TITLE & REVIEW
International Terrorist Miles Jackson (Aiden Gillen -
Game of Thrones
) and his girlfriend Erica (
Taylor Cole
) are on the run from the FBI.
Then a chance encounter with New Orleans cop Danny Fisher (John Cena -
Peacemaker
) sends Miles to prison.
Months later, Danny is enjoying a promotion to detective. Somehow, Miles has escaped from prison without the FBI actually telling anyone. Miles abducts Danny's wife Molly ( Ashley Scott ), holding her hostage. Danny is forced to perform a series of dares across the city.
The film is very derivative of other action movies. It feels a lot like Speed (1994) , though there is an element of Die Hard With A Vengeance .
A paramedic is forced to complete twelve tasks by a mad bomber who controls him by a mobile phone.
Yes, this kind of thing was done before in
Die Hard 3
, but the best example of the genre is
Speed
. Minimal backstory and exposition, a simplistic motivation for the villain, and a great cast.
In contrast, this effort is quite poor. The cast do their best, but the only recognisable name is Canadian TV actor Brian Markinson ( Continuum ) and he is no Dennis Hopper. The villain's lair is filled with expensive touch-screen computers, the kind of thing that all good villains have in cheesy TV shows like Arrow but that look completely out of place in a serious crime thriller.
Sam Riley (
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
) is hard up for money.
He takes an invite intended for a dead man,
and winds up involved in an illicit gambling ring.
Alexander Saarsgard (
True Blood
) is around to show him the ropes.
Jason Statham ( The Transporter ) is the gambler in charge of a rival team. The team's shooter is his brother (Ray Winstone - The Hot Potato ).
Mickey Rourke ( Blunt Force Trauma ) is the shooter in a third team.
This is a remake of a J-Horror movie, set in New Orleans.
A young salesman is fired from his job.
Unfortunately he is the sole breadwinner in his family.
Without his income or medical insurance,
his mentally disabled brother and racist father will have to move in with him.
This will be a problem, especially since his new bride is a black girl (
Rutina Wesley
).
The protagonist gets roped into a game of dares. It is like the movie Nerve but communication is by voice calls instead of an Internet app. A friendly old man who sounds like Charlie from Charlie's Angels gives instructions (and threats) over the mobile phone. The dares start simply enough, but get more and more extreme.
Police detective Ron Perlman ( Hellboy ) follows the trail of destruction. Relatively few of the early dares are actually serious crimes. The player trades an ostrich for a homeless man's clothes, for example. However, a conspiracy theorist (Pruitt Taylor Vince - Captivity ) reveals that the game is actually something more sinister.
This movie starts with Part Four.
Well, it was good enough for
Star Wars
. Anyway, this bookends the main story.
The protagonist (Antonio Banderas - Mark of Zorro ) is a rich, successful lawyer who has trouble balancing his work and his life. One night, when the lawyer is working late in the office, his wife and daughter are murdered. His father-in-law (Robert Forster - ), an ex-cop, blames the lawyer for protecting the human rights of suspected criminals.
Despite the help of a friendly cop (Karl Urban - Dredd 3-D ), the investigation goes nowhere. The lawyer seeks to punish himself, so he becomes a cage-fighter and gets beaten up a lot. Then he realises he can punish the criminal instead, so he learns to get better at the fighting.
Finally the lawyer gets a prime suspect. By incredible coincidence, the suspect's hobby is Mixed Martial Arts. The climax should be a cage fight between the two, but all this is just to establish their fighting skills when they tussle in a more conventional finale. Yes, the Death Game aspects of the film are window-dressing in a relatively mundane thriller. This has all been done before, and done better.
A small town in the USA is facing an economic downturn.
The Mayor decides to repurpose the local derelict asylum
and use it as site of a horror-themed event named Fright Fest.
To run it they hire horror movie director Spencer Crowe (Dylan Walsh -
Congo (1996)
), who has fallen out of favour in Hollywood because of his multiple convictions for DUI.
By incredible coincidence, a minibus filled with real-life convicted murderers crashes nearby. A couple of the inmates get mistaken for cast members at the asylum. Before long the real bodies start to outnumber the fake ones. Since nobody can tell the difference without close inspection, most people are dead before it becomes apparent that a massacre is underway.
The serial killer is a former inmate of the asylum, so he knows the layout of the building. The other inmate claims to be innocent, and offers to help some of the Festival staff to escape.
Crowe has locked himself in the central control room, where he can watch everything on the CCTV cameras. He is recording the massacre, so he can edit the footage together as his newest movie.
A Texan fire-fighter (Kellan Lutz -
Hercules
) is forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial games.
The good news is, he gets lots of free hookers.
However, he prefers the lady doctor (
Katia Winter
).
The death matches are streamed online by Samuel L Jackson ( Kong: Skull Island ) and Johnny Messner ( Anaconda 2: Blood Orchid ). But despite the high-tech nature of the story, it is shot in a very grim and grimy style.
Morgan Ganes (Henry Golding -
Snake Eyes
) is a freelance assassin.
He wants to retire, although his handler Caldwell (Sam Neill -
Jurassic Park
) wants him to sign up for a new mission.
Unfortunately, Morgan gets dragged into the mission anyway.
He is one of the targets.
Morgan and half a dozen assassins have been offered a massive bounty to kill each other. While Morgan prefers to play defensively, Falk ( Noomi Rapace ) is more pro-active and starts wiping out the others.
A young Englishman takes his girlfriend to meet his family for the first time.
Unfortunately she is Asian, and grandpa (David Bradley -
The Strain
) is a cantankerous old git.
Worse, the grandaughter shares his racist views ...
and dad always takes his daughter's side.
This is not just a tale about being trapped in suburbia for the Xmas holidays. It takes a step into the alegorical. The family wake up to discover that they have been sealed inside the house. Their only communication is though text messages that appear on their television screen. Dad assumes it is the government's emergency broadcast system - a logical deduction, on the face of it - and runs the family as a dictatorship rather than a democracy. As the text messages become more extreme and divisive, the family members start to turn against each other.
The final act has the strangest twist. So far, the characters have been taking messages from a television, sent by someone that wants to manipulate them like puppets. Like the Xmas lock-in, this now becomes more literal.
This is set in an office block in South America,
peopled with nerds (Sean Gunn -
Guardians of the Galaxy
).
The management are rent-a-villains like John C McGinley (The Rock (1995)).
An outsider (Gregg Henry - Just Before Dawn ) phones up to let the staff know that he has taken control of the building. He represents the company's senior management, and he gives them a series of tasks to perform. These tasks are of a murderous nature. Basically, the staff must kill each other off ... or the whole building will be destroyed.
Liz Rhodes (
Lynn Collins
) and her husband Ben Rhodes (James Tupper -
Aftermath
) hire a trio of Latinx workers
to do some construction work.
However, the workers are not going to receive
the cash-in-hand payment that they were promised.
This story is set in Colombia, in South America.
It concerns a subculture of quick-draw artists,
who engage in shoot-outs with each other in front of paying audiences.
They use live ammunition in their handguns,
although they also wear kevlar vests.
Freida Pinto is on a revenge quest, against the player who killed her brother. She teams up with a fellow player (Ryan Kwanten - True Blood ), and they have a road trip across the country.
Kwanten's chosen path in life is even more sinister. He wants to play a match against the greatest player around - Mickey Rourke ( The Expendables ). What makes Rourke's game different is that neither player gets to wear a kevlar vest. Yes, they are games to the death - which makes the movie's climax even more nail-biting.
A young woman takes her lesbian lover
to a weekend meet-up with her rich friends
in a remote cabin in the woods.
Well, it is a huge mansion ...
but equally isolated.
There is tension between the two males, David (Pete Davidson - The Suicide Squad ) and Greg (Lee Pace - Guardians Of The Galaxy ). After all, one is a DC and the other is a Marvel.
That night, the tweenagers play a game called Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. They draw lots, and one of them is randomly selected as the murderer. They then wander around the mansion until the murderer role-plays a killing.
As always in this kind of thing, someone winds up really dead. The others have to find out who it is, as the body-count climbs. There is a storm that cuts off the power, and there is predictably no cell-phone reception. However, the cell-phones still come in useful because the survivors run around using them as torches.
This is a post-Tarantinoesque action/crime movie
based on a Japanese Manga book.
One of the main complaints about it is that it is not Japanese enough -
the cast is eclectic and International,
with a lot of diversity.
This all stands out of place in the Japanese setting,
because that country is a notorious monoculture.
Ladybug (Brad Pitt - Once Upon A Time In Hollywood ) has been called out of retirement by Maria ( Sandra Bullock ) as a last-minute replacement for Carver (Ryan Reynolds - Deadpool ). His job is to board a Bullet Train in Japan, and steal a briefcase from rival assassins Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry - Godzilla Vs Kong ) and Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson - Tenet ).
There are a few other assassins on the train. The Hornet ( Zazie Beetz ) is a specialist in poisons, and Prince ( Joey King ) has a plot to assassinate Yakuza boss White Death (Michael Shannon - ). The Conductor (Masi Oka - Heroes ) and Unnamed Passenger (Channing Tatum - GI Joe ) add to the list of suspects.
The train incurrs a massive amount of damage, but this movie is not intended to be taken seriously. The violence is brutal but without consequences, leaving this a somewhat lighthearted comedy-thriller.
This is set up as based-on-a-true-story, like the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
series.
The desert setting, and the font used in the title credits,
seem intended to give it a Wild West feel.
However, the writer-director has set it in the 1970s.
Worse, the whole thing seems to be a series of homages to the works of
Quentin Tarantino
.
Of course, they have a hostage in the trunk of the car. It is a bank teller ( Ashley Bell ), so the film is now a bit more like From Dusk Til Dawn . Anyway, guess who turns out to be the Final Girl?
There is a sniper living in the wilderness. He is a Vietnam veteran who misses the war, like Scorpio in Dirty Harry. For some reason he favours the Garand rifle, a Second World War weapon.
Sheriff Moss (Alan Ruck - Star Trek: Generations ) is on the robbers' tail. Of course, this just adds yet more cliches.
The sniper's fetish is to play The Most Dangerous Game with his victims.
A group of California High School teenagers (including Final Girl
Nikki Reed
) receive a chain e-mail that threatens them with a horrific death if they do not pass it on.
And quickly enough, they find themselves victims to a serial-killer
who puts them in a series of torture-porn death-traps ... like in
Saw
.
Police Detective Keith David ( The Thing ) investigates, while schoolteacher Brad Douriff ( Alien: Resurrection ) is a creepy suspect.
Oliver is a young autistic boy who has trouble verbally communicating.
He thinks that an entity is contacting him from another world.
His mother (
Gillian Jacobs
) tries to get him to socialise with other boys of his age,
but unfortunately they are bullying him.
Yes, this film owes more than a little to
The Sixth Sense
.
The entity in this movie calls itself Larry. Not only can it observe him through Internet-connected devices, it actually downloads its e-book onto any of those devices so that Oliver and others can understand what it wants. Worse, it can transfer itself into Olvier's reality. Most of the time it is invisible, but the audience can see it whenever it will make the greatest visual impact.
The setup seems to owe a lot to Stranger Things - not just the creepy monster from another world, but also the emphasis on the childrens' characters. This movie's kids are much younger than those in the TV show, but they acquit themselves very well.
While the children are probably safe, and the female lead will end up as the Final girl, the boy's father has no such plot shielding. As a result, the most suspenseful scenes are his.
An American businessman decides to live-stream a version of
The Most Dangerous Game
. To do this, he bribes an El Salvador Prison Warden (Lani Tupu -
Farscape
) to hand over a few convicts from Death Row.
The convicts are dumped on a desert island,
where they will fight to the death.
The businessman's aim is to get forty million viewers, to match the American superbowl's figures. Since he charges fifty dollars a head, this will actually be incredibly lucrative. Remember, this is set in the era before online streaming took off. Practicalities like server crashes and credit card processing are not addressed, so the plan procedes just as the storyline demands. The cameras are either fixed in place, mobile on an overhead cable, or handheld by a cameraman in a ghillie suit. This would be a great opportunity for a Found Footage movie. However, the in-story camera footage is over-illuminated so the story itself is told conventionally.
The convicts are a deliberately diverse bunch, because the show is being broadcast worldwide. Paco the Mexican (Manu Bennett - Spartacus: Blood And Sand ) only cares about his wife, who is one of the two female convicts. McStarley the Brit (Vinnie Jones - Swordfish ) is a sadistic bastard who claims to be ex-SAS, although he repeatedly gives up the advantage whenever he has a ranged weapon. Conrad the Yank (Steve Austin - ) is an unstoppable force with a mysterious past. Yes, he is what passes as a hero in this piece. That said, when he has a chance to phone for help he decides to call his girlfriend for some domestic drama.
There is a lot of drama behind the scenes as well. Goldman (Rick Hoffman - Hostel ), in charge of the technical side, is unhappy at the general nature of the show. As always, Hoffman delivers an intense performance that takes the film to the next level.
The result is an okay action film, but it tries to be more thought-provoking than it deserves. The businessman is supposed to be a villain, because he lets Death Row convicts kill each other. The audience is supposed to be corrupt, because they watch and cheer the killings. Despite this, the good guys cheer when their favourite does well ... and the movie audience watch Steve Austin as eagerly as the fans did in his wrestling days. In other words, sheer hypocrisy!
This is set during the 2020 lockdown,
an era when a lot of people felt stressed by having to sit down and shut up.
The ultra-extrovert protagonist (
Annie Hardy
) deals with her stress by live-streaming herself online
as she drives around singing vulgar improvised rap songs.
She is also a weird conspiracy theorist,
and has her GoPro camera perched atop her MAGA hat.
The First Act of the story introduces the main characters, including the male sidekick (Amar Chadha-Patel - The Creator ). Eventually the supernatural element is introduced, in the form of a weirdly infected woman that the protagonist is paid to drive around during the livestream. There is also a subplot about a gun-toting psycho chasing their car. However, the problem is that this all gets incredibly repetitive. This reviewer lost count of the number of times the car crashed or was rammed off the road. Not due to numeracy problems, but due to lack of interest.
The best bit is probably the end credits, which is a flashback to the protagonist singing her vulgar raps. This makes her more interesting and likeable than anything in the previous hour or so.
This is set in a future where social media has taken over.
Everyone broadcasts their lives on video 24/7,
and battles for ratings and sponsors.
This makes for a strange mix of found footage and regular story-telling.
A reality podcaster gets killed while on a show. His older brother, a military combat veteran, installs his podcast implant and takes over his identity. The plan is to act as bait, to trap the murderers.
It turns out that there is a thriving gambling industry based around potential outcomes of RL podcasters' lives. One particular club seems to be involved. The manager is a mockney gangster type, and his henchman is a biker jacket-wearing yank.
This is not a terrible film. The characters are well drawn, and they deal with important issues like revenge porn and slut shaming. However, this is also a film that includes a scene where a character has a long conversation while apparently bleeding to death from a sucking chest wound. Like most bad low-budget movies, the director is also the person who write the screenplay.
The protagonists - one cannot call them heroes -
are a couple of slackers who make prank phone-calls for fun.
They film themselves doing it,
then post them on a video-sharing website like YouTube.
Yes, this will all look terribly dated with a few years,
but film-makers tend to get caught up in the moment.
Someone starts to prank-call the prankers. However, his videos are of a more murderous persuasion. They are basically torture porn, with the prankers' friends and family as victims. And it is staged so well that the killer has planned it out.
The killer's motive is no great twist. He was a victim of one of their prank phone calls. His wife ended up in an Oscar Pistorious situation, in a home defence situation that ended in a blue-on-blue encounter. Then, like a reverse version of Padme in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith , she decided that since her child was gone then her husband was not worth living for.
The story starts with a pair of Arab men in a desert,
which looks a lot more like South California than Arabia.
They bury a box in the sand,
which must be protected at all costs.
We flash forward to modern-day USA. Frank Brice (Skeet Ulrich - Scream (1996) ) runs an Escape Room company, and visits the local antique store for props. The owner ( Sean Young ) refuses to sell him the skull box, because it is reputed to be cursed and contains a demonic entity. Why she has such a dangerous item on display instead of securely locked in her basement, especially if it is not even for sale, is not explained. Anyway, while she is distracted giving out advice on Mogwai-keeping he makes off with the box. But at least he leaves her some cash for it.
A couple of tweenage horror-movie nerds take their unreasonably hot girlfriends to try out the new horror-themed Escape Room. This is interactive theatre combined with a puzzle that the customers must solve in order to exit the room before their time expires. The males bicker, nothing new or impressive, while the females are unimpressed. This makes them out to be perfect victims - they have no usable or practical skills that they might use to save themselves. Then, naturally, they transgress by opening the box.
The Escape Room is based on slasher movie tropes, and there is an actor chained to the wall dressed as a slasher killer. The demon possesses the actor, and his slasher-killer role now becomes real. His prospective victims, the customers of the game, must solve the puzzles and escape before the hour is up or they will be killed off for real.
There are a few things about this that do not make sense. Frank says several times that the Escape Room is just around the corner from the antiques store, but this is not the case in the final reel. And since the demon can jump from body to body, why does it choose the when and the who of its jumps?
Finally, the dialogue is pretty terrible. There are a couple of recognisable names among the no-name cast, but they are hampered with the worst lines since … ever. Seriously, this film has a basic concept and nothing much else going for it.
A diverse group of individuals, including a military veteran (
Deborah Ann Woll
) and a trucker (Tyler Labine -
Tucker and Dale Versus Evil
), get selected to play an Escape Room game.
The team must go from room to room, avoiding booby traps. Like in Cube , only with a budget that can afford rooms that look different.
The game is run by a Mega-Corporation that has kitted out an entire skyscraper. Yes, the budget is quite impressive. This looks as if it was set up for a cinematic release, and is left open for a sequel.
This is a by-the-numbers sequel to the 2019 movie.
For people who missed the original,
there is a helpful recap at the start.
Deborah Ann Woll
gets third billing, for some reason -
while her co-stars get listed at the bottom of the credits.
Since she only appears in the recap,
there is no obvious reason she should get preferential treatment.
In a surprise twist, it turns out that there are TWO versions of the movie -
and in one of them, there is an extended flashback sequence with Woll's character.
The main story of the second version begins by introducing us to Henry the game-maker (James Frain - ). He has family troubles, which is bad news for his wife. The end result is that he keeps his daughter Claire in a secure glass-walled cell in the basement. She is a genius at designing the escape rooms, so he keeps her busy.
The survivors of the first movie decide to track down the Midas Corporation, the villainous company who are behind the Escape Rooms. When the duo go to the building in question, they have no tools or backup with them. Luckily, the building is already empty and abandoned. However, they end up trapped in another escape room. This time the recognisable Canadian TV actress is Holland Roden .
This reviewer compared the original movie to Cube . However, the franchise is actually a lot more similar to the Saw Franchise. The biggest difference is that this relies on suspense rather than gore, so it is easier to dumb it down to a PG-13 audience.
This starts with a scream queen (
Abigail Breslin
) being stalked in a multi-story car-park.
Yes, this is set up as a slasher movie,
although it does attempt to put a new spin on the genre.
A horror movie fan is bored with all the predictable cliches. He is put in the sights of a group of killers. The people close to him, such as his girlfriend ( Caitlin Stasey ) and neighbour (Richard Riehle - Messengers 2 ), are also put in danger.
The protagonist knows all the standard horror movie tropes, so technically there is no actual Genre Blindness. However, he does not realise that the murders are real, so he acts like a clueless idiot victim in order to play along with the tropes.
This is more than just standard stalk-and-slash fare. There are a couple of decent twists along the way.
A young woman inherits the family business, a video-game arcade.
She and a couple of her friends get sucked into one of the games, like in
Tron
. Luckily, they look very good in their bikini costumes - like in
Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle
, but played seriously instead of for the subversion factor.
The main girl discovers that her long-lost brother has been trapped inside the game for years. Now she must save him as well as herself.
The girls team up with a woman ( Bai Ling ) who wants to overthrown the game world's evil overlord.
The protagonist, Cole Turner, is a video live-streamer with over a million followers.
He takes his girlfriend (
Holland Roden
) and the rest of his entourage to Russia,
where they have been invited to experience the ultimate
Escape Room
. They fall foul of some local thugs who work for the Bratva,
the organised crime syndicate mentioned in the
Arrow
TV show.
The escape room is straightforward enough - a former prison that has been filled with death-traps like a watered-down version of Saw . Cole has to rescue his friends before the clock runs out. It feels a bit extreme at times, for a form of interactive entertainment, but is still pretty basic stuff compared to other horror movies.
Cole is the biggest thing in legitimate live-streaming. However, the new urban myth to replace the snuff movie trope is the Red Room , which is a live-streamed version of the same thing. Guess what the Bratva's newest earner is?
The final twist only works if the audience assumes that the supporting characters did something incredibly stupid. So are the audience as dumb as the characters?
All in all, this is a pretty derivative film. The writer-director's influences are very obvious, but the truth is that this is an inferior copy.
A woman wakes up after being abducted by a man.
She has been dumped in a remote forest in Australia,
where she is hunted by strangers in masks - like in
Predators
but on a much lower budget.
These hunters are not aliens,
but men in stitched-together skin masks
armed with some nasty-looking farmyard tools.
It turns out that the hunters are not trying to kill the women - they are trying to kill each other. However, each hunter is paired with one of the women - and if the woman dies, the man she is paired with dies too. This should mean that the women have a better chance of survival ... but it also means that if one woman killed all the others then the hunters would all die too.
Billy Lo (Bruce Lee -
) is the biggest star in Hong Kong cinema.
He is making the same movies as Bruce Lee,
so more than the face and the initials are taken from the real-life man.
Billy is hassled by gangsters, so he fakes his own death. However, the gangsters go after his widow Ann Morris ( Colleen Camp ). The only way to ensure her safety is for him to take out the entire gang. This is accomplished through a series of quite disappointing action scenes, presumably shot with stunt doubles because Bruce Lee died before the film was completed.
The Third Act makes up for everything else in the film. Billy enters the Tower of Death, the villain's headquarters building. The ground floor is a restuarant, while the villain's henchmen live upstairs. Each floor is guarded by live-in martial artists like Pasqual (Dan Inosanto) and Hakim (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) who have their own unique styles. This allows Bruce Lee to show off his Jeet Kune Do, the style he developed that was flexible enough to defeat all other styles.
Billy Lo (Bruce Lee -
Game of Death (1978)
) is hanging out in Japan with a friend of his, a fellow martial artist.
Since Bruce Lee died before this film was made,
his presence is purely in the form of some deleted scenes from other things.
Not just the first film, but even from the Lee family's home movies.
The story takes off when Bobby attends his friend's funeral.
While the friend died off-screen,
Billy's inevitable demise is a set-piece.
In the Second Act, Bobby Lo investigates his brother's death. The first suspect is a creepy white man who owns a dojo called the Palace of Death. Bobby visits, and gets invited to stay.
In the Third Act, the hero enters the new Tower of Death. It is not a carbon-copy of the original. Instead, it seems to be a leftover set from a James Bond parody ... Complete with an army of guards, who stand no chance against the lone hero. Bobby then has a few one-on-one fights with a variety of specialists, and this is probably the best part of the film.
This starts as a low-rent cash-in on Bruce Lee's fame, the worst kind of thing up until the Bruce Willis Geezer Teasers . With a voice-over for the speaking and a stunt double for the fighting, what is left for the actor to perform? However, ironically the movie saves itself once Bruce Lee is no longer on-screen.
A stranger (Wesley Snipes -
Blade
) seeks help from an Inner City priest (Ernie Hudson -
Ghostbusters
). He narrates the main story as an extended flashback.
Snipes was leader of a hit-team, along with his sidekicks Zander ( The Expendables ) and Zoe Bell . They took out targets for the CIA.
The team are given a new target, a corrupt arms dealer (Robert Davi - Licence To Kill ). However, there is a change of plan. Snipes finds himself trapped in a hospital, hunted by a team of expert killers that he himself trained.
A diverse group of people wake up in a basement.
This sounds a lot like the plot of
Saw 2
. This time the victims include
Jamie Ray Newman
and
Bai Ling
.
The inmates seem to have been abducted for a specific reason. A couple of them pre-emptively murdered a suspicious-looking character who may or may not have intended to do them harm.
This is an attempt at an original horror movie based around a video-chat.
Unfortunately it turns into a series of rip-offs of other Internet-based horror movies.
The format is found footage, not unlike Unfriended .
Our heroine's friends get bumped off by a psycho killer with a mask. This particular mask is the misshapen one from Smiley .
Finally, the Third Act is Torture porn ... reminiscent of Chain Letter .
There is a final sequence, an attempt at a twist in the tale.
The movie starts with Fouchon (Lance Hendriksen -
The Terminator
) and his henchmen, led by Pick Van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo -
The Mummy
), playing
the most dangerous game
with Douglas Binder (
Chuck Pfarrer
) on the streets of New Orlean.
In real life Pfarrer is the movie's screenwriter,
and he was a US Navy Seal before he went to Hollywood.
A few days later Binder's daughter Natasha ( Yancy Butler ) comes looking for her father. Police detective Carmine ( Kasi Lemmons ) tries to help, but the city is bankrupt and the police department is on strike. Nat hires Chance Boudreaux (Jean Claude Van Damme - Universal Soldier ), a former US Marine who is now part of the blue-collar community who try to scrape a living in the city.
Fouchon runs a murder-participation service, like Hostel but with the emphasis on hunting rather than torture. The quarries are selected from the homeless, with the key criteria that they be combat veterans with no family members to report them missing. They are given a money belt with ten thousand dollars cash, and challenged to run ten miles on foot through the city. Of course, the hunter is aided by a team of gunmen so it is not exactly a fair contest.
Fouchon's gang ambush Boudreaux, who wipes them out in an impressive action scene. Then he goes on the run, in his home territory of the Cajun jungle where his uncle (Wilford Brimley - ) brews moonshine. The villains go after him to tie up loose ends, in spite of the huge mess they left in downtown New Orleans. This leads on to a reversal of Southern Comfort, with the Cajun bumping off the hunters. Since that movie influenced Predator , this is also a good comparison.
This was the first Hollywood movie of John Woo , the biggest action director in Hong Kong and probably the best in the world at the time. The stunt sequences certainly bear his hallmarks, but at least one scene seems more like the work of Sam Raimi . Since Raimi used Vosloo in the title role of the Darkman sequels, perhaps he actually stepped in to help. Ted Raimi ( Xena: Warrior Princess ) makes an appearance, increasing the likelihood.
This is about a gang of working-class thieves from a London slum
who specialise in burglarising rich houses in the English countryside.
They are presented as empathetic,
because they are only stealing for the right reasons.
One wants to send his younger brother to University
without the need to take out student loans.
Another refuses to get a job on a zero-hours contract,
saying I would rather be a thief than work for one.
The thieves fall into the hands of the aristocratic Mrs Fenwick ( Samantha Bond ). Along with her male relatives, she plans to run a fox-hunt ... with humans instead of foxes. Yes, this is set in a world like that of Kingsman , split between the extremes of rich and poor with no actual middle classes.
This movie is about class warfare, with the Upper Class perceiving the working class as being lazy work-shy scroungers. Ironically, only one of the thieves - the female - is an Anglo-Saxon. Two others are Black, while the only CIS White Male is an Eastern European immigrant. Yes, the Class War is portrayed as a Race War too!
This is a watchable Scifi-channel original effort.
Alex McArthur (
Lost Colony
) runs a version of
The Most Dangerous Game
. Four very photogenic convicts (including an ex-Marine pretty-boy)
are dumped on a remote Aegean island where they are hunted by
four gun-toting multi-millionaires (including William Gregory Lee -
Xena: S6
).
Unfortunately this is the island where Hercules slew the Hydra. Well, he tried to, anyway. Three thousand years later and it is still eating people.
The movie has predictably cheap SPFX, mediocre direction - but the acting is okay and some bits are actually quite watchable.
Kate (
Kate Bosworth
) and Michael (Emil Hirsch -
Into The Wild
) become residents in The Immaculate Room,
an immaculate bunker with no windows
or contact with the outside world.
If they can stay there for fifty days,
they will win a prize of five million dollars.
The challenge is not as easy as it seems. Since the contestants are not allowed distractions, all they have is each other. However, the people running the contest may be manipulating the situation for their own agenda.
This is the kind of film that was made under the Covid-19 lockdown, with a very small cast in a limited set of locations.
A young woman (
Nathalie Emmanuel
) discovers she is related to a rich, powerful family.
They invite her to a big family get-together at their countryside mansion.
The butler (Sean Pertwee - Gotham ) is a bit of a jerk. This is a red flag, so the audience knows something is off. Also, some mysterious entity starts killing the servants off.
Predictably, this is a rich-white-people-are-evil storyline. It has been done before, and done better.
Jake Barnes (Alain Moussi -
) is a US military veteran with severe amnesia.
He is found by some fishermen, like in
The Bourne Identity
, who then sell him to Crab Man from My Name Is Earl.
A US Military Intelligence officer, Myra (
Marie Avgeropolos
), tries interrogating him.
When he escapes, Captain Sand (Rick Yune -
) gets sent to bring him back.
Jake teams up with Wylie (Nicolas Cage - Face/Off ) and Harrigan (Frank Grillo - Boss Level ). They are a team of warriors who fight against a group of aliens that arrive on a comet that orbits the solar system every six years.
This was originally intended as a Bruce Willis Geezer Teaser . However, although Willis apparently loved the script he was unavailable for filming because he already had a three-movie contract with a different production company. Instead, Nicholas Cage got the role - and was paid 20% of the $25 million overall budget.
This is set in the near future.
Ryan Merriman (
Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
) and
Perry Reeves
run a reality TV show.
It is a game-show where death-row convicts are put in a VR simulation
and forced to complete a number of contests.
To speed them along, the simulation is filled with CGI dinosaurs.
And if you die in the simulation, you die in reality.
The convict contestants are a nasty and murderous bunch. However, to make one of them sympathetic he is made out to be innocent. Well, prisons are full of men who claim to be innocent.
There is also a subplot about a rebel movement that wants to end the games. Seriously, there are terrorists who want to free violent murderers and to kill a TV game-show host. None of this makes sense.
Someone is assassinating everyone in London called Ben Lyk.
The police round up all the surviving people who have that name,
and stick them in a remote mansion in the countryside.
Unfortunately the killer is a bit more talented than they expected.
What starts as a whodunnit with a jokey tone descends into Guy Ritchie territory, and becomes a gangster thriller with the usual twists.
A nurse, Suzanne (
Autumn Reeser
), is interviewed by Special Agents Holman (Peter Stormare -
Armageddon
) and Sanders (
Maria Conchita Alonso
). They are after Philip (Jean Claude Van Damme -
Universal Soldier
), who was involved in a shootout at the hospital.
This is the framing story,
so she narrates a flashback that makes up the main story.
Philip was a bodyguard, brought into the hospital after an attack on his boss. An assassin, Radovan Brokowski (Daniel Bernhardt - ), turns up to finish the job. He shoots up the hospital, killing some staff and chasing off the patients. The police never bother to turn up, but the assassin is joined by the rest of his gang. They have a variety of martial arts specialities, and they stalk Philip from floor to floor of the building.
The opening title cards reveal that this is about the Yugoslavian conflict, in the 1990s. Stormare delivers some exposition about Philip's backstory. Not only was he born in the former Yugoslavia, but his father was assassinated there for opposing the Serbian invasion of Croatia. The killers who are after Philip are supposedly a Serbian murder squad who committed war crimes in the 1990s and have gone freelance into organised crime. But Van Damme is far too old to be born in the 1980s, while the others are all too young to be born in the 1970s. The exception is Bernhardt, but he uses an Afrikaaner accent instead of a Serbian one.
Suzanne turns out to be a blackbelt in aikido, trained from childhood by her uncle. This is lucky, because she ends up in a girl-fight with the villains' token female. A pity that, despite getting a lot of scenes with dialogue, she only has a couple of fight scenes.
This all leads up to a pitiable twist ending that turns out to ask more questions than it answers.
The controller (Gary Oldman -
Batman Begins
) meets with one of his top assassins, Jade (
Jessica Alba
). Unfortunately her mission did not go as planned,
so things have to be put right.
The main storyline is set in an emotional support group led by the vicar ( Myanna Burring ). The regulars are a familiar-looking bunch - Tommy Flanagan ( Smoking Aces ), Tim McInerny ( Dr Who ) and Michael Socha ( Being Human (UK) ). A new member has come along - a young woman who does not seem to belong there.
Marcus is a freelance hitman working for middle-man Xane (Stephen Dorff -
Blade
). His killing skills are great,
but his operational security is less so.
He uses his personal cell-phone on a mission,
which allows his wife to interfere ...
with disastrous results.
A year later, he is still getting over what happened. He is offered the chance to participate in a game, involving a ten million dollar bounty on the world's greatest assassin. By incredible coincidence, his daughter falls suddenly ill with a mysterious illness so he needs ten million dollars to cure her.
Drakos (Frank Grillo - Captain America: Winter Soldier ) hires a group of assassins to come after him. The only recognisable one is Asha Khana ( Marie Avgeropolous ). He gifts them a set of specialist weapons each, and sends them into his maze-like venue one at a time. Drakos has stacked the game in his favour. Some of the assassins team up against him, which almost evens the odds.
This was written and directed by Kevin Grevioux , based on a comic-book he created for Darkstorm Publishing. It certainly seems comic-booky, with an ending set up for a sequel. Grevioux also has a small role as one of the assassins, and if he looks familiar that is because he was the brains behind the Underworld seres. Similarly, the movie's stunt coordinator ( Shara Kim ) also plays the Geisha assassin ... and is stunt double for Asha in her fight scenes.
The story starts during the Second World War.
Some Nazi scientists experiment with a set of magical dice.
A demonic entity slaughters them all.
The main story is set in the modern day. A couple of tweenage guys and three hot girls hang out in a disused clothing factory. They inadvertently summon the demon, who makes his appearance in a shocking way. In all fairness, his wisecracks are somewhat entertaining.
Some more tweenagers turn up to loot the factory and have pre-marital sex. The demon wipes them out in a messy but generic manner. Yes, the original and impressive monster quickly becomes just another unoriginal slasher.
Miss Serena (
Camille Rowe
) runs a gambling den where homeless military veterans
are forced to fight to the death.
Her newest victim is Roy Bodie,
a former Royal Marine Commando whose wife Chrissy (
Amy Bailey
) is under threat from Serena's henchman Happy (Phil Davis -
Being Human
). Of course, double-crosses ensue and Bodie goes on a revenge spree.
Bodie gets arrested by the SWAT team, and Redmond ( Jaime Winstone ) hands him over to Detective Chief Inspector Keaton ( Kate Dickie ) for interrogation. This bookends the main story, which is told in flashback ... and naturally allows for that nasty old trope - the Untruthful Narrator.
This was written and directed by one person, always a bad sign. It certainly has the hallmarks of a Tarantino homage, with the supporting cast being given nicknames and dialogue that develops character rather than just forwarding the plot.
Some kids play a game that involves summoning a demon called the Midnight Man.
The trick is to not get murdered.
Unfortunately the demon bends the rules because he does not like to lose.
The protagonist is a young woman who lives with her grandmother ( Lin Shaye ). The local doctor (Robert Englund - Nightmare On Elm Street ) also gets called in to help.
We also get a flashback of the Final Girl's mother ( Louise Linton ), who may be another one of the game's victims.
A pair of tweenage girls go hiking in the woods together.
Their intent is to play the Game of 72,
by going missing for 72 hours to see if their parents get upset.
One of the girls makes it home, while the other does not ...
The missing girl's mother assumes the worst, so she decides to search the woods by herself. This is something of a whodunnit, with several suspects in the girl's disappearance.
This seems to have been made for television. Not just because of the limited budget (few locations and a small cast) and the mainly female cast (for a mainly female audience) but also by the bloodlessness. The story has a bit of suspense, but the way it is told allows for no real pay-off. It is all a bit movie-of-the-week.
This is a typical product of The Asylum,
with all the hallmarks -
shot on remote scrub-land in California
and then finished off with cheap-looking CGI.
The storyline is basic enough,
owing a lot to other and better monster movies.
The biggest named star has the smallest part,
appearing only for exposition and the climax.
An alien spaceship crashes in California. The General (Tom Sizemore - Blue Steel ) contacts his best team, and sends them to investigate. Since this is the Twenty-First century, they have copied Aliens and made half their combat troops female.
The brains of the team is a somewhat obnoxious nerd, a civilian scientist known only as Bob. This is clearly a reference to Robert Lazard, a UFO enthusiast from the 1990s who claimed to have worked as an engineer in the fabled Groom Lake establishment known as Area 51.
The alien monsters, a lot of enormous CGI bipeds, are prison escapees rather than invaders. They hunt and eat the humans, showing a certain lack of intelligence. Perhaps they were zoo animals rather than prison inmates.
Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul -
Westworld
) lives in small-town USA,
hanging out with his ex-girlfriend Anita (
Dakota Johnson
) and his mechanic buddy Finn (Rami Malek -
Bohemian Rhapsody
). He keeps his repair garage open by subsidizing it
with winnings from his illegal street racing.
One day an old rival, Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper -
Preacher
), pays Tobey and his team to upgrade
a Ford Mustang modified by Carol Shelby (
Le Mans '66
). Unfortunately the rivalry is too powerful,
and it all ends badly.
The Monarch (Michael Keaton - ), a car-obsessed billionaire, runs an illegal street race annually. Tobey teams up with Julia Maddon ( Imogen Poots ) to drive the Shelby car from New York to California in the hope of entering the race. This means out-manoeuvreing police officers like Officer Lejeune (Nick Chinlund - Chronicles of Riddick ) by using a lot of car-related stunts that would not have been out of place in the 1970s.
The climactic third act is the Monarch's race. So, is this a modern-day Cannonball Run ? Well, this may have comedic moments but it is not played for laughs. The characters face very real consequences for their actions, including prison and death. The result is a film that balances humour and thrills.
Emma Roberts
is playing a High School girl again, even though she is in her mid-twenties
and was last seen as a college senior in
Scream Queens
. This time she is somewhat empathetic,
as she gets roped into playing an online game
that awards players online points for completing real-life dares.
She teams up with a fellow player, Ian (Dave Franco - Warm Bodies ), and they accept lots of fun dares. Unfortunately it all takes a turn for the more serious - well, it is unfortunate for the characters but the fact is that Hollywood movies need a strict structure or the audience will get confused.
Petula (
Imogen Waterhouse
) and her sister Tilda, a pair of tweenage grifters,
are on the run from the cops for some petty narcotics stuff.
They leave town and visit a childhood friend,
Daphne, who lives in a large house in the countryside.
Their plan is to locate Daphne's safe and loot her cash.
To do this, they must participate in her weird game.
Detective Siegel (Scott Cohen - Tenth Kingdom ) is looking for the girls. Does he want to save them or to arrest them?
Because of Petula's drug use, it is difficult for her to be certain how long the game has been going on for. This leads to her having a mental fracture, and the movie becoming a bit surreal.
During the Spanish Inquisition,
a witch was tortured to death and turned into a board-game.
Of course, the game carries her curse.
Somehow the rules are written in modern English instead of Latin or Spanish,
but that is the least of the
In the modern day, Mike Vogel ( Under The Dome ) is a surfer bum who hangs out on the north coast of Spain. He and his buddy hook up with Eliza Dushku and her gal-pal. The tweenagers start playing the board-game. Unfortunately it is like Jumanji , only with the victims getting mutilated.
One ends up like a scene from Final Destination - we know he will die, but not how ...
This starts with
Tara Reid
fleeing through the desert of Nevada, USA.
She is also listed as a Producer,
probably because she is the biggest name in this piece.
She also delivers the worst performance of the movie,
so viewers should not be put off by her.
The main storyline involves a young woman who hitches a ride on a party-bus going to the Burning Man Festival in the remote desert of ... Nevada, USA. Yes, it is obvious how these two plotlines will intersect. The bus driver takes the a detour, and the party-goers end up lost in the desert.
The party-goers are a pack of unknowns, but the characters actually have distinct personalities so the writing is not a total loss. Even better, the cast seems to include a few professional strippers because there is a lot of female nudity on show. Probably the most since Friday the 13th (2009) , that is.
It is hard to list all the movies that this makes homages to. Wolf Creek: Season 2 springs to mind, along with Race With The Devil . The bus is attacked by Cultists, who include a version on Santanico Pandemonium ( From Dusk Til Dawn ). One character starts to quote Aliens , and there is a visual reference to Species . But the most important thing to remember is that this movie does not take itself at all seriously.
The ending promises us a sequel - Party Bus 2 Hell and Back ... and this would not be a bad thing.
The protagonist, a burned-out slacker,
is roped into partnering his ex-girlfriend in an obscure Escape Room game named Paranoia.
They, along with a bunch of other tweenagers,
end up stuck in a disused asylum where they have to complete room after room of tasks.
Eventually it becomes apparent that the game will be played to the death. Nobody works it out when the lethal nature of the boobytraps is revealed - torture porn stuff out of Saw . No, only when the theme is revealed - an escaped mental patient on a kill-crazy ramage - and the bodies start to turn up.
This was made in Belgium, even though the cast all speak English. This explains the ropey acting - the actors are not using their first language.
A trio of nerdy losers get excluded from every fraternity on their college campus.
Will they start their own nerdy frat, like in Revenge of the Nerds?
No, they just get invited to a different party off-campus.
The hosts are very welcoming,
but it is clearly above the nerds' social status.
Nevertheless, they are suckered in.
The second party is not like the first. Lots of terrible hazing rituals, the usual stuff. And that is only the start of it.
The sources are pretty obvious. For example, someone whispers for the token black guy to run, which is a clear reference to the recent movie Get Out! .
Half a dozen women go for an outdoor sports bonding weekend.
Instead of going to the usual place they try somewhere more out of the way,
where they run into deadly trouble.
This is basically set up as
The Descent
, but with hiking instead of pot-holing.
A gang of local hillbillies are playing The Most Dangerous Game . Luckily for the girls, the hillbillies may have guns but they stupidly get close enough for the victims to fight back with rocks and knives.
The original of this kind of film is probably Deliverance , although in the 1980s Southern Comfort and its sci-fi imitator Predator (1987) became the most iconic examples of the sub-genre. In contrast, this movie is a pale imitation.
This starts with a framing story.
An old man walks into a bar in New York City,
after apparently having been away for many decades.
The main story starts in New York City, 1925. Chris Dubois (Jean Claude Van Damme - Universal Soldier ) is a Fagin-type character, a thirty-five-year-old man posing as a tweenager who runs a gang of thieving children. He makes them steal from the local Mafia boss Riggi (Louis Mandylor - ), who quickly tracks them down and comes for revenge. To escape the mobsters, Chris stows away on a tramp steamer. The ship is smuggling rifles to the Far East, where it gets hijacked by pirates led by the self-proclaimed Admiral Lord Dobbs (Roger Moore - The Spy Who Loved Me .
Despite his hardships in New York City, where he was hunted by both the cops and the Mafia, Chris was obsessed with getting back there. Instead, Dobbs left him with Khao (Aki Aleong - V: The Series ) to be trained as a Muay Thai fighter. Later, Dobbs is surprised to discover that Chris is now the local champion.
A female reporter named Carrie Newton ( Janet Gunn ) is in town, looking for a story. Dobbs latches onto her because she is attractive, but she also has a rich father so he has another reason to exploit her. However, she latches onto their group for her own selfish reasons.
Carrie joins Dobbs and Chris as they latch onto Maxie (James Remar - ), the World Heavyweight boxing champion who is in Asia to attend a mysterious Tibetan martial arts tournament. Every country's best fighter is invited, and the winner gets a massive gold statue of a dragon. The plan is for Chris to replace Maxie as the American, with Plan B being for Dobbs and his sidekick to steal the statue.
This was written by Frank Dux and directed by Jean Claude Van Damme himself. The result is a predictable mess. The fight scenes are good enough, but anything that requires actual thought is a disappointment. For example, the framing story itself makes no sense. It starts with Chris returning to New York in old age, apparently having spent decades in Asia. This is at odds with the actual ending of the main story. We then get a series of photographs which may be on a wall, but we do not know which wall or where. Finally we get the closing of the book of the story, although the text seems to be Loren Ipsum type cut-and-paste. In the 1990s, when VCRs were commonplace and freeze-frame was often used, this is unforgiveable. The shot of the book is a non-sequitor because the movie did not start with the book opening. In other words, the framing sequence is just a bunch of shots inspired by other, better movies ... stuck together by someone who has no actual understanding of why those movies used those shots in the first place.
Rachel Nichols
wakes up in an underground prison cell.
She has been abducted by a mysterious Cult.
Zoe Bell bare-knuckle brawls to the death with former co-stars like Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson, Adrienne Wilkinson . This is all incredibly brutal, something not usually associated with female-led movies.
The death-matches are governed by Sherilyn Fenn . The cult plans to hold a climactic ceremony involving the winner.
A young woman (
Samara Weaving
) marries her fiance (Mark O'Brien -
Arrival (2016)
). The good news is that she has married into a rich family,
and the ceremony is held at their luxurious mansion.
The bad news is that they have a tradition of playing a randomly selected game
on the night of every wedding ceremony.
The bride selects a card at random,
and it turns out to be Hide and Seek.
What they do not tell her is that they play it as a version of
The Most Dangerous Game
.
The Patriarch is Henry Czerny ( Mission: Impossible (1996) ), best known as husband of Madeline Stowe in the TV show Revenge. Here he is married to Andie MacDowell Stowe's co-star from Bad Girls . The family includes their daughter ( Melanie Scrofano ) and son (Adam Brody - Mr and Mrs Smith ) and his wife ( Elyse Levesque ). They are all talented, and stretch themselves by playing away from their best-known characters.
This is set in a dystopian future where the human race live in trailer parks.
Nobody cares, because they all live their waking hours in a virtual reality environment.
Like if
The Matrix
was privatised and became as all-consuming as Facebook.
The result is a mix of different copyrights, like a slightly more grown-up version of
The Lego Movie
. Since this film was directed by
Steven Spielberg
, he probably owns half the copyrights involved
The hero, Parzifal, goes on a quest to discover the creator's secret legacy. He becomes infactuated with his female counterpart, Artemis. Or at least her cyberspace avatar. No worries, in real life she looks like Olivia Cooke . Well, they uglied her up a bit by putting a tiny birthmark on her cheek.
When an avatar dies in cyberspace, they can re-spawn but they lose everything they have gained. While this may be high stakes indeed for those playing the game, it is a lot less involving for people who are merely watching. As a result, the story needs some real-life jeopardy. Luckily the villainous CEO sends his hench-woman ( Hannah John-Kamen ) after the rebels.
Andrew Simpson (
A Good Woman Is Hard To Find
) is hitch-hiking in northern France, in the area where
And Soon The Darkness (1972)
took place.
He meets up with a French girl who is also hitch-hiking,
and they get a lift with a local man.
He invites them to stay the night with him and his wife.
Of course, things have a slightly uncomfortable vibe ...
Tensions are high in the area, because there is a serial killer on the loose. Pretty much every character meets the profile, so suspense is ever present. And most characters' motivations are deliberately left unclear until the end.
The Final Girl and her boyfriend go on a camping trip.
It is an interactive story with a theme - slasher movies.
Besically, it is set up like
April Fool's Day
, only the murders turn out to be real.
The Final Girl discovers that it is difficult to work out who the killer is when there is a fake narrative set up by the company. What is real, and who can be trusted?
This is a found footage movie for the digital era.
It starts with a bunch of twenty-somethings shooting some behind-the-scenes footage
to publicise the launch of their new Internet startup.
The company's website features user-generated content. One user starts submitting some scary videos, and they are so popular that the company decide to track down the contributor and give her a well-paid contract.
The videos are jump-scares, not something truly creepy like Sadako's art-house montage in Ringu . However, when analysed it turns out that footage of a woman in a graveyard was actually shot in Rochester, New York State, at the grave of a man suspected of being Jack The Ripper. Even creepier, the woman pictured in the video has been officially reported missing.
The final Act is the crew heading off to confront the person who claims to have made the videos. She does not live in an actual cabin in the woods, but it is a somewhat secluded farmhouse.
This is an updating of the
Candyman
Urban myth, about a serial killer on the Internet.
The Final Girl summons Smiley to kill someone,
but then he starts to stalk her too.
The tension is ramped up - this film focuses on suspense,
unlike most films of the slasher genre these days.
Kurt (Joe Keery -
Free Guy
) is a tweenage rideshare driver
who wants to be a world-famous influencer on the Internet.
His live-streams get few to no views,
so he decides to up his game by murdering people live on air.
The film is formatted as a live-stream,
the modern equivalent of Found Footage.
Like most woke horror movies these days, the first victims are CIS-looking straight-acting white-passing males. They are white supremacists and horny heterosexuals, so the audience is not allowed to feel any sympathy for them. This trend seems to come from a basic misunderstanding of the Horror genre, based on the more jokey installments at the end of certain 1980s franchises. In reality, portrayal is not endorsement and horror movies do not endorse violence against women (or whoever).
Later on, the killer takes on some more diverse victims like Andrea ( Jessalyn Gilsig ) and London ( Mischa Barton ). Kurt's father Kris (David Arquette - Scream ) also gets some screen time. However, Kurt's biggest target is Jessie ( Sasheer Zamata ). She is a relatively successful Internet personality, the kind of person that Kurt aspires to be. That said, she achieved success through comedy rather than by becoming a spree killer.
Kurt is supposed to be relatively sympathetic when he is killing CIS-het white males. However, he becomes less sympathetic when he starts making references to sex tapes while talking to females. In contrast, Jessie the Final Girl is portrayed as perfect. A professional comedienne with a large online following, she roasts everyone she meets - especially those who help her. Despite this, the audience is meant to empathise with her.
Milo Ventriglieri (
Heroes
) and some gamer types play-test a computer game.
It is based on Countess Elizabeth Bathory, transplanted to a C19th plantation in Louisiana.
Apparently she ran a finishing school for white girls,
so racial issues are completely ignored.
Presumably the film-makers intended to use the villainess from
American Horror Story: Coven
but chickened out and used the more well-known figure of Bathory.
The list of tweenagers on the vampiric hit-list are TV actors including Frankie Muniz ( Cody Banks ), Jimmi Simpson ( Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ) and Samaire Armstrong .
This film lacks the subtlety or ploting of Final Destination , and instead relies on dodgy CGI reminiscent of Boogeyman . Despite the unoriginal concept (reminiscent of the J-Horror fad - The Ring, The Grudge, One Missed Call ) it is almost watchable.
A businesswoman (
Linnea Quigley
) and a female scientist accompany a pair of security men.
They are transporting a couple of crates by road to Costa Rica.
The crates contain genetically engineered dinosaurs,
which bust out of the crates and escape into a nearby warehouse.
The security leader calls for backup,
so a massive team of four or even FIVE mercenaries is called in.
They use CGI muzzle-flashes to fight the CGI dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs are property of the Triassic Corporation. The CEO (Michael Pare - Streets of Fire ) has weaponised them, and is auctioning them off to the highest bidder. Yes, the whole thing has been staged. While the mercenaries are ordered to use tranquiliser guns, the CEO has a couple of backup plans involving explosives.
In the third act, it turns out that the warehouse is filled with amonium nitrate fertiliser. A reference is made to the explosion in Beirut, which was on the kiloton scale. Worse, there is a nuclear power plant only five miles away. Yes, blowing the dinosaurs up will only make things worse.
This was made on the cheap by The Asylum. It is not completely terrible, as the story is solid enough. Some of the dialogue is terrible, which may not be the fault of the writing team. The real problem is the delivery, by the cheapest actors they could afford.
Olivia (
Lucy Hale
) and her tweenager friends, including Lucas (Tyler Posey -
Teen Wolf
), go to Mexico to work for a Houses For Humanity type charity.
They have a quick montage of partying,
then meet up with a jerk who talks them into transgressing.
He takes them to an old disused convent,
and plays a game of truth-or-dare.
When it is his turn to tell the truth,
he lets them know that the game is really a matter of life and death.
When the Final Girl gets back to college, she starts to see Truth or Dare written everywhere. A creepy old homeless man (Andrew Howard - The Outpost ) is lurking around outside.
The tweens quickly realise that the game is really possessed by a demon. They must perform the dares that the demon specifies, or it will force them to kill themselves. This leads on to some suspenseful scenes. However, at best it is a horror-genre version of the far superior Nerve .
This is a found footage film of sorts - the story takes place entirely
on the screen of the Final Girl’s laptop (except for the final scene).
Basically, a group of American teenagers hang out on the Internet
using Skype and other chat facilities.
However, this is the anniversary of the suicide of a girl they knew.
Someone is cyber-stalking them, somehow hacking their secret conference calls.
There are a couple of problems with the basic concept of the film. The emphasis on computer programs means this is very contemporary, but it will date incredibly quickly. Moore’s law states that computing power doubles ever 18 months, so by the time this is available on DVD or TV it will look sadly old-fashioned. The characters are supposed to be in their late teens, but predictably the actors are all a decade older. For example, the heroine ( Heather Sossamon ) is recognisable from playing a teenager in The Secret Circle five years ago.
This is not a direct sequel to the original,
which was a supernatural horror while this is a slasher film.
All that the two movies really share is the format,
a real-time Found Footage type setup based on the screen of the main character's laptop.
The protagonist has a new laptop computer. He uses it for group chats on a video-conferencing system. Unfortunately it turns out that he obtained the laptop by less than legal means, and the original owner wants it back.
The original story had the group being bumped off by a ghost. This time it is a cabal of psychos who trade snuff movies online. Unfortunately they seem to lack imagination.
Scott Adkins (
