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A Cadaver Christmas Review

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Title: A Cadaver Christmas

Year: 2011

Distributor: Level 33 Entertainment

Director: Joe Zerull

Stars: Daniel Rairdin-Hale, Hanlon Smith-Dorsey, Yosh Hayashi

Language: English

Length: 86 minutes

Sub-Genre: Zombie, Comedy

 

 

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Plot: After a janitor (Rairdin-Hale) shows up at a local bar covered in blood, a rag-tag team of heroes is thrust into battle with a horde of “cadavers”. Can the janitor, the drunk (Smith-Dorsey), the bartender, the cop (Hayashi) and his perp work together to survive this Christmas Eve and save humanity?

Review: I love Christmas. Soon after Thanksgiving I’ll be the first to start breaking out the Christmas CDs and I won’t be tired of it until New Year’s. Freakish, huh? Because of this, I have a hard time getting into Horror films which are set on or around Christmas, put simply: it’s just too macabre for me. Tim Burton’s animated, A Nightmare Before Christmas, truly disturbs me. I’m also not huge on Horror Comedy. My point in all of this is that this film should be a perfect film for me to whole-heartedly despise. It starts off leaning that way. We open with a bartender and a single patron in a bar and the first exchange (albeit small) leaves me wondering what I had gotten myself into. Then something strange happens; a janitor covered in blood walks in and heads to the bathroom to wash the blood off, he does so, and then comes back out still dripping in blood and for whatever reason, I was hooked from that point on. This janitor looks like one of the pencil-necked and single brain-celled teachers on Disney and Nick shows which my daughter likes so much. However this janitor becomes the action hero of the film and is almost believable. In terms of acting Rairdin-Hale, who plays our kickass janitor, is clearly the standout, but nearly everyone plays their part to perfection.  Soon we meet our bumbling cop type Sam Sheriff, that’s right -his last name is Sheriff- and he has to save the day by dragging the bar patrons back to the building in which the zombie (or cadaver) outbreak began. A female security guard joins the fray after a hilarious and useful side gag and then we’re ready for some serious mayhem. At times the film is nearly too silly to bear but it always works in its favor; it is reminiscent of a Monty Python film in ways. Touting a reported budget of only $7,000, A Cadaver Christmas looks damn good and I’ve seen films which cost over a hundred times more that look no better. For that budget the effects are more than adequate and the cinematography is solid. Let me say this about the writing; the stupider you can make a film and have it still work, the more intelligent the creators must be. That might be hard to grasp, but I believe it’s true nonetheless. The writers are very intelligent and aren’t just good at bringing laughter, they present some truly unique ideas. I don’t want to give anything away but I truly hope this creative team makes enough money on Cadaver to make a high-concept horror film one day, I think they have it in them. Kudos to everyone involved and to director Joe Zerulla, I may have found my first go to holiday horror film. Well done.

A Cadaver Christmas released on VOD and DVD October 4th. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwWQYWLb3MI

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Red: Werewolf Hunter Review

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Plot: The real-life descendants of Little Red Riding Hood are dedicated werewolf hunters, but Virginia “Red” Sullivan, her generation’s head tracker, faces a horrible conflict when her fiancé, Nathan, is bitten by a werewolf and she must protect him.

Review: I’ve had this movie for quite some time and always skipped over it as I knew this was a SyFy original picture, so I was expecting cheesiness, jokiness and ludacris CGI as with many that come out of the popular cable channel. Let me tell you, it’s not all bad, still not a glowing praise but read on.

The story is run of the mill; a special agent falls in love and hides her true background from her beau. When she takes her new found lover to her hometown all hell breaks loose and her true life style is exposed. She is the leader of her family’s werewolf hunting escapades and when her boyfriend gets bit by a new breed of werewolves that can turn during the daylight, she struggles to maintain her bloodline and her new found loyalty to her soon to be husband.

There are a few things that always come to my mind when I think of this movie. Her family calls her “Red” and you guessed it, she has bright red hair, but that is not the reason for the name, you also guessed it; they had to take 5 minutes out of the movie to explain it. How predictable and pretty lame writing. The other point that stands out, this is a positive note; several of the man-to-wolf transformations were pretty good. It’s all CGI but many of them were very credible, except and this is a big except, when they get to total hairy werewolves, its garbage. Video games have better effects than this movie.

The score and sound effects were satisfactory, nothing startling with jump appeal, but then again were talking about fake-looking werewolves so a movie like this couldn’t scare a teenager who never seen a horror movie. The action scenes were passable as was the acting. Good ole Stephen McHattie from Summer’s Blood and Pontypool plays the leader of the werewolves, and is by far the star of this movie, way over the lead Felicia Day who has been in umpteen TV shows.

I will say that Red: Werewolf Hunter kept me watching. There was an entertaining appeal to it, and even though I was lying in bed tired, I couldn’t doze off because there was things about it that you wanted to find out how the movie was going to conclude. Maybe it was McHattie, maybe it was some of the initial transformation scenes, whatever it was I don’t feel like I wasted any time by watching this.

Closing out the Red: Werewolf Hunter review, I will say that if you are a fan of werewolf-style movies I think you should take a watch on this. There were some twists to the story that I thought were credible. But for all other horror fans, skip this one by. If you are in need of a good werewolf movie, four always come to mind; Underworld, Ginger Snaps, The Howling and Wolfen. You may wonder why I excluded An American Werewolf In London; while it does have the best man-to-werewolf transformation ever filmed, I loathe the comic undertones that were inbred in that film.

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V/H/S Review

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Plot: Hired to steal a rare VHS tape from a secluded house, a group of petty crooks breaks in and discovers a corpse surrounded by TVs and stacks of tapes. Now they must watch each horrific and bizarre video as they search for the correct one.

Review: Is it possible to be immediately turned off of a horror movie you may ask, the answer is yes! And then you know you have to suffer through 2 more hours of atrocious handheld camerawork that looks like it was filmed by a 5-year old. V/H/S is an utter mess from start to finish.

A touch on the story; there are 6 different shorts with an anthology scenario that ties together in one basic theme. The overall concept has a group of annoying, bratty, loud and dorky teens breaking into an apparent abandon home to track down a VHS tape for an unknown perpetrator. While they’re there, they find an abundance of tapes and start to play them when the film breaks away to an approximately 20-minute short which has some strange occurrences and killings.

I must say V/H/S was extremely hard to get through; the camerawork is some of the worst that I have seen in a found footage movie. You have gobs of shakiness, twirliness, out-of-frame shots, dizzying in-and-out focus, and speedily jumbled shots and moreover it never stops! There may be a total of 10 minutes of still footage, and that is only one of the shorts where they are video conferencing via a computer, all the rest is unbearable.

The sound is as pathetic as with the video. Squeals, scratches, tininess, thumps, hollowness are the norm in V/H/S. The filmmakers tried to keep it authentic by having it sound like the dialog was coming from the crappy mikes that are on low-grade video cameras. They nailed that for the most part, but I did notice in several situations they added a touch of background and mood music which blew the whole concept up in smoke.

The thing that ticks me off the most is that some of the shorts in V/H/S had a great story arc and could have been amazing if filmed conventionally. For example; after a night of young male adults partying, this leads them to bringing a strange-looking chick back to their motel room for some gang sex-capades, but this girl turns out to be a sort-of vampire-like beast with super-human powers. There were some excellent practical’s, a throat-slit scene was one of the best I have ever seen shot. Suffice it to say a few highlights don’t make up for the poor choices made to keep this in the stupid cam shots.

Before the ratings and recommendations, I have to point out that the editor did a mind-boggling array of work, not his fault I assume, as the filmmakers wanted it this way, but the VCR tracking lines, fuzziness and constant blinks like a videotape in the uttermost poorest quality, which was NEVER like that in the day as I grew up on VCR’s, both, Betamax and VHS, was, and is, a total bummer.

On concluding V/H/S; it is one to dismiss as if you never heard about it. You can get it on VOD or Streaming if you so desire for $9.99 with a DVD date coming out later this year. Believe you me, if this is the way horror movies continue to be filmed, I just might be throwing up petitions and sending them out to studios to stop making films in this style. It does not make it feel more real, PERIOD! Get off the Paranormal Activity bandwagon and make HD movies, who the hell wants to watch the poorest of video, balls-low VHS quality in these days of time when we have 1080p High-Def, and 4k right around the corner!

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Truth Or Dare Review

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Truth or Dare

Year: 2012
Studio: Corona Pictures
Director: Robert Heath
Stars: Jennie Jaques (Shank) , Jack Gordon (Heartless), David Oakes (The Borgais), Jason Mava (Anuvahood)
Language: English (UK)
Length: 1:31
Sub-Genre: Kidnapping, Torture, Thriller, Mystery

Plot: A group of friends attend a birthday party for an acquaintance, and find themselves at the mercy of a maniac out for vengeance, who forces them to play a party game with dire consequences.

Review: Truth or Dare (also known as Truth or Die) is a stylish movie, that follows a group of young friends who are invited to a birthday party for an acquaintance a year after and eventful party, in which one of the couples ended their relationship. The story has several problems, the first of which, is the reasoning of all the friends even attending this party, as none of them being especially close to the birthday boy. Then, after they are shot kidnapped and torture is being applied (in the form of the famous party game from which the film gets it’s name), the characters are still unrealistically defiant. The path of the story, is unexpected, if not entirely enjoyable. Likeable characters not faring as well as the shallow, unpleasant ones. I particularly didn’t like the ending much at all.
The acting is mostly very good, with flaws which may be more the fault of the writing. They all deliver their lines well, but don’t convey any real sense of terror or shock that the situation would dictated. One character is shot in the leg and has a couple of fingers blown off, but remains the calm leader, hardly acting injured or in shock until nearly the end of the movie. One exception is Jennie Jaques, who plays Eleanor. She conveys the most range of emotion the best of this group of young actors, and overall probably the best performance.
As far as practical effects, they are done very well, although it’s not overly graphic. Mostly stab wounds, and other bloody injuries. The most notable one is one character has acid dumped on them and the makeup of their scalded flesh is done very well. Very little if any cgi was used.
The production values were high on this and it has a distinct visual style. While I tended to like the way the film is presented, I feel some people may not appreciate it. It comes down to personal taste. In my opinion, the way it is shot is one of the film’s strong suits.
In the end, it just isn’t very remarkable. The movie looks great, and has a lot of things going for it, but the story drags it down for me and leaves me with an unsatisfied feeling. It is not a particularly bad movie, it’s just flat, and ends up being pretty average.

Reviewer: Boss Butcher Trailer: N/A
Date: 9/12/2012 DVD: Amazon
Rating: 5/10 Blu Ray: N/A
Recommendation: Possible Rental Social Media: Twitter