This is part three of our exhausting 2007 Year in Review. We already gave you an in depth look at Eli Roth and Rob Zombie (Read Here), the two most influential people in the horror genre right now, then we listed our Top Ten Horror Films of 2007 (Read Here), now I give you The Best Alternative, Overlooked and Unappreciated Horror Films of 2007, again presented by our wonderful and eclectic 10% gay staff.
2007′s Best Alternative, Overlooked, Unappreciated, Direct to Video Horror Films
NOT HORROR, BUT…
ZODIAC
dir. David Fincher
David Fincher perfectly captures the paranoia, fear and dread caused by the Zodiac murders that terrorized the Bay Area in the seventies. More police procedural than thriller, Zodiac nevertheless is one of the more tension inducing films of the year. Many scenes standout; the attack on the couple by the lake, the murder of the cab driver at the intersection, the basement interrogation of the creepy projectionist who may be the Zodiac killer. Few movies these days leave you with such a lasting sense of unease. – Gary G.
INLAND EMPIRE
dir. David Lynch
Now that the poseur’s have officially jumped off the Lynch bandwagon we can appreciate Lynch on his own terms. This is the film that Lynch has been building towards his whole career. What was subtext is now text. The contents of a diseased mind are now spilled across the screen in a Freudian nightmare. Was it entertaining? No. Did it make sense? Hell if I know.. But the images linger. Laura Dern bleeding to death on a street corner as a trio of oblivious crackheads carry on a conversation. The group of “dead” prostitutes trapped in hell, which looks like a dirty motel room. The bunny rabbits. Grace Zabriske. If your up for it the horror fan is treated to many disturbing visuals. – Gary G.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
dir. The Coen Brothers
The most frightening villain of the year was Javier Bardem’s bowl haircut, compressed air can armed psychopath in the Coen Brothers gritty ode to human avarice and evil. Bardem’s sheer presence was enough to make you piss your pants. This sad, violent film also contained one of the years best hold your breath terror scenes when Bardem stalks his prey, Josh Brolin, through a deserted hotel room. Bravo to the Coen’s for doing what many horror films couldn’t do this year, scare the hell out of me. – Gary G.
MURDER PARTY
dir. Jeremy Saulnier
This film takes the notions of innocent pretending on Halloween and turns them in to a living nightmare. After finding a invitation to a “Murder Party” Chris goes and finds himself the victim of this party that is taking him as a prey. Why would anyone do this in their right mind? Because they are art students of course. Their leader, Alexander, claims that he will give a grant to them if he decides they are the most creatively deserving, which in this case means killing to his liking. These people are so desperate and insecure about themselves that they would become murderers in order to have some shot at getting money for their art. The characters are really what make the film. They are all so unique and quite out there. The main character of Chris is by far the best. He is very much a loner who gets lost in his own world. He is a very imaginative guy who just wants someone to share his world. When hearing of this party he creates his own knight costume made of cardboard. The most unsettling point of Murder Party is that Chris’ childlike spirit makes him seem so innocent. The film was wonderfully shot as an independent horror movie. There is enough gore to scare with still leaving hope since the prime subject is allowed to live for quite some time. The locations of warehouses in Brooklyn made it possible to keep the film at a lower cost. The warehouse also had an abandoned feel to it, which decreased the hope of someone finding out what was going on. The tables do begin to turn though as every one finds themselves in a sticky situation. Trickery seems to be everywhere in Murder Party from the victims to the victimizers. – Kelsey Zukowski
OVERLOOKED
THEM
dir. David Moreau and Xavier Palud
The absolute scariest movie of the year. That nobody saw. Them, a barely released french film about a married couple, alone in a secluded mansion in the woods, who are attacked in the middle of the night by “Them”, a gang of faceless boogeyman in black hoodies and tennis shoes. I am not kidding. The tension is palpable because for most of the running time you have absolutely no idea who or what “Them” are. A gang of thieves? Ghosts? Animated sports wear?
Them also has some of the best sound designed scares Ever. The film is practically silent so all we hear are the creaking of floorboards, the heavy breathing of the terrified couple, heavy footsteps running up and down stairs and the truly skin crawling screeching of the Them’s. The sound of rattles will now forever terrify me. See the preview here.
The real homage to Halloween was not in Rob Zombie’s remake but in this film. This is the most purely suspenseful, jump out of your seat, scare film in years. Catch it on video but first turn out the lights and turn on the surround sound system for the ultimate experience. A must see for all horror fans. – Gary G.
JOSHUA
dir. George Ratliff
This reviewer loves killer kid movies. But Joshua purposely avoids many of the cliches of the killer kid genre. We never really see Joshua do anything, which really annoyed many critics. The first half of the film introduces us to Joshua’s somewhat fractured family; the likable but unconnected dad, the edgy mother suffering from severe post partum depression, fussy, religious grandmother, and sardonic, sophisticated gay uncle. Ratliff does an amazing job delineating these complicated characters and the undercurrent of unhappiness in the family. The performances are uniformly amazing, especially Vera Farmiga as the mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Sam Rockwell as the oblivious father who doesn’t understand why his son would rather play piano concertos than play ball. Jakob Kogan’s “charmless” performance was misunderstood. He is supposed to be that type of quiet, unemotional, kid whose thoughts or feelings one can never truly gauge. Has there ever been a killer kid as creepy as little Joshua? I’ve, literally, seen them all and I say know. But what makes this film a disturbing experience is the coda that forces you to reexamine everything that happened. Is writer/director George Ratliff really suggesting that Joshua destroys his upper middle class family to be with the gay uncle he adores and emulates? Wow. That’s fucked up. And brilliant. – Gary G.
WEREWOLF IN A WOMEN’S PRISON
dir. Jeff Leroy
A while back I decided to revisit the Women in Prison genre and I was a bit disappointed, something that seemed so simple to get right, was so many times done wrong. It is a simple concept; give me caged women, lesbian sex, and gratuitous violence. But believe it or not, the bulk of WIP movies will bore you to tears. I titled this section of our site “Women in Prison: The Lost Art of Filmmaking” because let’s be honest we are probably never going to see one of these films ever be made again. But then Werewolf in a Women’s Prison came along and proved me wrong. Offering the fore mentioned and plenty of it Werewolf took the WIP genre up a notch by adding well… a werewolf, and not just any werewolf I might add, but the best looking werewolf since American Werewolf in London. Looking like one of those cheap Mexican rip-off Mickey Mouse toys with light-up eyes. This werewolf rips, shreds and tears apart the beautiful women who inhabit our prison, but not before they get naked and have lesbian sex. This may seem like a no-brainer if you never really dove into the WIP genre before, but Werewolf may be one of the top ten Women in Prison movies ever made, not to mention one of the top ten werewolf movies ever made. Let me ask when the last time you saw a werewolf with a stripper pole, and then let me show you one of the best merging of two subgenres…Werewolf in a Women’s Prison is where it’s at. – WIL Keiper
UNAPPRECIATED
RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION
dir. Russel Mulcahy
There used to be a time when fans could overlook bad acting, plot holes, and thinly devised characters in favor of amazing action set pieces. We do it for Lucio Fulci films. His horror films are frequently badly acted, horribly dubbed and completely ridiculous. But they make up for that with truly bizarre, over the top, gruesome, one of a kind scenes of horror mayhem. The splinter in the eyeball scene, the zombie shark attack, the guts puking, nipple shearing, scissors through the head, duck quaking insanity of it all IS what we appreciate in Fulci. But then Fulci has been pre-approved by The Cult Movie Appreciation Guild so it’s alright to like his films, ridiculous though they may be.
Russell Mulcahy has yet to receive such approval so it’s no wonder that many fans didn’t appreciate the third Resident Evil film for all of the gloriously over the top cinematic chaos on view. The zombie dog fight, the corpse pile of Alice clones, the zombie crow attack, the flame thrower burning the crows from the sky, Alice and her crossbow, the devastated Las Vegas landscape, the climactic showdown between Alice and the zombified Dr. Isaacs are like visual injections of horror heroine. You know it’s bad for you but if feels so good. – Gary G.
THE HILLS HAVE EYES Part Two
dir. Martin Weisz
Where have all the slasher film fans gone? Why are they ignoring perfectly good slasher movies like this? Are we too sophisticated now to enjoy such sleazy entertainment? Well I’m not, damn it. Director Martin Weisz, working with a screenplay by Wes Craven and son Jonathan, creates a lean and mean piece of slasher exploitation. Gruesome, gory, sickening and offensive as it could be, this movie wasn’t made for wimps. The cannibal rape scene alone is too brutal and disgusting for your average movie audience. I loved it. – Gary G.
ON VIDEO
BLOODY REUNION
dir. Dae-wung Lim
My problems with the film as a whole are the same that I have with a lot of the Asian horror films. Layer upon layer of plot and sub-plot, red herrings, and characters that take away from the impact of the story at hand. Bloody Reunion gets way with it because of the amazing brutality of the murders and creepiness of it’s villain, a bunny rabbit masked psycho. A group of students visit the dying, crippled elementary school teacher who abused them at her secluded sea side home. They are then systematically tortured and killed by the bunny-masked killer who may be the teacher’s retarded son who is locked in the basement. To say that this movie has a few twists is an understatement. There is so much shit going on in this movie it’s hard to keep up. But the overwhelming sense of grim brutality and melancholy that pervade the film and it’s character make it one of the more powerful horror movies of the year. The moral of the story, be nice to the kids who pee their pants. – Gary G.
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
dir. Graeme Whiffler
Neighborhood Watch is Sick. Disgusting. Gross, and one of the more disturbing films in years. Writer/Director Graeme Whiffler creates one of the most vile horror villains of all time in Adrian Trumbell, the perverted sleazebag who terrorizes the newlywed couple who move in next door. When he’s not masturbating to torture videos, picking scabs off his body, or finger fucking the puncture wounds in his stomach he is poisoning his neighbors water supply, terrorizing elderly invalids and giving his neighbors chocolates filled with homemade bile. Believe me this is one sick puppy. The ending is truly horrific. This film is not for weak stomachs. After traveling the festival circuit for a few years Neighborhood Watch will finally make it to video early next year with a stupid name change, Deadly End. By the way, the director also co-wrote Dr. Giggles. – Gary G.
BAD REPUTATION
dir. Jim Hemphill
In continuing with the “lost art” concept WIL started with Women in Prison flicks, I present the return of the Rape / Revenge flick. Revenge films have been making a comeback recently with the Kevin Bacon vehicle Death Sentence and the upcoming Already Dead. But no type of revenge is better justified than a woman raped and humiliated. That subgenre was huge in the 70s when after the second-wave feminism hit. So what the hell happened? Post-feminism, third-wave feminism, then silence. But Bad Reputation has proven that Rape / Revenge will be making a comeback. It not only stayed true to its roots (Girl is gang-raped, girl is rehabilitated, girl gets bloody revenge), but it added to the subgenre and modernized an old school of thought. Now, R / R films include high school bullies, tramp stamps, fear of homosexuals, cyber bullying, and more. Not only that, but this film is more sophisticated in that it shows the deterioration of every aspect of the victim’s life from perverts at school, an abusive alcoholic mother, police that offer no help, and a counselor that offers no sympathy. So the crime is not just a personal one, but something that affects society as a whole and the hate trickles down onto everyone else. The victim’s use of her sexuality as a tool can be argued as old school (like in the infamous bathtub knife scene in I Spit on Your Grave), but Bad Reputation shows the victim EMBRACING her sexuality and understanding that it gives her power outside of the bedroom as well. Once again, a new school of thought emerged and I’m sure this will continue in the immediate future and evolve over the years.
– Molly Celaschi
