Showing posts with label Thriller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thriller. Show all posts

Wednesday, 12 October 2016

Possession (2009)

A driven lawyer, Jess (Sarah Michelle Geller), lives a near-perfect life with her doting husband Ryan; the one thorn in their relationship comes in the shape of Ryan's violent and moody brother, Roman, who currently lives with them. 
The two brothers are involved in a head on crash, and both end up in comas.
Eventually, Roman wakes up... but he swears he is actually Ryan, even remembering things that only Jess and her husband could know.


Friday, 23 October 2015

Psycho (1960)


Desperate to get some cash together so she can finally be with her fiancĂ©, secretary Marion Crane makes off with €40,000 of her companies money.
Taking back roads to avoid the police, she winds up at a run-down and near deserted motel, run by Norman Bates a quiet, slightly odd, man who lives under the thumb of his supposedly feeble mother.
Norman takes an instant shine to Marion; but mother senses trouble... Women always bring trouble...


Tuesday, 14 October 2014

Stuck (2002)

On her way home from a club, care-worker Brandy hits a homeless man who stepped out in front of her car.
Unable to afford a DUI charge, she panics and flees the scene, with the man still stuck in her wind-shield.
After putting the car away in her garage the man, still in place, wakes up.
In too deep to simply call for help, she is left trying to find a way to deal with the injured man.


Saturday, 11 October 2014

Rage (2010)

A FULLER VERSION OF THIS REVIEW IS ALSO POSTED AT A BLOG I CONTRIBUTE TO YEAR-ROUND.

Head to Horror Movie A Week to see what my friend Lisa and I think of the 52 movies we review each and every year.



While parking his car, Dennis inadvertently cuts up a biker. It proves to be a far bigger mistake than he could have guessed.
Starting with childish baiting, and working his way up, the baker spends the day stalking and terrorising Dennis from behind his tinted visor, taking a simple disagreement way beyond road rage, and turning it into a terrifying ordeal.



Wednesday, 8 October 2014

A Wrong Way To Die (2012)

Aka: A Hole in the Desert, MoniKa, MoniKa: A Wrong Way To Die

Reagan Tyler receives a phone-call from his friend JJ, inviting him to meet at a motel in Las Vegas, where JJ has met a girl, and promises to hook Reagan up with the girls friend, who is staying in the room next to their own.
For lack of anything better to do, Reagan flies to Vegas, only to find JJ and his companion not answering their room door, he does however meet the promised friend, Monika ("with a K") who turns out to be the woman of his dreams. They go out, have a great time, and spend the night together.
The following morning, Ragan calls on JJ, and is told why he and his lady friend were unavailable the day before. It turns out that yesterday, before Ragan arrived in town, Monika was murdered...Not a earning a "recommended" but only the 2nd movie so far this year to go in my "keep" pile.

Saturday, 26 October 2013

The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

A silent and unnamed man (Vinnie Jones) is killing people on quiet, late night trains in the New York subway, but with no bodies are turning up, the victims are listed only as "Missing People".
A photographer photographs a woman minutes before her disappearance, and his investigation leads him to the killer.
Unable to convince the police, he becomes obsessed with the man, and is determined to find proof.


Thursday, 24 October 2013

Darklands (1998)


A reporter looks into a series of animal sacrifices in Wales, and is also asked to look into the death of a man in the steelworks.
He begins to suspect the two cases are related, and us drawn into a world of nationalism and religious cults. 


Monday, 14 October 2013

The Cellar Door (2007)

When Rudy goes to her friends house for a 'girls night in' they both end up passing out drunk.
She wakes up in a wooden crate, in a basement, as the prisoner of a socially awkward man, named Herman.
All Herman wants to do is keep her happy in her box, but sometimes she says mean things to Herman, or won't co-operate with him, and when she upsets Herman, she makes him do bad things...


The movies prologue sees Herman's previous obsession escaping, and her subsequent murder. I get that they wanted to give the movie a dramatic lead-in but later, when Rudy realises she is not the first woman that Herman has 'kept', it's a big thing for her, and it's lacking some of its punch for us as we already know. Another small thing is that his previous victim was blonde, whereas Rudy is a redhead... To me, I'd have liked to have seen Herman always kidnap a similar looking woman, but again, it's a minor gripe. 

Thursday, 10 October 2013

Some Guy Who Kills People (2011)

Years ago, Ken Boyd was trapped and tortured by the high school basketball team, leaving him emotionally (and physically) scarred.
Fresh out of the loony bin and working in an ice-cream parlour, Ken seems to be getting his life in order, and all is going well, until he is sent to one of the team member's birthday party to serve ice-cream, and the ex-jock mocks his work-uniform (a giant ice-cream cone).
The next day, the bully turns up dead; and he's not the last.
One by one, the people who tormented Ken get brutally slaughtered, to complicate things further, Ken's 11 year old daughter shows up.
Can Ken find his place in the world, can he be a dad, or is he just Some Guy Who Kills People?


Wednesday, 9 October 2013

The Collection (aka The Collector 2) (2012)

The Collector's MO of killing a building full of people to kidnap one continues... But this time his trophy is the daughter o a very rich man who sends a team of mercenaries to retrieve her.
And if you think he makes his victims houses deadly, wait until you see him on home turf...


Tuesday, 8 October 2013

9 Dead (aka Nine Dead) (2010)

After a spate of abductions in LA, all 9 of the masked kidnappers wake up in the same room, each handcuffed to a post.
The kidnapper enters the room, and tells them that they are all here for a reason; he will return every 10 minutes and ask if they know what the reason is. If they do, he will call the police, release them, and make a full confession; if they do not, he will kill one of them, and restart the clock...


Saturday, 27 October 2012

I Spit On Your Grave (2010 Remake)

Jennifer Hill rents a remote cabin near a lake, in order to get some solitude while she writes a novel.
On her way into town, she attracts the attention of the town lowlife; 3 guys who work at the gas station.
One night, liquored up in the woods, the men decide that Jennifer is a "Stuck up City Bitch" who is "Desperate for it"; they decide that she needs to be "taught a lesson" and so they take their retarded friend Matthew, who has met Jennifer and has a bit of a thing for her, around to her cabin, where they rape, beat and humiliate her, then leave her for dead.
A month later, Jenifer returns; she has been keeping herself alive in the woods and has occupied her mind with one thought: Revenge!


Tuesday, 23 October 2012

The Hamiltons

When their parents are killed in a tragic accident, eldest Hamilton sibling David relocates  the surviving family members to a quiet California suburb and assumes the responsibility of caring for his orphaned siblings Twins, Wendell and Darlene, and youngest sibling Francis.
Francis sets out preparing a school project about his family and it is through his lens that we begin to realise  that something is very wrong in the Hamilton household...

Saturday, 20 October 2012

Last House on the left (2009 Remake)

While staying in her family's summer house, Mari goes to meet her friend, Paige, in town, together they go back to a motel with Justin, a boy they just met, to smoke some weed.
Unfortunately Justin's father, Krugg, along with his brother and girlfriend (who just hijacked the police transport vehicle that was taking Krugg to prison)  return to the motel earlier than expected.
The gang torture the girls, rape them and leave them for dead, then stranded by a storm in the middle of nowhere, go to the nearest house they can find to seek shelter.
Little do the gang know, the house is Mari's parent's summer house... and when they work out what has happened to their daughter, and who is responsible they do what any good parents would... they take justice into their own hands.

Wednesday, 17 October 2012

Dream House

Top publisher, Will Atenten (Daniel Craig), his wife, Libby, and two daughters, Trish and Dee Dee, move to a new house, It's not long before they learn that the previous occupants were killed.
The case went down as "Unsolved" but suspicion fell on the family's father, Peter Ward... who has recently been released from the institute where he has spent the last 5 years.
Meanwhile, The Atenten girls are convinced that someone is watching them from outside the house, and the more Will finds out about the previous residents; the worse it gets.
Did Ward kill his family? Is that Who is watching? or is the real killer also out there?

Monday, 15 October 2012

Strangeland (AKA Dee Snider's Strangeland)

When a couple of girls go online looking for a party and get chatting to Capt. Howdy (Snider), they get more than they bargained for.
His profile lists Howdy as a college student into R&B, Hip-Hop and snow boarding... Reality has him as a sadistic 'modern savage', who lures people into his basement to 'help' them evolve spiritually through various rights of passage... including tattoos, branding, piercing, scarification, and suspension.

Monday, 31 October 2011

Scream 4 (SCRE4M)

I am a huge fan of the original Scream trilogy. At the time of the first films release it perfectly captured the mood of the horror scene (which is ironic, because it's countless copycats would ruin horror for the next 10 years as we got buried under a deluge of 'I still know what urban legend you did at cherry falls') so I was keen to see what the original writer (albeit with 'tweeks' from the writer of the third, and poorest, entry) would do with horror c2011.

Saturday, 8 October 2011

Pin

Unlike my 'reviews' over at VideoNastyAWeek.co.uk, which are mostly meant more as 'discussions' with those who have seen the films, or are at least familiar with them, I try to keep my Shocktoberfest Reviews pretty spoiler-lite, so that they can serve as recommendations (where warranted) to people who have not seen the films.

Saturday, 23 October 2010

Frozen

When 3 friends bribe their way onto a ski-lift for one last run before the slope closes for the week, a simple mis-communication leads to them getting stranded hundreds of feet in the air, in sub-zero temperatures.

If you think this sounds like "Adrift" only in a ski-lift instead of in the water, you'd be right - so whether or not you enjoy this at all depends on your opinion of that film - both are hard to review (or even write about - I'm not sure these things qualify as 'reviews' in any real sense) as the only thing you can say without spoilers is "they keep trying to find ways to escape".