Dungeon Girl

(2008, 81 min) Ulli Lommel's Dungeon Girl isn't so much a horror film (and definitely not a torture porn) as an exploration of the relationship between captor and captive. Well not so much that as a half-baked student film from one of the worst directors of all time. It's almost as if instead of a script, Lommel puts together three half-developed ideas and then edits them together with all the glee of a sophomore film major playing with After Effects for the first time while tripping balls. Even when it comes to nudity, usually Lommel's saving grace in the other stinking piles of garbage he's hurled at the world, he falls short giving viewers hoping for skin more male nudity than female with one recurring shot of Wendi Jean Linn's buttocks and another recurring image of an anonymous woman tied up on a cross wearing rags which are sliced to reveal her naked breasts and, pehaps, a glimpse at her bush. Linn is certainly an absolutely stunning creature and the exploitative pretense is almost a work of art on its own, but Dungeon Girl fails on almost every conceivable level.

– Rick Stanko

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Cloverfield

(2008, about 80 min) The highest of high-concept monster movies, Cloverfield purports to be just one video in the Department of Defense's library chronicling an unspecified disaster. The film starts out as a homemade video made by a gang of well-to-do and good looking late-twentysomethings of a friend's going away party. But, anyone who has seen the trailer knows that this video doesn't remain a birthday party for long. The ravaging of New York by an unexplained (and until late in the film unseen) monster is seen entirely through the eyes of a small group of people struggling to save themselves and each other from the sudden onset of total destruction. Credit is due to director Matt Reeves for never straying from this singular concept and, for the most part, maintaining its believability.

Certainly, there are moments when the boundaries of "suspension of disbelief" are stretched, perhaps even crossed. But Reeves overcomes these flaws from Drew Goddard's script by never relenting from the sheer terror and from his central premise. The shaky camera work and the limited information that the audience is given access to only serve to create a sense of panic not only on the screen but throughout the audience as well. Those with weak stomachs might do best to wait for the DVD, not for any excess of gore, but the combination of a nauseating camera with the emotional terror that the film serves up relentlessly would be likely to make one physically ill. Following in the footsteps of last year's The Host, Reeves has created a truly horrifying monster movie, one that cuts right to the core of contemporary political and environmental fears. It just might be the best American monster movie in many, many years.

– Daniel Reed

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Hostel: Part II

(2007, 93 min) Because of the financial success of its predecessor, the arrival of Hostel: Part II comes as no surprise. Unlike most hastily produced horror sequels, however, controversial auteur Eli Roth – the writer and director of the first installment – helms this equally unsettling project as well. Though it is, in many ways, the same film with a female cast, Roth makes slight improvements by widening the scope of the story, creating well-developed, more sympathetic characters and, of course, providing enough nausea-inducing gore to make the original look tame by comparison.

After a brief opening exposition featuring Paxton (Jay Hernandez), the severely wounded survivor of the first installment, Roth introduces three American girls studying in Rome. Perfectly cast according to type are Lauren German as Beth, the princess-like protagonist, Bijou Phillips as Whitney, her dangerously amorous best friend, and Heather Matarazzo (no stranger to suffering on celluloid) as Lorna, the hapless romantic virgin who they invite along on a trip to Prague out of pity. Their plans change when they meet Axelle (Vera Jordanova), a sultry nude art model who begins a flirtation with Beth and convinces the trio to join her on a trip to a Slovakian spa. Not surprisingly, they are led to a familiar, seemingly pleasant youth hostel where their passport pictures are scanned and sent to members of the Elite Hunting organization – initiating an international bidding war between wealthy psychopaths who will pay top dollar for the opportunity to torture and butcher our three lovely leads. Also introduced are lucky auction winners Stuart and Todd ("Desperate Housewives" alums Roger Bart and Richard Burgi), two unfulfilled married suburbanites who feel that offing a couple of innocent girls in cold blood will give them a hidden edge in their cut-throat business environments.

With a 10 million dollar budget, Roth is permitted to let his ghastly imagination run wild. He serves up graphic scenes of humiliation, torture, rape, cannibalism and an unforgettable, heavily eroticized lesbian blood bath involving a hay sickle. Considering all of the sadistic ultraviolence, drug use, nudity and sex in the film, it’s downright mind-boggling that it passed the eyes of the ordinarily conservative MPAA without an NC-17 rating. Those with moral objections and/or weak stomachs should, obviously, avoid it at all costs. The less sensitive of us who enjoy being shocked and can find humor in the unrelenting grotesqueries will not likely be disappointed. When all is said and done, Hostel: Part II delivers exactly what it promises in spades.

– Robert O'Neill

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Bug

(2007, 102 min) Based on the off-Broadway play by Steppenwolf Theater actor and writer Tracy Letts, Bug uses dialogue and a claustrophobic atmosphere to present a relatively short, socially conscious allegory of psychological horror and paranoia in the Bush Administration’s America. It proves to be one of the most engrossing and well-executed films from director William Friedkin since The Exorcist and showcases extraordinarily brave and appropriately over-the-top performances from Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon - a frequently unrecognizable character actor who originated his role on stages in New York and London.

Judd plays Agnes, a haggard alcoholic waitress living in a drab motel room in the Oklahoma desert. She carries a heavy nervous energy. Her son went missing in a supermarket years prior and she begins receiving mysterious phone calls just after Goss (Harry Connick Jr.), her egomaniacally abusive husband, is released from prison. She finds much comfort after meeting and shacking up with Peter (Shannon), a sweet-natured veteran who shares a similarly hopeless outlook on life. As the two get to know each other, Agnes reveals the devastating sadness of her past. Peter, in return, informs her that he was used as a lab rat in experiments by the US government, is absent from his military duties without proper leave and is likely being sought by Army intelligence. He believes that the government has implanted near-microscopic aphids under his skin and that Agnes, through contact, is in an equal amount of danger.

Soon set into motion is a chain of drastic actions inspired by extreme paranoia and a desperate loneliness that is healed only by the fact that each gives validation to their many combined suspicions and fears. Culminating within the deepest levels of schizophrenia, Agnes and Peter turn her room into a safe haven using aluminum foil, antiseptic and precautionary self-mutilation. By the time the film reaches its disturbing final act, the pair will stop at nothing to protect one another from the malevolent authority figures that they believe are watching and waiting from just beyond the front door.

Audiences expecting the creepy crawly horror outing that Lions Gate Films offered through a somewhat manipulative and misleading marketing strategy are better off renting 2006’s Slither. Bug is, above all else, a character study and a remarkably thought-provoking one at that. Due to the unapologetically violent nature of the film and its late-May theatrical release, neither Judd nor Shannon is likely to receive Oscar® nominations, though countless statuettes have been awarded to actors for far less effort. Also notable in the only supporting roles are Connick Jr., Lynn Collins (The Merchant of Venice) and Brian F. O’Byrne (Million Dollar Baby).

– Robert O'Neill

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Severance

(2006, 95 min) A collection of office stereotypes from multinational munitions company Palisade Defence is on a team-building weekend in Eastern Europe. Their tour bus meets a fallen tree, blocking their progress. The driver, a local, refuses to take an alternate road leading to the same destination. So you know that the tree is no accident and bad things will happen if they take that path. But apparently none of these guys has ever seen a cheesy comedy horror slasher flick before. (Cheesy in a good way.)

They trudge through the Hungarian forest, viewing the circumstances through their own personal filters (middle-management claptrap, toadyism, drug haze, social ineptitude, nascent insanity, corporate conformity and — rarest of the rare — basic common sense). They find a building that they take as the company lodge, but uncover files that evidence its earlier uses: insane asylum, prison, Nazi torture chamber. Their internecine bickering turns to uneasy awareness of the forces around them, as they uncover some buried history about Palisade itself.

Unsurprisingly, these purveyors of sophisticated weapons of mass destruction find themselves on the receiving end of some rudimentary weapons of individual destruction. Methods of execution are varied and inventive, and there’s no shortage of blood. It’s totally derivative and hackneyed, but grudgingly redeemed by some pretty good performances, some clever ideas, some snappy editing and a total lack of pretension. If you can take the gore, Severance can be a guilty pleasure.

But I have to ask: It was a team-building weekend, right? Why didn’t they just join together and move the damned tree?

– Ann Yarabinee

© TLA Entertainment Group

Grindhouse

(2007, 191 min) An unambitious epic, a carefully orchestrated piece of trash, an auteurist brain dump... whatever you want to call it, this unapologetic pulp is nonetheless the most entertaining three hours you're likely to spend at the cinema this year. If you're going to watch two brilliant directors squander their talent, this is probably the way to go.

In watching Tarantino and Rodriguez recreate the seedy Times Square style of late-night filmgoing, it's important to remember that there were no rules in these movies. It was a genre created out of economics, not form, with budgets so threadbare that only two results were reliable: There would be exploitation, and there would be peculiar auterist visions that creep out, with producers interested more in churning the fare out than reshooting and making the films perfect. On those counts, Grindhouse succeeds beautifully.

In a way, Robert Rodriguez has been making grindhouse films for most of his career. From the fake trailer for Danny Trejo in Machete (please turn this into a feature!) to the obsession with balls and pus in Planet Terror, he obviously would have been right at home in the '70s. Yet he uses digital photography and special effects to great effect, and has a blast turning as many actors as possible into bubbling pools of blood. Rose McGowan stays in wry, campy "Charmed" mode as a peglegged stripper (strike that... go-go dancer) with unlikely superpowers. And how wonderful is it to see Jeff Fahey, Michael Biehn and Josh Brolin taking on iconic roles so late in their careers.

The trailers that follow are pure brilliance. Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS has an air of familiarity about it... hard to believe no one thought of it sooner. Edgar Wright's Don't would make William Castle proud. And Eli Roth's deeply sick Thanksgiving makes Texas Chainsaw look like a Beach Party movie. Ironic that critics are eating up this trailer, whereas if it were actually a feature they would tear it to pieces.

Quentin Tarantino took a different tack, making a self-indulgent car-chase movie in the Monte Hellman realm. And if Two Lane Blacktop was self-indulgent, at least it was never boring. Unfortunately, Quentin decided to make about 70 minutes of his 80-minute movie filled with realistically mundane dialogue, mostly surrounding young women with little to say (Godard he ain't). Thank goodness when his girls get on the road, chased by a merciless Kurt Russell, he delivers the most exciting car chase since Ronin. Yet he's so enamored with his own images, he neglects to scratch up the print in the same way as Rodriguez. Good thing there are no rules, eh?

– David Gorgos

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The Host

(2006, 119 min) At a US military installation in South Korea, a pasty-faced American officer tells his Korean lab assistant to throw dusty bottles of formaldehyde down the drain. The assistant tries to tell the officer that formaldehyde is toxic, and the drain dumps directly into the Han River, which runs through the heart of Seoul. But the officer insists, and the bottles are emptied. It's the year 2000.

Two older gents are fishing in the Han River, when one notices a small unusual creature in the water. It snaps viciously when he tries to pick it up. They call it a mutation. It's 2002.

The Park family's home base is the food stand they run at the banks of the Han River. Gang-du's daughter Hyun-seo is angry at him for missing a parent-teacher meeting. His father is continually angry at him for his laziness. Gang-du's brother Nam-Il is an unemployed college graduate, and sister Nam-Joo is in competition for the national archery team. On this sunny summer day, Gang-du notices a crowd gather at the river's edge. People have noticed a mass suspended from under a nearby bridge. The object uncurls, drops into the river, then comes ashore. For lunch. And it's not standing in line at the food truck. It's 2006.

The Host is a superbly crafted sci-fi/horror movie, replete with bureaucratic ineptitude, political conspiracy, weird humor, family friction and a truly scary, acrobatic monster with disgusting eating habits and a really wicked back flip. Gang-du shows his mettle in the face of crisis: he springs into action when the creature grabs his daughter, and the entire family puts their squabbles on hold and unites with absolute resolve to get her back. The US Army comes into play again, ostensibly taking over to capture the creature, but is it really just an elaborate cover-up? Mutated, flesh-eating abominations aside, the real horror is what humans do to each other.

Director Joon-ho Bong scores a hit with The Host, adroitly incorporating multiple storylines, making the most of an accomplished cast (Ah-sung Ko as the young Hyun-seo is notable), creating a superb creature, and testifying to the ongoing usefulness of the Molotov cocktail. For creature feature aficionados, this is a must-see.

– Ann Yarabinee

© TLA Entertainment Group

The Hitcher

(2007, 84 min) Grace and Jim (Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton), two unusually dimwitted young lovers, are driving across the country for some completely irrelevant reason. Their casual pace and sunset canoodling are cut short with the arrival of John Ryder (Sean Bean), a tall, dark and handsome vagabond who psychologically tortures and murders travelers for amusement. Feeling guilty after nearly running him down with their car, Grace and Jim agree to give John a ride and narrowly escape with their lives. The surprisingly boring remainder of the film follows the couple as they attempt to track John down after he inadvertently frames them for the slaughter of an entire family.

The Hitcher is the newest insult to horror fans from money-hungry action producer Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes, the same production company responsible for remaking The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror (also in the works are updated versions of Friday the 13th and The Birds). Bay oversees half-assed commercial projects wherein the quality and content of the movie have much less importance than the fact that the title and plot are taken directly from a previously established and respected work. This time, music video director Dave Meyers was hired to update the original 1986 thriller and offers nothing stylistically that can't be found in the average car commercial.

Though marketed as a horror movie, The Hitcher is greatly lacking in shocks and scares. Instead, mediocre car-chase sequences occur too few and far between to redeem the film as a whole. Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton are given at least 90% of the screen time and spend all of it struggling with atrociously unrealistic dialog like students in a freshmen acting class while Sean Bean weakly attempts to impersonate the raspy-voiced intensity that Rutger Hauer (the original Hitcher) built his entire career on.

– Robert O'Neill

© TLA Entertainment Group

Hannibal Rising

(2007, 117 min) Imposing and impressive Lecter Castle is nestled in the lush Lithuanian countryside near a gently rolling river. Young Hannibal and his beloved sister Mischa bask in the pampering indulgence of their doting parents. But it's 1944, and they're caught between Nazi invaders and advancing Russian troops. When the armies move on, leaving behind death and destruction, scavengers both animal and human move in. Orphaned Hannibal and Mischa find themselves at the dubious mercy of a band of marauding miscreants, their own countrymen who lent themselves out to the Germans, and will just as easily attach themselves to the upcoming Communist regime. But right now, they're trapped with the children in a small country villa. It's the dead of winter, there is no food, they're pinned down... and they're hungry.

Hannibal Rising tracks the events that created the monster: his sister is taken from him in a most atrocious act; he is forced to live in his former castle home, now an orphanage replete with images of Stalin and the requisite bullies. After eight years of silent acquiescence, he leaves to search for his uncle in France; he finds his uncle’s widow and the discipline of Asian martial arts. His entry into medical school provides the final element of his new persona, an identity forged through loss and pain and unimaginable cruelty.

This looked like it might be a credible exploration of Hannibal Lecter's character formation. The script was the first one in the film series to be written by Thomas Harris, Hannibal's creator. The story provided the raw material for either a serious exploration of evil, or a terrific exploitation of horror. The locations are arresting and evocative, the performances are credible and competent (Dominic West and, of course, Gong Li stand out), the production values outstanding. It starts out with promise and then fizzles, going all De Laurentiis on itself ("Everbody cry when Mischa die," maybe?). For all its orchestrated gore, for all its myth-making intent, the film is curiously flat and remarkably empty; not quite campy enough, not quite scary enough, not quite incisive enough. Director Webber showed his facility for impressive presentation in Girl with a Pearl Earring. It seems he needs to allow his big screen craft to maturate, and to allow the protagonists to propel the story.

– Ann Yarabinee

© TLA Entertainment Group

Pan's Labyrinth

(2006, 112 min) Young Ofelia sits next to her pregnant mother Carmen in a car bouncing and rattling over a pitted country road. It's 1944, and a pall hangs over the seeming pastoral peace outside the vehicle's windows. Mother and daughter travel as though in a funeral cortege to a rural military outpost operated with the dismal repression which inundates postwar Spain. Her new stepfather commandeers this compound in the spirit promulgated by his hero Franco. Capitán Vidal is the polar opposite of Ofelia's beloved father, whose death profoundly altered Ofelia and Carmen’s lives. Carmen tries to adjust to her new realities, but has placed her trust in a man who wants only the son in Carmen's womb, not the family who accompanies it. Ofelia clings to her beloved collection of books, fairy tales which provide solace and an eerie reflection of her new, harsh environment. Upon their arrival at the converted mill now functioning as a military headquarters, Ofelia's only real welcome comes from the housekeeper Mercedes...unless you count the dragonfly which accompanied the car along the final leg of its journey.

Mercedes shows Ofelia the unkempt labyrinth which sits a bit removed from the buildings. It's frightening and daunting and comes to house the fantastic characters through which Ofelia grapples with the real horrors surrounding her. The mindless cruelty of the government enforcers is met by a small but growing resistance. As she defends against the merciless viciousness encircling her, Ofelia finds a faun in the center of the labyrinth, ogres behind her bedroom walls, and fairies everywhere. Savagery and heroism, treachery and bravery inhabit both of Ofelia's worlds; and these worlds merge in a final act of sacrifice.

This is the second entry in director Guillermo Del Toro's projected Spanish Civil War trilogy. The Devil's Backbone was the first title in the series, and the third entry 3993 has an announced release date of 2009. Del Toro masterfully combines stark realism with extravagant grotesques, exposing the thin veil that separates the material from the imaginary. The ensemble is uniformly excellent with special mention to Ivana Baquero, who portrays Ofelia with remarkable sensitivity and nuance. The first film to fully realize Del Toro’s seemingly boundless potential as an auteur, Pan's Labyrinth is an instant classic.

– Ann Yarabinee

© TLA Entertainment Group

Turistas

(2006, 94 min) John Stockwell (Crazy/Beautiful, Blue Crush) goes to Brazil to film this somewhat formulaic torture/slasher entry, exposing a young, international cast to an assured future as victims of a cruel fate. Locales lend an exotic sheen to the proceedings as a tour bus crashes on a narrow mountain pass, spilling the free spirits who start trekking through the verdant undergrowth. The guys and gals find a beautiful beach and soon are joined by happy locals, partying hard all night long. Sunrise finds them hung-over and stripped of all their possessions. Thus begins a familiar descent to one of the levels of hell, reserved especially for unwary travelers in a foreign land. A Brazilian lad, Kiko, is empathetic to their plight and volunteers to lead them to what he calls a "safe house". The most interesting sequence, swimming to underwater caves and then through the jungle, is underscored by the ambient sound design. Although lengthy, it adds a surreal air to the grittiness of the subject. Arriving at the house, oft-used clichés abound: creaking floorboards, deep shadows and mocking jungle birds build tension toward the pivotal scene – the arrival of a helicopter. The narrative takes a turn to political and societal statements at this point, and the actual central theme is revealed.

The ensuing escape for the survivors is effective in its editing and pacing intervals, recapitulating the desperation of both hunter and hunted in echoes of despair and upheaval. Themes of panic, claustrophobia and the mad rush to freedom are illustrated in the over-the-top finale. An effort to seriously dramatize the need to survive saves Turistas from being merely a grade-B thriller.

– Max Brinck

© TLA Entertainment Group