Published by Kelsey Zukowski July 4th, 2009
in Horror BOOKS.
The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Nightfall
Written By: L.J. Smith
Grade: A-
Nightfall marks the start of a new chapter in The Vampire Diaries series. The Return is a sort of sub-series. This is the start of a new trilogy with the same characters, but a new focus in the story: Elena, the light beauty and the charming and her relationship with the powerful vampire of darkness, Damon. Stefan, the caring and more morally conscious vampire actually isn’t even in majority of the book. Nightfall was written over 15 years after the first book and there are obvious differences in both Smith’s growth as well as her characters. The style is similar, but more adult, dark, and everything is far more layered and complex.
Elena Gilbert was once human, but when she died, she came back as a vampire from sharing the blood of both vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon. She gave her life to save theirs and was an angel that watched over her friends, helping warn them about the trouble to come despite interferences from her after death tormentor. Now she has miraculously come back as a human. However, she seems to still have hung on to some of her supernatural instincts and is a spirit child now. Elena can’t talk and doesn’t remember how to do anything she did as a human, she has truly been born again. Stefan works with her to remember anything she can. They do communicate through telepathy although Elena’s thoughts are somewhat jumbled. She often floats in the air and kisses those she sees to put the memory of them in her mind.
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Published by Kelsey Zukowski June 29th, 2009
in Horror BOOKS.
The Strain is a vampire novel brought to us by the collaborative efforts of horror director, Guillermo Del Toro and thriller author, Chuck Hogan. It seems that Del Toro set up the basic idea and possibly certain set ups in the story while Hogan composed the bulk of the work. The book seems to be void of Del Toro’s touch of artistry and meaning even if his basic idea of a vampire apocalypse through an airplane of the infected was promising.
The book is overloaded with countless numbers of stories, but the basic one starts with a plane that lands in New York’s JFK airport with all of the passengers dead. Of course, they aren’t really dead, just undead. The airport officials eventually call epidemiologists, Ephraim and Nora, who are part of the rapid response team. They take many precautions and wait it out quite some time before acting, but once they do they discover that everyone inside the plane appears to be dead and don’t have pulses…
Deadgirl took a few years to be released because of its controversial subject matter. I am very glad that it did as it’s one of the most creative zombie films to come out in quite some time. Nearly every zombie film has followed the Romero Night of the Living Dead inspired formula. The zombie outbreak takes place, the living run desperately, find somewhere to hide, and eventually make their final escape before the zombies corner them. We have gotten a few films that break away from this formula such as Fido, but for the amount of zombie films that come out very few follow a different story structure. Deadgirl doesn’t even use the word zombie and only shows one zombie throughout the film. The dead girl has been killed, but keeps on coming back to life. She also spreads her undead virus by biting her victims. Aside from not dying and her method of infecting others just about everything else is unique from other films in the zombie genre.
Mikael (Thomsen) is having a mid-life crisis. He has left his job for awhile and is devoting his free time to himself. He goes canoeing with his friend and brother-in-law and jumps at the chance to participate in a trial for an anti-depressant drug. Mikael doesn’t particularly feel depressed, but he knows he wants something more from life. He begins taking the pills and has to go in for check ups every 2 weeks. He keeps this a secret from his wife, Sigrid (Steen), desperate to have something for himself. He doesn’t feel any change for quite some time then suddenly he feels happy, much happier than he can ever remember feeling. Mikael feels that Sigrid has slowly taken control of everything in his life without her even realizing it. He begins to take back control step by step.
Kids Go to the Woods…Kids Get Dead is reminiscent of old slashers shown on TV alongside a flirtatious horror hostess. It has many elements of the campy horror film, away in the middle of nowhere. We have the old crazy veteran that gives the kids their fair warning, but is impossible for the characters to take him seriously. They are mostly consumed with sex and having a wild time anyway, which in the case of the typical slasher formula is promised to just kill them faster. One thing unique here is that everything that happens to them comes from a book by the same name that one of the characters is reading.
Plot: Catherine Dean (Jennifer Lopez) is a psychotherapist working for a unconventional and innovative new technique of treatment, allowing her mind enter in to her patients minds. They have found a revolutionary approach to helping patients through their authentic thoughts and memories. However, the researchers are in risk of getting shut down since they haven’t been able to prove any concrete progress. Catherine decides to take a risk to save the work they have been doing when F.B.I. agent, Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn), asks her to step in to the mind of a serial killer. She is in danger of being under his control by doing this, but she believes she might be able to reach out to him, get him to trust her, and help uncover where his existing victims are. Catherine learns about the killer’s tragic past of child abuse and aggression. She forms a trusted bond between the two of them starting with him as a child. Catherine begins to understand him and gets closer to him, she is in danger of being one of his victims as well.
This Side of Nightmare begins with a young lesbian couple, Piper and Ashley, driving through largely vacant roads in New Mexico. When they hit a rabbit in the road they get out of the care to check it out. A care drives by offering to help, but the girls avoid them and try to get out of there as fast as possible as they can tell there is something not right with these women. However, they aren’t able to get rid of them that easily. The women in this car go after them with the intentions for murder.
Piper and Ashley were one of the high points of the short. I was very relieved that they weren’t just played/written as “the lesbian couple”. They were actually given depth and they felt like real people rather than the stereotype they easily could have become. Also, these girls were smart characters and made it a lot easier to actually care whether they died or not.
Carnivorous isn’t a horror film to take seriously and wasn’t meant to be but it had the potential to be cheesy fun or just a horribly formulaic and ridiculous film. Sadly, the final product leans more towards the ladder. There really aren’t any funny moments here, not even in the sense that it’s “so bad it’s good”. Just about everything we see is void of any intelligence, especially from the stereotypical characters and the poorly written dialogue. It is clearly trying to rip off Anaconda, but it is just that; a rip off, nothing more.
When Alan Cade (Herthum) was young he stole an ancient writing device from a voodoo priest nearby. He uses this on his abusive father, which unleashes this monstrous creature with a massive snake body and a snappy crocodile mouth on him. Years later, Alan is happily married until a group of teenagers accidentally kill his wife in a car accident. To get revenge he draws with this voodoo tool again, promising that these teenagers will be the creature’s next victims. Some of the teens begin disappearing and the others realize that there is a dangerous creature out there that might be connected to what’s going on. However, they have no idea what they are dealing with until they come across Alan. Realizing what he has done, he tries to put a stop to the monster. So he goes to the voodoo priest’s grandson, Nick (DMX), for help. Nick has been desperate to kill the creature he calls, Lockjaw, for quite some time and agrees to help to take him down. However, once his victims have been drawn they are as good as dead.
Sam’s Lake begins with a generic camping trip scenario, but makes a complete transition in the story through the reveal of a murderer in their midst. As it goes in to the mindset of the murderer, the film takes a step away from what we expect and hits on some powerful questioning of whether killing those around is the only way to keep them close. Sam’s Lake’s main flaw is that it takes it’s time as a very simple movie and in the last act introduces so many new theories that several of them discredit the others.
Ghosts of Goldfield is set in the Goldfield Hotel of Nevada. It is said to be haunted and further more, one of the 7 portals that connects the living with the world of the dead, letting ghosts come and go as they please. However, the ghost of a woman named Elizabeth is said to be stuck in the now closed down motel. Ghosts of Goldfield seems to maintain and incorporate many of the same elements that witnesses have claimed to see or experience. Whether the story or what has been reported to happen there is true or not, Ghosts of Goldfield is still a film that clearly was inspired by the story and wanted to bring a version of this to the screen. The story by itself wouldn’t be anything great but there is a certain eeriness that this hotel does exist and paranormal activity has been at least rumored to have happened there.
Julie (Patterson) is working on her thesis, which requires her to explore the haunting of the Goldfield hotel. It has been closed down for years and really used as a museum where the ghost of Elizabeth (Rae), a women who was murdered there, remains, forced to relive her death over and over again.
Skeleton Crew is a Finnish film that combines asylum horror and the film within a film concept, leaving us with a bloody and camp filled film. It is not completely cheesy or completing serious. It pokes fun at itself and has a lot of fun with the typical conventions and even clichés of horror films. It still hits on some very creepy themes that make it captivating and sets up a great atmosphere that sets a tone for the psychological elements that are yet to come.
The film opens up on a dark stormy night when a young couple get in to a terrible crash. The girl goes for help at a mental institution since it’s the first place she sees. They take her in, the doctors care for her and her boyfriend, but she is stuck there overnight. In the morning a bus will come and she will be able to go back in to town. Dr. Andersson (Yoken) is very firm about no one walking around the halls though…
House of Black Wings is independent horror writer/director, David Schmidt’s second full feature. It is a character driven ghost story in a haunted house setting. Unlike many current films in the genre, it takes the time to build a story around our main characters. Suspense is gradually built up through dream sequences, illusions, and minor attacks from the creatures and spirits that seem to embody this house. So when the horror becomes unleashed further we actually care about what happens to the characters.
Kate Stone (Myette) has abandoned her music aspirations after getting a record deal with her band. Her dreams ended when her boyfriend and band mate was killed during one of their shows. Since then the group had a falling out and she has been going through a very rough time. Kate’s friend, Robyn, owns an apartment complex and she gives Kate a place to stay for awhile…
Published by Kelsey Zukowski April 29th, 2009
in Horror BOOKS.
Dark Reunion is the last chapter in the first series of The Vampire Diaries. This book was written much later than the first three. The series was originally meant to be a trilogy and in some ways I would have liked to see it end with The Fury. It was a clean cut ending and while tragic, it served as a good ending to the story, leaving no loose ends behind.
Dark Reunion begins when Stefan gives Bonnie Elena’s diary. We read from Bonnie’s perspective as she tells us how things are now that all of the vampires are either dead or gone. It is clear things are not about to go back to normal anytime soon though. Bonnie has a terrible nightmare about Elena. It was as if something took over when Elena was trying to tell her something. She talks about the dream with her best friend, Meredith, and they figure out that the danger that took over her in the dream is coming to Fell’s Church to kill. They have no idea what they are against, but they know it is powerful and something very different than anything they have ever seen before. They figure out that Elena was trying to tell them to get outside help to fight this thing…
Nightmare includes the film within a film feature, to depict a certain rawness in filmmaking while still including the creative aspects. It shows how sometimes filming real life can be dangerous when obsession and search for some truth through film is taken to an extreme. It’s a striking film with very powerful themes that take you in to an intensely interesting world of fact, fiction, and film. There is plenty of questioning of what’s real and what that frightening reality can do to a person when it isn’t something so settling.
Dark Secrets is an independent horror film that centers on a serial killer on the loose, using both crime and supernatural aspects. Through a few of the characters it hints at meaningless celebrity. The production values are good using dark shadowing and lighting, hinting at the events that will follow. It’s slow pace holds it back quite a bit and takes some of the appeal away from the film. While at moments you can’t feel like you are drifting away from the film, overall you still care about what happens in the end and how we get there.
