place as Vincent Price was in "House of the Long Shadows" and just as hammy.

The movie also had an important cameo by Warrington Gillette who played Jason Voorhees in "Friday the 13th Part 2". This wasn't really a "Friday the 13th" reunion, however, as Betsy Palmer wasn't in the sequel and they didn't share a scene in "Penny Dreadful" either.

One of my main reasons for buying this DVD, other than it being a ghost story, was Tina Krause. She was one of the first actresses I interviewed back in the day when we both had real websites. Her part in this movie was way too small and her character was quite irritating, but it was nice to see her in something which felt in a class above her usual projects.

Peter DuPre, as an estate agent, was yet another recognisable face, as was Leo Geter who even had the same character name (Barry Simms) as he did in "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers". All the characters had names taken from older horror movies just to complete the homage.

And the homages didn't stop there. Not only were a couple of old horror movies shown on the TV which Jessica (Emily Vecchiona) was watching just before a power cut, but there was even one moment which was straight out of "The Innocents".

Including the set dressing and creative effects, the spooky atmosphere which was achieved was really good, but if I had to find a flaw, none of it looked that great now on a modern HDTV. There was some CGI used in places which didn't really show, but the image quality of the transfer wasn't so hot. If you watch this on a normal CRT television then it's actually a lot better.

Having also just watched "The Innkeepers" in spite of my better judgement, there are a lot of similarities between these two movies which I'm not going to completely spoil for you until I do my inevitable review of Ti West's badly paced mess later this month.

For now, I'll just say that the same problems occurred in "Penny Dreadful" due to its length. I would have been quite happy to watch another hour or more with these characters, and the running time of 30 minutes was only just enough to tell the story.

The ending was a little bit too rushed after 25 minutes of build up. I felt a little bit let down at first by there only being 2 minutes of surprisingly bloody and gory action, but what there was of it was quite special.

I still highly recommend "Penny Dreadful" especially if you like haunted house movies. It's not perfect, but it was better than most of the full-length horror movies which came out at the time.

The Cat with Hands (2001)

"The dark, surreal story of a cat who wants to be human."

Director: Robert Morgan
Writer: Robert Morgan
Stars: Livy Armstrong, Victoria Hayes and Daniel Hogwood-Kane

I think this will do as October's "Horror Cat of the Month".

For more horror cats, please check out http://horrorcats.blogspot.com. Now with over 1000 followers on Twitter!

Something scary for the weekend

Mamá (2008)



"Little Victoria is woken up by her sister Lili who insists on leaving the house because somebody unpleasant has come back..."

Everyone has been raving about this award-winning short film by Andres Muschietti so I thought I'd better post it on here to scare you too.

According to the IMDb, "Mama" is due to become a full-length feature in 2012.