Tristan Sinns

Many years ago, in that far away land of elementary school, I had a series of roughly a half dozen dreams of which I have never completely forgotten. These were dreams of survival in a zombie plagued wasteland, forced to fight in broken down buildings and ruined suburban streets against hordes of the undead with whatever random weaponry might suddenly appear. These dreams were never scary; instead, they were completely joyous.

The spirit of those childhood zombie dreams has been made manifest in Ruben Fleischer's new Zombieland, a gory adventure filled with gratuitous gunfire, gut-eating zombies, and a hell of a lot of fun.

We've all heard the story of the lost film; that old horror classic that mysteriously and tragically falls through the cracks never to be seen again. A handful of them, such as the often bereaved London After Midnight, go on to attain a legendary status that was likely only made possible by their very absence. But what if, what if, some old forgotten film did carry the whisper of something dark, something real, something fat, deadly, and wanting its mother. Some mysteries are best left sleeping.

Science fiction has always been a wonderful genre to explore the human spirit; both the kinder aspects and those less kind. You learn a lot about an individual in witnessing their treatment of other things, especially the powerless and the weak. While human beings are certainly capable of noble intentions and acts, we are also quite susceptible to attitudes of apathy, selfishness, and cowardice. These uglier actions manifest even easier when driven by the repulsion and disgust of a people and culture far, far different than our own.

No other monster’s reputation has suffered the battering of bad films more thoroughly than that of the notorious vampire. The great and bloody stature of this renowned villain has been tainted and drained over the decades with a deluge of uninspired films filled with empty characters and cookie cutter plot lines. The paper thin stereotype of a sexy and romantic vampire was lifted up as a burning sun to eclipse the dark moon of its truer nature, until its bright and corny light was nearly all that could be seen for decades. 30 Days of Night was one of the more recent to break this trend and made vampires ugly and mean again; Let the Right One In continued the divergence with its poetic story of children, vampiric and otherwise, and their all-too-human inclinations for violence; and Park Chan-wook brings us a new wonderful film, Thirst, in which a well meaning young priest bleeds himself and others to suffer the degradation of immorality.

Sam Raimi has long held a special place in the hearts of horror fans. While Evil Dead held a definite entertainment value, its sequel, Evil Dead 2, struck a chord of hilarity that shivered the lifeblood of the entire genre. Sam Raimi's take on horror back in the late 80's was whacky, gory, absurd, and fun. Raimi since became the lost prodigal son to horror, however, as he understandably took a divergent path into the profitable Spiderman series. Now, with his pockets much fuller, he's returned to the sort of film he started with in Drag Me to Hell to show us that his creative talents within the genre are still bright, shiny, and full of smoking brimstone.

It's rare that a film features children behaving as they are actually inclined to behave. Too often screenwriters, directors, and others in responsible chairs simply forget how children act; they forget that children are, at some fundamental level, retarded and sniveling little disease carriers. They are, one in all, boogery little pockets of petulant pestilence inclined to suck all joy from an otherwise happy life. Given their propensity for expense and woe, it should be no small step for children to rise up and attempt to slaughter all of the adults around them in a blind and raging orgy of blood.

Don’t laugh. It just might happen, folks. It just might happen!

High school sucks. Long ago, a gasket blew among all the plans to establish a public educational system which could competently prepare the teen population to enter the adult world. Public high schools are now more about teen culture than that of teen education; society’s well-intended construction of free education is nothing but a pop culture Petri dish fed by a constant warm bath of mass media consumption and shitty corporate music. As banally hellish as it already is, it seems fitting then to see it with one fine addition; demonically possessed cheerleaders looking to devour your soul.

The Nazis were bad, bad people. On this, at least, I think we can all agree. The legacy of Hitler’s movement left an iconic evil in western culture; it would be difficult to find a real world image more naturally associated with malignant evil than an SS officer in full uniform. It is fitting then, especially since they are all dead, defeated, and gone, that those monsters of reality are themselves exploited to become some of the most entertaining boogeymen to venture into film.

Back in the dark ages of 1972, an unknown director wrote and released a picture that managed to nauseate audiences worldwide with sadistic violence and horrifically uncomfortable scenes of humiliation and pain. Inspired by the atrocities of the Vietnam War, this film sought to shake up movie goers by portraying the true face of senseless violence; mean, pointless, and indifferent.

This film was called The Last House on the Left.

A Tale of Two Sisters crowned the crest of the titanic wave of Korean horror films that have gushed from the country in recent years. It is top notch horror; top notch beauty; immaculate in its music, in aesthetic design, and is thematically rich with powerful subtexts of sibling love, bitter revenge, and deep regret. It is a complex film that doesn't necessarily reveal all of its secrets upon the first viewing; a clever assembly of ghosts, insanity, and twisting red herrings.

The Uninvited, the US remake, had its work cut out for it to even entertain redoing such a masterful film; it fails.